The period from 1870 to 1900 in the United States has become known as the Gilded Age, during which America was transformed almost beyond recognition. In the 1870s, the country was still recovering from a horrendously destructive Civil War. The nation was still mainly agrarian; cities were relatively small and large-scale industry almost non-existent. Thirty years later, the U.S. had become an industrial powerhouse with massive cities featuring skyscrapers, electric lights, automobiles on the streets, and subways running below. An influx of immigrants from different parts of the world had changed the very nature of American society which featured almost unimaginable wealth living side-by-side with abject poverty. Inside you will read about... ✓ Taming the Wild West ✓ Robber Barons and Captains of Industry ✓ Emergence of Labor Unions and Women’s Movements ✓ The New Immigrants ✓ Invention and Innovation And much more! The Gilded Age was an era of entrepreneurs, inventions, industrial development, and new ideas. Most of all, it was a period of rapid and profound change which came at a high cost for the working class. In a Golden Age, life is good for everyone. But in a Gilded Age, there is only a thin surface of gold over underlying base metal, a metaphor for a small number of fabulously wealthy people who grew rich by exploiting vast numbers who lived in poverty. This is the story of the Gilded Age of America.

    New York Times bestselling author Roger Stone lashes out with a blistering indictment, exposing the true history and monumental hypocrisy of the Bushes. In Stone’s usual “go for the jugular” style, this is a no-holds-barred history of the Bush family, comprised of smug, entitled autocrats who both use and hide behind their famous name. They got a long-overdue taste of defeat and public humiliation when Jeb’s 2016 presidential bid went down in flames.Besides detailing the vast litany of Jeb’s misdeeds — including receiving a $4 million taxpayer bailout when his father was vice president as well as his startlingly-close alignment with supposed “enemy” Hillary Clinton — Stone travels back to Bush patriarchs Samuel and Prescott, right on through to presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush to weave an epic story of privilege, greed, corruption, drug profiteering, assassination, and lies. A new preface to this paperback edition features explosive information, including the family’s Machiavellian plan to propel Jeb’s son George Prescott Bush forward as the family’s next political contender.The Bush Crime Family will have readers asking, “Why aren’t these people in prison?”

    He then gave a disastrous speech in Cairo in which he apologized for the United State's alleged misdeeds, bowed to the Saudi King whose government funds Islamic jihad worldwide, and praised the new Islamist government in Turkey after the Turkish-sponsored "Gaza Flotilla" incident. But perhaps the most troubling aspects of his plan to hit the "reset" button with Islam have been his abandonment of Israel as a way of currying favor with Muslim autocracies and his efforts to hamstring our intelligence community by effectively banning the truth about Islam. Now into his second term, it is hard to imagine that the consequences of his actions will not eventually be catastrophic.

    The Deals of Warren Buffett - Volume 1 charts the series of investments that made up that journey. In revealing detail, and with a lucid descriptive style, experienced author and investor Glen Arnold explains Buffett's thinking behind these investment deals and shows how his cumulative returns compounded his wealth over time. In this formative period, from 1941-78, Buffett developed and honed the investment philosophy that would lead him to become so successful as his career progressed. But it was not all plain sailing - Buffett made mistakes along the way - and Arnold shows how Buffett learned through success and failure how to select companies worth backing. Arnold also includes insightful 'learning points' at the end of each chapter, which reveal how investors can learn from the craft of Warren Buffett to improve their own investing. Investments featured in this first volume include: GEICO, American Express, Disney, Berkshire Hathaway, See's Candies, and The Washington Post. With stories and analysis drawn from decades of investing experience, join Glen Arnold and delve deeper in The Deals of Warren Buffett!

    Now, he adds, America has caught up with Europe on the great rush to self-destruction.It’s not just our looming financial collapse; it’s not just a culture that seems on a fast track to perdition, full of hapless, indulgent, childish people who think government has the answer for every problem; it’s not just America’s potential eclipse as a world power because of the drunken sailor policymaking in Washington—no, it’s all this and more that spells one word for America: Armageddon.What will a world without American leadership look like? It won’t be pretty—not for you and not for your children. America’s decline won’t be gradual, like an aging Europe sipping espresso at a café until extinction (and the odd Greek or Islamist riot). No, America’s decline will be a wrenching affair marked by violence and possibly secession.With his trademark wit, Steyn delivers the depressing news with raw and unblinking honesty—but also with the touch of vaudeville stand-up and soft shoe that makes him the most entertaining, yet profound, columnist on the planet. And as an immigrant with nowhere else to go, he offers his own prescription for winning America back from the feckless and arrogant liberal establishment that has done its level best to suffocate the world’s last best hope in a miasma of debt, decay, and debility. You will not read a more important—or more alarming, or even funnier—book all year than After America.

    The underlying illness is shareholder primacy. In The Divine Right of Capital, she shows that the corporate drive to maximize shareholder profits at any cost is not only out of step with democratic and free-market principles, but is detrimental to the long-term health of individual companies and the economy as a whole. Kelly offers a far-reaching solution to rebuild corporations in a way that serves all.

    He discovered the systems used to gather personal data, the staggering amount of personal information companies can gather, and the government’s role in helping companies learn about you.

    But here, at long last, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic William A. Henry III takes on, and debunks, some basic, fundamentally ingrained ideas: that everyone is pretty much alike (and should be); that self-fulfillment is more important than objective achievement; that everyone has something significant to contribute; that all cultures offer something equally worthwhile; that a truly just society would automatically produce equal success results across lines of race, class, and gender; and that the common man is almost always right. Henry makes clear, in a book full of vivid examples and unflinching opinions, that while these notions are seductively democratic they are also hopelessly wrong.

    A spiritual history ranging from the first English settlements to the present day, the book is also a lively, deeply learned meditation on hope.Andrew Delbanco tells of the stringent God of Protestant Christianity, who exerted immense force over the language, institutions, and customs of the culture for nearly 200 years. He describes the falling away of this God and the rise of the idea of a sacred nation-state. And, finally, he speaks of our own moment, when symbols of nationalism are in decline, leaving us with nothing to satisfy the longing for transcendence once sustained by God and nation.From the Christian story that expressed the earliest Puritan yearnings to New Age spirituality, apocalyptic environmentalism, and the multicultural search for ancestral roots that divert our own, The Real American Dream evokes the tidal rhythm of American history. It shows how Americans have organized their days and ordered their lives--and ultimately created a culture--to make sense of the pain, desire, pleasure, and fear that are the stuff of human experience. In a time of cultural crisis, when the old stories seem to be faltering, this book offers a lesson in the painstaking remaking of the American dream.

    In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideas—namely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines.In a bold new concluding chapter entitled “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?” Heilbroner reminds us that the word “end” refers to both the purpose and limits of economics. This chapter conveys a concern that today’s increasingly “scientific” economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. Thus, unlike its predecessors, this new edition provides not just an indispensable illumination of our past but a call to action for our future. (amazon.com)

    An accessible look at how the government promoted the housing bubble that it is now using for its own ends.

    Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.

    The Inner Level now explains how inequality affects us individually, altering how we think, feel and behave. It sets out the overwhelming evidence that material inequities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, so does the tendency to define and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority. A deep well of data and analysis is drawn upon to empirically show, for example, that low social status leads to elevated levels of stress hormones, and how rates of anxiety, depression and addictions are intimately related to the inequality which makes that status paramount.Wilkinson and Pickett describe how these responses to hierarchies evolved, and why the impacts of inequality on us are so severe. In doing so, they challenge the conception that humans are inescapably competitive and self-interested. They undermine, too, the idea that inequality is the product of "natural" differences in individual ability. This book draws together many of the most urgent problems facing societies today, but it is not just an index of our ills. It demonstrates that societies based on fundamental equalities, sharing and reciprocity generate much higher levels of well-being, and lays out the path towards them.

    Few people realize that the top private equity firms, such as Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, have become the nation’s largest employers through the businesses they own. Using leveraged buyouts that load their acquired companies with loans, private equity firms have generated more than $1 trillion in new debt—which will come due just when these businesses are least likely to be able to pay it off. Journalist Josh Kosman explores private equity’s explosive growth and shows how its barons wring profits at the expense of the long-term health of their companies. He argues that excessive debt and mismanagement will likely trigger another economic meltdown within the next five years, wiping out up to two million jobs. He also explores the links between the private equity elite and Washington power players, who have helped them escape government scrutiny. The result is a timely book with an important warning for us all.

    In True Wealth, economist Juliet B. Schor rejects the sacrifice message, with the insight that social innovations and new technology can simultaneously enhance our lives and protect the planet. Schor shares examples of urban farmers, DIY renovators, and others working outside the conventional market to illuminate the path away from the work-and-spend cycle and toward a new world rich in time, creativity, information, and community.