The chiefs of staff, often referred to as "the gatekeepers," wield tremendous power in Washington and beyond; they decide who is allowed to see the president, negotiate with Congress to push POTUS's agenda, and--most crucially--enjoy unparalleled access to the leader of the free world. Each chief can make or break an administration, and each president reveals himself by the chief he picks.Through extensive, intimate interviews with all seventeen living chiefs and two former presidents, award-winning journalist and producer Chris Whipple pulls back the curtain on this unique fraternity. In doing so, he revises our understanding of presidential history, showing us how James Baker's expert managing of the White House, the press, and Capitol Hill paved the way for the Reagan Revolution--and, conversely, how Watergate, the Iraq War, and even the bungled Obamacare rollout might have been prevented by a more effective chief.Filled with shrewd analysis and never-before-reported details, The Gatekeepers offers an essential portrait of the toughest job in Washington.

    From abortion to same-sex marriage, today's most urgent political debates will hinge on this two-part question: What did the United States Constitution originally mean and who now understands its meaning best? Rakove chronicles the Constitution from inception to ratification and, in doing so, traces its complex weave of ideology and interest, showing how this document has meant different things at different times to different groups of Americans.

    It covers the historic 2008 Presidential campaign and election while looking ahead to assess what the shifting political winds have in store for the future of the major political parties and Americans' political views.

    The People vs. Barack Obama strips away the soft media picture of the Obama administration to reveal a regime motivated by pure, unbridled power and details how each scandal has led to dozens of instances of as-yet-unprosecuted counts of espionage, involuntary manslaughter, violation of internal revenue laws, bribery, and obstruction of justice. The story of the Obama administration is a story of abuse, corruption, and venality on the broadest scale ever to spring from the office of the presidency. President Obama may be the culmination of a century of government growth—but more important, he is the apotheosis of the imperial presidency. Obama chooses when to enforce immigration laws, delays his own Obamacare proposals when it is politically convenient to do so, micromanages the economy, attacks the Supreme Court, Congress, and the sovereign states. And he proclaims that he alone is the voice of the people while encroaching on their rights. In The People vs. Barack Obama, Ben Shapiro brings Obama into the people’s court and addresses each of his abuses of power.

    Forty years later, the FBI have accused 14 executives of 47 counts of money laundering, racketeering and tax evasion linked to kickbacks totalling more than $150m. There's a fascinating story to be told here: how football got big, how FIFA got corrupt and what this means for soccer fans around the world. David Conn, who covered the scandal for The Guardian is the man for the job, putting the recent uproar in the context of FIFA's history and showing how far the organization has strayed from its humble beginnings. The narrative will cover the story up to now, covering everything that happened since the scandal broke - the FBI's investigation, what happened to Blatter and Platini, enquiries into the 2022 World Cup, the comedy of errors surrounding who should take over the presidency and so on. Conn's previous book was called Searching for the Soul of Football--he sees this book as an expansion of that book: an inquiry into the soul of soccer on the global scale, as we take stock of this shocking scandal and try to return the original spirit to the beautiful game.

    Stark, the author of The Rise of Christianity, reviews the history of the seven major crusades from 1095-1291 in this fascinating work of religious revisionist history.

    Until Charles Higham's 1.3 million-copy bestseller, much of her life was a glamorous mystery. Now, fifteen years later, major new documentary evidence, classified at the time, makes for a book far more sensational than the original bestseller. Drawing from long-suppressed archives in France, England, and the United States, Higham has uncovered the duchess's passionate affair with a top-ranking political figure, the duke's romantic involvement with a male equerry, the secret radio broadcasts the couple made to Hitler, and the blackmail plot in Paris that almost brought them-and the British royal family-to ruin. This updated new edition of The Duchess of Windsor is essential reading.

    His efforts shut down countless crooks -- both famous and obscure. Then he realized what the real problem was.In Give Me a Break, Stossel takes on the regulators, lawyers, and politicians who thrive on our hysteria about risk and deceive the public in the name of safety. Drawing on his vast professional experience (as well as some personal ones), Stossel presents an engaging, witty, and thought-provoking argument about the beneficial powers of the free market and free speech.

    In its entirety...you have the CSA "Confederate States of America" Constitution.This is a must read.....imagine a young country that just learned all the things wrong with their country and its government....then makes their own.The CSA was ahead of its time in many respects...(never mind the whole slavery thing)....If you are a History buff or just doing research...get this...read it....it is outstanding.

    Kaplan explores the wisdom of the ages for answers for today’s leaders. While the modern world may seem more complex and dangerous than ever before, Kaplan writes from a deeper historical perspective to reveal how little things actually change. Indeed, as Kaplan shows us, we can look to history’s most influential thinkers, who would have understood and known how to navigate today’s dangerous political waters.Drawing on the timeless work of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, among others, Kaplan argues that in a world of unstable states and an uncertain future, it is increasingly imperative to wrest from the past what we need to arm ourselves for the road ahead. Wide-ranging and accessible, Warrior Politics is a bracing book with an increasingly important message that challenges readers to see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be.

    With clarity, perspective, and cumulative impact, Professor Quigley examines the nature of that transition through two world wars and a worldwide economic depression. As an interpretative historian, he tries to show each event in the full complexity of its historical context. The result is a unique work, notable in several ways. It gives a picture of the world in terms of the influence of different cultures and outlooks upon each other; it shows, more completely than in any similar work, the influence of science and technology on human life; and it explains, with unprecedented clarity, how the intricate financial and commercial patterns of the West prior to 1914 influenced the development of today's world.

    Larry Siedentop argues that the core of what is now our system of beliefs, liberalism, emerged much earlier than generally recognized, established not in the Renaissance but by the arguments of lawyers and philosophers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Yet there are large parts of the world - fundamentalist Islam; quasi-capitalist China - where other belief systems flourish and faced with these challenges, understanding our own ideas' origins is more than ever an important part of knowing who we are.

    This new translation of the Treatise on Law offers fidelity to the Latin in a readable new version that will prove useful to students of the natural law tradition in ethics, political theory, and jurisprudence, as well as to students of Western intellectual history.

    And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political thinking, has long left practical realities far behind.The transcendental theory of justice, the subject of Sen's analysis, flourished in the Enlightenment and has proponents among some of the most distinguished philosophers of our day; it is concerned with identifying perfectly just social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society. The approach Sen favors, on the other hand, focuses on the comparative judgments of what is "more" or "less" just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions.At the heart of Sen's argument is a respect for reasoned differences in our understanding of what a "just society" really is. People of different persuasions--for example, utilitarians, economic egalitarians, labor right theorists, no--nonsense libertarians--might each reasonably see a clear and straightforward resolution to questions of justice; and yet, these clear and straightforward resolutions would be completely different. In light of this, Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.

    In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the background of American culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?The Brothers explores hidden forces that shape the national psyche, from religious piety to Western movies—many of which are about a noble gunman who cleans up a lawless town by killing bad guys. This is how the Dulles brothers saw themselves, and how many Americans still see their country's role in the world.Propelled by a quintessentially American set of fears and delusions, the Dulles brothers launched violent campaigns against foreign leaders they saw as threats to the United States. These campaigns helped push countries from Guatemala to the Congo into long spirals of violence, led the United States into the Vietnam War, and laid the foundation for decades of hostility between the United States and countries from Cuba to Iran.The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. It illuminates and helps explain the modern history of the United States and the world. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013