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  20 First Legislative Acts of the...

  Vladimir Lenin

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  Decrees were legislative acts of the highest Soviet institutions, primarily of the Council of People's Commissars (the highest executive body — Sovnarkom) and of VTsIK (the highest legislative body between sessions of the Congress of Soviets).
  The Bolshevik Initial Decrees were announced as soon as the Bolsheviks declared their success in the October Revolution (October 26, 1917). The Decrees seemed to conform to the popular Bolshevik slogan "Peace, Land and Bread". The slogan succinctly articulated the grievances of the Russian peasantry, armed forces and proletariat.
  The Bolsheviks were not opportunists but benevolent idealists; the point of the Decrees was to bring about a better quality of life for the Russian people. Regardless of which view is the more accurate account, it is clear from these opposing perspectives that the history of the Initial Decrees is a politically charged issue. This is perhaps because historians use the Decrees to try to discern whether the implementation of Marxist thought has totalitarian tendencies.

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  The American Supreme Court

  Robert G. McCloskey

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  The sixth edition of the classic and concise account of the US Supreme Court, its history, and its place in American politics. 
   
  For more than fifty years, Robert G. McCloskey’s classic work on the Supreme Court’s role in constructing the US Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation’s highest court. 
   
  As in prior editions, McCloskey’s original text remains unchanged. In his historical interpretation, he argues that the strength of the Court has always been its sensitivity to the changing political scene, as well as its reluctance to stray too far from the main currents of public sentiment. In this new edition, Sanford Levinson extends McCloskey’s magisterial treatment to address developments since the 2010 election, including the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding the Defense of Marriage Act, the Affordable Care Act, and gay marriage. 
   
  The best and most concise account of the Supreme Court and its place in American politics, McCloskey’s wonderfully readable book is an essential guide to the past, present, and future prospects of this institution. 
   
  Praise for The American Supreme Court 
   
  “The classic account of the American Supreme Court by the mid-twentieth century’s most astute student of American constitutionalism updated by the early twenty-first century’s most astute student of American constitutionalism. This is the first work constitutional beginners should—and constitutional scholars do—turn to.” —Mark Graber, University of Maryland School of Law 
   
  “Essential. . . . This fifth edition carries on the tradition of earlier iterations, keeping McCloskey’s keen insights, analytical framework, and normative instincts intact. . . . Levinson supplements the original argument with chapters . . . that draw on his remarkable intellectual range and invite readers to continue asking the still-salient questions McCloskey set forth a half-century earlier.” —Choice, on the fifth edition

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  Virus - Vaccinations the CDC and...

  Nina Burleigh

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  A few months before the virus slammed the world, global public health experts declared the United States the most prepared for a possible pandemic. Instead, we watched as the disease killed half a million Americans. A stunned nation has been too busy grieving and doing damage control to ask why, or to comprehend just how much of the blundering and chaos of the pandemic response was either deliberate or entirely predictable. New York Times bestselling author Nina Burleigh weaves together the key narrative strands to create an uncompromising and highly informed exposé about our shared global pandemic experience and what it means for our future. Here listeners will learn: ● How the Trump administration packed public health agencies with right wing Christians and their political allies who cared more about gender norms and policing morality than a possible pandemic.● How America's anti-expertise culture, long nurtured by right wing media and conservative politicians, and now at its apogee, has left countless millions of Americans doubting the efficacy and safety of vaccines.

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  We Do! - American Leaders Who...

  Madeleine M. Kunin, Jennifer...

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  “The encouraging story of American acceptance of gay marriage and the roles that politicians—gay and straight—have played in that history” (The Philadelphia Tribune).   Through speeches, interviews, and commentary, this book chronicles the road toward marriage equality in the United States, edited by former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin and author and activist Jennifer Baumgardner.   “Baumgardner and Kunin have compiled the writings and public pronouncements of public officials and other figures on the issue of marriage equality . . . This book will serve as a resource for what was said about the struggle.” —New York Journal of Books   “Detail[s] the politicians out there who are good-hearted, decent and basically worth knowing about.” —Detroit Metro Times   “Compiles speeches, interviews and commentary from 1977 through 2013, in which an array of political leaders . . . voice their unconditional support for the queer citizens of the US in their quest for same-sex marriage rights.” —Bay Area Reporter   “Highlights the path politicians have taken from Harvey Milk of San Francisco in 1977 until now, to advance the cause of marriage equality.” —Sun News Miami   “Powerful . . . As Vermont’s governor, Madeleine Kunin was a leader on gay rights years before it was fashionable and years before our state became the first in the country to allow civil unions and, later, gay marriage without a court order. The struggle for gay rights in Vermont was very difficult, divisive, and acrimonious. If you talk to young people today about gay rights or gay marriage, they ask, What was the big deal? Madeleine and Jennifer Baumgardner remind us what a big deal it was and how important it is.” —Bernie Sanders   “The gay marriage movement, like all civil rights movements, began with individuals telling the truth about who they are to a world that doesn’t accept them. It ends with an entire generation of young people who reject blatant civil rights discrimination . . . We Do! triumphantly chronicles this recent chapter.” —New Pages  Included on the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow Project Book List

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  The ANC Billionaires - Big...

  Pieter du Toit

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  'We were talking about the rise of Japan, about Ronald Reagan's Star Wars … globalisation, technology. And they were still banging on about the Freedom Charter.' – Anglo American's Michael Spicer on the ANC in the mid-1980s.
  In 1985, a group of white South African business leaders, led by Gavin Relly, the executive chairperson of Anglo American, travelled to a game lodge in Zambia to meet with the exiled ANC leadership under Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki. This visit set in motion a coordinated and well-resourced plan by big business to influence and direct political change in South Africa.
  In The ANC Billionaires, top-selling author Pieter du Toit draws on first-hand accounts by major roleplayers about the contentious relationship between capital and the ANC before, during and after the country's transition to democracy, and shows how the liberation organisation was completely unprepared to navigate the intersection between business and politics.
  He also ties the rise of the new elite – including Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Saki Macozoma – to the ANC, a party of government and patronage.

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  Hitler's Home Front - Memoirs of...

  Don A Gregory, Wilhelm R Gehlen

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  A “candid and revealing memoir shows a normal boy and a family at war and in its aftermath, determined to do what it took to survive . . . fascinating” (The Great War).   When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in 1933, he promised the downtrodden, demoralized, and economically broken people of Germany a new beginning and a strong future. Millions flocked to his message, including a corps of young people called the Hitlerjugend—the Hitler Youth.   By 1942 Hitler had transformed Germany into a juggernaut of war that swept over Europe and threatened to conquer the world. It was in that year that a nine-year-old Wilhelm Reinhard Gehlen, took the ‘Jungvolk’ oath, vowing to give his life for Hitler.   This is the story of Wilhelm Gehlen’s childhood in Nazi Germany during World War II and the awful circumstances which he and his friends and family had to endure during and following the war. Including a handful of recipes and descriptions of the strange and sometimes disgusting food that nevertheless kept people alive, this book sheds light on the truly awful conditions and the twisted, mistaken devotion held by members of the Hitler Youth—that it was their duty to do everything possible to save the Thousand Year Reich.

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