Here are 79 books that The Powers That Be fans have personally recommended if you like
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Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
I’ve read a lot of journalism memoirs, but I love this one because it is unapologetically a book for journalism junkies. Hersh—arguably the greatest investigative reporter of the past century—is matter-of-fact and unsentimental as he looks back on his impressive career.
It’s all about the work: the incredible lengths to which you need to go to expose the damaging secrets that powerful people want to keep hidden. Reading his account of how he got the story of the My Lai Massacre, my jaw was open the entire time in near-disbelief.
'Reporter is just wonderful. Truly a great life, and what shines out of the book, amid the low cunning and tireless legwork, is Hersh's warmth and humanity. Essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over' John le Carre
In the early 1950s, teenage Seymour Hersh was finishing high school and university - while running the family's struggling dry cleaning store in a Southside Chicago ghetto. Today, he is one of America's premier investigative journalists, whose fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every newspaper in the world, a staggering collection of awards, and no…
Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
Some books center on an argument, some focus on narrative, and some revolve around characters. What impressed me about this book is that it does all three remarkably well.
I was amazed to learn how some of the most powerful publishers in the U.S. and U.K. either dismissed the Nazi threat or (like Lord Rothermere and the Daily Mail) openly cheered for Hitler.
It also helps that the five men and one woman included in this “axis” all had fascinating backgrounds and quirky personalities, which Olmsted presents in wonderfully concise sketches.
How six conservative media moguls hindered America and Britain from entering World War II
"A damning indictment. . . . The parallels with today's right-wing media, on both sides of the Atlantic, are unavoidable."-Matthew Pressman, Washington Post
"A first-rate work of history."-Ben Yagoda, Wall Street Journal
As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the…
Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
There are lots of books about the stories newspapers published, but there are not so many books about what newspapers meant to people—and to the cities whose names they bore.
This book, which examines the press in four major U.S. cities around the turn of the 20th century, shows how newspapers helped Americans understand who they were in a modernizing country. I love that it doesn’t focus only on weighty national affairs and politics. Instead, Guarneri shows the influence the press had on things like gender roles, suburban growth, and social class.
The images alone—news stories, illustrations, and advertisements from the period—make this book so much fun to flip through.
At the close of the nineteenth century, new printing and paper technologies fueled an expansion of the newspaper business and publishers were soon reeling off as many copies as Americans could be convinced to buy. Newspapers quickly saturated the United States, especially its cities, which were often home to more than a dozen daily papers apiece. Using New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago as case studies, Julia Guarneri shows how city dailies became active agents in creating metropolitan spaces and distinctive urban cultures.Newsprint Metropolis offers a vivid tour of these papers, from the front to the back pages. Paying attention…
Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
My other recommendations focus on mainstream, mass-audience journalism. But there has always been much more to the press than that, particularly the advocacy-journalism tradition, of which Trotter is a shining example.
His newspaper, The Guardian, published for the Black community in Boston and beyond, pushed an uncompromising vision for racial justice that was ahead of its time. But Trotter had his faults, too, and I love that this biography refuses to engage in hero worship. Instead, Greenidge presents Trotter as a complex figure and doesn’t sugarcoat the poignant sadness of his downward spiral later in life.
William Monroe Trotter (1872- 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of…
I (Robert) am primarily interested in modern British history. During my postgraduate studies, I worked mainly with government papers that had just been declassified. Like many historians, I enjoy unraveling the mystery that archival research offers and shedding light on forgotten or unheard stories. Meanwhile, Peter, my co-author, is passionate about the intersection between national security and human rights. He developed this interest during his PhD research, which examined the institutionalization of torture during the Iraq War. This research relied heavily on documents released via freedom of information requests and leaks, both of which are relevant to our book on the Official Record.
One of the defining accounts of the original political scandal, Watergate, ultimately brought down US President Richard Nixon; Bernstein and Woodward’s book (later superbly adapted as a film starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford) is partly so intriguing because it conveys the energy of a 1970s newsroom and the surprising level of access to the Nixon administration.
Ultimately, though, this book is still vital because it brings together several themes crucial in understanding the Official Record: secrecy and its corrosive impact on democracy, whistleblowers, perceived impunity, and the impact that determined and courageous journalists can exert on the powerful.
50th Anniversary Edition—With a new foreword on what Watergate means today.
“The work that brought down a presidency...perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history” (Time)—from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of The Final Days.
The most devastating political detective story of the century: two Washington Post reporters, whose brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation smashed the Watergate scandal wide open, tell the behind-the-scenes drama the way it really happened.
One of Time magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books, this is the book that changed America. Published just months before President Nixon’s resignation, All the President’s Men revealed the…
When I was 16 years old, my father, Burton Kaufman, who is also a historian, took me to the Jimmy Carter Library in Georgia to help him research a book on America's thirty-ninth president. Having had a love of history since the sixth grade, that trip deepened my desire to major in History in college and teach it as a profession. It also made me interested in learning more about the presidency, starting with Carter. Several years ago, I edited a series of essays on both the Ford and Carter presidencies, and realized there was need for an in-depth political biography of our thirty-eighth chief executive. The result was my book on Ford.
I recommend this book with some caution, as Cannon worked for Ford, and sometimes authors who are too close to their subject will oversee their faults. But what makes Cannon’s work a must-read—and why I found it so helpful to my own research on Ford—is that he was one of the first to devote extensive attention to Ford’s pre-presidential years. Furthermore, he relied not only on archival materials but on dozens of interviews he conducted with people who knew and worked for Ford, as well as interviews with the former president himself.
Gerald Ford came to the presidency at the time of one of our nation's greatest constitutional crises, the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate affair. His service as president concluded a distinguished career in the House of Representatives during which he served as leader of the Republican Party in the House. With unrestricted access to Gerald Ford's papers, James M. Cannon tells the story of Ford's rise and Nixon's ruin, providing new insights into this troubling period of our history and Ford's role in guiding the nation through it. Cannon tells the story of…
As a reporter for The Washington Post, I was responsible for recording what has been called "the first rough draft of history." But I was always aware that there was more to the story--whether it was the collapse of communism or a big political controversy in the United States--than I or other reporters were able to uncover at the time. It can sometimes take decades for the real story to emerge as historians gain access to secret documents, diaries, and other unpublished materials. The secret Nixon tapes provide a unique insight into events that were off-limits to reporters and other outsiders. Writing King Richard, I felt like a fly on the wall of the Oval Office with the reader by my side, as we eavesdrop on conversations we were never meant to hear. For anyone who is curious about how politics really operates, it is a thrilling, sometimes shocking experience that can leave you laughing at the craziness of it all when you are not shaking your head in disbelief.
Gordon Liddy was an extraordinary character, a swaggering former FBI agent who was on a self-imposed mission to save America from "communism," even if it meant breaking the law. Even Nixon thought that Liddy was "a little nuts" but needed him as part of his campaign to get even with the Democrats and opponents of the war in Vietnam. In heading up the Watergate break-in, Liddy turned out to be a bungling amateur whose incompetence led directly to the failure of the operation. Nevertheless, he wrote one of the best books about Watergate--one that is both entertaining and revealing in its outrageous frankness and colorful descriptions of his fellow conspirators. A self-described admirer of Adolf Hitler, Liddy is a forerunner to the "patriots" who stormed Congress in January 2021 to "defend democracy." = Liddy's 1996 autobiography is key to understanding the mentality that led to Watergate and continues to pose…
As a reporter for The Washington Post, I was responsible for recording what has been called "the first rough draft of history." But I was always aware that there was more to the story--whether it was the collapse of communism or a big political controversy in the United States--than I or other reporters were able to uncover at the time. It can sometimes take decades for the real story to emerge as historians gain access to secret documents, diaries, and other unpublished materials. The secret Nixon tapes provide a unique insight into events that were off-limits to reporters and other outsiders. Writing King Richard, I felt like a fly on the wall of the Oval Office with the reader by my side, as we eavesdrop on conversations we were never meant to hear. For anyone who is curious about how politics really operates, it is a thrilling, sometimes shocking experience that can leave you laughing at the craziness of it all when you are not shaking your head in disbelief.
Had Nixon not taped himself in secret, it is doubtful that he would have been forced to resign as president of the United States. While some of the most incriminating tapes were released as a result of a Supreme Court order, the remainder became the subject of a long legal tussle that continued for several decades. Nobody did more to secure the full release of the tapes than the historian Stanley Kutler who published highlights in his 1997 book, Abuse of Power. The tapes provide a unique insight into the functioning of the modern-day presidency, and Nixon's own personality, that is unlikely ever to be matched. Thanks to Kutler's efforts, we are able to hear Nixon in his own words and feel his pain and bewilderment as his world disintegrates around him.
No President has taped Oval conversations so thoroughly or found himself in as much trouble as Richard Nixon. He and his heirs fought for years to keep hours of these sensitive recordings from ever being released. Now Stanley I. Kutler, an emminent historian and one of the principle parties to the lawsuit that forced the tapes release, has edited and annotated every tape concerning abuses of power from Nixon's entire presidency. Among the breathtaking revelations are evidence of Nixon's direct role in the obstruction of justice during the 'Watergate' investigation to the proposal for a $5 million scheme to secretly…
As a reporter for The Washington Post, I was responsible for recording what has been called "the first rough draft of history." But I was always aware that there was more to the story--whether it was the collapse of communism or a big political controversy in the United States--than I or other reporters were able to uncover at the time. It can sometimes take decades for the real story to emerge as historians gain access to secret documents, diaries, and other unpublished materials. The secret Nixon tapes provide a unique insight into events that were off-limits to reporters and other outsiders. Writing King Richard, I felt like a fly on the wall of the Oval Office with the reader by my side, as we eavesdrop on conversations we were never meant to hear. For anyone who is curious about how politics really operates, it is a thrilling, sometimes shocking experience that can leave you laughing at the craziness of it all when you are not shaking your head in disbelief.
Dean's book is essential to understanding the psychodrama that led to the unraveling of the Watergate conspiracy. An ambitious lawyer picked to serve as White House counsel at the age of thirty-one, Dean feared that he was being set up to take the blame for Watergate. He was the first Nixon aide to appreciate the legal perils of the cover-up and the risks he was being asked to run. In order to save himself, he had to exit the conspiracy, betraying the president who was relying on him to throw a blanket over the scandal. In this 1976 memoir, Dean provides a candid account of his state of mind as he led a double life - Nixon loyalist by day, prosecution informant by night. Juggling the conflicting pressures, he began drinking ever more heavily, leading to a crisis in his marriage that provides a dramatic personal counterpoint to the crisis…
A six-month New York Times bestseller: "Not only the best Watergate book, but a very good book indeed" (The Sunday Times).
As White House counsel to Richard Nixon, a young John W. Dean was one of the primary players in the Watergate scandal-and ultimately became the government's key witness in the investigations that ended the Nixon presidency. After the scandal subsided, Dean rebuilt his career, first in business and then as a bestselling author and lecturer. But while the events were still fresh in his mind, he wrote this remarkable memoir about the operations of the Nixon White House and…
As bedtime stories, I told our children my personal stories of life on a Pennsylvania farm with a city-slicker father who yearned to be a successful farmer. Growing up in a Jewish orphanage in the early 1900s, he dreamed of someday owning a farm and breathing the fresh air of the country. So many funny stories from the farm encouraged our children to say “Tell me a story when you were little, Mommy,” every night. I decided to write these down and they became my first memoir The Road Home. I love memoir and through my YouTube channel, I encourage others to “Write Your Story for Your Generations to Come.”
When I heard Ginny Dent Brant interviewed about her books, I couldn’t wait to purchase them for myself. Finding True Freedom recounts Ginny’s uncertain days of watching her father’s passion for politics. (Lots of well-documented info about his and others’ involvement in Watergate.) But Harry Dent experienced a conversion and left politics for the mission field of Romania. I wouldn’t normally read a book about politics; however, I highly recommend Finding True Freedom as it was a page-turner for me and taught me that true freedom is not the easiest to find, especially in highly charged Washington politics.
In the 1960s Harry Dent entered political service for love of country and liberty. Highly successful, Dent became known as the “Southern Strategist” who helped Nixon win the United States presidency. When the Watergate scandal broke and Dent was accused, his efforts at propagating American freedom seemed wasted. But Dent was found to be “more of an innocent victim than the perpetrator.” He could not deny God’s grace: Dent and Henry Kissinger were the only two of Nixon’s staff not given prison sentences. In 1978 Harry Dent embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ that his daughter Ginny had faithfully lived…
