Susan Glasser – författare

Co-authored by the Chief White House correspondent at The New York Times and the Washington columnist at the The New Yorker, this is a biography any would-be power broker must own: the story of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III, the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world.In the latter half of the twentieth century, no Republican won the presidency without his help, and the men he counseled in the Oval Office--Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush--defined more than one generation of American life. Campaign manager, chief of staff, treasury secretary, and ultimately secretary of state, James A. Baker III understood better than anyone how to make Washington work and how to pull the levers of power at home and abroad.      A suave and profane Texas Democrat, Baker worked as a wealthy Houston lawyer until his best friend, George H. W. Bush, drew him into Republican politics. His first dramatic win was in 1976 as the delegate hunter who secured the Republican nomination for Ford against a challenge from Ronald Reagan. His next job, as Bush''s campaign manager four years later, maneuvered Bush onto the ticket with Reagan and Baker into the most powerful office in Washington other than the Oval Office: White House chief of staff.      In his years in the White House and in the cabinet, Baker was the avatar of a style of politics and governance that valued pragmatism and deal making over purity. He went from win to win--reforming the tax code, negotiating the first Middle East peace talks, managing the dissolution of the Soviet Union--until his capstone victory, as field marshal for the younger Bush''s Florida recount battle, helped divide the country forever. In today''s era of gridlock, The Man Who Ran Washington is an electrifying escape.

In the tradition of Hedrick Smith''s The Russians, Robert G. Kaiser''s Russia: The People and the Power, and David Remnick''s Lenin''s Tomb comes an eloquent and eye-opening chronicle of Vladimir Putin''s Russia, from this generation''s leading Moscow correspondents. With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin''s handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, a childhood hooligan turned KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, resolved to bring an end to the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to reveal the culmination of Project Putin, the secret plot to reconsolidate power in the Kremlin. During their four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through the key moments of his tenure that re-centralized power into his hands, from his decision to take over Russia''s only independent television network to the Moscow theater siege of 2002 to the "managed democracy" elections of 2003 and 2004 to the horrific slaughter of Beslan''s schoolchildren in 2004, recounting a four-year period that has changed the direction of modern Russia. But the authors also go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encountered -- both those who have prospered and those barely surviving -- and show how the political flux has shaped individual lives. Opening a window to a country on the brink, where behind the gleaming new shopping malls all things Soviet are chic again and even high school students wonder if Lenin was right after all, Kremlin Rising features the personal stories of Russians at all levels of society, including frightened army deserters, an imprisoned oil billionaire, Chechen villagers, a trendy Moscow restaurant king, a reluctant underwear salesman, and anguished AIDS patients in Siberia. With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putin''s insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling new revelations about Russia''s leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land that he is building. As the first major book on Russia in years, it is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the country and promises to shape the debate about Russia, its uncertain future, and its relationship with the United States.