In 1996, longtime New Yorker writer Mark Singer was conscripted by his editor to profile Donald Trump. At that time Trump was a mere Manhattan-centric megalomaniac, a failing casino operator mired in his second divorce and (he claimed) recovering from the bankruptcy proceedings that prompted him to inventory the contents of his Trump Tower home. Conversing with Trump in his offices, apartments, cars, and private plane, Singer found himself fascinated with this man "who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."In Trump and Me, Singer revisits the profile and recounts how its publication lodged inside its subject's head as an enduring irritant--and how Singer ("A TOTAL LOSER!" according to Trump) cheerfully continued to bait him. He reflects on Trump's evolution from swaggering buffoon to potential threat to America's standing as a rational guardian of the world order. Heedlessly combative, equally adept at spewing insults and manipulating crowds at his campaign rallies, the self-proclaimed billionaire has emerged as an unlikely tribune of populist rage. All politics is artifice, and Singer marvels at how Trump has transfixed an electorate with his ultimate feat of performance art--a mass political movement only loosely tethered to reality.

    By examining the contradictions between the democratic and market principles proclaimed by those in power and those actually practiced, Chomsky critiques the tyranny of the few that restricts the public arena and enacts policies that vastly increase private wealth, often with complete disregard for social and ecological consequences. Combining detailed historical examples and uncompromising criticism, Chomsky offers a profound sense of hope that social activism can reclaim people's rights as citizens rather than as consumers, redefining democracy as a global movement, not a global market.

    Hardly oppressed like women and minorities, business corporations, too, have fought since the nation’s earliest days to gain equal rights under the Constitution—and today have nearly all the same rights as ordinary people.Exposing the historical origins of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, Adam Winkler explains how those controversial Supreme Court decisions extending free speech and religious liberty to corporations were the capstone of a centuries-long struggle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business. Beginning his account in the colonial era, Winkler reveals the profound influence corporations had on the birth of democracy and on the shape of the Constitution itself. Once the Constitution was ratified, corporations quickly sought to gain the rights it guaranteed. The first Supreme Court case on the rights of corporations was decided in 1809, a half-century before the first comparable cases on the rights of African Americans or women. Ever since corporations have waged a persistent and remarkably fruitful campaign to win an ever-greater share of individual rights.Although corporations never marched on Washington, they employed many of the same strategies of more familiar civil rights struggles: civil disobedience, test cases, and novel legal claims made in a purposeful effort to reshape the law. Indeed, corporations have often been unheralded innovators in constitutional law, and several of the individual rights Americans hold most dear were first secured in lawsuits brought by businesses.Winkler enlivens his narrative with a flair for storytelling and a colorful cast of characters: among others, Daniel Webster, America’s greatest advocate, who argued some of the earliest corporate rights cases on behalf of his business clients; Roger Taney, the reviled Chief Justice, who surprisingly fought to limit protections for corporations—in part to protect slavery; and Roscoe Conkling, a renowned politician who deceived the Supreme Court in a brazen effort to win for corporations the rights added to the Constitution for the freed slaves. Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long, Ralph Nader, Louis Brandeis, and even Thurgood Marshall all played starring roles in the story of the corporate rights movement.In this heated political age, nothing can be timelier than Winkler’s tour de force, which shows how America’s most powerful corporations won our most fundamental rights and turned the Constitution into a weapon to impede the regulation of big business.

    It is the story of two nurses who witnessed the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the frontline. It focuses on their lives and their experiences. Some of the story is raw, sometimes graphic, but familiar for people with HIV infection, family members, friends, and other nurses and medical professionals such as Ellen and Valery. There were hundreds of nurses who went through what Ellen and Valery experienced. They want to tell this story to give a voice to a generation lost, encouraging the world to remember one simple thing: this history cannot be repeated.

    Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions--the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law--to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice.Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless change, and social injustice that accompanied it.

    From 2004 to 2015, 1,800 print newspaper outlets closed in the US. One in five news organizations in Canada has closed since 2008. One in three Brazilians lives in news deserts. The absence of accountability journalism has created an atmosphere in which indicted politicians were elected, school superintendents were mismanaging districts, and police chiefs were getting mysterious payouts. This is not the much-discussed fake-news problem--it's the separate problem of a critical shortage of real news.America's premier media critic, Margaret Sullivan, charts the contours of the damage, and surveys a range of new efforts to keep local news alive--from non-profit digital sites to an effort modeled on the Peace Corps. No nostalgic paean to the roar of rumbling presses, Ghosting the News instead sounds a loud alarm, alerting citizens to a growing crisis in local news that has already done serious damage.

    Anchored by six megabanks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—which together control assets amounting, astonishingly, to more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, these financial institutions (now more emphatically “too big to fail”) continue to hold the global economy hostage, threatening yet another financial meltdown with their excessive risk-taking and toxic “business as usual” practices. How did this come to be—and what is to be done? These are the central concerns of 13 Bankers, a brilliant, historically informed account of our troubled political economy. In 13 Bankers, Simon Johnson—one of the most prominent and frequently cited economists in America (former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT, and author of the controversial “The Quiet Coup” in The Atlantic)—and James Kwak give a wide-ranging, meticulous, and bracing account of recent U.S. financial history within the context of previous showdowns between American democracy and Big Finance: from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They convincingly show why our future is imperiled by the ideology of finance (finance is good, unregulated finance is better, unfettered finance run amok is best) and by Wall Street’s political control of government policy pertaining to it. As the authors insist, the choice that America faces is stark: whether Washington will accede to the vested interests of an unbridled financial sector that runs up profits in good years and dumps its losses on taxpayers in lean years, or reform through stringent regulation the banking system as first and foremost an engine of economic growth. To restore health and balance to our economy, Johnson and Kwak make a radical yet feasible and focused proposal: reconfigure the megabanks to be “small enough to fail.” Lucid, authoritative, crucial for its timeliness, 13 Bankers is certain to be one of the most discussed and debated books of 2010.

    Two teams from the same city squared off against each other in an intracity World Series, pitting the heavily favored Cubs of the National League against the hardscrabble American League champion White Sox. Now, for its centennial anniversary, noted historian Bernard A. Weisberger tells the tale of a unique time in baseball, a unique time in America, and a time when Chicago was at the center of it all.At the turn of the century, American baseball and America itself were, to a modern observer, both completely alien and yet timelessly similar to what we know today. In 1906 the sport of baseball was still mired in the "dead ball" era, when defense won championships, and players didn't need bodybuilder physiques in order to be competitive. The league was racially segregated. A six-day workweek was threatened by early game times, as the first night game wouldn't be played for another three decades. There was no radio to broadcast the contest. Only one ball was used throughout the game. And yet it was still ninety feet between bases. The home team still batted in the bottom of the ninth inning. And the final score could still capture the attention of a nation.It was a time when the accomplishments on the field mirrored those beyond the diamond. America was the land of the self-made man, the land where hard work and determination could make a person's fortune. A. G. Spalding proved instrumental in making baseball what it is today -- a thriving business and a national pastime. Charles Comiskey worked his way from scoring runs as a player to becoming one of the most influential owners in baseball history. Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown overcame a horribly disfiguring injury to become a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cubs. And Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance proved that you could use teamwork to stand out as stars.A city that had rebuilt itself from the ashes of the Great Fire thirty-five years earlier was now the focal point of an entire baseball-loving country. The contest that could be called the Great Streetcar Series would electrify the city of Chicago, and prove to be one of the most unique and exciting World Series ever to be played.

    India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.

    No book could be more important." --George A. Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in EconomicsCritics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets--among economists as well as many ordinary citizens--is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea.Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. Friedman makes clear how the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about the after-life, and about the purpose of our existence, were all under scrutiny in the world in which Adam Smith and his contemporaries lived.Friedman explores how those debates go far in explaining the puzzling behavior of so many of our fellow citizens whose views about economic policies--and whose voting behavior--seems sharply at odds with what would be to their own economic benefit. Illuminating the origins of the relationship between religious thinking and economic thinking, together with its ongoing consequences, Friedman provides invaluable insights into our current economic policy debates and demonstrates ways to shape more functional policies for all citizens.

    In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

     LAST PLANE OUT OF SAIGON is a faithful reproduction of the journal he kept as a draftee working in the operating room of Vietnam's largest military hospital during the final year of the war. Supporting historical and political context is provided by award-winning scholar, John Hagan. Richard’s entries were written in real time and, as they chronicle the last desperate year of this tragic war, present readers with a better understanding of the complicated final year of the Vietnam War from the inside, looking out. A year that tragically remains unfamiliar to most Americans. This landmark book describes, in part, the hasty departure of American troops from Vietnam but is timely now as America again withdraws from war and is challenged with multiple global conflicts. It is a gripping real-time account of the anger, resistance and resilience forged in one man by the horrors of Vietnam witnessed up close, in graphically human terms, touching on mistakes that were made then and which our country continues to make today. The reader will feel the weight of this compelling account, as the Vietnam War continues to plague the consciousness of our country. All Americans should read this important piece of history, bound to leave them with chills. Richard Pena served in Vietnam as an Operating Room Specialist for the United States Army and left on the last day of American withdrawal. He is now a nationally renowned practicing attorney in Austin, Texas. He is a former President of the American Bar Foundation and State Bar of Texas and served on the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association. John Hagan is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Co-Director of the Center of Law & Globalization at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. He has published nine books and more than 150 articles in nationally renowned magazines and journals.

    This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations.The Prize is as much a history of the twentieth century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of history is enormous -- from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm.

    From the day it was erected, it has been the object of obsession for the heads of empires, conjuring their most hidden vices. In a riveting chronicle of betrayal, revenge, family rivalry, and raw greed, award-winning journalist Mitchell Pacelle tells the compelling tale of the history of the Empire State Building and the battle for ownership which reveals the inner workings of a world of powerful, self-made men. Pacelle brings to life the colorful cast of characters involved-a dramatis personae including the most powerful players in the international real estate markets both old and new, including John Raskob and Pierre du Pont alongside Donald Trump, the Helmsleys, Peter Malkin, and the eccentric Japanese billionaire Hideki Yokoi. Before the tale is over, Yokoi will accuse his beloved illegitimate daughter of stealing the building from him, several participants will land in jail, one will die suddenly, and a tense legal standoff will leave the landmark in limbo. One of the most fascinating characters to emerge from this richly layered story is the building itself, with its legendary romances and suicides, its odd tenants, and the countless human triumphs and tragedies that have been played out within its towering walls.

    The respected conservative historian couldn’t fathom that the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan could endorse such an unqualified reality-TV star. Yet the Twilight Zone episode that Boot believed he was watching created an ideological dislocation so shattering that Boot’s transformation from Republican foreign policy adviser to celebrated anti-Trump columnist becomes the dramatic story of The Corrosion of Conservatism.No longer a Republican, but also not a Democrat, Boot here records his ideological journey from a “movement” conservative to a man without a party, beginning with his political coming-of-age as a young émigré from the Soviet Union, enthralled with the National Review and the conservative intellectual tradition of Russell Kirk and F. A. Hayek. Against this personal odyssey, Boot simultaneously traces the evolution of modern American conservatism, jump-started by Barry Goldwater’s canonical The Conscience of a Conservative, to the rise of Trumpism and its gradual corrosion of what was once the Republican Party.While 90 percent of his fellow Republicans became political “toadies” in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Boot stood his ground, enduring the vitriol of his erstwhile conservative colleagues, trolled on Twitter by a white supremacist who depicted his “execution” in a gas chamber by a smiling, Nazi-clad Trump. And yet, Boot nevertheless remains a villain to some partisan circles for his enduring commitment to conservative fiscal and national security principles. It is from this isolated position, then, that Boot launches this bold declaration of dissent and its urgent plea for true, bipartisan cooperation.With uncompromising insights, The Corrosion of Conservatism evokes both a president who has traduced every norm and the rise of a nascent centrist movement to counter Trump’s assault on democracy.