Political Biographies

When Baltimore Police Sergeant Wayne Jenkins said he had a monster, he meant he had found a big-time drug dealer - one who he wanted to rob. This is the story of Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a super group of dirty detectives who exploited some of America’s greatest problems: guns, drugs, toxic masculinity, and hypersegregation. In the upside-down world of the GTTF, cops were robbers and drug dealers were the perfect victims, because no one believed them.

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.

Sinn Féin is the most popular political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. A movement once synonymous with a paramilitary campaign is on the brink of taking real power through purely democratic means. But if Sinn Féin has mastered the art of electoral politics, it remains strangely opaque. Who really runs the party? How is it funded? And what can we expect of it as a party of government? Aoife Moore, Irish Journalist of the Year in 2021, explores these and other burning questions in The Long Game.

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.

When they first met at Harvard in 1946, young Kenny O’Donnell and Bobby Kennedy could not have imagined where their lives would take them. The friendship they built saw them through some of the most pivotal moments of the twentieth century - including Robert Kennedy’s tenure as attorney general and O’Donnell’s time spent as John F. Kennedy’s chief of staff - and only ended with RFK’s tragic death.

In the turbulent world of Chicago politics, Boss dives deep into the captivating life and legacy of Richard J. Daley, the influential politician and mastermind behind the city's Democratic Party machine. Mike Royko's scathing and meticulously researched account follows Richard J. Daley's rise to power, from his inauspicious youth on Chicago's South Side through his rapid climb to the seat of power as the city's mayor. This engrossing biography brings to life the most powerful political figure of his time.

When veteran war reporter Benjamin Hall woke up in Kyiv on the morning of March 14, 2022, he had no idea that, within hours, Russian bombs would nearly end his life. As a journalist for Fox News, Hall had worked in dangerous war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but with three young daughters at home, life on the edge was supposed to be a thing of the past. Yet when Russia viciously attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Hall quickly volunteered to go. A few weeks later, while on assignment, Hall and his crew were blown up in a Russian strike.

The Widow Spy is the firsthand account of a true Cold War spy operation in Moscow told exclusively by the CIA case officer who lived this experience. Martha D. Peterson was one of the first women to be assigned to Moscow, a very difficult operational environment. Her story begins in Laos during the Vietnam War where she accompanied her husband, a CIA officer. She describes their life in a small city in Laos, ending with the tragic death of her husband. Then her own 30-year career begins in Moscow.

THE DISSIDENT is the story of how one fearless man, offended by the dishonesty and criminality of the Russian political system, mounted a relentless opposition movement and became President Vladimir Putin’s most formidable rival—so despised that the Russian leader makes a point of never uttering Navalny’s name.

Gloria Steinem - writer, activist, organizer, and one of the most inspiring leaders in the world - now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, traveling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and leading historian Doris Kearns Goodwin comes a definitive middle grade guide to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson and how they became leaders. So how did each of them do it—rise to become President of the United States? What did these four kids have individually—and have in common—that made them the ones to lead the country through some of its most turbulent times?

In his classic book Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green chronicled how the forces of economic populism on the right, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, turned Donald Trump into their flawed but powerful vessel. In The Rebels, he gives an epic account of the long struggle that has played out in parallel on the left, told through an intimate reckoning with the careers of the three political figures who have led the charge most prominently.

For the past 30 years, David Mamet has been a controversial and defining force in theater and film, championing the most cherished liberal values along the way. In some of the great movies and plays of our time, his characters have explored the ethics of the business world, embodied the struggles of the oppressed, and faced the flaws of the capitalist system. But in recent years Mamet has had a change of heart.

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.

In The Secret History of the American Empire, Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world and, drawing on interviews with other hit men, jackals, reporters, and activists, examines the current geopolitical crisis. Instability is the norm; it's clear that the world we've created is dangerous and no longer sustainable. How did we get here? Who's responsible? What good have we done and at what cost? And what can we do to change things for the next generations?

It was a time, much like today, when Americans feared for the future of their democracy, and women stood up for equal treatment. At the crossroads of the Watergate scandal and the women’s movement was a young lawyer named Jill Wine Volner (as she was then known), barely 30 years old and the only woman on the team that prosecuted the highest-ranking White House officials. Called "the mini-skirted lawyer" by the press, she fought to receive the respect accorded her male counterparts - and prevailed.

The most improbable approach toward American civil rights for Black citizens blended the beliefs of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and it was spearheaded by global activist Marcus Aurelius Garvey. The Jamaican began his career as an activist with a devotion to Washington’s path, but he subsequently leaned to the alternative and beyond. Beyond the worldview of both colleagues, Marcus Garvey’s bigger-than-life scheme was to establish a Black-owned and managed shipping line to transport much of America’s Black population back to Africa.

Surveillance Zone gives you an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look into the mysterious world of private-sector espionage, surveillance detection, and covert protective operations that take place right here at home, under most people's noses. You'll discover how corporate sector surveillance and surveillance detection work, what real-world special operations are like, how covert operators blend into different environments, and much more.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the self-styled prince and princess of America. Their swift, gilded rise to extraordinary power in Donald Trump’s White House is unprecedented, unconstitutional, and dangerous. In Kushner, Inc., investigative journalist Vicky Ward digs beneath the myth the couple has created that depicts themselves as the voices of reason in an otherwise crazy presidency and reveals that Jared and Ivanka are not just the president’s chief enablers, they are, like him, disdainful of rules, of laws, and of ethics.

Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Richard D. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination.