Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers
(Beacon Press, 2023)
A former People magazine editor reveals how our cult of celebrity has shaped our politics, our culture, and our personal lives—for better or worse.
From the writer and editor who coined the term “baby boomer” comes Celebrity Nation, an exploration into how and why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of “likes” and shares—and what this change means for American culture. Landon Jones—who spent decades in “celebrityland” only to emerge, like Alice, blinking in the sunlight—brings a personal and first-person perspective on fame and its dark underbelly, complicated even further by the arrival of the internet and social media.
William Clark and the Shaping of the West
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2004; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2009)
Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark cocaptained the most famous expedition in American history. But while Lewis ended his life just three years after the expedition, Clark, as the highest-ranking federal official in the West, spent three decades overseeing its consequences: Indian removal and the destruction of Native America. In a rare combination of storytelling and scholarship, bestselling author Landon Y. Jones vividly depicts Clark’s life and the dark and bloody ground of America’s early West, capturing the qualities of character and courage that made Clark an unequaled leader in America’s grander enterprise: the shaping of the West.
The Essential Lewis and Clark
(Ecco/Harper Colllins, 2000)
The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark remain the single most important document in the history of American exploration. This compact volume of their journals, compiled by American Book Award nominee Landon Y. Jones, includes all of the most riveting tales of their adventure, in their own words.
Great Expectations: America & the Baby Boom Generation
(Coward McCann, New York, 1980)
Great Expectations is the story of 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, a baby boom so extraordinary that it has affected every aspect of our society, from fads, fashions and music, to education, crime rates, and Social Security. This book coined the phrase “baby boomer” and in 1981 was a finalist for the American Book Award for Nonfiction.