Biography: U.S. Presidents from I Cannot Live Without Books

John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father's Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial by Dan Abrams and David Fisher History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country's second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials… Read more about this item

Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America by Jared Cohen Eight times in our republic a vice president has succeeded on the death of the president -- history altered by a heartbeat. In many cases, the men who came to fill the shoes of presidents had been spouses in marriages of political convenience chosen for the candidate's strategy, or to court a… Read more about this item

THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. Bill Clinton: a president of contradictions. He was a Rhodes scholar and a Yale Law School graduate, but he was also a fatherless child from rural Arkansas. He was one of the most talented politicians of his age, but he inspired enmity of such intensity that his opponents would stop… Read more about this item

Citizen Soldier: A Life of Harry S. Truman by Aida D. Donald In Citizen Soldier, acclaimed biographer Aida D. Donald presents a psychologically penetraiting portrait of Harry S. Truman, the unlikely president who rose from a modest background to preside over the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. Drawing on recently opened government documents and… Read more about this item

Haig's Coup: How Richard Nixon's Closest Aide Forced Him from Office by Ray Locker When General Alexander M. Haig Jr. returned to the White House on May 3, 1973, he found the Nixon administration in worse shape than he had imagined. President Richard Nixon, reelected in an overwhelming landslide just six months earlier, had accepted the resignations of his top aides… Read more about this item

Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader by Robert Middlekauff THERE IS A RED "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. A vivid, insightful, essential new account of the formative years that shaped a callow George Washington into an extraordinary leader, from the Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Robert Middlekauff. George Washington was famously unknowable, a man of deep passions… Read more about this item

Lincoln and the Fight for Peace by John Avlon As the tide of the Civil War turned in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by his young son, took a dangerous two-week trip to visit the troops on the front lines -- seeing combat up close, greeting liberated slaves in the ruins of Richmond and comforting wounded Union and Confederate… Read more about this item

Lincoln's Body: A Cultural History by Richard Wightman Fox THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. Even a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln's death, we, like Walt Whitman, "love the President personally." In a stunning feat of scholarship, insight, and engaging prose, LINCOLN'S BODY explores how a president ungainly in body and downright "ugly" of aspect came… Read more about this item

A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland by Seth G. Jones THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. December 1981 -- the CIA learns that the Polish government has cut telephone communications with the West and closed the border. The agency's leaders rush to brief President Ronald Reagan at Camp David. Within… Read more about this item

Washington's End: The Final Years and Forgotten Struggle by Jonathan Horn THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. Washington's End begins where most biographies of George Washington leave off, with the first president exiting office after eight years and entering what would become the most bewildering stage of his life. Embittered by partisan criticism and eager to return… Read more about this item

White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port by Kate Storey THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the Kennedy family. It is where, for a hundred years, America's most storied political family has come to celebrate, bond, play, and grieve. It is also the setting of… Read more about this item

Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made by Derek Leebaert THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. Unlikely Heroes provides an entirely new understanding of Franklin Roosevelt and his presidency. Only four people served at the top echelon of FDR's administration from the frightening early months of spring 1933 until he died in… Read more about this item

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird THERE IS A RED "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. Four decades after Ronald Reagan's landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But… Read more about this item

James Monroe: A Life by Tim McGrath THERE IS A RED "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" ON THE BOTTOM EDGES. Monroe lived a life defined by revolutions. From the battlefields of the War for Independence, to his ambassadorship in Paris in the days of the guillotine, to his own role in the creation of Congress's partisan divide, he was a man who embodied the restless spirit… Read more about this item

Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. In the early 1960s, Dallas was brewing with political passions, a city crammed with larger-than-life characters dead-set against the Kennedy presidency. These included rabid warriors like defrocked military general Edwin A. Walker; the world's richest oil baron, H.L. Hunt; the leader of… Read more about this item

1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson -- champion of American democracy, but also of segregation, advocate for free trade and a new world order based on freedom and justice -- thrust the United States into the First World… Read more about this item

Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House by Eleanor Herman THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. While Americans have a reputation for being straitlaced, many of the nation's leaders have been anything but puritanical. Alexander Hamilton had a steamy affair with a blackmailing prostitute. Warren G. Harding and Grover… Read more about this item

The Black Man's President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, & the Pursuit of Racial Equality by Michael Burlingame In a little-noted eulogy delivered shortly after Lincoln's assassination, Frederick Douglass called the martyred president "emphatically the black man's president," the "first to show any respect for their rights as men." To justify that description, Douglass pointed not just to Lincoln's official acts and… Read more about this item

Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency by Mark K. Updegrove Nearly sixty years after his death, JFK still holds an outsize place in the American imagination. While Baby Boomers remember his dazzling presence as president, millennials more likely know him from advertisements for Omega watches or Ray-Ban sunglasses. Yet his years in office were marked by more than his style and… Read more about this item

The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul by Brian Kilmeade In 1861, a bloody civil war loomed on America's horizon. No longer was it possible to pretend that slaveholding was consistent with the values of America's founding, but how fast could the country change? And could slavery be abolished while keeping… Read more about this item