President Memoirs

1923: Faced with impending personal and political scandals (corrupt cabinet members, drinking, gambling, failing health made worse by a quack physician, blackmailers attempting to exploit his numerous affairs and bastard children, murders, and suicides), President Warren G. Harding embarks on a cross-country train trip, from Washington D.C. to Alaska, in an effort to rehabilitate his chances for re-election - something he is unsure he even wants. But the GOP have lost faith in Warren.

Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant. Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

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.

Written 200 years after Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday on February 12, 1809, this insightful account sheds new light on two men who changed the way we think about the meaning of life and death. Award-winning journalist Adam Gopnik's unique perspective, combined with previously unexplored stories and figures, reveals two men planted firmly at the roots of modern views and liberal values.

Washington's rise constitutes one of the greatest self-reinventions in history. In his mid-20s, this third son of a modest Virginia planter had ruined his own military career thanks to an outrageous ego. But by his mid-40s, that headstrong, unwise young man had evolved into an unassailable leader chosen as the commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Army. By his mid-50s, he was unanimously elected the nation's first president. How did Washington emerge from the wilderness to become the central founder of the United States of America?

Les Presses Universitaires de France et Frémeaux & Associés proposent cette biographie d'Adolf Hitler, analysée et expliquée par les historiens Johann Chapoutot, Professeur à la Sorbonne et Christian Ingrao, Directeur de recherches au CNRS, spécialiste des violences de guerres nazies. Un homme peut-il à lui seul mener un continent entier à la guerre et à la plus intense des barbaries ? Le récit de la vie du Führer est aussi le récit de son époque.

A United States minister, senator, president, and congressman in turn, John Quincy Adams was one of the most prevalent and dedicated Americans in history. Drawing from Adams' 70-year diary, author Paul Nagel probes deeply into the psyche of this cantankerous, misanthropic, erudite, hardworking son of a former president whose remarkable career spanned so many offices.

Today the United States is the world’s great super­power, and yet we also wrestle with the government Franklin and Washington created more than two centuries ago - the power of the executive branch, the principle of checks and balances, the electoral college - as well as the wounds of their compromise over slavery. Now, as the founding institutions appear under new stress, it is time to understand their origins through the fresh lens of Larson’s Franklin & Washington, a major addition to the literature of the founding era.

After standing at Donald Trump’s side on Election Night, Cliff Sims joined him in the West Wing as special assistant to the president and director of White House message strategy. He soon found himself pulled into the president’s inner circle as a confidante, an errand boy, an advisor, a punching bag, and a friend. This is the story of what it was really like in the West Wing as a member of the president’s team. It's a story of power and palace intrigue, backstabbing and bold victories, as well as painful moral compromises, occasionally with yourself.

In Inside Trump's White House, Doug Wead offers a sweeping, eloquent history of President Donald J. Trump's first years in office, covering everything from election night to the news of today. The book will include never-before-reported stories and scoops, including how President Trump turned around the American economy, how he "never complains and never explains," and how his actions sometimes lead to misunderstandings with the media and the public. It also includes exclusive interviews with the Trump family about the Mueller report, and narrates their reactions to its release.

In this important new biography, Ronald C. White, Jr. offers a fresh and fascinating definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity - what today's commentators are calling "authenticity" - whose internal moral compass is the key to understanding his life. Through meticulous research, utilizing recently discovered Lincoln letters, legal papers, and photographs, White depicts Lincoln as a person of intellectual curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity, and capable of changing his mind.

L'opposition entre de Gaulle et Mitterrand met dos à dos un homme qui lutte contre l'effondrement d'une civilisation et un individu qui se moque que celle-ci disparaisse pourvu qu'il puisse vivre dans ses ruines à la façon d'un satrape. Le premier donne sa vie pour sauver la France ; le second donne la France pour sauver sa vie. L'un veut une France forte, grande et puissante, à même d'inspirer une Europe des patries ; l'autre la veut faible, petite et impuissante, digérée par l'Europe du capitalisme. L'un ressuscite Caton ; l'autre réincarne Néron.

Everyone knows the story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, but few are aware of the original conspiracy to kill him four years earlier in 1861, literally on his way to Washington, DC, for his first inauguration. The conspirators were part of a pro-Southern secret society that didn't want an antislavery President in the White House. They planned an elaborate scheme to assassinate the brand new President in Baltimore as Lincoln's inauguration train passed through en route to the Capitol.

After President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he retired to a farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Living next door was his teenage grandson, David; they would be neighbors for the rest of the decade. Based on personal stories, letters, diaries, and the reminiscences of Eisenhower’s closest friends, Going Home to Glory is both an intimate chronicle of the elder statesman’s final years and a coming of age story.

« Le jour où on écrira l’Histoire, on dira que c’est une femme qui a permis à l’État juif de voir le jour » - David Ben Gourion. Née à Kiev en 1898, Golda Meir fuit avec sa famille la terreur des pogroms et trouve refuge aux États-Unis. En 1921, elle émigre en Palestine avec son mari et s’installe dans un kibboutz. Militante infatigable de la cause sioniste, elle signe la déclaration d’indépendance d’Israël le 14 mai 1948. Ministre du Travail, ministre des Affaires étrangères, secrétaire générale du Parti travailliste, elle est nommée Premier ministre en 1969, à l’âge de 71 ans.

Within eight turbulent months in 1974 Gerald Ford went from the United States House of Representatives, where he was the minority leader, to the White House as the country's first and only unelected president. His unprecedented rise to power, after Richard Nixon's equally unprecedented fall, has garnered the lion's share of scholarly attention devoted to America's 38th president. But Gerald Ford's (1913-2006) life and career in and out of Washington spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

In this brave, beautiful, and deeply personal memoir, Laura Bush, one of our most beloved and private first ladies, tells her own extraordinary story. She writes openly about the White House during wartime, the withering and relentless media spotlight, and the transformation of her role as she began to understand the power of the first lady.

Queen Elizabeth I was all too happy to play on courtly conventions of gender when it suited her “weak and feeble woman’s body” to do so for political gain. But in Elizabeth, historian Lisa Hilton offers ample evidence why those famous words should not be taken at face value. With new research out of France, Italy, Russia, and Turkey, Hilton’s fresh interpretation is of a queen who saw herself primarily as a Renaissance prince—an expert in Machiavellian statecraft.

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.

After his victory in 1939, General Francisco Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist for 36 years. Franco’s rapid yet unlikely rise to power in Spain came to define a country for several generations. Franco was influenced by the wider trends and forces of the 20th century, yet he would indelibly make his mark on Spain in his own right, and in the process become one of the most widely derided figures in contemporary history.