President Memoirs

This book explores the multifaceted character of Nancy Reagan and reveals new details surrounding the tumultuous presidency. The Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty spent four years interviewing the people who knew this couple best and draws on overlooked archives, letters, memoirs, and White House records, compiling the most extensive biography of Nancy Reagan yet. From the AIDS epidemic to tensions with the Soviets and the War on Drugs, this book shows how Nancy Reagan became one of the most influential First Ladies of the century.

Andrew Jackson was easily one of the most mercurially energetic personalities in American history. Along with Washington and Lincoln, Jackson also ranks as one of the three most consequential US presidents. After Jackson, the nation would never be the same. His life in the Tennessee wilderness as lawyer, planter, and soldier was legendary, as were his duels, his racing stables, his whirlwind romance with Rachel Donelson, and his victory over the British at New Orleans. Born in South Carolina in 1767, Jackson came of age during the hardship and cruelties of the Revolutionary War.

Václav Havel was one of the most prominent figures of the 20th century: iconoclast and intellectual, renowned playwright turned political dissident, president of a united then divided nation, and dedicated human rights activist. Written by Michael Zantovsky Havel's former press secretary, advisor, and longtime friend, Havel: A Life presents a revelatory portrait of this giant among men and the turbulent times through which he prevailed.

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...

For the first time ever, the intimate thoughts and political decisions of Abraham Lincoln’s entire presidency - day by day. In a startlingly innovative format, journalist Stephen A. Wynalda has constructed a painstakingly detailed day-by-day breakdown of president Abraham Lincoln’s decisions in office - including his signing of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862; his signing of the legislation enacting the first federal income tax on August 5, 1861; and more personal incidents like the day his 11-year-old son, Willie, died.

Filled with drama and anecdote, presenting familiar characters in a penetrating new light, The Roosevelts is a soaring tale of triumph over heartbreak and frailty. But it is also a daunting story of the vanity of human wishes.

In James Madison and the Making of America, historian Kevin Gutzman looks beyond the way James Madison is traditionally seen - as "The Father of the Constitution” - to find a more complex and sometimes contradictory portrait of this influential Founding Father and the ways in which he influenced the spirit of today's United States.

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.

De la supériorité des femmes dans l'exercice du pouvoir. En raison de la loi salique, les femmes ont été écartées du trône sous l'Ancien-régime avant que la privation du suffrage universel ne les marginalise de la Révolution à la Libération. Mais la France n'est pas le monde et des dirigeantes d'exception n'ont cessé d'enrichir le riche livre d'heures de notre histoire de l'Antiquité à nos jours.

Before he grew up and became one of Washington's most respected reporters and editors, Andrew Ferguson was, of all things, a Lincoln buff, with the photos hung on his bedroom wall to prove it. Decades later, Ferguson's latent buffdom is reignited. In Land of Lincoln, he embarks on a curiosity-fueled coast-to-coast journey through contemporary Lincoln Nation, encountering everything from hatred to adoration to opportunism and all manner of reaction in between.

As President Clinton's senior adviser, George Stephanopoulos saw it all: the endless arguments, the back-hall scheming, the protracted decisions, and the last minute flip-flops that somehow produced real accomplishments but also set in motion an almost tragic series of events that placed the fate of the president in the hands of the Senate. Now, with the natural ease of a born storyteller and the sensitive eye for detail of a novelist, Stephanopoulos tells his extraordinarily gripping story.

This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.

No leader of modern times was more uniquely patriotic than Charles de Gaulle. As founder and first president of the Fifth Republic, General de Gaulle saw himself as "carrying France on [his] shoulders." In his 20s, he fought for France in the trenches and at the epic battle of Verdun. In the 1930s, he waged a lonely battle to enable France to better resist Hitler's Germany. Thereafter, he twice rescued the nation from defeat and decline by extraordinary displays of leadership, political acumen, daring, and bluff, heading off civil war and leaving a heritage adopted by his successors of right and left.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slave owner while Adams, the overachiever from New England's rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of government.

He's been called "America's greatest living tailor" and "the most interesting man in the world." Now, for the first time, Holocaust survivor Martin Greenfield tells his whole, incredible life story. Taken from his Czechoslovakian home at age 15 and transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz with his family, Greenfield came face-to-face with "Angel of Death" Dr. Joseph Mengele and was divided forever from his parents, sisters, and baby brother. In haunting, powerful prose, Greenfield remembers his desperation and fear as a teenager alone in the death camp.

Carlo D'Este's brilliant biography examines Winston Churchill through the prism of his military service as both a soldier and a warlord: a descendant of Marlborough who, despite never having risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel, came eventually to direct Britain's military campaigns as prime minister and defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito for the democracies.

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.

Spanning the years of transition, 1944 to 1948, Ascent to Power illuminates Truman’s struggles to emerge as president in his own right. Yet, from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth, Truman’s legacy transcends. With his come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, Truman’s decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today.

He was Grand Duke Michael, handsome brother of Tsar Nicholas II. She was the beautiful twice-divorced daughter of a Moscow lawyer. Their scandalous love affair and their runaway marriage to Vienna in 1912, trailed by the Tsar's secret police, caused uproar in Russia and was the talk of all Europe.

No one has ever captured Ronald Reagan like Peggy Noonan. In When Character Was King, Noonan brings her own reflections on Reagan to bear, as well as new stories - from President George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, his Secret Service men and White House colleagues, his wife, his daughter Patti Davis, and his close friends - to reveal the true nature of a man even his opponents now view as a maker of big history.