New Releases by David Maraniss

A biography of America’s greatest all-around athlete that “goes beyond the myth and into the guts of Thorpe’s life, using extensive research, historical nuance, and bittersweet honesty” (Los Angeles Times), by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered. Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. Most famously, he won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw’s New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind. But despite his awesome talent, Thorpe’s life was a struggle against the odds. At Carlisle, he faced the racist assimilationist philosophy “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball, and his supposed allies turned away from him when their own reputations were at risk. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe survived, determined to shape his own destiny, his perseverance becoming another mark of his mythic stature. Path Lit by Lightning “[reveals] Thorpe as a man in full, whose life was characterized by both soaring triumph and grievous loss” (The Wall Street Journal).

Pulitzer Prize–winning author and “one of our most talented biographers and historians” (The New York Times) David Maraniss delivers a “thoughtful, poignant, and historically valuable story of the Red Scare of the 1950s” (The Wall Street Journal) through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication. Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact. In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital 20th-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. “Remarkably balanced, forthright, and unwavering in its search for the truth” (The New York Times), A Good American Family evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is “clear-eyed and empathetic” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.

“A fascinating political, racial, economic, and cultural tapestry” (Detroit Free Press), Once in a Great City is a tour de force from David Maraniss about the quintessential American city at the top of its game: Detroit in 1963. Detroit in 1963 is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry Ford II; Motown’s founder Berry Gordy; the Reverend C.L. Franklin and his daughter, the incredible Aretha; Governor George Romney, Mormon and Civil Rights advocate; car salesman Lee Iacocca; Police Commissioner George Edwards; Martin Luther King. The time was full of promise. The auto industry was selling more cars than ever before. Yet the shadows of collapse were evident even then. “Elegiac and richly detailed” (The New York Times), in Once in a Great City David Maraniss shows that before the devastating riot, before the decades of civic corruption and neglect, and white flight; before people trotted out the grab bag of rust belt infirmities and competition from abroad to explain Detroit’s collapse, one could see the signs of a city’s ruin. Detroit at its peak was threatened by its own design. It was being abandoned by the new world economy and by the transfer of American prosperity to the information and service industries. In 1963, as Maraniss captures it with power and affection, Detroit summed up America’s path to prosperity and jazz that was already past history. “Maraniss has written a book about the fall of Detroit, and done it, ingeniously, by writing about Detroit at its height….An encyclopedic account of Detroit in the early sixties, a kind of hymn to what really was a great city” (The New Yorker).

The groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him, from Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, political commentator, and acclaimed biographer David Maraniss. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future. Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author’s classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

Based on hundreds of interviews and documents, this book chronicles the life of Barack Obama and the forces that shaped him, from early childhood through his adult years, as he became the first black president of the United States.

The first collection of the work of Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss, one of the most honored and versatile writers of his generation. The thirty-two "elegant and elegiac" (The Boston Globe) stories here cover a rich array of topics on life, politics, sports, and loss—ranging from seminal moments in modern history to intimate personal reflections, each piece illuminated by the author’s deep reporting and singular sensibility.

An account of the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome reveals the competition''s unexpected influence on the modern world, in a narrative synopsis that pays tribute to such athletes as Cassius Clay and Wilma Rudolph while evaluating the roles of Cold War propaganda, civil rights, and politics. 250,000 first printing.

Who exactly is Bill Clinton, and why was he, of all the brilliant and ambitious men in his generation, the first in his class to reach the White House? Drawing on hundreds of letters, documents, and interviews, David Maraniss explores the evolution of the personality of our forty-second president from his youth in Arkansas to his 1991 announcement that he would run for the nation''s highest office. In this richly textured and balanced biography, Maraniss reveals a complex man full of great flaws and great talents. First in His Class is the definitive book on Bill Clinton.

PRIZEWINNING WASHINGTON POST JOURNALISTS REVEAL HOW REALITY GAGGED THE GINGRICH REVOLUTION Speaker Newt Gingrich and his troops promised a revolution when they seized power in January 1995. The year that followed was one of the most fascinating and tumultuous in modern American history. After stunning early success with the Contract with America, the Republicans began to lose momentum; by year''s end Gingrich was isolated and uncertain, and his closest allies were telling him to shut up. Here is an unprecedented, fly-on-the-wall look at the successes, sellouts, and perhaps fatal mistakes of Newt Gingrich''s Republican Revolution. Based on the award-winning Washington Post series that documented the Republicans'' day-to-day attempts to revolutionize the American government, "Tell Newt to Shut Up!" gets to the heart of the political process.

En Clemente: la pasión y el donaire del ultimo héroe del béisbol, David Maraniss revive magistralmente al extraordinario deportista valiéndose de una narración de gran vuelo y de meticulosos detalles para captar, a un tiempo, al hombre y al mito. El último día de 1972, después de dieciocho magníficas temporadas en las grandes ligas, Roberto Clemente murió como un héroe al estrellarse el avión en que llevaba alimentos y suministros médicos a Nicaragua luego de un devastador terremoto. Cualquiera que vio jugar a Clemente, nunca podría olvidarlo: era una obra de arte en un juego que con demasiada frecuencia se define por las estadísticas. Durante su carrera con los Piratas de Pittsburg, ganó cuatro títulos de bateo y llevó a su equipo a los campeonatos de 1960 y 1971. Su carrera concluyó con tres mil hits, y él y Lou Gehrig son los únicos jugadores en la historia del béisbol cuya consagración en el Pabellón de la Fama no tomó en cuenta los tradicionales cinco años de espera. Pero Roberto Clemente fue un atleta singular que transcendió el ámbito de los deportes para convertirse en un símbolo de causas mayores. Nacido en Carolina, Puerto Rico, en 1934, una época cuando no había negros ni puertorriqueños en el béisbol profesional de Estados Unidos, Clemente llegaría a ser uno de los peloteros más notables de las grandes ligas; un jugador que se destacó por su determinación, su elegancia y su dignidad, y que abrió el camino para muchos latinos de generaciones posteriores que ahora brillan en ese deporte.

Focuses on a crucial two-day battle in Vietnam that was also marked by an ill-fated protest by University of Wisconsin students at the Dow Chemical Company, in an hour-by-hour narrative.

The Rise of Al Gore.

From the author of the Bill Clinton biography, First in His Class, comes this in-depth analysis on Bill Clinton and his famous speech about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Maraniss, regarded by his peers as the nation''s leading expert on Bill Clinton, sat in a darkened television studio in New York on the night of August 17 and watched the president deliver his curious apologia confessing that he had misled the nation about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. As Maraniss, the author of First in His Class, the highly acclaimed Clinton biography, listened to the president''s words that night, it struck him that he had heard them all before, though never in one speech, and that in those four and a half minutes Clinton had revealed all the contradictory qualities of his tumultuous life and political career. In this insightful book, drawing from the biography and his writings for The Washington Post, Maraniss dissects the speech as a revelation of the president''s entire life. Alternately reckless and cautious, righteous and repentant, evasive and forgetful, relying on family and friends to protect him, affirming his faith in God and then turning to polls to tell him what the public would tolerate, communicating with the public over the heads of pundits and professionals, transforming his personal trauma into a political cause by attacking his and his wife''s enemies, asking us all to put his troubles behind us, Clinton combined all his weaknesses and strengths in that one brief address. In the first section of The Clinton Enigma, Maraniss reflects as a biographer on his curious but revealing dealings with Clinton over the years. Then, after Clinton has spoken, Maraniss dissects the words and interprets the deeper meaning paragraph by paragraph, to show the roots and echoes from the president''s past and to explain why Clinton acts and speaks as he does. With Bill Clinton, Maraniss writes, past is always prologue.

By the time he died of cancer in 1970, after one season in Washington during which he transformed the Redskins into winners, Lombardi had become a mythic character who transcended sport, and his legend has only grown in the decades since. Many now turn to Lombardi in search of characteristics that they fear have been irretrievably lost, the oldfashioned virtues of discipline, obedience, loyalty, character, and teamwork. To others he symbolizes something less romantic: modern society''s obsession with winning and superficial success. In When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss renders Lombardi as flawed and driven yet ultimately misunderstood, a heroic figure who was more complex and authentic than the stereotypical images of him propounded by admirers and critics.

Le 17 août 1998 à 22 heures, après avoir été interrogé par le procureur Kenneth Starr et ses adjoints, le président de la plus grande puissance du monde faisait à la télévision pendant quatre minutes et demie une incroyable confession publique sur ses relations " déplacées " avec Monica Lewinsky. Pourquoi lui, alors que ses prédécesseurs n''avaient pas eu moins d''aventures sentimentales ni moins menti... Pour percer l''énigme et écrire ce livre, David Maraniss a décrypté, paragraphe par paragraphe, cette confession de Clinton, en enquêtant minutieusement sur son enfance agitée (il n''a pas connu son père), sa formation, ses ambitions - vite partagées par sa femme Hillary - et ses convictions religieuses. Le portrait le plus pénétrant qui ait jamais été brossé d''un homme dont la personnalité intrigue aujourd''hui le monde entier.