Politics and Prose Presents

In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded--one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin.

With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivete in an endless boom led to disaster. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today's world--where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again.

This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that "this time is different." It's about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming--only to be dismissed until it was too late.

Hailed as a landmark book, Too Big to Fail reimagined how financial crises are told. Now, with 1929, Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time--with lessons that remain as urgent as ever. More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is an award-winning journalist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC's signature morning program. He is also the founder and editor-at-large of DealBook, an online daily financial report published by The New York Times that he started in 2001. Sorkin is the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail and the co-producer of the 2011 film adaptation, which was nominated for eleven Emmy Awards. Sorkin is also co-creator of the drama series Billions on Showtime.

Sorkin is joined in conversation with Mike Allen, co-founder of Axios. Allen writes the Axios Daily Essentials newsletters, Axios AM, Axios PM and Axios Finish Line. He was also an executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning docu-news series, “Axios on HBO,” and co-author of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less. Allen was a co-founder of Politico, where he created Politico Playbook and helped build the company for its first decade. He has been named several times to Vanity Fair's “New Establishment” list. He is also an alumnus of TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He is from Orange County, Calif., and graduated from Washington and Lee University. 

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If you're channel surfing and happen upon Leland Vittert during his nightly national cable show on NewsNation, he comes off as a poised journalist prying nuggets from guests. If you watched him for years as an anchor at Fox News Channel, you saw him on the battlefields of the Middle East, the anchor desk, and the White House North Lawn. No one, including friends and co-workers, has ever known his full life story and how miraculous it was to get to that point.

Leland was a socially awkward boy who didn't speak for years, and when he finally did, teachers and leaders declared him "weird." His unique behavior and inability to connect with his peers made him a frequent target for bullying and exclusion. In one particularly harsh moment, a school principal bluntly told his parents, "The people here think Leland is pretty weird. I guess I do, too." Those words felt like being shot with an arrow, as his parents sat in stunned silence, grappling with their own fears and uncertainties for their son's future.

From a young age, Leland showed signs of being Autistic, a term rarely used at the time, struggling with social cues, communication, and behavioral norms that came naturally to other kids. The diagnosis didn't deter his father, Mark. He knew the world wouldn't change for Leland, so he quit his job and began changing Leland for the world. He became a full-time parent-coach, training Leland and teaching him the skills he needed to navigate in society. Simple concepts like eye contact, understanding humor, and instilling motivations had to be taught painstakingly. From hundreds of pushups at age 7 to toughen him against bullies, to coaching him through complex social interactions, Mark's relentless dedication changed the trajectory of Leland's life.

Born Lucky offers an intimate look into their inspiring journey. Leland lays bare his experiences of the crushing bullying during middle and high school, the sting of rejection continuing into college, and his ultimate transformation into an esteemed journalist. But above all, this book is a love letter from a grateful son, who despite his diagnosis, trusted his father and defied all odds.

It offers hope to every parent and every child who is grappling with their own unique challenges, to be inspired to break labels, tear down the walls that society builds, and create a better future.

Leland Vittert is the host of On Balance with Leland Vittertand serves as NewsNation's Chief Washington Anchor. A veteran journalist, Vittert joined NewsNation in May 2021, where he has been pivotal in covering national affairs and delivering special reports across the network's primetime weeknight newscasts. Before joining NewsNation, Vittert worked for Fox News from 2010 to 2021, starting as a foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem and later anchor and correspondent in Washington.

Vittert will be in conversation with Chris Cillizza. Cillizza serves as a network contributor for NewsNation. He also owns Cheney Road Productions, maintains a Substack newsletter called So What, hosts a the weekly series Politics Aside with Chris Cillizza, and maintains a daily YouTube channel with over 60,000 subscribers. Mr. Cillizza is the author two books, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency and The Gospel According to The Fix.

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Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the '70s and '80s, certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that helped raise her.

But as Macy's mother's health declined in 2020, she couldn't shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community's civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn't begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend--once the most liberal person she knew--became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.

This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother's death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the forty years since she'd left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues.

Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth--in person, with respect--she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope.

Beth Macy has won more than two dozen national journalism awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Dopesick, which was made into a Peabody Award-winning series for Hulu. Three of her books have been New York Times bestsellers. She lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

Macy is in conversation with Andrea Pitzer. 

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593656730?ic_referral=eaQGRguaf6nN8F1aUJ0-3Xyu3_bTJoZJ-MGfVn-f0CQwMwhO6rLAsEP6VIwj78oRrOquOxcLgs-rkiUmhlgnBu_9KVEvPyCymsdEMy3clFZziEck0y3QIWtgnp0J0Ai1hF8e9dI

Joanne Molinaro is everyone's favorite storytelling vegan cook. On her platform, The Korean Vegan, she's known for her personal narrative voiceovers, which accompany mouthwatering videos of her making everything from Kimchi to Korean-inspired pasta dishes. Whether it's a reflection on her relationship with her father over a plate of noodles or a story about learning to love her body as a marathon runner while she bakes dessert, Joanne is always making deep connections with her followers through food. Now, in The Korean Vegan: Homemade, Joanne offers the recipes that she makes most often at home.

As Joanne likes to say, she loves to "veganize" Korean cuisine and "Koreanize" everything else.  This book is a tribute to all the culinary inspirations that have shaped her cooking over the years and incredible flavors they have created. A memory about learning to repurpose leftover rice from her grandmother Hahlmuhnee results in Fried Rice Waffles; a question from her father leads to Joanne learning to make his childhood favorite noodles, Janchi Guksu; her Pesto Tteokbokki combines her husband's Italian roots with her own; and her love of savory snacks and kimchi helps invent Buffalo Kimchi Artichoke Dip. With her stunning signature photography and tips for building a Korean pantry, Joanne celebrates the magical connections between family, home, and food.

Joanne Lee Molinaro is the author of The Korean Vegan Cookbook and a Korean American social media star, born and raised in Chicago. Molinaro adopted a plant-based diet in January 2016 and began The Korean Vegan as a passion project later that year. Her immensely popular TikTok and Instagram, @thekoreanvegan, incorporate her recipes with personal narration. She has been featured in Salon, Healthyish by Bon Appétit, The Atlantic, The Kitchn, Thrive, and VegWorld, and on Food Network, CNN, BBC, and CNBC.

Molinaro is in conversation with Daniela Galarza, a staff writer for the Food section at The Washington Post who also writes "Eat Voraciously," a newsletter offering easy dinner recipes, cooking tips and inspiration. A former restaurant pastry chef, Galarza has been writing about food and cooking for more than 10 years. Before joining The Post, she was a features editor at Serious Eats, senior editor at Eater.com and deputy food editor at Los Angeles magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Wall Street Journal and other publications. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a certificate in pastry arts from the International Culinary Center in New York. After studying pastry and bread making in Paris and central France, she worked as a pastry chef and in product development in New York and Los Angeles before entering journalism.

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In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow--only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up--doctors, engineers, scientists--had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values?

In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin's lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate--and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin.

Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak--and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women.

Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and the Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck.

Ioffe is in conversation with Sabrina Tavernise, a national writer-at-large for The New York Times, where she covers American political life and the forces reshaping it. A former foreign correspondent, she has reported from Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, and multiple conflict zones, including Iraq and Ukraine. She was most recently a co-host of The Daily and lives in New York City.

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"The story of my life is the story of my stories," writes Susan Orlean in this extraordinary, era-defining memoir from one of the greatest practitioners of narrative nonfiction of our time. Joyride is a magic carpet ride through Orlean's life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, her curiosity draws her to explore the most ordinary and extraordinary of places, from going deep inside the head of a regular ten-year-old boy for a legendary profile ("The American Man Age Ten") to reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers, from capturing the routine magic of Saturday night to climbing Mt. Fuji.

Not only does Orlean's account of a writing life offer a trove of indispensable gleanings for writers, it's also an essential and practical guide to embracing any creative path. She takes us through her process of dreaming up ideas, managing deadlines, connecting with sources, chasing every possible lead, confronting writer's block and self-doubt, and crafting the perfect lede--a Susan specialty.

While Orlean has always written her way into other people's lives in order to understand the human experience, Joyride is her most personal book ever--a searching journey through finding her feet as a journalist, recovering from the excruciating collapse of her first marriage, falling head-over-heels in love again, becoming a mother while mourning the decline of her own mother, sojourning to Hollywood for films based on her work including Adaptation and Blue Crush, and confronting mortality. Joyride is also a time machine to a bygone era of journalism, from Orlean's bright start in the golden age of alt-weeklies to her career-making days working alongside icons such as Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Anna Wintour, Sonny Mehta, and Jonathan Karp--forces who shaped the media industry as we know it today.

Infused with Orlean's signature warmth and wit, Joyride is a must-read for anyone who hungers to start, build, and sustain a creative life. Orlean inspires us to seek out daily inspiration and rediscover the marvels that surround us.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and on Substack at SusanOrlean.Substack.com.

Orlean is in conversation with Marion Winik, the author of nine books, including The Big Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2019) and First Comes Love (Pantheon, 1996). Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and elsewhere; her column at BaltimoreFishbowl.com has been running since 2011. A professor at the University of Baltimore, she reviews books for The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and People, among others, and hosts the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader. She was a commentator on All Things Considered for fifteen years. She is the recipient of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Service Award.  

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Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award, In the Garden of Memory is a memoir on the family of Peter Osnos.

Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland's most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of one of the country's most illustrious clans, noted for its achievements in business, politics, and culture-as they lived, struggled, and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century.

Rich with tales of bravery as well as poignant, sometimes comic anecdotes of everyday life, the book follows the family members as they scattered around the world to European spas, tsarist prisons, Soviet war camps, and the Royal Air Force. Tracing their roots to a renowned Austrian rabbi, the family members included an array of amazing characters. One became an industrial magnate who founded the Citro n automobile company in France; another was a Communist revolutionary who ended up being arrested, tortured, and executed by Stalin's police. One worked as an undercover agent, another as a zoologist in France. One became a notable Polish publisher, another a leading Freudian psychiatrist.

Inevitably, the tragic history of the Second World War and its catastrophic impact on European Jews looms darkly over the narrative, yet remarkably enough only two members of the clan were killed in the Holocaust. Today the survivors have continued the family journey around the world, including in the United States. Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, In the Garden of Memory is ultimately the uplifting account of a family that never gave up hope and never gave in.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland's leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children's books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators' Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

Lloyd-Jones will be in conversation with Peter L.W. Osnos, the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. His most recent book is LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, he spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Columbia School of Journalism, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Bethesda, MD.

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Liberals With Attitude documents the sixteen months in 1991-92 between the brutal beating of Rodney King by four police officers that was captured on a home video camera and the resignation of LAPD chief Daryl Gates. Gates was reviled by the local Black and civil liberties communities because of the pattern of racism and brutality in the department, and he was uniquely powerful because of the structure of the Los Angeles City Charter and the secret files he kept on local politicians.

The effort to get Gates to step down after thirteen years as chief and to amend the City Charter to prevent another unaccountable chief from amassing that much power was led by Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, a former LAPD officer and the first Black mayor of the city. To overcome Gates's entrenched power, Bradley assembled a team that included future US secretary of state Warren Christopher, the local ACLU, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and activists who saw the struggle against Gates as an important chapter in the civil rights movement. Much of the local media, especially the Los Angeles Times, was supportive of Bradley's agenda, as was the burgeoning "gangsta rap" culture of LA, much of which emerged in reaction to the LAPD.

Author Danny Goldberg was the chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California during those years and was personally acquainted with the leaders of the fight against Gates. He interviewed several dozen people who are still alive and got access to thousands of pages of documents among the papers of Stanley Sheinbaum, who was married to the heiress of the Warner Bros. film fortune. Sheinbaum was chosen by Mayor Bradley to be the president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, with the specific mission of getting Gates out of office. Goldberg's insider saga demonstrates that cooperation between the political left and center is required to overcome white grievance and unaccountable power.

Danny Goldberg is the author of five previous books including In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea and the national bestseller Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain. He is a political activist who serves on the boards of Public Citizen, Americans for Peace Now, and Brave New Films. He was the chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California from 1987-1994, during which the events described in his newest book, Liberals with Attitude, took place. He is currently president of Gold Village Entertainment and has worked in the music business since the early 1970s as a personal manager for Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Bonnie Raitt, the Allman Brothers, and Steve Earle, among others; and as president of three major record companies: Atlantic, Warner Bros., and Mercury.

Goldberg is in conversation with David Corn, a veteran Washington journalist and political commentator. He is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine and an analyst for MSNBC. He is the author of American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (2022), a New York Times bestseller, and the coauthor of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (2018), a New York Times number one bestseller. He is the author of three other New York Times bestsellers: Showdown: The Inside Story of How Barack Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party; Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (with Michael Isikoff); and The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Corn is also the author of the novel Deep Background and the biography Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades. He has won the George Polk Award and a National Magazine Award.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781636142593?ic_referral=ZjqWjArWiKRbqiyw7RIr88H1sLIkp8GL1IGZaHJjLK4wM5s2ZIoHZcuG6frcvmuKMiT7nZia9i1ICPfnSS5wreGBc2tn8b4cMyhw5gCN5n7eawaQmCn8hB0Iil6p_SD9rm47pbE

This event will be in partnership with Free DC and the SNCC Legacy Project.

Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and blocking traffic to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of pervasive police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at discrediting and derailing their movement.

The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in both the North and South, Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the illusion of color-blind law enforcement.

The civil rights struggle against police abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.

Josh Davis is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore. He's the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods, an exploration of Black booksellers, natural food stores, feminist enterprises, and other businesses that emerged from movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. He's a;sp the co-editor along with Nicole King and Kate Drabinski of Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Resistance and Inequality in a U.S. City. His research has earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program. Josh has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Washington Post.

Davis is in conversation with Judy Richardson. Richardson served on SNCC's staff in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama (1963-66). Her experiences in SNCC continue to ground both her film and education work. In 1968, she co-founded Drum & Spear Bookstore in Washington, D.C., once the country’s largest African American Bookstore. Later, she was on the production team for all 14 hours of the seminal PBS series, Eyes on the Prize, as its series associate producer, then its education director. With Northern Light Productions she continued to produce documentaries: for PBS, the History Channel, and museums. Along with Betty Robinson and a series of women veterans of SNCC, Judy also co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a compilation of the testimonies of 53 SNCC women. She is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project board, was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and has an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College (PA). She recently finished the Frederick Douglass visitor center film for the National Park Service’s site at Cedar Hill in Washington, DC, and she is currently working on four museum films, including those for the civil rights museums in Memphis and Atlanta.

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In its duration, geographical reach, and ferocity, World War II was unprecedented, and the effects on those who fought it and their loved ones at home, immeasurable. The heroism of the men and women who won the war may be well documented, but we know too little about the pain and hardships the veterans endured upon their return home. As historian David Nasaw makes evident in his masterful recontextualization of these years, the veterans who came home to America were not the same people as those who had left for war, and the nation to which they returned was not the one they had left behind. Contrary to the prevailing narratives of triumph, here are the largely unacknowledged realities the veterans--and the nation--faced that radically reshaped our understanding of this era as a bridge to today.

The Wounded Generation tells the indelible stories of the veterans and their loved ones as they confronted the aftershocks of World War II. Veterans suffering from recurring nightmares, uncontrollable rages, and social isolation were treated by doctors who had little understanding of PTSD. They were told that they were suffering from nothing more than battle fatigue and that time would cure it. When their symptoms persisted, they were given electro-shock treatments and lobotomies, while the true cause of their distress would remain undiagnosed for decades to come. Women who had begun working outside the home were pressured to revert to their prewar status as housewives dependent on their husbands. Returning veterans and their families were forced to double up with their parents or squeeze into overcrowded, substandard shelters as the country wrestled with a housing crisis. Divorce rates doubled. Alcoholism was rampant. Racial tensions heightened as White southerners resorted to violence to sustain the racial status quo. To ease the veterans' readjustment to civilian life, Congress passed the GI Bill, but Black veterans were disproportionately denied their benefits, and the consequences of this discrimination would endure long after the war was won.

David Nasaw is a historian, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and bestselling author of The Last Million, named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and History Today, and, according to The Economist, one of the "six must-read books on the Second World War"; The Patriarch, a New York Times Five Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the winner of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize; and The Chief, winner of the Bancroft Prize. He is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and a past president of the Society of American Historians. In 2023, Nasaw was honored by the New York Public Library as a "Library Lion." His father served in the Army Medical Corps in Eritrea during World War II.

Nasaw is in conversation with Kai Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist. On July 21, 2023 Universal Studios  released a major motion picture, Oppenheimer, based on American Prometheus, the biography Bird co-authored with the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird’s current project is a biography of Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy, Donald Trump and the New York mafia (Scribner). His most recent books include The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter,   The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014), Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis

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