Tom Zoellner is the author of several nonfiction books, including
Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire and the newly released
The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America.
At Electric Lit, he tagged
sixteen attempts at the "one nonfiction book that encapsulated the grandeur, folly, ugliness, bravado, idealism, and tempestuousness of the United States of America," including:
These Truths, by Jill Lepore
The Harvard historian takes us from 1600 up to 2018 in a whopper of a volume that cannot possibly have everything stuffed into it. But Lepore makes a 
valiant attempt to fit in as much color and analysis as possible in 955 pages about the first nation in the world, as she puts it, to be governed “not by accident and force but by reason and choice.” Wars, strikes, riots, slavery, new religions, emancipation, skyscrapers, railroads, movies, highways, muskets, prisons, capitol swamps—all of it pinned down in readable prose, never minding what had to be left out for space. Lepore could have been writing this DAV ["Defining America Volume"] for the rest of her career.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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