This is the most penetrating account of how Obama won the election and how he confronted the implacable forces arrayed against him—a sluggish economy, vicious partisan opposition, his own failures as a politician and communicator.The book brings to life today’s climactic clash over the fate of the middle class and the future of the American Dream. On the ground and in the air, the 2012 election pitted Obama’s still-formidable citizens’ army versus Mitt Romney’s Super PAC moneyed elite.Alter takes readers deep inside Obama’s Chicago headquarters and Romney’s Boston-based campaign, as the candidates battle over jobs, their records, and who is more out of touch.Alter explains why the 2012 election will be long remembered as a pivotal contest. At stake, he writes, is not just the presidency but the role of government and our definition of what we owe each other.Obama has always believed he could hit the three-point shot at the buzzer. Alter takes us on the court with the president as he tries to nail the last big shot of his political career.

    It is the inside history of America’s inevitable wartime rise as a great power, written in wonderfully readable prose by White House speechwriter and prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood.

    Puller, Jr.'s memoir is a moving story of a man born into a proud military legacy who struggles to rebuild his world after the Vietnam War has shattered his body and his ideals. Raised in the shadow of his father, Marine General Lewis B. Chesty Puller, a hero of five wars, young Lewis went to Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War and served with distinction as an officer in his father's beloved Corps. But when he tripped a booby-trapped howitzer round, triggering an explosion that would cost him his legs, his career as a soldier ended, and the battle to reclaim his life began.

    In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school—just as American art began to dominate the international scene.Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.This is an authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master.

    Over sixty years later, this novel, which was an immediate bestseller when published in 1942, is still selling. The child of German American parents, Betty Smith was born and raised in the immigrant slums of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Forced to go to work at the age of fourteen, she never graduated from high school, but she achieved success as a playwright and novelist, writing four bestsellers over the course of her career. She married three times, was divorced twice, lived for many years with her lover, attended and taught graduate-level courses, raised two daughters, and supported her family during the Depression. While her writing focused on Brooklyn, she lived and worked for most of her adult life in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This is the first published biography of Betty Smith. Valerie Raleigh Yow has a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin. She has published two previous academic books and a biography of North Carolina novelist Bernice Kelly Harris (Louisiana State University Press, 1999) and is a psychotherapist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

    Kennedy’s assassination has been the subject of public and cultural fascination (a film by Oliver Stone, a novel by Stephen King, endless conspiracy theories) for nearly 50 years. It’s time, this brief biography argues, to give equal consideration to Kennedy’s life.

    Born the son of missionaries, Henry Luce spent his childhood in rural China, yet he glimpsed a milieu of power altogether different at Hotchkiss and later at Yale. While working at a Baltimore newspaper, he and Brit Hadden conceived the idea of Time: a “news-magazine” that would condense the week’s events in a format accessible to increasingly busy members of the middle class. They launched it in 1923, and young Luce quickly became a publishing titan. In 1936, after Time’s unexpected success—and Hadden’s early death—Luce published the first issue of Life, to which millions soon subscribed.Brinkley shows how Luce reinvented the magazine industry in just a decade. The appeal of Life seemingly cut across the lines of race, class, and gender. Luce himself wielded influence hitherto unknown among journalists. By the early 1940s, he had come to see his magazines as vehicles to advocate for America’s involvement in the escalating international crisis, in the process popularizing the phrase “World War II.” In spite of Luce’s great success, happiness eluded him. His second marriage—to the glamorous playwright, politician, and diplomat Clare Boothe—was a shambles. Luce spent his later years in isolation, consumed at times with conspiracy theories and peculiar vendettas. The Publisher tells a great American story of spectacular achievement—yet it never loses sight of the public and private costs at which that achievement came.

    Lucid in his vision of America's place in the world, refreshingly candid about his family life and his time in the Senate, Obama here sets out his political convictions and inspires us to trust in the dogged optimism that has long defined us and that is our best hope going forward.

    He has been viewed as one of the most powerful vice presidents—secretive, even mysterious, and at the same time opinionated and unflinchingly outspoken. He has been both praised and attacked by his peers, the press, and the public. Through it all, courting only the ideals that define him, he has remained true to himself, his principles, his family, and his country. Now in an enlightening and provocative memoir, a stately page-turner with flashes of surprising humor and remarkable candor, Dick Cheney takes readers through his experiences as family man, policymaker, businessman, and politician during years that shaped our collective history. Born into a family of New Deal Democrats in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was the son of a father at war and a high-spirited and resilient mother. He came of age in Casper, Wyoming, playing baseball and football and, as senior class president, courting homecoming queen Lynne Vincent, whom he later married. This all-American story took an abrupt turn when he flunked out of Yale University, signed on to build power line in the West, and started living as hard as he worked. Cheney tells the story of how he got himself back on track and began an extraordinary ascent to the heights of American public life, where he would remain for nearly four decades: * He was the youngest White House Chief of Staff, working for President Gerald Ford—the first of four chief executives he would come to know well. * He became Congressman from Wyoming and was soon a member of the congressional leadership working closely with President Ronald Reagan. * He became secretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, overseeing America’s military during Operation Desert Storm and in the historic transition at the end of the Cold War. * He was CEO of Halliburton, a Fortune 500 company with projects and personnel around the globe. * He became the first vice president of the United States to serve out his term of office in the twenty-first century. Working with George W. Bush from the beginning of the global war on terror, he was—and remains—an outspoken defender of taking every step necessary to defend the nation. Eyewitness to history at the highest levels, Cheney brings to life scenes from past and present. He describes driving through the White House gates on August 9, 1974, just hours after Richard Nixon resigned, to begin work on the Ford transition; and he portrays a time of national crisis a quarter century later when, on September 11, 2001, he was in the White House bunker and conveyed orders to shoot down a hijacked airliner if it would not divert. With its unique perspective on a remarkable span of American history, In My Time will enlighten. As an intimate and personal chronicle, it will surprise, move, and inspire. Dick Cheney’s is an enduring political vision to be reckoned with and admired for its honesty, its wisdom, and its resonance. In My Time is truly the last word about an incredible political era, by a man who lived it and helped define it—with courage and without compromise.

    Handsome, boyish and well-spoken, a law student with bright political prospects, Bundy was also a predator and sexual deviant who murdered and mutilated at least thirty young women and girls, many of them college coeds but at least two as young as twelve.

    Her collection is both international and democratic--dime-store pins share pride of place with designer creations and family heirlooms. Included are the antique eagle purchased to celebrate Albright's appointment as secretary of state, the zebra pin she wore when meeting Nelson Mandela, and the Valentine's Day heart forged by Albright's five-year-old daughter. "Read My Pins" features more than 200 photographs, along with compelling and often humorous stories about jewelry, global politics, and the life of one of America's most accomplished and fascinating diplomats.

    But Ted Kennedy -- the youngest of the Kennedy children and the son who felt the least pressure to satisfy his father's enormous ambitions -- would go on to live a life that no one could have predicted: dismissed as a spent force in politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation's keeper of traditional liberalism.As Peter S. Canellos and his team of "Boston Globe" reporters show in this revealing and intimate biography, the gregarious, pudgy, and least academically successful of the Kennedy boys has witnessed greater tragedy and suffered greater pressure than any of his siblings. At the age of thirty-six, Ted Kennedy found himself the last brother, the champion of a generation's dreams and ambitions. He would be expected to give the nation the confidence to confront its problems and to build a fairer society at home and abroad.He quickly failed in spectacular fashion. Late one night in the summer of 1969, he left the scene of a fatal automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island. The death there of a young woman from his brother's campaign would haunt and ultimately doom his presidential ambitions. Political rivals turned his all-too-human failings -- drinking, philandering, and divorce -- into a condemnation of his liberal politics.But as the presidency eluded his grasp, Kennedy was finally liberated from the expectations of others, free to become his own man. Once a symbol of youthful folly and nepotism, he transformed himself in his later years into a symbol of wisdom and perseverance. He built a deeply loving marriage with his second wife, Victoria Reggie. He embraced his role as the family patriarch. And as his health failed, he anointed the young and ambitious presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom many commentators compared to his brother Jack. The Kennedy brand of liberalism was rediscovered by a new generation of Americans.Perceptive and carefully reported, drawing heavily from candid interviews with the Kennedy family and inner circle, "Last Lion" captures magnificently the life and historic achievements of Ted Kennedy, as well as the personal redemption that he found.

    in the Depresson years and World War II that has ever been written."—Harrison Salisbury.

    Kennedy or his brother Robert Kennedy have woven either a tale of Camelot or a tawdry tale of ambition & reckless personal behavior. But the real story of the Kennedys in the 1960s has been submerged. "Brothers" sheds light on the inner life of the Kennedy presidency & its aftermath. Talbot, founder of Salon.com, has written a political history sure to be talked about. It begins on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, as a stricken Robert urgently demands answers about his brother's assassination. His suspicions focus on the nest of CIA spies, gangsters & Cuban exiles who'd long plotted a violent regime change in Cuba. The Kennedys had struggled to control this swamp of anti-Castro intrigue based in South Florida, but with little success. It then shifts back in time, revealing the shadowy conflicts that tore apart the Kennedy administration, pitting the president & his brother against their own national security apparatus. The brothers & a small circle of their trusted advisors -- men like Theodore Sorensen, Robert McNamara & Kenny O'Donnell, who were so close as to be regarded as family -- repeatedly thwarted Washington's warrior caste. These hard-line generals & spymasters were hell-bent on a showdown with Communism -- in Berlin, Laos, Vietnam & especially Cuba. But the Kennedys frustrated their militaristic ambitions, pushing for a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. The tensions within the administration were headed for an explosive climax, when gunfire in Dallas terminated JFK's presidency. Based on over 150 interviews -- including many of the Kennedys' aging band of brothers, whose testimony here may be their final word on this political story -- as well as newly released government documents, "Brothers" reveals the untold story of those years, including JFK's efforts to keep the USA out of war & RFK's secret quest to solve his brother's murder. Bobby's subterranean search was a dangerous one & led, in part, to his own campaign in 1968 leading to his own death. RFK may have been the victim of the same plotters he suspected of killing his brother. This is history at its best -- meticulously researched, movingly told. It's a sprawling narrative about the clash of powerful men & the darker side of the Cold War -- a tale of tragic grandeur that will change understandings of the Kennedy saga.

    Includes 16 pages of photos.