Middle America

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Ron Suskind takes you deep inside America's real battles with violent, unrelenting terrorists, a game of kill-or-be-killed, from the Oval Office to the streets of Karachi.

Former CIA operative Robert Baer examines the dangers behind America's collaboration with Saudi Arabia. Nominally based on a "harmony of interests" - the Saudis sold their oil to the American government very inexpensively - what we offered in exchange has damaged our position in the Middle East and left our country vulnerable to economic and terrorist threats. Baer goes behind the scenes to show how the US willingly overlooked the corruption of the Saudi royal family, its financing of violent Islamic fundamentalist groups, and its bribery of American officials.

When thinking about America's role in the world, Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, and Barack Obama may not seem to have a lot in common. But they do. While divided by background, generation, and political party, they exemplify a distinct and underappreciated tradition of American leadership: The Middle Way. As the scholar and former senior foreign policy official Derek Chollet shows in this deeply researched book, these three presidents took a centrist - and effective - approach to foreign policy.

Crowded in the Middle of Nowhere: Tales of Humor and Healing from Rural America is a collection of humorous and poignant stories from a veterinarian in a small, dusty farming and ranching community in rural West Texas. Dr. Brock gives you an intimate look into his small-town and big-hearted perspective on life, animals, and their owners. His unique perspective and tales of doctoring beloved pets, cantankerous livestock, and occasionally their owners will make you smile, laugh, cry, and evoke every other emotion under the sun.

Over the past decade, Mary Pipher has been a great source of wisdom, helping us to better understand our family members. Now she connects us with the newest members of the American family - refugees. In cities all over the country, refugees arrive daily. Lost Boys from Sudan, survivors from Kosovo, families fleeing Afghanistan and Vietnam: they come with nothing but the desire to experience the American dream. Their endurance in the face of tragedy and their ability to hold on to the virtues of family, love, and joy are a lesson for America. Their stories will make you laugh and weep.

Self-proclaimed liberals, Ellen and her “old man”, struggle to fit in with their fellow (mostly right-wing) "Trailer Dogs", as they recover from devastating personal and financial losses. Often profane, often caustic, and frequently satirical, Revenge of the Trailer Dogs takes up where Garrison’s first audiobook left off, at “The Resort”, a trailer park populated by wackos, racists, Evangelicals, hippies, NRA enthusiasts, transsexuals, homosexuals, and lesbians, each with their own views and prejudices.

This audiobook explains the fault lines that have often plagued US efforts to protect its national interests in the region and how these ongoing faults have led to a precipitous decline in American influence. It also includes some recommendations as to how this decline can be reversed.

Trailer Dogs is the profoundly profane, hysterically funny, yet often poignant, story of survival in today's near-extinct middle class. After losing their small business and life savings to the government's unfathomable shutdown, the author and her husband are forced to sell their home and move into a travel trailer.

Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family--real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma--the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.

A Son of the Middle Border is an epic story of the quest for new frontiers during the last half of the nineteenth century, and of the gradual, heartbreaking failure of America's pioneer ideal.

For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable - and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic.

For soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, the road to Baghdad began with a midnight flight out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in late February 2003. For Rick Atkinson, who would spend nearly two months covering the division for The Washington Post, the war in Iraq provided a unique opportunity to observe today's U.S. Army in combat.

The mainstream media and ultra-liberal Democrats can't understand why white voters, especially white men, are so angry. Wayne Allyn Root is an angry white male, and he knows why. This is his story, his testimony, and a look at what's happening to an entire group of good people: law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working, middle-class people. They're being targeted, silenced, intimidated, persecuted - virtually wiped off the planet.

Like no book before it, Preachers of Hate uncovered an ancient hatred that threatens the life and livelihood of every American. The “new” anti-Semitism targets not only Jews, but Americans specifically and the West in general. It targets our values, our lifestyle, and our freedoms. It is the single most important issue we face when trying to make sense of the Arab world.

In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience-store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing", Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being - and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead.

On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly of United Nations passed Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a form of racism. Afterward, a tall man with long, graying hair, horned-rim glasses, and a bowtie stood to speak. He pronounced his words with the rounded tones of a Harvard academic, but his voice shook with outrage: "The United States rises to declare, before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act."

America's middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation - that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did. It's the dark flipside of the American Dream - an American Nightmare of our own making.

The best-selling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America's ailing middle class what she did for the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the world of the white-collar unemployed.

In January 2005 Kirk Johnson, then twenty-four, arrived in Baghdad as USAID's only American employee who spoke Arabic. Despite his opposition to the war, Johnson felt called to civic duty and wanted to help rebuild Iraq. Appointed as USAID's first reconstruction coordinator in Fallujah, he traversed the city's IED-strewn streets, working alongside idealistic Iraqi translators - young men and women sick of Saddam, filled with Hollywood slang, and enchanted by the idea of a peaceful, democratic Iraq. It was not to be.

Lucky in Cyprus is a coming-of-age story set in the Middle East during the height of the Cold War. An American teenager - son of a CIA operative - is inspired by grand events and a Greek Cypriot teacher to learn about survival and his art. He witnesses earthquakes and riots and terrorist attacks, but in the end it is his teacher's gentle lessons that keep him whole.