72 results for "Biography"

Trump The Art of the Deal

Donald Trump,Tony Schwartz
La 4e de couverture indique : "Here is Trump in action—how he runs his organization and how he runs his life—as he meets the people he needs to meet, chats with family and friends, clashes with enemies, and challenges conventional thinking. But even a maverick plays by rules, and Trump has formulated time-tested guidelines for success. He isolates the common elements in his greatest accomplishments; he shatters myths; he names names, spells out the zeros, and fully reveals the deal-maker’s art. And throughout, Trump talks—really talks—about how he does it. Trump: The Art of the Deal is an unguarded look at the mind of a brilliant entrepreneur—the ultimate read for anyone interested in the man behind the spotlight."
Warner Books 1989 372 pages

The Final Days

Bob Woodward,Carl Bernstein
"The Final Days" is the classic, behind-the-scenes account of Richard Nixon's dramatic last months as president. Moment by moment, Bernstein and Woodward portray the taut, post-Watergate White House as Nixon, his family, his staff, and many members of Congress strained desperately to prevent his inevitable resignation. This brilliant book reveals the ordeal of Nixon's fall from office -- one of the gravest crises in presidential history.
Secker and Warburg 1987-10 496 pages

Life After Power Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House

Jared Cohen
This “informative…highly readable” ( The Wall Street Journal ) New York Times bestselling book from the author of the bestseller Accidental Presidents explores what happens after the most powerful job in the world: President of the United States. Former presidents have an unusual place in American life. King George III believed that George Washington’s departure after two terms made him “the greatest character of the age.” But Alexander Hamilton worried former presidents might “[wander] among the people like ghosts.” They were both right. Life After Power tells the stories of seven former presidents, from the Founding to today. Each changed history. Each offered lessons about how to decide what to do in the next chapter of life. This book follows the exceptional lives of past presidents including: -Thomas Jefferson whose time after the White House saw him shaping public debates and founding the University of Virginia, an accomplishment he included on his tombstone, unlike his presidency. -John Quincy Adams who served in Congress and became a leading abolitionist, passing the torch to Abraham Lincoln. -Grover Cleveland who was the only president in American history to serve a nonconsecutive term. -William Howard Taft who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. -Herbert Hoover who shaped the modern conservative movement, led relief efforts after World War II, reorganized the executive branch, and reconciled John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. -Jimmy Carter who had the longest post-presidency in American history, advancing humanitarian causes, human rights, and peace. -George W. Bush who made a clean break from politics, bringing back George Washington’s precedent, and reminding the public that the institution of presidency is bigger than any person. Jared Cohen explores the untold stories in the final chapters of these presidents’ lives, offering a “unique and fascinating look at how seven individuals made the transition from the most powerful position in the world to consequential and fulfilling lives post-presidency” (Condoleezza Rice, 66th Secretary of State). He tells how they handled very human problems of ego, finances, and questions about their legacy and mortality. He shows how these men made history after they left the White House.
Simon & Schuster 2025-01-28 528 pages

All the Powers of Earth The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. III, 1856-1860

Sidney Blumenthal
Lincoln’s incredible ascent to power in a world of chaos is newly revealed in this “ compelling, original, and elegantly written” (Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author) third volume of the “magisterial” ( The New York Times Book Review ) Political Life of Abraham Lincoln series, following A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel . After a period of depression that he would ever find his way to greatness, Lincoln takes on the most powerful demagogue in the country, Stephen Douglas, in the debates for a senate seat. He sidelines the frontrunner William Seward, a former governor and senator for New York, to cinch the new Republican Party’s nomination. All the Powers of Earth is the political story of all time. Lincoln achieves the presidency by force of strategy, of political savvy and determination. This is Abraham Lincoln, who indisputably becomes the greatest president and moral leader in the nation’s history. But he must first build a new political party, brilliantly state the anti-slavery case and overcome shattering defeat to win the presidency. In the years of civil war to follow, he will show mightily that the nation was right to bet on him. He was its preserver, a politician of moral integrity. All the Powers of Earth is “as essential as any political biography is likely to be” and Sidney Bluementhal is “the definitive chronicler of Lincoln’s political career” ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review).
Simon and Schuster 2020-10-27 784 pages

Franklin D. Roosevelt A Political Life

Robert Dallek
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and NPR “We come to see in FDR the magisterial, central figure in the greatest and richest political tapestry of our nation’s entire history” —Nigel Hamilton, Boston Globe “Meticulously researched and authoritative” —Douglas Brinkley, The Washington Post “A workmanlike addition to the literature on Roosevelt.” —David Nasaw, The New York Times “Dallek offers an FDR relevant to our sharply divided nation” —Michael Kazin “Will rank among the standard biographies of its subject” — Publishers Weekly A one-volume biography of Roosevelt by the #1 New York Times bestselling biographer of JFK, focusing on his career as an incomparable politician, uniter, and deal maker In an era of such great national divisiveness, there could be no more timely biography of one of our greatest presidents than one that focuses on his unparalleled political ability as a uniter and consensus maker. Robert Dallek’s Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life takes a fresh look at the many compelling questions that have attracted all his biographers: how did a man who came from so privileged a background become the greatest presidential champion of the country’s needy? How did someone who never won recognition for his intellect foster revolutionary changes in the country’s economic and social institutions? How did Roosevelt work such a profound change in the country’s foreign relations? For FDR, politics was a far more interesting and fulfilling pursuit than the management of family fortunes or the indulgence of personal pleasure, and by the time he became president, he had commanded the love and affection of millions of people. While all Roosevelt’s biographers agree that the onset of polio at the age of thirty-nine endowed him with a much greater sense of humanity, Dallek sees the affliction as an insufficient explanation for his transformation into a masterful politician who would win an unprecedented four presidential terms, initiate landmark reforms that changed the American industrial system, and transform an isolationist country into an international superpower. Dallek attributes FDR’s success to two remarkable political insights. First, unlike any other president, he understood that effectiveness in the American political system depended on building a national consensus and commanding stable long-term popular support. Second, he made the presidency the central, most influential institution in modern America’s political system. In addressing the country’s international and domestic problems, Roosevelt recognized the vital importance of remaining closely attentive to the full range of public sentiment around policy-making decisions—perhaps FDR’s most enduring lesson in effective leadership.
Penguin 2018-11-06 720 pages

Lincoln's Last Trial The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency

David Fisher,Dan Abrams
Instant New York Times bestseller! A Winner of the Barondess/Lincoln Award A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2018 A Suspense Magazine Best Book of 2018 A Mental Floss Best Book of 2018 A USA Today Top 10 Hot Book for Summer "Makes you feel as if you are watching a live camera riveted on a courtroom more than 150 years ago." --Diane Sawyer The true story of Abraham Lincoln's last murder trial, a case in which he had a deep personal involvement--and which played out in the nation's newspapers as he began his presidential campaign At the end of the summer of 1859, twenty-two-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln was hired to defend him. This was to be his last great case as a lawyer. What normally would have been a local case took on momentous meaning. Lincoln's debates with Stephen Douglas had gained him a national following. He was being urged to make a run for the presidency. His reputation was untarnished, but should he lose this trial, the spotlight now focused so brightly on him might be dimmed. The case also posed personal challenges for Lincoln. The victim had trained for the law in his office, and Lincoln had been his friend and his mentor. The accused killer, the young man Lincoln would defend, was the son of a close friend and supporter. And to win this trial he would have to form an allegiance with a bitter political rival. Lincoln's Last Trial captures the presidential hopeful's dramatic courtroom confrontations in vivid detail as he fights for his client--but also for his own political future.
Harlequin Enterprises ULC 2020-04-28 416 pages

Behind the Oval Office Winning the Presidency in the Nineties

Dick Morris
Dick Morris has written the ultimate inside story about the dramatic reelection of President Clinton, one that is certain to stir controversy about the way politics really works in America today. No one before has so vividly described what policy advisers, pollsters, and advertisers do behind the scenes in the Oval Office. And no one has so acutely identified the new political forces that are dominating America today. Dick Morris was, as Time magazine put it, the most influential private citizen in America. He was President Clinton's secret election strategist, invited to advise the demoralized president in the wake of the midterm debacle of 1994 that gave Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole control of Congress and, it seemed, a certain Republican victory in the 1996 presidential campaign. It did not turn out that way. Clinton made the biggest comeback in the history of modern politics, and he did it largely because of his partnership with Dick Morris, the man whose remarkable political insights helped Clinton become governor of Arkansas in 1978 and rescued him from defeat in 1982. They had a rapport that Clinton himself has called "probably unique in American history." The assignment after the 1994 Republican congressional victory began in utmost secrecy. Morris, who had to cross the road from being adviser to Republicans such as William Weld, Dan Coats, and Trent Lott, was for months known only as Charlie, an unknown source calling Clinton's private White House telephone number. None of Clinton's Cabinet or inner circle knew anything about this, and they could not understand why Clinton began speaking in a new voice. When Clinton decided he needed Morris in the White House working withothers, Morris became an object of intense scrutiny, speculation, and envy. He was Washington's great mystery man. He refused on-the-record press interviews. He was controversial. But he succeeded brilliantly. He laid the foundation for Clinton's return to the White House for a second term. He decided to write a book about it all--about his view of Clinton, his own role, and his perception of a change in the mood of the voters. In August, the president asked Morris to wait until after the election to write this book and to make it "right for Bill Clinton and right for Dick Morris." And then Morris blew it. On a day to savor his triumph, on the day when a resurgent Clinton addressed the Democratic Convention, Morris was on the way out in disgrace: revealed as having had a relationship with a prostitute who claimed he talked freely of his work for the president. In Behind the Oval Office, Dick Morris makes no excuses for his personal conduct. He is candid about it--painfully so--contemplating the wreckage of his career and the damage to his marriage. But with his book he achieves something significant on three levels. Shedding light on the unseen forces that drive politics today, he reveals just how the Republicans were routed by a combination of a Democratic shift to the center and an unprecedented and secret selling strategy. We have a box-seat view of the struggles in the White House for the soul of the Democratic party. We are taken deep into the hidden relationship between President Clinton and Republican Senate leader Trent Lott. The author explains how the deals they cut formulated the laws they passed--laws that doomed Dole's bid for the presidency. And then thereis William Jefferson Clinton. Morris gives us a three-dimensional portrait of the man and the politician. He draws on their twenty-year relationship to explain Clinton to us so vividly, with such new perspective, that we meet him as if for the first time. Morris lets us finally understand Bill Clinton and gives us vital clues about what he will do for the next four years. And we see Hillary Rodham Clinton at work and at home, facing up to political storms and adding her voice to the disputations about which way the Democrats should go. Finally, Morris, the master of polling, gives us a surprising perspective on the values and desires of America, the key that enabled Clinton to respond and unlock the door to a second term in the White House, the first Democratic president to achieve that in fifty years. This is an extraordinary book with a compelling narrative and incisive analysis by a political operator of unparalleled experience. It is filled with insights, touched with pathos. It is must reading for everyone who cares about the future of American democracy.
Random House 1997 359 pages

John Adams Under Fire The Founding Father's Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial

Dan Abrams,David Fisher
Look for Dan Abrams and David Fisher's new book, Kennedy's Avenger: Assassination, Conspiracy, and the Forgotten Trial of Jack Ruby. *NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* "An expert, extremely detailed account of John Adams' finest hour."--Kirkus Reviews Honoring the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre The New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln's Last Trial and host of LivePD Dan Abrams and David Fisher tell the story of a trial that would change history. An eye-opening story of America on the edge of revolution. History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country's second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials of the era--the Boston Massacre, where five civilians died from shots fired by British soldiers. Drawing on Adams's own words from the trial transcript, Dan Abrams and David Fisher transport readers to colonial Boston, a city roiling with rebellion, where British military forces and American colonists lived side by side, waiting for the spark that would start a war.
Harlequin Enterprises ULC 2021-03-02 320 pages

The First Conspiracy The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington

Brad Meltzer,Josh Mensch
Taking place during the most critical period of our nation’s birth, The First Conspiracy tells a remarkable and previously untold piece of American history that not only reveals George Washington’s character, but also illuminates the origins of America’s counterintelligence movement that led to the modern day CIA. In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington’s bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them. But unbeknownst to Washington, some of them were part of a treasonous plan. In the months leading up to the Revolutionary War, these traitorous soldiers, along with the Governor of New York, William Tryon, and Mayor David Mathews, launched a deadly plot against the most important member of the military: George Washington himself. This is the story of the secret plot and how it was revealed. It is a story of leaders, liars, counterfeiters, and jailhouse confessors. It also shows just how hard the battle was for George Washington and how close America was to losing the Revolutionary War. In this historical page-turner, New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer teams up with American history writer and documentary television producer, Josh Mensch to unravel the shocking true story behind what has previously been a footnote in the pages of history. Drawing on extensive research, Meltzer and Mensch capture in riveting detail how George Washington not only defeated the most powerful military force in the world, but also uncovered the secret plot against him in the tumultuous days leading up to July 4, 1776.
Flatiron Books 2020-01-07 432 pages

Lone Star Rising Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960

Robert Dallek
Like other great figures of 20th-century American politics, Lyndon Johnson defies easy understanding. An unrivaled master of vote swapping, back room deals, and election-day skulduggery, he was nevertheless an outspoken New Dealer with a genuine commitment to the poor and the underprivileged. And he was also a representative figure. Johnson's career speaks volumes about American politics, foreign policy, and business in the forty years after 1930. As Charles de Gaulle said when he came to JFK's funeral: Kennedy was America's mask, but this man Johnson is the country's real face.In Lone Star Rising, Robert Dallek, winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his study of Franklin D. Roosevelt, turns to this fascinating "sinner and saint" to offer a brilliant, definitive portrait of a great American politician. Based on seven years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this first book in a two-volume biography follows Johnson's life from his childhood to his election as vice-president under Kennedy. We see Johnson, the twenty-three-year-old aide to a pampered millionaire Representative, become a de facto Congressman, and at age twenty-eight the country's best state director of the National Youth Administration. We see Johnson, the "human dynamo," first in the House and then in the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career.Dallek pays full due to Johnson's failings--his obsession with being top dog, his willingness to cut corners, and worse, to get there--but he also illuminates Johnson's sheer brilliance as a politician, the high regard in which key members of the New Deal, including FDR, held him, and his genuine concern for minorities and the downtrodden.No president in American history is currently less admired than Lyndon Johnson. Bitter memories of Vietnam have sent Johnson's reputation into free fall, and recent biographies have painted him as a scoundrel who did more harm than good. Lone Star Rising attempts to strike a balance. It does not neglect the tawdry side of Johnson's political career, including much that is revealed for the first time. But it also reminds us that Lyndon Johnson was a man of exceptional vision, who from early in his career worked to bring the South into the mainstream of American economic and political life, to give the disadvantaged a decent chance, and to end racial segregation for the well-being of the nation.
Oxford University Press, USA 1991 721 pages

Wilson

A. Scott Berg
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, "a brilliant biography"* of the 28th president of the United States. *Doris Kearns Goodwin One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize–winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson —the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the twenty-eighth President. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson. From this material, Berg was able to add countless details—even several unknown events—that fill in missing pieces of Wilson’s character, and cast new light on his entire life. From the visionary Princeton professor who constructed a model for higher education in America to the architect of the ill-fated League of Nations, from the devout Commander in Chief who ushered the country through its first great World War to the widower of intense passion and turbulence who wooed a second wife with hundreds of astonishing love letters, from the idealist determined to make the world “safe for democracy” to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity—and the subterfuges around it—were among the century’s greatest secrets, from the trailblazer whose ideas paved the way for the New Deal and the Progressive administrations that followed to the politician whose partisan battles with his opponents left him a broken man, and ultimately, a tragic figure—this is a book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the icon—but Wilson the man. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS
Penguin 2014-09-02 880 pages

The Lincoln Conspiracy The Secret Plot to Kill America's 16th President--and Why It Failed

Brad Meltzer,Josh Mensch
Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, the bestselling authors of The First Conspiracy, which covers the secret plot against George Washington, now turn their attention to a little-known, but true story about a failed assassination attempt on the sixteenth president in The Lincoln Conspiracy . 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, D.C., for his first inauguration. The conspirators were part of a white supremacist secret society that didn’t want an abolitionist in the White House. They planned an elaborate scheme to assassinate the President-elect in Baltimore as Lincoln’s inauguration train passed through, en route to the nation's capital. The plot was investigated by famed detective Allan Pinkerton, who infiltrated the group with undercover agents, including Kate Warne, one of the first female private detectives in America. Had the assassination succeeded, there would have been no Lincoln Presidency and the course of the Civil War and American history would have forever been altered.
Flatiron Books 2021-05-04 448 pages

Lyndon B. Johnson Portrait of a President

Robert Dallek
Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Michael Beschloss, in The Los Angeles Times, said that it "succeeds brilliantly." The New York Times called it "rock solid" and The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Globe wrote that it was "dense with astonishing incidents." Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, we see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam. In these pages Johnson emerges as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this singular biography reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of the most extravagant characters ever to step onto the presidential stage.
Oxford University Press 2005 396 pages

Ulysses S. Grant The Unlikely Hero

Michael Korda
The first officer since George Washington to become a four-star general in the United States Army, Ulysses S. Grant was a man who managed to end the Civil War on a note of grace, and was the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve eight consecutive years in the White House. The son of an Ohio tanner, he has long been remembered as a brilliant general but a failed president whose second term ended in financial and political scandal. But now acclaimed, bestselling author Michael Korda offers a dramatic reconsideration of the man, his life, and his presidency. Ulysses S. Grant is an evenhanded and stirring portrait of a flawed leader who nevertheless ably guided America through a pivotal juncture in its history.
HarperCollins 2009-05-05 176 pages

Young Stalin

Sebag Montefiore,Simon Sebag Montefiore
Stalin, like Hitler, remains the very personification of evil but also one of the creators of today’s world. Now in an enthralling biography that reads like a thriller, Simon Sebag Montefiore unveils the shadowy, adventurous journey of the Georgian cobbler’s son who became the Red Tsar.What makes a Stalin? Was he illegitimate? Was his mother whore or saint? Was Stalin a Tsarist agent or Lenin’s chief gangster? Was his most notorious heist planned during his stay in London? Was he to blame for his wife’s death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful?Born in poverty, scarred by his upbringing, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet and trained as a priest but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary. He became the mastermind of bank robberies, protection-rackets, arson, piracy, and murder yet he was, uniquely part-intellectual, part-brigand. Surprisingly, he is also revealed as a scandalously prolific lover, leaving a trail of mistresses (varying from schoolgirls to noblewomen) and illegitimate children. Her is the arch-conspirator and escape-artist whose brutal ingenuity so impressed Lenin that he made Stalin (with Trotsky) his top henchman. The paranoid underworld of Joseph Conrad-style terrorism was Stalin’s natural habitat. Montefiore shows how murderous Caucasian banditry and political gangsterism, combined with pitiless ideology, qualified Stalin to demonstrate the Kremlin – and create the USSR in his flawed image. Based on massive research and astonishing new evidence in archives from Moscow to Georgia, YOUNG STALIN, companion and prequel to bestselling, prizewinning STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR, is a chronicle of the Revolution, a pre-history of the USSR – and an intimate biography: this is how Stalin became Stalin.
McArthur 2007 397 pages

Washington 2the Indispensable Man

James T. Flexner
After more than two decades, this dramatic and concise single-volume distillation of James Thomas Flexner's definitive four-volume biography George Washington , which received a Pulitzer Prize citation and a National Book Award for the fourth volume, has itself become an American classic. Now in a new trade paperback edition, this masterful work explores the Father of Our Country - sometimes an unpopular hero, a man of great contradictions, but always a towering historical figure, who remains, as Flexner writes in these pages, "a fallible human being made of flesh and blood and spirit - not a statue of marble and wood... a great and good man." The author unflinchingly paints a portrait of slave owner, brave leader, man of passion, reluctant politician, and fierce general. His complex character and career are neither glorified nor vilified here; rather, Flexner sets up a brilliant counterpoint between Washington's public and private lives and gives us a challenging look at the man who has become as much a national symbol as the American flag.
Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated 1984-04-03 460 pages