Government Administration

This first real look inside Team Obama mixes political warfare and big-business shakeups in equal proportions, and comes from a uniquely informed source. Steve Rattner is not just the man brought in by the president to save the auto industry, he is a former New York Times financial reporter who also earned a place among the top tier of Wall Street's most informed investment bankers and corporate experts.

Physician and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb asks: Has America’s COVID-19 catastrophe taught us anything? In Uncontrolled Spread, he shows how the coronavirus and its variants were able to trounce America’s pandemic preparations, and he outlines the steps that must be taken to protect against the next outbreak

In June 2009, Wendell Potter made national headlines with his scorching testimony before the Senate panel on health care reform. This former senior vice president of CIGNA explained how health insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and how they skew political debate with multibillion-dollar public relations campaigns designed to spread disinformation.

An insider's sometimes shocking account of how Defense Secretary James Mattis led the US military through global challenges while serving as a crucial check on the Trump Administration. For nearly two years as Trump's Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis maintained a complicated relationship with the president. A lifelong Marine widely considered to be one of America's greatest generals, Mattis was committed to keeping America safe. Yet he served a President whose actions were frequently unpredictable and impulsive with far-reaching consequences.

An unprecedented high-level master narrative of America's intelligence wars from the only person ever to helm both the CIA and NSA, at a time of heinous new threats and wrenching change. For General Michael Hayden, playing to the edge means playing so close to the line that you get chalk dust on your cleats. Otherwise, by playing back, you may protect yourself, but you will be less successful in protecting America.

In the third volume of his Proof series, New York Times best-selling author Seth Abramson takes listeners on a deep dive into the Ukraine scandal, revealing it to be more sinister, complex, and transnational than previously thought. Abramson’s research on Trump administration corruption positions the Ukraine scandal as the foreseeable culmination of years of clandestine machinations involving scores of players, from Beijing to Budapest, Ankara to Caracas, Warsaw to Jerusalem, Kyiv to Riyadh, and Moscow to DC.

No working journalist knows Donald Trump better than David Cay Johnston, who first met the 45th president in 1988 and has tracked him ever since. Featuring Johnston's renowned skill in bringing government policy to life, this crucial book explains how our daily lives will be affected by the actions of the Trump Administration. This book is essential listening for all Americans.

COVID. Climate change. Refugee resettlement. Global supply chains. We're facing a new generation of complex problems, stretching across the public and private sectors. Historically we've looked to government for big solutions, but the reality is, the government we have now is a poor match for the problems we face. We need a fresh new approach. As William D. Eggers and Donald F. Kettl show in this indispensable book, we need a government of bridgebuilders—public managers and leaders who collaborate with partners, both inside and outside government, to get the job done.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed.

When Dr. Scott W. Atlas was tapped by Donald Trump to join his COVID Task Force, he was immediately thrust into a maelstrom of scientific disputes, policy debates, raging egos, politically motivated lies, and cynical media manipulation. Numerous myths and distortions surround the Trump Administration’s handling of the crisis, and many pressing questions remain unanswered.

Euphemistically labeled as the "Water Supply and Prophylaxis Administration" and "HippoEpizootic Administration" of the Imperial Japanese Army, Unit 731 and Unit 100, as well as their subsidiary branches, performed human experimentation on the innocents under the leadership of Dr. Ishii Shiro. Although the exact number of victims is unclear since the Japanese destroyed most of the evidence at the end of the war, but it ranged from 3,000-250,000 innocent men, women, and children.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders served as White House press secretary for President Donald J. Trump from 2017 to 2019. A trusted confidante of the president, Sanders advised him on everything from press and communications strategy to personnel and policy. She was at the president's side for two and a half years, battling with the media, working with lawmakers and CEOs, and accompanying the president on every international trip, including dozens of meetings with foreign leaders - all while unfailingly exhibiting grace under pressure.

Nikki Haley is widely admired for her forthright manner (“with all due respect, I don’t get confused”), her sensitive approach to tragic events, and her confident representation of America’s interests as our ambassador to the United Nations during times of crisis and consequence. In this book, Haley offers a firsthand perspective on major national and international matters as well as a behind-the-scenes account of her tenure in the Trump administration.

In Bush, Jean Edward Smith demonstrates that it was not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice, but President Bush himself who took personal control of foreign policy. Bush drew on his deep religious conviction that important foreign-policy decisions were simply a matter of good versus evil. Domestically, he overreacted to 9/11 and endangered Americans' civil liberties.

Imagine being physically denied access to your office, business, or livelihood. Imagine being refused entry to a grocery store or being told who you can or cannot sit with at a restaurant. Imagine being barred from a hospital room when you or your family member needs critical care. Unthinkable? Today, these scenarios and worse are happening in “democracies” all over the world, and could be our collective future—orchestrated by AI, Big Tech, and state-sponsored apps—all in the name of “protecting” public health with vaccine passports.

Author Monica Sharma describes how we can source our inner capacities and wisdom to manifest change that embodies universal values such as dignity, compassion, fairness, and courage. Drawing on more than 20 years of work for the United Nations and elsewhere, she presents a radical new approach to transformational leadership, one that creates systems of change where everyone can engage - not just analysts and policy-makers.

In this "meticulously researched" account (New York Times Book Review), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author examines the dangers of a failing public health system unequipped to handle large-scale global risks like a coronavirus pandemic.

Barton Gellman shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for a keen-edged reckoning with Dick Cheney's domestic agenda in The Washington Post. In Angler, Gellman goes far beyond that series to rake on the full scope of Cheney's work and its consequences, including his hidden tole in the Bush administration's most fateful choices in war: shifting focus from aI Qaeda to Iraq, unleashing the National Security Agency to spy at home, and promoting "cruel and inhuman" methods of interrogation.

The United States is embarking on a medical revolution. Supporters of personalized, or precision, medicine—the tailoring of health care to our genomes—have promised to usher in a new era of miracle cures. Advocates of this gene-guided health-care practice foresee a future where skyrocketing costs can be curbed by customization and unjust disparities are vanquished by biomedical breakthroughs. Progress, however, has come slowly, and with a price too high for the average citizen.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods around the world - and continues to do so. These personal tragedies will, and must, be told and heard. There is, however, also a truthful and objective scientific narrative to be written about how the virus played out and how the world set about dealing with it. Spike is that story - from the inside. Its author, Jeremy Farrar, is one of the UK's leading scientists and a - member of the SAGE emergency committee.