Just in time for Christmas!
Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father, was a compelling and moving memoir focusing on personal issues of race, identity, and community. With his second book The Audacity of Hope, Obama engages themes raised in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, shares personal views on faith and values and offers a vision of the future that involves repairing a “political process that is broken” and restoring a government that has fallen out of touch with the people. We had the opportunity to ask Senator Obama a few questions about writing, reading, and politics–see his responses below.
“Hollings is working on a government reform project he can only conduct from the outside — getting the money out of politics and the politics back in to Congress. . . . Fritz Hollings outlines his plans for getting Washington off the money mill in a new book called Making Government Work.” — Bill Moyers Journal
“Making Government Work is part autobiography, part political history and part guidance on how Hollings, a former South Carolina governor who served six terms in the U.S. Senate speaking his mind, believes the nation can solve its problems.” — The Greenville S.C. News
“Hollings had a reputation for speaking his mind during his many years in office, and he continues to be familiarly forthright in his political memoir.” — The Charleston S.C. Post & Courier
“Hollings makes it clear in Making Government Work that he — perhaps more than any 20th-century S.C. political figure — understands the power and possibility of government.” — The Columbia S.C. State
“Thorough memoir . . . of former South Carolina Senator Hollings’s five decades of public service. . . . A sound account of a half-century’s functioning of the legislature.” — Kirkus Reviews
The first book of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq’s descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality, and anarchy, No End In Sight is a shocking story of wholesale incompetence, recklessness, and venality.
Culled from over 200 hours of footage collected for the film, the book provides a candid and alarming retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials, Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts. Together, these voices reveal the principal errors of U.S. policy that largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today—and what we could and should do about them now.
No End In Sight marks the first time Americans will be allowed inside the White House, Pentagon, and Baghdad’s Green Zone to understand for themselves the disintegration of Iraq— and how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.
Thomas L. Friedman’s phenomenal number-one bestseller The World Is Flat has helped millions of readers to see the world in a new way. In his brilliant, essential new book, Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America’s surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests. In this groundbreaking account of where we stand now, he shows us how the solutions to these two big problems are linked–how we can restore the world and revive America at the same time.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and nonagenarian makes a selection of his favorite unpublished writings, broadcasts, and interviews.
Millions of Studs Terkel fans have come to know the prizewinning oral historian through his landmark books—“The Good War”, Hard Times, Working, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, and many others. Few people realize, however, that much of Studs’s best work was not collected into these thematic volumes and has, in fact, never been published. P.S. brings together these significant and deeply enjoyable writings for the first time.
The pieces in P.S. reflect Studs’s wide-ranging interests and travels, as well as his abiding connection to his hometown, Chicago. Here we have a fascinating conversation with James Baldwin, possibly Studs’s finest interview with an author; pieces on the colorful history and culture of Chicago; vivid portraits of Studs’s heroes and cohorts (including an insightful and still timely interview with songwriter Yip Harburg, known for his “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”); and the transcript of Studs’s famous broadcast on the Depression, the very moving essence of what was to become Hard Times.
A fitting postscript to a lifetime of listening, P.S. is a truly Terkelesque display of Studs’s extraordinary range of talent and the amazing people he found to talk to.
“Some of “The Dark Side” seems right out of “The Final Days,” minus Nixon’s operatic boozing and weeping…. Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher.” —Frank Rich, New York Times
“In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, “hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system” and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Whatever it takes to get those bastards. The true nature of our Faustian bargain would not become clear until later, and maybe it needed a journalist as steely and tenacious as Jane Mayer to give us the full picture. “The Dark Side” is about how the war on terror became “a war on American ideals,” and Mayer gives this story all the weight and sorrow it deserves. Many books get tagged with the word “essential”; hers actually is.”
—Salon.com
Francine Prose, Oprah Magazine
“Quite frankly, I’ve never understood why it might be a bad idea to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and help the poor. But the next time I find myself in an argument with someone who believes that welfare and public education are ruining our society, and that universal health insurance will destroy our medical system, I will be very glad to have read (and to be able to quote) Deborah Stone’s The Samaritan’s Dilemma. Beginning with the disturbing observation that most Americans’ feelings about politics have become almost entirely divorced from their notions of kindness and obligation toward those in need, Stone’s calm, logical, and immensely reassuring book dismantles the standard arguments against a more caring society (“Help makes people dependent”) and persuades us that acts of charity and social responsibility actually make us stronger as individuals and better citizens of a democracy. She looks at examples of “everyday altruism”—from Meals on Wheels to family caregiving—and at the ways in which, over the last decades, our government has actively discouraged Americans from acting on their better impulses. Finishing The Samaritan’s Dilemma, you not only want to give the book to your neighbors and send it to your congressional representatives but may find yourself wishing that, when the time comes for our next president to assemble a cabinet, Deborah Stone could be appointed our first Secretary of Compassion.”
How did we go from Lyndon Johnson’s landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon’s equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a “Silent Majority” that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater’s massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style–equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson–that’s true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian’s empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon’s cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they’ll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear. –Tom Nissley
In this caustic critique of the growing American penchant for empire and sense of entitlement, Bacevich (The New American Militarism) examines the citizenry’s complicity in the current economic, political, and military crisis. A retired army colonel, the author efficiently pillories the recent performance of the armed forces, decrying it as an expression of domestic dysfunction, with leaders and misguided strategies ushering the nation into a global war of no exits and no deadlines. Arguing that the tendency to blame solely the military or the Bush administration is as illogical as blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression, Bacevich demonstrates how the civilian population is ultimately culpable; in citizens’ appetite for unfettered access to resources, they have tacitly condoned the change of military service from a civic function into an economic enterprise. Crisp prose, sweeping historical analysis and searing observations on the roots of American decadence elevate this book from mere scolding to an urgent call for rational thinking and measured action, for citizens to wise up and put their house in order.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author’s accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia’s state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans’s public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein’s economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people’s economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In this compelling and important analysis of the triumph of capitalism and the decline of democracy, former labor secretary Reich urges us to rebalance the roles of business and government. Power, he writes, has shifted away from us in our capacities as citizens and toward us as consumers and investors. While praising the spread of global capitalism, he laments that supercapitalism has brought with it alienation from politics and community. The solution: to separate capitalism from democracy, and guard the border between them. Plainspoken and forceful, if somewhat repetitious, the book urges new and strengthened laws and regulations to restore authority to the citizens in us. Reich’s proposals are anything but knee-jerk liberal: he calls for abolishing the corporate income tax and labels the corporate social responsibility movement distracting and even counterproductive. As in 2004’s Reason, Reich exhibits perhaps too much confidence in Americans’ ability to think and act in their own best interests. But he refuses to shift blame for corporations’ dominance to the usual suspects, instead pointing a finger at consumers like you and me who want better deals, and from investors like us who want better returns, he writes. Provocatively argued, this book could help begin a necessary national conversation.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
“This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” So begins Fareed Zakaria’s important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the “rise of the rest”—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.
Johnston, a New York Times investigative reporter, has spent his 40-year career exposing collusion between government officials and private sector entities as they enrich the rich and ignore consequences for middle-class laborers and the poor. In Perfectly Legal, he focused on hidden inequities in the tax system. This volume is a broader examination of collusion and unfairness, ranging from subsidies for professional sports stadiums to secret payouts to multinational corporate chief executives. At the base of Johnston’s journalistic indictment are the highly paid lobbyists working Congress, state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and government regulatory agencies. Johnston also cites the culpability of George W. Bush in his roles as professional baseball team owner, Texas governor and U.S. president, and targets well-known tycoons such as Donald Trump, Warren Buffett and George Steinbrenner as well as lesser-recognized beneficiaries who own golf courses and insurance companies and energy consortiums. Heroes appear occasionally, such as Remy Welling, an Internal Revenue Service investigator who blew the whistle on improper tax breaks for the wealthy and lost her job. Johnston writes compellingly to show how government-private sector collusion affects the middle class and the poor.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
“I may not agree with some of the political statements but Senator Daschle is right on target on the need to start a serious dialogue on health care for Americans. His thoughtful health-care proposals will move the process forward. Senator Daschle and I agree on the need for nonpartisanship in coming to grips with this number one domestic problem.” —Bob Dole, former Senate majority leader
“The American health-care system is in crisis, and workable solutions have been blocked for years by deeply entrenched ideological divisions. Sen. Daschle brings fresh thinking to this problem, and his Federal Reserve for Health concept holds great promise for bridging this intellectual chasm and, at long last, giving this nation the health care it deserves.” —Senator Barack Obama (IL)
“This book provides real solutions for America’s broken health care system.” —Senator Harry Reid (NV), Senate majority leader
“Critical provides answers to one of the most vexing challenges of our time.” —John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and a former White House chief of staff
“Senator Daschle adds to his reputation as a clear thinker and leader. Critical shows us not only why we must solve our health care crisis but that—with political will—we can.” —Judy Feder, professor and dean at Georgetown Public Policy Institute
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