A Pulitzer Prize--winning editorialist and a former syndicated columnist, Edwin M. Yoder Jr. spent forty years as a newspaper journalist. Telling Others What to Think, he writes, is about "an education in its broadest sense," the experiences and personal influences that formed him.

Yoder became a full-time editorial writer at the early age of twenty-four, and he traces his aptitude for punditry to the southern storytelling tradition, a long family heritage of scholars and schoolteachers, and his father's being "opinionated" -- in the better sense of that word. Journalism, Yoder says,...

This brash and rollicking autobiography is a potent primer of the rough-and-tumble world of political consulting by one of its founding fathers and preeminent experts. A cross between a patriotic redneck raconteur and a TV-savvy renaissance man, Raymond D. Strother is unafraid to name names and refuses to mince words in tales of what he calls "the beauty and gore" of American politics. From the crash course in Louisiana politics and corruption he received following graduate school to his compelling entry into the big-time senatorial and congressional races of the 1970s and early 1980s and...