America Government

The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster.

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did.

The Brethren is the first detailed behind-the-scenes account of the Supreme Court in action. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong have pierced its secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the Chief and Associate Justices - maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making decisions that affect every major area of American life.

An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic - John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and banish Trump's relentless lies about the stealing of the 2020 election. That is not what happened. Instead, “the big steal” has become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know.

No one could have predicted even two years ago that an African American would take the oath of office as president of the United States in January of 2009. For many, the occasion marks the climax to the civil rights movement and the fulfillment of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream that Americans could be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. This collection, with about 400 letters from Americans of all walks of life, is being created to stand as a symbol of this exciting moment in history.

The Israel lobby exerts incredible power and influence over America. While some informed voters know the US provides more foreign aid to Israel than any other country, the total flow of charitable, tax dollar, military aid, intelligence, and “opportunity cost” are unknown to those footing the bill - and the lobby is determined to keep it that way. Yet storm clouds are gathering over Israel’s lobby. Public opinion polls asking the right questions indicate Americans are nowhere near as approving as many Israel lobbyists insist.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Summary Report on Torture is a public document belonging to the American people, arising from the Senate investigation into the CIA’s Interrogation and Detention Program. Commonly known as The Torture Report, the document was made public, with redactions, on December 9, 2009. The events surrounding its investigation, writing, and publication are now the subject of Scott Z. Burns’ film The Report, an Amazon Original (in theaters on 11/15; on Amazon Prime 11/29 from Amazon Studios). Here, you can hear the report in its entirety.

The author of the best-selling Blowback Trilogy reflects on America's waning power in a masterful collection of essays. In his prophetic book Blowback, published before 9/11, Chalmers Johnson warned that our secret operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe would exact a price at home. Now, in a brilliant series of essays written over the last three years, Johnson measures that price and the resulting dangers America faces.

Whichever belief system was in play for the major industrial nations of Central and South America, a constant bombardment of foreign influence pushed the people of states such as Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and others toward overthrow. Few examples remain as memorable as the conflict in Nicaragua, where the Frente Sandinista de Liberation Nacional (FSLN), a left-wing revolutionary party, seized power in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua in July 1979, toppling four decades of dictatorial rule perpetrated by the Somoza dynasty.

From the best-selling author and former Starbucks CEO, here is a story that is part dramatic memoir, part blueprint of the new responsibilities that leaders and citizens share in America today. The book weaves two parallel narratives to show how experiences from Howard Schultz’s troubled childhood - some of which he has never before disclosed - propelled him out of the housing projects and fueled his efforts to build a global brand and redefine the role of a company in society. Ultimately, Schultz reveals the potential we all have to transform communities and uplift lives.

In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O’Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on covert cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O’Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Covert Regime Change assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was 10 times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War.

In the greatest intelligence operation in the history of the world, Donald Trump was made president of the United States with the assistance of a foreign power. For the first time, The Plot to Destroy Democracy reveals the dramatic story of how blackmail, espionage, assassination, and psychological warfare were used by Vladimir Putin and his spy agencies to steal the 2016 US election. It will show how Russia and its fifth column allies tried to flip the cornerstones of democracy in order to reengineer the world political order that kept most of the world free since since 1945.

First published in 1962, Negroes with Guns is the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement.

In an astonishing, tough firsthand reportage, Chris Hedges draws on stories from inside communities across America and reveals how the hurricanes of change have allowed an array of pathologies to arise: the opioid crisis, the retreat into gambling, the corporate coup d'état of government, the pornification of culture, the rise of magical thinking, the emboldening of violence and hate, the plagues of suicides, and the global upheaval caused by catastrophic climate change.

From master storyteller and historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur squared off to decide America's future in the aftermath of World War II.

Candidate Trump sold Americans a vision that was seemingly at odds with their country’s founding principles. Now in office, he’s put up a "for sale" sign - on the prestige of the presidency, on America’s global stature, and on our national identity. At what cost have these deals come? Joy-Ann Reid's essential new audiobook, The Man Who Sold America, delivers an urgent accounting of our national crisis from one of our foremost political commentators.

The gun control debate is revived with every mass shooting. But far more people die from gun deaths on the street corners of inner city America and across the border as Mexico’s powerful cartels battle to control the drug trade. Guns and drugs aren’t often connected in our heated discussions of gun control - but they should be. In Ioan Grillo’s groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, he shows us this connection by following the market for guns in the Americas and how it has made the continent the most murderous on earth.

In What It Took to Win, the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the Democratic Party's long-running commitment to creating "moral capitalism" - a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal.

For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights.