Book picks similar to
The Black Boom by Jason L. Riley
politics
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CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files
Jefferson Morley - 2016
Kennedy, Jefferson Morley is asked, “So who killed JFK? What’s your theory?” Morley, a former reporter for the Washington Post and author of Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, invariably disappoints. “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell.” Fifty-plus years after JFK’s death, this answer is laughable but serious. The JFK story remains unsettled well into the 21st century, no matter what the various conspiracy and anti-conspiracy theorists may proclaim. Indeed, the complex reality of how a president of the United States came to be gunned down on a sunny day, and no one lost his liberty — or his job — continues to live and grow in popular memory. This is a book that reveals deceit and deception on the part of the CIA relating to the Kennedy assassination and why the CIA should reveal to the American people what it is still keeping secret. Employing his investigative reporting skills through interviews and examination of long-secret records, Morley reveals that the CIA was closely monitoring the movements of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the months preceding the assassination of President Kennedy. Questions naturally arise: Did the CIA suspect that Oswald was up to no good? Or was its surveillance part of a CIA scheme to frame Oswald for the assassination of President Kennedy? Why did the CIA keep its surveillance secret from the Warren Commission?Morley also reveals a close relationship between the CIA and an American anti-Castro group that began advertising Oswald’s connections to communism and the Soviet Union immediately after the assassination? That raises questions: Why didn’t the CIA reveal that relationship to official agencies investigating the assassination of President Kennedy? Why did a federal judge and the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations accuse the CIA of deceit and deception?The U.S. government retains almost 3,600 assassination-related records, consisting of tens of thousands of pages that have never been seen by the public. More than 1,100 of these records are held by the CIA.What is in those secret files? What do they reveal about JFK’s death? Why has the CIA been so reluctant to release them? And when will they finally be revealed to the public? Will they answer the disturbing questions that the revelations in this book raise?
Mad Mobs & Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots
Steve Reicher - 2011
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Timothy Snyder - 2017
Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
The Boys' Club
Michael Warner - 2021
The Boys' Club is the must-read inside story behind the power and politics of AFL, Australia's biggest sport.Revealing how the fledgling state administrative body evolved into the Australian Football League and its meteoric rise to become one of the richest and most powerful organisations in the land, award-winning investigative journalist Mick Warner delivers a fascinating insight into key figures and their networks.Tracking the rise of the game and the AFL figureheads, The Boys' Club lifts the lid on the scandals, secrets and deal making that have shaped the Australian game.
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.
Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America--and How We Can Get More of It
Arthur C. Brooks - 2008
Liberals believe they are happier than conservatives, and conservatives disagree. In fact, almost every group thinks it is happier than everyone else. In this provocative new book, Arthur C. Brooks explodes the myths about happiness in America. As he did in the controversial Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, Brooks examines vast amounts of evidence and empirical research to uncover the truth about who is happy in America, who is not, and-most important-why. He finds that there is a real “happiness gap” in America today, and it lies disconcertingly close to America’s cultural and political fault lines. The great divide between the happy and the unhappy in America, Brooks shows, is largely due to differences in social and cultural values. The values that bring happiness are faith, charity, hard work, optimism, and individual liberty. Secularism, excessive reliance on the state to solve problems, and an addiction to security all promote unhappiness. What can be done to maximize America’s happiness? Replete with the unconventional wisdom for which Brooks has come to be known, Gross National Happiness offers surprising and illuminating conclusions about how our government can best facilitate Americans in their pursuit of happiness.
Foundations Of Indian Political Thought: An Interpretation: From Manu To The Present Day
V.R. Mehta - 1996
The study covers almost all the outstanding thinkers on politics in India and is perhaps the first book which provides an overview of the Indian political thought from Manu to the present day.
Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America's Border
Jan Brewer - 2011
Unfairly tarred by liberal critics as a state comprised of racist rednecks, Arizona is on the front lines in the battle against illegal immigration—and the courageous stand of its leader, a national hero who’s been called so tough that she “eats scorpions for breakfast,” will educate and inspire Americans from coast to coast.
Deadly Ambition
Donna Foley Mabry - 2010
The public hates her and so does he. Locke decides that it would be easier for the President to win re-election if he were a grieving widower and plots her murder. Nothing goes according to plan, and the attempted assassination sets off a chain of events that puts Locke only one murder away from gaining the Oval Office for himself. The FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA can't find the killer, but a veteran cop and the head of the President's security detail work together to unravel the clues. The question is, can they find the solution in time to save the next victim? Fresh as today's headlines, 'Deadly Ambition' takes you to the inside world of Washington D.C.'s power brokers and outrageous characters. There's the slovenly and pragmatic head of the DNC, a Vice President far too fond of women, some of them not old enough to drive, and the Presidential aide whose credit card bills have gotten so far ahead of him that he will do anything to pay them off. There's a Secret Service Agent willing to give his own life to protect his charge, and more than one assassin who believes that killing a President is easy, but knows that getting away with it is the hard part.
The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
Michiko Kakutani - 2018
Over the last three decades, Michiko Kakutani has been thinking and writing about the demise of objective truth in popular culture, academia, and contemporary politics. In The Death of Truth, she connects the dots to reveal the slow march of untruth up to our present moment, when Red State and Blue State America have little common ground, proven science is once more up for debate, and all opinions are held to be equally valid. (And, more often than not, rudely declared online.) The wisdom of the crowd has diminished the power of research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the "facts" that best confirm our biases.With wit, erudition, and remarkable insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and presents a path forward for our truth-challenged times.
The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
Andrew Delbanco - 1995
The very notion of evil seems incompatible with modern life, from which the ideas of transgression and the accountable self are fast receding. Yet despite this loss of old words and moral concepts - Satan, sin, evil - we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the universal human experience of cruelty and pain. My driving motive in writing this book has been the conviction that if evil, with all its insidious complexity, escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all.'Americans once believed in God and in Satan; they were known to be obsessed with sin, and they pictured their own history as a struggle with evil. Today, however, while the repetoire of evil seems never to have been richer, as we daily encounter (and even relish) images of unimaginable horror, our grasp on the reality of evil seems weak and uncertain, our responses to it flustered and sometimes indifferent. How has this crisis of incompetence come about?In this important new book, the brilliant scholar Andrew Delbanco proposes a fresh, persuasive interpretation of the American past - and present - that offers a way to resolve this crisis of moral imagination. In a kind of spiritual biography of the American nation, he shows us how the writers of the past three centuries have depicted evil and how, by giving it form and meaning, they have tried to defy and subdue it. His nuanced and yet tough-minded analyses of religious leaders like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, political redeemers such as Jefferson and Lincoln, classic writers like Emerson and Melville, Thoreau and Whitman, and more recent figures, including Niebuhr and Trilling, Rachel Carson and Susan Sontag, show us the strategies by which these writers have recognized and done battle with evil.One way of talking about evil is to demonize and satanize it, depict it as the foreign "other," a monstrous reality far from ourselves. This way of understanding evil as remote and alien seems to be on the rise again today. But as Mr. Delbanco's superb study shows us, Satan has sometimes had a very different meaning in our history - as a symbol of our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor toward creation. Americans have always been engaged in a contest between these two ways of understanding evil; and it remains a struggle in which nothing less than America's destiny is at stake.
Faisal
Rebecca Stefoff - 1989
A biography of the Saudi Arabian king who ruled from 1964 until his assassination in 1975 and who became, during his reign, an important world leader through his control of his country's vast oil resources.
On Palestine
Noam Chomsky - 2015
The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis.
This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital
Mark Leibovich - 2013
What keeps the permanent government spinning on its carousel is the freedom of shamelessness, and that mother's milk of politics, cash. In Mark Leibovich’s remarkable look at the way things really work in D.C., a funeral for a beloved television star becomes the perfect networking platform, a disgraced political aide can emerge with more power than his boss, campaign losers befriend their vanquishers (and make more money than ever!), "conflict of interest" is a term lost in translation, political reporters are fetishized and worshipped for their ability to get one's name in print, and, well - we're all really friends, aren't we? What Julia Phillips did for Hollywood, Timothy Crouse did for journalists, and Michael Lewis did for Wall Street, Mark Leibovich does for our nation's capital.'