Bob Riel

Bob Riel writes about history, politics, and travel. He is the author of Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America.

Bob earned a master’s degree in political science from Boston College, with a focus on the history of American presidential elections. In Quest for the Presidency, he weaves together his interest in presidential campaigns with a curiosity about the interconnectedness of events. The book is a popular history of each election from 1789 through 2020 and recounts a wealth of entertaining tales about campaigns and candidates. At the same time, it delves into the threads that link elections across time and it explores American democracy in a way that helps us to better understand present-day politics.

Subscribe to The Riel World, Bob’s Substack newsletter about politics, history, travel, books, and ideas.

Beyond this, Bob has a diverse range of writing experience. He spent several years early in his career as a journalist for a daily newspaper in Rhode Island and was later the ghostwriter for the New York Times’ bestselling book The Heart-Led Leader by Tommy Spaulding, which was named by Inc. Magazine as one of the Best Business Books of 2015.

He is also an avid traveler who has so far visited 45 countries on six continents. Some of these experiences are chronicled in his travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World: Tales and Insights from a Life Sabbatical, and in various published articles on travel and cross-cultural topics.

If he’s not writing or with his family, Bob is happiest while sitting in a coffeeshop with a book, wandering by the ocean, or watching the Red Sox.