“A portrait of political campaigning that is more like what we hope than what we fear . . . a stout defense—indeed, the best I have read—of the Obama years.” —David Gergen, The New York Times Book Review NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER David Axelrod has always been a believer. Whether as a young journalist investigating city corruption, a campaign consultant guiding underdog candidates against entrenched orthodoxy, or as senior adviser to the president during one of the worst crises in American history, Axelrod held fast to his faith in the power of stories to unite diverse communities and ignite transformative political change. Now this legendary strategist, the mastermind behind Barack Obama’s historic election campaigns, shares a wealth of stories from his forty-year journey through the inner workings of American democracy. Believer is the tale of a political life well lived, of a man who never gave up on the deepest promises our country has to offer. The heart of Believer is Axelrod’s twenty-year friendship with Barack Obama, a warm partnership that inspired both men even as it propelled each to great heights. Taking a chance on an unlikely candidate for the U.S. Senate, Axelrod ultimately collaborated closely Obama on his political campaigns, and served as the invaluable strategist who contributed to the tremendous victories in 2008 and 2012. Switching careers again, Axelrod served as senior adviser to the president during one of the most challenging periods in national history: working at Obama’s side as he battled an economic disaster; navigated America through two wars; and fought to reform health care, the financial sector, and our gridlocked political institutions. In Believer, Axelrod offers a deeper and richer profile of this extraordinary figure—who in just four years vaulted from the Illinois State Senate to the Oval Office—from the perspective of one who was at his side every step of the way. Spanning forty years that include corruption and transformation, turmoil and progress, Believer takes readers behind the closed doors of politics even as it offers a thrilling call to democratic action. Axelrod’s Believer is a powerful and inspiring memoir enlivened by the charm and candor of one of the greatest political strategists in recent American history.

Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

Biographies & Memoirs

Axelrod, David

Historical

Penguin??Books

When the orphanage he called home burns to the ground, 14-year-old Leo and his three friends turn to larceny, using as their textbook Harry Houdini's The Right Way to Do Wrong: An Exposé of Successful Criminals for survival. Leo proves to be a most gifted pickpocket, but when he is cruelly betrayed by his gang, he abandons the life of crime to become the apprentice of a has-been magician named Barzini. With Houdini’s help, Barzini is staging a comeback, complete with an improved variation on the bullet catch trick made famous by his arch enemy, Chung Ling Soo. He wants more than to outshine his old rival; he is out for revenge. As Leo struggles to escape his dangerous past, he must confront the possibility that his new mentor may be even more dangerous. This spellbinding mystery chronicles the coming-of-age of a resourceful young man who must refashion his destiny amid murder and misadventure in the golden age of mystery.

The Bullet Catch: Murder by Misadventure

Teen & Young Adult

Axelrod, Amy

Historical Fiction

Holiday House

Having grown up amid the ravaged coalfields of Ohio, poet and writer David Axelrod felt oddly at home when, twenty years ago, he moved west and saw his first clear-cut forest. In Troubled Intimacies, Axelrod explores his life in the rural interior West, and the way in which surroundings, visible and invisible, shape our emotional and intellectual lives. In describing his life and the lives of his neighbors in eastern Oregon's Grande Ronde Valley, Axelrod raises hard questions about the relationship between humans and the western landscape--a relationship too often predicated on disastrous violence. In a series of powerful and provocative essays, he reveals the dissonance that exists between the mythical American West of perpetual expansion and reinvention, and the far more complex and troubled relations we actually experience as individuals and communities in the western U.S. In Troubled Intimacies, Axelrod addresses matters of faith, literature, and natural and human history, and shows how these pursuits shape our relationship to the larger world. In writing about everything from his uneasy apprenticeship to a legendary Montana poet and his life as a Jew in a deeply Christian town to his family's annual trips into the mountains to pick huckleberries, Axelrod shows the challenges and rewards of piecing together a meaningful life in the rural West. Troubled Intimacies records his struggles to find a home in the "wounded" western landscape, to "live here without a distracting desire for elsewhere, to feel not diminished but enriched by its wealth and variety, to achieve even a glimmer of vision or knowledge indigenous to this place."

Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West

Arts & Literature

Oregon State University Press

In The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence, David Axelrod recalls a balmy night in May 1970 when he vowed to allow no one and nothing he loves to pass from this life without praise, even if it meant praising the most bewildering losses. In each of these fourteen essays Axelrod delivers on that vow as he ranges across topics as diverse as marriage, Japanese poetry, Craftsman design, Old English riddles, racism, extinction, fatherhood, mountaineering, predatory mega-fauna, street fighting, trains, the Great Depression, and the effects of climate change—accretions of absence that haunt the writer and will likewise haunt readers. The essays in this collection grew from a ten-year period when the author found himself periodically living and working abroad, wondering why foreign landscapes haunted him more than the familiar landscapes of the inland Pacific Northwest he called home. Each place had a long history of habitation, but at home he was blind, unable to see past the surfaces of things. Axelrod examines many aspects of that phenomenon in these pages, framing surface realities and imagining the scale and scope of that surface, but also trying to sense what is absent or changed, and how, despite its absence, the unseen accretes to ever-greater densities and persists as something uncanny. Curious, alert, and keenly observant, these essays probe the boundaries between what is here and what is gone, what is present and what is past, in elegant prose. Readers familiar with Axelrod’s poetry will find a new facet of his lyrical gifts, while those encountering his work for the first time will be richly rewarded by the discovery of this Northwest literary talent.

The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New and Selected Poems

Poetry

Lynx House Press

Best Guide: Loreto is the definitive land and sea guide to Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Written for first-time visitors and residents alike, it contains information designed to enhance your experience of living, working, and playing in Loreto. Illustrated with maps, charts and superb photography from some of the best photographers in the world, Best Guide: Loreto is the most complete and up-to-date guidebook on Loreto and is brought to you by people who love Loreto and know it well. The book is printed with 100% recycled materials and the publisher will contribute 1% of gross sales to the nonprofit Loreto Bay Foundation.

Loreto: Baja California Sur, Mexico (Best Guides)

Travel

Axelrod,Alan

Bodansky, Aaron

Mexico

Best Guides

Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night-school courses and displaced “adult learners,” from concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona, What Next, Old Knife? is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history - personal and otherwise. Throughout this new collection of poems, David Axelrod struggles with how we learn and unlearn our humanity, imagining the ways in which individuals and whole societies live with and recover from moral catastrophe.The collection ends with a long choral poem, a visionary dialogue between the living and the dead who insist that language can resist nihilism, reclaim hope, and enact future accord.

What Next, Old Knife?: Poems

Lost Horse Press

David Axelrod’s new collection of poems, Folly, is perhaps his most personal, vivid and honest work to date. Taking Desderius Erasmus as his noble guide, Axelrod follows the road of folly, error and ignorance that constitute our common life. Along the way we meet Dostoyevsky while Nordic skiing, get a haircut, watch a divorced woman and her daughter fly kites, hold a crippled bird in our hands, consider the virtue of shovels and the perversity of old chainsaws, cross a river with Basho, and blow up an oven heating bagels. Striking notes of real praise alongside bewilderment, this new collection from the author of What Next Old Knife?, reminds us over and over of our privilege and reverence for this existence and our “dumb luck."

Folly: Poems

The poems in The Open Hand journey across the upper Rhine and Alps to contemporary West Jerusalem and far northern Europe, asking, "Where does the joy come from?" Whether addressing the accusation of a "libelous chain of causation" in medieval legend, a moment in an alley with a Syrian refugee, foxes in the Tiergarten, or a Paris side street where the disciple of a charismatic rabbi celebrates "the graven acts God forbade," these poems return us always to earthbound pleasures, stepping toward us to say, after many rehearsals, "stay, enjoy."

The Open Hand

Get Away!: Design Your Ideal Trip, Travel with Ease, and Reclaim Your Freedom

Planning a trip doesn’t have to be hard, and taking that trip doesn’t have to be stressful. Regardless of work commitments, family obligations, or finances, your travel dreams can become realities. Get Away! provides the confidence and step-by-step guidance you need to design a transformative travel experience, perfectly tailored to your preferences.\nLet expert world traveler David Axelrod equip you with the essential tools, checklists, and mindset to choose your destination with purpose, craft an airtight itinerary, book your flights with finesse, and kick pre-trip anxiety to the airport curb. Learn how to maximize your travel time and savor all the wonders you set out in search of and more. Return home invigorated, with clarity, perspective, and enduring memories. 
Don’t waste any more time planning a trip that doesn’t pan out or postponing taking one at all. Get Away! is your ultimate ticket to the world. Read it, and any travel experience you desire can be yours.

Travel Writing

Lioncrest Publishing

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Books by Axelrod, David