David Remnick is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications. Mr. Remnick received a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his first book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. He was a reporter for The Washington Post for ten years, including four years as Moscow correspondent. A graduate of Princeton University, and former visiting fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Remnick lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Readers know from his now classic Lenin's Tomb that Remnick is a superb portraitist who can bring his subjects to life and reveal them in such surprising ways as to justify comparison to Dickens, Balzac, or Proust. In this collection, Remnick's gift for character is sharper than ever, whether he writes about Gary Hart stumbling through life after Donna Rice or Mario Cuomo, who now presides over a Saturday morning radio talk show, fielding questions from crackpots, or about Michael Jordan's awesome return to the Chicago Bulls -- or Reggie Jackson's last times at bat.
Remnick's portraits of such disparate characters as Alger Hiss and Ralph Ellison, Richard Nixon and Elaine Pagels, Gerry Adams and Marion Barry are unified by this extraordinary ability to create a living character, so that the pieces in this book, taken together, constitute a splendid pageant of the representative characters of our time.