Book picks similar to
The Trump Century: How Our President Changed the Course of History Forever by Lou Dobbs
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non-fiction
trump
nonfiction
Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana
Marc Frank - 2013
It takes on the challenge of describing what’s in a black box with energy and candor.”—VisitCuba.com “The most informative, accurate, insightful, detailed account available on twenty-first century Cuba.”—HavanaTimes.org “Marc Frank is the best foreign journalist reporting from Cuba today. We now have a behind-the-scenes look at the changes large and small taking place as the Cuban revolution molts from Fidel to Raúl to the next generation.”—Julia Sweig, author of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know“A must-read book to grasp what has been happening in Cuba over the past ten years.”—Wayne Smith, director of the Cuba Project, Center for International Policy“Frank enriches his fascinating reportage with his unparalleled access to expressive Cubans from all walks of life.”—Richard Feinberg, University of California, San Diego“With a sharp eye for human detail and a clear understanding of what makes Cuba tick, Frank’s narrative bears eloquent, balanced, and always sensitive witness to the troubled trajectory of Cuba from the ‘dark days’ of the 1990s economic collapse through to the challenging changes under Raúl. It genuinely gets ‘inside’ the otherwise confusing system and society, and is all the more welcome for that.”--Antoni Kapcia, coeditor of The Changing Dynamic of Cuban Civil Society“Gripping and insightful. It is rare indeed to find reporting as authoritative and well sourced as this about what remains an impenetrable and opaque regime.”—Michael Reid, author of Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul As a U.S.-born journalist who has called Havana home for almost a quarter century, Mark Frank has observed in person the best days of the revolution, the fall of the Soviet bloc, the great depression of the 1990s, the stepping aside of Fidel Castro, and the reforms now being devised by his brother. In Cuban Revelations, Frank offers a first-hand account of daily life in Cuba at the turn of the twenty-first century, the start of a new and dramatic epoch for islanders and the Cuban diaspora. Examining the effects of U.S. policy toward Cuba, Frank analyzes why Cuba has entered an extraordinary, irreversible period of change and considers what the island’s future holds. The enormous social engineering project taking place today under Raúl’s leadership is fraught with many dangers, and Cuban Revelations follows the new leader’s efforts to overcome bureaucratic resistance and the fears of a populace that stand in his way. In addition, Frank offers a colorful chronicle of his travels across the island’s many and varied provinces, sharing candid interviews with people from all walks of life. He takes the reader outside the capital to reveal how ordinary Cubans live and what they are thinking and feeling as fifty-year-old social and economic taboos are broken. He shares his honest and unbiased observations on extraordinary positive developments in social matters, like healthcare and education, as well as on the inefficiencies in the Cuban economy. Ultimately, Cuban Revelations is an objective account by a reporter who has lived with the Cubans for many years as their old world falls apart and they set about trying to build a new one.
No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed
John Stossel - 2012
Now, he dismantles the most sacred of them all: the notion that government action is the best way to solve a problem. From the myth that government can spend its way out of a crisis to the mistaken belief that labor unions protect workers, Stossel, a true libertarian, provides evidence that the reality is very different from what intuition tells us. His evidence leads to the taboo conclusions that: · Government already dominates health care—and that’s the problem· The state keeps banning foods, but food bans don't make us healthier· Government-run schools and teachers’ unions haven’t made kids smarterUtilizing his three decades in journalism, Stossel combines sharp insights, common sense, and documented facts to debunk conventional wisdom and challenge popular opinion about the role of our nation’s government.
The Grifter's Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency
Sarah Blaskey - 2020
Long known for its famous and wealthy clientele, the resort's guest list soon started filling with political operatives and power-seekers. Meanwhile, as Trump re-branded Mar-a-Lago "the Winter White House" and began spending weekends there, state business spilled out into full view of the club's members, and vast sums of taxpayer money and political donations began flowing into its coffers, and into the pockets of the president.
The Grifters' Club is a breakthrough account of the corruption, intrigue, and absurdity that has been on display in the place where the president is at his most relaxed. In these pages, a team of prizewinning Miami Herald journalists reveal the activities and motivations of the strange array of charlatans and tycoons who populate its halls. Some peddle influence, some look to steal government secrets, and some just want to soak up the feeling of unfettered access to the world's most powerful leaders. With the drama of an expose and the edgy humor of a Carl Hiaasen novel, The Grifters' Club takes you behind the velvet ropes of this exclusive club and into its bizarre world of extravagance and scandal.
The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters
Karl Rove - 2015
McKinley found ways to address these challenges and win, which is why his campaign is so relevant to our politics now.McKinley, a Civil War hero who preferred “The Major” above any other title he was given, changed the arc of American history by running the first truly modern presidential campaign. Knowing his party could only win if it grew beyond its base, he reached out to diverse ethnic groups, including openly seeking the endorsement of Catholic leaders and advocating for black voting rights. Running on the slogan “The People Against the Bosses,” McKinley also took on the machine men who dominated his own party. He deployed campaign tactics still used today, including targeting voters with the best available technology. Above all, he offered bold, controversial answers to the nation’s most pressing challenge—how to make a new, more global economy work for every American—and although this split his own party, he won the White House by sticking to his principles, defeating a charismatic champion of economic populism, William Jennings Bryan. The 1896 election is a compelling drama in its own right, but McKinley’s strategies offer important lessons for both political parties today.
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
Claudio Saunt - 2020
Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington’s small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government’s auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Unworthy Republic reveals how expulsion became national policy and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children.Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt’s deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many U.S. citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation’s values. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States.In telling this gripping story, Saunt shows how the politics and economics of white supremacy lay at the heart of the expulsion of Native Americans, how corruption, greed, and administrative indifference and incompetence contributed to the debacle of its implementation, and how the consequences still resonate today.
The Case Against Impeaching Trump
Alan M. Dershowitz - 2018
Maybe it’s what happened to everyone else.”—PoliticoAlan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek. Yet he has come under partisan fire for applying those same principles to Donald Trump during the course of his many appearances in national media outlets as an expert resource on civil and constitutional law.
The Case Against Impeaching Trump
seeks to reorient the debate over impeachment to the same standard that Dershowitz has continued to uphold for decades: the law of the United States of America, as established by the Constitution. In the author’s own words:“In the fervor to impeach President Trump, his political enemies have ignored the text of the Constitution. As a civil libertarian who voted against Trump, I remind those who would impeach him not to run roughshod over a document that has protected us all for two and a quarter centuries. In this case against impeachment, I make arguments similar to those I made against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton (and that I would be making had Hillary Clinton been elected and Republicans were seeking to impeach her). Impeachment and removal of a president are not entirely political decisions by Congress. Every member takes an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution sets out specific substantive criteria that MUST be met.I am thrilled to contribute to this important debate and especially that my book will be so quickly available to readers so they can make up their own minds.”
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
John Heilemann - 2010
For entertainment value, I put it up there with Catch 22.” —The Financial Times “It transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true….More interesting is what we learn about the candidates themselves: their frailties, egos and almost super-human stamina.” —The Financial Times “I can’t put down this book!” —Stephen Colbert Game Change is the New York Times bestselling story of the 2008 presidential election, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the best political reporters in the country. In the spirit of Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes and Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, this classic campaign trail book tells the defining story of a new era in American politics, going deeper behind the scenes of the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin campaigns than any other account of the historic 2008 election.
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
David Talbot - 2015
Drawing on revelatory new materials—including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials—Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA—which he used to further his public and private agendas—were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.An exposé of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state—and the battle for America’s soul.
The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
Sasha Issenberg - 2012
We’ve seen it in sports, and now in The Victory Lab, journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the hidden story of the analytical revolution upending the way political campaigns are run in the 21st century. The Victory Lab follows the academics and maverick operatives rocking the war room and re-engineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions. Armed with research from behavioural psychology and randomized experiments that treat voters as unwitting guinea pigs, the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do. Issenberg tracks these fascinating techniques—which include cutting edge persuasion experiments, innovative ways to mobilize voters, heavily researched electioneering methods—and shows how our most important figures, such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, are putting them to use with surprising skill and alacrity. Provocative, clear-eyed and energetically reported, The Victory Lab offers iconoclastic insights into political marketing, human decision-making, and the increasing power of analytics.
Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam
H.R. McMaster - 1997
It was lost in Washington, D.C." - H. R. McMaster (from the Conclusion) Dereliction Of Duty is a stunning new analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Southeast Asia. Fully and convincingly researched, based on recently released transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations and decisions, it is the only book that fully re-creates what happened and why. It also pinpoints the policies and decisions that got the United States into the morass and reveals who made these decisions and the motives behind them, disproving the published theories of other historians and excuses of the participants.Dereliction Of Duty covers the story in strong narrative fashion, focusing on a fascinating cast of characters: President Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy and other top aides who deliberately deceived the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Congress and the American public.Sure to generate controversy, Dereliction Of Duty is an explosive and authoritative new look at the controversy concerning the United States involvement in Vietnam.
Separated: Inside An American Tragedy
Jacob Soboroff - 2020
NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose the truth of what their lives were like on the inside after seeing them firsthand. His widely shared reports in June 2018 ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the President reversing his own policy by Executive Order, and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.In Separated, Soboroff weaves together his own experience unexpectedly covering this national issue with other key figures in the drama he met along the way, including feuding administration officials responsible for tearing apart and then reuniting families, and the parents and children who were caught in the middle. He reveals new and exclusive details of how the policy was carried out, and how its affects are still being felt. Today, there is still not a full accounting of the total number of children the President ripped away from their parents. The exact number may never be known, only that it is in the thousands. Now the President is doubling down on draconian immigration policies, including threatening to hold migrant families indefinitely and making tens of thousands applying for asylum wait in some of Mexico’s most dangerous cities. Separated is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how Trump and his administration were able to carry out this inhumane policy, and how so many missed what was happening before it was too late. Soboroff lays out compassionately, yet in the starkest of terms, its human toll, and makes clear what is at stake in the 2020 presidential election.
The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump
Andrew G. McCabe - 2019
McCabe was fired from his position as deputy director of the FBI. President Donald Trump celebrated on Twitter: "Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy."In The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, Andrew G. McCabe offers a dramatic and candid account of his career, and an impassioned defense of the FBI's agents, and of the institution's integrity and independence in protecting America and upholding our Constitution.McCabe started as a street agent in the FBI's New York field office, serving under director Louis Freeh. He became an expert in two kinds of investigations that are critical to American national security: Russian organized crime—which is inextricably linked to the Russian state—and terrorism. Under Director Robert Mueller, McCabe led the investigations of major attacks on American soil, including the Boston Marathon bombing, a plot to bomb the New York subways, and several narrowly averted bombings of aircraft. And under James Comey, McCabe was deeply involved in the controversial investigations of the Benghazi attack, the Clinton Foundation's activities, and Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.The Threat recounts in compelling detail the time between Donald Trump's November 2016 election and McCabe's firing, set against a page-turning narrative spanning two decades when the FBI's mission shifted to a new goal: preventing terrorist attacks on Americans. But as McCabe shows, right now the greatest threat to the United States comes from within, as President Trump and his administration ignore the law, attack democratic institutions, degrade human rights, and undermine the U.S. Constitution that protects every citizen.Important, revealing, and powerfully argued, The Threat tells the true story of what the FBI is, how it works, and why it will endure as an institution of integrity that protects America.
This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital
Mark Leibovich - 2013
What keeps the permanent government spinning on its carousel is the freedom of shamelessness, and that mother's milk of politics, cash. In Mark Leibovich’s remarkable look at the way things really work in D.C., a funeral for a beloved television star becomes the perfect networking platform, a disgraced political aide can emerge with more power than his boss, campaign losers befriend their vanquishers (and make more money than ever!), "conflict of interest" is a term lost in translation, political reporters are fetishized and worshipped for their ability to get one's name in print, and, well - we're all really friends, aren't we? What Julia Phillips did for Hollywood, Timothy Crouse did for journalists, and Michael Lewis did for Wall Street, Mark Leibovich does for our nation's capital.'
Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies
J.B. West - 1973
B. West, chief usher of the White House, directed the operations and maintenance of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—and coordinated its daily life—at the request of the president and his family. He directed state functions; planned parties, weddings and funerals, gardens and playgrounds, and extensive renovations; and with a large staff, supervised every activity in the presidential home. For twenty-eight years, first as assistant to the chief usher, then as chief usher, he witnessed national crises and triumphs, and interacted daily with six consecutive presidents and first ladies, their parents, children and grandchildren, and houseguests—including friends, relatives, and heads of state.In Upstairs at the White House, West offers an absorbing and novel glimpse at America’s first families, from the Roosevelts to the Kennedys andthe Nixons. Alive with anecdotes ranging from the quotidian (Lyndon B. Johnson’s showerheads) to the tragic (the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination), West’s book is an enlightening and rich account of the American history that took place just behind the Palladian doors of the North Portico.
Hard Choices
Hillary Rodham Clinton - 2013
“Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become.”In the aftermath of her 2008 presidential run, she expected to return to representing New York in the United States Senate. To her surprise, her former rival for the Democratic Party nomination, newly elected President Barack Obama, asked her to serve in his administration as Secretary of State. This memoir is the story of the four extraordinary and historic years that followed, and the hard choices that she and her colleagues confronted.Secretary Clinton and President Obama had to decide how to repair fractured alliances, wind down two wars, and address a global financial crisis. They faced a rising competitor in China, growing threats from Iran and North Korea, and revolutions across the Middle East. Along the way, they grappled with some of the toughest dilemmas of US foreign policy, especially the decision to send Americans into harm’s way, from Afghanistan to Libya to the hunt for Osama bin Laden.By the end of her tenure, Secretary Clinton had visited 112 countries, traveled nearly one million miles, and gained a truly global perspective on many of the major trends reshaping the landscape of the twenty-first century, from economic inequality to climate change to revolutions in energy, communications, and health. Drawing on conversations with numerous leaders and experts, Secretary Clinton offers her views on what it will take for the United States to compete and thrive in an interdependent world. She makes a passionate case for human rights and the full participation in society of women, youth, and LGBT people. An astute eyewitness to decades of social change, she distinguishes the trendlines from the headlines and describes the progress occurring throughout the world, day after day.Secretary Clinton’s descriptions of diplomatic conversations at the highest levels offer readers a master class in international relations, as does her analysis of how we can best use “smart power” to deliver security and prosperity in a rapidly changing world—one in which America remains the indispensable nation.