State Politics

In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, Ukrainian revolutionaries raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride,” was a favorite slogan of Hunter S. Thompson, and it pretty much defined both his work and his life. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the roller-coaster of a career at the magazine that was his literary home.

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States is an exciting piece of "speculative fiction." The novel posits that there was a nuclear attack against the US on March 21, 2020 by North Korea, and that a national bipartisan commission was created to investigate what and how it happened. It's pretty scary stuff.

Seize années durant, Angela Merkel a assumé la responsabilité d’un pays, l’Allemagne ; son action et son attitude ont marqué de leur empreinte la politique allemande, européenne et internationale. Dans ses Mémoires, elle revient pour la première fois sur sa vie en RDA jusqu’en 1990 puis dans l’Allemagne réunifiée.

In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation.

Sitting Bull’s name is still the best known of any American Indian leader, but his life and legacy remain shrouded with misinformation and half-truths. Sitting Bull’s life spanned the entire clash of cultures and ultimate destruction of the Plains Indian way of life. The reality of his life, as Bill Yenne reveals in his absorbing new portrait, Sitting Bull, is far more intricate and compelling. In Sitting Bull we find a man who, in the face of an uncertain future, helped ensure the survival of his people.

In this compelling biography, historian A. J. P. Taylor reevaluates Bismarck's motives and methods, focusing on the chancellor's rise to power in the 1860s and his removal from office in 1890.

Theodore Rex is the story—never fully told before—of Theodore Roosevelt’s two world-changing terms as President of the United States. A hundred years before the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, “TR” succeeded to power in the aftermath of an act of terrorism.

Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor’s daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her twenties working as a research chemist, entering politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within fifteen years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West. In this “masterpiece of discernment and insight” (The New York Times Book Review), acclaimed biographer Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of Merkel’s unlikely ascent.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-Blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms, and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides listeners with the first comprehensive account of nearly 400 years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization, and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions.

By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America and learn about the founding of America.

When Truman asked Stalin in 1945 whether Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, "No." As late as 1952, Eisenhower declared: "We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death." What really happened? Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams have compiled extensive evidence - some recently declassified - that Hitler actually fled Berlin and took refuge in a remote Nazi enclave in Argentina.

If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand. Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit.

Vigilante Nation tells this story of the American Right marginalizing, subordinating, and disenfranchising the increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan members of the American polity. This book exposes the vigilantes’ plans, explains their methods—everything from book bans to anti-abortion bounties to attacks on government proceedings, including elections—and underscores the stakes.

Zavalita y el zambo Ambrosio conversan en La Catedral. Estamos en Perú, durante el «ochenio» dictatorial del general Manuel A. Odría. Unas cuantas cervezas y un río de palabras en libertad para responder a la palabra amordazada por la dictadura.

For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America’s religious nationalists aren’t just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers".

Here is an impassioned plea for reason in a world divided by faith. This important and timely work delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes heinous crimes.

From the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace comes “an eye-opening, fully humanizing, deeply affecting look at the often-misunderstood juvenile justice system and its inhabitants—young people of earnestness, disappointment, hope, and resilience” (Booklist, starred review).