Acclaimed writer, bestselling author, and founder of Salon magazine, David Talbot has brought us masterful and explosive headline-breaking stories for over 25 years with books like the New York Times bestsellers Brothers, The Devil’s Chessboard, and nationally recognized Season of the Witch. Now for the first time, journalist and historian David Talbot turns inward in this intimate journey through the life-changing year following his stroke, a year that turned his life upside down, and ultimately, saved him.

In his signature voice and with powerful storytelling, Talbot examines the physical, emotional, and psychological impact his stroke has had on his identity. Along the way Talbot offers readers insider stories on the wild early days of Internet journalism, insights into the new tech culture, the down and dirty of Hollywood, and much more. This is an illuminating, often humorous, portrait of how a health crisis can truly shift one’s perspective on life and purpose.

New York Times bestselling author David Talbot and New Yorker journalist Margaret Talbot illuminate “America’s second revolutionary generation” in this gripping history of one of the most dynamic eras of the twentieth century–brought to life through seven defining radical moments that offer vibrant parallels and lessons for today.

The political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s was perhaps one of the most tumultuous in this country’s history, shaped by the fight for civil rights, women’s liberation, Black power, and the end to the Vietnam War. In many ways, this second American revolution was a belated fulfillment of the betrayed promises of the first, striving to extend the full protections of the Bill of Rights to non-white, non-male, non-elite Americans excluded by the nation’s founders.

Based on exclusive interviews, original documents, and archival research, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the twentieth century radical movement: Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; Heather Booth and the Jane Collective, the first underground feminist abortion clinic; Vietnam War peace activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda; Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers; Craig Rodwell and the Gay Pride movement; Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Russell Means and the warriors of Wounded Knee; and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s politics of stardom. Margaret and David Talbot reveal the epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.

America is still absorbing–and reacting against–the revolutionary forces of this tumultuous period. The change these leaders enacted demanded much of American society and the human imagination. By the Light of Burning Dreams is an immersive and compelling chronicle of seven lighting rods of change and the generation that engraved itself in American narrative–and set the stage for those today, fighting to bend forward the arc of history.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful–and secretive–colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers.

America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials–including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials–Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.

Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA–which he used to further his public and private agendas–were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients–colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

An expose of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state–and the battle for America’s soul.