PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.

I. F. Stone, proprietor of I. F. Stone's Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published The Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.

Benjamin C. Bradlee was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of The Washington Post. It was Ben who gave The Post the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless, and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, bestselling books.

Robert L. Bernstein, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation's premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and was the longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.

. . .

For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner, Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983 Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as "a redoubtable gadfly." His legacy will endure in the books to come.

Peter Osnos
Founder

This note and honorary colophon will appear in every PublicAffairs book.

Clive Priddle

Publisher

Clive Priddle joined PublicAffairs as executive editor in 2003. He became Editorial Director in 2006, and Publisher in 2012. Since joining PublicAffairs, the authors he has edited include Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Linda Robinson, Natan Sharansky, Kishore Mahbubani, John Kerry, David Rothkopf, Richard Haass, and Muhammad Yunus. Prior to that, he was publishing director of Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollins, where among the authors he acquired were Sebastian Junger, Laura Hillenbrand, David Ewing Duncan, James Naughtie, Francis Wheen, Geraldine Brooks, Oliver Morton, Eric Larson, and Michela Wrong. He previously worked for four years at Penguin UK. He won the Tony Godwin award in 2001. Born in London, a graduate of Cambridge University, Clive lives with his wife and two sons in northern Manhattan.

Jaime Leifer

VP, Associate Publisher and Director of Publicity

Jaime Leifer was named VP, Associate Publisher in December 2014. She returned to PublicAffairs as Director of Publicity in February 2010 from The New Yorker, where she handled media coverage for the magazine and worked with a wide range of writers, including Seymour M. Hersh, Malcolm Gladwell, George Packer, Jane Mayer, Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth Kolbert, and James Surowiecki. Leifer began her career in publishing at PublicAffairs, signing on as a publicity assistant in August 2001, immediately after moving to New York. Over the course of the next six years, she rose through the ranks to Publicity Manager, leading the campaigns of books ranging from Marjorie Williams’s The Woman at the Washington Zoo and Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa to Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s The Accidental President of Brazil and Jeremy Paxman’s On Royalty. A Massachusetts native, Leifer graduated from Harvard University and attended the Columbia Publishing Course. She lives in Brooklyn.

Lindsay Fradkoff

Marketing Director

Lindsay Fradkoff was named Marketing Director in December 2014. She joined PublicAffairs in 2006 and worked in marketing, advertising, and promotion. She developed the in-house social media accounts and managed all digital marketing efforts and online promotions by authors. She has worked on promotional campaigns for Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning, and bestselling titles including Disrupt Aging by JoAnn Jenkins, Black Mass by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, and Food, Inc. edited by Karl Weber. Prior to joining PublicAffairs, she worked in sales and marketing at Barefoot Books and Beacon Press. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son, and loves Boston sports, karaoke, and her dog.

Ben Adams

Executive Editor

Ben Adams came to PublicAffairs in 2012 after seven years at Bloomsbury Publishing. Books he’s published here include the New York Times bestseller The Phenomenon by Rick Ankiel, Garry Kasparov’s Winter is Coming, David Sax’s The Revenge of Analog, and Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. Other authors he has worked with include Gregg Easterbrook, Anya Kamenetz, Juan Williams, and Martin Seligman. In his career, Ben has acquired and published books in a wide variety of categories, including sports, science, current affairs, economics, history, food, humor, memoir and more. A fan of great writing, audiobooks, and the Red Sox, Ben lives in Manhattan with his wife and sons.

Colleen Lawrie

Executive Editor

Colleen Lawrie is an Executive Editor who joined PublicAffairs in 2015. Her list includes narrative nonfiction--business, politics, social justice, and history. She has published the New York Times bestselling book, The Storm Before The Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan, as well as the Washington Post and USA Today bestseller Disrupt Aging by AARP CEO JoAnn Jenkins, Crash Override by Zoe Quinn, and Radley Balko & Tucker Carrington’s The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South, among others. A resident of Harlem, she is a marathoner and obsessive podcast consumer—often at the same time.

Melissa Raymond

Group Managing Editor

Melissa Raymond first came to PublicAffairs in the summer of 2000 as a part-time, temporary employee. She never forgot the fond memories she had of the publishing experience and, when the opportunity presented itself in 2005, came back to PublicAffairs full-time. Raymond worked her way up from Production Editor to Assistant Managing Editor to Managing Editor, and now oversees the production process of PublicAffairs’full list of titles. She has worked on books by Muhammad Yunus (Creating a World Without Poverty and Building Social Business), George Soros (The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, The Crash of 2008 and What it Means, and The Soros Lectures), Participant Media (Food, Inc. and Waiting for “Superman”), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters), the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report), and many more. Raymond graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Journalism and moved to New York to attend the Manhattan School of Music, where she received her Master’s in Opera Performance. She continues to perform professionally whenever she has the opportunity.

Peter Osnos

Founder

Peter Osnos began his journalism career in 1965 as an assistant to I. F. .Stone on his weekly newsletter. Between 1966–1984 Osnos was a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and served as the newspaper’s foreign and national editor. From 1984-1996 he was Vice President, Associate Publisher, and Senior Editor at Random House and Publisher of Random House’s Times Books division. In 1997, he founded PublicAffairs. He served as Publisher and CEO until 2005 and continues as a consulting editor and Founder.

Among the authors he has published and/or edited are — former President Jimmy Carter, Rosalyn Carter, Gen. Wesley Clark, Clark Clifford, former President Bill Clinton, Paul Farmer, Earvin (Magic) Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Sam Donaldson, Kenneth Feinberg, Annette Gordon Reed, Meg Greenfield, Dorothy Height, Don Hewitt, Molly Ivins, Vernon Jordan, Ward Just, Stanley Karnow, Wendy Kopp, Charles Krauthammer, Brian Lamb, Jim Lehrer, Scott McClellan, Robert McNamara, Charles Morris, Peggy Noonan, William Novak, Roger Mudd. Former President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Nancy Reagan, Andy Rooney, Morley Safer, Natan Sharansky, George Soros, Susan Swain, President Donald Trump, Paul Volcker, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and Nobel peace prize Winner Muhammad Yunus, as well as journalists from America’s leading publications and prominent scholars.

Osnos has also been a commentator and host for National Public Radio and a contributor to publications including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. He wrote the Platform column for the Century Foundation, the Daily Beast and The Atlantic.com from 2006-2014. He has also served as Chair of the Trade Division of the Association of American Publishers and on the board of Human Rights Watch. From 2005-2009, he was executive director of The Caravan Project, funded by the MacArthur and Carnegie Foundations, which developed a plan for multi-platform publishing of books. He was the Vice-Chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review from  2007-2012. He is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations. He is an adjunct professor at Hunter College in the human rights program. He is a graduate of Brandeis and Columbia Universities.

He lives in New York City, with his wife Susan, a consultant to human rights and philanthropic organizations. His children are Evan L.R. Osnos and Katherine Sanford. There are five grandchildren.

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