A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan


Todd E. Robinson - 2012
    Historian Todd Robinson studies the issues surrounding school integration and bureaucratic reforms as well as the role of black youth activism to detail the diversity of black resistance. He focuses on respectability within the African American community as a way of understanding how the movement was formed and held together. And he elucidates the oppositional role of northern conservatives regarding racial progress. a"A City within a City" cogently argues that the post-war political reform championed by local Republicans transformed the city's racial geography, creating a racialized city within a city, featuring a system of managerial racism designed to keep blacks in declining inner-city areas. As Robinson indicates, this bold, provocative framework for understanding race relations in Grand Rapids has broader implications for illuminating the twentieth-century African American urban experience in secondary cities.

Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden


Chris Christie - 2021
    Here’s Chris Christie’s urgent guide for recapturing Republican glory and winning elections again, told with all the New Jersey frankness and news-breaking insights that have made the two-term governor, Trump early endorser, and presidential candidate an indispensable voice and instant New York Times bestselling author. As governor of New Jersey and a key Trump insider and longtime friend, Chris Christie has always been known for speaking his mind. Now that the depressing 2020 election is finally behind us, he shares his bold insights on how a battered Republican Party can soar into the future and start winning big elections again. The wrong answers are everywhere. Dangerous conspiracy theorists. A tired establishment. Truth deniers and political cowards. In Republican Rescue, Christie reveals exactly how absurd grievances and self-inflicted wounds sabotaged Donald Trump’s many successes and allowed Democrats to capture the White House, the House, and Senate in two years—a first for the GOP since the days of Herbert Hoover. In his frank and compelling voice, Christie dissects the last year of the Trump administration—which provoked nothing but conspiracy theories and infighting—and he lays out an honest and hopeful vision, explaining how Republicans can capture the future and save America from today’s damaging Democratic excesses. The core Republican values of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan are as relevant now as they’ve ever been, Christie writes. Opportunity for all. A strong national defense. Leaders we can all be proud of. Americans in charge of their own lives. A federal government that answers to the people—not the other way around. But these Republican ideals need to be reinvigorated with fresh clarity and open arms. Christie watched in horror as some in his beloved party embraced paranoia and explained away violence. Determined to restore the party’s integrity and success, he shows how to build a movement voters will flock to again, a Republicanism that’s blunt, smart, conservative, potent, and perfectly suited for the 21st century.

Don't Let My Past Be Your Future: A Call to Arms


Harry Leslie Smith - 2017
    A survivor of the Great Depression, a Second World War veteran, a lifelong Labour supporter and a proud Yorkshire man, Harry's life has straddled two centuries. As a young man, he witnessed a country in crisis with no healthcare, no relief for the poor, and a huge economic gulf between the North and South. Now in his nineties, Harry wanders through the streets of his youth and wonders whether anything has actually changed.Britain is at its most dangerous juncture since Harry's youth - the NHS and social housing are in crisis, whilst Brexit and an unpopular government continue to divide the country - but there is hope. Just as Clement Attlee provided hope in 1945, Labour's triumphant comeback of June 2017 is a beacon of light in this season of discontent. Britain has overcome adversity before and will do so again - a new nation will be forged from the ashes of grave injustice.Moving and passionate, Don't Let My Past be Your Future interweaves memoir and polemic in a call to arms. Above all, this book is a homage to the boundless grace and resilience of the human spirit.

Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country


Steve Almond - 2018
    The problem wasn’t just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond’s effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices―from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin―to help explain the roots of our moral erosion as a people.The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press into a for-profit industry, our enduring pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at providing clarity. It’s the book you can pass along to an anguished fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what the hell happened to our country.

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 Trigger Men: Assassins and Terror Bosses in the Ireland Conflict


Martin Dillon - 2003
    Over three decades he has interviewed and investigated some of the most professional, dangerous and ruthless killers in Ireland. Now Dillon explores their personalities, motivations and bizarre crimes.Many of Ireland's assassins learned their trade in fields and on hillsides in remote parts of Ireland, while others were trained in the Middle East or with Basque separatist terrorists in Spain. Some were one-target-one-shot killers, like the sniper who terrorised the inhabitants of Washington State in the autumn of 2002, while others were bombers skilled in designing the most sophisticated explosive devices and booby traps. Another more powerful group of 'trigger men' were the influential figures in the shadows, who were experts in motivating the killers under their control. All of these men, whether they squeezed the trigger on a high-powered rifle, set the timer on a bomb or used their authority to send others out to commit horrific and unspeakable acts of cruelty, are featured in this book. The Trigger Men takes the reader inside the labyrinthine world of terrorist cells and highly classified counter-terrorism units of British Military Intelligence. The individual stories are described in gripping, unflinching detail and show how the terrorists carried out their ghastly work. Dillon also explores the ideology of the cult of the gunmen and the greed and hatred that motivated assassins in their killing sprees. There are penetrating insights into the mindset of the most infamous assassins: their social and historical conditioning, their callousness......

Mussolini: History in an Hour


Rupert Colley - 2014
    Famed for his dictatorial style, his political cunning and admired – initially – by Hitler, Mussolini led the National Fascist Party and ruled Italy as Prime Minister from 1922 until his ousting in 1943. In so doing, he paved the way towards Italy’s defeat in World War Two, and some of the 20th century’s most destructive ideologies and practices.Following expulsion from Italian Socialist Party, Mussolini denounced all efforts of class conflict, and instead later commanded a Fascist March on Rome to become the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history. Thereafter he set about dismantling the apparatus of democracy and initiated what would become known as the one-party totalitarian state. With World War II came defeat, humiliation and his bloody deposing. Explaining his ideologies, policies, actions and flaws, ‘Mussolini: History in an Hour’ is the concise life of the man whose ideas helped create some of the worst horrors of the modern history.Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour…