President Memoirs

A hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the 20th 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 28th President. This is not just Wilson the icon - but Wilson the man.

Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro’s peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself—the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing—and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.

In this classic portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower the soldier, best-selling historian Stephen E. Ambrose examines the Allied commander's leadership during World War II. Ambrose brings Eisenhower's experience of the Second World War to life, showing in vivid detail how the general's skill as a diplomat and a military strategist contributed to Allied successes in North Africa and in Europe and established him as one of the greatest military leaders in the world.

New York Times bestselling author Barbara Leaming answers the question: What was it like to be Mrs. John F. Kennedy during the dramatic thousand days of the Kennedy presidency? Here for the first time is the full story of the extravagant interplay of sex and politics that constitutes one of modern history's most spectacular dramas.

Ronald Reagan today is a conservative icon, celebrated for transforming the American domestic agenda and playing a crucial part in ending communism in the Soviet Union. In his masterful new biography, H. W. Brands argues that Reagan, along with FDR, was the most consequential president of the 20th century. Reagan took office at a time when the public sector, after a half century of New Deal liberalism, was widely perceived as bloated and inefficient, an impediment to personal liberty.

From master storyteller and historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur squared off to decide America's future in the aftermath of World War II.

In the early hours of November 9, 2016, one of the most contentious, polarizing, and vicious presidential races came to an abrupt and unexpected end when heavily favored presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton called Donald J. Trump to concede, shocking a nation that had, only hours before, given little credence to his chances. Donald Trump pulled the greatest upset in American political history despite a torrent of invective and dismissal of the mainstream media.

This is a major political biography of a great American president - who won a war, transformed the government, and doubled the size of the United States...in four years. When Polk was sworn in as the 11th president, what followed was one of the most consequential presidencies in history.

Polls reveal that 85 percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Some even believe Oswald was entirely innocent. In this encyclopedic, absorbing audiobook, Vincent Bugliosi shows how the public has come to believe such lies about the day that changed the course of history. Bugliosi has devoted almost 20 years of his life to this project, and is determined to show that, despite the overwhelming popular perception, Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone.

Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.

By the acclaimed author of the classic Patriots and Union 1812, this major work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the growth of the American nation. After the War of 1812, Presidents Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, and Polk led the country to its Manifest Destiny across the continent, but the forces and hostility unleashed by that expansion led inexorably to Civil War.

Learn the stories and the struggles each president dealt with as we take a walk through the nation's development. Follow along as we discuss how the United States came into power, the leaders who shaped its development, and the wars that were fought to protect it. This book gives a detailed account of the United States through a look at its presidents. Each chapter takes an educational look at the life of each president, how they came to power, and what the country was like during their time in office. Never before has so much information been packed into one easy-to-listen book.

In The King and the Cowboy, renowned historian David Fromkin reveals how two unlikely world leaders - Edward the Seventh of England and Theodore Roosevelt - recast themselves as respected political players and established a friendship that would shape the course of the 20th century in ways never anticipated.

Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end.

In an American story of enduring importance, former President Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed the country.

After finishing his second term in office in 1877, Grant and his wife Julia took a trip around the world which left him short on money. Nearly 60 years old, the ex-president looked for something to engage his time. He ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1880, but lost to James Garfield. The next year, Grant moved to New York City to go into business with his son, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., and a young investor, Ferdinand Ward. The firm of Grant & Ward did well at first, bolstered by Ward's skills and Grant's name. But Grant was largely disengaged from the company's business, ...

Shortly after arriving in the White House in early 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard. His opponents thought his decision unwise at best and ruinous at worst. But they could not have been more wrong. With The Money Makers, Eric Rauchway tells the absorbing story of how FDR and his advisors pulled the levers of monetary policy to save the domestic economy and propel the United States to unprecedented prosperity and superpower status.

No Ordinary Time describes how the isolationist and divided United States of 1940 was unified under the extraordinary leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to become the preeminent economic and military power in the world.

Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, is often ranked among Americans’ most well-liked presidents. Yet what most Americans don’t know is that JFK’s historic presidency almost ended before it began—at the hands of a disgruntled sociopathic loner armed with dynamite. On December 11, 1960, shortly after Kennedy’s election and before his inauguration, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick waited in his car—a parked Buick—on a quiet street in Palm Beach, Florida.

Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.