President Memoirs

As a prisoner of war, Andrew Jackson walked several miles barefoot across state lines while suffering from smallpox and a serious head wound received when he refused to polish the boots of the soldiers who had taken him captive. He was thirteen years old. A few decades later, he became the first popularly elected president and served the nation, pausing briefly only to beat a would-be assassin with a cane to within an inch of his life.

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.

The most eagerly awaited presidential biography in years, Theodore Rex is a sequel to Edmund Morris’s classic bestseller The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It begins by following the new President (still the youngest in American history) as he comes down from Mount Marcy, New York, to take his emergency oath of office in Buffalo, one hundred years ago.

Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary brought her to the nadir of her political career, vanquished by a much younger opponent whose message of change and cutting-edge tech team ran circles around her stodgy campaign. And yet, six years later, she has reemerged as an even more powerful and influential figure, a formidable stateswoman and the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, marking one of the great political comebacks in history.

When Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to go somewhere, there was no stopping him. This dynamic president called for Air Force One as others summon a taxi - at a moment's notice, whatever the hour or the weather. And the man who made sure that LBJ got his ride was General James U. Cross, the president's hand-picked pilot, top military assistant, and personal confidante. The only Air Force One pilot to have a position, simultaneously, in the White House, General Cross is also the only member of LBJ's inner circle who has not publicly offered his recollections of the president. Until now.

P. V. Narasimha Rao (or PV, as he was popularly known) has been widely praised for enabling the economic reforms that transformed the country in 1991. From the vantage point of his long personal and professional association with the former prime minister, best-selling author Sanjaya Baru shows how PV's impact on the nation's fortunes went way beyond the economy.

Not too many people realize that the story of Dracula was based on a really sadistic ruler in Romania. Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad the Third, was a merciless despot who tried to make an example out of his opponents by impaling them and displaying them in public. He also enjoyed bathing in dead people’s blood and did some other gross, inhumane things. He was the terror of Eastern Europe for many years.

This is the bizarre tale of 12 young American soldiers who are deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. Rather than fight the enemy in combat, the men are unexpectedly assigned to guard the country's notorious leader - Saddam Hussein - in the months leading to his execution. Living alongside and caring for their "high-value detainee" in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions.

An absorbing account of the conspiracy to kill King James I by his handsome lover, the duke of Buckingham, a historical crime that has remained hidden for 400 years....

The Secret History, written by the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius, is one of the most extraordinary and scandalous documents to have survived from the early Byzantine period. Procopius, the leading official historian of his time, lived during the testing and indulgent time of Emperor Justinian the Great and wrote the official records of the successful wars and the grand building projects of his ruler. These were words of aggrandisement. But covertly, Procopius kept a very different record....

For nearly 10 years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration - first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President’s Daily Brief, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moments of the presidency. Now, he tells the full story of his partnership with a man who also happened to be a historic president of the United States.

In this evocative and affectionate memoir, Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, the last surviving child of Joe and Rose Kennedy, offers an intimate and illuminating look at a time long ago when she and her siblings, guided by their parents, laughed and learned a great deal under one roof.

President George W. Bush describes the critical decisions of his presidency and personal life. Decision Points is the extraordinary memoir of America’s 43rd president. Shattering the conventions of political autobiography, George W. Bush offers a strikingly candid journey through the defining decisions of his life. In gripping, never-before-heard detail, President Bush brings listeners inside the Texas Governor’s Mansion on the night of the contested 2000 election; aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America’s most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor...

A penetrating look at the necessity of constitutional limits upon government and exceptional men to lead those governments, uniquely taken by overlaying the life and writings of Winston Churchill with the American experiment.

From a renowned biographer comes the greatest untold story of the Civil War: how two American presidents faced off as the fate of the nation hung in the balance—and how Abraham Lincoln came to embrace emancipation as the last, best chance to save the Union. With a cast of unforgettable characters, from first ladies to fugitive coachmen to treasonous cabinet officials, Lincoln vs. Davis is a spellbinding dual biography from renowned presidential chronicler Nigel Hamilton: a saga that will surprise, touch, and enthrall.

In this highly anticipated follow-up to his blockbuster New York Times bestseller The Amateur, former New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Edward Klein delves into the rocky relationship between the Obamas and the Clintons. An old-school reporter with incredible insider contacts, Klein reveals just how deep the rivalry between the Obamas and the Clintons runs, with details on closed-door meetings buttressed by hundreds of interviews.

En El largo camino hacia la libertad Nelson Mandela recorre el sendero de su extraordinaria vida. Descubriremos sus primeros pasos como estudiante y pasante en Johannesburgo, el lento despertar de su conciencia política, la ruptura de su primer matrimonio, la dolorosa separación de sus hijos, los veintisiete años que estuvo en prisión -repletos de acontecimientos-, su libertad y la instauración definitiva en Sudáfrica de una democracia multirracial.

When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, he also won a long-running debate with his wife, Michelle. Contrary to her fears, politics now seemed like a worthwhile, even noble pursuit. Together they planned a White House life that would be as normal and sane as possible. Then they moved in. Filled with riveting detail and insight into their partnership, emotions, and personalities, and written with a keen eye for the ironies of public life, The Obamas is an intimate portrait that will surprise even listeners who thought they knew the president and first lady.

Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, writes about losing her father to Alzheimer's disease, saying goodbye in stages, and watching the progression of a disease that steals what is most precious: a person's memory. Past and present come together in this illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a girl and her father.

As former Prime Minister and our longest-serving Chancellor, Gordon Brown has been a guiding force for Britain and the world over three decades. This is his candid, poignant and deeply relevant story. In describing his upbringing in Scotland as the son of a minister, the near loss of his eyesight as a student and the death of his daughter within days of her birth, he shares the passionately held principles that have shaped and driven him, reminding us that politics can and should be a calling to serve.