America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't


Stephen Colbert - 2012
    You could say we're the #1 nation at being the best at greatness.But as perfect as America is in every single way, America is broken! And we can't exchange it because we're 236 years past the 30-day return window. Look around--we don't make anything anymore, we've mortgaged our future to China, and the Apologist-in-Chief goes on world tours just to bow before foreign leaders. Worse, the L.A. Four Seasons Hotel doesn't even have a dedicated phone button for the Spa. You have to dial an extension! Where did we lose our way?!It's high time we restored America to the greatness it never lost!Luckily, AMERICA AGAIN will singlebookedly pull this country back from the brink. It features everything from chapters, to page numbers, to fonts. Covering subject's ranging from healthcare ("I shudder to think where we'd be without the wide variety of prescription drugs to treat our maladies, such as think-shuddering") to the economy ("Life is giving us lemons, and we're shipping them to the Chinese to make our lemon-flavored leadonade") to food ("Feel free to deep fry this book—it's a rich source of fiber"), Stephen gives America the dose of truth it needs to get back on track.

The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy


Michael Lewis - 2018
    Nobody appeared. Across all departments the stories were the same: Trump appointees were few and far between; those who did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace.Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative of the Trump administration’s botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives, from ensuring the safety of our food and medications and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black- market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences of what happens when the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.

Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom


Ron Paul - 2011
    The term "Liberty" is so commonly used in our country that it has become a mere cliche. But do we know what it means? What it promises? How it factors into our daily lives? And most importantly, can we recognize tyranny when it is sold to us disguised as a form of liberty? Dr. Paul writes that to believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions. It is the seed of America. This is a comprehensive guide to Dr. Paul's position on fifty of the most important issues of our times, from Abortion to Zionism. Accessible, easy to digest, and fearless in its discussion of controversial topics, Liberty Defined sheds new light on a word that is losing its shape.

Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost


Michael C. Bender - 2021
    Bender, senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, presents a deeply reported account of the 2020 presidential campaign that details how Donald J. Trump became the first incumbent in three decades to lose reelection--and the only one whose defeat culminated in a violent insurrection.Beginning with President Trump's first impeachment and ending with his second, Frankly, We Did Win This Election chronicles the inside-the-room deliberations between Trump and his campaign team as they opened 2020 with a sleek political operation built to harness a surge of momentum from a bullish economy, a unified Republican Party, and a string of domestic and foreign policy successes--only to watch everything unravel when fortunes suddenly turned.With first-rate sourcing cultivated from five years of covering Trump in the White House and both of his campaigns, Bender brings readers inside the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and into the front row of the movement's signature mega-rallies for the story of an epic election-year convergence of COVID, economic collapse, and civil rights upheaval--and an unorthodox president's attempt to battle it all.Fresh interviews with Trump, key campaign advisers, and senior administration officials are paired with an exclusive collection of internal campaign memos, emails, and text messages for scores of never-before-reported details about the campaign. Frankly, We Did Win This Election is the inside story of how Trump lost, and the definitive account of his final year in office that draws a straight line from the president's repeated insistence that he would never lose to the deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol that imperiled one of his most loyal lieutenants--his own vice president.

Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House


Alyssa Mastromonaco - 2017
    Alyssa Mastromonaco worked for Barack Obama for almost a decade, and long before his run for president. From the then-senator's early days in Congress to his years in the Oval Office, she made Hope and Change happen through blood, sweat, tears, and lots of briefing binders.But for every historic occasion-meeting the queen at Buckingham Palace, bursting in on secret climate talks, or nailing a campaign speech in a hailstorm-there were dozens of less-than-perfect moments when it was up to Alyssa to save the day. Like the time she learned the hard way that there aren't nearly enough bathrooms at the Vatican.Full of hilarious, never-before-told stories, WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? is an intimate portrait of a president, a book about how to get stuff done, and the story of how one woman challenged, again and again, what a "White House official" is supposed to look like. Here Alyssa shares the strategies that made her successful in politics and beyond, including the importance of confidence, the value of not being a jerk, and why ultimately everything comes down to hard work (and always carrying a spare tampon).Told in a smart, original voice and topped off with a couple of really good cat stories, WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? is a promising debut from a savvy political star.

Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America


Kimberley Strassel - 2019
    Resistance (At All Costs) makes the opposite case -- that it is Trump's critics, in their zeal to oppose the president, who are undermining our foundations.From the FBI's unprecedented counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, to bureaucratic sabotage, to media partisanship, to the drive-by character assassination of Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the president's foes have thrown aside norms, due process and the rule of law.Resistance (At All Costs) shows that the reaction to Trump will prove far more consequential and damaging to our nation long-term than Trump's time in office.

The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution


Roger Stone - 2017
    Trump to concede, shocking a nation that had, only hours before, given little credence to his chances. Donald Trump pulled the greatest upset in American political history despite a torrent of invective and dismissal of the mainstream media. Here is the first definitive explanation about how the “silent majority” shifted the election to Donald Trump in reliable Democratic Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, thus handing him the presidency.Stone, a long time Trump retainer and confidant, gives us the inside story of how Donald Trump almost single-handedly harnessed discontent among “Forgotten Americans” despite running a guerrilla-style grass roots campaign to compete with the smooth running and free-spending Clinton political machine.From the start, Trump’s campaign was unlike any seen on the national stage—combative, maverick, and fearless. Trump’s nomination was the hostile takeover of the Republican party and a resounding repudiation of the failed leadership of both parties whose policies have brought America to the brink of financial collapse as well as endangering our national security.Here Stone outlines how Donald Trump skillfully ran as the anti-Open Borders candidate as well as a supporter of American sovereignty, and how he used the Globalist trade deals like NAFTA to win over three of ten Bernie Sanders supporters. The veteran adviser to Nixon, Reagan, and Trump charts the rise of the alt-conservative media and the end of the mainstream media monopoly on voter impacting information dissemination. This is an insider’s view that includes studying opposition research into Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton’s crimes, and the struggle by the Republican establishment to stop Trump and how they underestimated him. Stone chronicles Trump’s triumph in three debates where he skillfully lowered expectation levels but skewered Mrs. Clinton for the corruption of the Clinton Foundation, her mishandling of government email, and her incompetence as Secretary of State.Stone gives us the inside word on Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, Carlos Danger, Doug Band, Jeffery Epstein, and the efforts to hide the former first lady’s infirmities and health problems. Stone dissects the phony narrative that Trump was in cahoots with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin or that the e-mails released by Wikileaks came from the Russians.The grizzled political veteran of ten Republican presidential campaigns from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump explains how Trump’s election has averted near certain war with Russia over Syria and the rejection of the neocon policies of the Obama/Clinton Administration.The Making of the President 2016 reveals how Trump brilliantly picked at Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses, particularly her reputation as a crooked insider, and ignited the passions of out-of-work white men and women from the rust belt and beyond, at a time when millions of Americans desperately wanted change. Stone also reveals how and why the mainstream media got it wrong, including how the polls were loaded and completely misunderstood who would vote.Stone's analysis is akin to Theodore H. White’s seminal book The Making of the President 1960. It is both a sweeping analysis of the trends that elected Trump as well as the war stories of a hard-bitten political survivor who Donald Trump called “one tough cookie."Other books by Roger Stone: The Man Who Killed Kennedy , a New York Times bestseller in which Roger Stone makes a compelling case that Lyndon Baines Johnson was the mastermind behind the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Stone maps out LBJ’s motives for orchestrating the murder and uses fingerprint evidence and testimony to prove JFK was shot by a long-time LBJ hit man—not Lee Harvey Oswald. Nixon’s Secrets gives the inside scoop on Nixon’s rise and fall in Watergate. Stone charts Nixon’s rise from election to Congress in 1946 to the White House in 1968 after his razor-thin loss to John Kennedy in 1960, his disastrous campaign for Governor of California in 1962 and the greatest comeback in American Presidential history. Jeb and the Bush Crime Family , in which Stone collaborates with Saint John Hunt to make this a “no-holds-barred” history of the Bush family. After detailing the vast litany of Jeb’s misdeeds, Stone travels back to Samuel, Prescott, George H. W., and George W. Bush to weave an epic story of privilege, greed, corruption, drug profiteering, assassination, and lies. This exposition will have you asking, “Why aren't these people in prison?” The Clintons’ War on Women , where Roger Stone and historian Robert Morrow uncover the explosive and ugly truths about Bill and Hillary’s crimes and cover-ups. They reveal the details about their actions in Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s scandalous time in the White House, who really ordered the deadly attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Hillary’s federally-investigated tenure as secretary of state, their time at the corrupt Clinton Foundation, and Hillary’s failed campaign for president.

History Decoded: The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time


Brad Meltzer - 2013
    Is Fort Knox empty? Why was Hitler so intent on capturing the Roman 'Spear of Destiny'? What's the government hiding in Area 51? Where did the Confederacy's $19 million in gold and silver go at the end of the Civil War? And did Lee Harvey Oswald really act alone? Meltzer sifts through the evidence; weighs competing theories; separates what we know to be true with what's still--and perhaps forever--unproved or unprovable; and in the end, decodes the mystery, arriving at the most likely solution. Along the way we meet Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Nazi propagandists, and the real DB Cooper.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right


Jane Mayer - 2016
    But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws.The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights.When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network.The political operatives the network employs are disciplined, smart, and at times ruthless. Mayer documents instances in which people affiliated with these groups hired private detectives to impugn whistle-blowers, journalists, and even government investigators. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied.Jane Mayer spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews-including with several sources within the network-and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings in reporting this book. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy.Dark Money is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

Spying on the South: Travels with Frederick Law Olmsted in a Fractured Land


Tony Horwitz - 2019
    Identified in the paper as "Yeoman," to protect his identity, the writer roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, jolting the nation with his dispatches about slavery and the extremism of its defenders.This extraordinary journey would also re-shape the nation's landscape, driving "Yeoman"--real name Frederick Law Olmsted--to embark on his career as America's first and foremost architect of urban parks and other public spaces.Over a century and half later, there are echoes of the pre-Civil War in the angry ferment and fracturing of our own time. Is America still one country? Tony Horwitz, like Olmsted a Yankee and roving scribe, sets forth to find out by retracing Yeoman's journey through the South. Following his route and whenever possible his mode of transport--rail, riverboats, in the saddle--Horwitz travels Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande. Venturing, as Olmsted did, far off the beaten paths, Horwitz discovers colorful traces of an old weird America, shocking vestiges of the Cotton Kingdom, and strange new mutations that have sprung from its roots.The result is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic. Spying on the South is an intrepid, wise, and frequently hilarious expedition through an outsized landscape and its equally outsized state of mind. It is also a probing and poignant study of the young Olmsted, whose own life, and thinking about landscape and society, would be forever altered by his Southern odyssey.

The Case for Trump


Victor Davis Hanson - 2019
    And Trump alone had the instincts and energy to pursue this opening to victory, dismantle a corrupt old order, and bring long-overdue policy changes at home and abroad. We could not survive a series of presidencies as volatile as Trump's. But after decades of drift, America needs the outsider Trump to do what normal politicians would not and could not do.

The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth


Josh Levin - 2019
    The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. And that was just the beginning: Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. A desperately ill teacher, a combat-traumatized Marine, an elderly woman hungry for companionship; after Taylor came into their lives, all three ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But nobody--not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not presidential candidate Ronald Reagan--seemed to care about anything but her welfare thievery.Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Taylor was made an outcast because of her color. As she rose to infamy, the press and politicians manipulated her image to demonize poor black women. Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Josh Levin's mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism and an expose of the "welfare queen" myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day. The Queen tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name.

Settle for More


Megyn Kelly - 2016
    She goes behind-the-scenes of her career, sharing the stories and struggles that landed her in the anchor chair and taught her to ask the tough questions. Speaking candidly about her decision to "settle for more"—a motto she credits as having dramatically transformed her life at home and at work—Megyn discusses how she abandoned a thriving legal career to follow her journalism dreams.Admired for her hard work, humor, and authenticity, Megyn sheds light on the news business, her time at Fox News, the challenges of being a professional woman and working mother, and her most talked about television moments. She also speaks openly about Donald Trump’s feud with her, revealing never-before-heard details about the first Republican debate, its difficult aftermath, and how she persevered through it all.Deeply personal and surprising, Settle for More offers unparalleled insight into this charismatic and intriguing journalist, and inspires us all to embrace the principles—determination, honesty, and fortitude in the face of fear—that have won her fans across the political divide.

The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency


Chris Whipple - 2017
    The chiefs of staff, often referred to as "the gatekeepers," wield tremendous power in Washington and beyond; they decide who is allowed to see the president, negotiate with Congress to push POTUS's agenda, and--most crucially--enjoy unparalleled access to the leader of the free world. Each chief can make or break an administration, and each president reveals himself by the chief he picks.Through extensive, intimate interviews with all seventeen living chiefs and two former presidents, award-winning journalist and producer Chris Whipple pulls back the curtain on this unique fraternity. In doing so, he revises our understanding of presidential history, showing us how James Baker's expert managing of the White House, the press, and Capitol Hill paved the way for the Reagan Revolution--and, conversely, how Watergate, the Iraq War, and even the bungled Obamacare rollout might have been prevented by a more effective chief.Filled with shrewd analysis and never-before-reported details, The Gatekeepers offers an essential portrait of the toughest job in Washington.

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back


Elisabeth Rosenthal - 2017
    In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast?Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries--the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers--that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw.The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.