The Mayo Clinic

KEN BURNS has been making documentary films for almost forty years. Since the Academy Award– nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The Statue of Liberty; Huey Long; Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery; Frank Lloyd Wright; Mark Twain; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; Jackie Robinson; Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War; and The Vietnam War. Future projects include films on the history of country music, Ernest Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Franklin, the American Revolution, the history of crime and punishment in America, Lyndon B. Johnson and Civil Rights, Leonardo da Vinci, the history of Reconstruction, and Winston Churchill, among others. Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including fifteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations. In 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. DAVID BLISTEIN spent twenty-five years as the owner and creative director of a regional ad agency, after which he began writing nonfiction books and documentaries. He was a writer on the PBS documentary Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies and is currently working on a documentary about The Gene and co-authoring a book on the history of opium. David cowrote Grover Cleveland Again! with Ken Burns—a book about the American presidents for young adults—and is the author of David’s Inferno.