A celebrated political analyst’s exuberant and incisive coverage of the 2008 election—the longest, costliest, most surprising, and most intense presidential campaign in American history.

Hendrik Hertzberg witnessed the transformation of the Democratic Party, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama, and other seismic shifts in our national political consciousness while reporting on the 2008 presidential election for the New Yorker. ¡Obámanos!—the book title comes from a road sign Hertzberg spotted in New Mexico a few weeks after the election, a favorite example of what he calls “an artifact of Obamalove”—is adapted from Hertzberg’s “Talk of the Town” column and the informal blog he kept on his magazine’s Web site, and also includes an extensive new introductory essay by the author.

Hertzberg’s voice combines sharp observation, historical perspective, analytic power, and often funny polemic. He brings all these qualities to his chronicle of one of the most exciting and intense campaigns in the nation’s history, sharing how most Americans—including the New Yorker editors—came to identify a junior senator from Illinois as “a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe.”

Hertzberg—whose Obama coverage goes all the way back to the electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic convention—follows the central political players and rising stars while also looking at the issues that emerged as critical during the debates: health care, the Iraq war, and our economic crisis. Through his documentation and analysis of the campaign’s defining moments, we come to understand the current political landscape in a whole new way.

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The architect of the Obama campaign reveals how it all happened—and why its lessons are not limited to politics.

David Plouffe led not only the effort that put Barack Obama in the White House, he also changed the face of politics forever and reenergized the idea of democracy itself. The Audacity to Win is his story of that groundbreaking achievement, taking readers inside the remarkable 2008 campaign.

For two years Plouffe worked side by side with Obama, charting the course of the campaign. His is the ultimate insider’s tale, revealing both the strategies that delivered Obama to office and how the candidate and campaign handled moments of great challenge and opportunity. Moving from the deliberations about whether to run at all, through the epic primary battle with Hillary Clinton and the general election against John McCain, Plouffe showcases the high-wire gamesmanship that fascinated pundits and the drama and intrigue that captivated a nation.

The Audacity to Win chronicles the arrival of a new moment in American life as digital technology and grassroots organization converge, and the exciting possibilities revealed by a campaign that in many ways functioned as a $1 billion start-up with laserlike focus and discipline. In this extraordinary book, Plouffe unfolds one of the most important political stories of our time, one whose lessons reach to the greatest heights of what we dream about for our country and ourselves.

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How the historic presidential election of 1912—and the values of the Progressive Party and its candidate Theodore Roosevelt—led to the equally historic election of Barack Obama almost a century later.

Led by Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party made the 1912 campaign a passionate contest for the soul of the American people. Promoting an ambitious program of economic, social, and political reform that posed profound challenges to constitutional government, Roosevelt and his supporters provoked an extraordinary debate about the future of the country. Sidney M. Milkis revisits this emotionally charged contest to show how a party seemingly consumed by its leader’s ambition dominated the election and left an enduring legacy that set in motion the rise of mass democracy and the expansion of national administrative power.

Milkis depicts the Progressive Party as a collective enterprise of activists who pursued a program of reform dedicated to direct democracy, social justice, and a balance between rights and civic duty. These reformers hoped to create a new concept of citizenship that would fulfill the lofty aspirations of “we the people” in a quest for a “more perfect union”—a quest hampered by fierce infighting over civil rights and antitrust policy.

As Milkis reveals, the party’s faith in a more plebiscitary form of democracy would ultimately rob it of the very organization it needed in order to survive after Roosevelt. Yet the Progressive Party’s program of social reform and “direct democracy” has reverberated through American politics—especially in 2008, with Barack Obama appealing to similar instincts. By probing the deep historical roots of contemporary developments in American politics, Milkis shows how Progressivism continues to shape American politics.

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How American, British, and European policies have conspired to keep Africa hungry—and a plan for how this 21st-century famine can finally be overcome.

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the “Green Revolution” succeeded in South America and Asia, it never reached Africa. More than nine million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year—most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

In the West we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European self-interest and neglect have left Africa unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to stop famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

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An unsparing, tragic novel of the lost American dream—and of the redemptive power of love and friendship.

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to train yards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.

Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.

Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

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A challenging, controversial, and highly readable argument that the greenest community in the United States is New York City.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, wastelands of concrete, garbage, diesel fumes, and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, David Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in per capita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

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The cataclysmic changes in the lives of American women over the past fifty years—a story New York Times columnist Gail Collins was born to tell.

Picking up where her critically acclaimed 2003 book, America’s Women, left off, Gail Collins explores the enormous strides—and the rare setbacks—that women have experienced since 1960. “Hell yes, we have a quota [7 percent]” said a medical school dean in 1961. “We do keep women out, when we can.” At a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, Collins reports, “they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren’t.” Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs. In 1960, two-thirds of women 18–60 surveyed by Gallup didn’t approve of the idea of a female president, and it wasn’t until 2008 that Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to win a presidential primary.

Collins’s interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the ’60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room, and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers’ cigars on the men-only “Executive Flight” from New York to Chicago.

A comprehensive mix of oral history and keen research, When Everything Changed is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for.

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A lively exposé of the people responsible for our financial crisis, from Wall Street executives to the politicians who let it happen.

Over the past quarter century, we have lived through the greatest looting of wealth in human history. While billions of dollars streamed into the pockets of a few elites in the corporate and economic class, the vast majority of citizens have lived through a period of falling wages, disappearing pensions, and dwindling bank accounts that led to the personal debt crisis at the root of the current financial meltdown. This “audacity of greed” was legally blessed by the ethos of the “free market,” a phony marketing phrase that covered up the fleecing of the American public.

In The Audacity of Greed, Jonathan Tasini examines the reasons and exposes the people responsible for the looting of America, from the Wall Streeters who funded their lavish lifestyles at the public’s expense to the politicians who stood by and watched it happen. Tasini argues that we need a cultural and philosophical revolution that punctures the fable of market fundamentalism and values the contributions made by ordinary Americans throughout the economy.

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“…the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere.” - Jasper Johns

“1959: The Year Everything Changed” is the latest book from Fred Kaplan, Slate contributor and the author of another PBC pick “The Daydream Believers.” Kaplan covers pivotal events, from Naked Lunch to Vietnam, and their importance in shaping the world as it exists today.

This video is part three in a three part series (part 1, part 2).  Kaplan tells us about the flood tide of freedoms and its affect on the art of that year, particularly about how the blurring between art and life has change the way we live our lives today.

Watch the video on YouTube HD!

“No one in America can know what will happen.” - Allen Ginsberg

“1959: The Year Everything Changed” is the latest book from Fred Kaplan, Slate contributor and the author of another PBC pick “The Daydream Believers.” Kaplan covers pivotal events, from the Space Race to abstract art, and their importance in shaping the world as it exists today.

This video is part two in a three part series (the first video can be found here). Kaplan talks to PBC about what happened in 1959 to flip societal norms on their heads.  Tune in next week to hear about the leaps in artistic expression of that year!

Watch the video on YouTube HD!