Download or read book Evil Geniuses written by Kurt Andersen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change—and charts a way back to the future. “Essential, absorbing . . . a graceful, authoritative guide . . . a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change.”—The New York Times Book Review During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope. Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself. Only a writer with Andersen’s crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen’s vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.
Download or read book The Unmaking of the American Working Class written by Reg Theriault and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrays the American blue-collar culture as decreasing, citing administrations in the second half of the twentieth century that have eliminated large portions of the working class and how this has compromised the nation.
Download or read book Unjust written by Noah Rothman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An elegant and thoughtful dismantling of perhaps the most dangerous ideology at work today." — BEN SHAPIRO, bestselling author and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" "Reading Noah Rothman is like a workout for your brain." — DANA PERINO, bestselling author and former press secretary to President George W. Bush There are just two problems with “social justice”: it’s not social and it’s not just. Rather, it is a toxic ideology that encourages division, anger, and vengeance. In this penetrating work, Commentary editor and MSNBC contributor Noah Rothman uncovers the real motives behind the social justice movement and explains why, despite its occasionally ludicrous public face, it is a threat to be taken seriously. American political parties were once defined by their ideals. That idealism, however, is now imperiled by an obsession with the demographic categories of race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, which supposedly constitute a person’s “identity.” As interest groups defined by identity alone command the comprehensive allegiance of their members, ordinary politics gives way to “Identitarian” warfare, each group looking for payback and convinced that if it is to rise, another group must fall. In a society governed by “social justice,” the most coveted status is victimhood, which people will go to absurd lengths to attain. But the real victims in such a regime are blind justice—the standard of impartiality that we once took for granted—and free speech. These hallmarks of American liberty, already gravely compromised in universities, corporations, and the media, are under attack in our legal and political systems.
Download or read book Obama s America written by Dinesh D'Souza and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that President Obama intends to weaken America so that other nations may rise in the name of global fairness, claiming that a second Obama term would bring about defense cuts and increased dependence on foreign energy.
Download or read book The Unmaking of Americans written by John J. Miller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immigrants have always adopted America's ideological principles and striven to become "American". But now there is a war against the whole notion of assimilation; newcomers are encouraged to maintain their own separate cultural identity. In the tradition of Arthur Schlesinger's "The Disuniting of America", this commonsense manifesto promotes renewing the assimilation ethic in America.
Download or read book The End of Energy written by Michael J. Graetz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty years of energy incompetence: villains, failures of leadership, and missed opportunities. Americans take for granted that when we flip a switch the light will go on, when we turn up the thermostat the room will get warm, and when we pull up to the pump gas will be plentiful and relatively cheap. In The End of Energy, Michael Graetz shows us that we have been living an energy delusion for forty years. Until the 1970s, we produced domestically all the oil we needed to run our power plants, heat our homes, and fuel our cars. Since then, we have had to import most of the oil we use, much of it from the Middle East. And we rely on an even dirtier fuel—coal—to produce half of our electricity. Graetz describes more than forty years of energy policy incompetence and argues that we must make better decisions for our energy future. Despite thousands of pages of energy legislation since the 1970s (passed by a Congress that tended to elevate narrow parochial interests over our national goals), Americans have never been asked to pay a price that reflects the real cost of the energy they consume. Until Americans face the facts about price, our energy incompetence will continue—and along with it the unraveling of our environment, security, and independence.
Download or read book Before the Storm written by Rick Perlstein and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.
Download or read book Black White and Indian written by Claudio Saunt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-21 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices--to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship--were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country's racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons. Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William--both Creek Indians--had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America's racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them. Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other's existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America's past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of "blood" in the construction of identity. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.
Download or read book How to Tell when You re Tired written by Reg Theriault and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1997 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront for over thirty years, Reg Theriault distills that experience into a wry, knowing, tough-minded book that finally gives voice to the thoughts and conditions of laboring men and women. It is an engaging and moving defense of the working class's right to its portion of credit and dignity for building, job by dirty, demanding job, the civilization we inhabit. Here is a book George Orwell would understand--and applaud.
Download or read book Fantasyland written by Kurt Andersen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw “[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday “Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice “A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian “This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
Download or read book Dilemmas of Domination written by Walden Bello and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-01-10 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From "the world's leading no-nonsense revolutionary," a bold and effective analysis of American military, economic, and political vulnerability (Naomi Klein) The empire seems unassailable, but the empire is weak--and precisely because of its quest for global domination. So argues Walden Bello in this provocative portrait of imperial self-destruction, which systematically dissects the dilemmas confronting America as a result of its drive for supremacy. Puncturing the myth of American invincibility, Bello exposes its carefully concealed contradictions: despite the enormity of the U.S. military apparatus, American forces are critically overextended and ever threatened by the simmering resistance each new "victory" breeds. Though America is still the land of unprecedented prosperity, economic breakdown looms, the consequence of gargantuan military costs, exploitative trade and investment relations with developing countries, and record-breaking deficits. A clear and prophetic examination, Dilemmas of Domination reveals a not-too-distant future in which the empire's hidden weaknesses will yield fatal challenges to American omnipotence. "With unsentimental clarity, Walden Bello speaks the truth about American empire and why it is doomed by its own contradictions." --William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism
Download or read book Unmaking the Presidency written by Susan Hennessey and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a book for everyone who has developed an unexpected nostalgia for political 'norms' during the Trump years . . . Other books on the Trump White House expertly detail the mayhem inside; this book builds on those works to detail its consequences." —Carlos Lozada (one of twelve books to read "to understand what's going on") "Perhaps the most penetrating book to have been written about Trump in office." —Lawrence Douglas, The Times Literary Supplement The definitive account of how Donald Trump has wielded the powers of the American presidency The extraordinary authority of the U.S. presidency has no parallel in the democratic world. Today that authority resides in the hands of one man, Donald J. Trump. But rarely if ever has the nature of a president clashed more profoundly with the nature of the office. Unmaking the Presidency tells the story of the confrontation between a person and the institution he almost wholly embodies. From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations, where did they come from, and how great is the damage? As editors of the “invaluable” (The New York Times) Lawfare website, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes have attracted a large audience to their hard-hitting and highly informed commentary on the controversies surrounding the Trump administration. In this book, they situate Trump-era scandals and outrages in the deeper context of the presidency itself. How should we understand the oath of office when it is taken by a man who may not know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself? What aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents? When has he simply built on his predecessors’ misdeeds, and when has he invented categories of misrule entirely his own? By setting Trump in the light of history, Hennessey and Wittes provide a crucial and durable account of a presidency like no other.
Download or read book Ameritopia written by Mark R. Levin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller, Mark R. Levin explores the psychology, motivations, and history of the utopian movement, its architects—the Founding Fathers, and its modern-day disciples—and how the individual and American society are being devoured by it. Levin asks, what is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? Levin digs deep into the past and draws astoundingly relevant parallels to contemporary America from Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, as well as from the critical works of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other philosophical pioneers who brilliantly diagnosed the nature of man and government. As Levin meticulously pursues his subject, the reader joins him in an enlightening and compelling journey. And in the end, Levin’s message is clear: the American republic is in great peril. The people must now choose between utopianism or liberty. President Ronald Reagan warned, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Levin agrees, and with Ameritopia, delivers another modern political classic, an indispensable guide for America in our time and in the future.
Download or read book Assimilation American Style written by Peter D. Salins and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter D. Salins, a child of immigrants and a scholar of urban affairs, makes the case that at a time when the immigrant population of the United States is growing larger and more diverse, the nation must rededicate itself to its historic mission of assimilating immigrants of all ethnic backgrounds. He recounts how successive immigrant populations have become Americanized, despite being considered “alien” in their time and how assimilation continues to work among Hispanics and Asians today. America’s vitality as a nation, Salins argues, depends on its being as successful in assimilating its newest immigrants as it was in integrating earlier immigrant groups. “Peter D. Salins... anticipates a multicultural America, but the prospect causes him great distress. In his view, the old assimilationist formula served both immigrants and the nation extremely well.... Salins maintains... that the multiculturalist effort to renegotiate America’s traditional assimilationist contract — English as the national language, liberal democratic principles and the Protestant work ethic — is at the root of much contemporary anxiety over immigration.” — Peter Skerry, The New York Times “Peter Salins’s book... is a labor of love as much as of scholarship... Salins’s whole effort here is to defend the American model of high immigration levels accompanied by unforced but almost irresistible assimilation... [His] diagnosis is powerful and persuasive, and surely the first step is the one he takes: to understand how and why the American model worked so well, and how it is now being threatened.” — Elliot Abrams, The Public Interest “A thorough and convincing examination of assimilation in America: how it worked in the past, why it is necessary for the survival of the nation, and what to do about the recent and ominous assault on it... The author is superb in defining what constitutes assimilation... He also deftly explodes several myths about immigration. Past waves of immigrants, for instance, never surrendered their heritage and continued to speak their native tongue in their neighborhoods. Assimilation, he argues, is a gradual process and doesn’t necessitate abandoning one’s ethnic identity at the door... his book is pragmatic and solid, and should convince many of the value and continuing importance of assimilation.” — Kirkus “[A]n enlightening... book.” — Wall Street Journal “Salins... seeks a middle way between radical multiculturalism and resurgent nativism. That middle way is the ‘immigration contract’ that has long existed between American society and its newcomers. Its terms are a commitment to English as the national language, an acceptance of American values and ideals, and a dedication to the Protestant work ethic. Immigrants who accept these terms are welcomed and allowed to maintain certain elements of their culture, such as food, dress, and holidays. This arrangement, Salins argues, promotes a vibrant ethnicity while protecting against balkanizing ethnocentrism.” — Stephen J. Rockwell, Wilson Quarterly
Download or read book After Whiteness written by Mike Hill and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What comes after white becomes a minority in the United States.
Download or read book Harlem written by Camilo José Vergara and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture—but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, violence, disinvestment, and decay. Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been chronicling the neighborhood for forty-three years, and Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto is an unprecedented record of urban change. Vergara began his documentation of Harlem in the tradition of such masters as Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, and he later turned his focus on the neighborhood’s urban fabric, both the buildings that compose it and the life and culture embedded in them. By repeatedly returning to the same locations over the course of decades, Vergara is able to show us a community that is constantly changing—some areas declining, as longtime businesses give way to empty storefronts, graffiti, and garbage, while other areas gentrify, with corporate chain stores coming in to compete with the mom-and-pops. He also captures the ever-present street life of this densely populated neighborhood, from stoop gatherings to graffiti murals memorializing dead rappers to impersonators honoring Michael Jackson in front of the Apollo, as well as the growth of tourism and racial integration. Woven throughout the images is Vergara’s own account of his project and his experience of living and working in Harlem. Taken together, his unforgettable words and images tell the story of how Harlem and its residents navigated the segregation, dereliction and slow recovery of the closing years of the twentieth century and the boom and racial integration of the twenty-first century. A deeply personal investigation, Harlem will take its place with the best portrayals of urban life.
Download or read book Impossible Subjects written by Mae M. Ngai and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-27 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
