In a speech he delivered on Aug. 8, 1974, Richard Nixon announced his resignation as the 37th president of the United States. With the 40th anniversary of the historic moment approaching, a spate of books on Nixon are coming to market. These five run the gamut, from Nixon’s rebound after his 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy to Watergate and Ronald Reagan’s rise in the years after Nixon’s fall.

The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority

Patrick J. Buchanan
Crown Forum
Pages: 400
Pub Date: July 8, 2014

Buchanan, a conservative political commentator, onetime presidential hopeful, and former senior adviser to Nixon, gives a firsthand account of the years in which Nixon resurrected his political career after losing the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate

Ken Hughes
University of Virginia Press
Pages: 240
Pub Date: July 29, 2014

Complete with a blurb from Bob Woodward, Chasing Shadows draws on the decade Hughes spent combing the transcribed tapes from the Johnson and Nixon White Houses to “unearth a pattern of actions” by Nixon long before 1972, reaching back to the final months of the Johnson administration.

The Nixon Tapes

Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages: 784
Pub Date: July 29, 2014

Nearly 800 pages of transcripts from recordings made by Nixon’s voice-activated taping system between 1971 and 1973. They document the years Nixon “opened relations with China, negotiated the SALT I arms agreement with the Soviet Union, and won a landslide reelection victory,” all in the “growing shadow” of Watergate.

The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It

John W. Dean
Viking
Pages: 771
Pub Date: July 29, 2014

Dean, who was legal counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, provided key Senate testimony that helped lead to the president’s resignation. In The Nixon Defense, he “connects dots that have never been connected,” including the revelation of “how and why the Watergate break-in occurred” and how deeply Nixon was involved from the beginning of the coverup.

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

Rick Perlstein
Simon & Schuster
Pages: 800
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014

In our starred review, we wrote that Perlstein, author of Nixonland, “snuffs out any nostalgic glow” in his “massive and wide-ranging portrait of 1973 to 1976,” from Watergate to Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Gerald Ford in the Republican presidential primaries.