Ocean State Libraries

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of...

O'Reilly offers a detailed examination of how the decisions President Obama is making, the programs he is championing, and the support and opposition he is getting from others will ultimately impact everyday Americans. He backs up his analyses with behind-the-scenes information culled from campaign interviews with Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, as well as details of his confrontations with Congressman Barney Frank and others.

"'We were eight years in power' was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates...

From two of the best political reporters in the country comes the gripping inside story of the historic 2008 presidential election.

"In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein was just scraping by in DC when a posting on Craigslist landed her, improbably, in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama's stenographers. For five years, Beck was a part of the elite team of men and women who accompanied the president wherever he went, recorder and mic in hand. She got to know everyone from the White House butler to the secret servicemen, advance team, speechwriters, photographers, and press secretaries,...

Pulitzer Prize winning humanitarian Samantha Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?" In this memoir, Power transports us from her childhood in Dublin to the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the White House Situation Room and the world of high-stakes diplomacy. In 2005, her critiques of U.S. foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on...

"Delves into [what Klein sees as] the rocky relationship between the Obamas and the Clintons ... [positing] just how deep the rivalry between the Obamas and the Clintons runs, with details on closed-door meetings buttressed by hundreds of interviews"--Amazon.com.

"The former chief speechwriter for President Obama provides an account of ten days in his presidency in June 2015 in the shadow of a racist massacre in Charleston and two impending Supreme Court decisions."--

For nearly ten years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration, first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President's Daily Brief, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moments of the presidency. Now...