Publisher: Project Gutenberg
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Like a nonfiction version of All the King's Men, The Politician offers a truly disturbing, even shocking, perspective on the risks taken and tactics employed by a man determined to rule the most powerful nation on earth. Idealistic and ambitious, Andrew Young volunteered for the John Edwards campaign for Senate in 1998 and quickly became the candidate's right-hand man. As the senator became a national star, Young's responsibilities grew. For a decade he was this politician's confidant, and he was assured he was "like family." In time, however, Young was drawn into a series of questionable assignments that culminated with Edwards asking him to help conceal the senator's ongoing adultery. Days before the 2008 presidential primaries began, Young gained international notoriety when he told the world that he was the father of a child being carried by a woman named Rielle Hunter, who was actually the senator's mistress. While Young began a life on the run, hiding from the press with his family and alleged mistress, John Edwards continued to pursue the presidency and then the vice presidency in the future Obama administration.Young had been the senator's closest aide and most trusted friend. He believed that John Edwards could be a great president and was assured throughout the cover-up that his boss and friend would ultimately step forward to both tell the truth and protect his aide's career. Neither promise was kept.Not only is The Politician a moving personal account of Andrew Young's political education, but it also offers a look at the trajectory that made John Edwards the ideal Democratic candidate for president and the hubris that brought him down, leaving his career, his marriage, and his dreams in ashes.Show book
With a new foreword: The New York Times–bestselling biography of President Lyndon Johnson from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Team of Rivals. Featuring a 2018 foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning political historian that celebrates a reappraisal of Lyndon Johnson’s legacy five decades after his presidency, from the vantage point of our current, profoundly altered political culture and climate, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s extraordinary and insightful biography draws from meticulous research in addition to the author’s time spent working at the White House from 1967 to 1969. After Johnson’s term ended, Goodwin remained his confidante and assisted in the preparation of his memoir. In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, she traces the 36th president’s life from childhood to his early days in politics, and from his leadership of the Senate to his presidency, analyzing his dramatic years in the White House, including both his historic domestic triumphs and his failures in Vietnam. Drawing on personal anecdotes and candid conversation with Johnson, Goodwin paints a rich and complicated portrait of one of our nation’s most compelling politicians in “the most penetrating, fascinating political biography I have ever read” (The New York Times).Show book
America's runaway inequality has an engine: our unjust tax system.Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the ultra-rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile, working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice presents a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation, written by two economists who revolutionized the study of inequality. Eschewing anecdotes and case studies, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman offer a comprehensive view of America's tax system, based on new statistics covering all taxes paid at all levels of government. Their conclusion? For the first time in more than a century, billionaires now pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.Blending history and cutting-edge economic analysis, and writing in lively and jargon-free prose, Saez and Zucman dissect the deliberate choices (and sins of indecision) that have brought us to today: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax avoidance industry; and the spiral of tax competition among nations. With clarity and concision, they explain how America turned away from the most progressive tax system in history to embrace policies that only serve to compound the wealth of a few.Show book
A comprehensive guide to counterterrorism units around the world, and their recruitment, training, weapons, equipment, tactics, and missions. In the past thirty-five years, counterterrorist units have been deployed to deal with airplane, ship, train, and bus hijackings. They have rescued hostages in various types of buildings and have dealt with barricaded bank robbers, prison rioters, and assorted dangerous criminals. Thousands have been rescued and millions have been safer because terrorists were aware that elite antiterrorist units were poised to act should they take hostages. Following the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centre, the mission of many anti-terrorist units has expanded. Some units now track terrorists to their lairs in other countries and strike them there. Despite the significant and growing role of these units, little is known about the way they operate. The selection, training, structure, and principles of maintaining such units, together with basic theories of asymmetric warfare are the subject of Thompson’s latest work. In a practical, step-by-step guide he analyses the necessary organization of such elite teams, the arming and equipping of units, and methods for a variety of missions from hostage rescue and high-level dignitary protection to securing foreign embassies and counter–WMD strikes. Open the pages of this book and enter the world of the counterterrorist operator.Praise for The Counter Terrorist Manual “A finely illustrated guidebook to antiterrorist units deployed to handle airplane, ship, train and bus hijackings. Units around the world are examined in a survey of these elite antiterrorist units and their operations, a pick for any military library and packed with color photos of equipment and more.” —Midwest Book ReviewShow book
The words of China's most famous political prisonerIn Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in reeducation camps. One of the incarcerated—whose sentence, unlike most others, has no end date—is Ilham Tohti, an intellectual and economist, a prolific writer, and formerly the host of a website, Uyghur Online. In 2014, Tohti was arrested; accused of advocating separatism, violence, and the overthrow of the Chinese government; subjected to a two-day trial; and sentenced to life. Nothing has been heard from him since.Here are Tohti's own words, a collection of his plain-spoken calls for justice, scholarly explanations of the history of Xinjiang, and poignant personal reflections. While his courage and outspokenness about the plight of China's Muslim minorities is extraordinary, these essays sound a measured insistence on peace and just treatment for the Uyghurs.Winner of the PEN/Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought while imprisoned, this book is the only way to hear from a man who has been called "a Uyghur Mandela."Show book
Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. In Cogs and Monsters, Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems—but also opportunities—facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world's crises.Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are "cogs"—self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by "monsters"—untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. What is worse, by treating people as cogs, economics is creating its own monsters, leaving itself without the tools to understand the new problems it faces. In response, Coyle asks whether economic individualism is still valid in the digital economy, whether we need to measure growth and progress in new ways, and whether economics can ever be objective, since it influences what it analyzes.Filled with original insights, Cogs and Monsters offers a road map for how economics can adapt to the rewiring of society, including by digital technologies, and realize its potential to play a hugely positive role in the twenty-first century.Show book
