Recommendations based on "Accidental Presidents"

In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration of the origin, uncertain growth, and finally, the exercise of fully developed leadership.Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the man make the times or does the times make the man?In Leadership Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied - Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson - to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entry into public life, when their paths were filled with confusion, hope, and fear, we can share their struggles and follow their development into leaders.Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to forever shatter their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times.No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities and temperament, they shared a fierce ambition, a hunger to succeed beyond expectations. All four, at their best, were guided by a sense of moral purpose that led them at moments of great challenge to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others.This seminal work provides a roadmap for aspiring and established leaders. In today's polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in time of surpassing fracture and fear take on a singular urgency.(Previously published as: 'Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times')

The Obama White House staff invites us behind-the-scenes of history for a deeply personal and moving look at the presidency and how the president’s staff can change the nation“West Wingers is exceptional. . . . We have so much to learn from these stories.” —President BidenWhen we elect a president, we elect with them an entire team that will join them in the West Wing to help run the country. Each of these staffers has a story to tell, and in West Wingers, Barack Obama’s White House staff reveals how these extraordinary citizens shape the presidency and the nation.In these moving and revealing personal stories, eighteen Obama staffers bring us deep inside the presidency, offering intimate accounts of how they made it to the White House, what they witnessed, and what they accomplished there. We hear from a married gay staffer pushing the president towards marriage equality; a senior aide working to implement the Affordable Care Act while battling Stage IV cancer; a hijab-wearing Muslim adviser accompanying the President to a mosque. In each one we see the human face of government, staffers devoting themselves to the issues that have defined their lives. From the triumphs of Obamacare and marriage equality to the tragedy of the Charleston shooting, this book tells the history of the Obama presidency through the men and women who worked tirelessly to support his vision for America. More than just a history though, West Wingers is an inspiring call to arms for public service, a testament to the possibility of real social change, and a powerful demonstration of what true diversity, inclusivity, and progress can look like in America.“These deeply moving stories offer more than a fascinating view into the window of history: they show us how hope becomes real, sustainable change.” —Valerie Jarrett, former senior advisor to President Obama

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe former attorney general provides a candid account of his historic tenures serving two vastly different presidents, George H.W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.William Barr's first tenure as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush was largely the result of chance, while his second tenure under President Donald Trump a deliberate and difficult choice. In this candid memoir, Barr takes readers behind the scenes during seminal moments of the 1990s, from the LA riots to Pan Am 103 and Iran Contra. Thirty years later, Barr faced an unrelenting barrage of issues, such as Russiagate, the COVID outbreak, civil unrest, the impeachments, and the 2020 election fallout. One Damn Thing After Another is vivid, forthright, and essential not only to understanding the Bush and Trump legacies, but also how both men viewed power and justice at critical junctures of their presidencies.

A Washington Post Notable Work of NonfictionFrom the moment Chief Justice Roberts botched Barack Obama's oath of office, the relationship between the Court and the White House has been a fraught one. Grappling with issues as diverse as campaign finance, abortion, and the right to bear arms, the Roberts court has put itself squarely at the center of American political life. Jeffrey Toobin brilliantly portrays key personalities and cases and shows how the President was fatally slow to realize the importance of the judicial branch to his agenda. Combining incisive legal analysis with riveting insider details, The Oath is an essential guide to understanding the Supreme Court of our interesting times.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An Esquire Best Book of 2017 Remember when presidents spoke in complete sentences instead of in unhinged tweets? Former Obama speechwriter David Litt does. In his comic, coming-of-age memoir, he takes us back to the Obama years – and charts a path forward in the age of Trump.  More than any other presidency, Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House were defined by young people – twenty-somethings who didn’t have much experience in politics (or anything else, for that matter), yet suddenly found themselves in the most high-stakes office building on earth. David Litt was one of those twenty-somethings. After graduating from college in 2008, he went straight to the Obama campaign. In 2011, he became one of the youngest White House speechwriters in history. Until leaving the White House in 2016, he wrote on topics from healthcare to climate change to criminal justice reform. As President Obama’s go-to comedy writer, he also took the lead on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the so-called “State of the Union of jokes.” Now, in this refreshingly honest memoir, Litt brings us inside Obamaworld. With a humorists’ eye for detail, he describes what it’s like to accidentally trigger an international incident or nearly set a president’s hair aflame. He answers questions you never knew you had: Which White House men’s room is the classiest? What do you do when the commander in chief gets your name wrong? Where should you never, under any circumstances, change clothes on Air Force One? With nearly a decade of stories to tell, Litt makes clear that politics is completely, hopelessly absurd.    But it’s also important. For all the moments of chaos, frustration, and yes, disillusionment, Litt remains a believer in the words that first drew him to the Obama campaign: “People who love this country can change it.” In telling his own story, Litt sheds fresh light on his former boss’s legacy. And he argues that, despite the current political climate, the politics championed by Barack Obama will outlive the presidency of Donald Trump. Full of hilarious stories and told in a truly original voice, Thanks, Obama is an exciting debut about what it means – personally, professionally, and politically – to grow up.

As Chief Official White House Photographer, Pete Souza spent more time alongside President Barack Obama than almost anyone else. His years photographing the President gave him an intimate behind-the-scenes view of the unique gravity of the Office of the Presidency -- and the tremendous responsibility that comes with it. His latest collection is a portrait in Presidential contrasts, telling the tale of the Obama and Trump administrations through a series of visual juxtapositions. Here, more than one hundred of Souza's images of President Obama are framed by the tweets, news headlines, and quotes that defined the first five hundred days of the Trump White House. What began with Souza's Instagram posts soon after President Trump's inauguration in January 2017 has become a commentary on the state of the Presidency, and our country. Some call this "throwing shade." Souza calls it telling the truth. Souza's photographs are more than a rejoinder to the chaos, abuses of power, and destructive policies that now define our nation's highest office. They are a reminder of a President we could believe in, and a courageous defense of American values.

The war in Iraq . . . No bid contracts awarded to Halliburton . . . Hurricane Katrina . . . The CIA leak investigation . . . The story gets worse and worse. The evidence is glaring. George W. Bush's record as a president is abysmal. And it's time to impeach him. The Case for Impeachment lays out the reasons why in a straightforward, letter-of-the-law manner. Mixing the cold, hard facts with the lies and deceptions of this administration, The Case for Impeachment is a serious consideration of Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors while in office. This important and timely book will serve as a rallying cry for all those fed up with George W. Bush's abuses of power. It's time for the American people and Congress to act. With so much at stake, we have a president whose administration stands out in its criminality and disdain for the rule of law. The Case for Impeachment explains the legal history and grounds for impeaching George W. Bush and brings forth more than a half dozen articles of impeachment the likes of:*Lying and inducing Congress and the American people into an unjust war.*Allowing his friends and business cronies to profiteer off the war in Iraq.*Authorizing torture and rendition of prisoners of war and suspected terrorists--a complete violation of the Geneva Conventions, a treaty the U.S. has signed and is therefore part of our law.*Stripping American citizens of their Constitutional rights--holding people with no charge, wiretapping them illegally, offering them no trial, and never allowing them to face their accusers.*Failing in almost every way possible to defend the homeland and our borders.Hard hitting and persuasive in its argument, The Case for Impeachment will be one of the most talked-about political books for the pathetic remainder of the Bush Presidency. As timely as today's headlines, this vital book explains why impeachment should be deployed against the serial Constitution-shredder George W. Bush. The third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was illegal spying on Americans--a crime indisputably committed also by Bush and his cronies. But this book also makes a compelling case that Bush has arrogantly flouted his oath of office and the laws of the land by committing other impeachableoffenses--telling lies to Congress and the American people to take us into an illegal war, violating the War Powers act, abusing the power of his office, failing to protect the United States, and more. Dave Lindorff (a first-rate independent progressive journalist) and Barbara Olshansky (a dedicated civil liberties attorney), in The Case for Impeachment, have restored this vital tool to the arsenal of democracy. Any American who wants to preserve what's left of our precious Bill of Rights from further encroachments, and to repair the Constitutional separation of powers vitiated by George Bush, should read this essential book -- which should also be force-fed to every single member of Congress.-- Doug Ireland, columnist for the LA Weekly "In the United States, our best journalism is published in books now and talked about on the radio and the internet. If you get your news from a television or a newspaper, you live in another world. This no doubt contributes to how divided we are politically. Dave Lindorff's and Barbara Olshansky's book could help bridge this national divide. The genius of this book is in its brevity. Lindorff and Olshansky have boiled the list of Bush and Cheney's documented crimes down to an amazingly concise summary, one that however gives a real flavor of the goings on in this criminal administration. I work on these issues and still learned a great deal by reading this book. If each of us who knows some of this and is able to process it easily buys ten copies to give to people who get their news from TV, this clear crisp book might just help save this country."-- David Swanson, co-founder AfterDowningStreet.org The impeachment of George W. Bush today seems politically unlikely. But Lindorff and Olshansky insist that we not avert our eyes, that it is not OK to tolerate a president who "revokes the basic constitutional rights of American citizenship"--locking people up indefinitely without trial, claiming a right to ignore laws and court orders. President Bush justifies his violations of the Constitution by citing the emergency of a war which is in truth "a police action against stateless terrorists"--a crusade which can thus have "no beginning and no end," Lindorff and Olshansky forcefully argue. If Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about having sex, they ask, how much more dangerous is it to shrug off the corrosive impact of a president who knowingly lied the nation into a costly and counterproductive war in Iraq? The authors then proceed to meticulously document their case that many of the false grounds for war were, indeed, knowing lies. "If we fail to stand up for the Constitution now," they warn, "it may only be a piece of paper by the end of President Bush's second term."--Vin Suprynowicz, Las Vegas Review Journal

The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump provides a coherent and nuanced psychological portrait of Donald Trump, drawing upon biographical events in the subject's life and contemporary scientific research and theory in personality, developmental, and social psychology. Dan P. McAdams, renowned psychologist who pioneered the study of lives, examines the central personality traits, personal values and motives, and the interpersonal and cultural factors that together have shaped Trump's psychological makeup, with an emphasis on the strangeness of the case--that is, how Trump again and again defies psychological expectations regarding what it means to be a human being. The book's central thesis is that Donald Trump is the episodic man. The chapters, structured as stand-alone essays each riffing on a single psychological theme, build on each other to present a portrait of a person who compulsively lives in the moment, without an internal story to integrate his life in time. With an emphasis on scientific personality research, rather than political rhetoric, McAdams shows that Trump's utter lack of an inner life story is truly exceptional. This book is a remarkable case study which should be of as much interest to psychologists as it is to readers trying to reckon with the often confounding behavior and temperament of the 45th President of the United States.

A grounded and intimate portrait of life by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Where We Keep the Light is the story of public service and personal faith. From an early age, Josh Shapiro learned and practiced the power of showing up, listening, and executing, to make people’s lives a little better. In the pages of this account of his life, Shapiro relates powerful stories about his family, his faith, and what matters to Americans tired of all the divisiveness and distrust in our leaders. Reflecting on what he’s learned by knocking on doors, serving his community, and tackling the tough problems that no one wanted to touch in new and different ways, Shapiro reminds us that government can be a force for good, that conventional wisdom is rarely wise, and there’s more that unites Americans than divides us. Shapiro is answering a call to service at a time when we need leaders like him to step up. Where We Keep the Light is a must-read account of his life and what lies ahead.

'An intimate, insightful portrait of an extraordinarily private leader' WALTER ISAACSON From the bestselling author of Enemies of the People An intimate and deeply researched account of the extraordinary rise and political brilliance of the most powerful - and elusive - woman in the world. Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor's daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her twenties working as a research chemist, only entering politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within fifteen years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West. Acclaimed author Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of this unlikely ascent. With unparalleled access to the chancellor's inner circle and a trove of records only recently come to light, she teases out the unique political genius that is the secret to Merkel's success. No other modern leader has so ably confronted authoritarian aggression, enacted daring social policies and calmly unified an entire continent in an era when countries are becoming only more divided. Again and again, she's cleverly outmanoeuvred strongmen like Putin and Trump, and weathered surprisingly complicated relationships with allies like Obama and Macron. Famously private, the woman who emerges from these pages is a role model for anyone interested in gaining and keeping power while staying true to one's moral convictions. At once a riveting political biography, an intimate human portrait and a revelatory look at successful leadership in action, The Chancellor brings forth from the shadows one of the most extraordinary women of our time.