In this brave, beautiful, and deeply personal memoir, Laura Bush, one of our most beloved and private first ladies, tells her own extraordinary story.
Born in the boom-and-bust oil town of Midland, Texas, Laura Welch grew up as an only child in a family that lost three babies to miscarriage or infant death. She vividly evokes Midland's brash, rugged culture, her close relationship with her father, and the bonds of early friendships that sustain her to this day. For the first time, in heart-wrenching detail, she writes about the devastating high school car accident that left her friend Mike Douglas dead and about her decades of unspoken grief.
When Laura Welch first left West Texas in 1964, she never imagined that her journey would lead her to the world stage and the White House. After graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1968, in the thick of student rebellions across the country and at the dawn of the women's movement, she became an elementary school teacher, working in inner-city schools, then trained to be a librarian. At age thirty, she met George W. Bush, whom she had last passed in the hallway in seventh grade. Three months later, "the old maid of Midland married Midland's most eligible bachelor." With rare intimacy and candor, Laura Bush writes about her early married life as she was thrust into one of America's most prominent political families, as well as her deep longing for children and her husband's decision to give up drinking. By 1993, she found herself in the full glare of the political spotlight. But just as her husband won the Texas governorship in a stunning upset victory, her father, Harold Welch, was dying in Midland.
In 2001, after one of the closest elections in American history, Laura Bush moved into the White House. Here she captures presidential life in the harrowing days and weeks after 9/11, when fighter-jet cover echoed through the walls and security scares sent the family to an underground shelter. She writes openly about the White House during wartime, the withering and relentless media spotlight, and the transformation of her role as she began to understand the power of the first lady. One of the first U.S. officials to visit war-torn Afghanistan, she also reached out to disease-stricken African nations and tirelessly advocated for women in the Middle East and dissidents in Burma. She championed programs to get kids out of gangs and to stop urban violence. And she was a major force in rebuilding Gulf Coast schools and libraries post-Katrina. Movingly, she writes of her visits with U.S. troops and their loved ones, and of her empathy for and immense gratitude to military families.
With deft humor and a sharp eye, Laura Bush lifts the curtain on what really happens inside the White House, from presidential finances to the 175-year-old tradition of separate bedrooms for presidents and their wives to the antics of some White House guests and even a few members of Congress. She writes with honesty and eloquence about her family, her public triumphs, and her personal tribulations. Laura Bush's compassion, her sense of humor, her grace, and her uncommon willingness to bare her heart make this story revelatory, beautifully rendered, and unlike any other first lady's memoir ever written.

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Prisoner of the State "is the story of Premier Zhao Ziyang, the man who brought liberal change to China and who was dethroned at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 for trying to stop the massacre. Zhao spent the last years of his life under house arrest. An occasional detail about his life would slip out, but scholars and citizens lamented that Zhao never had his final say.
But Zhao did produce a memoir, secretly recording on audio tapes the real story of what happened during modern China's most critical moments. He provides intimate details about the Tiananmen crackdown, describes the ploys and double crosses used by China's leaders, and exhorts China to adopt democracy in order to achieve long-term stability. His riveting, behind-the-scenes recollections form the basis of "Prisoner of the State."
The China that Zhao portrays is not some long-lost dynasty. It is today's China, where its leaders accept economic freedom but resist political change. Zhao might have steered China's political system toward openness and tolerance had he survived. Although Zhao now speaks from the grave, his voice still has the moral power to make China sit up and listen.

Aubrey Jones was born in Merthyr Tydfil the oldest son of a miner father and a teacher mother. He was educated at the local Cyfarthfa Castle school from where he won a scholarship to the London School of Economics. He left the LSE with a first class honours degree, as well as the Gladstone memorial prize and a Gerstenberg award for postgraduate studies. Shortly after leaving the LSE he joined the Times, departing his desk in Berlin just days before the outbreak of the Second World War. On return to London he served in the War Office and army intelligence, finally seeing theatre in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war he returned to the Times but soon tired of journalism and took a post as assistant to the director of the British Iron and Steel Federation, eventually becoming its director. He was first elected to Parliament as an unlikely member of the Conservative party in 1950 and appointed first, Minister for Fuel and Power and then Minister of Supply under successive Conservative Prime Ministers. But Macmillan's re-election in 1959 saw him return to the back-benches and reinvigorate his industrial experience. From that time he was convinced that the UK should join the European Community, as it then was. He also took a strong position in support of technological development, believing the country would benefit from a Government policy encouraging closer cooperation between military and civil technology. When Harold Wilson won the 1964 election for Labour he and George Brown, surprisingly, picked Aubrey Jones to become chairman of the newly formed National Board for Prices and Incomes. He was selected for the role from a dozen names as the only candidate acceptable to both the TUC and the CBI. The decision to take the job saw him give up his Conservative seat and face a wider rejection by the Conservative party. George Brown told him there'd be a peerage at the end of his chairmanship of the NBPI but that was never Aubrey Jones' goal. Instead he returned to industry, taking up various directorships in the UK and he later spent time abroad, first consulting on reforming the civil service for the military Government of Nigeria and then acting in various consultancy roles for the Government of the Shah of Iran until just before the revolution in that country. Upon his return to the UK Aubrey Jones sought to return to the House of Commons. He fought and lost the 1983 General Election in the Birmingham constituency of Sutton Coldfield for the Liberal Alliance. He later joined the Social Democrats and eventually the Liberal party. He firmly believed there was a role for the State in civil society, more so than the politics of the Conservative party would allow. He also passionately believed that, with the Empire gone, the UK needed to be part of a much larger entity to make its voice heard in the world. That entity was, for Aubrey Jones, the European Community and the Liberal Party was the only political party of the day, which was firmly committed to membership of the Community. Unfortunately Aubrey Jones ended his memoirs when he departed from Iran but his views on Europe come across strongly in the selection of notes and letters he wrote subsequently. It's fair to say he would be deeply frustrated by the result of the 2016 EU referendum and the ensuing debacle about the manner and terms of the final withdrawal from the European Union.

A newly minted second lieutenant fresh from West Point, Hugh Lenox Scott arrived on the northern Great Plains in the wake of the Little Bighorn debacle. The Seventh Cavalry was seeking to subdue the Plains tribes and confine them to reservations, and Scott adopted the role of negotiator and advocate for the Indian "adversaries." He thus embarked on a career unique in the history of the U.S. military and the western frontier. Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853-1934: Reluctant Warrior is the first book to tell the full story of this unlikely, self-avowed "soldier of peace," whose career, stretching from Little Bighorn until after World War I, reflected profound historical changes. The taste for adventure that drew Scott to the military also piqued his interest in the tenacity of Native cultures in an environment rife with danger and uncertainty. Armand S. La Potin describes how Scott embraced the lifeways of the Northern Plains peoples, making a study of their cultures, their symbols, and most notably, their use of an intertribal sign language to facilitate trade. Negotiating with dissident bands of Indians whose lands were threatened by Anglo settlers and commercial interests, he increasingly found himself advocating federal responsibility for tribal welfare and assuming the role of "Indian reformer." La Potin makes clear that "reform" was understood within the context of Scott's own culture, which scaled "civilization" to the so-called Anglo race. Accordingly, Scott promoted the "civilization" of Native Americans through assimilation into Anglo-American society-an approach he continued in his later interactions with the Moro Muslims of the southern Philippines, where he served as a military governor. Although he eventually rose to the rank of army chief of staff, over time Scott the peacemaker and Indian reformer saw his career stall as Native tribes ceased to be seen as a military threat and military merit was increasingly defined by battlefield experience. From these pages the picture emerges of an uncommon figure in American military history, at once at odds with and defined by his times.

Can you name the creator of the Territorial Army and the British Expeditionary Force? The man who laid the foundation stones of MI5, MI6, the RAF, the LSE, Imperial College, the 'redbrick' universities and the Medical Research Council? This book reveals that great figure: Richard Burdon Haldane. As a philosopher-statesman, his groundbreaking proposals on defence, education and government structure were astonishingly ahead of his time-the very building blocks of modern Britain. His networks ranged from Wilde to Einstein, Churchill to Carnegie, King to Kaiser; he pioneered cross-party, cross-sector cooperation. Yet in 1915 Haldane was ejected from the Liberal government, unjustly vilified as a German sympathiser. John Campbell charts these ups and downs, reveals Haldane's intensely personal side through previously unpublished private correspondence, and shows his enormous relevance in our search for just societies today. Amidst political and national instability, it is time to reinstate Haldane as Britain's outstanding example of true statesmanship. A Sunday Times Politics and Current Affairs Book of the Year, 2020. A Telegraph Best Book of the Year, 2020.