Private Politics

In America’s collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and “plastic” in the press. Pat married Richard Nixon in June of 1940. As the couple rose to prominence, Pat became Second Lady from 1953-1961 and then First Lady from 1969-1974.

Wherever Sean Drummond goes, it seems that the JAG officer leaves a trail of political fallout in his wake. So when his superiors get an opportunity to loan him to a prestigious law firm, they jump on it, hoping he'll soak up the nuances of civilian lawyering. But almost immediately, dark clouds appear when Sean's predecessor in the loan-out program is murdered. Then Sean begins to sense something amiss with the firm's biggest client, a telecom behemoth with large defense contracts.

Sam Capra has one reason to live: to rescue his baby son from the people who abducted him. An ex-CIA agent, Sam now owns bars around the world as cover for his real mission - working undercover for a secret network as mysterious as it is powerful, while using his skills to find his child. Now the kidnappers have offered a deadly deal: they'll surrender Sam's child... if Sam finds and murders the one man who can expose them.

Cue the accordions: Battle Lake, Minnesota, is kicking off October Fest with polka, sausage, and cold suds. The big inaugural event? A debate between two congressional hopefuls. One, stultifyingly sincere. The other, a foot-in-mouth tippler. Reporter Mira James is roped into covering their fighting words…and then a murder, when a relentless pit bull of a blogger is found dead at a motor lodge filled to capacity with fellow pundits, campaign entourages, and tourists—all of whom have just become suspects.

Attorney Justin Glass's practice, housed in a shabby office on the north side of Saint Louis, isn't doing so well that he can afford to work for free. But when eight-year-old Tanisha Walker offers him a jar full of change to find her missing brother, he doesn't have the heart to turn her away. Justin had hoped to find the boy alive and well. But all that was found of Devon Walker was his brutally murdered body - and the bodies of twelve other African American teenagers, all discarded like trash in a mass grave.

A peaceful mountaintop setting crucially removed from the constant scrutiny of the press, Camp David has served as both a site of critical diplomacy and unparalleled tranquility. It is where President and Mrs. Reagan rode horses through the mountains, where Gerald Ford could take a moment to jump on a trampoline with his daughter, where Nixon rode shotgun with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, and where Jimmy Carter could find the ultimate flight-sledding - only to break his clavicle two weeks before the end of his tenure.

My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. My name is Sara Eden. This is all Sara Eden knows about herself. She was found at the age of 10, abandoned in a vat of water - a homemade sensory-deprivation chamber. Someone had placed her there - trapped for days in the dark, with only a cassette player taped to her head repeating again and again, 'My name is Sara Eden'. There were a handful clues: a battered cassette player, a cheap necklace, a few scraps of paper. And a Polaroid of a stranger with a handwritten note: 'Don't trust this man'.

A deeply private man, shut off even to those who worked closely with him, Abraham Lincoln often captured “his best thoughts", as he called them, in short notes to himself. He would work out his personal stances on the biggest issues of the day, never expecting anyone to see these pieces of writing, which he’d then keep close at hand, in desk drawers and even in his top hat. The profound importance of these notes has been overlooked, because the originals are scattered across several different archives and have never before been brought together and examined as a coherent whole.

A revelatory, minute-by-minute account of JFK’s final days that asks what might have been. Fifty years after his assassination, President John F. Kennedy’s legend endures. Noted author and historian Thurston Clarke reexamines the last months of the president’s life to show a man in the midst of great change, both in his family and in the key issues of his day: The Cold War, Civil Rights, and Vietnam, finally on the cusp of making good on his extraordinary promise.

When 12-year-old Valentina fails to return from a visit to her father in Moscow, alarm bells start ringing. Her rich and powerful family know there's one man they can depend on to bring her back safe: former SAS major Ben Hope. But what starts off as an apparently straightforward case of parental child abduction quickly takes on more sinister dimensions as Ben travels to Moscow and starts to investigate the whereabouts of Valentina and her father, Yuri, a man with a hidden past not even his ex-wife knows about.

Publicada en 1940 y considerada una obra maestra, La vida privada y pública de Sócrates consagró a René Kraus como biógrafo de excepción. René Kraus realiza impagables descripciones del filósofo, de algunos de sus célebres contemporáneos y del ambiente de la ciudad y la época, subrayando la tesis que subyace en esta obra: que los seres excepcionales, incluso cuando son incomprendidos y maltratados en vida, terminan imponiendo su elevado ejemplo moral y proporcionan a la humanidad un horizonte de civilización.

In The Private Production of Defense, Hoppe takes on one the most difficult subjects in economic and political theory: the provision of security. Addressing those who would claim that only the state can and should supply society with the service of protection, Hoppe argues that in fact it is better provided by free markets than government. In the process he tackles a hundred counterarguments. Here we have an important and exhilarating update and refinement of an argument rarely made even in the libertarian tradition.

In 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a top CIA official, was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath near her home. Mary Meyer was a secret mistress of President John F. Kennedy, whom she had known since private school days, and after her death, reports that she had kept a diary set off a tense search by her brother-in-law, newsman Ben Bradlee, and CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton. But the only suspect in her murder was acquitted, and today her life and death are still a source of intense speculation.

Arriving home from a fund-raising dinner, senior Illinois senator Lyle Simmons discovers his wife's brutally bludgeoned body. And like any savvy politician with presidential aspirations, his first move is to phone his attorney. In this case, it's his old friend and college roommate, former DA Philip Rotondi, who gamely agrees to step out of quiet retirement and into the thick of a D.C.-style political, criminal, and public relations maelstrom from which no one will escape unscathed.

When Congressman and DeMarco’s long-time employer John Mahoney gains custody of his 15-year-old goddaughter, Cassie Russell, he sends DeMarco to evaluate the situation. Cassie’s parents have just perished in a plane crash that Cassie survived, and she has now inherited her father’s billions. DeMarco plans to advise Mahoney to leave Erin Kelly, manager of the Russell’s fund, in charge of Cassie’s finances, but he soon learns that Erin may not be as trustworthy as she first appeared.

North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.

Ellen McGarrahan was a young journalist for The Miami Herald in 1990 when she witnessed the botched execution of convicted killer Jesse Tafero: flames and smoke and three jolts of the electric chair. When evidence later emerged casting doubt on Tafero’s guilt, McGarrahan found herself haunted by his fiery death. Had she witnessed the execution of an innocent man? Decades later, McGarrahan, now a successful private investigator, is still gripped by the mystery and infamy of the Tafero case, and decides she must investigate it herself.

Grahame Mayer specialises in selling books, not solving mysteries. So when he’s asked to play private investigator and track down a soldier from the Spanish Civil War, he wonders if it’s some sort of test – and if so, what will happen if he fails.... Armed with fresh information, he is sent to Glasgow on the trail of Jock Cameron, and a meeting with a former nurse who knew him back in Spain furnishes Grahame with further clues. But despite these new leads, the elusive Jock remains tantalisingly out of reach.

The year is 1995, and an energetic senator wants to disarm, perhaps even eliminate, the CIA. To accumulate the evidence necessary to persuade the Senate, he needs the cooperation of Blackford Oakes, now retired. He wants from Oakes an account of his covert activity 10 years earlier, when Oakes served as chief of covert activities for the CIA. But, what will the frustrated senator do to compel cooperation from Blackford Oakes?

Adults don’t talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: The world of public bathrooms is problem - and politics-free. No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs reveals the opposite is true. No Place to Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place to Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways - momentous and mockable - public bathrooms just don’t work.