Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader
Martin Scorsese - 2004
Racing in the Street is the first comprehensive collection of writings about Springsteen, featuring the most insightful, revealing, famous, and infamous articles, interviews, reviews, and other writings. This nostalgic journey through the career of a rock-’n’-roll legend chronicles every album and each stage of Springsteen’s career. It’s all here—Dave Marsh’s Rolling Stone review of Springsteen’s ten sold-out Bottom Line shows in 1975 in New York City, Jay Cocks’s and Maureen Orth’s dueling Time and Newsweek cover stories, George Will’s gross misinterpretation of Springsteen’s message on his Born in the USA tour, and Will Percy’s 1999 interview for Double Take, plus much, much more.
An Anthropologist Among The Marxists And Other Essays
Ramachandra Guha - 2001
A substantial portion of the book expands on this salvo: it analyses Gandhians and psuedo-Gandhians, Marxists and anti-Marxists, Nehruvians and anti-secularists, democrats and Stalinists, scientists and historians, environmentalists and cricketers - in short all those who comprise the intellectual life of thinking Indians today.
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth
Michael Savage - 2014
Not between the states, but between true patriots who believe in our nation's founding principles and those he believes are working every day to undermine them and change the very nature of the country. Michael Savage is convinced we face more than just political differences. He believes the split between right and left is possibly irreversible unless we understand what's destroying American values and how to stop it. This fervent warning offers the Savage truth - a call to action in the voting booth - in order to defend the freedoms our Constitution so brilliantly established.
Guardian of the Republic: An American Ronin's Journey to Faith, Family and Freedom
Allen West - 2014
Colonel, U.S. Representative, “Dad,” and Scourge of the Far Left. He rose from humble beginnings in Atlanta where his father instilled in him a code of conduct that would inform his life ever after. Throughout his years leading troops, raising a loving family, serving as Congressman in Florida’s 22nd district, and emerging as one of the most authentic voices in conservative politics, West has never compromised the core values on which he was raised: family, faith, tradition, service, honor, fiscal responsibility, courage, freedom. Today, these values are under attack as never before, and as the far Left intensifies its assaults, few have been as vigorous as West in pushing back. He refuses to let up, calling out an Obama administration that cares more about big government than following the Constitution, so-called black “leaders” who sell out their communities in exchange for pats on the head, and a segment of the media that sees vocal black conservatives as threats to be silenced. Now more than ever, the American republic needs a guardian: a principled, informed conservative who understands where we came from, who can trace the philosophical roots of our faith and freedom, and who has a plan to get America back on track. West isn’t afraid to speak truth to power, and in this book he’ll share the experiences that shaped him and the beliefs he would die to defend.From the Hardcover edition.
The Pentagon Papers: Making History at the Washington Post (A Vintage Short)
Katharine Graham - 2017
After inheriting the Post from her father, and assuming its leadership in 1963 after the death of her husband, Graham found herself unexpectedly playing a role in history. Here she recounts the riveting episodes that transformed a shy widow into a newspaper legend, as she defied the government to publish the Pentagon Papers’ secrets about the Vietnam War and then led the way in exposing the Watergate scandal. Graham gives us an intimate behind-the-scenes view of the tense debates and high stakes she and her editors faced, and concludes with a powerful argument for the freedom of the press as a bulwark against abuses of power. An ebook short.
The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning
Peter Hitchens - 2009
Left-wingers keenly support the bombing of Belgrade and the invasion of Iraq. Tories warn against the threat to civil liberties. The 'progressive' BBC gives a fair hearing to the Conservative Party. Socialist journalists turn and rend Ken Livingstone. In democratic London, merely expressing your opinion can be seriously bad for your career, while in autocratic Moscow you can say pretty much what you like, provided you don't do anything about it. The tearing down of the old Iron Curtain may have allowed markets to sweep into the old Warsaw Pact lands - but it has also permitted revolutionary left-wing ideas to spread like a bacillus through the 'West'.Nobody really cares any more about the old shibboleths of state ownership. The British Labour Party - which opposed nuclear weapons, supposedly on principle, when they mattered - is quite happy to spend billions on the same weapons now that they are unnecessary.The supposed 'right' is as confused and nonsensical as the supposed 'left'. Neo-conservatives run vast budget deficits at home and engage in utopian adventures abroad. They are actively opposed to old conservative ideas such as national sovereignty, strong families and rigorous selective education, and happy to bend the knee to left-wing orthodoxies from man-made global warming to egalitarianism.The political compass is broken, its needle swinging wildly and meaninglessly. The existing political parties have converged, or perhaps simply retreated in confusion on to what looked like safe territory, the often tried and repeated failed policies of Fabian Social Democracy, now worsened by 1960s sexual and social radicalism. They are no longer adversaries, their personnel are interchangeable and they struggle to find ways to distinguish themselves from each other. They simply ignore - or deny - huge areas of human experience and concern from mass immigration to the collapse of marriage and the disappearance of order and rigour in the state education system.Yet conventional wisdom continues to insist that formal politics can and should continue as it did before - and that an exasperated and increasingly angry electorate should place its hopes in a mere change of personnel at the next election. Peter Hitchens argues for the re-establishment of proper adversary politics and the rediscovery of principle.
Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
Wendy Lesser - 2011
Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a "diary, the story of his soul." The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works.Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, Music for Silenced Voices is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.
Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
Michael Zielenziger - 2006
But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Equally as troubling are the more than one million young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from society, and the growing numbers of "parasite singles," the name given to single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children. In "Shutting Out the Sun," Michael Zielenziger argues that Japan's rigid, tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality and the expression of self are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution. Giving a human face to the country's malaise, Zielenziger explains how these constraints have driven intelligent, creative young men to become modern-day hermits. At the same time, young women, better educated than their mothers and earning high salaries, are rejecting the traditional path to marriage and motherhood, preferring to spend their money on luxury goods and travel. Smart, unconventional, and politically controversial, "Shutting Out the Sun" is a bold explanation of Japan's stagnation and its implications for the rest of the world.
The Way I See It
Patti Davis - 1992
The daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan offers an insider's view of growing up Reagan, describing her father's emotional abandonment of her, her mother's cruelty, and the family's bitter rivalries, uncontrollable rage, and dark secrets.
Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
George Marshall - 2014
What is the psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not? George Marshall’s search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prize–winning psychologists and Texas Tea Party activists; the world’s leading climate scientists and those who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals. What he discovers is that our values, assumptions, and prejudices can take on lives of their own, gaining authority as they are shared, dividing people in their wake.With engaging stories and drawing on years of his own research, Marshall argues that the answers do not lie in the things that make us different, but rather in what we share: how our human brains are wired—our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blind spots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe. Once we understand what excites, threatens, and motivates us, we can rethink climate change, for it is not an impossible problem. Rather, we can halt it if we make it our common purpose and common ground. In the end, Don’t Even Think About It is both about climate change and about the qualities that make us human and how we can deal with the greatest challenge we have ever faced.
Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground
Charles Bowden - 2002
Down, down he leads us, in intoxicating, nearly hallucinogenic prose-past the Yaqui, the Anasazi, and other ghosts of our collective history, past the hookers, winos, and assorted have-nots outside the prosperous circle by the fire. We meet a prisoner obsessed with painting presidents, sex offenders whose desires are not as alien as we wish, a murderer whose execution does not cure what ails us. I wound up looking at a world where cannibalism is life, Bowden writes, and of course, given the diet, a life without a future. He mourns a young artist who couldn't find a reason to keep living and tends a mesquite tree that won't die. And down among its metaphoric roots, he reacquaints us with the appetites-fierce, flawed, human-that might save us too. Blues for Cannibals is scripture for an age when bushes no longer burn.
No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination
Scott Greer - 2017
Across the country, ugly campus protests over speakers with dissenting viewpoints, as well as a preoccupation with "micro-aggressions," "trigger warnings," "safe spaces" and brand-new "gender identities," make it obvious that something has gone terribly wrong with higher education. For years, colleges have pursued policies favoring students based not on their merit, but on their race, gender, and sexual orientation. The disturbingly negative effects of this culture are now impossible to deny. Scott Greer’s investigative work links such seemingly unrelated trends as "rape culture" hysteria and Black Lives Matter to an overall campus mindset intent on elevating and celebrating leftist-designated "protected classes" above everyone else – while intimidating, censoring, and punishing those who disagree with this perversely un-American agenda. In No Campus for White Men, Greer broadens the usual media focus well beyond coverage of demonstrations by easily offended college students, to spotlight the darker forces at work behind the scenes that are feeding higher education’s metastasizing crisis – and how all this results in sustained animosity, first and foremost, toward white men. Greer also documents how this starkly totalitarian culture is not isolated to higher education, but is rather a result of trends already operating in society. Thus, he shows, today's campus madness may eventually dominate much more of America if it is not addressed and reversed soon.
The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America
James Sullivan - 2008
Yet few have addressed his contribution in the darkest hour of the civil rights movement. Telling the untold story of his historic Boston Garden concert of 1968, The Hardest Working Man also captures the magnificent achievements that made Brown a revolutionary icon of American popular culture. Acclaimed journalist James Sullivan begins his stirring account by depicting the racially charged climate of Boston in the hours after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death. Brown’s concert was slated for cancellation as police geared up for mass retaliation. After Brown butted heads with the mayor, the show was allowed to go on—and his emotional, electric performance was broadcast live on local television. Though rioting erupted in more than a hundred U.S. cities that night, Boston remained quiet. Not only bringing to life that transforming show, James Sullivan also charts Brown’s incredible rise from poverty to self-made millionaire and the pivotal voice behind the signature anthem “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” making The Hardest Working Man a tribute to an unforgettable concert and a rousing biography of a revolutionary musician.
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
George Friedman - 2008
It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.” —George Friedman In his long-awaited and provocative new book, George Friedman turns his eye on the future—offering a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century.The Next 100 Years draws on a fascinating exploration of history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years. Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era—with changes in store, including:• The U.S.-Jihadist war will conclude—replaced by a second full-blown cold war with Russia.• China will undergo a major extended internal crisis, and Mexico will emerge as an important world power.• A new global war will unfold toward the middle of the century between the United States and an unexpected coalition from Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Far East; but armies will be much smaller and wars will be less deadly.• Technology will focus on space—both for major military uses and for a dramatic new energy resource that will have radical environmental implications.• The United States will experience a Golden Age in the second half of the century.Written with the keen insight and thoughtful analysis that has made George Friedman a renowned expert in geopolitics and forecasting, The Next 100 Years presents a fascinating picture of what lies ahead.For continual, updated analysis and supplemental material, go to www.Stratfor.com
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Jonathan Haidt - 2018
These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility. The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations. This is a book about how we got here. First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt take us on a tour of the social trends stretching back to the 1980s that have produced the confusion and conflict on campus today, including the loss of unsupervised play time and the birth of social media, all during a time of rising political polarization. This is a book about how to fix the mess. The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life, with devastating consequences for them, for their parents, for the companies that will soon hire them, and for a democracy that is already pushed to the brink of violence over its growing political divisions. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.