Book picks similar to
Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets in by Vic Satzewich
non-fiction
politics
america
blm
Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us
Jim Marrs - 2015
syndicate a global monopoly of guns, oil, and drugs is consciously destroying American values and offers prescriptive solutions to fix our nation.According to the Declaration of Independence, all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But America today has failed to live up to the Founding Fathers ideals.In 2014 there were three million homeless people in the United States and almost 20 million vacant homes. The most technologically advanced nation in the world has a life expectancy lower than that of Chile and Bahrain. And citizens of the wealthiest country on the planet continue to ingest toxic chemicals through their food, their vaccines, and even their water. America, Jim Marrs argues, has been seized by a culture of death. And who promulgates this culture? The globalist masters of the G.O.D. Syndicate guns, oil, and drugs. Pushed to the brink by this lethal triumvirate, Americans increasingly find themselves headed toward an inexorable decline ending in servitude and premature death.In "Population Control," Marrs takes aim at our deteriorating nation and offers practical steps we can take to save it. As he exposes how daily living from the food we eat to the water we drink to the drugs we ingest pushes us closer to an early grave, he shows us how a return to true prosperity is possible and explains what we need to do to fight back and save our lives and our nation's soul."
American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good
Colin Woodard - 2016
In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these two key strands in American politics through the four centuries of the nation’s existence, from the first colonies through the Gilded Age, Great Depression and the present day, and he explores how different regions of the country have successfully or disastrously accommodated them. The independent streak found its most pernicious form in the antebellum South but was balanced in the Gilded Age by communitarian reform efforts; the New Deal was an example of a successful coalition between communitarian-minded Eastern elites and Southerners. Woodard argues that maintaining a liberal democracy, a society where mass human freedom is possible, requires finding a balance between protecting individual liberty and nurturing a free society. Going to either libertarian or collectivist extremes results in tyranny. But where does the “sweet spot” lie in the United States, a federation of disparate regional cultures that have always strongly disagreed on these issues? Woodard leads readers on a riveting and revealing journey through four centuries of struggle, experimentation, successes and failures to provide an answer. His historically informed and pragmatic suggestions on how to achieve this balance and break the nation’s political deadlock will be of interest to anyone who cares about the current American predicament—political, ideological, and sociological.
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
Saul D. Alinsky - 1969
Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.ContentsThe PurposeOf Means and EndsA Word about WordsThe Education of an OrganizerCommunicationIn the BeginningTacticsThe Genesis of Tactic ProxyThe Way Ahead
The U.S. Constitution: Explained--Clause by Clause--For Every American Today
Ray Raphael - 2017
Setting forth the workings of our democracy, it is the bedrock document from which we derive our policies on topics as diverse and galvanizing as immigration, gun ownership, voting rights, taxation, policing, civil liberties, and war.In this indispensable edition, acclaimed historian and Constitutional expert Ray Raphael guides us through the origins, impact, and current relevance of the original text and all twenty-seven amendments. Here is the key historical context for issues in the news today--from the Electoral College to Washington gridlock, from peaceful protests to executive power. Thoughtful and nuanced, lively and highly readable, this annotated Constitution is for all of us to read and refer to--the ultimate political fact-checking source for every American.
The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream
David M. Rubenstein - 2021
-Jill Lepore on the promise of America -Madeleine Albright on the American immigrant -Ken Burns on war -Henry Louis Gates Jr. on reconstruction -Elaine Weiss on suffrage -John Meacham on civil rights -Walter Isaacson on innovation -David McCullough on the Wright Brothers -John Barry on pandemics and public health -Wynton Marsalis on music -Billie Jean King on sports -Rita Moreno on film Exploring the diverse make-up of our country’s DNA through interviews with Pulitzer Prize–winning historians, diplomats, music legends, and sports giants, The American Experiment captures the dynamic arc of a young country reinventing itself in real-time. Through these enlightening conversations, the American spirit comes alive, revealing the setbacks, suffering, invention, ingenuity, and social movements that continue to shape our vision of what America is—and what it can be.
Refugee High: Coming of Age in America
Elly Fishman - 2021
Sullivan High School has been a landing place for migrants. In recent years, it boasts one of the highest proportions of immigrant and refugee students in the country. In 2017 around half its student population hailed from another country, with students from thirty-five different countries speaking more than thirty-eight different languages.Refugee High is a chronicle of the 2017-8 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday challenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique education needs of refugee and immigrant children.
Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
Francis Fukuyama - 2018
Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to "the people," who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Demand for recognition of one's identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious "identity liberalism" of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.Identity is an urgent and necessary book--a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
Harsha Walia - 2021
Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, ruling class, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world.Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial exclusion. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and far-right nationalism is escalating deadly violence in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.
The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era
Michael Grunwald - 2012
Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.
Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America
James M. Fallows - 2018
A realistically positive and provocative view of the country between its coasts.For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, they have met hundreds of civic leaders, workers, immigrants, educators, environmentalists, artists, public servants, librarians, business people, city planners, students, and entrepreneurs to take the pulse and understand the prospects of places that usually draw notice only after a disaster or during a political campaign.The America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems--from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge--but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey--and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
Barbarians: How The Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed my Generation
Lauren Southern - 2016
Instead, millennials have been raised to hold hedonism above all. Whatever feels good goes. Freedoms and rights are things for legislators and judges to conjure out of thin air, not precious traditions forged in the crucible of history. Most millennials reject the nuclear family, and the religious values, that our culture was built on because they resemble some sort of “unenlightened” old world of responsibility and duty that millennials want no part in. In short, squaring the truth about the West with the twisted values they’ve been brought up to swallow without complaint is not something that will be comfortable for many millennials. But I think that if not now, eventually most of them will take the plunge. Because deep down I think we know that what we’ve done is not empowering. Abandoning all guidance of our past and embracing hedonism and subjectivity was not some genius idea. Dismissing the guidance built for us over thousands and thousands of years in the form of gender roles, traditional lifestyles, hard work, objectivity, and cultural supremacy was, in fact, painfully stupid. Because really, what have we got to show for it? Nothing but infinite license to put who and what we want in our bodies, while our freedoms to speak, to think, to dream, and to build get more limited every day. We’ve decided to fall backwards off the shoulders of giants, and that fall probably feels good, until you realize there’s going to be a “splat” at the end. So with the ground of reality rushing up at them, more and more young people are clawing for anything to stop their feelings of personal, ethical, political, intellectual and artistic failure. And the rotted timber of progressivism is increasingly failing to break their fall. So eventually, they turn elsewhere. And so, a steadily increasing number of millennials are finally beginning to wake up to the choice we face as a civilization, and to the value they’ve so long overlooked in traditional standards of morality and beauty. They are wondering: is modern culture really so great if it means we substitute Meghan Trainor for Mozart, Emma Sulkowicz for Da Vinci, or Bell Hooks for Plato? Is it really such a step forward that our civilization, which once shed both blood and ink debating Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, is now reduced to considering theses like VICE Magazine’s “Dear Straight Guys: It’s Time to Start Putting Things In Your Butt?” Is this all there is, or can we do better? No, it isn’t, and yes, we can and must do better. Sure, it’ll be hard for us to dig ourselves out of the pit that the left-wing indoctrination and media machines has dug for everyone our age. But it’s work worth doing. Because right now, the world is on fire. And while my generation didn’t start the fire, with apologies to Billy Joel, I believe we have a chance to contain it, or even put it out. But first we have to expose the frauds, liars, idiots, and above all, barbarians who threw gas on it. So without further ado, let’s get to naming those names.
So, You Want to Join the Peace Corps: What to Know Before You Go
Dillon Banerjee - 2000
As you contemplate the reality of volunteering, your mind races with questions. Which programs are my skills best suited to? How will the culture shock affect me? What will my life overseas be like? Will my work really make a difference? Written by a returned Peace Corps volunteer, SO, YOU WANT TO JOIN THE PEACE CORPS...is a candid, straightforward guide that answers all these questions and many more. Author Dillon Banerjee shares his personal insights--and those of returned volunteers who served all over the world--to help prepare you for the experience of a lifetime. Whether you're thinking of joining, or have already been accepted and are getting ready to leave, this book provides answers you simply can't find elsewhere.
The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America
Kristen Soltis Anderson - 2015
Cultural factors are reshaping how a new generation of voters considers issues. Demographic shifts are creating an increasingly diverse electorate, and technological advances are opening new avenues for voter contact and persuasion.Kristen Soltis Anderson examines these hot-topic trends and how they are influencing the way youth, women, and minorities vote. Blending observations from focus groups, personal stories, and polling results, the Republican pollster offers key insights into the changing nature of American politics. The Selfie Vote introduces you to tech-savvy political consultants and shows you how these hip young pollsters and consultants are using data mining and social media to transform electoral politics—including tracking your purchasing history. Make some purchases at a high-end culinary store? Crave sushi? Your choices outside the ballot box can reveal how you might vote. And anyone interested in the future of politics should know where these cultural trends are heading.Data-driven yet highly readable, The Selfie Vote busts established myths about campaigns and elections while offering insights about what’s ahead—and what it could mean for American politics and governance.
The Willie Lynch Letter And the Making of A Slave
Willie Lynch - 2011
You see, survival of the colored race in America is at a difficult point where it has to be taught to our youth. The old practices of lynching and segregation which are thought to have been eradicated from our society lives on but in various other forms: police brutality, income inequality, unemployment and single motherhood… designs to keep our communities in perpetual turmoil and slavery.This book should be required reading for the youth and a lesson to any group that man’s inhumanity to man has not ended in America and is practiced around the world.
What I Learned About Politics: Inside the Rise-and Collapse-of Nova Scotia's NDP Government
Graham Steele - 2014
Required reading, I would say, for anyone remotely considering getting involved in politics. [...] It will become course material for political science courses in this province." - Marilla Stephenson for The Chronicle-HeraldOn October 8, 2013, Nova Scotia’s NDP government went down to a devastating election defeat. Premier Darrell Dexter lost his own seat, and the party held the dubious distinction of being the first one-term majority government in over 100 years. In this new memoir, former NDP finance minister and MLA Graham Steele tries to make sense of the election result and shares what he’s learned from a fifteen-year career in provincial politics. In his trademark candid style, Steele pulls no punches in assessing what’s right—and what’s often wrong—with our current political system. Includes an insert of colour photographs and a foreword from CBC Information Morning host Don Connolly.