Compiled by Jamie H. Vaught
Updated October 21, 2024
--A Crown That Lasts: You Are Not Your Label by Demi Leigh Tebow (W Publishing Group, $29.99) is a memoir written by former Miss Universe and Miss South Africa. In the 254-page hardcover, the author confesses the danger of tying our identities to our accomplishments. She weaves her fascinating story together with the insights she’s learned along the way while walking you through the amazing journey of her evolving confidence. She writes the purpose of our lives is to love and serve God and others. Her husband is former football star Tim Tebow.
--Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boots (Liveright, $45) is an impressive 836-page biography about our 40th president, Ronald Reagan. The hardcover tells the the untold story of Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over 100 of the president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, the author explains how Reagan was an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. A former movie actor and a two-term governor of California, Reagan was a master communicator. The author is a columnist for the Washington Post, a global affairs analyst for CNN, and the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
--Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World by Casey Michel (St. Martin’s Press, $30) is a dramatic and investigative story about our foreign lobbying industry and its threat to end democracy. For years, one group of Americans worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the world. In the process, they've not only entrenched dictatorships and spread corrupted networks, but they've secretly guided the U.S. policy without the rest of us even being aware. And now, some of them have begun turning their sights on the U.S. democracy itself. The author is a writer and director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation. His first book. American Kleptocracy, was named by The Economist as one of the “best books to read to understand financial crimes.”
--What Would Reagan Do? Life Lessons from the Last Great President by Chris Christie with Ellis Henican (Threshold Editions, $30) is a fresh look at President Reagan’s character-driven political instincts and deeply impactful relationships across party lines. A former governor of New Jersey and a presidential candidate, the author shows how the life lessons of the beloved president are more alive than ever—and can restore American leadership again with the country badly divided as two major parties are on a bitter collision course.
--Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy by David Rohde (W.W. Norton & Company, $29.99) investigates the strategies President Donald Trump systematically used to turn the nation's two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons. The author also reveals how, during the Joe Biden years, Justice Department's non-partisan 1970s norms that Attorney General Merrick Garland reinforced inadvertently helped Trump, and could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by the 2024 election. The 267-page hardcover exposes how ill-suited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power. The rise of hyper-partisanship and the Trump and Biden presidencies have uncovered core flaws in American constitutional democracy that Trump would exploit in a second term. The author is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Price.
--Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) by Salman Khan (Viking, $30) explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, and offers a road map for teachers, parents and students to navigate this exciting and sometimes intimidating new world. A pioneer in the field of education technology, Khan examines the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools and how they will revolutionize the way we learn and teach. The author, who is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, emphasizes that embracing AI in education is not about replacing human interaction but enhancing it with customized and accessible learning tools that encourage creative problem-solving skills and prepare students for an increasingly digital world. Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization that provides a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
--The Case for Trump: 2024 Edition by Victor Davis Hanson (Basic Books, $19.99) is an updated edition with a comprehensive new introduction. The 465-page paperback attempts to explain how a celebrity businessman with no political or military experience prevailed over 16 well-qualified Republican rivals, a Democrat with a quarter-billion-dollar war chest, and a hostile media and Washington establishment to become an extremely successful president. An award-winning historian and political commentator, the author is a senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno.
--Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig (Penguin Press, $35) is an explosive investigation into the history of Donald Trump’s wealth, revealing how one of the country’s biggest business failures lied his way into the White House. Drawing on over 20 years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information, including the tax returns he tried to conceal, alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, the authors track Trump's financial rise and fall, and rise and fall again. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, the 519-page hardcover is a thorough examination spanning nearly a century, filled with scoops from Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, Atlantic City, and the set of The Apprentice. Buettner and Craig write for the New York Times as investigative reporters.
--Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Bold Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Kristen R. Ghodsee (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, $19.99) is a fascinating tour through the ages in search of the thinkers and communities that have dared to reimagine how we might better live our daily lives. Since the sixth century BC, humans have been dreaming up better ways to organize how we live together, pool our resources, raise our children, and determine who’s part of our families. Some of these experiments burned brightly for only a brief while, but others carry on today: from the Danish cohousing communities that share chores and deepen neighborly bonds, to matriarchal Colombian ecovillages where residents grow their own food; and from Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra “alloparents” to help raise children not their own, to China where planned micro districts ensure everything a busy household might need is nearby. The author is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
--All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C. Trump III (Gallery Books, $30) breaks his decades-log silence in his memoir and sheds a whole new light on the family name with never-before-told stories. The nephew of former President Donald Trump and the grandson of Fred Trump, the patriarch of the Trump family real-estate empire, Fred Trump III recounts for the first time what it was like growing up Trump: from his grandfather's family wealth to win-at-all cost dynamics between Donald Trump and his siblings that threatened the health and safety of Fred's son, who was diagnosed with developmental and intellectual disabilities. It’s a story of power, love, money, cruelty, and the unshakable bonds of family, played out underneath a glaring media spotlight.
--Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) is an examination of Gates -- one of the most powerful and fascinating figures of the past four decades -- and an eye-opening exploration of our national fixation on billionaires. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, academics, nonprofits, and those with insight into the Gates universe, the hardcover delves into Gates’ relationships with Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda French Gates, and others, to uncover the truths behind the public persona. The author is the finance editor of The New York Times.
Jamie H. Vaught, a longtime sports columnist in Kentucky, is the author of six books about UK basketball, including recently-published “Forever Crazy About The Cats: An Improbable Journey of a Kentucky Sportswriter Overcoming Adversity.” Now a retired college professor who taught at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Middlesboro., he is the editor and founder of KySportsStyle.com Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @KySportsStyle or reach him via email at KySportsStyle@gmail.com.
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