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Based on exhaustive research and filled with rich detail, George Marshall is sure to be hailed as the definitive work on one of the most influential figures in American history—the general who ran the U.S. campaign during the Second World War, the secretary of state who oversaw the successful rebuilding of postwar Europe, and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. While Eisenhower Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, MacArthur, Nimitz, and Leahy waged battles in Europe and the Pacific, one military leader, George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1945, actually ran World War II for America, overseeing all personnel and logistics. This biography, the first to offer a complete ...
This Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and his wife have penned a portrait of a great American dynasty and its legacy in business, technology, the arts, and philanthropy.
This is a must-have anthology of the milestone speeches, manifestos, court decisions, and groundbreaking journalism of the Sixties. No other period in American history has been more liberating, more confusing, more unforgettable, and had a more direct impact on the way we navigated the profound changes that swept over the country in the following three decades. From Betty Friedan to Barry Goldwater, from the formidable presence of the Kennedy brothers to the unimaginable influence of Woodstock, Pulitzer prize-winning author Irwin Unger and journalist Debi Unger present the complexities of a volatile and tumultuous decade, while explaining how and why each significant event took place and how...
“Mad Men for the literary world.” —Junot Díaz Farrar, Straus and Giroux is arguably the most influential publishing house of the modern era. Home to an unrivaled twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and generation-defining authors like T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen, it’s a cultural institution whose importance approaches that of The New Yorker or The New York Times. But FSG is no ivory tower—the owner's wife called the office a “sexual sewer”—and its untold story is as tumultuous and engrossing as many of the great novels it has published. Boris Kachka deftly reveals the era and the city that built FSG th...
WATERGATE. MONICA LEWINSKY. PAINKILLERS IN THE OVAL OFFICE. IRAN-CONTRA. READ MY LIPS. THE CHARACTER FACTOR. The American president’s character matters. To most Americans, it matters deeply. But how do we define what character means, and why can’t we agree? In this sober, probing consideration of “the character factor” and the presidency, veteran political analyst James P. Pfiffner leads us through a survey of three aspects of presidential character that have proved problematic for recent chief executives: lies, promise-keeping, and sexual probity. His goal is not to tell us which presidents have been “good” and which “bad.” Rather, he helps us think critically and impartially about complex character issues and invites us to reach our own conclusions. The Character Factor avoids both the abyss of moral relativism and the desert of political cynicism. It helps us look at our presidents (and our presidential candidates) without illusions, knowing that flawed men can still be great leaders but that some flaws deserve defeat at the polls—or even the ultimate presidential sanction, impeachment.
Alfred S. Regnery, the publisher of The American Spectator, has been a part of the American conservative movement since childhood, when his father founded The Henry Regnery Company, which subsequently became Regnery Publishing -- the preeminent conservative publishing house that, among other notable achievements, published William F. Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale. Including many uniquely personal anecdotes and stories, Regnery himself now boldly chronicles the development of the conservative movement from 1945 to the present. The outpouring of grief at the funeral of Ronald Reagan in 2004 -- and the acknowledgment that Reagan has come to be considered one of the greatest presiden...
The 1960s and early 70s saw the evolution of Frontier Myths even as scholars were renouncing the interpretive value of myths themselves. Works like Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War exemplified that rejection using his experiences during the Vietnam War to illustrate the problematic consequences of simple mythic idealism. Simultaneously, Americans were playing with expanded and revised versions of familiar Frontier Myths, though in a contemporary context, through NASA’s lunar missions, Star Trek, and Gerard K. O’Neill’s High Frontier. This book examines the reasons behind the exclusion of Frontier Myths to the periphery of scholarly discourse, and endeavors to build a new model for understanding their enduring significance. This model connects NASA’s failed attempts to recycle earlier myths, wholesale, to Star Trek’s revision of those myths and rejection of the idea of a frontier paradise, to O’Neill’s desire to realize such a paradise in Earth’s orbit. This new synthesis defies the negative connotations of Frontier Myths during the 1960s and 70s and attempts to resuscitate them for relevance in the modern academic context.
From Pulitzer prize-winning writer, Irwin Unger, and Debi Unger comes this history of the people and politics behind the Great Society reforms considers how the programs shaped the political scene and began to go awry and describes Lyndon Johnson's aggressive efforts to promote its success.
Best remembered as the father of Vice President Al Gore, Albert Gore, Sr., worked tirelessly in politics himself, a Democratic congressman and senator from 1939 to 1971 and a representative of southern liberalism and American reformism. In the first comprehensive biography of Gore, Kyle Longley has produced an incisive portrait of a significant American political leader and an arresting narrative of the shaping of a southern and American political tradition. His research includes archival sources from across the country as well as interviews with Gore’s colleagues, friends, and family. Longley describes how the native of Possum Hollow, Tennessee, became known during his political career as...
"Looking at the athletic strengths, feats, and shortcomings of our presidents, John Sayle Watterson explores not only their health, physical attributes, personalities, and sports IQs, but also the increasing trend of Americans in the past century to equate sporting achievements with courage, manliness, and political competence."--Dust jacket [p. 2].