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The Amazon editors have revealed their picks for Best Books of 2015. According to the press release, 22 debut authors were selected for the Top 100 Books of the Year list.  Follow this link to see the full list of 100 titles.

We’ve listed the top 10 books below. In addition to a general list, the Amazon team has also put together “top 20 lists in over two-dozen categories.” Did any of your favorites make the cut?

Amazon Editors’ Top 10 Books of 2015

1. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

2. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

3. Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt

4. An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

5. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

6. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

7. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

8. Purity by Jonathan Franzen

9. Hold Still by Sally Mann

10. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

In The Wright Brothers, David McCullough spins a history both exhaustive and personal, sharing original correspondence and examining secondary characters like the Wright sister, Katharine. With McCullough's signature depth and thoroughness, The Wright Brothers pays captivating homage to the two men who so exemplified the American spirit. Books mentioned in this post Portland Noir (Akashic [...]

Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough has a new book out this week in which he tells the dramatic story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

“The Wright Brothers” lands on book store shelves tomorrow and is already the No. 7 book on Amazon’s Top 100 Books list, and is No. 1 in various categories including History and Engineering & Transportation. Here is more about the book from Simon & Schuster:

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot.

The American Writers Museum is coming to downtown Chicago. This institution will be “dedicated to engaging the public in celebrating American writers and exploring their influence on our history, our identity, our culture and our daily lives.”

According to The Chicago Tribune, Malcolm O’Hagan founded the American Writers Museum Foundation more than three years ago.

The foundation executives plan to open the museum’s doors sometime in 2015.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Three publishers will drop the agency model that kept eBook prices the same across all marketplaces, and the eBook price wars have already commenced. PaidContent confirmed yesterday that HarperCollins prices have already started to change.

Last week, a federal judge approved a settlement between between Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins and the Department of Justice. Soon eBook marketplaces can sell some digital books at a discount, reigniting the eBook price wars.

Prices on Hachette and Simon & Schuster digital books still contain the “This price was set by the publisher” tag on Amazon, but their price restrictions will also be lifted as part of the agreement. In the meantime, we took a look at the most expensive books from these publishers–a way to track the changes in agency model books.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

David McCullough Jr. has inked a book deal with HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint for a book based on his high school commencement speech, “You Are Not Special” (video embedded above).

McCullough Jr. is an English teacher and the son of historian David McCullough. His speech criticized our national focus on being special, explaining that  “life is a great adventure to swallow whole rather than a checklist to complete.” McCormick & Williams agent Amy Williams negotiated the deal with executive editor Hilary Redmon. Publication is tentatively set for fall 2013.

Here’s an excerpt from the speech that earned 1.6 million views on YouTube: “You’re not special. You’re not exceptional; contrary to what your U9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card; despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia. No matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you, you are nothing special. Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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By Brooke Blower

Thanks to Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris and David McCullough’s book The Greater Journey, summer crowds are again satisfying their appetite for that guilty pleasure: the Americans-in-Paris romp. Such celebrations of the adventures of Americans in the City of Lights are certainly fun. But they evoke a version of the city that’s rooted as much in fantasy as fact. Like many guilty pleasures, they actually tell us a lot more about who we are, and about our yearning for an elusive American innocence, than they do about the gritty realities of the French capital.

In his chronicle of artists and apprentices who journeyed to France during the 19th century, McCullough gives us his trademark vignettes, so richly descriptive that you can feel the tight clothing and smell the candles going out. The Americans are well-meaning and hard-working. In turn, Paris is obliging, with picturesque rather than menacing poverty, and where, the author tell us, no drunks stagger through the streets.

With Allen we also get postcard Paris and a parade of illustrious expatriates ripped from history as we follow Owen Wilson’s character on his fantastical journey back to the 1920s. The film’s opening montage sets the tone: shots of Fouquet’s café on the Champs Elysées; the wind-milled Moulin Rouge; squares magically empty of traffic jams; and alleys mercifully free of noise, drug deals, or urine. While Wilson plays the incredulous but enthusiastic initiate, the French serve as scene shifters and helpful guides.

Allen and McCullough may look to different golden ages, but both essentially give us old-timey Paris with mirrored brasseries, obligatory homages to the Eiffel Tower, mustaches, and just a dash of prostitution so things don’t seem too sanitized. It’s the same airbrushed city that wowed moviegoers in An American in Paris and Funny Face. It’s the same depoliticized place that armchair time travelers look for when they pick up Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Here, Americans are bystanders to war and civil unrest, and, in peacetime, the only bad guys around are Englishmen, snooty waiters, or maybe a few fussy bureaucrats.

In this mythical Paris, no one rolls their eyes at your American accent or asks you to defend U.S. foreign policy. No one rubs up against you in line. No one gets arrested. Can’t you see the lights dancing on the Seine? Can’t you hear the accordions? Americans eat this stuff up — but not simply because Allen and McCullough do it so well.

Such a romanticized Paris provides the perfect backdrop for depicting Americans abroad as wide-eyed newcomers exploring foreign lands with only the best intentions, as reluctant heroes who never intended to throw their weight around. The Americans-in-Paris romp allows us to imagine ourselves out in the world, but removed from political quagmires, the burdens of world leadership, anti-American blowback, and other problems, which have, in fact, long plagued tourists and policy-makers alike. Going to Paris was imagined as novel and chic by those coming from a nation with few French immigrants. It wasn’t like a homecoming, which is how many experienced London, Berlin, or Rome. But at the same time, it didn’t seem too threatening. It promised to be only delightfully exotic.

In truth, Paris back then, like today, teemed with conflicts that Americans never fully escaped. In addition to its revolutions and failed insurrections, the city attracted anarchist assassins, angry exiles, and anti-Semites who waged their battles in the streets (not to mention plenty of unruly absinthe drinkers). While Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent painted their portraits, distrustful national leaders and a far-right municipal council ruled the capital with an iron fist.

I love history, always have, and I’m astonished that other people–most others!–don’t.

History is life and death, war and peace, courage and betrayal, sex and violence…a lot of sex and violence!

What’s not to like?

But dislike it they do, and from that distaste ignorance has grown.

“We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate,” popular historian David McCullough has warned.

Evidence of that illiteracy is rampant…and hilarious.

“Acey gots an update!”

“We should get her a little hat that says ‘Acey gots an update’”

“Heheeee… ooh! It’s a dancing game! I love dancing games!”

“Let’s get over to the Powa!”