Theme
Memoir & Biography
One life at a time — usually someone close enough to power to describe how it actually operates.
40 books
most recent read first
The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
Gregory Zuckerman · 2019 · read Jul 2026Most of what you learn about investing says to understand the business.
Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America
Robert B. Reich · 2025 · read Mar 2026Reich is still proud of family and medical leave and the expanded tax credits of the Clinton years.
The Fall
Michael Wolff · 2023 · read Feb 2026Fox paid Dominion $787.5 million in April 2023, after Rupert Murdoch had privately predicted the lawsuit would cost about $50…
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
Stephen Witt · 2025 · read Nov 2025From a founding in a Denny's to a brief moment in June 2024 as the world's most valuable company, Nvidia got there on Jensen…
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir
John Bolton · 2020 · read Oct 2025Bolton's case is that Trump ran foreign policy around his own interests and reelection rather than national security.
107 Days
Kamala Harris · 2025 · read Oct 2025You have 107 days, from Biden dropping out on July 21, 2024 to Election Day, and the Secret Service calls you Pioneer.
Source Code: My Beginnings
Bill Gates · 2025 · read Sep 2025By his own account, Bill Gates growing up today would likely be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
Michael V. Hayden · 2016 · read Jun 2025Hayden's case is that spy agencies should work right up to the edge of what the law allows, and that your privacy, a value he…
Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis
Scott Payne · 2025 · read Jun 2025In 2019 an FBI undercover agent using the alias Pale Horse got inside the Base, and ended up at a neo-Nazi ritual in the Georgia…
Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford
Clint Hill · 2016 · read May 2025Clint Hill is remembered for one moment: climbing onto the back of the limousine in Dallas to shield the President and Mrs.
Madoff: The Final Word
Richard Behar · 2024 · read Mar 2025Behar's argument is that Bernie Madoff's fraud began decades before the date Madoff confessed to, and that it couldn't have run…
Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator
Jung H. Pak · 2020 · read Feb 2025Kim Jong Un was supposed to fall quickly after taking power in 2011.
Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds
David Goggins · 2018 · read Feb 2025When you think you're finished, you've used only about 40 percent of what you can do, according to David Goggins.
A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology
Mike Rinder · 2022 · read Feb 2025A billion years is the term of the Sea Organization contract Mike Rinder signed after high school, having been raised in…
Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty
Hillary Rodham Clinton · 2024 · read Jan 2025Clinton writes these essays as if you're sitting across from her at a dinner party.
On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service
Anthony Fauci · 2024 · read Dec 2024From a Brooklyn childhood to decades running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci tells his career as…
The Showman
Simon Shuster · 2024 · read Dec 2024Shuster was inside Volodymyr Zelensky's presidential compound in Kyiv as Russia's full-scale invasion unfolded, with extensive…
A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times
Mark T. Esper · 2022 · read Dec 2024During the 2020 George Floyd protests, Trump asked whether troops could just shoot protesters in the legs, according to Mark…
At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House
H.R. McMaster · 2024 · read Nov 2024Run a structured national security process amid internal power struggles, leaks and partisan media: that was the task McMaster…
True Gretch: What I've Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between
Gretchen Whitmer · 2024 · read Oct 2024COVID-19, a severe flood, a mass shooting at a high school near Detroit, and an FBI-foiled plot to kidnap her: those are the…
Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump
Michael Cohen · 2020 · read Oct 2024Cohen admits he enabled crimes on Trump's behalf during more than a decade as his personal attorney and fixer, and the confession…
What Happened
Hillary Rodham Clinton · 2017 · read Sep 2024Who does Clinton blame for losing in 2016?
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
James B. Comey · 2018 · read Aug 2024Your loyalty belongs to lasting values like justice and truth, not to any one person.
The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump
Andrew G. McCabe · 2019 · read Aug 2024When you think about what the FBI protects you from, you picture mobsters and terrorists.
The Art of Power: My Story as America's First Woman Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi · 2024 · read Aug 2024From housewife and mother of five to the first woman Speaker of the House, Pelosi arranges her more than three decades in…
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J.D. Vance · 2016 · read Jul 2024Deindustrialization hit Rust Belt towns hard, and Vance grants what that did.
Permanent Record
Edward Snowden · 2019 · read Mar 2024What Snowden found inside American intelligence was phone, email, text and internet data collected at scale without public…
Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country
Adam Kinzinger · 2023 · read Dec 2023Adam Kinzinger's vote to impeach Trump after January 6 effectively ended his House career.
Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning
Liz Cheney · 2023 · read Dec 2023Before anything else, Liz Cheney tells you that Trump must never return to the White House or any position of public trust.
Romney: A Reckoning
McKay Coppins · 2023 · read Nov 2023Journals, emails, text messages and about 45 interviews over two years: Mitt Romney handed McKay Coppins all of it.
Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation
Jon Ward · 2023 · read Nov 2023Two decades inside evangelical circles, then two outside them: that's where Jon Ward writes from, starting as a pastor's son at…
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson · 2023 · read Oct 2023How far past Elon Musk can you see after two years at his side?
Counting the Cost
Jill Duggar · 2023 · read Sep 2023Jill Duggar discovered she had unknowingly signed a performance contract before her televised wedding.
The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer—The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb
James W. Kunetka · 2015 · read Sep 2023Before he ran the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers oversaw construction of the Pentagon.
Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could
Adam Schiff · 2021 · read Aug 2023Between two scenes of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which he blames on Trump, Adam Schiff tells the story of the first…
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Rick Rubin · 2023 · read Mar 2023Not a method, and not a manual.
Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free
Linda Kay Klein · 2018 · read Feb 2023Twelve years of research, hundreds of interviews, and a teenager who broke up with her boyfriend because she believed God…
Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life
Eugene O'Kelly · 2005 · read Jan 2023In May 2005, at 53, the chairman and CEO of KPMG in the US learned he had terminal brain cancer and roughly three to six months…
A Promised Land
Barack Obama · 2020 · read Nov 2021Starting from a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, Barack Obama carries you to May 2011 and the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan,…
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015 · read Feb 2021Written to his 15-year-old son, Samori, Ta-Nehisi Coates's letter argues that American racism is first a physical threat to Black…