5 Politics, Sociology eBooks

Corn Flakes for Dinner: A heartbreaking comedy about family life by Aidan Comerford
Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (Modernity and Political Thought) by Kam Shapiro
The Occupy Movement Explained (Ideas Explained) by Nicholas Smaligo
Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI and the New York Intellectuals by John Rodden
Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 by Michael Staudenmaier

Corn Flakes for Dinner: A heartbreaking comedy about family life by Aidan Comerford
English | October 13th, 2017 | ASIN: B0765ZT7YZ, ISBN: 0717179036 | 288 Pages | EPUB | 1.75 MB
What do you do when both of your daughters have been diagnosed with autism, your wife is depressed and your job has been made redundant? You become a comedian!
After years of feeling like he was losing at life, Aidan Comerford was on top of the world. He had just stepped off stage after being crowned the winner of So You Think You’re Funny? at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014, joining previous winners such as Peter Kay, Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan. This was it! His big break.
Back in Ireland, on the same day, at a remote country cottage near a lake, his daughter went missing .
A funny, heartfelt and uplifting memoir about the challenges and adventures of parenting, and accepting that sometimes you have to have Corn Flakes for dinner.

Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (Modernity and Political Thought) by Kam Shapiro
English | July 25, 2008 | ISBN: 0742533417, 0742533425 | EPUB | 152 pages | 0.4 MB
This book explores Carl Schmitt's efforts to distinguish sources of sovereignty and political identity in an age of rapid and volatile social change. In Schmitt writings, Shapiro finds a dynamic conception of the relationship between political power and social form, organic traditions and their strategic deployment. As these writings indicate, the political constitution of a sovereign people involves the channeling of attachments and antagonisms of various kinds.
The book explicates this process as it appears in changing contexts, following Schmitt's turn from Catholic politics to secular nationalism, and finally beyond the nation-state during and after the Second World War. These shifts in Schmitt's approach reflect a general intensification of politics as its grounds are rendered increasingly fluid and volatile by accelerated movements of finance, warfare and communication. The result is a both a transformation in the practice of government - requiring flexible and rapid adjustments to changes across the globe - and in the nature of legitimacy, whereby an ethos of belief grounded in relatively stable cultural and social rituals is supplanted by a more fluid and mobile pathos of identification.

The Occupy Movement Explained (Ideas Explained) by Nicholas Smaligo
English | September 16, 2014 | ISBN: 081269855X | EPUB | 288 pages | 0.7 MB
A readable, compact account and analysis of the Occupy protests, The Occupy Movement Explained is thoroughly researched, painstakingly accurate, and fully documented. Debunking a number of prominent myths and misunderstandings, Nicholas Smaligo shows how the movement arose out of radical currents that have been active below the media's radar since the 1970s. Occupiers are not all the same, and the author reviews some of the debates and changes within the movement.
The occupations began under a slogan that conjured up a naive sense of unity — "We Are the 99%!" It did not take very long for that sense of unity to give way to an appreciation of just how socially, economically, and ideologically fragmented American society is. For some, this was an excuse to return to their cynicism; for others, it was an invitation to lose their illusions and begin to see the world from the viewpoint of political activists.
The Occupy Movement Explained describes this process of education and the lessons learned about "the 99%," the police, direct democracy, political demands, and the intimately related questions of social change, violence, and property.

Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI and the New York Intellectuals by John Rodden
English | January 18, 2017 | ISBN: 0252040473, 0252081943 | EPUB | 152 pages | 3.5 MB
Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of intellectual fellow travelers bent on painting the world red.
John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents’ hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government dossiers and archives, Rodden focuses on the onetime members of a radical political sect of ex-Trotskyists (barely numbering a thousand at its height), the so-called New York intellectuals. He describes the nonsensical decades-long pursuit of this group of intellectuals, especially Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe. The Keystone Cops style of numerous FBI agents is documented carefully in Rodden's meticulous case studies of how Hoover's men recruited informants to snoop on the "Commies," opened their personal mail, tracked their movements, and reported on their wives and friends.

Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 by Michael Staudenmaier
English | June 5, 2012 | ISBN: 1849350973 | EPUB | 304 pages | 2.5 MB
Founded in Chicago in 1969 from the rubble of the recently crumbled SDS, the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) brought working-class consciousness to the forefront of New Left discourse, sending radicals back into the factories and thinking through the integration of radical politics into everyday realities. Through the influence of founding members like Noel Ignatiev and Don Hamerquist, STO took a Marxist approach to the question of race and revolution, exploring the notion of “white skin privilege,” and helping to lay the groundwork for the discipline of critical race studies.