5 Politics, Sociology eBooks (27)

K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist by Peter Carlson
A Less Perfect Union: The Case for States' Rights by Adam Freedman
Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence, and Empire by Reese Erlich and Baer Robert
Jared Yates Sexton, "The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage"
Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed–and Why It Still Matters by Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles

K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist by Peter Carlson
English | July 6, 2010 | ISBN: 1586488465 | EPUB | 352 pages | 2.2 MB
Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted. Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe.
K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communist's road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in America, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America.

A Less Perfect Union: The Case for States' Rights by Adam Freedman
English | June 30, 2015 | ISBN: 0062269941 | EPUB | 368 pages | 0.4 MB
One of America’s leading conservative commentators on constitutional law provides an illuminating history of states’ rights, and the vital importance of reviving them today.
Liberals believe that the argument for “states’ rights” is a smokescreen for racist repression. But historically, the doctrine of states’ rights has been an honorable tradition—a necessary component of constitutional government and a protector of American freedoms. Our Constitution is largely devoted to restraining the federal government and protecting state sovereignty. Yet for decades, Adam Freedman contends, the federal government has usurped rights that belong to the states in a veritable coup.
In A Less Perfect Union, Freedman provides a detailed and lively history of the development and creation of states’ rights, from the constitutional convention through the Civil War and the New Deal to today. Surveying the latest developments in Congress and the state capitals, he finds a growing sympathy for states’ rights on both sides of the aisle. Freedman makes the case for a return to states’ rights as the only way to protect America, to serve as a check against the tyranny of federal overreach, take power out of the hands of the special interests and crony capitalists in Washington, and realize the Founders’ vision of libertarian freedom—a nation in which states are free to address the health, safety, and economic well-being of their citizens without federal coercion and crippling bureaucratic red tape.

Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence, and Empire by Reese Erlich and Baer Robert
English | 2010 | ISBN: 113846788X, 0982417136 | 191 pages | PDF | 3 MB
Drawing on original research and firsthand interviews, Conversations with Terrorists offers critical portraits of six Middle Eastern leaders often labeled as terrorists: Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, Hamas top leader Khaled Meshal, Israeli politician Geula Cohen, Iranian Revolutionary Guard founder Mohsen Sazargara, Hezbollah spiritual advisor Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Fadlallah, and former Afghan Radio and Television Ministry head Malamo Nazamy.
Veteran journalist Reese Erlich offers them a chance to explain key issues and to respond to charges leveled by the United States. Critiquing these responses and synthesizing a broad range of material, Erlich shows that yesterday’s terrorist is today’s national leader, and that today’s freedom fighter may become tomorrow’s terrorist. He concludes that the global war on terror has diverted public attention from the war’s real goal—expanding U.S. influence and interests in the Middle East—and offers policy remedies.

Jared Yates Sexton, "The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage"
ISBN: 1619029561 | 2017 | EPUB | 320 pages | 3 MB
"An impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race . . . Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate’s presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election . . . This book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville . . . [His] dispatches are bracing." ―The Washington Post
When he agreed to cover the 2016 election season, journalist Jared Yates Sexton didn't know he was stepping into what would become―for both political parties―the most rageful and divisive political circus in U.S. history.
His initial dispatches showed Democrats at war with their establishment, coming apart at the seams over the long-gestating ascendancy of Hillary Clinton and the upstart momentum of Bernie Sanders, whose grassroots campaign provoked uprisings of people desperate for change. Then, on June 14, Sexton attended a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to witness these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over 1 million times, his reporting was soon featured in The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for The New York Times. Sexton gained more than 18,000 followers on Twitter in a matter of days, and received online harassments, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever.
The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that divided both parties and powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization―a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers.
Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer―books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life―The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.

Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed–and Why It Still Matters by Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles
English | 2012 | ISBN: 0061986445, 0061986453 | 448 pages | EPUB | 9,3 MB
Oklahoma City is a riveting account of one of the deadliest acts of terrorism on American soil, combining groundbreaking investigative research with a thrilling and true conspiracy story that has implications for national security and law enforcement today.
April 19, 1995: Timothy McVeigh drove into downtown Oklahoma City in a rented Ryder truck containing a fertilizer bomb that he and his army buddy Terry Nichols had made the previous day. He parked, hopped out of the truck, and walked away. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the bomb obliterated one-third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including 19 infants and toddlers.
Weaving together key elements of personal correspondence with co-defendant Terry Nichols, hundreds of hours of interviews, and thousands of government documents, Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed—and Why It Still Matters by investigative reporter Andrew Gumbel and retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel Roger G. Charles is a riveting piece of journalism and a cautionary tale for our times.