BEST AUTHOR BEST : DAVID LEVERING LEWIS

'' After a professional career focused on the large world,'' the prize winning historian says, '' I realized it was time to look closer to home.'' '' The Stained Glass Window '' considers his tangled family tree.

.-  What book would you recommend for understanding America's current political moment?

Self-serving or not, my last book, '' The Improbable Wendell Willkie : The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order.''

The book described a responsible capitalism free of zero-sum fatalism, and visionary enough to embrace a modernizing global north and south [ and racially equitable United States ]. 

I might add Richard Slotkin's 2024 : '' A Great Disorder : National Myth and the Battle for America.''

.-  What's the last great book you read?

The autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant. It is the most honest presidential memoir to date.

.-  What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?

Ibn Hazm's '' The Ring of the Dove,'' translated by A.J. Arberry [1953]  An 11th-century treatise on Muslim love.

.-  What books are on your night stand?

David Greenberg, '' John Lewis : A Life ''; Joshua Green, '' The Rebels : Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics ''; Martha Hodes, '' My Hijacking : A Personal History of  Forgetting and Remembering '' ; Michael Cook, '' A History of the Muslim World : From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity.''

.-  Why write '' The Stained Glass Window '' now?

In the early Trump era, a white taxi driver provoked me with a comment professing total innocence of racism on behalf of all his ancestors.

After a professional career focused on the large world, rather than the immensely revelatory personal one, I realized it was time to look closer to home.

'' The Stained Glass Window '' seeks to shift the fundamentals of our national story by retelling that story across the lives of four of my own family lines : two of them white [ the Kings and the Belvins ]  the third free and colored [ the Bells] ; the fourth an up-from slavery success [ the Lewises ].

My book wraps the lives of these Kings, Belvins, Bells and Lewises around almost 200 years of North American history.

It explains macro-history as family history.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.