In the late summer of 2007, shares of Northern Rock went into free-fall, causing a run on the bank - the first in over 150 years. Northern Rock proved to be only the first. Twelve months later, as the world was engulfed in the worst banking crisis for more than a century, one of its largest banks, RBS, came within hours of collapse. Back from the Brink tells the gripping story of Alistair Darling's one thousand days in Number 11 Downing Street. As Chancellor, he had to avert the collapse of RBS hours before the cash machines would have ceased to function; at the eleventh hour, he stopped Barclays from acquiring Lehman Brothers in order to protect UK taxpayers; he used anti-terror legislation to stop Icelandic banks from withdrawing funds from Britain. From crisis talks in Washington, to dramatic meetings with the titans of international banking, to dealing with the massive political and economic fallout in the UK, Darling places the reader in the rooms where the destinies of millions weighed heavily on the shoulders of a few. His book is also a candid account of life in the Downing Street pressure cooker and his relationship with Gordon Brown during the last years of New Labor. Back from the Brink is a vivid and immediate depiction of the British government's handling of an unprecedented global financial catastrophe. Alistair Darling's knowledge and understanding provide a unique perspective on the events that rocked international capitalism. It is also a vital historical document.

    Today he controls 80% of the voting shares of both Viacom and CBS, meaning that on a whim he could replace the entire boards of two public companies with a combined value of $40 billion. He spent decades performing meticulous estate planning so that his control would extend beyond the grave (which he loved telling reporters he would never lie in), constructing trusts designed to make it impossible for his heirs to sell his companies after he died. “Unless they start doing terribly,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2012, “which they will not.”As readers will discover in The King of Content, Redstone’s confidence at the time was not misplaced. His life up to that point had been a story of exceeding expectations, climbing from the son of a linoleum peddler in the Jewish immigrant tenements of Boston’s West End to Harvard Law School, from the president of his father’s regional drive-in movie chain to the owner of Viacom, from a cerebral lawyer who shopped at Filene’s Basement to the owner of a coveted Hollywood studio, and ultimately, after the Viacom-CBS merger, to the controlling shareholder of the largest merged media entity in U.S. history. The credo that he coined and repeated for decades—“content is king”—turned out to be more true in the digital world than he could have ever guessed.Through exclusive interview and hundreds of pages of legal documents, Keach Hagey reveals the story behind the rise and fall of this remarkable figure, and the details of the family members fighting for control of his vast empire. At the heart of all the dueling lawsuits running through the Redstone family is Sumner Redstone’s tumultuous love life —particularly the fallout from his 2002 divorce from Phyllis, his wife of 52 years. More recently, Redstone’s life has become a tabloid soap opera thanks a lawsuit brought by one of his ex-girlfriends, Manuela Herzer. If the judge finds him incompetent, it will greatly increase the pressure on his trustees to begin the process of placing his controlling stakes in the hands of a seven-person trust who are expected to duke it out over what will become of the companies.Yet the appetite for Redstone’s assets is not what it would have been just a few years ago. While CBS—bolstered by its sports rights and the programming prowess of its former actor CEO, Les Moonves—has experienced modest declines in the age of cord-cutting, Viacom’s fall has been dizzying. Ratings at its biggest cable networks, which include MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, BET, and Vstrong, have been falling double-digit percentages for years. A few small cable companies, annoyed at Viacom’s demands for price hikes for their entire package of dozens of channels when ratings were so weak, dropped them altogether last year—a move widely viewed as a canary in the industry coal mine.There’s a corporate whodunnit here, as well as a series of mysteries that has captivated both the business and tabloid press. The answers lie in family feuds, corporate battles and alliances that go back decades, and will be laid bare in this ambitious book.

    In Accomplice , Olson separates fact from fiction and shows us Hilllary's often disturbing complicity in her husband's affairs.

    Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.Acclaimed author Charles R. Morris vividly brings the men and their times to life. The ruthlessly competitive Carnegie, the imperial Rockefeller, and the provocateur Gould were obsessed with progress, experiment, and speed. They were balanced by Morgan, the gentleman businessman, who fought, instead, for a global trust in American business. Through their antagonism and their verve, they built an industrial behemoth—and a country of middle-class consumers. The Tycoons tells the incredible story of how these four determined men wrenched the economy into the modern age, inventing a nation of full economic participation that could not have been imagined only a few decades earlier.

    . . . It is to Mark Adams’s great credit that, in Mr. America, he has rescued from obscurity a man whose influence is still felt in this country more than a century after he muscled his way onto the national scene.” —Wall Street Journal“Hilarious. . . . Delightful. . . . If Macfadden hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him.” —Washington Post Mr. America is the fascinating true story of Bernarr Macfadden, a self-made millionaire and founding father of bodybuilding, alternative medicine, and tabloid culture. Madfadden’s impact on popular American culture is everywhere, from yoga to raw food diets to US Weekly, and Mr. America vividly brings to life this charismatic and intriguing character.

    According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.”Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.

    In When Character Was King, Noonan brings her own reflections on Reagan to bear as well as new stories--from Presidents 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. Marked by incisive wit and elegant prose, When Character Was King will both enlighten and move readers. It may well be the last word on Ronald Reagan, not only as a leader but as a man.

    Driving the car is Michael Paterniti, a young journalist from Maine. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955--and simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years.On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars.Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature. With the brain as both cargo and talisman, Paterniti perceives every motel, truck-stop diner, and roadside attraction as a weigh station for the American dream in the wake of the scientist's mind-blowing legacy. Finally, inspired by the man who gave a skeptical world a glimpse of its cosmic origins, this extraordinary writer weaves his own unified field theory of time, love, and the power to believe, once again, in eternity.

    But now, surprisingly, he has turned his wit and elegant storytelling gifts to a candid memoir of the first forty years of his life. Palimpsest is written from the vantage point of Vidal's library in his villa on the Italian coast. As visitors come and go, his memory ranges back and forth across a rich history. Vidal's childhood was spent in Washington, D.C., in the household of his grandfather, the blind senator from Oklahoma, T. P. Gore, and in the various domestic situations of his complicated and exasperating mother, Nina. Then come schooldays at St. Albans and Exeter; the army; life as a literary wunderkind in New York, London, Rome, and Paris in the forties and fifties; sex in an age of promiscuity; and a campaign for Congress in 1960. Vidal's famous skills as a raconteur, his forthrightness, and his wicked wit are brilliantly at work in these recollections of a difficult family, talented friends, and interesting enemies. The cast includes Tennessee Williams, the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman Capote, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Christopher Isherwood, Jack Kerouac, Jane and Paul Bowles, Santayana, Anais Nin, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, among others. Beautifully rendered anecdotes are intermixed with meditations on writing, history, acting, and politics. Perhaps most surprising is the leitmotif of a great, lost love. "A memoir is how one remembers one's own life," Vidal says, "while an autobiography is history." Palimpsest is a true story, but also an extraordinary work of literary imagination.

    Now, in this sweeping, monumental memoir, Novak offers the first full account of his involvement in that affair, while also revealing the fascinating story of his remarkable life and career. This is a singular journey through a half century of stories, scandals, and personal encounters with Washington's most powerful and colorful people. Novak has been a Washington insider since the days when the place was a sleepy southern town and journalism was built on shoe leather and the ability to cultivate and keep sources (not to mention the ability to hold one's liquor). He has covered every president since Truman, known (personally and professionally) virtually all the big movers and shakers in D.C., and broken a number of the biggest stories--the Plame story, we see here, being far from the most important. In this book, he puts it all into perspective. He also reveals the extraordinary transformations that have fundamentally remade Washington, politics, and journalism--and his own role in those transformations. Moving beyond the "first draft of history" that is daily journalism, Novak can at last tell the stories behind the stories. He vividly recalls encounters with the Kennedys (angry meetings with Bobby, a scary ride home in Jack's convertible), his unusual relationship with Lyndon Johnson (who hosted Novak's wedding reception and who, "drunk as a loon," had to be carried out of a bar by the young newsman), a decidedly odd off-the-record lunch with Ronald Reagan, and his first meetings with George W. Bush--at which the veteran journalist seriously underestimated the future president. We meet other fascinating characters as well, from Deng Xiaoping to Ted Turner to Ezra Pound. Writing with bracing candor, Novak tells us how politics and journalism truly operate at the highest levels, both publicly and behind closed doors. He is equally open about his private experience. He writes frankly about the days when his drinking reflected too closely the boozy ways of the town. He acknowledges times when his job took precedence over his family. He is reflective about his political journey to the right. And he writes more personally than ever before about his spiritual journey, from his early life as a secular Jew to his conversion to Catholicism at the age of sixty-seven. Packed with riveting, never-before-told stories, "The Prince of Darkness" is a hugely entertaining and equally perceptive view of fifty years in the life of Washington and the people who cover it.

    Critic Dave Marsh has traced Springsteen's career from its beginning, and has earned the singer's respect through his careful documentation and critical description of Springsteen's work. This biography brings together for the first time Marsh's two previous biographies, Born To Run (which covered Springsteen's early career through the mid-'70s) and Glory Days (which took him through the mid-'80s). Both were widely praised for their insightful and near definitive coverage of Springsteen's life and music. For this book, Marsh has written a new chapter covering major developments in Springsteen's career to today, particularly focusing on his album The Rising and its impact on American culture.

    Brought together in one volume and edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, "The Reagan Diaries" provides a striking insight into one of this nation's most important presidencies and sheds new light on the character of a true American leader.

    Heston began his career as an actor in New York shortly after he returned from service in World War II. Television was a fledgling industry then, and there were many opportunities for young performers in this new medium. Broadway was thriving as well, and Heston found work there too. It was not long, however, before Hollywood took note of his talents and his commanding presence. Soon he was embarked on a series of films that were both memorable and hugely successful. He was Moses in The Ten Commandments; he played the title character in Ben-Hur (for which he won an Academy Award); he was Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy; he played the title character in El Cid; he has played presidents, generals, and statesmen. In recent years, Heston has continued to appear in films, on stage, and on television, but at the same time, he has devoted a great amount of his energy to causes in which he has strong and outspoken beliefs. An active supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the early days of the struggle for civil rights in America, he continues to this day to lobby hard for the rights of all men to live family and equally in a country that he loves dearly.

    Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... In the first trade paperback edition of his national bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel presents "the real American experience" (Chicago Daily News) -- "a magnificent book . . .. A work of art. To read it is to hear America talking." (Boston Globe)

    Grant (1822-1885) was one of the most esteemed individuals of the nineteenth century. His two-volume memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, have never gone out of print and were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and Edmund Wilson hailed these works as great literature, and Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both credit Grant with influencing their own writing. Yet a judiciously annotated clarifying edition of these memoirs has never been produced until now.The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, fully representing the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. An introduction contextualizes Grant's life and significance, and lucid editorial commentary allows the president's voice and narrative to shine through. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. Grant Association's Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the antebellum era, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. Grant provides insight into how rigorously these events tested America's democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order.The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant preserves and extends a work of profound political, historical, and literary significance and serves as the gateway for modern readers of all backgrounds to an American classic.