He also has couple of upcoming Bay Area performances. See below:
Thursday, January 29:
San Francisco
Commonwealth Club
595 Market St.
San Francisco, CA 94105
6:00 p.m.
For tickets, call 415-597-6700 or visit http://tickets.commonwealthclub.org/
VIDEO: Watch other Commonwealth Club appearances
Friday, January 30:
M is for Mystery
Belmont Library
1110 Alameda de las Pulgas
Belmont, CA 94002
San Mateo
7:30 p.m.
Phone: 650-401-8077
About Leonard Downie Jr.:
Leonard Downie Jr. is the Vice President At Large of the Washington Post and served as that paper's executive editor from 1991 to 2008. During Downie's seventeen years as executive editor, the Washington Post's news staff won twenty-five Pulitzer Prizes including three Pulitzer gold medals for public service. His books include Justice Denied, Mortgage on America, The New Muckrakers, and The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril with Robert G. Kaiser, which won the Goldsmith Award from the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. THE RULES OF THE GAME is his first novel.
Downie received the National Press Foundation's Ben Bradlee Editor of the Year Award for 2008. He will become the Weil Professor of Journalism at The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University in August, 2009. He has been interviewed frequently on network, cable, and local television, and on national and local public radio.
About the book:
THE RULES OF THE GAME is a riveting debut novel about corruption, coverups, and D.C. politics.
Sarah Page, a reporter at the Washington Capital, is investigating Trent Tucker, a lobbyist who has made himself essential to the presidential campaign. When Sarah's source is murdered, she realizes this is no ordinary corruption case. Progressing despite death threats and warnings about national security, she slowly uncovers the maneuverings of Palisar, a massive, labyrinth corporation that wins no-bid government contracts for overseas military deployments and hides the profits in ghost companies.
Meanwhile, Susan Cameron - freshman Senator from California - is named as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate on Monroe Capeheart's ticket. Capehart and Cameron win the election, but Capeheart dies soon thereafter. As Cameron becomes the first female President, Tucker's protégé lands as her chief of staff, well-positioned to serve Palisar's interests. As Sarah uncovers contract fraud, kickbacks, and bribes to members of Congress, President Cameron learns what is transpiring, and must weigh how it will affect the nation's stability-ultimately forcing her to choose between her political future and the well-being of the nation.
THE RULES OF THE GAME grew out of Downie's "fascination with the complex and often ambiguous relationships among journalists, politicians, consultants and lobbyists, and the ways in which they all often broke the rules with and without consequences." Early reviews hail it as a "taut, brisk-paced tale… a tense and thrilling first novel," and say "the plot goes way deeper than the eerie similarities between Downie's fiction and the [real-life] political developments that only a crystal ball could have predicted".
