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  Glorious Lessons - John Trumbull...

  Richard Brookhiser

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  The complicated life and legacy of John Trumbull, whose paintings portrayed both the struggle and the principles that distinguished America's founding moment 
   
   
    
  John Trumbull (1756–1843) experienced the American Revolution firsthand—he served as aid to George Washington and Horatio Gates, was shot at, and was jailed as a spy. He made it his mission to record the war, giving visual form to what most citizens of the new United States thought: that they had brought into the world a great and unprecedented political experiment. His purpose, he wrote, was "to preserve and diffuse the memory of the noblest series of actions which have ever presented themselves in the history of man." Although Trumbull's contemporaries viewed him as a painter, Trumbull thought of himself as a historian. 
   
   
    
  Richard Brookhiser tells Trumbull's story of acclaim and recognition, a story complicated by provincialism, war, a messy personal life, and, ultimately, changing fashion. He shows how the artist's fifty-year project embodied the meaning of American exceptionalism and played a key role in defining the values of the new country. Trumbull depicted the story of self-rule in the modern world—a story as important and as contested today as it was 250 years ago.

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  Of Consolation - To Marcia To...

  Seneca the Younger

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  These three ‘Consolations’, written by Seneca to his mother and two friends, have been described as ‘the crowning achievement in the canon of ‘consolation letters’. But sentimental they are not, for they emerge from the writer’s deep-seated commitment to Stoicism, where individuals are exhorted to inhabit qualities of virtue, positivity, resilience, and indifference. This recording opens with Seneca’s consolatory letter to Marcia, who, after three years, was still mourning the death of her son. He recognises her exceptional personal qualities and what benefits she has brought to her family, having rescued her father’s legacy as a historian following his death. He cites other noble Roman mothers who lost their sons, and enjoins her to adopt a more Stoic attitude of mind: we are all destined to die, he declares.  
  The second letter is to his mother sent after he had been exiled to Corsica by Emperor Caligula. He counsels Helvia not to mourn his absence – not least because he himself does not feel grief at the prospect of his own exile. He acknowledges the trials of his mother during her life, remarking ‘ill-fortune has given you no respite’. But her grief at the absence of her son may be put to one side in the knowledge that as he has ‘never trusted in Fortune,’ she can be comforted that her son is not discommoded. And history points to far harsher separations.  
  The final letter is to Polybius, Emperor Claudius’s Literary Secretary, who was mourning his brother.  Written while in exile, Seneca’s unwavering commitment to Stoic philosophy is again in evidence. One of Seneca’s principal suggestions is for Polybius to distract himself from grief by an increasing involvement in work.  
  These ‘Consolations’ have been widely admired from Classical times to the present, but are periodically questioned for their emphasis on a somewhat detached approach to grief and bereavement. Not all can manage imperturbability in such circumstances. Nevertheless, there is a steadiness and emotional calm in these missives, which Seneca himself displayed when ordered to commit suicide by Emperor Nero.

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  The Price of Misfortune - Rights...

  Daniel Platt

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  A history of the struggle for debtors’ rights from the Civil War to the Great Depression 
   
  What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors’ rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law. 
    
  Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure. He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors, keeping them secure in their labor, property, and personhood. Yet, as Platt demonstrates, those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower someone who was white, propertied, and male. In subsequent decades, the emancipatory promise of debtors’ rights would be tested as women, wage earners, and African Americans seized on their language to challenge other structural inequalities: the dependency of marriage, the exploitation of industrial capitalism, and the oppression of Jim Crow. By reconstructing these forgotten developments—and recovering the experiences of indebted farmwives, sharecroppers, and wage workers—The Price of Misfortune narrates a new history of inequality, coercion, and law amid the early financialization of American capitalism.

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  Inflation - A Guide for Users...

  Nicolò Fraccaroli, Mark Blyth

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  Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis. 
   
   
   
  Leading political economists Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli reveal why inflation really happens, challenge how we think about it, and argue for fresh approaches to combat it. With accessible and engaging commentary, and a good dose of humor, Blyth and Fraccaroli bring the complexities of economic policy and inflation indices down to earth. 
   
   
   
  Climate shocks, demographic change, geopolitical tensions, and politicians promising to upend the global order are all combining to create a more inflationary future, making a new paradigm for understanding inflation urgently necessary. Astute, timely, and engaging, Inflation is a must-listen for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping our economy and politics.

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  My Time as a Second Class Citizen

  E. Stevens

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  Prison. The word conjures up thoughts of oppression, violence, and misery. An apt description. Follow along the personal experiences of a former police officer, who found out firsthand what it means when the law does not factor the intent of the criminal, forcing him to plead guilty to a crime that was unwittingly committed. From a corrupt system to vile living conditions, from apathetic corrections officers to a system that does nothing to rehabilitate men, learn one man’s experience just trying to survive the Michigan Department of Corrections…all while keeping his sanity, attempting to piece together a failing marriage and hoping to be reunited with a father he just met before it’s too late.

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  Inside the NRA - Armed and...

  Jack Anderson

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  A chilling examination of the NRA and its powerful influence on America.In 1996, deaths by gun violence in the United States totaled roughly 14,000. With so many casualties— along with an astounding rise of armed militias and the discovery of huge caches of weapons stockpiled in private residences— Americans were forced to re-examine what it meant to have the "right to bear arms." The scrutinizing public eye wasted no time in looking for answers from the National Rifle Association, a group whose foundation and lifeblood is founded in the Second Amendment. Famed muckraker Jack Anderson went behind the scenes of the NRA to produce this blistering expose. Nearly thirty years later— as gun violence has escalated and America endures mass shootings on an almost weekly basis— Anderson' s scathing portrait of the NRA rings as true as ever.

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