Not sure if this is of interest-- I don't read on a Kindle myself-- but someone just pointed out to me that today Amazon has discounted my West From Appomattox to $2.99. This book walks through the creation of the American middle class around an ideology of independence. It's a really smart book-- my smartest until the most recent-- but I think it's a bit dense, personally. Still, lots of good stories in it. It was intended to resurrect the Myth and Symbols school of American Studies. No one ever noticed that was the point, but because of that there is a lot on literature, art, and culture (including the radical origins of the game Monopoly).
A fun fact on the writing: the book was patterned on a romance novel. I wanted a way to tell 35 years of history as a narrative, and couldn't find a way to do that. Turns out the answer is to follow a few characters throughout the whole period, just as romance novelists do. So, after becoming obsessed with learning all I could about the techniques of romance novel writing, that's what I did. My characters are real, of course: Julia Ward Howe, Booker T. Washington, Jesse James, and so on. (They had to stay alive throughout the whole period or die in some significant fashion.)
Another fun fact: the other people who carried an idea through a long period of time very powerfully were the writers of the Lord of the Rings films. Their writers' version of the director's cut was so useful to me, I thanked them (by their initials) in the acknowledgements.
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