Chosen as a top ten finalist for The National Book Award for American Nonfiction in 2022. Listed by The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2022. Selected by TIME as one of the hundred "Must Read" books of 2022. An "Editors' Choice" of The New York Times Book Review. Featured on NPR's Morning Edition, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Morning Joe and The Takeout on CBS News. A finalist for the Plutarch award for the year's best biography.
"A sense of promise lost and regained imbues this biography of a figure whose long career encompassed the ascendancy of liberalism, its decline under Reagan, and the country’s descent into today’s partisanship. Kennedy continually reached across the aisle even as he saw the era of coalition-building come to an end. Hobbled by his struggle to measure up to his brothers, and by the grim shadow of the Chappaquiddick incident, he was nonetheless a standard-bearer of the left who, in his last years, helped seed a newly resilient and forward-looking strain of liberalism. By tracing this life of tragedy, tenacity, and service, Farrell draws a complex portrait of a man who, like his family—and perhaps his nation—was `always running to keep ahead of the darkness.'” - The New Yorker.
Tip O' Neill and the Democratic Century
Selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2001. Awarded the D. B. Hardeman Prize by the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.
When most modern political personas seem to be slick and elusive images fashioned by outside interests and partisan spinmasters, O'Neill's legacy endures as a champion of the common man who never forgot where he came from. A garrulous legislative titan and rogue, he used the force of his personality to persuade his colleagues to work with him at a time when the government's role as a protector of society was changing dramatically.
"John Aloysius Farrell's long, detailed and fascinating book is more than the definitive biography of a flawed but startlingly successful old-fashioned political leader. It's also a guided tour through American governmental history from the beginning of the New Deal through the Reagan years.....An entertaining book and a valuable history of the fifty years that have changed America, probably forever." -- Mario Cuomo, New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Best-Seller. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Listed by The Washington Post as one of its hundred Notable Books of 2017. A National Public Radio Best Book of 2017. A New York Time Critics Favorite Book of 2017.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Biography of 2011 and listed by The NY Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2011.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Clarence Darrow lived to take on big, lost, unpopular causes. Murderers. Socialists. Anarchists. The innocent and guilty. Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned is the first full documented life of our greatest defense attorney, who championed the common man and forged the heroic archetype of the American lawyer.
"People want heroes. But history demands truth. This gritty biography demystifies a deeply flawed legal hero, who 'almost assuredly' bribed jurors and witnesses in order to level the playing field against`the rich and powerful.' Darrow was a giant of his corrupt times. His biography is a must read for all Americans who care about both the means and ends of justice!" —Alan M. Dershowitz
