Cheaters Always Win The Story of America

A social history of cheating and how American history -- through real estate, sports, finance, academics, and of course politics -- has had its unfair share of rigged results and widened the margins on its gray areas.
Drawing from the intriguing (and sometimes unbelievable) true stories of the lives of everyday Americans, historian Julie M. Fenster traces the history of the weakening of our national ethics through the practice of cheating. From marital infidelity to financial fraud; rigged sports competitions to corruption in politics and the American education system; nuclear weaponry to beauty pageants; hospitals, TV gameshows, and charities; nothing and no one is exempt.
And far from being ostracized, cheaters in every sphere continue to survive and even thrive, casting their influence over the rest of our society. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the recent tectonic shift in politics, where a revolution in our collective attitude toward fraudsters has ushered in a new kind of leadership.
Part history of an all-American tradition, part dissection of an ongoing national crisis, Cheaters Always Win is irresistible reading -- a smart, sardonic, and scintillating look into the practice that made America what it is today.

J.M. Fenster is the award-winning author of many works of American history and commentary, including Packard: The Pride, which won several national awards; Ether Day, which won the Anesthesia Foundation prize; the New York Times bestseller Parish Priest with Doug Brinkley; the PBS documentary First Freedom; and the book Mavericks, Miracles and Medicine, which was also a documentary on A&E. After writing The Spirit of Invention at the invitation of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center, she published two works of presidential biography: The Case of Abraham Lincoln and FDR's Shadow. Fenster has been called "witty" by The New York Times and compared to Mark Twain by The Wall Street Journal. Her most recent book was Jefferson's America. A graduate of Colgate University, she lives in upstate New York.