Book picks similar to
The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game by Ronald Kessler
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Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department
Elie Honig - 2021
During his tenure, Barr has done profound and pervasive damage, trampling the two core virtues that have long defined the department and its mission across both Democratic and Republican administrations: credibility and independence. Barr has bent the truth, distorted the law, and undermined his Department’s own prosecutions, with one consistent outcome: to protect and advance the political interests of Donald Trump.Barr’s first act as AG was distorting the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, earning a public rebuke for his dishonesty from Mueller himself and, later, from a federal judge. Barr tried to manipulate the law to squash a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine—the report that eventually led to Trump’s impeachment. Barr intervened in the prosecutions of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, undermining the work of his own prosecutors to aid the loyal Trump advisers. He got caught lying about his late-night effort to displace the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office was investigating the Trump family and its business. Barr has denigrated Democrats and Trump opponents and has amplified baseless theories about massive mail-in ballot fraud, bolstering the possibility of an ugly battle over the 2020 election results. Working at the Justice Department, Elie Honig was taught that the two most important assets a prosecutor has is credibility and independence; without them, a prosecutor is lost. While he and his colleagues fought hard to do justice, to charge well-supported and righteous cases, and to convict serious lawbreakers, they knew that nothing was worth sacrificing character or integrity. To America’s detriment, Barr has relinquished both.Hatchet Man examines Barr’s unprecedented abuse of power as Attorney General and the lasting structural damage done to the Justice Department through his callous, almost gleeful, politicization of his position and his vast power.
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Nancy MacLean - 2017
The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism
Seyward Darby - 2020
Trump, journalist Seyward Darby went looking for the women of the so-called alt-right--really just white nationalism with a new label. The mainstream media depicted the alt-right as a bastion of angry white men, but was it? As women headlined resistance to the Trump administration's bigotry and sexism, most notably at the women's marches, Darby wanted to know why others were joining a movement espousing racism and anti-feminism. Who were these women, and what did their activism reveal about America's past, present, and future? Darby researched dozens of women across the country before settling on three: Corinna Olsen, Ayla Stewart, and Lana Lokteff. Each was born in 1979 and became a white nationalist in the post-9/11 era. Their respective stories of radicalization upend much of what we assume about women, politics, and political extremism.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Jon Krakauer - 2003
This is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.
Raising Trump
Ivana Trump - 2017
Raising Trump is a non-partisan, non-political book about motherhood, strength, and resilience. Though Ivana writes about her childhood in communist Czechoslovakia, her escape from the regime and relocation to New York, her whirlwind romance, and her great success as a businesswoman, the focus of the book is devoted to Ivana’s raising of her children. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump will all contribute their own memories to the book. “Every day, people ask me how I raised such great kids. They are truly amazed when I tell them that there was no magic to their upbringing. I was a tough and loving mother who taught them the value of a dollar, not to lie, cheat, or steal, respect for others, and other life lessons that I’ll share now in Raising Trump, along with unfiltered personal stories about Don, Eric, and Ivanka from their early childhood to becoming the ‘first sons and daughter.’” —Ivana Trump
Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse
John Lithgow - 2019
Chronicling the last few raucous years in American politics, Lithgow takes readers verse by verse through the history of Donald Trump's presidency.- Lampoons the likes of Betsy DeVos, William Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and dozens more.- Illustrated from cover to cover with Lithgow's never-before-seen line drawings.- Draws inspiration from A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and even Mother Goose.- Great for fans of A Very Stable Genius by Mike Luckovich, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter by Scott Adams, and The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.The poems collected in Dumpty draw inspiration from A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Mother Goose, and many more. A feat of laugh-out-loud lyrical storytelling, this timely volume is bound to bring joy to poetry lovers, political junkies, and Lithgow fans alike.
The Good Soldiers
David Finkel - 2009
In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way.What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale—not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.
Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution
Tucker Carlson - 2018
The host of Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight offers a blistering critique of the new American ruling class, the elites of both parties, who have taken over the ship of state, leaving the rest of us, the citizen-passengers, to wonder: How do we put the country back on course?
American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
Shane Bauer - 2018
An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Rebecca Traister - 2016
It was the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent; and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890–1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven. But over the course of her vast research and more than a hundred interviews with academics and social scientists and prominent single women, Traister discovered a startling truth: The phenomenon of the single woman in America is not a new one. And historically, when women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, the results were massive social change—temperance, abolition, secondary education, and more. Today, only twenty percent of Americans are married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960.
The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ
Roger Stone - 2013
Kennedy. Consummate political insider Roger Stone makes a compelling case that Lyndon Baines Johnson had the motive, means, and opportunity to orchestrate the murder of JFK. Stone maps out the case that LBJ blackmailed his way on the ticket in 1960 and was being dumped in 1964 to face prosecution for corruption at the hands of his nemesis attorney Robert Kennedy. Stone uses fingerprint evidence and testimony to prove JFK was shot by a long-time LBJ hit man—not Lee Harvey Oswald.President Johnson would use power from his personal connections in Texas, from the criminal underworld, and from the United States government to escape an untimely end in politics and to seize even greater power. President Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was the driving force behind a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.In The Man Who Killed Kennedy, you will find out how and why he did it.Legendary political operative and strategist Roger Stone has gathered documents and uses his firsthand knowledge to construct the ultimate tome to prove that LBJ was not only involved in JFK’s assassination, but was in fact the mastermind.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination
Philip Shenon - 2013
Though A Cruel and Shocking Act began as Shenon's attempt to write the first insider's history of the Warren Commission, it quickly became something much larger and more important when he discovered startling information that was withheld from the Warren Commission by the CIA, FBI and others in power in Washington. Shenon shows how the commission's ten-month investigation was doomed to fail because the man leading it – Chief Justice Earl Warren – was more committed to protecting the Kennedy family than getting to the full truth about what happened on that tragic day. A taut, page-turning narrative, Shenon's book features some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century—Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Justice Warren, CIA spymasters Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, as well as the CIA's treacherous "molehunter," James Jesus Angleton.Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to the surviving commission staffers and many other key players, Philip Shenon's authoritative, scrupulously researched book will forever change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination and about the deeply flawed investigation that followed. A groundbreaking, explosive account of the Kennedy assassination that will rewrite the history of the 20th century's most controversial murder investigation.A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013
The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him
Patrick M. Byrne - 2021
He describes how his team of "cyber-ninjas" unraveled it while they worked against the clock of Constitutional processes, all against the background of being a lifetime entrepreneur trying to interact with Washington, DC. This book takes you behind the headlines to backroom scenes that determined whether or not the fraud would be exposed in time, and paints a portrait of Washington that will leave the reader asking, "Is this the end of our constitutional republic?"
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
Stephen Kinzer - 2003
The victim was Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Although the coup seemed a success at first, today it serves as a chilling lesson about the dangers of foreign intervention.In this book, veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer gives the first full account of this fateful operation. His account is centered around an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the events of August 1953, and concludes with an assessment of the coup's "haunting and terrible legacy."Operation Ajax, as the plot was code-named, reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East, and the world. It restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne, allowing him to impose a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Revolution, in turn, inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its protection."It is not far-fetched," Kinzer asserts in this book, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."Drawing on research in the United States and Iran, and using material from a long-secret CIA report, Kinzer explains the background of the coup and tells how it was carried out. It is a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents. There are accounts of bribes, staged riots, suitcases full of cash, and midnight meetings between the Shah and CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, who was smuggled in and out of the royal palace under a blanket in the back seat of a car. Roosevelt,the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was a real-life James Bond in an era when CIA agents operated mainly by their wits. After his first coup attempt failed, he organized a second attempt that succeeded three days later.The colorful cast of characters includes the terrified young Shah, who fled his country at the first sign of trouble; General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War commander and the radio voice of "Gang Busters," who flew to Tehran on a secret mission that helped set the coup in motion; and the fiery Prime Minister Mossadegh, who outraged the West by nationalizing the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British, outraged by the seizure of their oil company, persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward Communism. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain became the coup's main sponsors.Brimming with insights into Middle Eastern history and American foreign policy, this book is an eye-opening look at an event whose unintended consequences - Islamic revolution and violent anti-Americanism--have shaped the modern world. As the United States assumes an ever-widening role in the Middle East, it is essential reading.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann - 2017
After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,” roamed – virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.A true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.