Chris Matthews would be the first to tell you he’s had a long-standing obsession with President John F. Kennedy. Even though he grew up in a Republican household, as a young man he found JFK to be the most interesting political figure of the time. His first book was Kennedy & Nixon. His latest book, Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero, goes right to the heart of the matter. In the preface, he writes that during all the decades since the 1963 assassination, his “fascination with the elusive spirit of John F. Kennedy has remained an abiding one.”

Matthews may be best known as a television personality. He hosts MSNBC’s Hardball and is an NBC political commentator. But his roots are in column writing, and his published books, so far, total six. He grew up in Philadelphia, went to college in Worcester, Massachusetts, served in the Peace Corps, was a Carter White House speechwriter, and for six years was a top aide to speaker of the House Tip O’Neill before jumping to newspapers and television.

We checked in to talk about the new book—but as in any conversation with Chris Matthews, the path was winding.

Photograph from Traci Nobles’ appearance on the Today show.

Traci Nobles, one of the women who had an online affair with former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, says she still plans to publish her tell-all, I Freinded You [sic], but it has been postponed until at least the end of the year. Earlier it was announced it would come out last month. She says she’s “struggling” right now—divorcing, jobless, suffering from endometriosis, and having to live off the man who will be her ex-husband. Nobles, 35, is a former cheerleading coach and Pilates instructor “with two college degrees, in exercise science and health promotion and education.” We caught up with her to learn more about the book, why she is publishing it, and what it has to say that hasn’t already been made public.

Three top Washington thinkers have new books, all much more readable than their physical weight and subject matter suggest. Daniel Yergin engagingly weaves together the economy and the war on terror in a way few historians have done. Thomas L. Friedman, with Michael Mandelbaum, argues that the US is failing to confront the challenges of globalization. Christopher Hitchens returns with about 100 of his best recent essays. Here’s a comparison of these intellectual heavyweights.

An Indian scout who helped Scott Wallace on his Amazon trek. Photograph of Indian scout by Scott Wallace

With only five days’ notice, National Geographic photojournalist Scott Wallace was launched into the Amazon rainforest, accompanying Brazilian activist Sydney Possuelo on a potentially deadly expedition to research the flecheiros, one of the last remaining native tribes untouched by the outside world. Possuelo’s team hoped to learn as much as possible about the flecheiros without letting its presence be known, with the goal of helping prove to the Brazilian government that the tribe should be protected from outside contact. Wallace’s new book, The Unconquered, is a gripping tale of the adventure, a 2002 journey replete with dangers including drug traffickers, wildlife, disease, and those they were there to help—the flecheiros, whose way of life is glimpsed in the translation of their name: people of the arrow. Here’s a conversation with Wallace.

Girls in White Dresses
Here’s a strategy for fine-tuning your first novel: Get a job at the DC bookstore Politics and Prose and float the manuscript to your coworkers, prodigious readers all. Chicago transplant Jennifer Close did just that, and Girls in White Dresses—a lit-lite tale about a trio of female Manhattanites drinking and dating their way through their twenties—is the result.

Read a full review of Girls in White Dresses.

The American military operation that killed Osama bin Laden in May was shocking not only for its outcome but for where it went down—not in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan but in Abbottabad, a leafy, middle-class community that also houses a major Pakistani military academy.

The school’s proximity to the terrorist leader’s compound raised questions about the Pakistani government’s dealings with radical organizations, among them al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. In The Unraveling, his uppercut of an extended essay about America’s fraying relationship with the Islamic republic, John Schmidt of George Washington University argues convincingly that Pakistan’s policy of jihadist appeasement has its root in the country’s proxy war with India for regional dominance.

Schmidt, who worked in the US Embassy in Islamabad for years, ornaments his polemic with personal anecdotes and hard-won insights. The book’s final chapter, in which he lays out what could happen if jihadists were to take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, will have you riveted.