Showing titles in Politicians

Before he was a politician, Chris Bryant was an Anglican priest, baptising babies and holding the hands of the dying. Before that, he manned the barricades in Latin America, and before that, he was the scared son of an alcoholic mother and an estranged father. This is a no-holds-barred account of a Minister’s truly unconventional life before politics – one that has left Bryant equally at home behind the altar, in sweaty gay night clubs, on the hustings or the stage.

Stress Test is the story of Tim Geithner’s education in financial crises. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then as President Barack Obama’s secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner helped the United States navigate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, from boom to bust to rescue to recovery.

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself.

With a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, sex and appallingly rudimentary medicine. These were dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality, and Buckingham stood at its centre until his spectacular fall from grace.

Over 4,000 students gathered at the University of Michigan to hear Republican Party candidate Ron Paul speak. As he began to address the topics of monetary policy and the coming depression, a chant rose from the crowd, "End the Fed! End the Fed!" As dollar bills were lit on fire and thrown into the night skies, it became clear that the real problem, one that nobody in the media was talking about, was the central bank-an unconstitutional entity and a political, economic, and moral disaster.

Andrew Kwong was only seven when he witnessed his first execution. The grim scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his commitment as a revolutionary in Mao's New China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him.

In Grace and Power, New York Times best-selling author Sally Bedell Smith takes us inside the Kennedy White House with unparalleled access and insight. Having interviewed scores of Kennedy intimates, including many who have never spoken before, and drawing on letters and personal papers made available for the first time, Smith paints a richly detailed picture of the personal relationships behind the high purpose and poiltical drama of the 20th century's most storied presidency.

As he stumbled through high school, struggling to find a community among other fans of punk rock music, Christian Picciolini was recruited by a now notorious white power skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to "protect the white race from extinction." Soon, he had become an expert in racist philosophies, a terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. When his mentor was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison, 16-year-old Picciolini took over the man's role as the leader of an infamous neo-Nazi skinhead group.

On Thursday 19 July 2001, after a perjury trial lasting seven weeks, Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in jail. He was to spend the first 22 days and 14 hours in HMP Belmarsh, a double A-Category high-security prison in South London, which houses some of Britain's most violent criminals. This is the author's daily record of the time he spent there.

This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.

In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford University lecturer Bertrand M. Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky's tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky: Downfall ofa Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history's most famous yet elusive figures.

The Politics Book makes government and politics easy to understand by explaining the big ideas simply. The key events in political history are outlined from the origins of political thinking by Confucius and Aristotle to modern-day activists such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. This audiobook breaks down their important concepts into bite-size chunks to make the subject accessible to students of politics and anyone with an interest in how government works.

Russell Kirk has ingeniously combined into a living whole the private Burke and the public Burke. He gives us a fresh assessment of Burke, a statesman enjoying even greater influence today than in his own time. He lucidly unfolds Burke's philosophy, showing how it revealed itself in concrete historical situations in the 18th century and how Burke, through his philosophy, "speaks to our age".

As Prime Minister for three years and Home Secretary for six years, Theresa May confronted a series of issues in which the abuse of power led to devastating results for individuals and significantly damaged the reputation of, and trust in, public institutions and politicians. From the Hillsborough and Grenfell tragedies, to the Daniel Morgan case and parliamentary scandals, the powerful repeatedly chose to use their power not in the interests of the powerless but to serve themselves or to protect the organisation to which they belonged.

Having entered the British Navy at the age of 12, Horatio Lord Nelson achieved the rank of captain at the age of 20. As captain, he was quickly recognized as a magnetic and controversial figure. He triumphed at Cape St. Vincent and the Nile, but failed at Tenefife and Boulogne. With the glories of Copenhagen and Trafalgar yet ahead of him, his ardent passion for Emma Hamilton, the wife of a British Ambassador, cast a heavy shadow over his career.

Peter Mandelson is one of the most influential politicians of modern times. The Third Man is his story – of a life played out in the backroom and then on the frontline of the Labour Party during its unprecedented three terms in government. Much of the book is devoted to the defining political relationships of Peter Mandelson’s life – with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Charting what he terms the ‘soap-opera’ years of the Labour government, his book is certain to ruffle many feathers.

Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager - and thus a letter writer - for his entire adult life. The letters collected in I Embrace You with All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967 range from letters home during his Motorcycle Diaries trip, to the long letter to Fidel after the success of the Cuban revolution in early 1959 (from which the book's title comes).

The startling truth behind one of the most notorious dynasties in history is revealed in a remarkable new account by the acclaimed author of The Tudors and A World Undone. Sweeping aside the gossip, slander, and distortion that have shrouded the Borgias for centuries, G. J. Meyer offers an unprecedented portrait of the infamous Renaissance family and their storied milieu.

Raised in a struggling industrial town, JD Vance's early life was scarred by poverty, family turmoil, and the deep cultural roots of Appalachia. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, catapulted him to fame as the voice of the forgotten working class. But his story was just beginning. From the halls of Yale Law to the high-stakes world of Silicon Valley venture capital, and ultimately, to the political battlefield that led him to the White House, Vance’s rise has been nothing short of extraordinary.

When Dorothy Day died in 1980, the New York Times eulogized her as “a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality...founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and leader for more than 50 years in numerous battles of social justice.” Here, in her own words, this remarkable woman tells of her early life as a young journalist in the crucible of Greenwich Village political and literary thought in the 1920s, and of her momentous conversion to Catholicism that meant the end of a Bohemian lifestyle and common-law marriage.