540 items

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  Presidential ambition : how the presidents gained power, kept power, and got things done

  Combining a potent narrative with persuasive and compelling insights, Shenkman reveals that it is not just recent presidents who have been ambitious - and at times frighteningly overambitious, willing to sacrifice their health, family, loyalty, and values as they sought to overcome the obstacles to power - but that they all have. This volcanic ambition, Shenkman shows, has been essential not only in obtaining power but in facing - and attempting to master - the great historical forces that have continually reshaped the United States, from Manifest Destiny and Emancipation to immigration, the Great Depression, and nuclear weapons.As Shenkman describes the lives and careers of the most representative and colorful presidents from Washington to Nixon, he shows that those who succeeded in reaching the White House, whatever their flaws, were complicated human beings, idealistic as well as ambitious. Over time, however, they began to make increasingly troubling compromises, leading to a decline in the moral tone of American politics.What drove politics downward? In a stunning conclusion, Shenkman demonstrates that it wasn't a decline in presidential character that was responsible, but change - the dramatic transformation of the United States from a country of four million in Washington's day to more than a quarter billion today - that made running the country more complicated and difficult. Instead of things getting better and better they got worse and worse as people became used to increasingly promiscuous political practices.
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  Embracing defeat : Japan in the wake of World War II

  Discusses how the defeat and American military occupation of Japan after World War II affected each level of Japanese society.
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  Walking on water: Black American lives at the turn of the twenty-first century.

  Randall Kenan's depictions of African American life.
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  The future and its enemies : the growing conflict over creativity, enterprise, and progress

  Looking ahead into the next century, the author predicts a conflict between advocates of bureaucracy and the status quo and advocates of competition and choice.
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  1863 : the rebirth of a nation

  Drawing from personal letters, official documents, and rare photographs, the author offers a look at the "tumultuous" 1863 and all the personalities of the year.
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  Confucius lives next door : what living in the East teaches us about living in the West

  The author "uses his family's experience overseas--including mishaps and misapprehensions--to look at Asia's 'social miracle' and its origin in the ethical values outlines by the Chinese sage Confucius 2,500 years ago."--Jacket.
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  The times of my life and my life with the Times

  In this memoir, The New York Times's Max Frankel tells his life story the way he lived it - in tandem with the big news stories of our time. "Max Frankel started to write for The New York Times as a student at Columbia in 1949, and during the next half century he held just about every important position on the paper - foreign correspondent, Washington bureau chief, editorials editor, and executive editor." "When The Times of My Life begins, Max Frankel is a boy in Nazi Germany; we experience the terror of his wartime escape with his heroic mother, their immigrant lives in New York, and a teacher's inspired decision that he could belatedly learn to read English if he learned to write it. And so Max Frankel found his career. His book, like his life, moves through Hitler's Berlin, Khrushchev's Moscow, Castro's Havana, and the Washington of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It reevaluates the Cold War and interweaves Frankel's personal and professional lives with the era's greatest stories, from Sputnik to the Pentagon Papers, from the building of the Berlin Wall to its collapse, all the while tracking the tensions of managing the world's greatest newspaper."--BOOK JACKET.
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  American heritage great minds of history

  Five historians ; Stephan Ambrose, David McCullough, James McPherson, Richard White, Gordon Wood, discuss various aspects of American history.
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  Ex-friends : falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer

  Norman Podhoretz's account of the breakup of a group of New York intellectuals of the 50s and 60s.
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  Robert Frost : a life

  A biography of Robert Frost, the poet who won four Pulitzer prizes before dying in 1963. The book describes his early life--he wanted to be a baseball player--his farming in New England, its influence on his poetry, and his many bouts with depression and self-doubt.
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  Morgan : American financier

  A century ago, J. Pierpont Morgan bestrode the financial world like a colossus. The organizing force behind General Electric, U.S. Steel, and vast railroad empires, he served for decades as America's unofficial central banker: a few months after he died in 1913, the Federal Reserve replaced the private system he had devised. An early supporter of Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, the confidant (and rival) of Theodore Roosevelt, England's Edward VII, and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, and the companion of several fascinating women, Morgan shaped his world and ours in countless ways. Yet since his death he has remained a mysterious figure, celebrated as a hero of industrial progress and vilified as a rapacious robber baron. In this account, drawn from more than a decade's work in newly available archives, biographer Jean Strouse animates Morgan's life and times to reveal the entirely human character behind the often terrifying visage.Morgan brings eye-opening perspectives to the role the banker played in the emerging U.S. economy as he raised capital in Europe, reorganized bankrupt railroads, stabilized markets in times of crisis, and set up many of the corporate and financial structures we take for granted. And surprising new stories introduce us in vivid detail to Morgan's childhood in Hartford and Boston, his schooling in Switzerland and Germany, the start of his career in New York - as well as to his relations with his esteemed and exacting father, with his adored first and difficult second wives, with his children, partners, business associates, female consorts, and friends.Morgan had a second major career as a collector of art, stocking America with visual and literary treasures of the past. Strouse's biography gives dramatic new dimension not only to Morgan but to the culture, political struggles, and social conflicts of America's momentous Gilded Age.
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  We band of angels : the untold story of American nurses trapped on Bataan by the Japanese

  Chronicles the experiences of ninety-nine Army and Navy nurses who were captured when the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the American bases located in the Philippines.
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  The way of the bootstrapper : nine action steps for achieving your dreams

  Reverend Floyd Flake explains nine steps that can help people achieve their dreams by relying on their own personal resources.
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  Deadlines and datelines

  This collection of essays includes materials from Rather's weekly newspaper column, his daily [CBS] radio program, and articles written for magazines and newspapers ... Short essays, most written in 1997 and 1998, are grouped in sections on news from across America, foreign policy, national politics, personalities, and lighter topics. Libr J.
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  An even better place : America in the 21st century

  An Even Better Place is more than just a collection of good, common-sense ideas about what's right and what's wrong. It's a powerful, provocative statement, Gephardt's first ever, about what our priorities must be if we are to be able to get our politics and our policy back on track. Drawing from examples in his own life - his childhood in St.Louis, his career in Congress, and the lives and ideas of the many Americans he has encountered - Gephardt offers a roadmap that illuminates where we've come from, and where we need to go. Refreshingly candid, An Even Better Place is a book for everyone frustrated with the state of politics in America and everyone who believes that we can and must be better.
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  Beyond the narrow gate : the journey of four Chinese women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America

  The author tells the intertwining stories of her mother and three classmates who, having already left China for Taiwan in the wake of the invasion of the Red Army, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, a time in which the Chinese were very much a minority in America.
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  Betrayal : how the Clinton administration undermined American security

  No reporter has done more than Bill Gertz to expose the threat the Clinton administration poses to American national security. Now, using his unrivaled access to confidential documents and sources at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House, Gertz tells the whole sordid story of how the Clinton administration has weakened our military, given comfort to our enemies, and endangered American safety.
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  Honor's voice : the transformation of Abraham Lincoln

  Examines certain aspects of the life of Abraham Lincoln in the years between 1831 and 1842, presenting him as a stubborn youth, partial to off-color jokes, and prone to depression; and traces the process by which he rose from unskilled laborer to a position of prominence in the Illinois legislature.
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  Agent of destiny : the life and times of General Winfield Scott

  Historian John S.D. Eisenhower, author of So Far From God and The Bitter Woods, explores the facets of Scott's career and the ways he shaped - and was shaped by - the goals and ambitions of a young republic. As Eisenhower vividly demonstrates, American history cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of Scott's life and influence.He not only presided over America's territorial expansion and, reluctantly, over the relocation of American Indians during the episode known as the Trail of Tears, but also played a leading role in the development of the United States Army from a tiny, loosely organized, politics-dominated establishment to a disciplined professional force capable of effective and sustained campaigning.Scott's career was not an uninterrupted series of successes. He was the hero of two major wars and the diplomat who prevented at least three other potential wars with Britain. Yet during his fifty years of service, Scott was placed before a military court three times and once even convicted, incurring a year's suspension from the army. He was roundly defeated when he ran for president in 1852. As Eisenhower's careful study discloses, some of Scott's troubles were created by his own political ambitions.But Scott the General was a person of monumental proportions and the key agent of America's Manifest Destiny.
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  The System : the American way of politics at the breaking point

  In this remarkable book, two of America's best-known journalists use their unparalleled access to the major players to examine The System, specifically as it operated during the ferocious battle over the Clinton effort to provide universal health insurance for Americans - and they come to some startling conclusions about America's future.From the beginning of the struggle, Johnson and Broder gained the confidence of more than one hundred of the participants, including the President and the First Lady; key congressional leaders like Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Ted Kennedy, and George Mitchell; the many competing special interests; and, outside the Beltway, ordinary citizens and workers on the battlefront of medical care. The authors have written a brilliant chronicle of the battle - of lost opportunities in the White House and of the savage determination and cunning tactics of the Gingrich forces, who plotted secretly for more than a year in advance to kill health care reform in an attempt to regain control of Congress and lead a conservative Republican Revolution that would fundamentally alter American government, privatize public function, and dismantle progressive programs and policies established over the last sixty years.Filled with stunning disclosures about the President and his supporters and adversaries, The System is an extraordinary portrait of democracy under siege, providing one of the most candid looks at American politics and government ever written. It is a book of vital importance to every American and is certain to become a classic in years to come.
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  The shoemaker and the tea party : memory and the American Revolution

  Award-winning historian Alfred F. Young unearths a rich story of the American Revolution with this account of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who took part in such key events as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, and then served in the militia and as a seaman.Young pieces together this extraordinary tale and adds to it poignant reflections on the historical value of oral testimony and memory, and explores key questions about a time crucial in the shaping of national identity: What did it mean for the Tea Party to be claimed as an American symbol by both Boston Brahmins and the first trade unions? How do the memories of ordinary people pass into history? How should their stories be recognized by keepers of the past? Young's search leads us on an exciting journey and offers a provocative reading of American history.
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  Freedom from fear : the American people in depression and war, 1929-1945

  Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. Freedom from Fear tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.--Jacket.
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  Winston and Clementine : the personal letters of the Churchills

  In a moving commemoration of the 125th anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth, Soames, his last surviving child (Family Album, 1982; Clementine Churchill, 1979), presents a large selection of the intimate letters of Churchill and his wife, Clementine, from 1909 to 1964. Soames presents the letters both chronologically and topically, starting with the courtship and marriage of the Churchills in 1909 and swiftly moving into Churchill's long career in Parliament and the government.
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  The Roosevelt women

  Draws from letters, memoirs, and interviews to chronicle the lives of nine women from the Roosevelt clan, covering a period of 150 years; discussing their activities as wives, mothers, authors, campaigners, and socialites.
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  Honor bound : American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973

  With this book, two respected scholars in the field offer a comprehensive, balanced, and authoritative account of what happened to the nearly eight hundred Americans captured in Southeast Asia. The authors were granted unprecedented access to previously unreleased materials and interviewed more than one hundred former POWs, enabling them to meticulously reconstruct the captivity record as well as produce an evocative narrative of a once sketchy and misunderstood yet key chapter of the war. "Giving due praise but never shirking from criticism, the authors describe in detail dozens of cases of individual courage and resistance, from celebrated heroes like Jim Stockdale, Robinson Risner, Jeremiah Denton, Bud Day, and Nick Rowe to lesser-known legends like Ray Schrump and Medal of Honor recipient Donald Cook."--BOOK JACKET.