Our culture is increasingly immoral, the family structure is threatened from all sides, and government programs consistently overreach, creating massive debt.In this powerful and prophetic book, nationally syndicated columnist and trusted political commentator Cal Thomas offers a diagnosis of what exactly is wrong with the United States by drawing parallels to once-great empires and nations that declined into oblivion. Citing the historically proven 250-year pattern of how superpowers rise and fall, he predicts that America's expiration date is just around the corner and shows us how to escape their fate.Through biblical insights and hard-hitting truth, he reminds us that real change comes when America looks to God instead of Washington. Scripture, rather than politics, is the GPS he uses to point readers to the right road - a road of hope, life, and change. Because, he says, if we're willing to seek God first, learn from history, and make changes at the individual and community level, we can not only survive, but thrive, again.This powerful, timely, and much-needed perspective is a must-read for anyone who longs for a promising future for our great nation.

    This is the America we believe in a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing opportunity gap emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was. Robert Putnam about whom The Economist said, "His scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny," offers a personal but also authoritative look at this new American crisis. Putnam begins with his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. By and large the vast majority of those students "our kids" went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren have had harder lives amid diminishing prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable body of research done especially for this book. Our Kids is a rare combination of individual testimony and rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of the American dream that should initiate a deep examination of the future of our country.

     Born in a California women’s prison in 1963, Laureen Pittman was relinquished for adoption. As a child, Laureen was conditioned to believe that being adopted didn’t matter. So, it didn’t . . . until it did. Through scraps of information, Laureen stitched together her history – one that started in the psychedelic sixties and ended up in a future where DNA could solve mysteries. She never imagined that spitting into a plastic tube, along with painstaking research and the explosion of technology would reveal the answers to her identity. Laureen’s tale is for anyone who has ever questioned who they are, where they came from, or how they fit in. Her journey to find her truth illustrates the strength and power of our need for connection, belonging, and healing through knowledge. What people are saying about The Lies That Bind "Pittman walks, with grace and wisdom, through the uncharted and difficult territory, where she uncovers secrets long buried and finds those who embrace one another as a family. Hers is a story of resilience and tenacity. It is about the peace that comes when we are in the shadows no more, and it will inspire others on their own healing path." ~ Linda Hoye, Author of Two Hearts: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Grief to Gratitude "Laureen’s tale from the point of view of an adoptee is one of incredible bravery and courage. Her beautiful voice echoes through the pages with pain and joy, disappointment and redemption. No matter if you have been involved in adoption directly or not, there is beauty to be found in this heart-wrenching book." ~ From the Foreword by Angie Martin, Bestselling & Award-winning author of Conduit and Chrysalis

    In a quick, easy read, you can take the main principles from White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism! The phrase “white fragility” has grown into a term that many people have accepted and referenced when talking about the defensiveness and discomfort a white person feels when talking about race. The term, originally coined in a 2011 article by Robin DiAngelo, is now used in various articles, books, TV shows, and more. Although it’s commonly heard, not many people truly understand what it means. That’s why Robin DiAngelo wrote the book entitled White Fragility: Why it’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. DiAngelo is an author, former professor, and lecturer with a PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle. For more than 20 years, she’s focused on racial justice and whiteness studies. Her book on white fragility is a culmination of everything she’s learned from her personal experiences, her studies, and her interactions with white people and people of color. Her book aims to create a dialogue about race despite the white fragility that Americans feel when confronted with that topic. The book, published in 2018, has gained strong reviews because it explores race in-depth and attempts to break down those walls that white people have built in order to protect themselves from acknowledging their race and the benefits it gives them in life. The book debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List. DiAngelo is the two-time winner of the Student’s Choice Award for Educator of the Year at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. Aside from her White Fragility book, DiAngelo has numerous other publications and books under her belt. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism is the #1 bestseller in the discrimination & racism category on Amazon. That’s because it’s a useful tool that can be used in classrooms, discussions, lectures, and more. For those not in an academic setting, it’s also simply just a book that people from all different cultures can learn from, as it aims to teach us all how we got to this point in society, why we have the racial biases we do, and how we can overcome white fragility in order to have meaningful relationships with people of color.

    Soon Gen Xers will be the only cohort of Americans who remember life as it was lived before the arrival of the Internet. They are, as Hennessey dubs them, “the last adult generation,” the sole remaining link to a time when childhood was still a bit dangerous but produced adults who were naturally resilient. More than a decade into the social media revolution, the American public is waking up to the idea that the tech sector’s intentions might not be as pure as advertised. The mountains of money being made off our browsing habits and purchase histories are used to fund ever-more extravagant and utopian projects that, by their very natures, will corrode the foundations of free society, leaving us all helpless and digitally enslaved to an elite crew of ultra-sophisticated tech geniuses. But it’s not too late to turn the tide. There’s still time for Gen X to write its own future. A spirited defense of free speech, eye contact, and the virtues of patience, Zero Hour for Gen X is a cultural history of the last 35 years, an analysis of the current social and historical moment, and a generational call to arms.

    Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.

    In exposing this shadowy and complex system that dominates our lives, Owen Jones sets out on a journey into the heart of our Establishment, from the lobbies of Westminster to the newsrooms, boardrooms and trading rooms of Fleet Street and the City. Exposing the revolving doors that link these worlds, and the vested interests that bind them together, Jones shows how, in claiming to work on our behalf, the people at the top are doing precisely the opposite. In fact, they represent the biggest threat to our democracy today - and it is time they were challenged.Owen Jones may have the face of a baby and the voice of George Formby but he is our generation's Orwell and we must cherish him (Russell Brand)This is the most important book on the real politics of the UK in my lifetime, and the only one you will ever need to read. You will be enlightened and angry (Irvine Welsh)Owen Jones displays a powerful combination of cool analysis and fiery anger in this dissection of the profoundly and sickeningly corrupt state that is present-day Britain. He is a fine writer, and this is a truly necessary book (Philip Pullman)

    She found that navigating the basics of everyday life—from buying a cell phone and filing taxes to education and childcare—was much more complicated and stressful than anything she encountered in her homeland. At first, she attributed her crippling anxiety to the difficulty of adapting to a freewheeling new culture. But as she got to know Americans better, she discovered they shared her deep apprehension. To understand why life is so different in the U.S. and Finland, Partanen began to look closely at both.In The Nordic Theory of Everything, Partanen compares and contrasts life in the United States with life in the Nordic region, focusing on four key relationships—parents and children, men and women, employees and employers, and government and citizens. She debunks criticism that Nordic countries are socialist “nanny states,” revealing instead that it is we Americans who are far more enmeshed in unhealthy dependencies than we realize. As Partanen explains step by step, the Nordic approach allows citizens to enjoy more individual freedom and independence than we do.Partanen wants to open Americans’ eyes to how much better things can be—to show her beloved new country what it can learn from her homeland to reinvigorate and fulfill the promise of the American dream—to provide the opportunity to live a healthy, safe, economically secure, upwardly mobile life for everyone. Offering insights, advice, and solutions, The Nordic Theory of Everything makes a convincing argument that we can rebuild our society, rekindle our optimism, and restore true freedom to our relationships and lives.

    In it, twelve southerners-Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H. Lanier, Stark Young, Allen Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, John Donald Wade, and Robert Penn Warren-defended individualism against the trend of baseless conformity in an increasingly mechanized and dehumanized society. In her new introduction, Susan V. Donaldson shows that the Southern Agrarians might have ultimately failed in their efforts to revive the South they saw as traditional, stable, and unified, but they nonetheless sparked debates and quarrels about history, literature, race, gender, and regional identity that are still being waged today over Confederate flags, monuments, slavery, and public memory.

    I’m Tim. I’m a single cell in society’s body. U.S. society, to be specific.So let me explain why we’re here.As a writer and a generally thinky person, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the society I live in, and societies in general. I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger.When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our best.The thing is, when I’ve recently tried to imagine what society might look like, I haven’t really been picturing this:Giant stick figure: "I am grown up."Based on what I see around me, in person and online, it seems like my society is actually more like this:Giant stick figure throwing a giant tantrum because their chocolate ice cream fell on the ground.Individual humans grow older as they age—but it kind of seems like the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year that goes by.So I decided to write a blog post about this. But then something else happened.When I told people I was planning to write a post about society, and the way people are acting, and the way the media is acting, and the way the government is acting, and the way everyone else is acting, people kept saying the same thing to me.Don’t do it. Don’t touch it. Write about something else. Anything else. It’s just not worth it.They were right. With so many non-controversial topics to write about, why take on something so loaded and risk alienating a ton of readers? I listened to people’s warnings, and I thought about moving on to something else, but then I was like, “Wait what? I live inside a giant and the giant is having a six-year-old meltdown in the grocery store candy section and that’s a not-okay thing for me to talk about?”It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society."

    On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they've purchased, sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have turned to urban farming to revitalize the blighted city they both love. And near Missoula, Montana, a couple who have been at the forefront of organic farming for decades navigate what it means to live and raise a family ethically.A work of immersive journalism steeped in a distinctively American social history and sparked by a personal quest, The Unsettlers traces the search for the simple life through the stories of these new pioneers and what inspired each of them to look for -- or create -- a better existence. Captivating and clear-eyed, it dares us to imagine what a sustainable, ethical, authentic future might actually look like.

    This and other developments will prompt utilities to undergo the largest changes in their history. Smart Power examines the many facets of this unprecedented transformation. This enlightening book begins with a look back on the deregulatory efforts of the 1990s and their gradual replacement by concerns over climate change, promoting new technologies, and developing stable prices and supplies. In thorough but non-technical terms it explains the revolutionary changes that the Smart Grid is bringing to utility operations. It also examines the options for low-carbon emissions along with the real-world challenges the industry and its regulators must face as the industry retools and finances its new sources and systems. Throughout the book, Peter Fox-Penner provides insights into the policy choices and regulatory reform needed to face these challenges. He not only weighs the costs and benefits of every option, but presents interviews with informed experts, including economists, utility CEOs, and engineers. He gives a brief history of the development of the current utility business model and examines possible new business models that are focused on energy efficiency.Smart Power explains every aspect of the coming energy revolution for utilities in lively prose that will captivate even the most techno-phobic readers.

    Now he looks at the complex and surprising ways the weak can defeat the strong, the small can match up against the giant, and how our goals (often culturally determined) can make a huge difference in our ultimate sense of success. Drawing upon examples from the world of business, sports, culture, cutting-edge psychology, and an array of unforgettable characters around the world, David and Goliath is in many ways the most practical and provocative book Malcolm Gladwell has ever written.

    The result is a radical interrogation of work, leisure, and capitalism. Described by The New York Times as a writer who "advances from all sides, like a chess player," Biss brings her approach to the lived experience of capitalism. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, across bars and laundromats and universities, she asks, of both herself and her class, "In what have we invested?"

    The history of Tolerance (or the lack thereof) in the history of man as described by one of the best popular historians of all time