In Strom, Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson deliver a remarkable look at the life of a remarkable — and complicated — politician. First elected to public office in 1929, Strom Thurmond was a pivotal figure in the nation's politics for more than seven decades particularly when it came to issues of race: the Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948, originator of the 1956 "Southern Manifesto" against the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, holder of the record for a Senate filibuster for his opposition to the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. Yet as a young man Thurmond had secretly fathered a daughter with the family's black maid, and quietly supported her through college and beyond.

An intense public examination of Thurmond's legacy began when he left the Senate at age 100, continued when he passed away soon after and only grew when Essie Mae Washington-Williams announced in December 2003 that she was the senator's long-rumored black daughter.

Bass and Thompson know Strom better than anyone. They both covered him for years and broke the big stories. In Strom, they tell us a great deal about power and politics in our nation and race's twisted roots in the 20th century South.

Jack Bass teaches at the College of Charleston. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and is the author or co-author of six nonfiction books, including The Transformation of Southern Politics, Taming the Storm, winner of the 1994 Robert Kennedy Book Award, and the 1998 biography, Ol' Strom, on which he collaborated with Marilyn Walser Thompson.

Marilyn Walser Thompson was an award-winning reporter in South Carolina, where she covered Thurmond in the late 1970s. She later served as assistant managing editor for investigations at the Washington Post and in 2004 became vice president and editor of Kentucky's Lexington Herald-Leader. Thompson is the author or co-author of three previous nonfiction books.