Recommendations based on "Personality and Power"

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 WeeklyA 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 makerIn 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.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for NonfictionFinalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book PrizeEmbracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life. Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order. 75 illustrations and map

Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book ReviewNamed one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, USA Today, Time, and New York magazine.Winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book on International AffairsWinner of the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in JournalismThe Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. It brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration's war policy and led America to the Assassins' Gate―the main point of entry into the American zone in Baghdad.The Assassins' Gate also describes the place of the war in American life: the ideological battles in Washington that led to chaos in Iraq, the ordeal of a fallen soldier's family, and the political culture of a country too bitterly polarized to realize such a vast and morally complex undertaking. George Packer's best-selling first-person narrative combines the scope of an epic history with the depth and intimacy of a novel, creating a masterful account of America's most controversial foreign venture since Vietnam.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the texts of the Nobel Prize-winning author's three speeches in the United States in the summer of 1975, his first major public addresses since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974: on June 30 and July 9 to trade-union leaders of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., and in New York City, and on July 15 to the United States Congress; and also the texts of his BBC interview and radio speech, which sparked widespread public controversy when they were aired in London in March 1976. Solzhenitsyn's outspoken criticism of the West's growing weakness and complacency and his belief that Russia's growing strength will enable her to establish supremacy over the West without risk of a nucelar holocaust are expressed with the moral authority of a great novelist and historian. "Solzhenitsyn mounts a public indictment of the supine inattention of the West that rings like the blows of the hammer with which Luther nailed his manifesto to the doors at Wittenberg."--Times Literary Supplement

Clean and tight binding. Nice copy

The masterfully told story of the unlikely men who came together to make the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history.On the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, Andrei Cherny tells a remarkable story with profound implications for the world today. In the tradition of the best narrative storytellers, he brings together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat but changed how the world viewed the United States, and set in motion the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and to AmericaÂ's victory in the Cold War. On June 24, 1948, intent on furthering its domination of Europe, the Soviet Union cut off all access to West Berlin, prepared to starve the city into submission unless the Americans abandoned it. Soviet forces hugely outnumbered the AlliesÂ', and most of AmericaÂ's top officials considered the situation hopeless. But not all of them. Harry Truman, an accidental president, derided by his own party; Lucius Clay, a frustrated general, denied a combat command and relegated to the home front; Bill Tunner, a logistics expert downsized to a desk job in a corner of the Pentagon; James Forrestal, a secretary of defense beginning to mentally unravel; Hal Halvorsen, a lovesick pilot who had served far from the conflict, flying transport missions in the backwater of a global war—together these unlikely men improvised and stumbled their way into a uniquely American combination of military and moral force unprecedented in its time. This is the forgotten foundation tale of America in the modern world, the story of when Americans learned, for the first time, how to act at the summit of world power—a masterful and exciting work of historical narrative, and one with strong resonance for our time.

In the 1930s a band of smart and able young men, some still in their twenties, helped Franklin D. Roosevelt transform an American nation in crisis. They were the junior officers of the New Deal. Thomas G. Corcoran, Benjamin V. Cohen, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, and James Rowe helped FDR build the modern Democratic Party into a progressive coalition whose command over power and ideas during the next three decades seemed politically invincible. This is the first book about this group of Rooseveltians and their linkage to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Vietnam War debacle. Michael Janeway grew up inside this world. His father, Eliot Janeway, business editor of Time and a star writer for Fortune and Life magazines, was part of this circle, strategizing and practicing politics as well as reporting on these men. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of events and previously unavailable private letters and other documents, Janeway crafts a riveting account of the exercise of power during the New Deal and its aftermath. He shows how these men were at the nexus of reform impulses at the electoral level with reform thinking in the social sciences and the law and explains how this potent fusion helped build the contemporary American state. Since that time efforts to reinvent government by "brains trust" have largely failed in the U.S. In the last quarter of the twentieth century American politics ceased to function as a blend of broad coalition building and reform agenda setting, rooted in a consensus of belief in the efficacy of modern government.Can a progressive coalition of ideas and power come together again? The Fall of the House of Roosevelt makes such a prospect both alluring and daunting.

A new look at the drama that lay behind the end of the war in the Pacific Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender that formally ended the war in the Pacific brought to a close one of the most cataclysmic engagements in history. Behind it lay a debate that had been raging for some weeks prior among American military and political leaders. The surrender fulfilled the commitment that Franklin Roosevelt had made in 1943 at the Casablanca conference that it be "unconditional." Though readily accepted as policy at the time, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945 support for unconditional surrender wavered, particularly among Republicans in Congress, when the bloody campaigns on Iwo Jima and Okinawa made clear the cost of military victory against Japan. Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945 had been one thing; the war in the pacific was another. Many conservatives favored a negotiated surrender. Though this was the last time American forces would impose surrender unconditionally, questions surrounding it continued through the 1950s and 1960s--with the Korean and Vietnam Wars--when liberal and conservative views reversed, including over the definition of "peace with honor." The subject was revived during the ceremonies surrounding the 50th anniversary in 1995, and the Gulf and Iraq Wars, when the subjects of exit strategies and "accomplished missions" were debated. Marc Gallicchio reveals how and why the surrender in Tokyo Bay unfolded as it did and the principle figures behind it, including George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. The latter would effectively become the leader of Japan and his tenure, and indeed the very nature of the American occupation, was shaped by the nature of the surrender. Most importantly, Gallicchio reveals how the policy of unconditional surrender has shaped our memory and our understanding of World War II.

The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 6,000 soldiers killed--four times the number lost on D-Day, and twice the number killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. In Crossroads of Freedom, America's most eminent Civil War historian, James M. McPherson, paints a masterful account of this pivotal battle, the events that led up to it, and its aftermath. As McPherson shows, by September 1862 the survival of the United States was in doubt. The Union had suffered a string of defeats, and Robert E. Lee's army was in Maryland, poised to threaten Washington. The British government was openly talking of recognizing the Confederacy and brokering a peace between North and South. Northern armies and voters were demoralized. And Lincoln had shelved his proposed edict of emancipation months before, waiting for a victory that had not come--that some thought would never come. Both Confederate and Union troops knew the war was at a crossroads, that they were marching toward a decisive battle. It came along the ridges and in the woods and cornfields between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River. Valor, misjudgment, and astonishing coincidence all played a role in the outcome. McPherson vividly describes a day of savage fighting in locales that became forever famous--The Cornfield, the Dunkard Church, the West Woods, and Bloody Lane. Lee's battered army escaped to fight another day, but Antietam was a critical victory for the Union. It restored morale in the North and kept Lincoln's party in control of Congress. It crushed Confederate hopes of British intervention. And it freed Lincoln to deliver the Emancipation Proclamation, which instantly changed the character of the war. McPherson brilliantly weaves these strands of diplomatic, political, and military history into a compact, swift-moving narrative that shows why America's bloodiest day is, indeed, a turning point in our history.

"1969 was a year of rising tension, violence and change for the people of Northern Ireland. Rioting in Derry's Bogside led to the deployment of British troops and a shortlived, uneasy truce. The British army soon found itself engaged in an undercover war against the Provisional IRA, which was to last for more than twenty years. In this enthralling and controversial book, Martin Dillon examines the roles played by the Provisional IRA, the State forces, the Irish Government and the British Army during this troubled period. He unravels the mystery of a war in which informers, agents and double agents operate, and reveals disturbing facts about the way in which the terrorists and the intelligence agencies target, undermine and penetrate each other's ranks. The Dirty War contains startling disclosures and throws new light on previously unexplained events." --Descripción del editor.