Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO On the Feds' Hit-List


Howard Root - 2016
    Fifteen years later, his Minnesota company had created over 500 American jobs and developed more than 50 new medical devices that saved and improved lives. But in 2011, the federal government threatened to destroy his company and put Howard behind bars for years. Why? Federal prosecutors had been sold a bill of goods – a tall tale peddled by a money-hungry ex-employee out for revenge. All over one device. A device that never harmed a single patient and made up less than 1% of the company s sales. The investigation revealed the charges to be baseless, but the scalp-hunting prosecutors didn't back off. Instead they dug in – threatening witnesses, misleading grand juries, and strategically leaking secret documents. Whatever it took to pressure a headline-grabbing settlement. Howard Root stood up to the shakedown. Five years, 121 attorneys and $25 million in legal fees later, his life's work and freedom rested in the hands of 12 strangers in a San Antonio jury room. Would Howard and his company be vindicated by the verdict, or had he made the biggest mistake of his life by challenging the federal government? Cardiac Arrest is the eye-opening true story of life on the Feds' hit-list, told from the desk of a CEO who decided to fight back. Follow Howard from the boardroom to the courtroom, as he tells the inside story of the case that sparked outrage in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and triggered a congressional investigation.

The Unarmed Truth: My Fight to Blow the Whistle and Expose Fast and Furious


John Dodson - 2013
    In 2007, following the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech, John Dodson walked through the classrooms, heartbroken, to cover up the bodies of the victims. Then came Arizona. The American border. Ten days before Christmas, 2010, ATF agent John Dodson awoke to the news he had dreaded every day as a member of the elite team called the Group VII Strike Force: a U.S. border patrol agent named Brian Terry had been shot dead by bandits armed with guns that had been supplied to them by ATF. Was this an inevitable consequence of the Obama administration’s Project Gunrunner, set in place one year earlier ostensibly to track Mexican drug cartels? Brian Terry’s murder would not only change John Dodson’s life forever; it would reveal a scandal so unthinkably unpatriotic that it forced President Barack Obama to claim executive privilege and caused Attorney General Eric Holder to be held in contempt of Congress. Federal Agent John Dodson, an ex-military man, took an oath to defend the world’s greatest country, and proudly considered himself a walking patriotic example of the American Dream. Brian Terry, ex-military like Dodson, was only forty years old, a family man who served his country by working for the government. Dodson was terrified when the next phone call came, one with the potential to destroy his career, his family, and his life. CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson asked Dodson to go public with what he knew about Fast and Furious. To Agent Dodson, this meant blowing the whistle. But to the family of Agent Terry, it was a chance to save lives and right a wrong. As he took a fight from the border towns of Arizona to a showdown in the halls of Congress, John Dodson clung to the hope that truth would prevail, that he would be redeemed, and that Brian Terry’s death would not be in vain. Like whistle-blowers before him, John would not be welcome back on the job. But he found strength in his conscience, in the support of the American public, and in Senators Darryl Issa and Chuck Grassley. When his first-amendment rights to publicly tell his story were threatened, the ACLU took up his case. For her report revealing John Dodson as the key whistle-blower in Fast and Furious, Sharyl Attkisson received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Ultimately, John Dodson was cleared by the Inspector General’s office, publicly heralded as a hero, and returned to Arizona. Perhaps a lesson gleaned from John Dodson’s powerful account is well stated by former Speaker of the House of Representatives Sam Rayburn: “If you always tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.”

Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth


Rachel Maddow - 2019
    That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, Ukrainian revolutionaries raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House


Michael Wolff - 2018
    Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

Rosewater: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival


Maziar Bahari - 2011
    Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.For the Bahari family, wars, coups, and revolutions are not distant concepts but intimate realities they have suffered for generations: Maziar’s father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Alone in his cell at Evin Prison, fearing the worst, Maziar draws strength from his memories of the courage of his father and sister in the face of torture, and hears their voices speaking to him across the years. He dreams of being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and his rambunctious, resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must be doing to campaign for his release. During the worst of his encounters with Rosewater, he silently repeats the names of his loved ones, calling on their strength and love to protect him and praying he will be released in time for the birth of his first child. A riveting, heart-wrenching memoir, Rosewater offers insight into the past seventy years of regime change in Iran, as well as the future of a country where the democratic impulses of the youth continually clash with a government that becomes more totalitarian with each passing day. An intimate and fascinating account of contemporary Iran, it is also the moving and wonderfully written story of one family’s extraordinary courage in the face of repression.Now a major motion picture directed by Jon Stewart - Previously published as Then They Came for Me.

Triumph


Carolyn Jessop - 2010
    The author of Escape, which detailed her escape along with her eight children from the cult she had been raised in, the extremist Mormon sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, follows up on the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which her ex-husband ran for Warren Jeffs on a sprawling 1,700-acre ranch near Eldorado, Texas.

Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In


Bernie Sanders - 2016
    In the book, Sanders shares experiences from the campaign trail and outlines his ideas for continuing a political revolution to fight for a progressive economic, environmental, racial and social justice agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all.

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America


Linda Tirado - 2014
    Linda Tirado, in her signature brutally honest yet personable voice, takes all of these preconceived notions and smashes them to bits. She articulates not only what it is to be working poor in America (yes, you can be poor and live in a house and have a job, even two), but what poverty is truly like—on all levels. Frankly and boldly, Tirado discusses openly how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why “poor people don’t always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should.”

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy


Talia Lavin - 2020
    Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies of how white supremacy proliferates online.Within these pages, she reveals the extremists hiding in plain sight online: Incels. White nationalists. White supremacists. National Socialists. Proud Boys. Christian extremists. In order to showcase them in their natural habitat, Talia assumes a range of identities, going undercover as a blonde Nazi babe, a forlorn incel, and a violent Aryan femme fatale. Along the way, she discovers a whites-only dating site geared toward racists looking for love, a disturbing extremist YouTube channel run by a fourteen-year-old girl with over 800,000 followers, the everyday heroes of the antifascist movement, and much more.By combining compelling stories chock-full of catfishing and gate-crashing with her own in-depth, gut-wrenching research, she also turns the lens of anti-Semitism, racism, and white power back on itself in an attempt to dismantle and decimate the online hate movement from within. Culture Warlords explores some of the vilest subcultures on the Web-and shows us how we can fight back.

The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop


Steve Osborne - 2015
    Steve Osborne is the real deal, people: the tough, streetwise New York cop of your dreams, one with a big, big heart. Kojak? NYPD Blue? Law & Order? Fuggedaboudem! The Job blows them out of the water.     Steve Osborne has seen a thing or two in his years in the NYPD—some harmless, some definitely not. In “Stakeout,” Steve and his partner mistake a Manhattan dentist for an armed robbery suspect, and reduce the man to a puddle of snot and tears when questioning him. In “Mug Shot,” the mother of a suspected criminal makes a strange request and provides a sobering reminder of the humanity at stake in his profession. And in “Home,” the image of Steve’s family provides the adrenaline he needs to fight for his life when assaulted by two armed and violent crackheads.      From stories about his days as a rookie cop to the time spent patrolling in the Anti-Crime Unit—and his visceral, harrowing recollections of working during the weeks after 9/11—The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop captures the humanity, the absurdity, and the dark humor of police work, as well as the bravery of those who do it. These stories will speak to those nostalgic for the New York City of the 1980s and ’90s, a bygone era when the city was a crazier, more dangerous (and possibly more interesting) place.

The Mueller Report


The Washington Post - 2019
    This edition from The Washington Post/Scribner contains: —The long-awaited Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election —An introduction by The Washington Post titled “A President, a Prosecutor, and the Protection of American Democracy” —A timeline of the major events of the Special Counsel’s investigation from May 2017, when Robert Mueller was appointed, to the report's delivery —A guide to individuals involved, including in the Special Counsel’s Office, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Trump Campaign, the White House, the Trump legal defense team, and the Russians —Key documents in the Special Counsel’s investigation, including filings pertaining to General Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, and the Russian internet operation in St. Petersburg. Each document is introduced and explained by Washington Post reporters. One of the most urgent and important investigations ever conducted, the Mueller inquiry focuses on Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and Russian interference in the 2016 election, and draws on the testimony of dozens of witnesses and the work of some of the country’s most seasoned prosecutors. The special counsel’s investigation looms as a turning point in American history. The Mueller Report is essential reading for all citizens concerned about the fate of the presidency and the future of our democracy.

Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor's Fight for Fairness


Laura Coates - 2022
    Laura Coates bleeds for justice on the page.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an AntiracistWhen Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Through Coates’s experiences, we see that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just. On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it—for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire. Through these revelatory and captivating scenes from the courtroom, Laura Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.

Illusion of Justice: Inside Making a Murderer and America's Broken System


Jerome F. Buting - 2017
    Buting explains the flaws in America’s criminal justice system and lays out a provocative, persuasive blue-print for reform.Over his career, Jerome F. Buting has spent hundreds of hours in courtrooms representing defendants in criminal trials. When he agreed to join Dean Strang as co-counsel for the defense in Steven A. Avery vs. State of Wisconsin, he knew a tough fight lay ahead. But, as he reveals in Illusion of Justice, no-one could have predicted just how tough and twisted that fight would be—or that it would become the center of the documentary Making a Murderer, which made Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey household names and thrust Buting into the spotlight.Buting’s powerful, riveting boots-on-the-ground narrative of Avery’s and Dassey’s cases becomes a springboard to examine the shaky integrity of law enforcement and justice in the United States, which Buting has witnessed firsthand for more than 35 years. From his early career as a public defender to his success overturning wrongful convictions working with the Innocence Project, his story provides a compelling expert view into the high-stakes arena of criminal defense law; the difficulties of forensic science; and a horrifying reality of biased interrogations, coerced or false confessions, faulty eyewitness testimony, official misconduct, and more.Combining narrative reportage with critical commentary and personal reflection, Buting explores his professional and personal motivations, career-defining cases—including his shocking fifteen-year-long fight to clear the name of another man wrongly accused and convicted of murder—and what must happen if our broken system is to be saved. Taking a place beside Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow, Illusion of Justice is a tour-de-force from a relentless and eloquent advocate for justice who is determined to fulfill his professional responsibility and, in the face of overwhelming odds, make America’s judicial system work as it is designed to do.

The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear


Kate Moore - 2021
    The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened - by Elizabeth's intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband. But most disturbing is that Elizabeth is not the only sane woman confined to the institution. There are many rational women on her ward who tell the same story: they've been committed not because they need medical treatment, but to keep them in line - conveniently labeled "crazy" so their voices are ignored.No one is willing to fight for their freedom and, disenfranchised both by gender and the stigma of their supposed madness, they cannot possibly fight for themselves. But Elizabeth is about to discover that the merit of losing everything is that you then have nothing to lose...

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America


Gene Weingarten - 2019
    That day--chosen completely at random--turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.That Sunday between Christmas and New Year's turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling.One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as "ordinary" when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.