The March 10, 2008, disclosure that Governor Eliot Spitzer had patronized prostitutes from the Emperors Club VIP sex ring shocked New Yorkers and his admirers around the world, who had celebrated Spitzer as the "Sheriff of Wall Street" and a likely future U.S. president. Ironically, one man's disillusionment with Spitzer had begun to disappear fifteen hours earlier, when Spitzer confessed what the rest of the world would soon learn in a media storm...

When COVID-19 hit the United States, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was thrust onto the national stage, hailed around the globe for his leadership. Alongside him every step of the way, Melissa DeRosa quickly became a household name. In her riveting memoir, DeRosa details her journey as a young woman in politics rising to the highest levels of government, writing with raw honesty and vulnerability about the personal challenges she faced--a failing...

Saladin Ambar's American Cicero traces Cuomo's rise from the rough-and-tumble world of New York City politics to liberal champion, and a central question threads throughout the narrative: was he a symbol of liberalism's long decline in twentieth-century American politics, or a prophet in the wilderness, heralding the rise of a new progressivism? Moving from his youth in an immigrant neighborhood in Queens to his final years in Albany, Ambar argues...