Politics and Prose Presents

America’s bestselling biographer reveals the origins of the most revolutionary sentence in the Declaration of Independence, the one that defines who we are as Americans—and explains how it should shape our politics today.

To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a fascinating deep dive into the creation of one of history’s most powerful sentences: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, this line lays the foundation for the American Dream and defines the common ground we share as a nation.

Isaacson unpacks its genius, word by word, illuminating the then-radical concepts behind it. Readers will gain a fresh appreciation for how it was drafted to inspire unity, equality, and the enduring promise of America. With clarity and insight, he reveals not just the power of these words but describes how, in these polarized times, we can use them to restore an appreciation for our common values.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982181314?ic_referral=bUxrtPasBuCZCieGQya8cBK0IW02OkNqiUWNzBUVOyowM90NM2UNXWGZZNRlyH3HYWi5qDj6U_g1zK0LaBZqPQ_aqnn6n8dkNtKo7LkIGGJCozRgZbhVKlw-aj6YvX6QcXR8yo4

Lucy and her three best friends share a glamorous but decaying house in the heart of Georgetown. They call themselves “the Sweeties” and live an idyllic post-grad lifestyle complete with exciting jobs, dramatic love lives, and, most importantly, each other.
But when Addie, the group’s queen bee, discovers that her ex-boyfriend Josh has gone missing, the Sweeties’ worlds are turned upside down. In the days leading up to his disappearance, Josh, a star investigative journalist from a prominent political family, was behaving erratically—and Lucy is determined to find out why. All four friends upend their lives to search for him, but detectives begin to suspect that the Sweeties might know more than they’re letting on.
As the investigation unfolds, Lucy’s obsession with the case reaches a boiling point, and with it, her own troubling secrets begin bubbling to the surface of her carefully curated life. A thrilling account of the lies and delusions that lurk beneath cloistered groups of female friends and the sinister realities of celebrity, Watch Us Fall is a gripping mystery and an examination of the things we tell ourselves when we can’t face the truth.

Christina Kovac is the author of The Cutaway. She worked for seventeen years managing Washington, DC, newsrooms and producing crime and political stories in the District. Her career as a television journalist began with Fox Five’s Ten O’Clock News, and after that, the ABC affiliate in Washington and then at NBC news. She lives with her family outside of Washington, DC. 

Kovac is in conversation with Angie Kim, the New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls, a GMA and B&N book club pick, Virginia Literary Award winner, Oprah Daily’s #1 novel of 2023, and accordingly to Gary Shteyngart, is "what Dostoevsky might have written if he had been an American and also not a jerk". Her debut, Miracle Creek, was an Edgar winner and one of Time’s 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time. A Korean immigrant who moved to Baltimore in middle school, Kim attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.  

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781501141720?ic_referral=6csyAnU5QLvNgag7ympImEGLGnOBr-k7835Sw8I437EwMzQ_ZIduZY1YwE6k3kJwawKxRYgqDv5jFpN5SKSCeeQweYGNzyZqU8GlDBgNhNm2ICY7VpIdvKYfq70tkmt0abvvR4E

From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, ranging from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.

Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.

Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.

In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, and the editor of six anthologies. Her most recent title, Touching the Art, was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her previous title, The Freezer Door, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her new novel is Terry Dactyl.

Bernstein Sycamore is in conversation with Jennifer Natalya Fink is a professor of English and core faculty in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of seven books, including All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship. Fink is the winner of the  Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction and the Dana Award for the Novel. Watch for her new novel, A Mischief, coming in 2027, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore for Bunny Presse (an imprint of Fonograph Editions).

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781566897419?ic_referral=EyEBVpBouxZf3rLJKY2a3unXourSIF6LtIYtZUPFKjEwM3iFn3cq5hoWANRH_pED5In7v8YdlwX0zIjjSSEJasxhozEbNnAfX-bjVnEWObNut7jyy1amA5NBW3kIPcevMziGbXc

Peter Buck Feller's father disappeared in Moscow in 1938, when Feller was just six months old. As a young boy he asked his mother about him, but his questions went invariably unanswered. Decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Feller embarked on a detailed search to reclaim his father.

His journey took him and his adult daughters to Moscow, Siberia, and Germany. He gained access to a now-declassified espionage FBI file, which contained an anonymous letter from a man who had been imprisoned in one of Stalin's gulags: "I plan to write a book about all what occurred to me during these dreadful ten years. The title of this book, I would like it to be 'The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller.'"

Feller was stunned. William Schwarzfeller was his lost father, for whom he searched, in one way or another, all of his life. He learned that his father had been an agent for Red Army Intelligence. He was arrested in 1938 and starved to death in a gulag in 1943. This new information led him to a host of discoveries, his mother's vast FBI file, and a story about his father on the front page of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker.

Peter Buck Feller is an independent historian with a particular interest in Soviet-German conflicts and espionage during the Second World War. He has written articles for Foreign Policy, and for The Pennsylvania Gazette.

Feller is in conversation with Carole Sargent, PhD, a Georgetown University faculty member. She advises professors with foreign policy and military backgrounds to publish analysis of global conflict with university presses including Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, and Cornell, and at high-impact academic journals. Her authors have won international recognition, including the Pulitzer Prize. She has been an advisor to faculty at National Defense University, Swedish Defence University, Hiroshima University, Johns Hopkins SAIS, the RAND Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and many others. She is the author of three books. Additionally, with Berkley Center fellow Drew Christiansen SJ, PhD she is co-editor of A World Free from Nuclear Weapons: The Vatican Conference on Disarmament, including contributions from Pope Francis, Nobel peace laureates such as Jody Williams, Beatrice Fihn (ICAN), and Muhammad Yunus, and military leaders.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9798881807573?ic_referral=Z2FoXjqdLBDPq4QXdGnjJN8lMdNfX4hB3POSaoizca0wM2gaGP0N9lm-sI_d6X4ZOiizpPs1HC_kDv3W-IK1SL_5dJO21hmaLe6xPiXCrJOciS_oipXGGkmSaWy9qnydlb6uks4

From the host of Hardball (now on Substack) and acclaimed Kennedy biographer Chris Matthews comes a centennial tribute about why Robert F. Kennedy’s revolutionary vision offers the roadmap America needs today.
Bobby Kennedy exemplified moral leadership and political bravery. He led us in pursuit of ideals. He took risks for peace and united us. Look at our country now, with its wide and deepening divisions. 100 years after his birth, RFK matters more than ever. On Bobby’s centennial, Chris Matthews, one of America’s foremost political commentators and Kennedy biographers, gives us ten electrifying lessons for today taken from Bobby’s life. Take them as a roadmap. America is great when it tries, at its best, to be good. This special anniversary book also includes a selection of Bobby Kennedy’s greatest speeches.

Chris Matthews is the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit; Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero; Kennedy & Nixon: A Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America; and Hardball: How Politics Is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game. Matthews was a presidential speechwriter and top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. For a generation, he hosted Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, which is now exclusively on Substack.

Matthews is in conversation with Margaret Carlson, Editor-at-Large of Semafor and a contributor at the Washington Monthly. She was Managing Editor of The New Republic, moved in 1988 to Time Magazine as its first female columnist, and then to Bloomberg News in 2004. For 20 years, she appeared as a panelist on CNN's Capitol Gang and Inside Politics. She is a graduate of Penn State and George Washington University Law School. 

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668010938?ic_referral=s43JaspLMn3fIXotM2t1ezDEjJPcgRtG334gTFOR7zMwMyqHn97moSLLWsTQhdyqjgQ2kmqMdeV3zi59hFp0Z9xZGCKg-RKIoatwF6Fa9ihGvia-jxlbFtHPcNsGZ3SaJF-_6uQ

As the 75th anniversary of the legendary Battle of Chosin Reservoir approaches, Steve Vogel tells the little-known story of the Army soldiers who gave all during the Korean War’s most consequential battles and then were denigrated for their sacrifice. A Task Force Called Faith delivers a fresh perspective on Chosin, where 150,000 Chinese soldiers trapped 20,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers in the frozen mountains of North Korea in November and December of 1950. For seven decades, the Marines who successfully broke out from Chosin have been justly hailed as heroes, but the Army soldiers who fought alongside them have been reviled as cowards. The Army survivors and their families have long sought to clear their names of those terrible charges and reclaim the honor they won at the frozen lake. A Task Force Called Faith tells their story.

Vogel carries the narrative to the present day, as the remains of many of the hundreds of soldiers still missing in action at Chosin continue to be identified and returned to their families. During a time of growing tension and uncertainty in the relationship between the U.S. and China, A Task Force Called Faith provides an original, deeply researched look at the brutal, undeclared war the two countries fought 75 years ago. Chosin was the moment the Cold War turned into a savage and exceedingly hot conflict, leaving behind an uneasy standoff that looms ever larger with a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Steve Vogel is a historian and former foreign and military correspondent for The Washington Post. His coverage of the US war in Afghanistan was part of a package of Washington Post stories selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. He reported on the US war with Iraq in 2003 as an embedded journalist with an Army airborne brigade. Based in Germany from 1989 through 1994 and reporting for the Washington Post and Army and Air Force Times, he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War, as well as military operations in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans.

Vogel covered the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon and was the first journalist to get inside the building's most damaged sections. He reported in depth on the victims of the attack and the building's reconstruction which led to his writing the history of the Pentagon. He lives in Barnesville, Maryland.

Vogel is joined in conversation with, Ferdinand Protzman, an author, cultural critic and award-winning journalist who has worked for national and international newspapers, magazines and publishers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, ARTnews, and National Geographic Books.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781493092895?ic_referral=XT8BJ23n1sAKAIRZ39J9CDtCzIZaFpV77J9Qi3ej2EAwM7qrNgZj9payToRzAOSP-U6ywjf2cnKeSDBqDckoHf6JTMt5raKpejJ78ic4GEg35YYfZFk72VWdlTxkF3plEzgLP0s

A teenage girl stares at her roof, hoping it won’t collapse over her head. A young student searches the Internet for photos of libraries around the world, hoping he’ll be able to visit them one day. Another walks around the city, taking notes of all the buildings she dreams of repairing.
These are the stories of young people from Gaza, born under Israeli occupation and blockade. They are people who have endured unspeakable struggles and losses, who keep fighting to be recognized not as numbers, but as human beings with hopes, dreams, and lives worth living.
We Are Not Numbers was founded in 2014 to give voice to the youth of Gaza. In this collection—vital, urgent and full of heart, spanning over ten years to the present moment—we gain an unparalleled insight into the past, as well as the current and next generation of Palestinian leaders, artists, scientists and scholars and imagine where we might go from here.

Pam Bailey is a social-justice activist and journalist based in Washington DC. She lived and worked in the Gaza Strip following the 2008/9 Israeli assault, and co-founded We Are Not Numbers in 2015. Today, in addition to her ongoing support of the Palestinian cause, she serves as co-founder and managing director of a nonprofit that advocates for currently and formerly incarcerated DC residents, called More Than Our Crimes.

Bailey is joined in conversation with Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist, is Poet Laureate Emerita (2022-25) for the City of Alexandria, Virginia. Her full-length poetry collection, Some Things Never Leave You, was published by Tiger Bark Press in July 2023, and her chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, in 2021 by The Poetry Box. She has volunteered as a mentor for We Are Not Numbers since 2016 and currently serves as WANN's poetry editor.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781623715816?ic_referral=4kUGqncpOfmUWhWu5xaN7LvqVH0K2RpSP_nSajbCx70wMwLwfHLhbYJ9LDa5uztHOuWL3FXX_B53xAiq4t2DGas1wK4U6mYZ7uAI7n9YqfTQUXMrjjBnW28bYoiamw1N7inh2zM

A revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them.
Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential—or more utterly opaque—than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it’s an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it’s unfair?
Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.
This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.
 

Ray D. Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School and the cofounder and director of the Boston College Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. She is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead and lead author of The Practical Guide to Estate Planning. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,  The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, among other outlets.

Madoff is in conversation Dina Temple-Raston. Temple-Raston is the author of A Death in Texas, Justice on the Grass, The Jihad Next Door, and In Defense of Our America. She is NPR’s counter-terrorism correspondent and host of the radio special, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” She is also the creator, host, and correspondent of the podcast “What Were You Thinking.”

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226835204?ic_referral=y_QGLDPYIYaI3_Fxf2y7sA6GoVOGRTX3wplppeLcRXUwMwgJuUwxjG705Li2m-_ebI1-7y9FqL-2r9TTWRW0W90oxaTcZXwkoW7_CKNr4jLLrbz8SrtnSQHeZsuVQJ6QrZbE8uw

From acclaimed author Shadi Hamid comes an urgent and deeply personal argument for why American dominance, despite its many flaws, remains the world's best hope. Hamid traces his journey from opposing America's role in the world to reluctantly embracing it--while grappling with how recent events, from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to Israel's devastating war in Gaza, have challenged his convictions.

Drawing on his unique perspective as both an American and a Muslim who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, Hamid contends with the contradictions of American power: how a nation founded on moral purpose so often fails to live up to its ideals. Hamid confronts head-on America's failures, from the war in Iraq to support for authoritarian regimes across the Middle East. Yet, he argues that in a world where power is a fact and someone must wield it, the alternative to American leadership isn't a morally perfect superpower--it's the brutal authoritarianism of countries like China and Russia.

At once idealistic and pragmatic , this is a book about embracing our power as the only moral option in a world beset by tragedy. Because America is a democracy, it retains the potential to correct past mistakes and change for the better. That part is up to us. Bracing and timely, The Case for American Power is an ambitious work on what may be the most fundamental question facing America today: How should we think about the power we have--while we still have it?

Shadi Hamid is a columnist at The Washington Post. From 2023 to 2024, he served on the Post’s Editorial Board. Hamid is the author of several books, including The Problem of Democracy and Islamic Exceptionalism, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on foreign affairs. In 2019, he was named one of the world’s top fifty thinkers by Prospect magazine. Hamid lives in Washington, DC.

Hamid is in conversation with Dr. Samuel Kimbriel, a political philosopher, author, and founding director of Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative. The Initiative seeks to reignite a national tradition of public philosophy, enabling us to grapple with our largest and most haunting issues of societal purpose—What is justice? What is a good life? What is society for? He is part of an emerging generation of philosophers rethinking basic questions of individuality, identity, and community. Author of Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation (Oxford University Press), he is also Editor-at-Large at Wisdom of Crowds and writes widely on topics of solidarity, ideology, democracy, power, and trust for outlets including the Washington Post and BBC. He lives in Washington, D.C. and holds MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668031889?ic_referral=HlUNWA3LbDvlSy8YzIJLQFI3PgjuDKnPnkQlGiBY-h4wM2GPwb6cef3yuFmgC-uyGc4zQgKS2_LIpP23wNQwTWMCQLsauMJ7pcG26I5pB6qZDO3h6pMEyyhxYQSDeZ_-iJB3tJI

When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan's first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world.

More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls.

Lyse Doucet, the BBC's Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.

It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel's 1970s glory days--an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the 'Paris of Asia'. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con's famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy--only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021.

The result is a remarkably vivid history of how Afghans have survived a half century of destruction and disruption. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.

Lyse Doucet is a Canadian journalist and the BBC's Chief International Correspondent. In the course of a career spanning four decades, she has reported from countries around the world and was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem, Amman, Islamabad, Kabul, and Abidjan. She has led the BBC's coverage of major events including the recent Iran-Israel war, the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War. She received an OBE in the Queen's Honours list in 2014, and was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2019. Her latest awards in the U.S. include the 2024 Zenger Award for Press Freedom from the University of Arizona, and the 2018 Trailblazer Award from Georgetown University. She was a recipient of the Colombia School of Journalism Award in 2016, an Emmy in 2014 for her team’s reporting from Syria, and Peabody Awards for her work from Syria and Afghanistan. In 2021, she was nominated for a Peabody for her work as a writer and reporter on the BBC podcast Afghanistan: Documenting A Crucial Year. Doucet has twenty honorary doctorates from leading British and Canadian Universities. She has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Toronto, and a BA Hons. from Queen’s University in Kingston. She is also a senior fellow of Massey College of the University of Toronto. Doucet has been reporting on Afghanistan since 1988. She visits the Inter-Continental whenever she is in Kabul.

Doucet is in conversation with Eric Weiner, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God, The Socrates Express and, his latest book, Ben & Me. A former foreign correspondent for NPR, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He regularly leads writing workshops in Bhutan. He lives with his family and a menagerie of animals in Silver Spring, MD. For more information, visit: EricWeinerBooks.com.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780735243415?ic_referral=HaqpwooL4AX7VMR0Hkr-PAHrl9qIGumWO1b7V8649zowM4Tm1eKNvEjs1copqf_umMa_aGrv8PwHDDaycjdizxUTSJSN1LDwYcAhi4h6bP8lUdNXYwFX5tiQmxMWGXU2N3phy1U