Mitt Romney had a strong showing in the Iowa caucus, was the front-runner in New Hampshire, but has trailed Newt Gingrich since South Carolina. As the nation waits to see if the once-assumed Republican victor will be catapulted on to victory, a new book by Ronald B. Scott explores how Romney decided to enter politics in the first place, portraying him as more human than he often appears to be on the stump. Both as a seasoned journalist and as a fellow Mormon and a distant cousin to Romney, Scott examines Romney’s character and convictions, his words and actions, his flips and flops, and his triumphs and setbacks, interviewing those who know him best—allies and adversaries alike—to provide what nationally syndicated columnist George E. Curry calls “a fascinating portrait of one of America’s most complicated political figures.” 

The only independent biographical profile of the candidate who would be president, “Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics” puts the businessman and former Republican governor of Massachusetts in context like no other book before.

The San Francisco Chronicle hails ABC’s Suburgatory as “a genuinely funny and immediately likable sitcom,” and The Hollywood Reporter calls it “one of the biggest surprises of the fall,” a show that not only “clicks on a number of different levels, it even has a Juno-esque element to it, plus a breakout-worthy star in Jane Levy.” Viewers are equally taken by the series. The show opened in late September as ABC’s biggest half-hour comedy premiere in 8 years, and its ratings have increased steadily ever since.

As with many good TV shows and movies, Suburgatory started with a great book. Linda Erin Keenan was a CNN senior producer/h ead-writer for seven years before she reconsidered her 24/7 lifestyle, exchanging a decent paycheck and a New York City address for a baby and a house in the suburbs. Going from “80 miles an hour to zero,” however, this thoroughly urban, trash-talking news producer soon found herself trapped in what she calls “Lesschester County, a gleaming expanse of white people as far as the eye could see, where subversion seemed policed and I often felt like I’d been taken hostage by an adult Girl Scout troop. What was less about Lesschester? Less humor, less edge.”

Refusing to lessen her own humor and blunt her edge, however, Keenan trained her twisted reporters eye on the strange inhabitants of this foreign land, writing fake news satire. The result was Suburgatory: Twisted Tales from Darkest Suburbia—a book that uses laugh-out-loud humor to target racism, homophobia, submerged suburban sexuality, class welfare, willful ignorance, and the all-around bad behavior raging beneath the surface of those obsessively tended suburban lawns and bikini lines.