The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House

Chuck Todd (Get this book)
Todd, the newly minted "Meet the Press"host and former NBC chief White House correspondent, provides an even-handed, concise, and thorough account of President Obama's first six years in the Oval Office. Todd frames his perspective with his choice of title President Obama "came to Washington on the strength of being a stranger to the city and to the political elites, but it hasn't always served him well." He covers in great detail the die-hard obstructionism, exemplified in Sen. Mitch McConnell's proclamation that his priority was to deny Obama a second term, that has characterized the Republican response to the president's agenda. There isn't a lot here that will be news to readers who follow politics closely no Bob Woodward type revelations but the thoughtful organization of material make this as good a summation of Obama's successes and failures, and the reasons for them, as anything else out there.--Publisher's Weekly

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution

Richard Whittle (Get this book)
They may soon be delivering this book to you, but for now, drones are anything but your friends. Put a laser, a cannon and some Hellfire missiles into an unmanned aircraft, and you have a potent killing machine. The impulse to create the unmanned drone came from an Israeli lab in response to a quite specific problem: namely, Soviet rockets with multistage radars aimed at Israeli jets by Syrian and Egyptian fighters. There's plenty of geekery befitting a Tom Clancy novel to keep readers entertained, with Whittle occasionally sliding into jargon-y prose. Such longueurs aside, Whittle's account comes to a pointed conclusion: Drone technology has already changed how we die, but what remains to be seen is how it "may change the way people live." For students of technological history and political wrangling alike, the book is endlessly interesting and full of implication.--Kirkus