NEW YORK — Former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who broke with his party two years ago after the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, has a book deal.
The Open Field, a Penguin Random House imprint overseen by Maria Shriver, announced Tuesday that Kinzinger’s “Renegade: My Life in Faith, the Military, and Defending America from Trump’s Attack on Democracy” is scheduled for release on Oct. 17.
“Ever since my final falling-out with the GOP, on the day of the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol by Donald Trump’s followers, I have wanted to tell the inside story of how my party and also my faith have been hijacked by extremists who represent a real danger to our democracy,” Kinzinger said in a statement.
“This book is the result, a full telling of my experience from a pilgrim with genuine values to a conservative who has no home but is determined to play a role in our recovery from a devastating political war,” he added.
Kinzinger, an Iraq War veteran first elected to Congress in 2010, became a leading GOP critic of Trump and his Republican colleagues after Jan. 6. He denounced Trump for inciting “an angry mob” with false claims the 2020 election was stolen and voted to impeach the then-president. He was later one of two Republicans, along with Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who joined the House committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack.
Last fall, he announced he would not seek reelection after the Democrat-controlled Illinois Legislature approved new congressional maps that would have forced Kinzinger and a fellow Republican incumbent, Rep. Darin LaHood, into a primary matchup.
Kinzinger “examines the forces that allowed such an attack to happen in the first place, from the misinformation campaign waged by Fox News and partisan media to the inculcation of extremism in families and faith communities,” according to his publisher.
The publisher described the book as “part memoir, part searing examination.”
The book will offer “an inside account of one of the most tumultuous events in recent American history and sounds the alarm on the devastating consequences of letting extremism go unchecked,” the publisher said.
