Book picks similar to
The Debs Decision by Scott Nearing
essays
philosophy-theology-theory
politics
social-justice
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.
Caught Between the Dog and the Fireplug, or How to Survive Public Service
Kenneth H. Ashworth - 2001
The book is written as a series of lively, entertaining letters of advice from a sympathetic uncle to a niece or nephew embarking on a government career. The book will interest students and teachers of public administration, public affairs, policy development, leadership, or higher education administration. Ashworth's advice will also appeal to anyone who has ever been caught in a tight spot will working in government service.
The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies - 1979
last year, this updated collection contains the best of Robertson Davies' newspaper and magazine articles written over the past 50 years. "Each piece is entertaining and enlightening. . . ".--Publishers Weekly.
Feminasty: The Complicated Woman's Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death
Erin Gibson - 2018
Since women earned the right to vote a little under one hundred years ago, our progress hasn't been the Olympic sprint toward gender equality first wave feminists hoped for, but more of a slow, elderly mall walk (with frequent stops to Cinnabon) over the four hundred million hurdles we still face. Some of these obstacles are obvious-unequal pay, under-representation in government, reproductive restrictions, lack of floor-length mirrors in hotel rooms. But a lot of them are harder to identify. They're the white noise of oppression that we've accepted as lady business as usual, and the patriarchy wants to keep it that way. Erin Gibson has a singular goal-to create a utopian future where women are recognized as humans. In Feminasty -- titled after her nickname on the hit podcast "Throwing Shade" -- she has written a collection of make-you-laugh-until-you-cry essays that expose the hidden rules that make life as a woman unnecessarily hard and deconstructs them in a way that's bold, provocative and hilarious. Whether it's shaming women for having their periods, allowing them into STEM fields but never treating them like they truly belong, or dictating strict rules for how they should dress in every situation, Erin breaks down the organized chaos of old fashioned sexism, intentional and otherwise, that systemically keeps women down.
How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong
James O'Brien - 2018
But what makes James’s daily LBC show such essential listening – and has made James a standout social media star – is the careful way he punctures their assumptions and dismantles their arguments live on air, every single morning.In How To Be Right, James provides a hilarious and invigorating guide to talking to people with faulty opinions. With chapters on every lightning-rod issue, James shows how people have been fooled into thinking the way they do, and in each case outlines the key questions to ask to reveal fallacies, inconsistencies and double standards.If you ever get cornered by ardent Brexiteers, Daily Mail disciples or little England patriots, this book is your conversation survival guide.‘I have had a ringside seat as a significant swathe of the British population was persuaded that their failures were the fault of foreigners, that unisex lavatories threatened their peace of mind and that ‘all Muslims’ must somehow apologise for terror attacks by extremists. I have tried to dissuade them and sometimes succeeded… The challenge is to distinguish sharply between the people who told lies and the people whose only offence was to believe them.’James O’Brien
Rough Men
Aric Davis - 2013
Worse, Alex wasn’t an innocent bystander but part of the gang that raided the vault and left behind numerous bodies.Simmering with rage over his loss, Will tries to let the police handle the matter. But as Alex’s killers remain at large, Will decides that it’s up to him—and a few old friends—to enact revenge in a most brutal manner.Now he’s calling on dangerous connections that have been buried for years—and should’ve stayed that way. But Will vows to do whatever it takes to see Alex’s killers repay their sins in blood, even if it means his own damnation.
Deadly Ambition
Donna Foley Mabry - 2010
The public hates her and so does he. Locke decides that it would be easier for the President to win re-election if he were a grieving widower and plots her murder. Nothing goes according to plan, and the attempted assassination sets off a chain of events that puts Locke only one murder away from gaining the Oval Office for himself. The FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA can't find the killer, but a veteran cop and the head of the President's security detail work together to unravel the clues. The question is, can they find the solution in time to save the next victim? Fresh as today's headlines, 'Deadly Ambition' takes you to the inside world of Washington D.C.'s power brokers and outrageous characters. There's the slovenly and pragmatic head of the DNC, a Vice President far too fond of women, some of them not old enough to drive, and the Presidential aide whose credit card bills have gotten so far ahead of him that he will do anything to pay them off. There's a Secret Service Agent willing to give his own life to protect his charge, and more than one assassin who believes that killing a President is easy, but knows that getting away with it is the hard part.
Mahatma Vs Gandhi
Dinkar Joshi - 1988
The tussle between the father and the son was the most poignant and pathetic stories of their lives. Gandhi,who was busy attending meetings and conferences where the fate of forty crore Indians was to be decided, would often find headlines in a newspaper screaming 'Police arrested drunk Harilal for creating a scene on the road'. And sometimes, Harilal himself from the dias of the fundamentalist Muslim organization's meeting - 'I shall continue fighting till Ba and Bapu embrace Islam.'In this book the author tries to make an ardent effort to understand yet another enigmatic facet of human life.
7 Days In Ohio: Trump, the Gathering of the Juggalos and The Summer Everything Went Insane: If We Make It Through November Hugely Expanded Edition
Nathan Rabin - 2016
The "If We Make It Through November expanded edition" augments the original book with twice as much content. This version includes both a lengthy "manifesto" about the nature of Donald Trump's appeal and a prequel chapter chronicling the curious day when Rabin and his long-lost brother were reunited under a scalding sun, setting the stage for their unlikely but glorious Gathering adventure. Rabin's best book to date chronicles a surreal week the veteran pop culture writer spent covering, in rapid succession, the Republican National Convention where Donald Trump was nominated for President, possibly setting into motion a series of events leading to mankind's end, and the 17th annual Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse's notorious yearly festival of arts and culture. Rabin's companion throughout this crazy adventure, Raoul Duke to his Dr. Gonzo, is the author's long-lost half brother Vincent, a street-fighting welder from the mean streets of Saint Louis with a roughneck past filled with knife fights, horrific violence and almost unimaginable darkness. 7 Days in Ohio is a hilarious and surprisingly moving exploration of a unique moment in American life. It's also a story of brotherhood and family, about two very different men who find common ground in their shared affection for Insane Clown Posse. In the tradition of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and Rabin's previous memoirs comes the book Donald Trump doesn't want you to read (in part because he hates literacy) and the most soulful, moving and even tear-jerking text about men who pretend to be wicked clowns ever written. Praise for Nathan Rabin: "Smart and funny"-Mindy Kaling, The New Yorker "Brilliant"-John Green The Big Rewind: "I'm not as interested in anything as much as Nathan Rabin is interested in everything."-- Chuck Klosterman “With his uncanny grasp of cultural zeitgeist, Rabin could unseat Chuck Klosterman as the slacker generation’s vital critical voice.” —Heeb Magazine "Nathan Rabin's life reads like a fanboy's collision with Dostoyevsky. Hilarious, sad, truthful memoir is compulsively readable."-- Roger Ebert "[Rabin] has packed [The Big Rewind], like a cannon, full of caustic wit and bruised feelings. The result is a lo-fi, sometimes crude book that is nonetheless more effective (and affecting) than it has any right to be."-- The New York Times My World Of Flops: "Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops is like watching a genius nurse a score of frightened, wounded baby birds back to life--a superhuman level of care and compassion lavished on That Which Never Had A Right To Exist. Truly brilliant." —Patton Oswalt You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me "An extremely funny and engaging book about how fandom provides people with surrogate families and a way to escape day-to-day banality." (Rolling Stone (four-star review) "I Love This Book"-Harris Wittels
World War II: The Resistance
C. David North - 2015
It was not until 1942 that widely dispersed underground organizations would band together to form a united opposition to the occupying Germans. It was not until then that resistance would become the Resistance - a disciplined multi-national movement that would play a significant part in the outcome of World War II. In each occupied nation, resistance groups would grow, gathering and sending information to London, planning increasingly complex sabotage operations, and assisting thousands of people, particularly Jews, in fleeing Nazi-occupied territories. Their actions would eventually become a focused counteroffensive against the German army in 1944, when Allied troops gathered in Great Britain to prepare for the invasion of France. As their widespread activity weakened German outposts in France and other occupied countries, the Allies would gain the foothold they needed to win the war. This is their story.
In Black and White
Alexandra Wilson - 2020
Slower this time, taking in the details of everyone's faces. I began to play the game I'd played my whole life: spot the black person. Of course, I wish it didn't matter what I looked like or where I came from, but it was obvious that no one there looked like me.'Alexandra is 25, mixed-race and from Essex. As a trainee criminal barrister, she finds herself navigating a world and a set of rules designed by a privileged few. This is her story.We follow Alexandra through a criminal justice system still divided by race and class. We hear about the life-changing events that motivated her to practice criminal law, beginning with the murder of a close family friend and her own experiences of knife crime. She shows us how it feels to defend someone who hates the colour of your skin or someone you suspect is guilty, and the heart-breaking cases of youth justice she has worked on. We see what it's like for the teenagers coerced into county line drug deals and the damage that can be caused when we criminalise teenagers.Her story is unique in a profession still dominated by a privileged section of society with little first-hand experience of the devastating impact of violent crime.
On Disruption
Katharine Murphy - 2018
The internet has shaken the foundations of life: public and private lives are wrought by the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news cycle that means no one is ever off duty. On Disruption is a report from the coalface of that change: what has happened, will it keep happening, and is there any way out of the chaos?
Training for War: An Essay
Tom Kratman - 2014
Kratman’s contention: an army is for winning wars. And to win wars, you have to train men (and some women) to be warriors, not police or social workers. Herein Kratman gives guidance and a practical plan of action to officers tasked with training troops—advice than might be equally applied to other crucial training situations, as well.At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).Tom Kratman is a former infantry colonel who served in the U.S. Army for many years before becoming a lawyer in Virginia. He’s now a full-time writer.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
Rebecca Solnit - 2014
As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit’s concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom. Gathered here are celebrated iconic essays along with little-known pieces that create a powerful survey of the world we live in. In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit’s collection charts a way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Like the women who've pioneered before her—Sontag, Didion, and Dillard—her essays are a beacon.
Travels with Doctor Death
Ron Rosenbaum - 1991
Rosenbaum's articles delve into some of America's greatest mysteries such as "Oswald's Ghost", "The Mysterious Death of J.F.K.'s Mistress", "Back on the Watergate Case with Inspector RN", and "Dead Ringers". Rosenbaum is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and The New York Times.