For more than forty years, Jack Germond enjoyed an extraordinary career in political reporting. With his trademark no-nonsense style and tremendous wit in abundance, Fat Man in a Middle Seat remembers the personalities that dominated national politics during Germond’s career: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Germond writes about the real stuff of politics and captures the details of the reporter’s life on the road—the off-the-record briefings and strategy sessions, countless late nights in bars, and overcrowded Friday-night standby flights. In the words of Tim Russert, this is “quintessential Germond—candid, insightful, and irreverent.”

For more than forty years, Jack Germond has been covering politics for Gannett newspapers, the Washington Star, and the Baltimore Sun, and talking politics on the Today show, The McLaughlin Group, and Inside Washington. Now, in Fat Man Fed Up, Germond confronts the most critical issues raised by our election process and offers a scathing but wry polemic about what’s wrong with American politics. Is there any connection between what happens in campaigns and what happens in government? And if not, where does the blame for the discontent lie? Was Tocqueville right? Do we get the leaders we deserve? Indeed, according to Germond, the politicians aren’t the only ones to blame, or even the chief culprits. He describes how he and his colleagues in the news media have been guilty of dumbing-down the political process–and how the voters are too apathetic to demand better coverage and better results. Instead, they simply turn away and too often end up enduring third-rate presidents. This no-sacred-cows manifesto faces the problems many are reluctant to address: • Polls and how they are used and abused by politicians and press to mislead gullible voters. • The critical failure of the press to accurately portray figures in the political realm, from Eugene McCarthy to Barbara Bush to Al Sharpton. • How the complaints about liberal bias in the press miss the real point: whether that bias, if it exists, colors the way editors and reporters work. • The staggering influence of television, and the networks’ inability to provide anything but the most simplistic coverage of politics. • The “big lie” school of campaigning. From “Where’s the beef?” to “compassionate conservatism,” the politics of empty slogans has always placed noise above nuance: Say anything loudly enough and long enough, and voters are bound to mistake it for the truth. Along the way, Germond illustrates his arguments by drawing from his war chest of priceless anecdotes from decades in the business. With his inimitable combination of incisive journalism and sardonic and witty straight talk, Germond guides us through the fog created by candidates and the media. In this timely, outrageous, and compulsively readable book, no one is let off the hook. Fat Man Fed Up is a bracing look at how we never seem to get the truth about the people we’re electing.

For more than forty years, Jack Germond has been covering politics for Gannett newspapers, the Washington Star, and the Baltimore Sun, and talking politics on the Today show, The McLaughlin Group, and Inside Washington. Now, in Fat Man Fed Up, Germond confronts the most critical issues raised by our election process and offers a scathing but wry polemic about what’s wrong with American politics. Is there any connection between what happens in campaigns and what happens in government? And if not, where does the blame for the discontent lie? Was Tocqueville right? Do we get the leaders we deserve? Indeed, according to Germond, the politicians aren’t the only ones to blame, or even the chief culprits. He describes how he and his colleagues in the news media have been guilty of dumbing-down the political process–and how the voters are too apathetic to demand better coverage and better results. Instead, they simply turn away and too often end up enduring third-rate presidents. This no-sacred-cows manifesto faces the problems many are reluctant to address: • Polls and how they are used and abused by politicians and press to mislead gullible voters. • The critical failure of the press to accurately portray figures in the political realm, from Eugene McCarthy to Barbara Bush to Al Sharpton. • How the complaints about liberal bias in the press miss the real point: whether that bias, if it exists, colors the way editors and reporters work. • The staggering influence of television, and the networks’ inability to provide anything but the most simplistic coverage of politics. • The “big lie” school of campaigning. From “Where’s the beef?” to “compassionate conservatism,” the politics of empty slogans has always placed noise above nuance: Say anything loudly enough and long enough, and voters are bound to mistake it for the truth. Along the way, Germond illustrates his arguments by drawing from his war chest of priceless anecdotes from decades in the business. With his inimitable combination of incisive journalism and sardonic and witty straight talk, Germond guides us through the fog created by candidates and the media. In this timely, outrageous, and compulsively readable book, no one is let off the hook. Fat Man Fed Up is a bracing look at how we never seem to get the truth about the people we’re electing.

There was no sign of life. But not for a second did Pascoe admit the possibility of death. Dalziel was indestructible. Dalziel is, and was, and forever shall be, world without end, amen. Chief constables might come and chief constables might go, but Fat Andy went on forever. Caught in the full blast of a huge explosion, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel lies on a hospital bed, with only a life support system and his indomitable will between him and the Great Beyond. His colleague, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, is determined to bring those responsible to justice. Pascoe suspects a group called The Templars, and the deeper he digs, the more certain he is that The Templars are getting help from within the police force. The plot is complex, the pace fast, the jokes furious, and the climax astounding. And above it all, like a huge dirigible threatening to break from its moorings, hovers the disembodied spirit of Andy Dalziel.

Eugene McCarthy was one of the most fascinating political figures of the postwar era: a committed liberal anti-Communist who broke with his party’s leadership over Vietnam and ultimately helped take down the political giant Lyndon B. Johnson. His presidential candidacy in 1968 seized the hearts and fired the imaginations of countless young liberals; it also presaged the declining fortunes of liberalism and the rise of conservatism over the past three decades. Dominic Sandbrook traces Eugene McCarthy’s rise to prominence and his subsequent failures, and makes clear how his story embodies the larger history of American liberalism over the last half century. We see McCarthy elected from Minnesota to the House and then to the Senate, part of a new liberal movement that combined New Deal domestic policies and fierce Cold War hawkishness, a consensus that produced huge electoral victories until it was shattered by the war in Vietnam. As the situation in Vietnam escalated, many liberals, like McCarthy, found themselves increasingly estranged from the anti-Communism that they had supported for nearly two decades. Sandbrook recounts McCarthy’s growing opposition to President Johnson and his policies, which culminated in McCarthy’s stunning near-victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary and Johnson’s subsequent withdrawal from the race. McCarthy went on to lose the nomination to Hubert Humphrey at the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which secured his downfall and led to Richard Nixon’s election, but he had pulled off one of the greatest electoral upsets in American history, one that helped shape the political landscape for decades. These were tumultuous times in American politics, and Sandbrook vividly captures the drama and historical significance of the period through his intimate portrait of a singularly interesting man at the center of it all.

American poet and writer John G. Neihardt (1881–1973) possessed an inquiring and spiritual mind. Those qualities came to the fore in Black Elk Speaks, the story of the Lakota holy man Black Elk, for which he is best remembered. Over the course of thirty years he also wrote a five-volume epic poem, A Cycle of the West, which told the story of the settling of the American West. Despite Neihardt’s widespread name recognition, the success of Black Elk Speaks, and a list of critically acclaimed books and poems, Lonesome Dreamer is the first biography of Neihardt in nearly forty years. Timothy G. Anderson describes Neihardt’s life from his humble beginnings in Illinois, to being named poet laureate of Nebraska in 1921, to his appearance on the Dick Cavett Show at the age of ninety. Anderson also delves into Neihardt’s success as a poet far from the East Coast literary establishment, his resistance to modernist movements in poetry, and his wish to understand and describe the experience of the Plains Indians. Offering insight into both his personal and his literary life, this biography reaffirms Neihardt’s place in American literary history, his successes and failures, and his unbreakable spirit.

A state of the union address as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first—from the New York Times–bestselling author of America, the Last Best Hope. In A Century Turns, William J. Bennett explores America’s recent and momentous history—the contentious election of 1988, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of global Communism, the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton, the technological and commercial boom of the 1990s, the war on terror, and the election of America’s first black president. Surveying politics and pop culture, economics and technology, war and religion, Bennett pieces together the players, the personalities, the feats and the failures that transformed key moments in the American story. And he captures it all with piercing insight and unrelenting optimism.