21 Speeches That Shaped Our World: The people and ideas that changed the way we think


Chris Abbott - 2010
    He examines the power of the arguments embedded in these speeches to inspire people to achieve great things, or do great harm. Abbott draws upon his political expertise to explain how our current understanding of the world is rooted in pivotal moments of history. These moments are captured in the words of a range of influential speakers including: Emmeline Pankhurst, Martin Luther King, Jr, Enoch Powell, Napoleon Beazley, Kevin Rudd, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, Margaret Beckett, Winston Churchill, Salvador Allende, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Tim Collins, Mohandas Gandhi, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Robin Cook and Barack Obama. The speeches in this book are arranged thematically, linked by concepts such as 'might is right', 'with us or against us' and 'give peace a chance'. Each transcript is accompanied by an insightful commentary that analyses how the words relate to our modern society. Fresh and relevant, this is a book that will make you stop in your tracks and think about what is really happening in the world today.

Summary: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow


Readtrepreneur Publishing - 2017
    We have managed to overcome and even come up with solutions to major world problems like famine, plague, and war.   This book Homo Deus discusses the evolution of man over the years; from simple-minded beings who believed in God to intelligent man who questions God’s existence and would rather rely on Science and data computation to get their answers. (Note: This summary is wholly written and published by readtrepreneur.com It is not affiliated with the original author in any way) “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.” – Yuval Noah Harari Homo Deus tells us of the journey throughout man’s quest for power as they attempt to become more godlike, and the reasons behind why they could accomplish so much. Humankind has always thought of themselves as more superior than the other species and believed that their existence has great meaning and meant for a higher purpose. P.S. Open your eyes and mind as you learn more about our own species – mankind. As we read along, Homo Deus will make us ponder – Are we really that great as we think? Are we bettering ourselves, or self-destructing?   P.P.S. This is a ZERO-RISK investment. Should you find this book unworthy of the original coffee price of $3.99, get a REFUND within 7 days! The Time for Thinking is Over! Time for Action! Scroll Up Now and Click on the “Buy now with 1-Click” Button to Download your Copy Right Away! Why Choose Us, Readtrepreneur? Highest Quality Summaries Delivers Amazing Knowledge Awesome Refresher Clear And Concise Disclaimer Once Again: This book is meant for a great companionship of the original book or to simply get the gist of the original book. If you’re looking for the original book, search for this link: http://amzn.to/2t3cUk3

Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis


Mark Binelli - 2012
    But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neo-pastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists—all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native and Rolling Stone writer Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's "museum of neglect"—its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie—he tracks the signs of blight repurposed, from the school for pregnant teenagers to the killer ex-con turned street patroller, from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's wager on the Volt electric car and the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center.Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning—what might just be the first post-industrial city of our new century.

Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson


Kenneth R. Timmerman - 2002
    Martin Luther King, Jr.

Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads


Paul Theroux - 2015
    Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America — the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It’s these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux’s keen traveler’s eye.  On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road “the plantation.” He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families — the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without.  From the writer whose “great mission has always been to transport us beyond that reading chair, to challenge himself — and thus, to challenge us” (Boston Globe), Deep South is an ode to a region, vivid and haunting, full of life and loss alike.

Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City


Antero Pietila - 2010
    The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of white flight after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.

To Live Outside the Law: Caught by Operation Julie, Britain's Biggest Drugs Bust


Leaf Fielding - 2011
    The book opens with Leaf Fielding's arrest in a pre-dawn police raid and ends five years later with his release from jail.The narrative moves back and forth between the harsh world of prison and his previous life - from a childhood at a brutal boarding school onto undergraduate days and his LSD epiphany in the summer of love, 1967.Acid transformed him in an instant from nerdy scholar to footloose freak. His ten years of adventures in the hippie underground gave the title to this book - a quote from a Bob Dylan song - they also took him across Europe, to the Andes, to Indochina and on to the edge of the known universe. They also led inexorably to his downfall.

The Great American Divorce: Why Our Country Is Coming Apart—And Why It Might Be for the Best


David Austin French - 2020
    

An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago


Alex Kotlowitz - 2019
    What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing about individuals who have emerged from the violence and whose stories capture the capacity--and the breaking point--of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate profiles that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America. Among others, we meet a man who as a teenager killed a rival gang member and twenty years later is still trying to come to terms with what he's done; a devoted school social worker struggling with her favorite student, who refuses to give evidence in the shooting death of his best friend; the witness to a wrongful police shooting who can't shake what he has seen; and an aging former gang leader who builds a place of refuge for himself and his friends. Applying the close-up, empathic reporting that made There Are No Children Here a modern classic, Kotlowitz offers a piercingly honest portrait of a city in turmoil. These sketches of those left standing will get into your bones. This one summer will stay with you.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story


Nikole Hannah-JonesNikole Hannah-Jones - 2019
    In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story builds on The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project,” which reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on the original "1619 Project, "weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This legacy can be seen in the way we tell stories, the way we teach our children, and the way we remember. Together, the elements of the book reveal a new origin story for the United States, one that helps explain not only the persistence of anti-Black racism and inequality in American life today, but also the roots of what makes the country unique. The book also features an elaboration of the original project’s Pulitzer Prize–winning lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones on how the struggles of Black Americans have expanded democracy for all Americans, as well as two original pieces from Hannah-Jones, one of which makes a case for reparative solutions to this legacy of injustice.

Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama's Final Campaign


Michael Hastings - 2013
    With access to the Obama re-election machine, Michael Hastings reports the behind-the-scenes story of the campaign trail: from Obama's self-destructive performance at the first debate to the harrowing days of Hurricane Sandy, all culminating in his triumphant victory late in the evening on November 6th. Along the way, Hastings gives a first hand account of the excitement and madness traveling with the White House press corps, bringing to life a series of unforgettably strange moments from the trail. From one of the sharpest, funniest, and most controversial young American journalists writing today comes "Panic: 2012" - the definitive account of how President Obama almost blew it.

Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?


Mumia Abu-Jamal - 2017
    This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos."--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States“[Mumia’s] writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly, urgently.”—Cornel West“He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them.”—Angela Y. DavisIn December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness.In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country’s black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.Mumia Abu-Jamal is author of many books, including Death Blossoms, Live from Death Row, All Things Censored, and Writing on the Wall.

The Boy Looked at Johnny: The Obituary of Rock and Roll


Julie Burchill - 1978
    Book by Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City


Andrea Elliott - 2021
    Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. By the time Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis is exploding as the chasm deepens between rich and poor. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani must lead her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools, and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system. When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. As she learns to “code switch” between the culture she left behind and the norms of her new town, Dasani starts to feel like a stranger in both places. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love? By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book vividly illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases


Ida B. Wells-Barnett - 1892
    Fearless in her opposition to lynchings, Wells documented hundreds of these atrocities. Wells became a public figure in Memphis when, in 1884, she led a campaign against racial segregation on the local railway. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech, an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Memphis on Beale Street. She also published in 1892 her famous pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases. This pamphlet, along with her 1895 The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, documented her research on and campaign against lynching. In 1892, Wells went to Great Britain at the behest of British Quaker Catherine Impey. An opponent of imperialism and proponent of racial equality, Impey wanted to be sure that the British public was informed about the problem of lynching. After her retirement, Wells wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928). Her other works include Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900).