No figure in American public life has had such great expectations thrust upon him and fallen short of them so quickly. But Ted Kennedy, the gregarious, pudgy, and least academically successful of the Kennedy boys, became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation’s keeper of traditional liberalism.

As Peter S. Canellos and his team of Boston Globe reporters show in this intimate biography, Ted witnessed greater tragedy and suffered greater pressure than his siblings. He inherited a generation’s dreams and ambitions, and was expected to help confront his nation’s problems and to build a fairer society. But political rivals turned his all-too-human failings into a condemnation of his liberal politics. As the presidency eluded his grasp, Kennedy was finally free to become his own man. He transformed himself into a symbol of wisdom and perseverance.

Now, in two new chapters, Last Lion reveals how Kennedy battled cancer while helping Barack Obama bring about the biggest reform of health care in the nation’s history, and how he said good-bye to his family, friends, and enemies.

Perceptive and carefully reported, drawing from candid interviews with the Kennedy family, Last Lion captures magnificently the life, historic achievements, and personal redemption of Ted Kennedy, and offers a fresh assessment of his enduring legacy.

The “superb” (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.

They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom.

But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court.

At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US.

Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”–and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.

Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a “magnificent” (Douglas Brinkley) and “thoroughly researched” (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system’s most significant failures and most inspiring successes.