Triumvirate: The Story of the Unlikely Alliance That Saved the Constitution and United the Nation


Bruce Chadwick - 2009
    Together they wrote the startlingly original Federalist Papers not as an exercise in governmental philosophy, but instead aimed at overcoming the common man's fears. Their relentless efforts laid the groundwork for ratifying the Constitution against rampant opposition.

The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror


Arun Kundnani - 2014
    Another sixty officers surrounded the building on that October morning, the culmination of a two-year undercover investigation that had infiltrated the imam’s Detroit mosque. The FBI quickly claimed that Luqman Abdullah was “the leader of a domestic terrorist group.” And yet, caught on tape, he had refused to help “do something” violent, as it might injure innocents, and no terrorism charges were ever lodged against him.Jameel Scott thought he was exercising his rights when he went to challenge an Israeli official’s lecture at Manchester University. But the teenager’s presence at the protest with fellow socialists made him the subject of police surveillance for the next two years. Counterterrorism agents visited his parents, his relatives, his school. They asked him for activists’ names and told him not to attend demonstrations. They called his mother and told her to move the family to another neighborhood. Although he doesn’t identify as Muslim, Jameel had become another face of the presumed homegrown terrorist.The new front in the War on Terror is the “homegrown enemy,” domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed—at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda “sympathizers,” and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years.Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disparate as Texas, New York, and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived antiextremism.

Hillary the Other Woman: A Political Memoir


Dolly Kyle - 2016
    After all, they have been in the public eye—from Arkansas to the White House and beyond—for over forty years. Dolly Kyle met former president Clinton (Billy as she calls him) on a Hot Springs golf course when she was eleven and he was almost thirteen. It was colpo de fulmine (the thunderbolt) at first sight. Their friendship grew throughout high school and college. It became a decades-long affair that lasted despite marriages and politics all the way to the threshold of the White House—when she became a political liability, and he threatened to destroy her, as Hillary had done to so many of his other women over the years. What you know about the Clintons is probably limited to the pleasantries that the mainstream media have chosen to share with you. Hillary the Other Woman pulls no punches in describing the way “media magic” makes Clinton stories disappear. Have you heard about • The RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) federal lawsuit that Kyle filed against Clinton and cronies while he and co-president Hillary were in the White House? • The racial discrimination lawsuits filed by African-Americans against Clinton as governor of Arkansas? • Cinton’s orders for the Arkansas State Police to “stop and search” vehicles driven by Hispanics? • Thousands of young African-American men given long prison sentences under the “three strikes” laws pushed by co-presidents Bill and Hillary? • The co-president Clintons pandering to minorities with a subtle form of race baiting with their welfare agenda? • The racist names they call Jesse Jackson behind his back? Hillary the Other Woman is not only about the politics of the Arkansas gubernatorial years and the famous “two for the price of one” presidency. It also provides a perspective on Arkansas life that formed the backdrop and training ground for the Clintons in their later crimes, their gangster-like threats and intimidation of political enemies, and their arrogant belief that they are above the law. You will see the connection between Hillary’s current email scandal and her shredding of documents when they left the Arkansas governor’s mansion. You will realize that the Clinton Foundation is the new international version of the money laundering and bribes that you glossed over as “Cattlegate.” You will read clear, concise, entertaining accounts that put the multitude of Clinton scandals into everyday perspective. Finally, you will be privy to the Clinton “truth suppression” techniques that allowed them to get away with all of it. Until now…

Unbound Justice: Australian Historical Fiction Novel


Michael Beashel - 2021
    He sails with revenge in his heart—his beloved sister has been raped by her landlord, William Baxterhouse, who escapes on another ship with even grander plans for success in New South Wales. In Sydney, hard workers like Leary and ruthless newcomers like Baxterhouse find a city fired by the Gold Rush and dedicated to creating the finest buildings in the colony. Leary has a double motive to make his construction company succeed: he has fallen in love with the beautiful Clarissa McGuire, whose family despise him, and Baxterhouse continues to rise in wealth and influence, seemingly untouchable. Meanwhile another woman, Beth O’Hare, is in love with John Leary, and he makes some hard choices—including a climactic showdown with Baxterhouse.This is the first novel in The Sandstone Trilogy: a new, magnificent view of nineteenth-century Sydney from the ground up.Three novels, Unbound Justice, Unshackled and Succession, span 37 years of Sydney life in the second half of the nineteenth century. They follow the fortunes of 20-year-old John Leary, who in 1850 leaves his rural home in Ireland and sails as an assisted immigrant to New South Wales.His trade is carpentry but his ambition is boundless. By hard work, talent and opportunism he manages to create his own construction company, never ceasing the struggle to become the biggest and the best. The building industry becomes a metaphor for his chosen city, with its mixture of squalor and grandeur, of corruption and high ideals.The Sandstone Trilogy is a historical drama with a rich cast of compelling characters. It is also a family saga, in which love, revenge and tragedy all come to influence the Learys’ destiny.‘Well-written and thoroughly enjoyable. It’s a love story with a vivid background of those early days of European settlement—and all the drinking, hard work, treachery and jostling for position that was mandatory in those times. You warm to the characters as they make their way in this new land. More of it!’Wendy O’HanlonAustralian Provincial Newspapers

Socialism: The Failed Idea that never Dies


Kristian Niemietz - 2019
    Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism's adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were "real socialism". This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as "not real socialism".

The American Crisis: What Went Wrong. How We Recover.


Writers of The Atlantic - 2020
    The past four years in the United States have been among the most turbulent in our history—and would have been so even without a global pandemic and waves of protest nationwide against police violence. Drawn from the recent work of The Atlantic staff writers and contributors, The American Crisis explores the factors that led us to the present moment: racial division, economic inequality, political dysfunction, the hollowing out of government, the devaluation of truth, and the unique threat posed by Donald Trump. Today’s emergencies expose pathologies years in the making. Featuring leading voices from The Atlantic, one of the country’s most widely read and influential magazines, The American Crisis is a broad and essential look at the condition of America today—and at the qualities of national character that may yet offer hope. With contributions by: Danielle Allen, Yoni Appelbaum, Molly Ball, David W. Blight, Mark Bowden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Lizabeth Cohen, McKay Coppins, James Fallows, Drew Gilpin Faust, Caitlin Flanagan, Franklin Foer, David Frum, Megan Garber, Michael Gerson, Elizabeth Goitein, David A. Graham, Emma Green, Yuval Noah Harari, Ibram X. Kendi, Olga Khazan, Adrienne LaFrance, Annie Lowrey, James Mattis, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Angela Nagle, Vann R. Newkirk II, George Packer, Elaina Plott, Jeremy Raff, Jonathan Rauch, Adam Serwer, Matthew Stewart, Alex Wagner, Tara Westover, and Ed Yong.

Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession


Chuck Thompson - 2012
    In Better Off Without ’Em, the biggest book of his career, Thompson offers a heavily researched, serious inquiry into national divides that is unabashedly controversial, often uproarious, and always thought-provoking.     By crunching numbers, interviewing experts, and traveling the not-so-former Confederacy, Thompson—an openly disgruntled liberal Northwesterner—makes a compelling case for Southern secession. Along the way, he interacts with possum-hunting conservatives, trailer park lifers, prayer warriors, and other regional trendsetters, showing that the South’s perverse church-driven morality, politics, and personality never have and never will define the region as a fully committed part of the United States. Better Off Without ’Em is a deliberately provocative book whose insight, humor, fierce and fearless politics, and sheer nerve will spark a national debate that is perhaps long overdue.

Before Ebola: Dispatches from a Deadly Outbreak (Kindle Single)


Peter Apps - 2014
    The year is 2005. A highly infectious, unidentified Ebola-like virus is sweeping through the slums and villages of northern Angola. Within months, more than 200 people have died, medical services have collapsed and aid workers are on the brink of exhaustion. At 23, Peter Apps was just starting out as a foreign correspondent when Reuters sent him into the heart of the outbreak to get the story. In “Before Ebola: Dispatches from a Deadly Outbreak” Apps recalls in vivid, unflinching detail the horrors of life in a hot zone, the compassion of those trying to contain it, and how a terrified young journalist came of age in a time of almost unbearable crisis. Peter Apps is a global defense correspondent for Reuters news, currently dividing his time between London and Washington, D.C. In September 2006, Apps broke his neck in a minibus crash while covering the Sri Lankan civil war, leaving him largely paralyzed from the shoulders down. Cover design by Kristen Radtke.

Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court


Amy Bach - 2009
    Less visible is the chronic injustice meted out daily by a profoundly defective system.In a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, Amy Bach reveals a judicial process so deeply compromised that it constitutes a menace to the people it is designed to serve. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who brings almost no cases to trial; the court that works together to achieve a wrong verdict. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Bach identifies an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants to keep the court calendar moving, and she exposes the collusion between judge, prosecutor, and defense that puts the interests of the system above the obligation to the people. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible--the first and necessary step to any reform.Full of gripping human stories, sharp analyses, and a crusader's sense of urgency, "Ordinary Injustice" is a major reassessment of the health of the nation's courtrooms.

Stony Creek


Christine Gardner - 2013
    She lives in Melbourne and enjoys the life of a single girl in 1970, with no intention of marrying any time soon, if at all. She has no desire to live the life she sees her mother has, with a house full of children. Things change suddenly after she loses her job and she finds herself faced with very different choices. She finds a new life in the outback, with a new kind of love and a new kind of pain.

Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street


Neil Barofsky - 2010
    In behind-the-scenes detail, he shows the extreme degree to which government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the public—& at the expense of effective financial reform. During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office in NYC, where he'd convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives & mortgage fraud perpetrators, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of bailout money spending. From the first his efforts to protect against fraud & to hold big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.Barofsky discloses how, in serving banking interests, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner & his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs to would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms & would have allowed them to game the markets & make huge profits with almost no risk or accountability, while repeatedly fighting efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG & Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses & that the Obama administration’s TARP Czar lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.Providing details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners & the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner & his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who wouldn't have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction ($1.4 billion when he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system totaled $4.7 trillion. As he raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction. He recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street the political system is & why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger & more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act


Nicholson Baker - 2020
    In the course of his research, he had become deeply disillusioned with the process of FOIA requests. He has been forced to wait years in some cases, while other requests have been answered only with documents rendered inscrutable, or even illegible, by copious redactions. Rather than wait forever, with his head full of secrets about government atrocities committed by his own country, Baker sets out to keep a personal journal of his obstructed research instead. He begins documenting his correspondence with the government administrators who are charged with responding to, and thus stymying, his requests. The result is one of the most original and daring works of nonfiction in recent memory, a singular and mesmerizing narrative into the history of some of the darkest and most shameful secrets of the CIA and US government - all willfully concealed to some degree despite the existence of the so-called Freedom of Information Act.In his preternaturally lucid and unassuming style, Baker unearths stories of CIA programs involving weaponized insects and the deliberate spread of Lyme disease, dangerous military experiments carried out on unsuspecting American citizens, and devastating chemical munitions designed to inflict terrible harm on innocent civilians in far-flung countries. At the same time, he shares beautiful anecdotes from his daily life in Maine feeding his dogs and watching the morning light gather on the horizon. The result is an astonishing and utterly disarming story about waiting, bureaucracy, the horrors of war, and, above all, the deadly secrets the United States government keeps from its citizens.

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961


Nicholas E. Reynolds - 2017
    Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy brings to light for the first time this riveting secret side of Hemingway’s life—when he worked closely with both the American OSS, a precursor to the CIA, and the Soviet NKVD, the USSR’s forerunner to the KGB to defeat Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.Reynolds dig deep into Hemingway’s involvement in World War II, from his recruitment by both the Americans and the Soviets—who valued Hemingway for his journalistic skills and access to sources—through his key role in gaining tactical intelligence for the Allies during the liberation of Paris, to his later doubts about communist ideology and his undercover work in Cuba. As he examines the links between his work as a spy and as an author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway’s wartime experiences shook his faith in literature and contributed to the writer’s block that plagued him for much of the final two decades of his life. Reynolds also illuminates how those same experiences also informed one of Hemingway’s greatest works—The Old Man and the Sea—the final novel published during his lifetime.A unique portrait as fast-paced and exciting as the best espionage thrillers, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy illuminates a hidden side of a revered artist and is a thrilling addition to the annals of World War II.