Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century


George Packer - 2019
    Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America’s greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence.In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War


Joe Bageant - 2007
    Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas. Nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, and many have no health care. Credit ratings are low or nonexistent, and alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant's report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., white trashonomics; the ubiquitous gun culture”and why the left doesn't get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered magical thinking of the Christian right. (Bageant's brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.Deer Hunting with Jesus is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs the "American hologram" the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.

Jezebel's War With America: The Plot to Destroy Our Country and What We Can Do to Turn the Tide


Michael L. Brown - 2019
    But her spirit lives today.Jezebel was the most wicked woman in the Bible, a powerful seductress who killed the prophets, led Israel into idolatry and immorality, and emasculated men. She was seductive and determined to snuff out the voices coming against her, because these voices were calling out for repentance.In twenty-first-century America, Jezebel is not a person. But it’s as if the spirit of Jezebel is alive again today. The influence of the same demonic force is being felt in the massive increase of pornography and sexual temptation, the militant spirit of abortion, the rise of radical feminism, and most importantly, in the attempt to silence prophetic voices. Just as Jezebel clashed with strong men almost three thousand years ago, the demonic spirit of Jezebel is powerful in America, and it is going after the church.This eye-opening book not only unveils the satanic plot to destroy America, beginning with an all-out assault on the church, but it will equip every believer with tools to defeat the enemy in their own personal lives as well as in the nation. This book will show you how the spirit of Jezebel is active in America today and teach you how to protect the church.OTHER BOOKS BY MICHAEL L. BROWN, PHD:Playing With Holy Fire (2018) ISBN-13: 978-1629994987The Power of Music (2019)ISBN-13: 978-1629995953Breaking the Stronghold of Food (2017) ISBN-13: 978-1629990996

Piety & Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House


Tom Lobianco - 2019
    The seasoned political reporter was at the first campaign rally governor Pence held in his hometown of Columbus, Indiana. He was there when Pence returned to Washington as Donald Trump’s vice president. Drawing on his deep ties both within the Beltway and in Indiana state politics, as well as reams of research and deep access to the vice president and his staff, LoBianco offers a revealing portrait of the devout Christian who shocked many of his closest followers when he joined the campaign and became one of the strongest champions of Donald Trump. He also explores the rumors—much debated inside the Beltway and among pundits in the media—surrounding the Vice President’s ambitions to succeed and even "overthrow" Trump.LoBianco dissects Pence’s entire political life, from his detours in the ’90s, to his rapid ascension through the first decade of the twenty-first century, to the White House, and provides an inside account of how Pence nearly crashed and burned his career while governor, only to miraculously rise from the ashes thanks to the unlikely election of Trump. He also gives a rare look inside the "shadow government" Pence has built—a conservative machine at Trump’s call for now, but one that could just as easily step in if Trump is removed from office.Piety & Power cuts to the core of the nation’s most enigmatic politician, and unearths new, important, and fascinating anecdotes about Pence’s faith, his marriage to Karen Pence, his bizarre, obsequious relationship with Trump, his deeply buried personality, his ascent to power under John Boehner, and his presidential aspirations and plans for America’s future.From the explosive revelations of the Russia investigation to the sea change affecting the Republican party and its direction under Trump, it is vital that Americans know more about the man who could ascend to the Oval Office. Piety & Power provides insights and answers as it sheds light on this ambitious Midwestern politician, his past, and his possible future.

Dreamseller: An Addiction Memoir


Brandon Novak - 2017
    By the time he was fourteen, he was living the dream. Discovered by skate legends Bucky Lasek and Tony Hawk. Touring the U.S. with the elite Powell-Peralta team. Signing autographs and appearing in films and magazines. Brandon had it all. Then he got hooked on heroin.Soon the up-and-coming star was living a down-and-out life in a garage, begging for change, and hustling to score his next fix. He stole from his family and friends. He pushed the fantasy that everything was okay, that he was going to rehab, getting help, and getting better. But it was all a lie.This is the story of an addict--a dreamseller who stopped believing the lies he was selling and started believing in himself. With the help of his celebrity buddy Bam Margera of Jackass fame, Brandon joined the cast of MTV's Viva La Bam and made an honest reach for sobriety. The road was hard, and he had some falls. But like any great skateboarder, Brandon Novak was always determined to get up again . . ."Entertaining, shocking, crazy, unimaginable."--Bam MargeraWith 24 pages of photos Updated with a New Epilogue

On the Water: Discovering America in a Row Boat


Nathaniel Stone - 2002
    The hull glides in silence and with such perfect balance as to report no motion. I sit up for another stroke, now looking down as the blades ignite swirling pairs of white constellations of phosphorescent plankton. Two opposing heavens. ‘Remember this,’ I think to myself.”Few people have ever considered the eastern United States to be an island, but when Nat Stone began tracing waterways in his new atlas at the age of ten he discovered that if one had a boat it was possible to use a combination of waterways to travel up the Hudson River, west across the barge canals and the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and back up the eastern seaboard. Years later, still fascinated by the idea of the island, Stone read a biography of Howard Blackburn, a nineteenth-century Gloucester fisherman who had attempted to sail the same route a century before. Stone decided he would row rather than sail, and in April 1999 he launched a scull beneath the Brooklyn Bridge to see how far he could get. After ten months and some six thousand miles he arrived back at the Brooklyn Bridge, and continued rowing on to Eastport, Maine. Retracing Stone’s extraordinary voyage, On the Water is a marvelous portrait of the vibrant cultures inhabiting American shores and the magic of a traveler’s chance encounters. From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a rower at the local boathouse bequeaths him a pair of fabled oars, to Vanceburg, Kentucky, where he spends a day fishing with Ed Taylor -- a man whose efficient simplicity recalls The Old Man and the Sea -- Stone makes his way, stroke by stroke, chatting with tugboat operators and sleeping in his boat under the stars. He listens to the live strains of Dwight Yoakum on the banks of the Ohio while the world’s largest Superman statue guards the nearby town square, and winds his way through the Louisiana bayous, where he befriends Scoober, an old man who reminds him that the happiest people are those who’ve “got nothin’.” He briefly adopts a rowing companion -- a kitten -- along the west coast of Florida, and finds himself stuck in the tidal mudflats of Georgia. Along the way, he flavors his narrative with local history and lore and records the evolution of what started out as an adventure but became a lifestyle. An extraordinary literary debut in the lyrical, timeless style of William Least Heat-Moon and Henry David Thoreau, On the Water is a mariner’s tribute to childhood dreams, solitary journeys, and the transformative powers of America’s rivers, lakes, and coastlines.From the Hardcover edition.

Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership,and the Olympic Games


Mitt Romney - 2004
    The head of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics organizing committee describes how he assumed the leadership of the troubled organization and turned it around to present one of the most successful Olympic Games ever.

Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of Scum America


Scott McMurrey - 2017
     The result is thorough lambasting of the people who put Trump in place and the even more reprehensible people who have come out of the shadows since Trump's election. McMurrey takes on the whole cadre of cretinous creatures who flocked to Trump, from the right-wing nutjobs left over from the Tea Party years to the slime who admired him from playing a mogul on TV to the bottom-dwelling Republicans who just saw him as a thug and a bully who would get them what they wanted. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Trump, King of Assholes 2. Asshole Nation: Trump’s Natural Constituency 3. Why Trumpist Assholes are Republicans 4. Why Assholes are Comfortable in the Republican Party 5. Why Asshole Nation Adores Trump 6. Don’t Feel Bad for Trumpists 7. Beating Back Trump’s Asshole Nation 8. Even “Never-Trump” Republicans are Responsible for the Rise of Asshole Nation 9. Trump, Roy Moore, and the Rise of Scum America 10. Crush Scum America and Stop the Careening Eighteen-Wheeler of Democracy If you are disgusted by Trump and by knuckle-dragging conservatism, this book will be a pick-me-up during these dispiriting times. McMurrey speaks the language of anti-Trumpers. He recognizes that Trump mania is just the latests (and let's hope the last!) manifestation of conservatism—a worthless, unnecessary, and fear-filled ideology that promotes selfishness and anti-social attitudes. Pick up Asshole Nation for yourself and give copies to all your Trump-hating friends!

How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election


Chuck Todd - 2009
       Although much has changed in the nearly four years since, How Barack Obama Won remains the essential guide to Obama’s electoral strengths and offers important perspective on his 2012 bid. The votes in each state for Obama and McCain are broken down by percentage according to gender, age, race, party, religious affiliation, education, household income, size of city, and according to views about the most important issues (the economy, terrorism, Iraq, energy, healthcare), the future of the economy (worried, not worried) and the war in Iraq (approve, disapprove).

Full of Grace: Miraculous Stories of Healing and Conversion Through Mary's Intercession


Christine Watkins - 2010
    Each story is accompanied by scripture, prayer, and discussion exercises designed to remind readers of Mary of Medjugorje's intercession on their behalf and God's personal love for them. Watkins gives nationwide talks and workshops and works as a spiritual director in the Bay Area, in addition to maintaining an active website and e-mail newsletter.

The ARRL Extra Class License Manual for Ham Radio


H. Ward Silver - 2002
    Whenyou upgrade to Extra Class, you gain access to the entire Amateur Radio frequency spectrum. Ues this book to ace the top-level ham radio licensing exam. Our expert instruction will lead you through all of the knowledge you need to pass the exam: rules, specific operating skills and more advanced electronics theory.

Running in the Midpack: How to be a Strong, Successful and Happy Runner


Martin Yelling - 2021
    

Bless You Boys: Diary of the Detroit Tigers' 1984 Season


Sparky Anderson - 1984
    Sparky Anderson, the Tigers' colorful manager and 1984 American League Manager of the Year, tells all in this, his day-by-day diary of the making of a championship ball club.

A Force for Justice: The Maurice McCabe Story


Michael Clifford - 2017
    However, over the following eight years, he exposed gross incompetence and corruption within An Garda Siochána. It ranged from a violent criminal being free to murder, to country-wide corruption in the policing of road safety.Along the way he paid a terrible price, enduring vilification, bullying and harassment by forces who wanted to silence him and his inconvenient truths. Worse still were the rumours of an extreme nature, which had a devastating effect on his whole family.McCabe's actions ultimately led to some of the biggest reforms of An Garda Siochána since the foundation of the state, caused major political upheaval, and culminated in a Tribunal established in 2017, to examine whether there had been a smear campaign against him within the force.A Force For Justice reveals the story behind the scenes, of one man struggling to survive in the most challenging of circumstances. It is a dramatic account of a garda sergeant's journey from a rural outpost into the heart of the Irish political and legal system.

Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood


Craig Lesley - 2005
    Their story is one of hardship, violence, and cautious, heartbreaking attempts toward compassion. Lesley's fearless journey through his family history provides a remarkable portrait of hard living in the Western states, and confirms his place as one of the region's very best storytellers.