A biography of America's greatest all-around athlete that "goes beyond the myth and into the guts of Thorpe's life, using extensive research, historical nuance, and bittersweet honesty" (Los Angeles Times), by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered. Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. Most famously, he won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw's New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind. But despite his awesome talent, Thorpe's life was a struggle against the odds. At Carlisle, he faced the racist assimilationist philosophy "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball, and his supposed allies turned away from him when their own reputations were at risk. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe survived, determined to shape his own destiny, his perseverance becoming another mark of his mythic stature. Path Lit by Lightning "[reveals] Thorpe as a man in full, whose life was characterized by both soaring triumph and grievous loss" (The Wall Street Journal).

On New Year's Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss now brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, " a book destined to become a modern classic. Much like his acclaimed biography of Vince Lombardi, "When Pride Still Mattered, " Maraniss uses his narrative sweep and meticulous detail to capture the myth and a real man.

Anyone who saw Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury, will never forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. During his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he won four batting titles and led his team to championships in 1960 and 1971, getting a hit in all fourteen World Series games in which he played. His career ended with three-thousand hits, the magical three-thousandth coming in his final at-bat, and he and the immortal Lou Gehrig are the only players to have the five-year waiting period waived so they could be enshrined in the Hall of Fame immediately after their deaths.

There is delightful baseball here, including thrilling accounts of the two World Series victories of Clemente's underdog Pittsburgh Pirates, but this is far more than just another baseball book. Roberto Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born near the canebrakes of rural Carolina, Puerto Rico, on August 18, 1934, at a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the United States, Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the major leagues. He was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson of the Spanish-speaking world, a ballplayer of determination, grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later generations and who now dominate the game.

The Clemente that Maraniss evokes was an idiosyncratic character who, unlike so many modern athletes, insisted that his responsibilities extended beyond the playing field. In his final years, his motto was that if you have a chance to help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth. Here, in the final chapters, after capturing Clemente's life and times, Maraniss retraces his final days, from the earthquake to the accident, using newly uncovered documents to reveal the corruption and negligence that led the unwitting hero on a mission of mercy toward his untimely death as an uninspected, overloaded plane plunged into the sea.

In the golden years of professional football, one team and one coach reigned supreme: the 1960's Green Bay Packers, and the fiery Vince Lombardi.
"Run to Daylight "is Lombardi's own diary of a week at the helm of that magnificent club. Together with legendary sports-journalist, W.C. Heinz, Lombardi takes us from the first review of game films on Monday right through the final gun on Sunday afternoon. We see the planning, the plotting, the practice and the pain as forty-plus men come together to form that precision unit that makes for winning football. Lombardi gives us his views on life, the game, coaching, success, family, and the famed "Lombardi Sweep."
Now, in this anniversary edition, with a special foreword by David Maraniss, we are once again reminded of the passion and power behind America's greatest game. Written in W.C. Heinz's inimitable style, "Run to Daylight " is part diary, part philosophy text, part coaches manual. Here, is professional football at its best.

From the author of "First in His Class," the definitive biography of Bill Clinton, this "New York Times" bestseller was hailed by critics as a groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him.
In "Barack Obama: The Story," David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.
The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama's white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future.
"Barack Obama: The Story" chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author's classic study of Bill Clinton, "First in His Class," this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

Here is the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties told through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967. "They Marched Into Sunlight" brings that tumultuous time back to life while exploring questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth, issues as relevant today as they were decades ago.
In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together the stories of three very different worlds: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. To understand what happens to the people in these interconnected stories is to understand America's anguish. Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the book describes the battles that evoked cultural and political conflicts that still reverberate.

More than any other sports figure, Vince Lombardi transformed football into a metaphor of the American experience. The son of an Italian immigrant butcher, Lombardi toiled for twenty frustrating years as a high school coach and then as an assistant at Fordham, West Point, and the New York Giants before his big break came at age forty-six with the chance to coach a struggling team in snowbound Wisconsin. His leadership of the Green Bay Packers to five world championships in nine seasons is the most storied period in NFL history. Lombardi became a living legend, a symbol to many of leadership, discipline, perseverance, and teamwork, and to others of an obsession with winning. In When Pride Still Mattered, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss captures the myth and the man, football, God, and country in a thrilling biography destined to become an American classic.

In Barack Obama, David Maraniss has written a sweeping narrative which reveals the real story of Obama's beginnings: child of a black man from Luoland and a white woman born in Kansas. He charts the fortunes of the two disparate families, polar opposites in every way, which produced these two extraordinary individuals, who met briefly in Hawaii, never cohabited, and married only to legitimize the child born of that union. At the heart of Obama's psyche and his political beliefs - and therefore his presidency - is his life-long struggle to understand the extreme duality of his identity. Maraniss explores his extraordinary journey from a mixed race boy raised by white grandparents in laid-back Hawaii to an African America with a burning political vision and vocation. Barack Obama contains a wealth of new material. Maraniss reveals here previously unpublished love letters written by Obama as a young man in a search of an identity: black or white, writer or a man who could lead. He also includes the journal entries of Obama's first significant (white) girlfriend, which chart their intense relationship and the moment when young Barack realized that he must leave everything behind him and set out for Chicago in order to 'become' an African American. The story wrought here is one of fierce ambition, survival, and love.

"INTO THE STORY "is the first collection of the work of David Maraniss, one of the most honored and versatile writers of his generation. The thirty-two stories here cover a rich array of topics, ranging from seminal moments in modern history to intimate personal reflections, each piece illuminated by the author's deep reporting and singular sensibility.

From the critically acclaimed and bestselling author David Maraniss, a groundbreaking book that weaves sports, politics, and history into a tour de force about the 1960 Rome Olympics, eighteen days of theater, suspense, victory, and defeat

David Maraniss draws compelling portraits of the athletes competing in Rome, including some of the most honored in Olympic history: decathlete Rafer Johnson, sprinter Wilma Rudolph, Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, and Louisville boxer Cassius Clay, who at eighteen seized the world stage for the first time, four years before he became Muhammad Ali.

Along with these unforgettable characters and dramatic contests, there was a deeper meaning to those late-summer days at the dawn of the sixties. Change was apparent everywhere. The world as we know it was coming into view.

Rome saw the first doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, the first athlete paid for wearing a certain brand of shoes. Old-boy notions of Olympic amateurism were crumbling and could never be taken seriously again. In the heat of the cold war, the city teemed with spies and rumors of defections. Every move was judged for its propaganda value. East and West Germans competed as a unified team less than a year before the Berlin Wall.There was dispute over the two Chinas. An independence movement was sweeping sub-Saharan Africa, with fourteen nations in the process of being born. There was increasing pressure to provide equal rights for blacks and women as they emerged from generations of discrimination.

Using the meticulous research and sweeping narrative style that have become his trademark, Maraniss reveals the rich palate of character, competition, and meaning that gave Rome 1960 its singular essence.

After losing the closest American election in years, Al Gore remains a fascinating political figure, a man both revered and reviled. Drawing on documents, letters, and interviews with more than three hundred people, including six lengthy conversations with the vice president, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima look closely at the forces that have shaped Gore's life and career to explore the man behind the contradictory public persona. Beginning with Gore's earliest years -- when this son of a senator was torn between elite Washington and rural Tennessee -- one is struck by the image of a young American prince burdened by expectations of his likely political fate. With a new afterword written after the election, The Prince of Tennessee depicts Gore as an intelligent and competent man whose struggles with self-doubt and insecurity made him one of our least understood presidential candidates.

PRIZEWINNING WASHINGTON POST JOURNALISTS REVEAL HOW REALITY GAGGED THE GINGRICH REVOLUTION

Speaker Newt Gingrich and his troops promised a revolution when they seized power in January 1995. The year that followed was one of the most fascinating and tumultuous in modern American history. After stunning early success with the Contract with America, the Republicans began to lose momentum; by year's end Gingrich was isolated and uncertain, and his closest allies were telling him to shut up.

Here is an unprecedented, fly-on-the-wall look at the successes, sellouts, and perhaps fatal mistakes of Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution. Based on the award-winning Washington Post series that documented the Republicans' day-to-day attempts to revolutionize the American government, "Tell Newt to Shut Up!" gets to the heart of the political process.

On New Year's Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss now brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, " a book destined to become a modern classic. Much like his acclaimed biography of Vince Lombardi, "When Pride Still Mattered, " Maraniss uses his narrative sweep and meticulous detail to capture the myth and a real man.

Anyone who saw Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury, will never forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. During his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he won four batting titles and led his team to championships in 1960 and 1971, getting a hit in all fourteen World Series games in which he played. His career ended with three-thousand hits, the magical three-thousandth coming in his final at-bat, and he and the immortal Lou Gehrig are the only players to have the five-year waiting period waived so they could be enshrined in the Hall of Fame immediately after their deaths.

There is delightful baseball here, including thrilling accounts of the two World Series victories of Clemente's underdog Pittsburgh Pirates, but this is far more than just another baseball book. Roberto Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born near the canebrakes of rural Carolina, Puerto Rico, on August 18, 1934, at a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the United States, Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the major leagues. He was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson of the Spanish-speaking world, a ballplayer of determination, grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later generations and who now dominate the game.

The Clemente that Maraniss evokes was an idiosyncratic character who, unlike so many modern athletes, insisted that his responsibilities extended beyond the playing field. In his final years, his motto was that if you have a chance to help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth. Here, in the final chapters, after capturing Clemente's life and times, Maraniss retraces his final days, from the earthquake to the accident, using newly uncovered documents to reveal the corruption and negligence that led the unwitting hero on a mission of mercy toward his untimely death as an uninspected, overloaded plane plunged into the sea.

Who exactly is Bill Clinton, and why was he, of all the brilliant and ambitious men in his generation, the first in his class to reach the White House? Drawing on hundreds of letters, documents, and interviews, David Maraniss explores the evolution of the personality of our forty-second president from his youth in Arkansas to his 1991 announcement that he would run for the nation's highest office. In this richly textured and balanced biography, Maraniss reveals a complex man full of great flaws and great talents. First in His Class is the definitive book on Bill Clinton.