Political Biographies

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! At one of the most chaotic periods in American history, in a time of national distrust and despair, one tanned TV host holds the key to the future. In How I Saved the World, Jesse Watters takes readers on a tour of his life from basement-dwelling Fox minion to...

From the admired judicial authority, author of Louis D. Brandeis (“Remarkable”—Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books; “Monumental”—Alan M. Dershowitz, The New York Times Book Review), Division and Discord, and Supreme Decisions—Melvin Urofsky’s major new book looks at the...

Today's political scene looks nothing like it did thirty years ago, and that is due mostly to Reagan's monumental reshaping of the Republican party. What few people realize, however, is that Reagan's revolution did not begin when he took office in 1980, but in his failed presidential challenge...

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with the First Family. The next morning, news that the president had dined with a Black man-and former slave-sent shock waves through the nation. Although African Americans had helped build the White House and had worked for most of the presidents, not a single one had ever been invited to dine there. Fueled by inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, and even vulgar songs, the scandal escalated.

In 1983 Chicago elected Harold Washington as the city's first black mayor. This is the story of Washington's improbable victory over Jane Byrne, heir to the late Richard J. Daley's political empire, and over Daley's eldest son. It's the story of a coalition outside the party's mainstream coming to power and ruling in the country's most political of cities. In Fire on the Prairie, Gary Rivlin reveals the personalities and philosophies of those who were at the center of events, from black separatists such as Lu Palmer to community organizers such as Jesse Jackson....

At 2:00 a.m. on October 2, 2001, Robert Stevens entered a hospital emergency room. Feverish, nauseated, and barely conscious, no one knew what was making him sick. Three days later he was dead. Stevens was the first fatal victim of bioterrorism in America. Bioterrorism expert Leonard Cole has written the definitive account of the Anthrax attacks. Cole is the only person outside law enforcement to have interviewed every one of the surviving inhalation-anthrax victims, along with the relatives, friends, and associates of those who died.

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....

An invigorating guide to fighting back—part philosophy, part history, and part manual for living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian drift How do we push back in a world where political leaders wield fear and intimidation? Where digital technology dehumanizes and flattens...

In interviews ranging from 1975 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher talks about being a woman in politics; managing men and women; her response to the media attacks she received in the early days of her career, and the importance of wearing the right clothes. She also recalls her memories of home...

How does a person organize a good life? The ancient Greeks divided time into five types: labour, work, leisure, play and aergia (contemplation). But labour was separated from work, as painful, onerous work undertaken for survival, whereas work could include caring for family members, study, or political activities. But now our jobs are supposed to provide all meaning in life and our time outside of work is thought of as simply 'time off'.

Mr. Churchill in the White House presents a new perspective on the politician, war leader, and author through his intimate involvement with one Democratic and one Republican president during his two terms as prime minister.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin remains the single most consequential event in Israel's recent history and one that fundamentally altered the trajectory for both Israel and the Palestinians. Killing a King relates the parallel stories of Rabin and his stalker, Yigal Amir, over the two years leading up to the assassination, as one of them planned political deals he hoped would lead to peace - and the other plotted murder.

The series weaves together more than 50 first-person interviews with an unprecedented collection of archival sound: a rare recording of the 1964 trial that resulted in Mandela's life sentence; a visit between Mandela and his family secretly taped by a prison guard; marching songs of guerilla soldiers; government propaganda films; and pirate radio broadcasts from the African National Congress (ANC).

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx - a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

"I thought the nation was coming to an end,’ wrote Khushwant Singh, looking back on the violence of Partition that he was witness to over half a century ago. He believed then that he had seen the worst that India could do to herself. But after the violence in Gujarat in 2002, he had reason to...

This New York Times bestseller shares the rich history of the White House grounds, revealing how the story of the garden is also the story of America. The 18-acres surrounding the White House have been an unwitting witness to history—kings and queens have dined there, bills and treaties have...

In Bush, Jean Edward Smith demonstrates that it was not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice, but President Bush himself who took personal control of foreign policy. Bush drew on his deep religious conviction that important foreign-policy decisions were simply a matter of good versus evil. Domestically, he overreacted to 9/11 and endangered Americans' civil liberties.

AMERICAN GUNFIGHT is the fast-paced, definitive, and breathtakingly suspenseful account of an extraordinary historical event–the attempted assassination of President Harry Truman in November of 1950 by two Puerto Rican Nationalists and the bloody shoot-out in the streets of Washington, D.C...

Ben Mattlin lives a normal, independent life. Why is that interesting? Because Mattlin was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital weakness from which he was expected to die in childhood. Not only did Mattlin live through childhood, he became one of the first students in a wheelchair to attend Harvard, from which he graduated and became a professional writer. His advantage?

A brilliant, authoritative, and riveting account of the most critical six months in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, when he penned the Emancipation Proclamation and changed the course of the Civil War. On July 12, 1862, Abraham Lincoln spoke for the first time of his intention to free the slaves. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, doing precisely that. In between, however, was perhaps the most tumultuous six months of his presidency....