Because Secret Service agents are sworn to secrecy, the American public rarely knows what presidents, vice presidents, presidential candidates, and Cabinet officers and their families are really like. If they did, says a former Secret Service agent, "They would scream."

Acclaimed biographer Smith combines contemporary scholarship and a broad range of primary source material to narrate the epic life of the president who, more than any other individual, changed the relationship between the American people and their government. We see how Roosevelt's energy, intellect, and personal magnetism permitted him to master countless challenges. Smith recounts FDR's battles with polio and physical disability, and how they helped...

Updated with the latest information on all recognized feline breeds, this valuable reference source includes a survey of feline history and evolution, a detailed description of the attributes that make a purebred cat, a summary of feline genetics, and an in-depth discussion of conformation, color, and coat. The breed profiles follow, with each profile accompanied by color photos and a bar graph-style at-a-glance summary of the breed's characteristics....

Overview: Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land-from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly,...

O'Brien's searing memoir of his years as a soldier in Vietnam takes readers with him through the ghostly ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong.

For decades, Walter Cronkite was known as "the most trusted man in America." Millions across the nation welcomed him into their homes, first as a print reporter for the United Press on the front lines of World War II, and later, in the emerging medium of television, as a host of numerous documentary programs and as anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 until his retirement in 1981. Yet this very public figure was a remarkably private man. Few know...

"In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist...

Examines the many facets of America's most extraordinary founding father. Politician, diplomat, scientist, printer, and civic improver, Franklin influenced every aspect of American life, from his own time to the present. This book, designed to accompany the traveling Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary exhibition celebrating Franklin's 300th birthday, includes essays by ten prominent scholars that offer an overview of Franklin's life and cover the full...

Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its...

Fox News host Mark Levin shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within: "not government oppression or suppression, " he writes, but self-censorship, group-think, bias by omission, and passing off opinion, propaganda, pseudo-events, and outright lies as news. Levin takes the reader on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration...