Recommended reading
Following are some books that I recommend. For more information, you can click on any that interest you.
American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family
In this powerful book that combines the best aspects of memoir and political history, the son of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of JFK takes us on an intimate journey through his life, including watershed moments in the history of our nation. Stories of his grandparents Joseph and Rose set the stage for their nine remarkable children, among them three U.S. senators—Teddy, Bobby, and Jack—one of whom went on to become attorney general, and the other, the president of the United States. We meet Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover, two...
read moreReporter
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author and preeminent investigative journalist of our time—a heartfelt, hugely revealing memoir of a decades-long career breaking some of the most impactful stories of the last half-century, from Washington to Vietnam to the Middle East. Seymour Hersh’s fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every major newspaper in the free world, honors galore, and no small amount of controversy. Now in this memoir he describes what drove him and how he worked as an...
read moreA Nation Unmade by War
As veteran author Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better-funded military than any other power on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing. Its unending wars, in fact, have only contributed to a world growing more chaotic by the second. From its founding, the United States has been a nation made by wars. Through incisive analysis and characteristic wit, Engelhardt ponders whether in this...
read moreAmerican Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear
Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. Beydoun charts its long and terrible history, from the plight of enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum South and the laws prohibiting Muslim immigrants from becoming citizens to the ways the war on terror assigns blame for any terrorist act to Islam and the myriad trials Muslim Americans face in the Trump...
read moreSchoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story
Authors Jason LInkins and Phil Lewis describe what Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is doing to destroy secular public schools in America. Born into extreme wealth, married into an Amway fortune, the sister of mercenary magnate Erik Prince, DeVos is a combination of religious extremist, crony capitalist, and reactionary conservative who has made it her mission to privatize American public education and indoctrinate children with her religious beliefs. This is a publication of Strong Arm Press, a small imprint devoted to publishing short and...
read moreAntifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
In a smart and gripping investigation, historian and former Occupy Wall Street organizer Mark Bray provides a detailed survey of the full history of anti-fascism from its origins to the present day — the first transnational history of postwar anti-fascism in English. Based on interviews with anti-fascists from around the world, Antifa details the tactics of the movement and the philosophy behind it, offering insight into the growing but little-understood resistance fighting back against fascism in all its guises. As long as there has been...
read moreThe Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
In The Captured Economy , Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles identify a common factor behind breakdowns in democratic governance that allow wealthy special interests to capture the policymaking process for their own benefit. They document the proliferation of regressive regulations that redistribute wealth and income up the economic scale while stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. When the state entrenches privilege by subverting market competition, the tradeoff between equity and efficiency no longer holds. Over the past four decades,...
read moreThe Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives
From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, “a fast moving, fly-on-the-wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission…It is a book of superheroes” (San Franscisco Review of Books). Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed “Too Big to Fail” to almost every large corporation in America—to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and...
read moreStamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Stamped from the Beginning is the winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The book is unflinching in showing how racist ideas have been accepted and repeated throughout US history by everyone, from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, even from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois (whose intellectual journey from a “double-consciousness of racist and antiracist ideas” to “a single consciousness of antiracism” is one of the book’s most powerful...
read moreSleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation
In Sleepwalking to Armageddon, pioneering antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott assembles the world’s leading nuclear scientists and thought leaders to assess the political and scientific dimensions of the threat of nuclear war today. Chapters address the size and distribution of the current global nuclear arsenal, the history and politics of nuclear weapons, the culture of modern-day weapons labs, the militarization of space, and the dangers of combining artificial intelligence with nuclear weaponry, as well as a status report on enriched...
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