Just as politics is dominating the headlines, it is dominating the best-seller lists.  “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” by Michael Wolff is now available at the library as well as on the WVDELI.  Be sure to sign into your account, since a copy is available to Bridgeport cardholders in eBook form.

               

Wolff’s book is a look at the first nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency with insider accounts and quotes.  From the campaign where Wolff alleges Trump never expected to win and was using it for publicity to the turmoil and chaos that became life in the White House, this book is certainly a page-turner.

               

MSNBC host, Chris Matthews, has written a revealing new portrait of another White House in “Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.”  Matthews, the host of “Hardball,” takes his fascination with the Kennedys to portray a younger brother who was always the underdog, overshadowed by his famous brothers.  Yet Bobby Kennedy always had a connection with everyday Americans, a connection that was most vividly displayed when he campaigned for President in 1968.

               

“Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit” takes a look at the inner man in this immensely moving and readable biography.

               

Some of the same time period is covered in another MSNBC host’s look at 1968 in “Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics” by Lawrence O’Donnell.  Anyone who lived through 1968 knows that there has hardly been another year like it in American politics.  From the campaign by Eugene McCarthy to the entry of Robert Kennedy and the assassination of Martin Luther King, this was a year of turmoil and emotion. 

               

LBJ decided not to run, followed by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and the riots at the Democratic convention that summer benefited Richard Nixon’s run to the Presidency.  O’Donnell brings his political knowledge and his writing skills to make sense of all this turmoil and what it means to today’s politics.

               

Masha Gessen looks at another nation’s politics to show how Russian individuals reacted to the change back to totalitarianism after a brief glimpse of democracy in “The Future is History.”  The winner of this year’s National Book Award for Non-Fiction, this is a masterful, yet intimate view of Russian life and the soul-crushing administration of Putin and his cronies.