"For six weeks in high school, V.I. Warshawski thought she was in love with Frank Guzzo. He broke up with her, she went off to college, he started driving trucks. She forgot about him until the day his mother was convicted of bludgeoning his kid sister to death. Stella Guzzo was an angry, uncooperative prisoner. Newly released from prison, she is looking for exoneration, so Frank asks V.I. for help. V.I. doesn't want to get involved. Stella hated...

Public funds spent on jets and horses. Shoeboxes stuffed with embezzled cash. Ghost payrolls and incarcerated ex-governors. Illinois' culture of "Where's mine?" and the public apathy it engenders has made our state and local politics a disgrace. In this book, veteran political observers Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson take aim at business-as-usual. Naming names, the authors lead readers through a gallery of rogues and rotten apples to illustrate...

National Bestseller
In this nuanced and complex portrait of Barack Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Remnick offers a thorough, intricate, and riveting account of the unique experiences that shaped our nation’s first African American president.
 
Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, Remnick explores the elite institutions that

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"After a period of depression that he would ever find his way to greatness, Lincoln takes on the most powerful demagogue in the country, Stephen Douglas, in the debates for a senate seat. He sidelines the frontrunner William Seward, a former governor and senator for New York, to cinch the new Republican Party's nomination. All the Powers of Earth is the political story of all time. Lincoln achieves the presidency by force of strategy, of political...

"The first of a multi-volume history of Lincoln as a political genius--from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, assassination, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War dreams of Reconstruction. This first volume traces Lincoln from his painful youth, describing himself as 'a slave', to his emergence as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln. From his youth as a 'newsboy', a voracious newspaper reader, Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom...