Government Fiction

Academics, journalists, and popular historians agree: our greatest presidents are the ones who confronted a national crisis and mobilized the entire nation to face it. That’s the conventional wisdom. The chief executives who are celebrated in textbooks and placed in the top echelon of presidents in surveys of experts are the bold leaders - the Woodrow Wilsons and Franklin Roosevelts - who reshaped the United States in line with their grand “vision” for America. Unfortunately, along the way, these “great” presidents inevitably expanded government - and shrank our liberties.

This is the true story of Shannen Koostachin and the people of Attawapiskat, a Cree community in Northern Ontario, who have been fighting for a new school since the late 1970s when a fuel leak contaminated their original school building.

From award-winning journalist Jack Shenker, The Egyptians is the essential book about Egypt and radical politics. In early 2011 Cairo's Tahrir Square briefly commanded the attention of the world. Half a decade later, the international media has largely moved on from Egypt's explosive cycles of revolution and counter-revolution - but the Arab world's most populous nation remains as volatile as ever, its turmoil intimately bound up with forms of authoritarian power and grassroots resistance that stretch right across the globe.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

In all of Roman history there was never a more turbulent year than A.D. 69, the ill-omened "Year of the Three Emperors". By some miracle, the greatest historian of the age, Tacitus, was able to chronicle those momentous events in a work he called The History. In its pages are some of the most memorable events of Roman history described in some of the most intensely passionate prose ever devised.

In 12 years, Michelle Lyons witnessed nearly 300 executions. First as a reporter and then as a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Michelle was a frequent visitor to Huntsville's Walls Unit, where she recorded and relayed the final moments of death row inmates' lives before they were put to death by the state. Michelle was in the death chamber as some of the United States' most notorious criminals, including serial killers, child murderers and rapists, spoke their last words on earth, while a cocktail of lethal drugs surged through their veins.

Para aqueles que não conhecem o trabalho de Nicolau Maquiavel, O príncipe pode parecer um manual abstrato para a conduta de um mandatário. Entretanto, este clássico da filosofia moderna, fundador da ciência política, é fruto da época em que foi concebido.

Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse is a satirical poetry collection from award-winning actor and best-selling author John Lithgow. Chronicling the last few raucous years in American politics, Lithgow takes listeners verse by verse through the history of Donald Trump's presidency.

At the most elite private school in Washington, DC., whenever anyone has a problem that they need to go away, they hire Hana Yang Lerner. Hana is a fixer. She knows who to call, what to say, and how to make sure secrets stay where they belong—buried. She can fix anything. Except her own life, which was destroyed when her father, Senator Skip Lerner, was arrested for an accident that left one woman nearly dead. Now Hana’s reputation is ruined and her friends are gone.

Immediately after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Dennis Smith volunteered in the rescue effort. Having spent his career as both a respected writer and a member of one of the city's busiest firehouses, Smith became determined to use his unique background to tell the story of the disaster and its aftermath with the empathy and understanding that only an insider could bring to it. In this audio memoir, he has collected astonishing first-person testimony.

The Prince was the first great work of modern political and historical analysis, but it suffered from a tragic flaw: Machiavelli chose as his "hero" Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, who, unknown to the author, employed murder as one of his tools of statecraft. The Prince has been studied by Hitler, Stalin, Richelieu, Bismarck, and Frederick the Great, among others.

When long-time White Rock resident Mike Donnelly is found dead at his hunting camp, it appears as if the tragic death was by his own hand. But a gut feeling tells Chief of Police Sam Mason otherwise. Is it any coincidence that Mike's family farm sits smack in the middle of a parcel of land that greedy Lucas Thorne desperately needs to complete the development of his resort? Sam and Sergeant Jody Harris's line of questioning stirs up a hornet's nest.

Amid the constant rain of German bombs and the escalating violence of World War II, British parents by the thousands chose to send their children out of the country: the wealthy, independently; the poor, through a government relocation program called CORB. In September 1940, passenger liner SS City of Benares set out in a convoy of 19 ships sailing for Canada. On board were 90 CORB children, chaperones, and crew, along with paying passengers. When the war ships escorting the Benares to safe waters peeled off, a German submarine attacked and torpedoed the Benares.

Fascism is notoriously hard to define. How do we make sense of an ideology that appeals to streetfighters and intellectuals alike? That is overtly macho in style, yet attracts many women? That calls for a return to tradition while maintaining a fascination with technology? And that preaches violence in the name of an ordered society? In the new edition of this Very Short Introduction, Kevin Passmore brilliantly unravels the paradoxes of one of the most important phenomena in the modern world

Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey” Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning.

Rousseau's Social Contract remains, after a quarter of a millennium, one of the most controversial texts in the history of political philosophy, variously seen as a model for participatory democracy, a blueprint for totalitarianism, and several points in between. In addition to Rousseau’s magnum opus, this production includes an introduction by George Douglas Howard Cole, an English political theorist, economist, writer and historian. Also included are three discourses that Rousseau composed apart from The Social Contract.

On an otherwise normal morning, former Special Forces operative Sam Dryden is the target of an unsuccessful attempted abduction. Using his attacker's cell phone, he learns that another person, a woman named Danica Ellis, is also being targeted. Dryden arrives just in time to save Danica from the assault team sent after her. But neither of them recognizes the other or has any idea why they are being targeted. The only clue is a heavily redacted, official-looking document given to Danica by her stepfather before he was killed.

In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram.

Meena Menon was The Hindu's correspondent in Islamabad till she was expelled by the Pakistani authorities in May 2014. In spite of her truncated stay and the restrictions placed on her movements, Menon managed to write on a range of subjects covering swathes of life in Islamabad.

In September 1870 a train leaves Manchester bound for London. Onboard is Lizzie Burns, a poor worker from the Irish slums who is embarking on the journey that will change her forever. Sitting in the first-class carriage beside her lover, the wealthy mill owner Frederick Engels, the vision of a life of peace and comfort takes shape before her eyes: finally, at nearly 50, she is to be the lady of a house and the wife to a man. Perhaps now she can put the difficulties of the past behind her and be happy.