"The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--Peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure...

Conservative columnist Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high -- in wealth, freedom, and social stability -- and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell describes the political turning points of the past half century, taking readers on a roller-coaster ride...

"If you were asked when America became polarized, your answer would likely depend on your age: you might say during Barack Obama's presidency, or with the post- 9/11 war on terror, or the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, or the 'Reagan Revolution' and the rise of the New Right. For leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, it all starts in 1974. In that one year, the nation was rocked by one major event after another: the Watergate...

"Bobby Kennedy was a personal hero to a multitude of Americans. As the train carrying his body headed to Washington, whites and blacks alike stood along the tracks, saluting him. They loved him as a fellow patriot who believed a great country could also be a good one. Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC's Hardball, has discovered what made him who he was. By tracing Kennedy's life from early boyhood, he's found the man's moral roots. He's answered the...

"President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest--fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered. Yet even as Biden's life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune....

"The epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedy--an immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality. Edward M. Kennedy was never expected to succeed. The youngest of nine, he lacked his brothers' natural gifts and easy grace. Yet after winning election to the Senate at the tender age of thirty, he became the most consequential legislator of his lifetime,...