Pulitzer Prize-winning author in Naperville

New York Times best-selling biographer Jon Meacham is coming to Naperville next month to share and sign his new book, "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels."

The current tide of divisiveness in political life is nothing new, Meacham says, as he explores other points in our nation's history with similar upheaval. "The Soul of America" offers some encouragement and thoughtful analysis of the bumpy road we face.

Fans can meet Meacham at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 27, at Madden Theater, 171 E. Chicago Ave., on the campus of North Central College, Naperville. The event is presented by Anderson's Bookshop. Tickets are available at andersonsbookshop.com, in Anderson's downtown Naperville store, or by calling (630) 355-2665.

Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, discusses how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day, even in turbulent times.

Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of citizen activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings turning points in American history to life.

He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women's rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch hunts led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson's crusade against Jim Crow.

He is the author of The New York Times best-sellers "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power," "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House," "Franklin and Winston," and "Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush."