With humor and chutzpah, attorney, commentator, and popular radio host Michael Smerconish takes on today's oversensitive culture with a collection of entertaining, outlandish anecdotes about PC gone wild-stories that are hilarious, horrifying, and unbelievably true.Why are sports leagues handing out trophies to losers? Why are little old grandmas hired to guard 200-pound prisoners? Why are newborn babies and old men with walkers singled out at the airport while likely terrorists are ushered through security with ease?This book shows through these absurdities that today's atmosphere of censorship and multiculturalism is paving the way for serious threats to our cultural identity and national security: "It's one thing for the forces of political correctness to muzzle our day-to-day lives here at home in the US, quite another when that same cancer metastasizes into the war on terror."We must eradicate the PC disease. Our sanity-and our very lives-depend on it."Michael Smerconish talks the talk: If you say unpopular things, watch out! Using vivid examples of PC rubbish, "Muzzled" will lead you into a world that would terrify Rod Serling. An entertaining and provocative book." -Bill O'Reilly"Reads like fiction, too bad it's true." -Nelson DeMille, novelist, author of "Night Fall and The General's Daughter""The PC virus is out of control . . . and it's worse than you think! In this entertaining and important book, Michael Smerconish chronicles just how mindless things have gotten in politically correct America. He tells fascinating stories that will make you laugh . . . right up until the time they make you scream. Thanks to the PC crowd, we are all living in The United States of the Absurd." -Bernard Goldberg, journalist and author of "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America," "Arrogance," and "Bias""I really squirm whenever I find myself agreeing with Smerconish. (I know the feeling is mutual.) I did a lot of squirming while reading this provocative book. All true liberals and conservatives must agree with Smerconish that the PC muzzles must be removed so that people can decide based on the marketplace of ideas." -Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard and author of "Preemption""I don't often find myself on the same side of the political barricades as Michael Smerconish. But "Muzzled" is a witty, provocative, and timely book. Even when Michael is wrong, which is often, he draws you in and keeps you reading." -Arianna Huffington, author of "Pigs at the Trough" and "Fanatics and Fools""In Muzzled, my American Blood Brother of status-quo-obliterating defiance, Michael Smerconish, once again smokes out the cockroaches of political correctness . . . "Muzzled" is a great title for a book that I am convinced every American school kid should read and be tested on. If a new generation doesn't grow some intellectual balls, our Once Great Nation will continue to repeat horrific mistakes and pay the price . . . Read it. Live it." -Ted Nugent, rock star, author, television personality, and hunter extraordinaire

    This whimsical look at “the language of no language” will teach you to hurl insults, flirt, agree, excuse yourself, cross the street, and even make promises—wordlessly! (And who is that stoic guy wearing a suit in all the photos?) Finally, a way to tell someone at a loud party, “Your underwear is showing,” in four easy hand motions. This is a book for the serious student, the class clown, and the crazy guy at Akihabara Station hoping to communicate with Godzilla.Hamiru-aqui is a Japanese artist based in Tokyo.

    Governments spend millions on a losing war against it, yet it's still the drug of choice in the West. How did the cocaine economy become so massive? Who keeps it running behind the scenes?In Cocaine Nation, Tom Feiling travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to London and New york. he meets Medellin hitmen, U.S. kingpins, Brazilian traffickers, and talks to soldiers and narcotics officers who fight the gangs and cartels. He traces cocaine's progress from legal 'pick-me-up' to luxury product to global commodity, looks at legalization programs in countries such as Switzerland, and shows how America's anti-drugs crusade is actually increasing demand. Cutting through the myths about the white trade, this is the story of cocaine as it's never been told before.

    Award-winning Consumer Reports travel journalist William McGee, a former editor of the Consumer Reports Travel Letter, spent nearly seven years in airline flight operations management, and what he learned was less than uplifting. From TSA power grabs and an endemic lack of oversight to legislative battles and lobbying boondoggles to antiquated flight patterns and outsourced maintenance workers, the airlines and the government are in cahoots, conspiring to turn a profit any way they can, no matter who has to pay the price. A provocative and hard-hitting call to action, Attention All Passengers will explode all our previous misconceptions about the airline industry.

    However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in El Norte, the nation has much older Spanish roots—ones that have long been unacknowledged or marginalized. The Hispanic past of the United States predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century, and has been every bit as important in shaping the nation as it exists today.El Norte chronicles the sweeping and dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century to the present—from Ponce de Leon’s initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican-American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico. Interwoven in this stirring narrative of events and people are cultural issues that have been there from the start but which are unresolved to this day: language, belonging, community, race, and nationality. Seeing them play out over centuries provides vital perspective at a time when it is urgently needed.In 1883, Walt Whitman meditated on his country’s Spanish past: “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them,” predicting that “to that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.” That future is here, and El Norte, a stirring and eventful history in its own right, will make a powerful impact on our national understanding.

    Osho speaks on the relationship between freedom and consciousness, defines his neo-sannyas, and elaborates on the mysteries of initiation and disciplehood.

    They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls.The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a "family" that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."Sharlet's discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the cold war, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not "What do fundamentalists want?" but "What have they already done?"Part history, part investigative journalism, The Family is a compelling account of how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power, a story that stretches from the religious revivals that have shaken this nation from its beginning to fundamentalism's new frontiers. No other book about the right has exposed the Family or revealed its far-reaching impact on democracy, and no future reckoning of American fundamentalism will be able to ignore it.

    Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977–with his wife and three young children–intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding: The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them. Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the Pirahã, and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.

    Long after their disappearance, the people of Matanza and the adjacent towns of Navidad consistently report sightings of Bruno—on the beach, in bars, gambling—while reports on Alicia, however, are next to none. And every story and clue keeps circling back to a man named Boris Real . . .At least that’s how the story—or one of many stories, rather—goes. All of them are told by a journalist narrator, who recounts the mysterious case of the Vivar family from an underground laboratory where he and six other “subjects” have taken up a novel-game, writing and exchanging chapters over email, all while waiting for the fear-inducing drug hadón to take its effect, and their uncertain fates.A literary descendent of Roberto Bolaño and Andrés Neuman, Carlos Labbé’s Navidad and Matanza is a work of metafiction that not only challenges our perceptions of facts and observations, and of identity and reality, but also of basic human trust.“Carlos Labbé’s [Navidad & Matanza] begins to fuck with your head from its very first word—moving through journalese, financial reporting, whodunit, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Nabokov to David Lynch.”—Toby Litt

    C. Grayling's lucid and stimulating books, based on the idea that philosophy should engage with the world and make itself useful, are immensely popular.The Challenge of Things joins earlier collections like The Reason of Things and Thinking of Answers, but this time to collect Grayling's recent writings on the world in a time of war and conflict. In describing and exposing the dark side of things, he also explores ways out of the habits and prejudices of mind that would otherwise trap us forever in the deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds.Whether he is writing about the First World War and its legacy, free speech, the advantages of an atheist prime minister or the role of science in the arts, his essays are always enlightening, enlivening and hopeful.

    Magazine Reads for the Rest of Us | Bustle Most Anticipated Books | PopSugar Best Books | BiblioLifestyle Most Anticipated Historical Fiction Books | Book Riot Book Recommendations | Finer Things Book Lover Gifts They’ll Actually LoveAs a child in Spain, Puri always knew her passion for chocolate was inherited from her father. But it’s not until his death that she learns of something else she’s inherited—a cocoa estate in Vinces, Ecuador, a town nicknamed “París Chiquito.” Eager to claim her birthright and filled with hope for a new life after the devastation of World War I, she and her husband Cristóbal set out across the Atlantic Ocean. But it soon becomes clear someone is angered by Puri’s claim to the estate… When a mercenary sent to murder her aboard the ship accidentally kills Cristóbal instead, Puri dons her husband’s clothes and assumes his identity, hoping to stay safe while she searches for the truth of her father’s legacy in Ecuador. Though freed from the rules that women are expected to follow, Puri confronts other challenges at the estate—newfound siblings, hidden affairs, and her father’s dark secrets. Then there are the dangers awakened by her attraction to an enigmatic man as she tries to learn the identity of an enemy who is still at large, threatening the future she is determined to claim…Perfect for fans of Julia Alvarez and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, this exhilarating novel transports you to the lush tropical landscape of 1920s Ecuador, blending family drama, dangerous mystery, and the real-life history of the coastal town known as the “birthplace of cacao.”

    In this torrential book we are told the odyssey that brought him first to Barcelona, later to Sevilla and finally to America, where he would experience all kinds of outlandish situations.Using historical facts as raw material, and with stellar appearances of characters such as Miguel de Cervantes or the brigand Serrallonga among others, Besora converses with the satirical tradition of works such as Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels or Don Quixote, to paint a fresco of Catalonia in the seventeenth century and the Golden Age of the Spanish empire, creating a novel, fresh, sharp and bursting with exuberant adventures.A triumphant, playful masterpiece brought into a unique style of English thanks to the triumphant creativity of translator Mara Faye Lethem.

    In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British empire to the present. Astonishingly wide-ranging and richly detailed, Empire of Things explores how we have come to live with so much more, how this changed the course of history, and the global challenges we face as a result.

    In this novel, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards who were only small children during the Spanish Civil War, grew up under a stifling dictatorship, and, in many cases, emigrated in desperation from their dying country. Upon his return, the narrator confronts the most controversial political, religious, social, and sexual issues of our time with ferocious energy and elegant prose. Torn between the Islamic and European worlds around him, he finds both ultimately unsatisfactory. In the end, only displacement survives.

    Do you know the Most Amazing Passage in the entire Bible?In this study of Daniel's 70 Weeks, you will discover this amazing prophecy in the Old Testament predicted the very day that Jesus presented Himself as the Meschiach Nagid, the Messiah the King, to Jerusalem.The Seventy Week Prophecy of Daniel 9 includes the most incredible validation of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, which He held them accountable to have known.In a confidential briefing to His disciples, Jesus also highlights this passage as the key to understanding all other prophecies concerning His return.It is essential to understanding the Book of Revelation and other related passage