The best Ronald Reagan books

America’s triumph over Soviet Communism, orthodoxy tells us, was a splendid bi-partisan accomplishment in which all Americans can take pride, marred only by America’s singularly unjust, ill-advised campaign in Vietnam, which was undertaken in good faith by well-meaning and intelligent men acting in the country’s interest. Nonsense.

In Reckoning, I identify facts that have been hiding in plain sight—“elephants in the room” as they are commonly known—and prove that: 1) the war in Vietnam, while winnable, was lost by a corrupt political class that was focused on domestic politics and opponents in Washington rather than Communists in Asia; 2) the war crimes allegations advanced by the antiwar left are false. The facts and figures regarding day-to-day operations in Vietnam, when compared to those of Korea and World War II, prove clearly that the men who fought in Vietnam were as honorable as any generation of American veterans. Finally, I demonstrate conclusively that you will never understand the Vietnam War by reading about the Vietnam War. You must begin with the “legacy of the 1930s” and the policies to which it gave rise. For the Vietnam War was but one campaign among many within the Truman Doctrine, and if it was the “Bad War fought for all the wrong reasons and in all of the wrong ways” that orthodoxy tells us it was, the Truman Doctrine itself becomes nothing but a long campaign of, in Daniel Ellsberg’s words, “American aggression.”

"One of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years” (The Wall Street Journal) and based on a decade of research and reporting—a delightful new window into the public and private lives of America’s presidents as authors.

This book is the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history—Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929—to ones we know and love—Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which was very nearly never published—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works.

A person strapped to a polygraph machine. Nervous eyes, sweaty brow, the needle trembling up and down. Few images are more evocative of Cold War paranoia. In this first comprehensive history of the polygraph as a tool and symbol of American Cold War policies, John Philipp Baesler tells the story of a technology with weak scientific credentials that was nevertheless celebrated as a device that could expose both internal and external enemies.

Considered the go-to technology to test agents' and employees' loyalty, the polygraph's true power was to expose deep ideological and political fault lines. While advocates praised it as America's hard-nosed yet fair answer to communist brainwashing, critics claimed that its use undermined the very values of justice, equality, and the presumption of innocence for which the nation stood. Clearer Than Truth demonstrates that what began as quick-fix technology promising a precise test of honesty and allegiance eventually came to embody tensions in American Cold War culture between security and freedom, concerns that reach deep into the present day.

Kamala’s Way is my first book; I’m working on a second. I first wrote about Kamala Harris in 1994 when she was a young prosecutor and got to know her in 2007 when I was part of the LA Times team covering the 2008 presidential campaign. She was San Francisco district attorney and a surrogate for Barack Obama. Later, as a columnist and editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, I covered her campaigns for California attorney general and U.S. senator. The subtitle is “An American Life.” But I’m a California native and a California-based journalist, and juxtaposed what was happening in California as Harris rose. This project came about quickly in September 2020 after I wrote a column about Harris for The Washington Post.

White House Usher: Stories from the Inside was published in October 2017, with a Second Edition released December 2020. The book is a memoir detailing the authors time managing the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. 

Foreword written by former First Lady Barbara Bush.

Good writing is today’s secret sauce of success—the indispensible tool for connecting with other people, winning our opportunities, and advocating for what we believe in. Good writing doesn’t mean “correctness.” It means giving readers the right persuasive substance because at heart every message is “an ask,” from meet me for lunch to hire me, agree with my idea, fund this program. 

Business Writing for Dummies gives readers a systematic way of deciding what to say and how to say it in every situation. It demonstrates how to sharpen strategic thinking, use writing to build relationships, and fix “mechanical” weaknesses with easy commonsense techniques. The book leads users to advance their skills step by step, and also works as a comprehensive resource for make-or-break occasions.

“Protest” music is largely perceived as an unsubtle art form, a topical brand of songwriting that preaches to the converted. But popular music of all types has long given listeners food for thought. Fifty years before Vietnam, before the United States entered World War I, some of the most popular sheet music in the country featured anti-war tunes. The labor movement of the early decades of the century was fueled by its communal “songbook.” The Civil Rights movement was soundtracked not just by the gorgeous melodies of “Strange Fruit” and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but hundreds of other gospel-tinged ballads and blues.

My book is an anecdotal history of the progressive movements that have shaped the growth of the United States and the songs of all genres that have accompanied and defined them.

The early 1980s were a tense time. The nuclear arms race was escalating, Reagan administration officials bragged about winning a nuclear war, and superpower diplomatic relations were at a new low. Nuclear war was a real possibility and antinuclear activism surged. By 1982 the Nuclear Freeze campaign had become the largest peace movement in American history. Alarmed, the Reagan administration worked to co-opt the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze and contain antinuclear activism. Recently declassified White House memoranda reveal a concerted campaign to defeat activists' efforts.

In this book, William M. Knoblauch examines these new sources, as well as the influence of notable personalities like Carl Sagan and popular culture such as the film The Day After, to demonstrate how cultural activism ultimately influenced the administration's shift in rhetoric and, in time, its stance on the arms race.

Hijacking History analyzes the high school world history textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials. For them, history is the story of God's actions interpreted through the Bible and a weapon to condemn civilizations that do not accept the true God or adopt "biblical" positions. These textbooks use history to identify ideas God abhors and has punished, including evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science. These judgments lead students to believe that God sanctions rightwing social and political views and that America must advance them as well as their sectarian, intolerant Christianity as “biblical truth.”

As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these textbooks promote have significant implications for contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education, and pose a direct challenge to a pluralistic democracy.

An investigation into the damage wrought by the colossal clothing industry and the grassroots, high-tech, international movement fighting to reform it. .

What should I wear? It's one of the fundamental questions we ask ourselves every day. More than ever, we are told it should be something new. Today, the clothing industry churns out 80 billion garments a year and employs every sixth person on Earth. Historically, the apparel trade has exploited labor, the environment, and intellectual property--and in the last three decades, with the simultaneous unfurling of fast fashion, globalization, and the tech revolution, those abuses have multiplied exponentially, primarily out of view. We are in dire need of an entirely new human-scale model. Bestselling journalist Dana Thomas has traveled the globe to discover the visionary designers and companies who are propelling the industry toward that more positive future by reclaiming traditional craft and launching cutting-edge sustainable technologies to produce better fashion.