Robert Scheer - Books

Books

Scheer's latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books), was released on September 7, 2010. Publishers Weekly wrote that the book "proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows." The book made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list and on October 17, 2010 was reviewed in the same paper by Jonathan Kirsch, who wrote

Robert Scheer is a journalist in the gadfly tradition of Lincoln Steffens, I. F. Stone and Seymour Hersh. His latest book, 'The Great American Stickup,' blames the 'captains of finance' for causing the 2008 'meltdown' of the global economy in the first place and then profiting from the tax dollars that were thrown at the problem — 'a giant hustle that served the richest of the rich,' as he puts it, 'and left the rest of us holding the bag.'

Scheer has written eight other books, including a collection entitled Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War; and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals. In 2004, Scheer published The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, which became a Los Angeles Times Bestseller. It was co-authored by his oldest son, Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor at Alternet.

In 2006 Scheer published Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton – and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush (Akashic Books), a collection of his many interviews, profiles, and columns about Presidents Nixon through George W. Bush. In 2008 he published The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

Scheer and his son were creative script consultants on the Oliver Stone film Nixon, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. He has appeared in small speaking roles as a journalist in several feature films, including The Siege and Bulworth. In 2005, the Mill Valley Film Festival premiered a documentary he co-produced on the activist and philanthropist Stanley Sheinbaum.