One of Vanity Fair's 21 Best Books of 2020 Winner, 2020 Richard Wall Memorial Award Special Jury Prize, Theatre Library Association The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production. Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called "the most important story" he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for Atlas Shrugged. Greg Mitchell's The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military-for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood). Mitchell has found his way into the lofty rooms, from Washington to California, where it happened, unearthing hundreds of letters and dozens of scripts that show how wise intentions were compromised in favor of defending the use of the bomb and the imperatives of postwar politics. As in his acclaimed Cold War true-life thriller The Tunnels, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.

Read the incredible true story of the daring escapes from East Berlin. 'A story with so much inherent drama.' The Guardian 'One of the great untold stories of the Cold War.' Alex Kershaw, author of Avenue of Spies _______________ In the summer of 1962, the year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, a group of young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture and even death to liberate friends, lovers, and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. As Greg Mitchell's riveting narrative unfolds we meet a host of extraordinary characters who demonstrate astonishing courage in the face of adversity: the legendary cyclist who became East Berlin's most wanted man; the tunneller who had already served four years in the East German gulag; the young East Berliner who escapes with her baby, then marries one of the tunnellers; an engineer who would later help build the tunnel under the English Channel; and the Stasi informer who betrays them all. Capturing the spirit of a divided Berlin and celebrating the subversive power of ordinary people in desperate circumstances, The Tunnels is an exhilarating real-life thriller with themes that reverberate today. _________________ 'A stark reminder that barriers can never cut people off entirely but only succeed in driving them underground.' New York Times

---- Winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize.

In 1934, voters hoping to turn the tide of the Great Depression backed an unlikely candidate for governor of California: Upton Sinclair, muckraking author of "The Jungle" and lifelong socialist. Amazingly, Sinclair swept the Democratic primary, leading a mass movement called EPIC (End Poverty in California). More than a thousand EPIC chapters formed, much like Occupy Wall Street sites popped up in 2011.

Alarmed, Sinclair's opponents launched an unprecedented public relations blitzkrieg to discredit him. The result was nothing less than a revolution in American politics, and with it, the era of the "spin doctor" was born. The iconic Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg created the first "attack ads" for the screen, the precursor of today's TV travesties. Hollywood took its first all-out plunge into politics and money started to play the tune in our political process.

In a riveting, blow-by-blow narrative featuring the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Louis B. Mayer, H. L. Mencken, William Randolph Hearst, Will Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and a Who's Who of political, literary and entertainment stars, Greg Mitchell brings to life the outrageous campaign that forever transformed the electoral process.

A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, it served as the basis for one episode in the award-winning PBS documentary "The Great Depression"

"Sizzling, rambunctiously useful." -Los Angeles Times

"Fascinating....a lively, anecdote-filled history." -The New York Times Book Review

"To read The Campaign of the Century is to understand how the business of electing officials began to get so colossally out of hand." -Newsweek

"America witnessed a transforming experience, as Greg Mitchell makes clear in his vivid chronicle." -Wall Street Journal

"There are lessons to be learned herein. Politicians learned them long ago, to the general detriment. Perhaps now Mitchell can help the rest of us learn them." -Washington Post Book World

"A passionate, deeply felt and altogether personal account of coming to Beethoven in middle age, after a lifetime's immersion in other musical forms. They understand Beethoven's eternal wildness: As well as we may think we know this composer, he constantly surprises and reinvigorates us." -- Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on classical music, Professor of Music and Journalism at the University of Southern California

Finally, a Beethoven for our time. In "Journeys With Beethoven," Kerry Candaele and Greg Mitchell offer a unique and dynamic exploration of the composer's musical, cultural and political influence, around the world and in America, today. It's a new kind of adventure story--and expanded in this new 2013 edition.

The two longtime rock 'n rollers-Candaele is a writer, musician and filmmaker, Mitchell a journalist and author of twelve previous books-discovered a shared passion for Beethoven later in life, and in this book they probe this deep obsession. Candaele illuminates trips for his new "Following the Ninth" documentary set in Chile, China, Germany, Japan and London (with Billy Bragg), while Mitchell, who is co-producer of the film, travels to famous U.S. venues, screens dozens of films related to Beethoven. He also interviews a leading pianist, Jeremy Denk, and trombonist Joseph Alessi, and others.

Five years ago, Candaele set out on a world journey to film the global impact-in freedom struggles, and in inspiring people in their daily lives-of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He ended up traveling to twelve countries and four continents. His film has drawn raves from The New York Times, Bill Moyers and "All Things Considered," among others.

In China he discovered why a student leader played the Ninth over a loudspeaker as the troops moved in to Tiananmen Square. In England, the folk/punk singer, Billy Bragg, talked about writing a new libretto for the Ninth in English. Candaele was there when his version was performed before the Queen. In Japan, the Ninth is performed hundreds of times each December, sometimes with 5000 or 10,000 singers in the chorus, intent on transmitting a message of solidarity between all people. And in a new chapter for this edition, he tells the story of how a young East German woman--and famed conductor Leonard Bernstein--marked the falling of the Berlin Wall, aided by Beethoven. As "Journeys With Beethoven" reveals, the Ninth turns worlds inside out and upside down.

In Part II of the book, Greg Mitchell-who as senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy magazine helped create the first major article about Bruce Springsteen-describes his own journey to Beethoven and his pursuit of all things Ludwig during the past several years via CDs, films, books, lectures, and what he calls the "new LvB delivery systems" music downloads, YouTube videos, blogs, Web forums, Twitter feeds.

He also takes us to some of the dozens of recent concerts he's attended throughout the northeast United States and in London. He poses questions to experts such as Beethoven biographer Edmund Morris and author Tim Page, besides his very revealing interviews with Denk and Alessi. We learn how Beethoven changed the lives of famous writers and musicians, from William F. Buckley to Leonard Bernstein. Mitchell (who writes the popular new blog, Roll Over, Beethoven) even provides a guide to Beethoven films, from the silent era to "A Clockwork Orange" and "Immortal Beloved."

Greg Mitchell -- award-winning author, popular blogger and former editor of Editor & Publisher magazine -- probes the historic 2008 race for president, from the first primary to the aftermath of the election, but also focuses on lessons for 2012 and the future. In "Why Obama Won" he explores, with insight (and often humor), all of the key controversies, old media vs. new media, and the emergence of video and online organizing as major players. Political campaigns, and politics in America, he reveals, will never be the same. "Why Obama Won" has been featured on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, other national news outlets and hailed at leading political blogs Huffington Post, DailyKos and Talking Points Memo, among others. Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including "The Campaign of the Century" (winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize) and "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady," and the acclaimed "So Wrong for So Long," on Iraq and the media.

"Great " -- Will Bunch, author "Tear Down This Myth"

"A provocative book" -- Paul Street, author "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics"

In this timely book, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell investigate the mindsets of individuals involved in the death penalty -- including prison wardens, prosecutors, jurors, religious figures, governors, judges, and relatives of murder victims -- and offer a textured look at a system that perpetuates the longstanding American habit of violence.

Richly rewarding and meticulously researched, Who Owns Death? explores the history of the death penalty in the United States, from hanging to lethal injection, and considers what this search for more "humane" executions reveals about us as individuals and as a society... and what the future of the death penalty holds for us all.