Book picks similar to
A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat by Zell Miller
politics
non-fiction
political
nonfiction
Leadership
Rudolph W. Giuliani - 2002
Mayor Rudoph Guiliani had barely escaped with his life in the collapse of the first tower. Fires burned furiously near the site as the other buildings verged on collapse. Air Force fighter jets criss-crossed the sky to ward off other attacks. And yet in those moments after the calamity, and in the following days and months, Mayor Guiliani not only steered the city through the crisis, but did so with an assurance and authority that was hailed around the world as a model of courageous leadership. In this book, Guiliani describes vividly the chaos and horror of the twin-towers catastrophe, and explains how the rules of management he enforced as Mayor enabled him to gain control of the emergency. These are also the rules, Guiliani makes clear, that anyone in a leadership position - from the head of a large corporation to the owner of a corner shop - can use to inspire others and achieve concrete results.
A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America
Ted Cruz - 2015
The outspoken Texas Senator has a knack for getting under their skin. His quotable remarks - and even more, his principled stands on numerous national issues - have made him a political lightning rod and the most googled man in Washington. Indeed, his name has become a national punchline for liberals - he was even mentioned in a recent episode of True Blood. There is a simple reason Senator Cruz has dominated so much of the national conversation. Since his election to the Senate in 20 2 he has refused to go along with the established way of doing business in Washington. As a result, he has become a voice for millions of Americans frustrated with governmental corruption and gridlock. Telling the truth is a radical act in our nation's capital - a city dominated by empty promises, meaningless 'show votes,' and a self-protection racket designed to get politicians re-elected rather than heeding the demands of the American people. Cruz has told the truth - about Washington collusion, a corrupted political process, and the institutional barriers to actually fixing the enormous challenges we face. The book will tell Cruz's story as a Cuban immigrant's son who made it to the Ivy League, to the Supreme Court bar, and eventually the U.S. Senate. It's a deeply personal journey that begins with Cruz's father experiencing brutality in a Cuban prison and ends with Cruz's discovery that Washington has neither the courage nor the desire to preserve the freedom and opportunities that gave hope to his father, and millions like him. Pulling back the curtain on the backroom deals between Republicans, Democrats, and the lobbyists who keep them in office (instead of keeping them accountable to their constituents), the book will offer an inside look at what has gone wrong in our nation's capital. Cruz will argue that the need for change is urgent, and that the only way to bring about real change is to revitalize the Constitutional principles that made our country great. It's a book that will win Ted Cruz few friends in Washington. Then again, that isn't why he went there in the first place.
Al Franken, Giant of the Senate
Al Franken - 2017
From Senator Al Franken - #1 bestselling author and beloved SNL alum - comes the story of an award-winning comedian who decided to run for office and then discovered why award-winning comedians tend not to do that.This is a book about an unlikely campaign that had an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga, which is pretty funny in retrospect.It's a book about what happens when the nation's foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it.It's a book about our deeply polarized, frequently depressing, occasionally inspiring political culture, written from inside the belly of the beast.In this candid personal memoir, the honorable gentleman from Minnesota takes his army of loyal fans along with him from Saturday Night Live to the campaign trail, inside the halls of Congress, and behind the scenes of some of the most dramatic and/or hilarious moments of his new career in politics.Has Al Franken become a true Giant of the Senate? Franken asks readers to decide for themselves.
Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer
Peter Wright - 1987
Wright drew on his own experiences and research into the history of the British intelligence community. Published first in Australia, the book was banned in England (but not Scotland) due to its allegations about government policy and incidents. These efforts ensured the book's notoriety, and it earned considerable profit for Wright.
Rewriting History
Dick Morris - 2004
For, as he argues, no politician in America today is better aligned to become president in 2008—and none would bring more baggage to the White House—than Mrs. Clinton. In Rewriting History, Morris draws on his own long working relationship with the Clintons, as well as his trademark deep research and candid, nonpartisan analysis, to create a rebuttal to Hillary's bestselling autobiography, Living History. Morris documents how Hillary hides her true self behind a "Hillary" brand that is chatty, charming, giggly, and warm—but is far from her true personality.In Rewriting History, Morris pierces the mask to get at the truth behind the distortions and omissions of Hillary's memoir. Here we meet the real Hillary, both good and bad: the manager who makes the trains run on time, but also the paranoid who sees all those who disagree with her as personal enemies; the idealist, but also the "advice addict" easily misled by the guru of the moment. Morris describes Hillary's sense of entitlement, and warns that it may lead deep into financial scandal. And he demonstrates how Hillary dodges criticism by pretending that every attack is directed not just at her, but at every working woman in America.Ultimately, Morris argues, the Hillary Clinton of today is marketing a false front, obscuring both her wants and her assets behind the phony facade of a domestic Everywoman. But as she pursues higher office, she also faces a choice. Will she, like Bobby Kennedy, see the error of her ruthless ways, and embrace the sincere idealism she professes? Or, like Richard Nixon, will she allow the darker angels of her nature to overcome her, jeopardizing herself and the country in the process?As Rewriting History suggests, we can only hope that Hillary Clinton's past performance is no guarantee of future results.
All The Best, George Bush: My Life and Other Writings
George H.W. Bush - 1999
Fortunately, since the former president does not plan to write his autobiography, this collection of letters, diary entries, and memos, with his accompanying commentary, will fill that void.Organized chronologically, the volume begins with eighteen-year-old George's letters to his parents during World War II, when, at the time he was commissioned, he was the youngest pilot in the Navy. Readers will gain insights into Bush's career highlights - the oil business, his two terms in Congress, his ambassadorship to the U.N., his service as an envoy in China, his tenure with the Central Intelligence Agency, and of course, the vice presidency, the presidency, and the postpresidency.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
Mary L. Trump - 2020
Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.A first-hand witness to countless holiday meals and family interactions, Mary brings an incisive wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events. She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for re-gifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.Numerous pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J. Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick. She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity
Bill O'Reilly - 2008
Dwight Eisenhower was President, but in my life it was the diminutive, intense Sister Mary Lurana who ruled, at least in the third-grade class where I was held captive. For reasons you will soon understand, my parents had remanded me to the penal institution of St. Brigid's School in Westbury, New York, a cruel and unusual punishment if there ever was one. Already, I had barely survived my first two years at St. Brigid's because I was, well, a little nitwit. Not satisfied with memorizing the Baltimore Catechism's fine prose, which featured passages like "God made me to show his goodness and to make me happy with him in heaven," I was constantly annoying my classmates and, of course, the no-nonsense Sister Lurana. With sixty overactive students in her class, she was understandably short on patience. For survival, she had also become quick on the draw. Then it happened. One day I blurted out some dumb remark, and Sister Lurana was on me like a panther. Her black habit blocked out all distractions as she leaned down, looked me in the eye, and uttered words I have never forgotten: "William, you are a bold, fresh piece of humanity." And she was dead-on. One day in 1957, in the third-grade classroom of St. Brigid's parochial school, an exasperated Sister Mary Lurana bent over a restless young William O'Reilly and said, "William, you are a bold, fresh piece of humanity." Little did she know that she was, early in his career as a troublemaker, defining the essence of Bill O'Reilly and providing him with the title of his brash and entertaining issues-based memoir. And this time it's personal. In his most intimate book yet, O'Reilly goes back in time to examine the people, places, and experiences that launched him on his journey from working-class kid to immensely influential television personality and bestselling author. Readers will learn how his traditional outlook was formed in the crucible of his family, his neighborhood, his church, and his schools, and how his views on America's proper role in the world emerged from covering four wars on five continents over three-plus decades as a news correspondent. What will delight his numerous fans and surprise many others is the humor and self-deprecation with which he handles one of his core subjects: himself, and just how O'Reilly became O'Reilly.
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir
Dick Cheney - 2011
He has been viewed as one of the most powerful vice presidents—secretive, even mysterious, and at the same time opinionated and unflinchingly outspoken. He has been both praised and attacked by his peers, the press, and the public. Through it all, courting only the ideals that define him, he has remained true to himself, his principles, his family, and his country. Now in an enlightening and provocative memoir, a stately page-turner with flashes of surprising humor and remarkable candor, Dick Cheney takes readers through his experiences as family man, policymaker, businessman, and politician during years that shaped our collective history. Born into a family of New Deal Democrats in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was the son of a father at war and a high-spirited and resilient mother. He came of age in Casper, Wyoming, playing baseball and football and, as senior class president, courting homecoming queen Lynne Vincent, whom he later married. This all-American story took an abrupt turn when he flunked out of Yale University, signed on to build power line in the West, and started living as hard as he worked. Cheney tells the story of how he got himself back on track and began an extraordinary ascent to the heights of American public life, where he would remain for nearly four decades: * He was the youngest White House Chief of Staff, working for President Gerald Ford—the first of four chief executives he would come to know well. * He became Congressman from Wyoming and was soon a member of the congressional leadership working closely with President Ronald Reagan. * He became secretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, overseeing America’s military during Operation Desert Storm and in the historic transition at the end of the Cold War. * He was CEO of Halliburton, a Fortune 500 company with projects and personnel around the globe. * He became the first vice president of the United States to serve out his term of office in the twenty-first century. Working with George W. Bush from the beginning of the global war on terror, he was—and remains—an outspoken defender of taking every step necessary to defend the nation. Eyewitness to history at the highest levels, Cheney brings to life scenes from past and present. He describes driving through the White House gates on August 9, 1974, just hours after Richard Nixon resigned, to begin work on the Ford transition; and he portrays a time of national crisis a quarter century later when, on September 11, 2001, he was in the White House bunker and conveyed orders to shoot down a hijacked airliner if it would not divert. With its unique perspective on a remarkable span of American history, In My Time will enlighten. As an intimate and personal chronicle, it will surprise, move, and inspire. Dick Cheney’s is an enduring political vision to be reckoned with and admired for its honesty, its wisdom, and its resonance. In My Time is truly the last word about an incredible political era, by a man who lived it and helped define it—with courage and without compromise.
Why Romney Lost
David Frum - 2012
David Frum urges a Republican party that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible - a party that can meet the challenges of the Obama years and lead a diverse America to a new age of freedom and prosperity.
The Life of Mohammed: The Sira
Bill Warner - 2010
He was an orphan who rose from poverty to become the first ruler of all of Arabia. He created a new religion, new methods of war and a new political system including a legal code, the Sharia. Mohammed was the world's greatest warrior. Today no one wages war in the name of Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon or any other military leader. However, every year many people die because of Mohammed. After 1400 years, Islam is more powerful than it has ever been. Mohammed said that one day all of the world would live under his rule of law.To understand Islam, you must know the life of Mohammed. Every Muslim's desire is to live a life identical to his. His every word and deed are the perfect model for being a Muslim. Every Muslim is a Mohammedan. The religion of Islam is not about worshiping Allah; it about worshiping Allah exactly as Mohammed did. This book is unique. It is concise, but it is completely authoritative. The reference system allows you to verify all information.
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
Christopher Caldwell - 2020
Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half century, taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycontin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement is a brilliant and ambitious argument about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Jonah Goldberg - 2007
Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term -National socialism-). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities--where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. Do these striking parallels mean that today's liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal. Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a -friendlier, - more liberal form. The modern heirs of this -friendly fascist- tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies
Michael V. Hayden - 2018
Meanwhile, the world order is teetering on the brink. North Korea is on the verge of having a nuclear weapon that could reach all of the United States, Russians have mastered a new form of information warfare that undercuts democracy, and the role of China in the global community remains unclear. There will always be value to experience and expertise, devotion to facts, humility in the face of complexity, and a respect for ideas, but in this moment they seem more important, and more endangered, than they've ever been. American Intelligence--the ultimate truth teller--has a responsibility in a post-truth world beyond merely warning of external dangers, and in The Assault on Intelligence, General Michael Hayden takes up that urgent work with profound passion, insight and authority. It is a sobering vision. The American intelligence community is more at risk than is commonly understood, for every good reason. Civil war or societal collapse is not necessarily imminent or inevitable, but our democracy's core structures, processes, and attitudes are under great stress. Many of the premises on which we have based our understanding of governance are now challenged, eroded, or simply gone. And we have a President in office who responds to overwhelming evidence from the intelligence community that the Russians are, by all acceptable standards of cyber conflict, in a state of outright war against us, not by leading a strong response, but by shooting the messenger. There are fundamental changes afoot in the world and in this country. The Assault on Intelligence shows us what they are, reveals how crippled we've become in our capacity to address them, and points toward a series of effective responses. Because when we lose our intelligence, literally and figuratively, democracy dies.
The Ends of Power
H.R. Haldeman - 1977
Also in the book, Haldeman explained Nixon's statement in the Watergate tapes that Watergate could "open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing". Haldeman said that "Bay of Pigs" was a reference to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.