Political Study

Though they may seem to be dividing the country irreparably, today's heated cultural and political battles between right and left, progressives and the Tea Party, religious and secular are far from unprecedented. In this engaging and important work, Stephen Prothero reframes the current debate, viewing it as the latest in a number of flashpoints that have shaped our national identity.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".

The Fox Effect follows the career of Ailes from his early work as a television producer and media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Consequently, when he was hired in 1996 as the president of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship conservative cable news network, Ailes had little journalism experience, but brought to the job the mindset of a political operative. As Brock and Rabin-Havt demonstrate through numerous examples, Ailes used his extraordinary power and influence to spread a partisan political agenda....

Tales of the Out & the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America's most provocative literary anti-hero. The first section of the audiobook, War Stories, offers six stories enmeshed in the vola-tile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, Tales of the Out & the Gone, reveals Amiri Baraka's increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration.

The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel.

With research and insight, Charles Eisenstein details how the quantification of the natural world leads to a lack of integration and our “fight” mentality. With an entire chapter unpacking the climate change denier’s point of view, he advocates for expanding our exclusive focus on carbon emissions to see the broader picture beyond our short-sighted and incomplete approach. This refocusing away from impending catastrophe and our inevitable doom cultivates meaningful emotional and psychological connections and provides real, actionable steps to caring for the Earth.

Alyssa Mastromonaco is back with a bold, no-nonsense, and no-holds-barred 21st-century girl's guide to life, tackling the highs and lows of bodies, politics, relationships, moms, education, life on the internet, and pop culture. Whether discussing Barbra Streisand or The Bachelor, working in the West Wing or working on finding a wing woman, Alyssa leaves no stone unturned...and no awkward situation unexamined.

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the 18th century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. In this path-breaking audiobook, Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon - and Islam as a political religion.

This volume in the Revolutions Series presents Jesus Christ as a figure akin to revolutionaries like Robespierre, Marx, and Che Guevara. In this new presentation of the Gospels, Terry Eagleton makes a powerful and provocative argument for Jesus Christ as a social, political and moral radical, a friend of anti-imperialists, outcasts and marginals, a champion of the poor, the sick and immigrants, and as an opponent of the rich, religious hierarchs, and hypocrites everywhere

In 1983 Chicago elected Harold Washington as the city's first black mayor. This is the story of Washington's improbable victory over Jane Byrne, heir to the late Richard J. Daley's political empire, and over Daley's eldest son. It's the story of a coalition outside the party's mainstream coming to power and ruling in the country's most political of cities. In Fire on the Prairie, Gary Rivlin reveals the personalities and philosophies of those who were at the center of events, from black separatists such as Lu Palmer to community organizers such as Jesse Jackson....

In this remarkable book, Sandra Day O’Connor explores the law, her life as a Supreme Court Justice, and how the Court has evolved and continues to function, grow, and change as an American institution. Tracing some of the origins of American law through history, people, ideas, and landmark cases, O’Connor sheds new light on the basics, exploring through personal observation the evolution of the Court and American democratic traditions.

An acclaimed chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, Peniel Joseph presents this sweeping overview of a key component of the struggle for racial equality: the Black Power movement. This is the story of the men and women who sacrificed so much to begin a more vocal and radical push for social change in the 1960s and 1970s.

Based on groundbreaking original reporting, an extensive new look at Donald Trump's relationships with women, revealing new accusations of sexual misconduct, exploring the roots of his alleged predatory behavior, and illustrating how Trump's presidency has helped catalyze the #MeToo movement and revitalize women's activism.

This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889 a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold on to land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teenage son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River.

In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for 25 years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars - the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive.

A breakout media and political analyst delivers a sweeping snapshot of American democracy and the role that African Americans have played in its shaping while offering concrete information to help harness the electoral power of the country’s rising majority and exposing political forces aligned to subvert and suppress black voters.

Constitutional fundamentalists read the Constitution selectively and self-servingly. Fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution elevate certain constitutional rights above all others, benefit the most powerful members of society, and undermine the integrity of the document as a whole. The conservative fetish for the Second Amendment (enforced by groups such as the NRA) provides an obvious example of constitutional fundamentalism; the liberal fetish for the First Amendment (enforced by groups such as the ACLU) is less obvious but no less influential.

There is a tug of war going on for the future of America. At one end of the rope are those who think America is a secular nation; at the other end are those who believe religion is at the root of our country's foundation. In this audio release of the thought-provoking America's Real War, renowned leader and speaker Rabbi Daniel Lapin encourages America to reembrace the Judeo-Christian values on which our nation was founded and logically demonstrates why those values are crucial to America's strength in the new millennium.

This rather incoherent work by Russian anarchist philosopher Michael Bakunin is described in a way that he described his own life: a fragment. Rife with criticisms on Christianity and the technocracy, Bakunin presses communist values without fear of bordering extremism. Listening to this work is like walking through Bakunin’s disjointed mind; often cutting off and starting mid-sentence, including footnotes several paragraphs long as if his thoughts suddenly start to wander, as well as ending rather abruptly mid-sentence.