"The FBI that Louis Freeh took over in the summer of 1993 was still reeling from the bloody standoff at Ruby Ridge and the conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Unpopular, underfunded, and understaffed, the Bureau was also creeping along in the technological Dark Ages. For eight years - the second-longest tenure of any director since J. Edgar Hoover - Freeh would fight tooth and nail to turn the FBI around." "Maybe because...

"This portrait of Johnny Appleseed restores the flesh-and-blood man beneath the many myths. It captures the boldness of an iconic American life and the sadness of his last years, as the frontier marched past him, ever westward. And it shows how death liberated the legend and made of Johnny a barometer of the nation's feelings about its own heroic past and the supposed Eden it once had been. It is a book that does for America's inner frontier what...