Political Biographies

Never having run for office before, Katie Porter charted a new path in 2018 when she was elected to Congress as a Democrat in historically conservative Orange County, California. Underestimated as a single mom and chided for her progressive values, Katie defied expectations. Then, using her signature whiteboard, she began to take CEOs and corrupt government officials to task in Congressional hearings. The videos went viral, introducing Americans to her no-bullshit style, and making her a coveted guest on cable news and late-night television.

Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes.

Theirs was the most captivating American political partnership since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: a bold and untested president and his seasoned, relentless vice president. Confronted by one crisis after another, they struggled to protect the country, remake the world, and define their own relationship along the way. In Days of Fire, Peter Baker chronicles the history of the most consequential presidency in modern times through the prism of its two most compelling characters, capturing the elusive and shifting alliance of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney as no historian has done before.

Blind Ambition is an autobiographical account of a young lawyer who accelerated to the top of the Federal power structure to become Counsel to the President at 30 years of age, only to discover that when reaching the top, he had touched the bottom. Most striking in this chronicle is its honesty. Dean spares no one, including himself. But, as Time noted, Dean survived, despite the opposition of powerful foe, because he had no false story to protect and he had an amazing ability to recall the truth.

History often appears to consist of big gestures and dramatic shifts. But for every peace treaty signed, someone set the stage and provided the pen. As social secretary to the Clintons for eight years, and more recently as chief of protocol under President Obama, Capricia Penavic Marshall has not just borne witness to history, she facilitated it. For Marshall, diplomacy runs on the invisible gesture: the micro-moves that affect the macro-shifts. Facilitation is power, and more often than not, it is the key to effective diplomacy.

Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala's leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death in his garage on a Sunday night in 1998, two days after the presentation of a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some 200,000 civilians.

After the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Ayn Rand occasionally lectured in order to bring her philosophy of Objectivism to a wider audience and apply it to current cultural and political issues. These taped lectures and the question-and-answer sessions that followed added not only an eloquent new dimension to Ayn Rand's ideas and beliefs, but a fresh and spontaneous insight into Ayn Rand herself.

Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries' attempts at democracy.

Can you name a real spy from history? Meet Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were communist spies for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Learn about their work on the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb for the US, and their eventual trial for espionage. Do you think these historical spies were guilty for sharing secrets with the Soviets?

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin as part of American history. As one of the founding fathers, he is a fundamental part of our history—but he was once a kid, just like you! Learn what he was like as a child and how his childhood included hard work, listening to others, writing and reading—all helped him become one of the most influential men we learn about in school.

Move America's capital to another city? To Alexander Robey Shepherd, the solution to Washington, DC's problems was clear: modernization. Shepherd took on the monumental task of improving roadways and drinking water, adding street gaslights, and planting trees.

A gripping and often harrowing inquiry into the factors that motivate young people to join extremist causes, In the Skin of a Jihadist is a pause register that helps us better understand the appeal of extremism.

In December 2003, after one of the largest, most aggressive manhunts in history, US military forces captured Iraqi president Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. Beset by body-double rumors and false alarms during a nine-month search, the Bush administration needed positive identification of the prisoner before it could make the announcement that would rocket around the world. At the time John Nixon was a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent years studying the Iraqi dictator.

On April 14, 1865, only days after the Civil War had come to a close, a gunshot rang out in Ford’s Theatre and President Abraham Lincoln slumped forward in his seat. Hours later, the United States had lost its leader. Now listeners can step back in time to learn about what led up to the assassination plot, how the fateful evening unfolded, and the ways in which one tragic day changed America forever.

Tasked with finding common ground and building friendships between the world's two largest countries and arctic neighbors, a young Canadian diplomat finds himself on his first overseas assignment in Moscow, the Soviet capital. It's the early 1970s and a Cold War between communism and capitalism, the west and the east, is simmering-while the ice rink is just starting to heat up. Smith opts for sports diplomacy, throwing off his embassy black tie dress codes and donning the blue and white sweater of the Moscow Maple Leafs.

From politics to the personal, from fashion to food, from the campus to the locker room, the desire to be cool has infected all aspects of our lives. At its most harmless, it is annoying. At its worst, it is deadly, on a massive scale. The Cool are the termites of life, infiltrating every nook and cranny and destroying it from within. The Cool report the news, write the scripts, teach our children, run our government - and each day they pass judgment on those who don’t worship their coolness.

In A Convenient Death, investigative reporters Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper search for the truth of what really happened to Jeffrey Epstein. With access to Epstein's victims and lawyers, to doctors, Wall Street insiders, and law enforcement officers, they reveal the dirty secrets and sinister ties that may have driven someone in Epstein’s circle to take matters into their own hands.

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the belief that the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

Former U.S. President Richard Nixon candidly reflects on his career and discusses such topics as the USSR., Mikhail Gorbachev, secrecy, Watergate, and more.

On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. According to official reports, the students commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. During the journey, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Hernández reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely the most complete picture available.