English Government

Renowned journalist Don Lemon always had a complicated relationship with God. He cherished the Southern Black church he was raised in, but struggled with the fundamentalist rejection of his right to exist as a gay man—one who wanted to marry his longtime love in a church wedding with all the traditional trimmings. In his work as a reporter, moreover, he saw his fellow Americans losing faith in a higher power, in institutions, and in each other.

Politics has never been more unpredictable. Radical populists and insurgents have turned politics-as-usual on its head. "Rebel" explores how we got here, where we are heading and what we can do about it. Douglas Carswell argues that these insurgencies are a reaction against the emergence of a political and economic oligarchy that has subverted our democracy and stifled our market system. "Politics," he writes, "is a cartel. Like the economy, it is rigged in the interests of a few."

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor Adrienne Maree Brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism.

Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism is a masterly history of these chaotic, tragic and above all futile conflicts, ranging with his usual excoriating accuracy from Mali to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen by way of Syria and Libya. Millions are dead, disabled or languish desperately far from their homes as the direct result of our blunders, bewilderment and outright malicious stupidity.

Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

When a drug-addled Hunter Biden abandoned his waterlogged computer at a Mac repair shop in Delaware in the spring of 2019, just six days before his father announced his candidacy for the United States presidency, it became the ticking time bomb in the shadows of Joe Biden’s campaign.

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

He details the issues that his current economic system and the unequal distribution of wealth present in achieving said ideals. He puts forth his beliefs on what the purposes of an economic system should be, including production and security. He criticizes monopolies and all the damage that they have done.

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.

Renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking book revisits the formation of the State of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred, and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called "ethnic cleansing."

In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives.

Thousands of American soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan with severe wounds from chemical war. They are not the victims of ruthless enemy warfare, but of their own military commanders. These soldiers, afflicted with rare cancers and respiratory diseases, were sickened from the smoke and ash swirling out of the "burn pits" where military contractors incinerated mountains of trash, including old stockpiles of mustard and sarin gas, medical waste, and other toxic material.

Democracy has been the American religion since before the Revolution - from New England town halls to the multicultural democracy of Atlantic pirate ships. But can our current political system, one that seems responsive only to the wealthiest among us and leaves most Americans feeling disengaged, voiceless, and disenfranchised, really be called democratic? And if the tools of our democracy are not working to solve the rising crises we face, how can we - average citizens - make change happen? David Graeber, one of the most influential scholars and activists of his generation, takes listeners on a journey through the idea of democracy.

Conspirituality takes a deep dive into the troubling phenomenon of influencers who have curdled New Age spirituality and wellness with the politics of paranoia—peddling vaccine misinformation, tales of child trafficking, and wild conspiracy theories.

Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.

In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly 20 years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in.

Over the past three decades, citizens of democracies who claim to value freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law have increasingly embraced illiberal politicians and platforms. Democracy is in trouble - but who is really to blame? In Our Own Worst Enemy, Tom Nichols challenges the current depictions of the rise of illiberal and antidemocratic movements in the United States and elsewhere as the result of the deprivations of globalization or the malign decisions of elites. Rather, he places the blame for the rise of illiberalism on the people themselves.

Two leading authorities—an acclaimed historian and the outstanding battlefield commander and strategist of our time—collaborate on a landmark examination of war since 1945. Conflict is both a sweeping history of the evolution of warfare up to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, and a penetrating analysis of what we must learn from the past—and anticipate in the future—in order to navigate an increasingly perilous world.

A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.

In an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international situation, Noam Chomsky argues that the United States, through its military-first policies and its unstinting devotion to maintaining a world-spanning empire, is both risking catastrophe and wrecking the global commons.