Showing titles in United States

The United States of 1797 faced enormous challenges. The father of the new nation, George Washington, left his vice president, John Adams, with relatively little guidance and impossible expectations to meet. Adams was confronted with intense partisan divides, debates over citizenship, fears of political violence, potential for foreign conflict with France and Britain, and a nation unsure that the presidency could even work without Washington at the helm. Making the Presidency is an exploration of the second US presidency, a period critical to the survival of the American republic.

A revealing, behind-the-scenes examination of how Congress twice fumbled its best chance to hold accountable a president many considered one of the most dangerous in American history. The definitive—and only—insider account of both Trump impeachments, as told by the two reporters on the front lines covering them for The Washington Post and Politico.

Why are clocks in Germany always correct while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why are Singaporeans jailed for selling gum? Why do women in New Zealand have three times the sex of females worldwide? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? And why does each generation of Americans give their kids weirder and weirder names?

As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is not just an economic divide but a fracturing of American society along class lines. Upper-middle-class children become upper-middle-class adults.

This definitive history of presidential lying reveals how our standards for truthfulness have eroded - and why Trump's lies are especially dangerous.

America’s chaotic retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 was nothing short of a horror show. Women and children were trampled to death outside the gates of the Kabul airfield. Desperate Afghans fell from the landing gear of departing planes. Taliban fighters mercilessly whipped and humiliated U.S. civilians. Countless Afghan interpreters were abandoned to the mercy of the Taliban after risking their lives alongside American troops for years. And thirteen U.S. service members were murdered in an ISIS suicide bombing. Still, the full story is worse than anyone imagined.

In the face of the most perilous challenges of our time—climate change, terrorism, poverty, and trafficking of drugs, guns, and people—the nations of the world seem paralyzed.

The problems are too big, too interdependent, too divisive for the nation-state. Is the nation-state, once democracy's best hope, today democratically dysfunctional? Obsolete? The answer, says Benjamin Barber in this highly provocative and original book, is yes.

Burn looks beyond renewable biomass or carbon capture energy systems to offer a bigger and bolder vision for the next phase of human progress, moving carbon from wasted sources into soils and agricultural systems to rebalance the carbon, nitrogen, and related cycles; enhance nutrient density in food, rebuild topsoil, and condition urban and agricultural lands to withstand flooding and drought; to cleanse water by carbon filtration and tropic cascades within the world’s rivers, oceans, and wetlands.

And on its surface, the Chappaquiddick Incident (as it has infamously become known) was a simple but tragic traffic accident. However, its political fallout caused it to become the most speculated-upon car accident until Princess Diana's fatal ride, some 28 years later: Was Kennedy drunk? Was he trying to conceal an affair by deliberately killing Kopechne? Why did he wait for so long before reporting the accident? And who else was involved?

The Presidents Club was born at Eisenhower’s inauguration when Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover first conceived the idea. Over the years that followed - and to this day - the presidents relied on, misunderstood, sabotaged, and formed alliances with one another that changed history. The world’s most exclusive fraternity is a complicated place: its members are bound forever because they sat in the Oval Office and know its secrets, yet they are immortal rivals for history’s favor.

In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises. Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems - climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity - there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on how we treat the soil. Drawing on the work of thinkers and doers, renegade scientists and institutional whistleblowers from around the world, Schwartz challenges much of the conventional thinking about global warming and other problems. For example, land can suffer from undergrazing as well as overgrazing, since certain landscapes, such as grasslands, require the disturbance from livestock to thrive.

What if the state as we know it didn't exist? Our air would be poisonous, our votes uncounted, and our markets dysfunctional. Yet across the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel, the UK, and the US, attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. They are morphing into power grabs by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What replaces the modern state once it is fatally undermined is not the free market and the flowering of personal liberty.

Following on from the huge success of the eponymous West End and Broadway play, Frost/Nixon tells the extraordinary story of how David Frost pursued and landed the biggest fish of his career. When he first conceived the idea of interviewing Richard Nixon and trying to bring the ex-president to confront his past, he was told on all sides that the project would never get off the ground.

From the author of the international best seller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a bracing and original look at the tension between our democratic egalitarian political ideals and our recalcitrant biology. Human beings are tribal. We possess a fundamental desire to belong to groups, teams, clubs, a tribe - something larger than ourselves. Political Tribes explores the phenomenon of human groupishness: how identities are shaped and formed by belonging to a group.

This is a story about how the extreme became mainstream. It reveals how the truth became ‘fake news’, how fringe ideas spread and how a candidate many dismissed as a joke was propelled to the presidency by the dark side of the internet. For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded with alt-right propagandists, who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda.

W "Polactwie", które w wersji audio czyta sam autor, Ziemkiewicz zadaje pytanie, co stalo sie z Polakami po upadku komunizmu. Pisarz nie oszczedza polityków z zadnej opcji politycznej, ostro formuluje tezy dotyczace najnowszej historii Polski, "sprawiedliwosci" spolecznej, roli zwiazków zawodowych, wyborów Polaków.

To the charity workers, Dadaab refugee camp is a humanitarian crisis; to the Kenyan government, it is a 'nursery for terrorists'; to the Western media, it is a dangerous no-go area; but to its half a million residents, it is their last resort. Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, in the midst of the inhospitable desert of Northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab is a city like no other.

In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world.

In a time when Washington, DC and the country are more polarized than they have been for decades, John McCain is the rare public figure who has earned the respect of people on both sides of the aisle. He is a model for bipartisanship and political integrity. In his 40 years in politics, McCain has never been afraid to buck trends or ruffle a few feathers. His words are more important today than ever.

From the author of the New York Times best sellers First Women and The Residence, an intimate, news-making look at the men who are next in line to the most powerful office in the world - the vice presidents of the modern era - from Richard Nixon to Joe Biden to Mike Pence. In interviews with more than 200 people, Kate Andersen Brower pulls back the curtain and reveals the sometimes cold, sometimes close, and always complicated relationship between our modern presidents and their vice presidents.