Book picks similar to
A Queer Way Out: The Politics of Queer Emigration from Israel by Hila Amit
jewish-nonfiction
queer-nonfiction
history-and-politics
jewish-nonfic
Let It Be Morning
Sayed Kashua - 2004
In his searing new novel, a young Arab journalist returns to his hometown — an Arab village within Israel — where his already vexed sense of belonging is forced to crisis when the village becomes a pawn in the never-ending power struggle that is the Middle East. Hoping to reclaim the simplicity of life among kin, the prodigal son returns home to find that nothing is as he remembers: everything is smaller, the people are petty and provincial. But when Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, the village devolves into a Darwinian jungle, where paranoia quickly takes hold and threatens the community's fragile equilibrium.With the enduring moral and literary power of Camus and Orwell, Let It Be Morning offers an intimate, eye-opening portrait of the conflicted allegiances of the Israeli Arabs, proving once again that Sayed Kashua is a fearless, prophetic observer of a political and human quagmire that offers no easy answers.
Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past
Ray Raphael - 2004
Exploring the dynamic intersection between history-making and story-making, award-winning author and historian Ray Raphael shows how these fictions—conceived in the narrowly nationalistic politics of the nineteenth century—undermine our democratic ideals.
Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young
Helen Razer - 2017
In 2017, they face the problems of underemployment, unaffordable housing and economists who write crap columns telling them that it's their fault for taking an Uber to brunch.Today, the future's so dark, we need night vision goggles, not a few liberal guys shining a torch on a sandwich. Maybe today, we could use the light of Karl Marx.Marx may not have had much to say about brunch in the twenty-first century, but he sure had some powerful thoughts about where the system of capitalism would land us. Over time, it would produce a series of crises, he said, before pushing the wealth so decisively up, a top-heavy system would come crashing down with a push.Pushy old communist Helen Razer offers an introduction to the thought of Marx for Millennials, and anyone else tired of wage stagnation, growing global poverty and economists writing desperate columns saying everything would work better, if only we stopped eating sandwiches. Brunchers of the world must unite! They have nothing to lose but a life lived for the wealth of a few. Both for themselves and their comrades in the Global South, they have a world to win.
The Second Amendment:: Preserving the Inalienable Right of Individual Self-Protection
David Barton - 2000
Learn about the Founders' views on this important freedom and their solutions for averting the plague of violence that has disrupted communications.
Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets
David A.T. Stafford - 1999
On these foundations Roosevelt and Churchill constructed a fighting alliance unlike any other in history.The two men also developed an extraordinary personal relationship‹-communicating almost daily by telegram, telephone, personal meetings, or through intermediaries‹that lasted until FDR1s death on April 12, 1945, just hours before American and British troops liberated Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. Stafford dispels much of the sentimental mythology surrounding the almost legendary relationship and reveals how, despite mutual trust, each man guarded knowledge from the other in pursuit of separate national interests, while at the same time building a joint intelligence structure.
A Concise History of Hong Kong (Critical Issues in History) (Critical Issues in World and International History)
John Mark Carroll - 2007
This book concludes by exploring the legacies of colonial rule, the consequences of Hong Kong's reintegration with China, and significant developments and challenges since 1997.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed
Shea Serrano - 2015
Shea Serrano deftly pays homage to the most important song of each year. Serrano also examines the most important moments that surround the history and culture of rap music—from artists’ backgrounds to issues of race, the rise of hip-hop, and the struggles among its major players—both personal and professional. Covering East Coast and West Coast, famous rapper feuds, chart toppers, and show stoppers, The Rap Year Book is an in-depth look at the most influential genre of music to come out of the last generation. Complete with infographics, lyric maps, hilarious and informative footnotes, portraits of the artists, and short essays by other prominent music writers, The Rap Year Book is both a narrative and illustrated guide to the most iconic and influential rap songs ever created.
Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World
Gina Mallet - 2004
Over the course of the last 50 years, we have gone from loving food to fearing it. We have become frightened by food science and spooked by medical doctors, and so old familiar foods and recipes - the threads of community - are being lost. Lingering over sensual memories of forgotten taste, Mallet traces the vicissitudes of five popular foods, their history and their predicament: how the egg that made the souffl supreme has been brought near to extinction by science and pathogen; how the war against bacteria is widening the cultural gulf between Europe and America, and endangering raw milk cheese; how beef has now been humbled by disease; why we can't grow a hundred varieties of peas the way the Victorian gardeners did, and why the tomato is surviving technology while the apple is dying in the West; and how fish are vanishing - just as we were relearning how to cook them properly. Mallet grew up in a hamlet with her family in the English countryside after the Second World War, and afterwards they moved to an apartment above Harrods. Although food was scarce in England in the era of wartime rationing and shortages, Mallet never forgot the tastes of her childhood.
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
Christopher L. Hayes - 2012
In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit – utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public's failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives.Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.
We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement
Ryan Grim - 2019
We’ve Got People is the story of that movement, which first exploded into public view with the largely forgotten presidential run of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a campaign that came dangerously close to winning. With the party and the nation at a crossroads, this timely and original book offers new insight into how we’ve gotten where we are – and where we're headed.
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria
Wendy Pearlman - 2017
The government’s ferocious response, and the refusal of the demonstrators to back down, sparked a brutal civil war that over the past five years has escalated into the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our times.Yet despite all the reporting, the video, and the wrenching photography, the stories of ordinary Syrians remain unheard, while the stories told about them have been distorted by broad brush dread and political expediency. This fierce and poignant collection changes that. Based on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians conducted over four years across the Middle East and Europe, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is a breathtaking mosaic of first-hand testimonials from the frontlines. Some of the testimonies are several pages long, eloquent narratives that could stand alone as short stories; others are only a few sentences, poetic and aphoristic. Together, they cohere into an unforgettable chronicle that is not only a testament to the power of storytelling but to the strength of those who face darkness with hope, courage, and moral conviction.
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
Jeffrey Toobin - 2007
An institution at a moment of transition, the Court now stands at a crucial point, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, and church-state relations. Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and with a keen sense of the Court’s history and the trajectory of its future, Jeffrey Toobin creates in The Nine a riveting story of one of the most important forces in American life today.
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream
Doris Kearns Goodwin - 1976
From the moment the author, then a young woman from Harvard, 1st encountered President Johnson at a White House dance in the spring of 67, she became fascinated by the man: his character, his enormous energy & drive, & his manner of wielding these gifts in an endless pursuit of power. As a member of his White House staff, she soon became his personal confidante. In the years before his death he revealed himself to her as to no other. Widely praised & enormously popular, Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream is a biography like few others. With insight & a richly engrossing style, the author renders LBJ in all his vibrant, conflicted humanity.PrefacePrologueGrowing up Education & the dream of success The making of a politician Rise to power in the senateThe senate leader The vice-presidencyThe transition yearThe great society Vietnam Things go wrongUnder siege in the White House The withdrawalEpilogueAcknowledgmentsAuthor's PostscriptNotesIndex
Himmler
Peter Padfield - 1990
Heinrich Himmler was not only head of Hitler's SS police and Gestapo, but was also in charge of the death camps in the East. The account of Himmler's life and his impact on the rise and fall of the Nazi state make a gripping and horrifying story. But more than this, it is a profound moral and intellectual inquiry into the nature of evil in the human character.
1861: The Civil War Awakening
Adam Goodheart - 2011
Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents’ faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal. It set Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom.The book introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Adam Goodheart takes us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at this moment of ultimate crisis and decision.