Books

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this deeply original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president. 

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is a "brilliant" multiple biography and New York Times bestseller centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.

"Endlessly absorbing.... [A] lovingly rendered and masterfully fashioned book," says The Wall Street Journal, and "An elegant, incisive study,” comes from The New York Times. The book will be rereleased 16 October 2012 as the movie tie-in edition for Steven Spielberg's Lincoln starring Academy Award-winner Daniel Day-Lewis as our country's most important president.

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Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching and best-selling memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, she re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.

Goodwin introduces us to the people who most influenced her early in life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books, but whose debilitating illness left her housebound; and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood. 

"This is a book in the grand tradition of girlhood memoirs, either fact or fiction, dating from Louisa May Alcott to Carson McCullers and Harper Lee." ~ Ron Fimrite, Washington Post Book World

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Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize for History for her compelling chronicle of President Franklin Roosevelt in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.

This masterfully written book recounts the fascinating period when modern American was created. With an uncanny feel for detail and a master storyteller's grasp of drama and depth, Goodwin brilliantly narrates the interrelationship between the inner workings of the Roosevelt White House and the destiny of the United States.

“Engrossing…no ordinary book…An ambitiously conceived and imaginatively executed participants eye view of the United States in the war years…” said The New York Times and “endlessly gripping” noted the Boston Globe. No Ordinary Time paints a comprehensive, intimate portrait that fills in a historical gap in the story of our nation under the Roosevelts. This book also won the Harold Washington Literary Award, New England Bookseller Association Award, The Ambassador Book Award and The Washington Monthly Political Book Award.

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Acclaimed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's best-selling The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga explores the fascinating, pertinent history of two immigrant families, their rise to potent political dynasties, and the marriage that brought the two together to found the most powerful family in America.

Drawing on unprecedented access to the family and its private papers, Goodwin takes readers from John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald's baptism in 1863 through his reign as mayor of Boston, to the inauguration of his grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as President of the United States ninety-eight years later. Each character emerges unforgettable: the young, shrewdly political Rose Fitzgerald; her powerful, manipulative husband, Joseph P. Kennedy; and the “Golden Trio” of Kennedy children—Joe Jr., Kathleen, and Jack—whose promise was eclipsed by the family's legacy of tragedy.

Called "A rich tapestry of brigands and dreamers, hustlers and stoics, cynics and idealists, and a rousing good story," by USA Today, Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is at once the story of an era, of the immigrant experience, and—most of all—of two families, whose ambitions propelled them to unrivaled power and whose passions nearly destroyed them.

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Doris Kearns Goodwin's Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream is a compelling examination of the classic life of Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the Great Society, the Vietnam War, and the tumultuous 1960s.

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream takes us through the vast landscape of Johnson's political and personal life: from his childhood, dominated by an indulgent mother and hell-raising politico father, through this early political victories and the ideals that inspired them; from the Washington system that trained him, through his election as Vice President and the transitional year, 1964, When JFK's assassination brought him to the highest office in the land.

"The most penetrating, fascinating political biography I have ever read...No other President has had a biographer who had such access to his private thoughts" says the New York Times,  and "Magnificent, brilliant, illuminating...A profound analysis of both the private and the public man" according to the Miami Herald.

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