Book picks similar to
Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture by Annie McClanahan
cultural-studies
economy
lit-crit
newsandpolitics
The Absent State: Insurgency as an Excuse for Misgovernance
Neelesh Misra - 2010
What has pushed the country, which has otherwise held together through seemingly insurmountable odds in the past, to the edge? In a series of dispatches the authors unveil the tensions, frustrations, challenges and justifications that are everyday realities in these troubled regions. Civil administrators talk about the widespread misappropriation of development funds in tribal and remote areas; security and police personnel describe extreme confrontations in the face of inadequate training and equipment; rebel ranks and former insurgents reveal how unemployment, lack of education and rampant exploitation have fuelled their defiance against the establishment and encouraged secessionist activities. At the heart of the on-going turmoil, ordinary people mourn the loss of their loved ones ? to starvation, lack of healthcare facilities and militancy ? even as they voice their demand to be heard.
Thieves of Bay Street: How Banks, Brokerages and the Wealthy Steal Billions from Canadians
Bruce Livesey - 2012
Though no large financial institution has recently gone bust in this country, white-collar criminals, scam artists, Ponzi schemers and organized crime, from the Hells Angels to the Russian mafia, know that Canada is the place in the Western world to rip off investors. And the fraudsters do so with little fear of being caught and punished. Thieves of Bay Street investigates Canada's biggest financial scandals of recent years. Readers will learn what banks do with investors' money and what happens when they lose it. They will meet the bogus investment gurus, the brokers who lose money with both reckless abandon and impunity, the bankers who squander money in toxic investments, the lawyers who protect them and the regulators who do nothing to keep them from doing it again. And most importantly, they'll meet the victims who are demanding that our vaunted banking sector finally come clean on its dirtiest secret.
Men Around The Messenger: The Companions Of The Prophet
Khalid Muhammad Khalid
The sixty-four Companions presented here are representative of that unique generation, a generation without any parallel in history. They come from all walks of life and character. These are stories of real people which can be historically verified. These stories will touch the souls of believers, for they will find in them yet another proof of that conviction that fills their hearts, though it may be denied and its signs effaced by wielders of power in the Muslim lands through treachery and cowardice.
The Way We Never Were: American Families & the Nostalgia Trap
Stephanie Coontz - 1992
Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, Coontz sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice.
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Joel Bakan - 2003
Eminent Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that today's corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.In this revolutionary assessment of the history, character, and globalization of the modern business corporation, Bakan backs his premise with the following observations:-The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others. -The corporation’s unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal. -Governments have freed the corporation, despite its flawed character, from legal constraints through deregulation and granted it ever greater authority over society through privatization.But Bakan believes change is possible and he outlines a far-reaching program of achievable reforms through legal regulation and democratic control.Featuring in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and cultural critic Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is an extraordinary work that will educate and enlighten students, CEOs, whistle-blowers, power brokers, pawns, pundits, and politicians alike.
Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
Francis Fukuyama - 1995
In Trust, a penetrating assessment of the emerging global economic order "after History," he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance. Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy. A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life, Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation's economic health.
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.
100 Years of Leeds United: 1919-2019
Daniel Chapman - 2018
Since its foundation in 1919, Leeds United Football Club has seen more ups and downs than most, rising to global fame through an inimitable and uncompromising style in the 70s, clinching the last Division One title of the pre-Sky Sports era in 1992, before becoming the epitome of financial mismanagement at the start of the 21st century. Despite this demise, United remains one of the best supported – and most divisive – clubs in football, with supporters’ clubs dotted across the globe. In 100 Years of Leeds United, Chapman delves deep into the archives to discover the lesser-known episodes, providing fresh context to the folkloric tales that have shaped the club we know today, painting the definitive picture of the West Yorkshire giants.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Benjamin M. Friedman - 2021
No book could be more important." --George A. Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in EconomicsCritics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets--among economists as well as many ordinary citizens--is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea.Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. Friedman makes clear how the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about the after-life, and about the purpose of our existence, were all under scrutiny in the world in which Adam Smith and his contemporaries lived.Friedman explores how those debates go far in explaining the puzzling behavior of so many of our fellow citizens whose views about economic policies--and whose voting behavior--seems sharply at odds with what would be to their own economic benefit. Illuminating the origins of the relationship between religious thinking and economic thinking, together with its ongoing consequences, Friedman provides invaluable insights into our current economic policy debates and demonstrates ways to shape more functional policies for all citizens.
Why We're Polarized
Ezra Klein - 2020
Most Americans could agree that no candidate like Donald Trump had ever been elected President before. But political journalist Ezra Klein makes the case that the 2016 election wasn't surprising at all. In fact, Trump's electoral victory followed the exact same template as previous elections, by capturing a nearly identical percentage of voter demographics as previous Republican candidates.Over the past 50 years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.In this groundbreaking book, Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and each other. And he traces the feedback loops between our polarized political identities and our polarized political institutions that are driving our political system towards crisis.Neither a polemic nor a lament, Klein offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. A revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.
The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
Robert D. Kaplan - 2012
Kaplan, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts, offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
Tony Judt - 2008
The twentieth century has become "history" at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 is so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it. In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization, with the geographical shifts of emphasis and influence it brings in its wake, has altered the structures of thought that had been essentially unchanged since the European industrial revolution. Quite literally, we don't know where we came from. The results have proved calamitous thus far, with the prospect of far worse. We have lost touch with a century of social thought and socially motivated social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting, and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects the key aspects of the world we have lost in order to remind us how important they still are to us now and to our hopes for the future. Reappraisals draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of "evil" in the understanding of the European past to the rise and fall of the "state" in public affairs and the displacement of history by "heritage." With his trademark acuity and Žlan, Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it and reveals how many aspects of our history have been sacrificed in the triumph of mythmaking over understanding, collective identity over truth, and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we so vitally need.
The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game
Mary Pilon - 2015
That story, however, is not exactly true. Ralph Anspach, a professor fighting to sell his Anti-Monopoly board game decades later, unearthed the real story, which traces back to Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and a forgotten feminist named Lizzie Magie who invented her nearly identical Landlord's Game more than thirty years before Parker Brothers sold their version of Monopoly. Her game--underpinned by morals that were the exact opposite of what Monopoly represents today--was embraced by a constellation of left-wingers from the Progressive Era through the Great Depression, including members of Franklin Roosevelt's famed Brain Trust.A fascinating social history of corporate greed that illuminates the cutthroat nature of American business over the last century, The Monopolists reads like the best detective fiction, told through Monopoly's real-life winners and losers.
Runaway: How a Slave Defied America's First President (Kindle Single)
Bill Donahue - 2016
Runaway introduces us to the only one of those enchained people to escape and tell her story. Ona Judge was the young personal attendant to Martha Washington. On a spring evening in 1796, she slipped out of the president's home, throwing her master and mistress into a consternation that lingered for years. Why had Ona fled, and where had she gone? Join Harper's and New York Times Magazine contributor Bill Donahue as he traces the flight of America's most intriguing fugitive slave.Journalist Bill Donahue has written for Wired, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Atlantic, Runner’s World, The New Yorker, and Harper’s. In reporting stories from over 20 countries, he has searched for fallen meteorites in the Sahara Desert, biked the streets of Shanghai, snuck into Manuel Noriega’s abandoned beach house in Panama, and taste-tested moonshine in the snowy Caucasus mountains of Georgia. He is the author of The Secret World of Saints, an e-book about the Catholic Church and its saintmaking process, and his work has been reprinted in Best American Sports Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and many other anthologies. He lives in rural New Hampshire, where he runs the Scriven Arts Colony.Cover Design by Kerry Ellis.
No Safe Spaces
Dennis Prager - 2019
Students lashing out at any speaker brave enough to say something they disagree with. Precious snow flakes demanding “Safe Spaces” to protect them from any idea they haven’t heard from their liberal professors. In this book and the accompanying movie, Dennis Prager, Mark Joseph, and Adam Carolla expose the attack on free speech and free thought. It began in the universities, but—fair warning—it’s coming to your neighborhood and your workplace. “No Safe Spaces is a film every American should see. I could barely move when it was over. Powerful, emotional, and a call to action for anyone worried about the intellectual fascism happening in this country. A brave, timely, and important film.” —MEGYN KELLY, former FOX News anchor and host of Megyn Kelly Today “There is no free speech in America for free thinkers! You can have free speech in America but only if you say what everybody else agrees with. It’s not enough to ‘live and let live’ now. The psycho-elite believe ‘silence is violence’ and you must actively promote what THEY want no matter how vile or reprehensible it is to you. George Orwell lives! They should’ve called Orwell ‘Nostradamus’ because his most frightening prophecies have come to pass, as you will witness in No Safe Spaces!” —MANCOW MULLER, radio phenomenon “An excellent film, the best I’ve seen on the subject of free speech. I especially like Dennis’s line, ‘They have to believe we are evil; otherwise they’d have to debate us.’ Perfect!” —CAL THOMAS, America’s #1 syndicated columnist