Leadership in Turbulent Times.

Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018) is the seventh book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, New York Times number one bestselling author, and former Harvard professor whose half century of immersive study of the American presidency has established her as the foremost popular historian of presidential leadership in the United States. Published in September 2018 to critical acclaim and becoming an instant New York Times bestseller, the book represents a culmination of Goodwin's five-decade career of studying the American presidency, drawing on the four presidents she has examined most closely across her previous works, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson, to explore the central questions of political leadership: whether leaders are born or made, how adversity shapes and tests character, and whether the leader makes the times or the times make the leader. Organized into three thematic sections examining the early development of leadership ambition, the experience of crisis and reversal, and the exercise of leadership at decisive historical moments, the book traces what Goodwin identifies as the qualities these four men shared across their profound differences in background and temperament, including fierce ambition, deep resilience, an appetite for learning, and an instinctive capacity for communicating with and mobilizing the public at moments of national peril. The Boston Globe called the book insightful, readable, and compelling, arriving just in time, while USA Today described Goodwin as leading the league of presidential historians after five decades of magisterial output, and the book has since served as the basis for a 2022 History Channel docudrama on Abraham Lincoln produced by Goodwin herself.