Political Biographies

Many of us find ourselves caught somewhere between unbelieving activists and inactive believers. We can write a check to feed starving children or hold signs in the streets and feel like we've made a difference without ever encountering the faces of the suffering masses. In this book, Shane Claiborne describes an authentic faith rooted in belief, action, and love, inviting us into a movement of the Spirit that begins inside each of us and extends into a broken world.

Offering an in-depth psychological and political portrait of what makes Donald Trump tick, Dangerous Charisma combines psychoanalysis with an investigation into the personality of the current American president. This narrative not only examines the life and psychology of Donald Trump but also provides an analysis of the charismatic psychological tie between Trump and his supporters. In this new book, the psychiatrist who once served under five American presidents applies his expertise to profiling the current resident in the White House with surprising and revelatory results.

Nixon - loathed or admired, the name recalls one of the most extraordinary political survivors in American history. Author Jonathan Aitken interviewed the legendary politician and was granted unprecedented access to his private documents to root out answers to many questions. Why didn't he burn the Watergate tapes? What were his relationships with John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, and Henry Kissinger?

Donald Trump isn't a despot. But he is increasingly acting like the "despot's apprentice", an understudy in authoritarian tactics that threaten to erode American democracy, including attacking the press, threatening rule of law by firing those who investigate his alleged wrongdoings, using nepotism to staff the White House, and countless other techniques. Donald Trump is borrowing tactics from the world's dictators and despots.

As President Clinton's senior adviser, George Stephanopoulos saw it all: the endless arguments, the back-hall scheming, the protracted decisions, and the last minute flip-flops that somehow produced real accomplishments but also set in motion an almost tragic series of events that placed the fate of the president in the hands of the Senate. Now, with the natural ease of a born storyteller and the sensitive eye for detail of a novelist, Stephanopoulos tells his extraordinarily gripping story.

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.

Most Americans have grown accustomed to accept the version of history that the Soviets were our noble allies and took the brunt of the casualties during World War II. But after decades of research by veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans and intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein, the truth has come to light and is now exposed in Stalin's Secret Agents. Evans and Romerstein focus on the role of secret Communist Alger Hiss at the crucial Yalta Conference of 1945, where vast U.S. concessions were made to Russia....

On July 18, 1924, a mob in Tehran killed US foreign service officer Robert Whitney Imbrie. His violent death, the first political murder in the history of the service, outraged the American people. Though Imbrie’s loss briefly made him a cause célèbre, subsequent events quickly obscured his extraordinary life and career.

That Donald Trump is an asshole is a fact widely agreed upon - even by his supporters, who actually like that about him. But his startling political rise makes the question of just what sort of asshole he is, and how his assholedom may help to explain his success, one not just of philosophical interest but of almost existential urgency. Enter the philosopher Aaron James, author of the foundational text in the burgeoning field of Asshole Studies: the best-selling Assholes: A Theory.

This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes."

A Palestinian American activist recalls his adolescence in Gaza during the Second Intifada and how he made a strong commitment to peace in the face of devastating brutality in this moving, candid, and transformative memoir that reminds us of the importance of looking beyond prejudice, anger, and fear.

Ronald Reagan carried a conservative vision of America to the White House, where his administration gave it life. Peggy Noonan followed Reagan to Washington as his speechwriter— and gave his vision voice. As speech writer for George Bush during his Presidential campaign, Noonan dispelled her candidate's "wimpy" image and replaced it with one of quiet strength by coining such eloquent phrases as "a thousand points of light" and "a kinder, gentler nation."

In No One Left to Lie To, a New York Times best seller, Christopher Hitchens casts an unflinching eye on the Clinton political machine and offers a searing indictment of a president who sought to hold power at any cost. With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right, and he argues that the president's personal transgressions were ultimately inseparable from his political corruption.

Before Kamala Harris was elected to the vice presidency, she was a little girl who loved superheroes. And when she looked around, she was amazed to find them everywhere! In her family, among her friends, even down the street - there were superheroes wherever she looked. And those superheroes showed her that all you need to do to be a superhero is to be the best you can be.

Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines in 2016. In his first 18 months in office, 12,000 people were murdered on the streets, gunned down by police officers and vigilante citizens - all with his encouragement. Duterte is a serial womanizer and a self-confessed killer, who has called both Barack Obama and Pope Francis "sons of whores." He is on record as saying he does not "give a shit" about human rights. Yet he is beloved of the 16.6 million Filipinos who voted for him, seen as vulgar but honest, a breath of fresh air, and an iconoclastic, anti-imperialist rebel.

The author of Lincoln's Boys takes us inside Lyndon Johnson's White House to show how the legendary Great Society programs were actually put into practice: Team of Rivals for LBJ. The personalities behind every burst of 1960s liberal reform - from civil rights and immigration reform, to Medicare and Head Start - and what we'll lose if those programs are dismantled.

Within eight turbulent months in 1974 Gerald Ford went from the United States House of Representatives, where he was the minority leader, to the White House as the country's first and only unelected president. His unprecedented rise to power, after Richard Nixon's equally unprecedented fall, has garnered the lion's share of scholarly attention devoted to America's 38th president. But Gerald Ford's (1913-2006) life and career in and out of Washington spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

1968 was an unprecedented year in terms of upheaval on numerous scales: political, military, economic, social, cultural. In the United States, perhaps no one was more undone by the events of 1968 than President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kyle Longley leads his listeners on a behind-the-scenes tour of what Johnson characterized as the 'year of a continuous nightmare'. Longley explores how LBJ perceived the most significant events of 1968, including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, widely known as NTR, was not merely a film star who strayed into politics and captured power in Andhra Pradesh. The actor-politician redefined the political culture in the state and scripted a new political idiom. His rather dramatic entry into politics, the profound impact he left on the people of Andhra Pradesh and the vital role he played in national politics during his relatively short political life, however, have not received deserving recognition.

In 2018, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Hank Paulson came together to reflect on the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis 10 years on. Recognizing that, as Ben put it, "the enemy is forgetting," they examine the causes of the crisis, why it was so damaging, and what it ultimately took to prevent a second Great Depression. And they provide to their successors in the United States and the finance ministers and central bank governors of other countries a valuable playbook for reducing the damage from future financial crises.