Kirjahaku

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION An enthralling and ground-breaking new biography of one of modern America's most fascinating and consequential political figures, drawing on important new sources, by an award-winning biographer who covered Kennedy closely for many years John A. Farrell's magnificent biography of Edward M. Kennedy is the first single-volume life of the great figure since his death. Farrell's long acquaintance with the Kennedy universe and the acclaim accorded his previous books--including his New York Times bestselling biography of Richard Nixon, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--helped garner him access to a remarkable range of new sources, including segments of Kennedy's personal diary and his private confessions to members of his family in the days that followed the accident on Chappaquiddick. Farrell is, without question, one of America's greatest political biographers and a storyteller of deep wisdom and empathy. His book does full justice to this famously epic and turbulent life of almost unimaginable tragedy and triumph. As the fourth son of the close-knit but fiercely competitive Kennedy clan, Ted was the runt of the litter. Expelled from Harvard University for cheating, he was a fun-loving playboy who nevertheless served his brothers loyally and effectively. It was easy to take Ted lightly, and many did. But when he was elected to the United States Senate at the age of thirty to fill his brother Jack's seat, something unexpected happened: he found his home and his calling there. Over time, Ted Kennedy would build arguably the most significant senatorial career in American history. His life was buffeted by heartbreak: the violent deaths of his three older brothers, his own terrible plane crash, his children's bouts with cancer, and the hideous self-inflicted wounds of Chappaquiddick and stretches of drinking and womanizing that caused irreparable damage to an already fragile first marriage. Those wounds scarred Ted deeply but also tempered his character, and, eventually, he embarked on a run as legislator, party elder, and paterfamilias of the Kennedy family that would change America for the better. John A. Farrell brings us the man as he was, in strength and weakness, his profound but complicated inheritance and his vital legacy, as only a great biographer can do. Without the story this book tells, no understanding of modern America can be complete.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION An enthralling and groundbreaking new biography of one of modern America's most fascinating and consequential political figures, drawing on important new sources, by an award-winning biographer who covered Kennedy closely for many years John A. Farrell's magnificent biography of Edward M. Kennedy is the first single-volume life of the great figure since his death. Farrell's long acquaintance with the Kennedy uni­verse and the acclaim accorded his previous books--including his New York Times best­selling biography of Richard Nixon, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--helped garner him access to a remarkable range of new sources, including segments of Kennedy's personal diary and his private confessions to members of his family in the days that followed the accident on Chappaquiddick. Farrell is, without question, one of America's greatest politi­cal biographers and a storyteller of deep wisdom and empathy. His book does full justice to this famously epic and turbulent life of almost unimaginable tragedy and triumph. As the fourth son of the close-knit but fiercely competitive Kennedy clan, Ted was the runt of the litter. Expelled from Harvard University for cheating, he was a fun-loving playboy who nevertheless served his brothers loyally and effectively. It was easy to take Ted lightly, and many did. But when he was elected to the United States Senate at the age of thirty to fill his brother Jack's seat, something unexpected happened: He found his home and his calling there. Over time, Ted Kennedy would build arguably the most significant senatorial career in American history. His life was buffeted by heartbreak: the violent deaths of his three older brothers, his own terrible plane crash, his children's bouts with cancer, and the hideous self-inflicted wounds of Chappaquiddick and stretches of drinking and womanizing that caused ir­reparable damage to an already fragile first marriage. Those wounds scarred Ted deeply but also tempered his character, and, eventually, he embarked on a run as legislator, party elder, and paterfamilias of the Kennedy family that would change America for the better. John A. Farrell brings us the man as he was, in strength and weakness, his profound but complicated inheritance and his vital legacy, as only a great biographer can do. Without the story this book tells, no understanding of modern America can be complete.

Brilliantly researched, authoritatively crafted by a prize-winning biographer, and lively on the page, this is the Nixon we've been waiting for. Richard Nixon opens with young Navy lieutenant Nick Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism.Within four years of that first win, Nixon would be a U.S. senator; in six the vice president of the United States of America. Few came so far, so fast, and so alone, Farrell writes. Finally president, Nixon's staff was full of bright young men who devised forward-thinking reforms addressing health care, poverty, civil rights, and protection of the environment. It was a fine legacy, but Nixon cared little for it. He aspired to make his mark on the world stage instead, and his 1972 opening to China was the first great crack in the Cold War. Nixon had another legacy, too: an America divided and polarized. It was Nixon who launched the McCarthy era, who set South against North, and who spurred the Silent Majority to despise and distrust the country's elites. He persuaded Americans to gnaw, as he did, on grievances and to look at one another as enemies. Finally, in August 1974, after two years of the mesmerizing intrigue and scandal known as Watergate, Nixon became the only president to resign in disgrace. Richard Nixon is an enthralling tour de force biography of our darkest president, one that reviewers will hail as a defining portrait, and the full life of Nixon readers have awaited.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography The definitive biography of Clarence Darrow, the brilliant, idiosyncratic lawyer who defended John Scopes in the "Monkey Trial" and gave voice to the populist masses at the turn of the twentieth century, thus changing American law forever. Amidst the tumult of the industrial age and the progressive era, Clarence Darrow became America's greatest defense attorney, successfully championing poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts, against big business, fundamentalist religion, Jim Crow, and the US government. His courtroom style--a mixture of passion, improvisation, charm, and tactical genius--won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang. In Farrell's hands, Darrow is a Byronic figure, a renegade whose commitment to liberty led him to heroic courtroom battles and legal trickery alike.