Politics Nation

Former Marin County community organizer and promoter of “systems thinking” shares her first-person voice following on insights gathered over five years of local experience. This book is full of specific datapoints, examples, and suggestions for making the world a better place, beginning with Marin County residents learning more about the very real challenges within their own community.

How do you eliminate a half trillion annual expense in the US alone? How do you prevent capital offenses in the first place? God has the solution: we just don't like key parts of it. We shoot ourselves in the foot in order to think of ourselves as dignified and compassionate. Yet the responsibility of public stoning (with the rest of the Biblical model) is more dignified and compassionate than any alternative. Death is the most severe court judgment in the full range of Biblical justice tools, and so it deserves primary investigation.

America is on the brink of collapse. What will you do to save your country? America has suffered some big losses - eroding morals, a Godless culture, and a declining national spirit. These losses have corrupted the very fabric of our once-stalwart nation, coalescing into social and political overthrow with anarchy raging in the streets. Many wonder, Is this the end of America?

The winds of change are blowing everywhere. Uncertainty is creating extreme anxiety. Whether it’s an act of nature or an act of terrorism or a lone shooting, it seems we are all on edge. American traditions and institutions are being shaken to the core. But it's crystal clear that during moments of extreme crisis, survival depends on a unified effort. This is The Hurricane Factor.

First published in 1997,

Little X chronicles the multigenerational experience of Tate's family, who broke from the traditional Black church in the 1950s to join the radical Nation of Islam, then struggled to remain intact through disillusionment, shifting loyalties, and forays into Orthodox Islam.

Little X offers a rare glimpse into the everyday experience of the Nation of Islam and into a little-understood part of America's history and heritage.

In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with theshortcomings of "shock and awe", the U.S. military shifted its focus to"stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed.

What is America becoming? Or, more importantly, what can she be if we reclaim a vision for the things that made her great in the first place? In America the Beautiful, Dr. Ben Carson helps us learn from our past in order to chart a better course for our future. From his personal ascent from inner-city poverty to international medical and humanitarian acclaim, Carson shares experiential insights that help us understand: What is good about America, where we have gone astray, and which fundamental beliefs have guided America from her founding into preeminence among nations.

Our economy is on the move, fueled by revolutions in energy, immigration, innovation, big data, and advanced manufacturing. America's energy independence has set off shockwaves. Just as important are the social transformations that are making the country ever more racially and culturally diverse, younger, and a home to immigrants. While most other countries struggle profoundly with immigration and religious and racial differences, America is on a path to multicultural identity.

America was built on nine distinct virtues that shaped the character of our nation and made it great. Grit, manliness, individualism, merit, profit and providence, dominion over our environment, thrift, and, above all, pride in our country - these qualities define us and are the reason that hundreds of millions of people worldwide look to America for hope, inspiration, and opportunity.

While Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first hundred days may be the most celebrated period of his presidency, the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor proved the most critical. Beginning as early as 1939, when Germany first attacked Poland, Roosevelt skillfully navigated a host of challenges: a reluctant population, an unprepared military, and disagreements within his cabinet to prepare the country for its inevitable confrontation with the Axis.

We are living in a time of monumental change. Countless numbers of ordinary people, men and women from all walks of life, are joining forces to challenge the direction our national leaders are now taking us. Washington’s idea of change has failed, and most Americans are now frustrated, disappointed, and angry. The result is a long list of offenses, both perceived and real, that can easily set off a chain reaction that quickly becomes irreversible.

With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw people began their journey over the Trail of Tears from their homelands in Mississippi to the new lands of the Choctaw Nation. Suffering a death rate of nearly 20 percent due to exposure, disease, mismanagement, and fraud, they limped into Indian Territory, or, as they knew it, the Land of the Dead (the route taken by the souls of Choctaw people after death on their way to the Choctaw afterlife). Their first few years in the new nation affirmed their name for the land.

From the admired judicial authority, author of Louis D. Brandeis (“Remarkable”—Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books; “Monumental”—Alan M. Dershowitz, The New York Times Book Review), Division and Discord, and Supreme Decisions—Melvin Urofsky’s major new book looks at the role of dissent in the Supreme Court and the meaning of the Constitution through the greatest and longest lasting public-policy debate in the country’s history, among members of the Supreme Court, between the Court and the other branches of government, and between the Court and the people of the United States.

Americans, for all our talk of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, obsessively seek advice on matters large and small. Perhaps precisely because we believe in bettering ourselves and our circumstances in life, we ask for guidance constantly. And this has been true since our nation's earliest days: From the colonial era on, there have always been people eager to step up and offer advice, some of it lousy, some of it thoughtful, but all of it read and debated by generations of Americans.

In American Gospel (literally meaning the "good news about America"), New York Times best-selling author Jon Meacham sets the record straight on the history of religion in American public life. As Meacham shows, faith, meaning a belief in a higher power, and the sense that we are God's chosen, has always been at the heart of our national experience, from Jamestown to the Constitutional Convention to the Civil Rights Movement to September 11th.

America seems to be crumbling from within. Having abandoned the Judeo-Christian values that are the foundation of its culture, our nation, in the eyes of many, is going the way of the great civilizations of the past. If our 250-year experiment in ordered liberty has really run its course, is it time to recognize the inevitable, pack up our families, and head for the hills, hunkering down through the dark days to come? Or is there hope for an American restoration?

On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s 50th birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. The young nation had outlived the men who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free? American Radicals is a dynamic, timely history of 19th-century activists - free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes - and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era.

Americans have been shocked in the past few years to discover how vulnerable our nation is to disaster, be it terrorist attack or act of God. But what's truly shocking, argues leading security expert Stephen Flynn, is how little we have learned from the cataclysms of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. When it comes to catastrophe, America is living on borrowed time and squandering it. But it doesn't have to be this way.

This audiobook examines democracy, or a representative electoral political system, and the interaction with a nation's economy.

Most Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier rebel against political and diplomatic norms, a "populist" champion of ordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration. Despite his reverence for the "sovereign people", however, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and often unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets.