On My Radar (Macmillan Edition)

Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan 
by Del Quinten Wilber
Henry Holt & Co./Macmillan
Hardcover

  From the publisher website:

A minute-by-minute account of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary.

  On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was just seventy days into his first term of office when John Hinckley Jr. opened fire outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, wounding the president, press secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a D.C. police officer. For years, few people knew the truth about how close the president came to dying, and no one has ever written a detailed narrative of that harrowing day. Now, drawing on exclusive new interviews and never-before-seen documents, photos, and videos, Del Quentin Wilber tells the electrifying story of a moment when the nation faced a terrifying crisis that it had experienced less than twenty years before, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Book website

Washington Post review by David Baldacci

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Politics & Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally-Funded Gated Community, and Lived to Tell the Tale
by Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, Jr. & David Fisher
Thomas Dunne Books/Macmillan
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

     An election is a war and "to the victor belongs the spoils."  As I learned so well, that's thre real democratic process.  After all, you'll never see a victorious politician tell his supporters, "I want to thank all of you who worked so hard for my election.  However, in the interest of good government, I've decided to give all the jobs to those people who voted against me."

     My name is Buddy Cianci.  I spent almost three decades as mayor of Providencce...before leaving for an enforced vacation in a federally funded gated community.

     When I first took office, Providence was a dying industrial city, and I helped turn it into one of the most desirable places to  live in America.  I did it by playing the game of hardball politics as well as it has ever been played.  My favorite Frank Sinatra lyricc is "I did it my way," because that's the only way a mayor can run a city.  As I used to tell my staff, "When you spend your weekends kissing elderly women with mustaches, you can make the decisions."

     If you want to know the truth about how politics is played, you picked the right book.  This is the behind-the-locked-door story of how politics in America really works.  It's take me a lifetime of successes and failures to write it.  It's all in these pages.  I hve been called many things in my career: I've been "America's Most Innovative Mayor," a "colorful character," and a convicted felon.  But no one has ever called me shy.

Kirkus Reviews on Politics & Pasta

Seattle Post-Intellligencer on Politics & Pasta

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The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Crooked Pols, Money-laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys,  and the Informant who Brought It All Down
by Ted Sherman & Josh Margolin
St. Martins Press/Macmillan
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In the summer of 2009 the blog Gawker stated “Everybody in New Jersey Was Arrested Yesterday.” Now for the first time, the real story behind the biggest corruption bust in New Jersey’s notoriously corrupt history.
Among the forty-four people arrested in July 2009 were three mayors, five Orthodox rabbis, two state legislators, and the flamboyant deputy mayor of Jersey City, Leona Beldini, once a stripper using the stage name “Hope Diamond.” At the center of it all was a dubious character named Solomon Dwek, who perpetrated a $50 million Ponzi scheme before copping a plea and wearing a wire as a secret FBI undercover informant, setting up friends, partners, rabbis, and dozens of politicians. Mr. Dwek played his role like an extra in a mob movie. On surveillance tape, he repeatedly referred to his fraudulent “schnookie deals,” which is Yiddish for, well, schnook. Full of impossible-to-make-up detail and fresh revelations from the continuing trials and investigations, this book—the inside, untold account of a federal sting operation that moves from the streets of Brooklyn to the diners of Jersey City, and all the way to Israel—is a wonderful tour de force of investigative journalism by the reporting team that broke this amazing story.

 Book website

Kirkus Reviews on The Jersey Sting