The Best American Political Writing 2008 draws from a variety of publications and political viewpoints to present the year's most insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking pieces on the current political scene. This year's edition will include full coverage of the presidential candidates and conventions, and will offer incisive reporting on America's most pressing political concerns -- from the threat of a looming economic recession, to the continued struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Selections will include Jane Mayer's investigation of the various highly coercive interrogation techniques routinely employed by the CIA and the Pentagon, Jonathan Chait's report on how radical economic extremists have hijacked national policy, Andrew Sullivan's article on "Why Barack Obama Matters," George Packer's analysis of the contrasting appeals of Obama and Hillary Clinton, Parag Khanna on America's struggle to retain its status as the world's great superpower, and John Judis's essay on how politicians wield power by tapping into our deepest anxieties, from such publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Vanity Fair.

The Best American Political Writing 2008 draws from a variety of publications and political viewpoints to present the year's most insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking pieces on the current political scene. This year's edition will include full coverage of the presidential candidates and conventions, and will offer incisive reporting o...

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The definitive account of America's conflict with Islamic fundamentalism and a searing exploration of its human costs—an instant classic of war reporting from the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, we witness the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, the aftermath of the attack on New York on September 11th, and the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins is the only American journalist to have reported on all these events, and his experiences are conveyed in a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters and astonishing scenes. Brilliant and fearless, The Forever War is not just about America's wars after 9/11, but about the nature of war itself.

Barack Obama’s presidential victory naturally led people to believe that the United States might finally be moving into a post-racial era. Obama’s Race—and its eye-opening account of the role played by race in the election—paints a dramatically different picture. The authors argue that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record—and perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. As Obama’s campaign was given a boost in the primaries from racial liberals that extended well beyond that usually offered to ideologically similar white candidates, Hillary Clinton lost much of her longstanding support and instead became the preferred candidate of Democratic racial conservatives. Time and again, voters’ racial predispositions trumped their ideological preferences as John McCain—seldom described as conservative in matters of race—became the darling of racial conservatives from both parties. Hard-hitting and sure to be controversial, Obama’s Race will be both praised and criticized—but certainly not ignored.

Before Game Change there was What It Takes, a ride along the 1988 campaign trail and “possibly the best [book] ever written about an American election” (NPR). Written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and New York Times–bestselling author Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes is “a perfect-pitch rendering of the emotions, the intensity, the anguish, and the emptiness of what may have been the last normal two-party campaign in American history” (Time). An up-close, in-depth look at six candidates—George H. W. “Poppy” Bush, Bob Dole, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt, and Gary Hart—this account of the 1988 US presidential campaign explores a unique moment in history, with details on everything from Bush at the Astrodome to Hart’s Donna Rice scandal. Cramer also addresses the question we find ourselves pondering every four years: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that allows them to throw their hat in the ring as a candidate for leadership of the free world? Exhaustively researched from thousands of hours of interviews, What It Takes creates powerful portraits of these Republican and Democratic contenders, and the consultants, donors, journalists, handlers, and hangers-on who surround them, as they meet, greet, and strategize their way through primary season chasing the nomination, resulting in “a hipped-up amalgam of Teddy White, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). With timeless insight that helps us understand the current state of the nation, this “ultimate insider’s book on presidential politics” explores what helps these people survive, what makes them prosper, what drives them, and ultimately, what drives our government—human beings, in all their flawed glory (San Francisco Chronicle).

Pulp Politics helps us understand how political ads work by exploring how people think and feel, how our brains work, and how we tell and listen to stories. The book dissents from much popular and scholarly opinion that contends that political advertising only despoils democracy. It proposes that the fabric of popular culture, not the essentials of informed consent, constitutes the communicative core of contemporary political campaigns. The book subjects campaign spots to compellingly detailed and nuanced analysis.

An exciting e-format containing 27 video clips taken directly from the CBS news archive of a brilliant, best-selling account of the Nixon era by one of America’s most talented young historians. Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know today was born. Nixonland begins in the blood and fire of the Watts riots-one week after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and nine months after his historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater seemed to have heralded a permanent liberal consensus. The next year scores of liberals were thrown out of Congress, America was more divided than ever-and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Six years later, President Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment borne of that blood and fire, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's, and the outlines of today's politics of red-and-blue division became already distinct. Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland: • Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods, while suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns. • The civil war over Vietnam, the assassinations, the riot at the Democratic National Convention. • Richard Nixon acceding to the presidency pledging a new dawn of national unity--and governing more divisively than any before him. • The rise of twin cultures of left- and right-wing vigilantes, Americans literally bombing and cutting each other down in the streets over political differences. •And, finally, Watergate, the fruit of a president who rose by matching his own anxieties and dreads with those of an increasingly frightened electorate--but whose anxieties and dreads produced a criminal conspiracy in the Oval Office.