From his first day in the White House until long after his appearance as the only presidential aide ever to testify in an impeachment trial, Blumenthal acted in or witnessed nearly all the battles of the Clinton years. His major new book—part history, part memoir—is the first inside account we have of the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.The Clinton Wars begins in 1987, when Blumenthal first met Bill and Hillary Clinton. His chronicle of Clinton’s first presidential campaign and first term draws on his experiences as confidant to both the President and the First Lady, and is enriched with previously unpublished revelations about both. This remarkable personal interpretation goes far in explaining the polarizing nature of Clinton’s presence on the national scene. The narrative of Clinton’s second term is even more dramatic. Blumenthal takes special note of the battle that was waged within the media between the President’s detractors and defenders, which he expands into a vivid picture of Washington society torn apart by warring factions. But he does not neglect the wars fought on other fronts—in Kosovo, against Congress, and for economic prosperity. His remarkable book ends with the inside story of the fight to elect Al Gore in 2000 and extend the legacy of the Clinton-Gore Administration.Every page of this unrivaled, authoritative book, with its intimate insights into Clinton’s personality and politics, attests to Blumenthal’s literary skill, profound understanding of politics, and unique perspective on crucial events of our recent past. The Clinton Wars is a lasting contribution to American history.

    She also reveals wonderfully entertaining and intimate stories and anecdotes about her family—in particular her uncle William, or “Pappy,” with whom she shared color­ful, sometimes utterly frank, sometimes whimsical, conversations and experiences.              This deeply felt memoir explores the close re­lationship between Dean’s uncle and her father, Dean Swift Faulkner, a barnstormer killed at age twenty-eight during an air show four months be­fore she was born. It was William who gave his youngest brother an airplane, and after Dean’s tragic death, William helped to raise his niece. He paid for her education, gave her away when she was married, and maintained a unique relationship with her throughout his life.                         From the 1920s to the early civil rights era, from Faulkner’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature to his death in 1962, Every Day by the Sun explores the changing culture and society of Oxford, Mis­sissippi, while offering a rare glimpse of a notori­ously private family and an indelible portrait of a national treasure.

    In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.

    This multigenerational saga follows the Kent family and their pursuit of a foothold and future in the expanding United States. From the family’s initial journey traveling to America’s shore to their voyage to the Western frontier, their fate is intertwined with the course of American history in these first three volumes of the series.  The Bastard: Denied his birthright as the illegitimate son of the Duke of Kentland, Philippe Charboneau seeks a new life in London, where he meets Benjamin Franklin and reads the works of patriot firebrand Sam Adams. Inspired by such brave new ideas, he travels to the American colonies at the brink of the Revolution. There he will choose his own name—Philip Kent—and finally decide his own fate.  The Rebels: Philip Kent fights as a Continental soldier at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In a bold move, he has taken up arms for the future of his new family. Spirited and unwavering in his dedication to his adopted homeland, Philip fights in the most violent battles in America’s early history. But far from the front lines, another battle rages that will sweep his wife, Anne, on her own perilous journey that may destroy all Philip has fought for.  The Seekers: Returning from fighting valiantly on the frontier, Abraham Kent—son of Philip and Anne—returns to Boston, only to realize that he cannot abide the confines of civilization. Determined not to live in his father’s shadow, he takes his young bride and settles on the American frontier. But the life of a pioneer comes at a high price, and the cost of Abraham’s restless ambitions may be more than he can bear.

    L. Doctorow), and "an unforgettable historical drama" (Chicago Sun-Times), "Big Trouble" brings to life the astonishing case that ultimately engaged President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the politics and passions of an entire nation at century's turn. After Idaho's former governor is blown up by a bomb at his garden gate at Christmastime 1905, America's most celebrated detective, Pinkerton James McParland, takes over the investigation. His daringly executed plan to kidnap the radical union leader "Big Bill" Haywood from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho sets the stage for a memorable courtroom confrontation between the flamboyant prosecutor, progressive senator William Borah, and the young defender of the dispossessed, Clarence Darrow. "Big Trouble" captures the tumultuous first decade of the twentieth century, when capital and labor, particularly in the raw, acquisitive West, were pitted against each other in something close to class war. Lukas paints a vivid portrait of a time and place in which actress Ethel Barrymore, baseball phenom Walter Johnson, and editor William Allen White jostled with railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, socialist Eugene V. Debs, gunslinger Charlie Siringo, and Operative 21, the intrepid Pinkerton agent who infiltrated Darrow's defense team. This is a grand narrative of the United States as it charged, full of hope and trepidation, into the twentieth century.

    Now what? This was the pressing political question for the United States in 1784, and a consuming one for George Washington. He had laid down his sword and returned home to Mount Vernon after eight and a half years as commander of the Continental Army. He vowed that he had retired forever, that he would be a farmer on the bank of the Potomac River, under his own “vine and fig tree.” But history was not done with him, and he was not done with history. Within a year, as Joel Achenbach relates in this stunning narrative, Washington saddled up and rode away on one of the most daring journeys of his rich and adventurous life: a trek across the Appalachian mountains to the frontier, where he would inspect his long-neglected western property and try to collect rent. The Grand Idea is the story of Washington’s ambitions for the brand-new republic that he had fought so hard to create. His western journey culminates in a breathtaking scheme: Washington, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, will transform the Potomac River into a commercial artery that will link the new West to the old East. Worried that the newborn country was so fragmented that it might literally split into two separate and rival nations, he uses the skills he learned as a young backwoods surveyor to come up with his river plan. The future of the Union, Washington believes, depends on the Potomac route to the West, which will bind the country to one enterprise. Achenbach’s sympathetic and wry portrait of General Washington is not the stiff figure of official portraits, but that of a bold man who plunges into uncharted forest and sleeps in a downpour with only his cloak for shelter. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, and land speculator. He loves the West. This Washington is someone who understands that the fledgling republic clinging to the Atlantic seaboard will become a great and booming nation.Achenbach tracks Washington’s river plan from the choosing of the site for the national capital, which led to his being elected as the first president, to its link, decades after his death, to various grandiose plans for a canal that would run hundreds of miles. Ultimately the dream of a Potomac route to the West is abandoned. The nation splits not East and West but North and South, and the river becomes a boundary between warring sides in the Civil War. Like such classics as Undaunted Courage and Founding Brothers, Achenbach’s The Grand Idea is a large narrative of a great man and his grand plan that captures the uncertainties and conflicts of the new country, the passions of an ambitious people, and the seemingly endless beauty of the American landscape.

    For more than a half century, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was at the vital center of American political and cultural life. From his entrance into political leadership circles in the 1950s through his years in the Kennedy White House and up until his very last days, he was that rare thing, a master historian who enjoyed an extraordinary eyewitness vantage on history as it was being made. On intimate terms with many of the most prominent political, cultural and intellectual figures of the last fifty years, he was a man whose proximity to power never obscured his appreciation for the reality of those who have none. For that capacity for empathy and for much else, he was often called American liberalism's greatest voice. For most of his adult life, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. dutifully recorded his experiences and opinions in journals that, until now, have never been seen. Edited by his oldest sons, they offer remarkably fresh and lucid observations on a half century of public life, and a rare and privileged view into the mind of one of America's most distinguished men of letters. Frank, revelatory, suffused with wit and humanity, these entries offer an intimate history of postwar America, from his days on Adlai Stevenson's campaign team to his years in JFK and RFK's inner circle, through to the election of George W. Bush. They contain his candid reminiscences about many of the signal events of our time - the Bay of Pigs, the devastating assassinations of the 1960s, Vietnam, Watergate, the fall of the Soviet Union, Bush v. Gore. These journals also offer an extraordinary window into the lives of the wide range of politicians, intellectuals, writers and actors who were his friends - from the Kennedys to the Clintons, from Henry Kissinger to Adlai Stevenson, from Norman Mailer to Lauren Bacall. Together they form an astonishingly vivid portrait of American politics and culture in the second half of the 20th century - one that only a man who knew everyone and missed nothing, could provide. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was one of America's greatest moral and intellectual forces, and the publication of his journals is both itself an epic event in the history of American letters, and a fitting opportunity to celebrate this most remarkable American life.

    He was to history what Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, “in harm’s way.” Evan Thomas’s minute-by-minute re-creation of the bloodbath between Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the British man-of-war Serapis off the coast of England on an autumn night in 1779 is as gripping a sea battle as can be found in any novel. Drawing on Jones’s correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the American Revolution—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—Thomas’s biography teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones’s spirit was classically American.

    Now in the great man’s footsteps comes humorist and twenty-year Washington resident Christopher Buckley with the real story of the city’s founding. Well, not really. We’re just trying to get you to buy the book. But we can say with justification that there’s never been a more enjoyable, funny, and informative tour guide to the city than Buckley. His delight as he points out things of interest is con-tagious, and his frequent digressions about his own adventures as a White House staffer are often hilarious.In Washington Schlepped Here, Buckley takes us along for several walks around the town and shares with us a bit of his “other†Washington. They include “Dante’s Paradiso†(Union Station); the “Zero Milestone of American democracy†(the U.S. Capitol); the “Almost Pink House†(the White House); and many other historical (and often hysterical) journeys. Buckley is the sort of wonderful guide who pries loose the abalone-like clichés that cling to a place as mythic as D.C. Wonderfully insightful and eminently practical, Washington Schlepped Here shows us that even a city whose chief industry is government bureaucracy is a lot funnier and more surprising than its media-ready image might let on.

    Taylor, a theoretical physicist who has been one of the most inventive nuclear scientists of our time.Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how close we are to terrorist attacks employing homemade nuclear weaponry.

    Though tragic, it is also a story of triumph that scarcely has an equal. It is one of history's great witnesses of the power of faith and sacrifice. Although this story is one of the most frequently told of all Mormon pioneer accounts, it is also among the least understood. This book provides the most comprehensive and accessible account of these pioneers' epic 1856 journey. In addition to painting a broad perspective of the trek, it includes dozens of personal stories from the pioneers themselves. Woven into the larger story of the journey west, these stories inspire, build faith, recount miracles, and reveal how these pioneers were able to endure such adversity. The book also includes chapters on the lives of many of these pioneers after the handcart trek. Immerse yourself in the challenges and miracles of this astounding odyssey as never before!

    They were retracing the route of the Navajo deity Naay+(c)+(c)' neizgh+in+, the Slayer of Alien Gods, on his quest to restore beauty and balance to the Earth. More than a travelogue, Preston's account of the journey is a tale of two cultures meeting in a sacred land."

    Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut, Miranda v. Arizona. Drawing on unmatched access to government, academic, and private documents pertaining to Warren's life and career, Newton illuminates both the public and the private Warren. The result is a monumental biography of a complicated and principled figure that will become a seminal work of twentieth-century American history.

    The Blues, as they were called, were perpetually understrength and considered to be acceptable losses in hopeless situations—but their amazingly successful record proved otherwise.A firsthand account of mortal combat with the Ninth Cavalry, Flashing Saber is the remarkable story of the brave men who served in the First Air Cavalry Division's reconnaissance squadron. Included is an account of an air-ground raid that overran a regimental command post and killed more high-ranking enemy officers than any similar engagement of the war. The story begins when a teenager, an Eagle Scout and West Point Prep School student, goes to Vietnam in 1965. Motivated by patriotism and the desire to see combat firsthand, Brennan volunteers for front line duty and spends years as an artillery forward observer and infantryman. Promoted to sergeant and then to lieutenant, Brennan participates in hundreds of assault landings.An expansion and careful reworking of his previous work, Brennan's War, published in 1985, and in the vein of classic memoirs by Johnnie Clark and Frederick Downs, Flashing Saberis a harrowing firsthand account of life and death in war, one filled with breathtaking details about a renowned unit.

    Young soldier Honus Gant and beautiful Cresta Lee are the only survivors of a wagon train, and Gant must protect Cresta, a former Native American captive, from the legendary Cheyenne chieftain, Spotted Wolf, once Cresta's husband.