Civil Liberties

Does free speech have limits? Can torture be justified? Who is really in charge of your rights? Every day we are confronted with news of foreign governments who refuse to acknowledge liberties that we in the Western world take for granted. But civil liberties are nearly always under threat, no matter where you live. Tom Head traverses the globe in order to provide a clear introduction to what civil liberties are and why they're worth defending.

From identification cards to how we protect our property, public debate rages over what our basic human rights are and how they are to be protected. In this trenchant and provocative audiobook, Peter Hitchens sets out to show that popular views of these hotly contested issues - from crime and punishment to so-called 'soft drugs' - are based on mistaken beliefs, massaged figures, and cheap slogans. His powerful and counterintuitive conclusions make challenging listening for those on both the Left and the Right.

In February 2014, Reni Eddo-Lodge posted an impassioned argument on her blog about her deep-seated frustration with the way discussions of race and racism in Britain were constantly being shut down by those who weren't affected by it. She gave the post the title 'Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race'. Her sharp, fiercely intelligent words hit a nerve, and the post went viral, spawning a huge number of comments from people desperate to speak up about their own similar experiences.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Coddling of the America Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, read by Jonathan Haidt. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. And yet they have become increasingly woven into education, culminating in a stifling culture of 'safetyism' that began on American college campuses.

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly re-creates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling, and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience, and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader.

Helen Lewis argues that feminism’s success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperfect women who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights. Too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in our modern search for feel-good, inspirational heroines. It’s time to reclaim the history of feminism as a history of difficult women.

Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Richard D. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination.

An inspiring account from one of history’s darkest moments. Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor. This is her story. As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany’s many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo.

Noam Chomsky’s backpocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control begins by asserting two models of democracy - one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky, "propaganda is to democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state", and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States.

In 1969, a series of riots over police action against The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, changed the longtime landscape of the homosexual in society literally overnight. Since then the event itself has become the stuff of legend, with relatively little hard information available on the riots themselves.

In Data and Goliath, Schneier reveals the full extent of surveillance, censorship, and propaganda in society today, examining the risks of cybercrime, cyberterrorism, and cyberwar. He shares technological, legal, and social solutions that can help shape a more equal, private, and secure world. This is an audiobook to which everyone with an Internet connection - or bank account or smart device or car, for that matter - needs to listen.

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States.

Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek. Get Trump makes clear that unconstitutional efforts to stop Trump from retaking the presidency challenge the very foundations of our liberty: due process, right to counsel, and free speech.

lf a man cannot stand freedom, he will probably turn fascist. This, in the fewest possible words, is the essential argument in this modem classic, Escape from Freedom. The author, Erich Fromm, is a distinguished psychologist, late of Berlin and Heidelberg, now of New York City.

From leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., to lesser-known figures such as Barbara Rose Johns and Jim Zwerg, each man and woman made the decision that something had to be done to stop discrimination. These moving accounts of the first decade of the civil rights movement are a tribute to the people, black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and the struggle they endured.

April 16th, the year is 1963. Birmingham, Alabama, has had a spring of nonviolent protests known as the Birmingham Campaign, seeking to draw attention to the segregation against Blacks by the city government and downtown retailers. The organizers longed to create a nonviolent tension so severe that the powers that be would be forced to address the rampant racism head on. Recently arrested was Martin Luther King, Jr.... It is there in that jail cell that he writes this letter; on the margins of a newspaper he pens this defense of nonviolence against segregation.

White supremacy is a violent system of oppression that harms Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, and if you are a person who holds white privilege, then you are complicit in upholding that harm, whether you realise it or not. And if you are person who holds white privilege, the question you should be asking isn't whether or not this is true, but rather, what are you going to do about it?

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was an orator of Black Nationalism, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. He advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global movement, known as Garveyism. This book, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923) was compiled by his wife, Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey, mainly from his speeches. Promoting unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule in Africa and encouraged the political unification of the continent.

At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the 21st century.

Once in a great while a book comes along that radically changes our understanding of a crucial political issue and helps to fuel a social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander offers a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status, denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement.