Government Fiction

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.

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.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a seminal work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist. He observes that a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. In a crowd, the conscious personality of the individual is submerged and dominated by the collective mind. Furthermore, every sentiment becomes contagious to a degree that individuals readily sacrifice their personal interest to the collective.

From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as 20 writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures.

The United States Constitution is the supreme law of the United States of America. This is the document which defines the rights and responsibilities of federal government of the United States of America.

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.

Sam Dryden, retired special forces, lives a quiet life in a small town on the coast of Southern California. While out on a run in the middle of the night, a young girl runs into him on the seaside boardwalk. Barefoot and terrified, she's running from a group of heavily armed men with one clear goal - to kill the fleeing child. After Dryden helps her evade her pursuers, he learns that the 11-year-old, for as long as she can remember, has been kept in a secret prison by forces within the government. But she doesn't know much beyond her own name, Rachel.

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.

Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. The 70 essays collected here, written over the last 10 years, cover an astonishing range of subjects.

Richard Nixon said he wanted administration to be "the best chronicled in history". But when Alexander Butterfield disclosed the existence of a voice-activated tapind system to a Senate committee in July 1973, Nixon's White House and its recordings quickly became the most infamous in American history. Only 60 hours were actually made public in the 1970s. Many thousands of hours remained secret and Nixon's hands, and he fought fiercely to keep them that way right up to his death.

The New Atlantis (1627) is a utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon in which he describes a vision of the future of human discovery, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humanity. The novel portrays a utopian world where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the dominant qualities of the inhabitants.

They were a band of outsiders unable to get jobs with New York's gilded financial establishment. They would go on to corner the world's multitrillion-dollar oil market, reaping unimaginable riches while bringing the economy to its knees. Meet the self-anointed kings of the New York Mercantile Exchange. In some ways, they are everything you would expect them to be: a secretive, members-only club of men and women who live lavish lifestyles; cavort with politicians, strippers, and celebrities; and blissfully jacked up oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel while profiting off the misery of the working class.

India has unmatched talent and ambition with an inherent tendency to work hard; then what is it that keeps India from overtaking the world? Why does India as a nation settle for the ordinary when the extraordinary is well within reach? Dr. Kalam shares his dream of a nation that is unrivaled, he discusses how he has, from his experience, met such skilled people whose visions can transform the nation.

For more than three decades, Jeffrey D. Sachs has been at the forefront of international economic problem solving. But Sachs turns his attention back home in The Price of Civilization, a book that is essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity.

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

Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines in 2016. In his first 18 months in office, 12,000 people were murdered on the streets, gunned down by police officers and vigilante citizens - all with his encouragement. Duterte is a serial womanizer and a self-confessed killer, who has called both Barack Obama and Pope Francis "sons of whores." He is on record as saying he does not "give a shit" about human rights. Yet he is beloved of the 16.6 million Filipinos who voted for him, seen as vulgar but honest, a breath of fresh air, and an iconoclastic, anti-imperialist rebel.

The first modern treatise of political philosophy, The Prince remains one of the world's most influential and widely read books. Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with expedient exercises of will, reveals nothing less than the secrets of power: how to gain it, how to wield it, and how to keep it. But curiously, this work of outspoken clarity has, for centuries, inspired myriad interpretations as to its author's true message.

New York Times best-selling author and acclaimed Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is known for such groundbreaking works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A provocative collection of rants and reflections from Thompson’s columns at ESPN.com, Hey Rube offers outrageously brilliant insight on topics ranging from the 2000 election to his unconventional take on professional sports (“eliminate the pitcher” to improve Major League Baseball).

Catch the Jew! recounts the adventures of gonzo journalist Tuvia Tenenbom, who wanders around Israel and the Palestinian Authority for seven months in search of the untold truths in today's Holy Land. With holy chutzpah, Tenenbom boldly goes where no Jew has gone before, at times risking his life as he assumes the identities of Tobi the German and even Abu Ali in order to probe into the many stories in this strange land and poke holes in all of them.