In this deeply reported book, Toobin explores why the Founding Fathers gave the power of pardon to the President and recreates the behind-the-scenes political melodrama during the tumultuous period around Nixon’s resignation. The story features a rich cast of characters, including Alexander Haig, Nixon’s last chief of staff, who pushed for the pardon, and a young Justice Department lawyer named Antonin Scalia, who provided the legal justification.
Ford’s shocking decision to pardon Nixon was widely criticized at the time, yet it has since been reevaluated as a healing gesture for a divided country. But Toobin argues that Ford’s pardon was an unwise gift to an undeserving recipient and an unsettling political precedent. The Pardon explores those that followed: Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, and the extraordinary story of Trump’s unprecedented pardons at the end of his first term.
The Pardon is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the complex dynamics of power within the highest office in the nation, and the implications of presidential mercy.
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.
Stella reached for an oyster, tipped her head, and tossed it back. It was cool and slippery, the flavor so briny it was like diving into the ocean. Oysters, she thought. Where have they been all my life?
When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual inheritance: a one-way plane ticket and a note reading “Go to Paris.” Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a traumatic childhood has kept her confined to the strict routines of her comfort zone. But when her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.
Alone in a foreign city, Stella falls into old habits, living cautiously and frugally. Then she stumbles across a vintage store, where she tries on a fabulous Dior dress. The shopkeeper insists that this dress was meant for Stella and for the first time in her life Stella does something impulsive. She buys the dress—and embarks on an adventure.
Her first stop: the iconic brasserie Les Deux Magots, where Stella tastes her first oysters and then meets an octogenarian art collector who decides to take her under his wing. As Jules introduces Stella to a veritable who’s who of the Paris literary, art, and culinary worlds, she begins to understand what it might mean to live a larger life.
As weeks—and many decadent meals—go by, Stella ends up living as a “tumbleweed” at famed bookstore Shakespeare & Company, uncovers a hundred-year-old mystery in a Manet painting, and discovers a passion for food that may be connected to her past. A feast for the senses, this novel is a testament to living deliciously, taking chances, and finding your true home.
Detroit, 1960. Lila Pereira is two years old when her angry, abusive father has her mother committed to an asylum. Lila never sees her mother again. Three decades later, having mustered everything she has—brains, charm, talent, blond hair—Lila rises to the pinnacle of American media as the powerful, brilliant executive editor of The Washington Globe. Lila unapologetically prioritizes her career, leaving the rearing of her daughters to her generous husband, Joe. He doesn’t mind—until he does.
But Grace, their youngest daughter, feels abandoned. She wishes her mother would attend PTA meetings, not White House correspondents’ dinners. As she grows up, she cannot shake her resentment. She wants out from under Lila’s shadow, yet the more she resists, the more Lila seems to shape her life. Grace becomes a successful reporter, even publishing a bestselling book about her mother. In the process of writing it, she realizes how little she knows about her own family. Did Lila’s mother, Grace’s grandmother, die in that asylum? Is refusal to look back the only way to create a future? How can you ever be yourself, Grace wonders, if you don’t know where you came from?
Spanning generations, and populated by complex, unforgettable characters, Like Mother, Like Mother is an exhilarating, portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit, and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.
One was a tough junkman’s son, the other a cosseted mama’s boy, but they dreamed the same mighty dream: that the right movies could make a profit and change both the culture and individual lives. Sharing a religion and an evangelical zeal for film, Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957) and Irving Thalberg (1899–1936) were unlikely partners in one of the most significant collaborations in movie history. Over the course of their decade-long relationship, as key players at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and major players in Hollywood, they joined forces in redefining and mastering the template for the film industry.
Mayer, older by more than a dozen years, was the business-minded face of the studio, while Thalberg worked closely with the creative corps, especially writers; together they rarely set a foot wrong. And while Mayer initially viewed Thalberg as the son he never had, the two would go from passionate friends to near enemies before Thalberg’s shocking death at the age of thirty-seven.
In the first joint biography of the two men in fifty years, film critic Kenneth Turan traces their fraught relationship while examining the complicated history of Jewish identity in Hollywood.
When the jolly Italian peasant-turned-cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli of Venice was elected Pope John XXIII in 1958, change was in the air. The Church, many said, had refused to enter the twentieth century. In response, Pope John launched Vatican II, an “ecumenical council” that summoned hundreds of church leaders to Rome. It marked one of the most progressive turns the Church had taken in centuries: “medicine of mercy,” as Pope John called it. Yet not everyone in the Church was prepared to accept this modernization. The lines were drawn—in a battle that continues to rage into the twenty-first century.
In Jesus Wept, Philip Shenon takes us inside the Holy See to reveal its intricacies, hypocrisies, and hidden maneuverings, bringing all the momentous disputes and issues vividly to life: priestly celibacy, birth control, homosexuality, restoring ties with other Christians and Jews, shameful sex abuse crimes, the role of women in the Church.
In his rich portrayals of the popes from John to Francis, Shenon draws on research across four continents, including hundreds of interviews and the exhaustive archival material. He also brings to light other key figures in the Church, such as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the incredibly powerful, conservative, and staunchly anticommunist director of the Holy Office under Pius XII, who lived proudly by the motto semper idem—“always the same.” This is a consummate, vibrant history of the modern Church.
“To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth,” Rolling Stone has advised, “you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert.” From her National Magazine Award-winning series The Climate of Man to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert’s work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays.
An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific ideas, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that’s succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who’s considered the “father of global warming,” amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection.
The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.
They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.
As prosperity for Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.
Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous—larger-than-life, all of them, yet vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride.
Robert S. McNamara was widely considered to be one of the most brilliant men of his generation. While he could be cold and arrogant, he was an invaluable friend to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as US secretary of defense and had a deeply moving relationship with Jackie Kennedy. McNamara was the leading advocate for American escalation in Vietnam during the summer of 1965, strongly urging Johnson to send hundreds of thousands of American ground troops just weeks before he concluded that the war was unwinnable. For the next two and a half years, despite his doubts, he failed to urge Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw.
In McNamara at War, Philip and William Taubman examine McNamara’s life of intense personal contradictions. They trace his career from a young faculty member at Harvard Business School and his World War II service to his leadership of the Ford Motor Company and the World Bank. McNamara at War is a portrait of a man at war with himself—riven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late.
Few people beyond South Carolina’s Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—Mother Emanuel—before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the church’s charismatic pastor and eight worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted Mother Emanuel—the first AME church in the South—to agitate racial strife, he could not have anticipated the aftermath: an outpouring of forgiveness from victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.
In Mother Emanuel, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack explores the inspiring history that brought the church to that moment and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall. It reveals how African Methodism was cultivated from the harshest American soil, and how Black suffering shaped forgiveness into both a religious practice and a survival tool. Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church’s history to trace the long arc of Black life in the city where nearly half of enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Through the microcosm of one congregation, he explores the development of a unique practice of Christianity, from its daring breakaway from white churches in 1817, through the traumas of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.
At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic account of perseverance, not just of a congregation but of a people who withstood enslavement, Jim Crow, and all manner of violence with an unbending faith.