🧲 Books like this
Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
Anthony Summers · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
David Talbot · 704 pages
"An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful and secretive colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America's greatest untold story: the United States' rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
Doris Kearns Goodwin · 910 pages
The gap between rich and poor has never been wider. Legislative stalemate paralyzes the country. Corporations resist federal regulations. Spectacular mergers produce giant companies. The influence of money in politics deepens. Bombs explode in crowded streets. Small wars proliferate far from our shores. A dizzying array of inventions speeds the pace of daily life. These unnervingly familiar headli
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Masha Gessen · 333 pages
This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oliga
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963
Robert Dallek · 848 pages
An Unfinished Life is the first authoritative single-volume life of John F. Kennedy to be written in nearly four decades. Drawing upon firsthand sources, freshly unearthed documents, and never-before-opened archives, prizewinning historian Robert Dallek reveals more than we ever knew about Jack Kennedy, forever changing the way we think about his life, his presidency, and his legacy. In a tale tha
American Scoundrel
Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
A co-author of “American Prometheus” chronicles the life and work of the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn. Read by Ari Fliakos. 15 hours, 42 minutes unabridged.
George F. Kennan: An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis · 814 pages
A remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.
Ho Chi Minh: A Life
William J. Duiker · 695 pages
"This book chronicles Ho's childhood as the son of a willfully poor and brilliant scholar. It follows Ho through his early years as an itinerant expatriate - forced to leave French Indochina to escape arrest, he shipped out as a cook on a passenger steamer and traveled the globe. It tells of his years in the heady environment of London and Paris during and after World War I, where he supported hi
Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years
Barbara Leaming
Young Stalin
Simon Sebag Montefiore · 460 pages
The shadowy journey from obscurity to power of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red Tsar--the man who, along with Hitler, remains the modern personification of evil: a merciless psychopath who was, as well, a consummate politician, the dynamic world statesman who helped create and industrialize the USSR, outplayed Churchill and Roosevelt, and defeated Hitler? Historian Montefiore tells th
Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Rosemary Sullivan · 741 pages
"The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators--her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the
The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin
Joe McGinniss · 321 pages
After three years of research, McGinniss presents his already controversial and much anticipated investigative chronicle of Sarah Palin as an individual, politician, and cultural phenomenon.
Mao Zedong
Jonathan D. Spence · 198 pages
"From humble origins in the provinces, Mao Zedong rose to absolute power, unifying with an iron fist a vast country torn apart by years of weak leadership, colonialism, and war."--BOOK JACKET. "Both a canny tactician and a hardworking organizer, Mao parlayed the privations of the famous Long March and the success of his guerrilla army into a powerful cult of personality and a dominant position in
The Making of Donald Trump
David Cay Johnston · 263 pages
Love him or hate him, Trump's influence is undeniable. A man of great media savvy, entrepreneurial spirit, and political clout, Trump's career has been plagued by legal troubles and mounting controversy. Johnston tells the full story of how a boy from a quiet section of Queens, NY would become an entirely new, and complex, breed of public figure. Drawing on decades of interviews, financial records
The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
Kitty Kelley · 736 pages
The Bush family's rise to dominance has been marked by their masterful orchestrations of their own public image, their money and status having always afforded them a curtain of privacy. Until now. An important polemic on wealth, power, and class in America, The Family is rich in texture, probing in its psychological insight, revealing it its political and financial detail, and stunning in the patt
The Death of a President: November 1963
William Manchester · 736 pages
An account of the assassination of President Kennedy and the days after culled from "evidence and recollection, scenes and moods, quotations and opinions from an enormous number of observers and participants." Pub W.
Trump & Me
Mark Singer · 110 pages
"An updated portrait of the business mogul and presidential candidate, written by his long-suffering chronicler and the author of Funny Money, traces Trump's rise as an unlikely tribune of populist rage, political artifice and fantasy-based performance artistry, "--NoveList. "In 1996, longtime New Yorker writer Mark Singer was conscripted by his editor to profile Donald Trump. At that time Trump
Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero
Chris Matthews · 448 pages
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President
Thurston Clarke · 432 pages
JFK's Last Hundred Days reexamines the last months of the President's life to show a man in the midst of great change, finally on the cusp of making good on his extraordinary promise.
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Christopher Hitchens · 159 pages
Drawing on first-hand testimony, previously unpublished documentation and broad sweeps through material released under the Freedom of Information Act, Christopher Hitchens mounts a devastating indictment of a man whose ambition and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter.--Publisher description.
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Jon Meacham · 568 pages
In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era. Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was th
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
William Taubman · 896 pages
Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, Taubman (political science, Amherst College) writes a thorough biography of one of the most complex and important political figures of the 20th century whose life and career spanned revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, the Cold War, Stalinism, and post-Stalinism. Includes two sections of good
Trump Revealed
Michael Kranish, Marc Fisher · 448 pages
Authoritative, timely, and provocative, this deeply researched biography of Donald Trump provides a complex portrait of the man who--despite broad skepticism--could be the next president of the United States. Despite decades of scrutiny, many aspects of Trump's life are not well known. Few individuals have ever roamed so widely through such diverse realms as real estate, sports, entertainment, and
Eleanor Roosevelt: Vol 2, The Defining Years, 1933-38
Blanche Wiesen Cook · 704 pages
The captivating second volume of this Eleanor Roosevelt biography covers tumultuous era of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the gathering storms of World War II, the years of the Roosevelts' greatest challenges and finest achievements. In her remarkably engaging narrative, Cook gives us the complete Eleanor Roosevelt—an adventurous, romantic woman, a devoted wife and mother, and a visionary

