Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism

The Bully Pulpit

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the acclaimed multi-million copy bestseller Team of Rivals, filmed by Spielberg as Lincoln, turns to the birth of America's Progressive Era - that heady, optimistic time when the 20th Century is fresh. Reform is in the air, and it is time to take on the robber barons and corrupt politicians who have brought the country to its knees. 
 
The story is told through the close friendship between two Presidents: Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and his handpicked successor William Howard Taft (1909-1913). The decades-long intimacy strengthens both men as they reform America, breaking up monopolies, protecting the rights of labour, banning unsafe drugs and closing sweatshops. 
 
Also at the heart of the story are the original 'muckrakers' - a brilliant group of investigative journalists at the celebrated magazine McClure's. They publish popular exposes of fraudulent railroads and millionaire senators, aiding Roosevelt in his quest for change and fairness. 
 
As Roosevelt, Taft and the muckrakers confront corruption and expose exploitation, America is reborn.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author of the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. She won the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II and is also the author of the bestsellers Wait Till Next Year, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.

Lessons from the Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson for Turbulent Times

Leadership

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Leadership written and read by Doris Kearns Goodwin, with additional narration from Beau Bridges, David Morse, Jay O. Sanders and Richard Thomas. 
 
Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? 
 
In Leadership Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied - Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson - to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entry into public life, when their paths were filled with confusion, hope, and fear, we can share their struggles and follow their development into leaders. 
 
Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to forever shatter their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. 
 
No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities and temperament, they shared a fierce ambition, a hunger to succeed beyond expectations. All four, at their best, were guided by a sense of moral purpose that led them at moments of great challenge to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. 
 
This seminal work provides a roadmap for aspiring and established leaders. In today's polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of fracture and fear take on a singular urgency. 
 
 
'Well-researched and well-written ... Superb' Professor Andrew Roberts, author, Churchill: Walking with Destiny 
 
'A marvelous banquet with four great presidents who provide lessons for all. Pull up a chair' Warren Buffett

A masterwork on how good leaders become great leaders.  A culminating work of a true intellectual artist

Jim Collins, author Good to Great, co-author Built to Last

A marvelous banquet with four leaders whose lives provide lessons for all. Pull up a chair

Team of Rivals was a huge bestseller . . . this book may do even better. It is a safe bet that Leadership will soon sit on the nightstand of every chief executive officer in the land and will be avidly read by the legion of ambitious young people who want their jobs

Colourful, fun and illuminating...a master storyteller

I have not enjoyed a history book as much for years

What Doris Kearns Goodwin brings to this book -- above all her other attributes -- is a true sense of wisdom. A lifetime of writing important and thought-provoking books means that she has thought deeply on the crucial subject of leadership, and about the way that lessons learned in the political and military spheres might translate into the business and social ones. The profundity of her thought on these issues is evident on every well-researched and well-written page. Superb.

Professor Andrew Roberts, author, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

This is a wonderful book, which illuminates and entertains. In analysing the leadership qualities of four very different presidents, Doris Kearns Goodwin underlines how these attributes are almost wholly missing from the political equipment of the present incumbent of the Oval Office.

Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador to the United States

Business students invariably ask me: 'With what historical figure would you like to have lunch?' Doris Kearns Goodwin has prepared a marvelous banquet with four great presidents who provide lessons for all. Pull up a chair

Doris Goodwin is the grand master of presidential biography. Now, in this marvelous synthesis, Goodwin deploys her deep knowledge of four towering individuals-Lincoln, TR, FDR, and LBJ-to create a masterwork on how good leaders become great leaders. She shows how burning personal ambition can be elevated into driving ambition for a cause greater than self, how egotism can be transformed into humility born of crushing setbacks, and how fierce individual resolve can be transferred into collective will to do what must be done. Riveting, uplifting, and incisive, Leadership is a culminating work of a true intellectual artist

It is to Goodwin's credit that she teases out the variety and peculiarities among the four presidents . . . she renders her characters with a depth and intricacy that not all academic historians seek to attain. We can only hope that a few of Goodwin's many readers will find in her subjects' examples a margin of inspiration

A timely study of what makes a great President . . . Few are better placed to explain the current vacuum, and predict what might fill it, than Doris Kearns Goodwin. The 75-year-old swam with Lyndon Johnson at his ranch, worked with Steven Spielberg on Lincoln and dined with Barack Obama at the White House. It is not, as the title implies, an opportunistic entry into the ever-expanding Trump canon. She began work on it five years ago . . . She considers what lessons they offer for transformational crisis management, turnaround and visionary leadership, but sugars the pill with telling details and funny anecdotes

Pulitzer- and Carnegie Medal-winning historian Goodwin draws on 50 years of scholarship in this strong and resonant addition to the literature of the presidency . . . extremely relevant

Remarkable ... comprehensive, human, and engaging, clearly the results of long study.

An inspiring guide to the very best of human endeavour - a book filled with well-told stories and lessons

Henry Mance, Political correspondent, Financial Times

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin demonstrates how leaders are made, not born, as she thoughtfully explores the highs and lows of four U.S. presidents who faced moments of horrific national crisis. Goodwin's clean, assured sentences set the stage as each future president discovers within himself the desire to enter politics, the calamitous blows that knocked each one down, and how they tackled the struggles that tore at the sinews of the country. Most fascinating is Goodwin's revelations about how very differently Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson approached not only their political careers but how they developed the character traits that helped them see-or make-a path toward a critical response that many others disagreed with. Lincoln's delivery of the Emancipation Proclamation, Theodore Roosevelt's handling of labor strikes, FDR's battle against the Great Depression in his first 100 days, and Johnson's prioritization of civil rights while a nation mourned were actions that could have ripped the country further apart but eventually bound it together and strengthened its democratic foundations. The rare weakness within Leadership: In Turbulent Times is the outlining of specific qualities, such as "Take the measure of the man" and "Set a deadline and drive full-bore to meet it," that are meant to distill leadership wisdom into bullet points, like contemporary business books. Goodwin's strength is in the rich context she provides as she shows that great leaders develop in dissimilar ways but ultimately have a vision they reach for and rely on when times are at their most turbulent.

Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review (An Amazon.com Best Book of September 2018)

Leadership should help us raise our expectations of our national leaders, our country and ourselves

She writes easily and attractively; the reader is carried along effortlessly with the narrative sweep of her prose . . . engrossing . . . it is impossible not to admire the skill with which Goodwin tells four absolutely riveting stories

She is the most fluent, most wide-ranging of modern presidential chroniclers . . . compelling. There is much in Leadership that offers lessons, even consolations that apply universally. Kearns Goodwin shows they offer lessons that can be embraced by the businessman, the aspiring politician and the striving individual

Riveting . . . Goodwin appraises in illuminating detail

A fabulously engrossing, exciting narrative in the grand old style ... overflowing with colour and character

'A marvelous banquet with four great presidents who provide lessons for all' Warren Buffett 
 
In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration of the origin, uncertain growth, and exercise of fully developed leadership. 
 
Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? 
 
In Leadership Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied - Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson - to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entry into public life, when their paths were filled with confusion, hope, and fear, we can share their struggles and follow their development into leaders. 
 
Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to forever shatter their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fit to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. 
 
No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities and temperament, they shared a fierce ambition, a hunger to succeed beyond expectations. All four, at their best, were guided by a sense of moral purpose that led them at moments of great challenge to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. 
 
This seminal work provides a roadmap for aspiring and established leaders. In today's polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of fracture and fear take on a singular urgency. 
 
'A masterwork on how good leaders become great leaders' Jim Collins

Doris Kearns Goodwin's magnum opus tackles the big leadership questions: are leaders born or made? Do the times make the leader or does the leader make the times? 
 
In Leadership Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied - Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson - to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entry into public life, when their paths were filled with confusion, hope, and fear, we can share their struggles and follow their development into leaders. 
 
 This seminal work provides a road-map for aspiring and established leaders. In today's polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of fracture and fear take on a singular urgency.

The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Team of Rivals

The bestselling and prize-winning study of one of the most legendary American Presidents in history, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin is the book that inspired Barack Obama in his presidency. 
 
When Barack Obama was asked which book he could not live without in the White House, his answer was instant: Team of Rivals. This monumental and brilliant work has given Obama the model for his presidency, showing how Abraham Lincoln saved America by appointing his fiercest rival to key cabinet positions. As well as a thrilling piece of narrative history, it's an inspiring study of one of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen. 
 
'A wonderful book . . . a remarkable study in leadership' Barack Obama 
 
'A portrait of Lincoln as a virtuosic politician and managerial genius' The New York Times 
 
'I have not enjoyed a history book as much for years' Robert Harris 
 
 
Doris Kearns Goodwin is the doyenne of US presidential historians, and one of the most acclaimed non-fiction authors in the world. Her works include Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995.

A wonderful book ... a remarkable study in leadership

The most uplifting book that I have read in the last two decades. Sensational

A  fabulously engrossing, exciting narrative in the grand old style ... overflowing with colour and character

A brilliant book ... I couldn't get enough of it

Goodwin's narrative abilities are on full display here. A portrait of Lincoln as a virtuosic politician and managerial genius

In this monumental multiple biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin studies Abraham Lincoln's mastery of men. She shows how he saved Civil War-torn America by appointing his fiercest rivals to key cabinet positions, making them help achieve his vision for peace. As well as a thrilling piece of narrative history, it's an inspiring study of one of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen. A book to bury yourself in.