Government Fiction

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.

Writing from the perspective of a friend, Frederick Joseph offers candid reflections on his own experiences with racism and conversations with prominent artists and activists about theirs - creating an essential listen for white people who are committed anti-racists and those newly come to the cause of racial justice.

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.

How is it that the law enforcer itself does not have to keep the law? How is it that the law permits the state to lawfully engage in actions which, if undertaken by individuals, would land them in jail? These are among the most intriguing issues in political and economic philosophy. More specifically, the problem of law that itself violates law is an insurmountable conundrum of all statist philosophies. The problem has never been discussed so profoundly and passionately as in this essay by Frederic Bastiat from 1850. This essay might have been written today. It applies to our own time.

Chronicling Andrew Solomon's stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union; his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban; his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar steeped in contradictions as it slowly, fitfully pushes toward freedom; and many other stories of profound upheaval, this book provides a unique window onto the very idea of social change.

The Annals, Part 2 picks up in the year A.D. 32 with the increasingly menacing and tyrannical behavior of Tiberius. With hundreds murdered or driven to suicide and many more in exile, Tiberius descends steadily into growing lust and debauchery on his private estate on the isle of Capri. Overseas, Rome is victorious in her struggle with Parthia, and as Tiberius is being smothered to death in A.D. 37 by Macro, peace at last comes to the eastern frontier.

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 When the Facts Change, Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last 15 years of Judt's life, the years in which he found his voice in the public sphere. Included are seminal essays on the full range of Judt's concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11.

A nuclear terror plot is thwarted just outside Washington, D.C. And it's an election year. Mandisa "Mandi" Nkosi is a young reporter who, while on a trip to Johannesburg to connect with her roots, is contacted by an anonymous source with evidence that material seized from a nuclear terror plot will point squarely at one of humanity's most important companies as the supplier.

Fourteen-year-old Rachel Marsh is nanny to John and Abigail Adams' children and witnesses firsthand how tension builds in the feisty New England town in the two years before it erupts in the Boston Massacre. Friends become foes and families divide as British troops arrive in 1768 to force the outspoken Bostonians to toe the line and obey the British government.

A princess of White Russian descent, Marie Vassiltchikov was 23 years old when she was trapped in Berlin by the outbreak of World War II. In these secret diaries, she chronicles the glamorous rise and shattering fall of the Nazi Party, as seen from the vantage point of her desk at the Foreign Ministry. She also describes how she and her friends became involved in a desperate conspiracy to murder Hitler.

Few novels have made a more shattering impact on their society than El Filibusterismo - and its predecessor, Noli Me Tangere, by Jose Rizal. And surely no writer has paid a higher penalty for self-expression. Rizal was executed by firing squad mainly because of these two books.

P.J. O'Rourke traces his development from hippie protester to conservative grouch to jaded humorist. Along the way, we are privy to his strange, twisted days as editor in chief of National Lampoon, as well as the in-depth looks at appropriate sports for middle-aged Republicans, namely those which can be engaged in with a smuggled Havana between the teeth - fly-fishing, bird hunting, deep-sea fishing, and of course, golf. Plus, you'll hear O'Rourke's take on the Virtues of Automobiles - because what good was oil doing sitting in the ground for millions of years? - and many other hilarious rants in this off-the-wall collection by America's premier political humorist.

With more than a dozen kills under her belt, ex-Marine Mara Roberts is one of the Agency's most reliable assassins. But her latest target - a convicted traitor about to be released from prison - is different than her other marks. He's a former agent who betrayed his country. He's responsible for the death of Mara's mother. And he happens to be Mara's father. Scott Roberts knows that his daughter was sent to kill him. He realizes he has only one chance to convince her that he's been framed for treason - and that every member of their family are pawns to be sacrificed, one by one.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish philosopher, social commentator, satirical writer, essayist, mathematician, and historian. Latter-Day Pamphlets is a series of essays published in 1850, in which he harshly denounces the political, social, and religious injustices and stupidities of the period. The target of many of the essays is the effect of greed on the culture. Carlyle also attacked the British parliament, democracy and the prison system.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given 10 handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens - the unfiltered voice of a nation - from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years:

Here are the confessions of a senior CIA operative who ran the interrogation of one of the highest profile al-Qaeda captives. Carle’s journey is a tale of international intrigue, deceit, and betrayal—and an extraordinary and intimate portrait of our war on terror.

Celebrated for her nonfiction books aimed at young readers and listeners, award-winning author Suzanne Tripp Jurmain illuminates historical figures in fun and engaging ways. Worst of Friends draws listeners into the earliest days of America's history to profile the friendship and rivalry that grew between Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both of whom would go on to become president of the United States.

Mortimer Adler devoted a lifetime to studying the great ideas of Western culture and explaining even the most difficult concepts to the average citizen, earning Time magazine’s praise as a "philosopher for everyman". In We Hold These Truths, Dr. Adler caps his life’s work by illuminating the ideas and ideals that have made the United States of America a truly unique nation in the annals of history.