Biography tends to tilt history, because every person you are writing about becomes larger than life.

You live your life as a biography and you have chapters and how you handle yourself in time of adversity and crises defines you.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history,

I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.

When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography - Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.

We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.