President Memoirs

In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation.

In this definitive biography, Israel's leading journalist-historian, Tom Segev, uses large amounts of previously unreleased archival material to give an original, nuanced account, transcending the myths and legends that have accreted around Ben-Gurion. Segev's probing biography ranges from the villages of Poland to Manhattan libraries, London hotels, and the hills of Palestine, and shows us Ben-Gurion's relentless activity across six decades.

The New York Times best-selling author of George Washington's Secret Six and Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates turns to two other heroes of the nation: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In The President and the Freedom Fighter, Brian Kilmeade tells the little-known story of how two American heroes moved from strong disagreement to friendship, and in the process changed the entire course of history.

Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird deftly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history.

In the first multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln to be published in decades, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame offers a fresh look at the life of one of America's greatest presidents. Incorporating the field notes of earlier biographers along with decades of research in multiple manuscript archives and long-neglected newspapers, this remarkable work will both alter and reinforce our current understanding of America's 16th president.

The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to its own people and to the world.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's classic life of Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the Great Society, the Vietnam War, and other defining moments in the tumultuous 1960s, is a monument in political biography. From the moment the author, then a young woman from Harvard, first encountered President Johnson at a White House dance in the spring of 1967, she became fascinated by the man - his character, his enormous energy and drive, and his manner of wielding these gifts in an endless pursuit of power.

David O. Stewart presents this well-researched account of the U.S. Constitution's creation not as a dry analysis of events, but as a high-powered narrative filled with dramatic intensity and larger-than-life historical figures.

The drama of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is the foundational story of America - courage, loyalty, hope, fanaticism, greatness, failure, forgiveness, love. Agony and Eloquence is the story of the greatest friendship in American history and the revolutionary times in which it was made, ruined, and finally renewed. In the wake of Washington's retirement, longtime friends Thomas Jefferson and John Adams came to represent the opposing political forces struggling to shape America's future.

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.

One has been famous longer than anyone on the planet - a wily stateswoman and an enduring symbol of a fading institution. One is the great-granddaughter of a king's mistress and a celebrated homewrecker who survived a firestorm of scorn to marry her lover and replace her archrival, a beloved 20th-century figure. One is a beautiful commoner, the university-educated daughter of a self-made entrepreneur, a fashion idol, and wife and mother to two future kings.

Esteemed Harvard University historian and Associate Fellow Kathleen Dalton has been studying Theodore Roosevelt since 1975. This authoritative work, incorporating the latest scholarship, paints a compelling portrait of the president in all his robust glory.

More than a million listeners have thrilled to Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln, the can't-stop-listening work of nonfiction about the shocking assassination that changed the course of American history. Now the anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts in gripping detail the brutal murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—and how a sequence of gunshots on a Dallas afternoon not only killed a beloved president but also sent the nation into the cataclysmic division of the Vietnam War and its culture-changing aftermath.

This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize - and National Book Award - winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, marks the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written 40 books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?

In this powerful reflection, President Jimmy Carter contemplates how faith has sustained him in happiness and disappointment. He considers how we may find it in our own lives. As President Carter examines faith's many meanings, he describes how to accept it, live it, how to doubt and find faith again. A serious and moving reflection from one of America's most admired and respected citizens.

For decades, government pundits have dismissed these "coincidental" deaths, even regarding them as "myths" as "urban legends." Like most people, Richard and David were initially unsure about what to make of these 'coincidences'. After all, events don't "consult the odds" prior to happening; they simply happen. Then someone comes along later and figures out what the odds of it happening were. Some of the deaths seemed purely coincidental; heart attacks, hunting accidents.

In Dead Presidents, NPR host Brady Carlson takes listeners to presidential gravesites, monuments, and memorials to tell the death stories of our greatest leaders. Mixing biography and travelogue, Carlson explores whether William Henry Harrison really died of a cold, why Zachary Taylor's remains were exhumed 140 years after his death, and how what killed James A. Garfield wasn't an assassin's bullet.

Donald Trump v. The United States tells the dramatic story of those who felt compelled to confront and try to contain the most powerful man in the world as he shredded norms and sought to expand his power. Michael S. Schmidt takes listeners inside the defining events of the presidency, chronicles them up close, and records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia.

A behind-the-scenes, revelatory account of John F. Kennedy's wily campaign for the White House, beginning with his bold failed attempt to win the vice presidential nomination in 1956. A young and undistinguished junior plots his way to the presidency and changes the way we nominate and elect presidents. John F. Kennedy and his young warriors invented modern presidential politics.

In this masterful and engaging biography, acclaimed journalist Steve Paikin brings to life John Turner (1929-2020), one of the most glamorous and successful politicians in Canadian history.