Norman Ornstein

The American people are disgusted with the U.S. Congress. In 2014, public approval of the "first branch" of government reached a forty-year low, its popularity ranking well below Nixon during the Watergate years and BP during the oil spill. Congress has been producing legislation at a historically anemic rate, while many of the nation's most immedi...

Jonathan Cohn's The Ten Year War is the definitive account of the battle over Obamacare, based on interviews with sources who were in the room, from the nation's foremost healthcare journalist. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as "Obamacare," was the most sweeping and consequential piece of legislation to become law in modern American hi...

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil WarIn The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legi...

This well-researched and highly critical examination of the state of our mental health system by the industry's most relentless critic presents a new and controversial explanation as to why--in spite of spending $147 billion annually--140,000 seriously mentally ill are homeless, 390,000 are incarcerated, and even educated, tenacious, and caring peo...

The sharp images and elegant lines of Judith Bowles' collection do indeed seem to come from some hidden origin, the fusion of eye and ear and hand that results in this poet's stunning craft....

Poet Judith Bowles gathers in this debut collection a harvest of observations on illuminated spaces, made so by the act of paying close attention....

An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate? As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race -- and ...

“The incomparable and mysterious Sandy Koufax is revealed…. This is an absorbing book, beautifully written.” —Wall Street Journal “Leavy has hit it out of the park…A lot more than a biography. It’s a consideration of how we create our heroes, and how this hero’s self perception distinguishes him from nearly every other great athlete in living memor...

At the height of WWI, historys most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not th...

In this groundbreaking biography, David Maraniss captures all of football great Vince Lombardi: the myth, the man, his game, and his God.More than any other sports figure, Vince Lombardi transformed football into a metaphor of the American experience. The son of an Italian immigrant butcher, Lombardi toiled for twenty frustrating years as a high sc...

A psychiatrist and award-winning documentarian sheds light on the mental health care crisis in the U.S.When Dr. Kenneth Rosenberg trained as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s, the state mental hospitals, which had reached peak occupancy in the '50s, were being closed at an alarming rate, with many patients having nowhere to go. There has never been ...