Other books that might interest you

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  Stand Up! - How to Get Involved...

  Gordon Whitman

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  “Grassroots organizing is our best hope. If you're serious about making change from the bottom up, read Stand Up! and pass it on.”—Congressman Keith EllisonEach of us faces a moment of truth—at a time of crisis, do we stand up and speak out or retreat into our private lives? This book is for those frustrated by what they see happening in the world but not sure what they can do about it.Veteran organizer Gordon Whitman shows that we have the power we need to create a racially and economically just society. But it won't happen if we stay on the sidelines sharing social media posts and signing online petitions. We win only if we're willing to join other people in the kind of face-to-face organizing that has powered every successful social movement in history. Whitman describes five types of conversations that enable people to build organizations that can solve local problems and confront the greatest challenges facing our country—from gun violence to climate change. The book is a road map for standing up to the bullies who've hijacked our democracy and divided us against each other.Find your voice, make it heard, create lasting change, and live your purpose in the world!

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  Stories are Weapons -...

  Annalee Newitz

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  In Stories Are Weapons, Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America's deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin's Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America's secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there's a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry. 
   
   
   
  Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace.

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  I Am the Famous Carlos - A Novel...

  Christina Hoag

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  He was the most wanted man in the world for decades. Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born terrorist, carried out a wave of attacks across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. A ruthless self-proclaimed revolutionary and notorious womanizer, he claimed to fight for the Palestinian cause and communist ideology, but also worked as a mercenary for rogue regimes and organizations. After bursting onto the world stage with the 1975 OPEC siege in Vienna, where he took 60 hostages and killed three people, he managed to evade capture for two decades. Finally arrested in a daring raid in Sudan in 1994, he was brought to justice in France where he is serving three life sentences for his reign of terror. A novel based on the life of the pudgy Caracas schoolboy who became the world’s first celebrity terrorist.

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  The Union War

  Gary W. Gallagher

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  Even one hundred and fifty years later, we are haunted by the Civil War—by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary W. Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment. 
   
  In a searing analysis of the Civil War North as revealed in contemporary letters, diaries, and documents, Gallagher demonstrates that what motivated the North to go to war and persist in an increasingly bloody effort was primarily preservation of the Union. Devotion to the Union bonded nineteenth-century Americans in the North and West against a slaveholding aristocracy in the South and a Europe that seemed destined for oligarchy. Northerners believed they were fighting to save the republic, and with it the world's best hope for democracy. 
   
  Once we understand the centrality of union, we can in turn appreciate the force that made Northern victory possible: the citizen-soldier. Gallagher reveals how the massive volunteer army of the North fought to confirm American exceptionalism by salvaging the Union. Contemporary concerns have distorted the reality of nineteenth-century Americans, who embraced emancipation primarily to punish secessionists and remove slavery as a future threat to union—goals that emerged in the process of war. As Gallagher recovers why and how the Civil War was fought, we gain a more honest understanding of why and how it was won.

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  Heroic Failure - Brexit and the...

  Fintan O'Toole

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  A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book, from the author of Ship of Fools, about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. 
   
  In exploring the answers to the question: 'why did Britain vote leave?', Fintan O'Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps, and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. 
   
  "There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style" THE TIMES.

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  Limits of a Post-Soviet State -...

  Abel Polese

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  This book illustrates why and how informality in governance is not necessarily transitory or temporary, but a constant in most systems of the world. The difference between various administrative structures is not whether informality is present or not, but where, in which areas, it is located. The essays gathered in this volume demonstrate that, in some cases, informal mechanisms are self-protective, while, in others, they are perceived as ‘normal’ responses  and a set of tactics for individuals, classes, and communities to respond to unusual demands. Where expectations—of the state, a company, or some commission—are too far from citizens’ existing models of normative behavior, informal behavior continues to thrive. Indeed, new tactics are adopted in order to cope with disjunctions between theory and reality as well as to serve as contrasts to values imposed by a center of power, such as a central state, a city administration, or the management board of a large company. 
  
  The focus of the papers contained in this book is two-fold and rests on an analysis of phenomena manifesting themselves “beyond” and “in spite of” the state. The first part deals with areas where the state is not always, or only marginally, active whilst the second analyzes activities performed in conflict with state regulations, i.e. behavior often studied from a criminal and legal standpoint.

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