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Coming Soon: Savage Peace: Paperback

• More reviews are in... check the reviews page for details.
• The American Booksellers Association has selected Savage Peace as a Book Sense Notable Book for the month of May. 

 

Savage Peace is the bold story of America in the watershed year of 1919, a startling time when the nation’s struggles eerily resembled ours today and when the intense clash of hope and fear defined modern America.

Written with the sweep of an epic novel and grounded in extensive research into contemporary documents, Savage Peace is a striking portrait of American democracy under stress. It is the extraordinary story of a time in our nation’s history when Americans worried about terrorism and were deeply divided over the issues of domestic spying, free speech, immigration and U.S. intervention abroad. Read More...

"Savage Peace reads like a wondrous and sprawling novel, except that it is all true. Thoroughly researched and insightful, it spins together the fascinating threads of 1919. And what a wonderful cast of characters! From Eddington to Einstein to Du Bois and Wilson, they all come alive. This book is so joyful you'll forget that it's serious history."
--Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Einstein: His Life and Universe

"Savage Peace is Ann Hagedorn's brilliantly conceived, meticulously researched, and beautifully written biography of the year 1919. Now we have a historian who is up to the challenge of vividly demonstrating not only 1919's historical significance, but also its political and cultural relevance to us in the era of 9/11 and the Patriot Act."
--William M. Tuttle, Jr. author of "Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children and Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919

"Ann Hagedorn gives us a grand reappraisal of the American context for the Savage Peace of 1919. Everyone interested in the path to our present struggles and future alternatives will want to read this splendid and important book."
--Blanche Wiesen Cook, Professor of History, John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; author of Eleanor Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2, The Defining Years, 1933-1938

 

"The Great War in Europe left this country both in sinister shadow and bright promise. Ann Hagedorn has written a book with nuanced detail and novelistic narrative. Show me a more crucial year - find me a better writer to tell the story: can't be done!"
--Noah Adams, author of The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur and Orville Wright

Ann Hagedorn is an award winning author and journalist who earned degrees from Denison University, the University of Michigan and Columbia University. She has been a staff writer for several newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The San Jose Mercury News and The New York Daily News. She has written for other publications including The Washington Post. She has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of three other books: Wild Ride, Ransom, and Beyond the River. Beyond the River, also a Simon and Schuster book, was selected as one of the ALA's 25 Notable Books in America in 2004 and earned high praise nationwide, including Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s comment: "Beyond the River is as vivid in its narration as it is scrupulous in its scholarship. It is a wonderful reminder of the little known men and women who played heroic roles in stirring the republic to live up to its ideals.". Read the full bio