Political Biographies

This is Tony Blair’s firsthand account of his years in office and beyond. Here he describes for the first time his role in shaping our recent history, from the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death to the war on terror. He reveals the decisions necessary to reinvent his party, the relationships with colleagues including Gordon Brown, the negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland, the implementation of the biggest reforms to public services in Britain since 1945, and his relationships with leaders on the world stage.

On the morning of January 31, 2009, Roxana Saberi, a brilliant and fearless Iranian American journalist working in Iran, was dragged from her home by four men and secretly arrested. The intelligence agents who captured her accused her of espionage---a charge she denied. For 11 days, Saberi was cut off from the outside world, forbidden even a phone call. For weeks, neither her family, friends, nor colleagues had any knowledge of her whereabouts.

Forced to become a normal citizen, the exiled son of the late Shah of Iran attempts to provide understanding and direction for his country and its people.

America need look no further than its own lauded leaders for a war criminal whose offenses rival those of the most heinous dictators in recent history: Henry Kissinger. Employing evidence based on firsthand testimony, unpublished documents, and new information uncovered by the Freedom of Information Act, and using only what would hold up in international courts of law, The Trial of Henry Kissinger outlines atrocities authorized by the former secretary of state in Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, and more.

History remembers Robert F. Kennedy as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy's enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that had its beginnings in the conservative 1950s. In Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to paint a complete portrait of this singularly fascinating figure.

You may never have heard of him, but you've probably heard of the many people civil rights activist Bayard Rustin influenced. He was a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and refused to move to the back of the bus many years before Rosa Parks did. The son of a freed slave, Bayard Rustin grew up during the peak of the Jim Crow laws, which segregated Blacks and Whites.

A tour de force of historical reportage, America’s Bank illuminates the tumultuous era and remarkable personalities that spurred the unlikely birth of America’s modern central bank, the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed is the bedrock of the financial landscape, yet the fight to create it was so protracted and divisive that it seems a small miracle that it was ever established. For nearly a century, America, alone among developed nations, refused to consider any central or organizing agency in its financial system.

The best-selling author of Nancy Reagan and His Way exposes all the secrets of the most powerful political dynasty in American history. From Ohio to Connecticut to Texas and to Washington, D.C., Bush men and women have made millions of dollars, dominated the U.S. government, and created a legacy unlike any other family.

By the time he was 19, Frank Schaeffer’s parents had achieved global fame as best-selling evangelical authors and speakers, and Frank had joined his father on the evangelical circuit. He would go on to speak before thousands and publish his own best seller. But while coming of age as a rising evangelical star, Schaeffer felt increasingly alienated, and as a result, he experienced a crisis of faith that would ultimately lead to his journey out of the fold - even if it meant losing everything.

For her whole life, Souad Mekhennet, a reporter for the Washington Post who was born and educated in Germany, has had to balance the two sides of her upbringing - Muslim and Western. She has also sought to provide a mediating voice between these cultures, which too often misunderstand each other.

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor.

A fearless deep dive into the 2020 election from former MSNBC “Road Warrior” and now NBC Capitol Hill correspondent Ali Vitali, who covered the campaign trail every step of the way—investigating the gendered double standards placed on women presidential candidates of that cycle and those who came before, and what it will take for a woman to finally break the glass ceiling and win the White House.

In the Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution, Independent congressman, presidential candidate, and activist Bernie Sanders continues his fight against the imbalances in the nation's status quo and shows you how to make a difference to effect the changes America and the world need to create a better tomorrow.

lhan Omar was only eight years old when war broke out in Somalia. The youngest of seven children, her mother had died while Ilhan was still a little girl. She was being raised by her father and grandfather when armed gunmen attacked their compound and the family decided to flee Mogadishu. They ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where Ilhan says she came to understand the deep meaning of hunger and death. Four years later, after a painstaking vetting process, her family achieved refugee status and arrived in Arlington, Virginia.

Against the Wind completes Neal Gabler’s magisterial biography of Ted Kennedy, but it also unfolds the epic, tragic story of the fall of liberalism and the destruction of political morality in America. With Richard Nixon having stilled the liberal wind that once propelled Kennedy’s—and his fallen brothers’—political crusades, Ted Kennedy faced a lonely battle. As Republicans pressed Reaganite dogmas of individual freedom and responsibility and Democratic centrists fell into line, Kennedy was left as the most powerful voice legislating on behalf of those society would neglect or punish.

In the face of a president who lobs accusations without facts, evidence, or logic, truth tellers are under attack. Meanwhile, the world order is teetering on the brink. North Korea is on the verge of having a nuclear weapon that could reach all of the United States, Russians have mastered a new form of information warfare that undercuts democracy, and the role of China in the global community remains unclear.

Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy's birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK's most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by a commentary and reflections by leading American and internationals figures - including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama.

Guy Burgess is the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - the group of British men recruited to pass intelligence to the Soviets during World War Two and the Cold War. Burgess' story takes us from his student days in 1930s Cambridge, where he was first approached by Soviet scouts, through his daring infiltration of the BBC and the British government to his final escape to Russia and lonely, tragic-comic exile there.

Just in time for the kickoff of the 2012 presidential campaign, Joe McGinniss, the author of the classic account of the packaging of a presidential candidate, The Selling of the President; of the acclaimed search for the essence of Alaska, Going to Extremes; and of the best-selling study of the dark family secrets of an American patriarch, Fatal Vision; presents his already controversial investigative chronicle of Sarah Palin as an individual, politician, and cultural phenomenon.

The first of a multivolume history of Lincoln as a political genius - from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, his assassination, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War dreams of Reconstruction. This first volume traces Lincoln from his painful youth, describing himself as "a slave", to his emergence as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln.