Other books that might interest you

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  The Republican House Divided -...

  Tim Galsworthy

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  How the Republican Party transformed from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Lee 
   
  The Republican House Divided is the first comprehensive study of the relationships between the Republican Party and Civil War memory in the twentieth century. Tim Galsworthy reveals how rival Republicans deployed Civil War memory to support, oppose, and ultimately shape the GOP's transformation, during the civil rights era, into a racially conservative party. Drawing on extensive archival research, Galsworthy underlines how references to the past were vitally important to Republican Party politicians as they negotiated their party's positions toward African American civil rights and attempted to appeal to erstwhile white Southern Democrats. Paying attention to a range of actors—including national party leaders, southern conservatives, prominent progressives, and defiant Black Republicans—he traces the actions of Republican politicians and operatives from across the party's ideological and geographical spectrums as they struggled to control and direct party messaging, strategy, and policy. The Republican House Divided is a timely work, offering insight into how the "Party of Lincoln" started on the road to becoming the GOP of today.

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  The New Leviathans - Thoughts...

  John Gray

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  Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities. 
   
   
   
  In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident. 
   
   
   
  Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us?

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  Understanding Machiavelli’s The...

  Denis Collin

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  Machiavelli has a reputation as an immoral thinker. His most famous work, The Prince, is oftemnm criticized as being a manual for political cunning and cynicism.
  On the contrary, Machiavelli invites us to face up to political and human reality. Faced with illusions and moralistic rhetoric, we must seek the truth and adopt a scientific approach to seriously reflect upon action.
  This introduction provides us with the keys to understanding The Prince, a foundational book of modern political thought, and the relevance of its teachings for our contemporary societies.

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  Stakeknife's Dirty War - The...

  Richard O'Rawe

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  Freddie Scappaticci was born in 1946 and raised in a deeply nationalist area of Belfast. When the Troubles broke out in 1969, he joined the Provisional IRA, where he quickly rose through the ranks, becoming commander of Belfast in 1984. 
   
  From the outside, Scappaticci appeared to be a dedicated volunteer, but inwardly, he had become disenchanted with the IRA and, in 1977, he started working for British intelligence. At the same time, he took up a leading role in a newly formed IRA Internal Security Unit (ISU), aka ‘The Nutting Squad’. He personally executed two suspected informers and condemned at least thirty-seven more to death. 
   
  Was he the serial killer that history portrays him? Undoubtedly. But it’s not that simple, because every time he passed the death penalty on an informer, he told his British intelligence handlers about the intended execution, giving them the opportunity to prevent the killing. 
   
  Did the tasking and co-ordinating group, the primary British intelligence organisation in Northern Ireland during the troubles, aid and abet the IRA in the mass-murder of British citizens? That is the question Richard O’Rawe poses in Stakeknife’s Dirty War. But O’Rawe goes further: he lays out a very compelling case that points to the TCGs running the IRA’s war from the mid-1980s to the 1994 ceasefire. Such was the British intelliegence penetration of the IRA, that Freddie Scappaticci, aka ‘Stakeknife’, was in control of all IRA operations in the Belfast Brigade area. This book will shock readers, and cause them to reevaluate everything they formerly held to be true about Stakeknife’s dirty war in Ireland.

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  America's Great-Power...

  Ali Wyne

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  It has become axiomatic to contend that U.S. foreign policy must adapt to an era of renewed "great-power competition." The United States went on a quarter-century strategic detour after the Cold War, the argument goes, basking in triumphalism and getting bogged down in the Middle East. Now China and Russia are increasingly challenging its influence and undercutting the order it has led since 1945. How should it respond to these two formidable authoritarian powers? 
   
   
   
  In this timely intervention, Ali Wyne offers the first detailed critique of great-power competition as a foreign policy framework, warning that it could render the United States defensive and reactive. He exhorts Washington to find a middle ground between complacence and consternation, selectively contesting Beijing and Moscow but not allowing their decisions to determine its own course. Analyzing a resurgent China, a disruptive Russia, and a deepening Sino-Russian entente, Wyne explains how the United States can seize the "great-power opportunity" at hand: to manage all three of those phenomena confidently while renewing itself at home and abroad.

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  The Magic and Mayhem of Donald...

  Gretchen Wollert

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  In today’s deeply divisive political environment, the constant media storm pits Democrats against Republicans and liberals against conservatives, and drives narratives that describe Donald Trump as the worst president in American history who should be incarcerated forever for high crimes against society. But another segment of America believes Trump is the savior of the nation and worthy of sainthood. 
  What is the truth? Is there an acceptable reality somewhere within these two extremes? Can we know what actually guides Trump’s larger than life political persona? What really makes him tick? Is he worthy of the support of an American people desperately seeking the best for a nation in turmoil? 
  The Magic and Mayhem of Donald Trump lays out with uncommon clarity the reality of the Trump enigma. Known for his supreme self-confidence, inexhaustible ambition, braggadocio, arrogance, vanity, and knack for thriving amid conflict, Trump, who fights opponents with a fierce intensity that is often cruel and harsh, also possesses a firm but realistic sense of right and wrong influenced by a simple faith and bears a serious connection to everyday common people that springs from his past. 
  You will confidently discover, amidst the magic and the mayhem, the real man behind the myth. And in the process, you just might acquire a renewed or even novel appreciation for this American original.

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