29 Best General, Political Science Books

On December 26, 1991, an event of extraordinary importance in universal history took place.

It involved the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an event of enormous repercussions that almost no one had anticipated. In fact, only the historian Andrei Amalrik and Nobel laureate and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, two Russian dissidents, had enough courage and vision to forecast that such a seismic event would take place.

Although it is indisputable that the Cold War had come to an end, there are more than a few who intend to continue analyzing the current global situation from the perspective of a historical period that ended four decades ago. Claiming to understand the present with the paradigms of the Cold War–even to a large extent with those espoused by the Left and Right–is a very serious mistake with consequences that are extremely harmful. History has continued to move forward, and just as it would have been foolish to claim to understand Europe of the end of the nineteenth century on the basis of what life was like for Napoleon, who was finally dethroned in 1815; it is absurd, and even ridiculous, to try to understand our world on the basis of what the Cold War entailed.

Is a fight against equality and for privilege a fight for religious supremacy? A constitutional attorney dives into the debate on religious liberty, the modern attempt to weaponize religious freedom, and the Supreme Court’s role in that “crusade.”
Critically acclaimed author and constitutional attorney Andrew L. Seidel looks at some of the key Supreme Court cases of the last thirty years–including Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (a bakery can deny making a wedding cake for a gay couple), Trump v. Hawaii (the anti-Muslim travel ban case), American Legion v. American Humanist Association (related to a group maintaining a 40-foot Christian cross on government-owned land), and Tandon v. Newsom (a Santa Clara Bible group exempted from Covid health restrictions)–and how a hallowed legal protection, freedom of religion, has been turned into a tool to advance privilege and impose religion on others. The book will include a foreword by noted constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky.

A prize-winning historian chronicles a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans’ freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way.

American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom–their freedom to dominate others.

In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize Native lands, champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction, question the New Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement.

A riveting history of the long-running clash between white people and federal authority, this book radically shifts our understanding of what freedom means in America.

These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of half a century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues. The sources range from Dr. Sowell’s letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from late-talking children to tax cuts for the rich, baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians. These topics are dealt with by drawing sometimes on history, sometimes on economics, and sometimes on a sense of humor.

There are only two ways that humans work together: they cooperate with one another, or they coerce one another. And once you realize this fundamental fact, it will change how you see the world.

In this myth-busting book, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan display their wisdom and talent for explaining complex topics, which have attracted a devoted audience to their weekly podcast, Words & Numbers, and made them popular speakers around the country.

By looking for cooperation and coercion in everyday life, they help make sense of a wide range of issues that dominate the public debate. You’ll come away from this book with a clear understanding of everything from the minimum wage to taxes, from gun control to government regulations, from the War on Terror to the War on Drugs to the War on Poverty.

It turns out that coercion is necessary…sometimes. Even in a democracy, we all abide by rules, including plenty that we don’t agree with, in the name of getting along.

But in the end, Davies and Harrigan show that cooperation, without question, is the key to human happiness and progress. The more we encourage it, the better off we all are.

An audio-only collection published in partnership with CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

Barack Obama: The 60 Minutes Interviews offers an unprecedented glimpse into the Obama presidency, through a series of extended interviews presented with new commentary by award-winning 60 Minutes veteran Steve Kroft.

Kroft conducted more one-on-one television interviews with Barack Obama than any other journalist, from a January 2007 conversation on the eve of his unlikely candidacy to the 44th president’s final White House interview a decade later.

Collected here on audio, in chronological order, these conversations reveal Obama’s evolution from idealistic young senator to galvanizing candidate to two-term president. They also capture the development of the remarkable, decade-long dynamic between journalist and subject that created the atmosphere in which the first draft of history could be spoken aloud as it was unfolding.

In new material written and recorded for this program, Kroft places each of the seventeen segments in historical context, bringing listeners on a one-of-a-kind journey through the Obama presidency. To listen to these conversations is to relive the turning points of a tumultuous ten years. You’ll hear revelatory conversations in which Obama and Kroft are joined by then VP candidate Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And you’ll sense the growing power of political forces that continue to shape our discourse today.

More than anything, these conversations return listeners to the company of the man who so memorably moved, challenged, and inspired the nation. At a moment when questions of leadership are in the forefront of our national conversation, his voice is truly one for our time.

A fascinating, original, and highly readable book that makes a meaningful contribution to understanding the Lost Cause and Civil War memory

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal but it was founded on falsehoods.

The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and have been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day.

Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war’s cause, Reconstruction, and slavery–as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies–were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history’s greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners.

Domby shows how the dubious concept of “Black Confederates” was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as “loyal slaves.”

The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.

Thomas Sowell has a different idea about how economics should be taught. With this groundbreaking introduction to economics, Sowell has thrown out the graphs, statistics, and jargon. Learning economics, he believes, should be relaxing–and even enjoyable.

Sowell reveals the general principles behind any kind of economy–capitalist, socialist, feudal, and so on. In understandable language, he shows how to critique economic policies in terms of the incentives they create rather than the goals they proclaim. With clear explanations of the entire field, from rent control and the rise and fall of businesses to the international balance of payments, this is the first book for anyone who wishes to understand how the economy functions.

In this edition, Basic Economics has been revised and expanded to address the new concerns of the twenty-first century. It’s focus has become more international, including the range of economic problems faced by foreign countries around the world. Each chapter reflects the experiences of many different peoples and cultures. In his straightforward style, Sowell demonstrates that the basic principles of economics are not confined by national borders.

As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment–halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist–usually queer, anticapitalist, grassroots, and women of color–organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but a recognition of a stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.

Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant, community-based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.

El 26 de diciembre 1991, tuvo lugar un hecho de extraordinaria importancia en la Historia universal. Se trato de la disolucion de la Union Sovietica, un acontecimiento de enormes repercusiones que pocos habian previsto. A decir verdad, solo el historiador Andrei Amalrik y el premio Nobel Alexander Solzhenitsyn , disidentes rusos, habian tenido el valor y la vision para anunciar que semejante seismo tendria lugar. Aunque es indiscutible que la Guerra fria concluyo, no son pocos los que pretenden seguir analizando la situacion actual del globo desde la perspectiva de un periodo historico que termino hace cuatro decadas. Pretender comprender el presente con paradigmas de la Guerra fria – incluso con los de izquierdas y derechas – constituye una equivocacion de consecuencias perjudiciales. La Historia ha seguido avanzando y al igual que habria constituido una necedad pretender comprender la Europa de finales del siglo XIX sobre lo que fue la vida de Napoleon, destronado definitivamente en 1815, es absurdo, e incluso ridiculo, entender nuestro mundo sobre la base de la Guerra fria. Nuestro mundo ha seguido cambiando desde 1991 y lo que resulta aun mas relevante es que ese conjunto de cambios es constante e implica desafios colosales con los que nunca antes ha tenido que enfrentarse el genero humano. Lejos de ser la democracia y la libertad realidades que se imponen de manera casi natural, lo cierto es que se encuentran mas amenazadas que nunca y que esa amenaza no solo es externa sino, en buena medida, tambien interna. Un mundo que cambia es un intento de explicar que es verdaderamente la democracia y su fragilidad, y que es la agenda globalista, la cual amenaza a el patriotismo y la continuidad de la misma democracia.

American Exception seeks to explain the breakdown of US democracy, to understand the uncanny continuity of American foreign policy, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power into an overworld of the corporate rich.

To trace the evolution of the American state, Aaron Good takes a deep-politics approach. The term “deep state” was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it here refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions.

Key institutions involve the relationships between the overworld of the corporate rich, the underworld of organized crime, and the national security actors that mediate between them. History-making interventions include the toppling of foreign governments, the launching of aggressive wars, and the political assassinations of the 1960s.

In its long history before World War II, the United States had a deep political system, a system of governance in which decision-making and enforcement were carried out within–and outside of–public institutions. It was a system that always included some degree of secretive collusion and law-breaking. After World War II, US elites decided to pursue global dominance over the international capitalist system.

Setting aside the liberal rhetoric, this project was pursued in a manner that was by and large imperialistic rather than progressive. To administer this covert empire, US elites created a massive national security state characterized by unprecedented levels of secrecy and lawlessness. The “Global Communist Conspiracy” provided a pretext for exceptionism–an endless “exception” to the rule of law. What gradually emerged after World War II was a tripartite state system of governance. The open democratic state and the authoritarian security state were both increasingly dominated by an American deep state.

Aaron Good concludes by assessing the prospects for a revival of US democracy.

This classic work of political theory and practice offers an account of the modern Machiavellians, a remarkable group who have been influential in Europe and practically unknown in the United States. The book devotes a long section to Machiavelli himself as well as to such modern Machiavellians as Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham contends that the writings of these men hold the key both to the truth about politics and to the preservation of political liberty.

“An original book…about individuals who used ideas to change the world” (The New Yorker)–the fascinating exploration into the creation and history of the Paris Peace Pact, an often overlooked but transformative treaty that laid the foundation for the international system we live under today.

In 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within the year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, had been ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal. But within a decade of its signing, each state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war. And in the century that followed, the Peace Pact was dismissed as an act of folly and an unmistakable failure. This book argues that the Peace Pact ushered in a sustained march toward peace that lasts to this day.

A “thought-provoking and comprehensively researched book” (The Wall Street Journal), The Internationalists tells the story of the Peace Pact through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals. It reveals the centuries-long struggle of ideas over the role of war in a just world order. It details the brutal world of conflict the Peace Pact helped extinguish, and the subsequent era where tariffs and sanctions take the place of tanks and gunships.

The Internationalists is “indispensable” (The Washington Post). Accessible and gripping, this book will change the way we view the history of the twentieth century–and how we must work together to protect the global order the internationalists fought to make possible. “A fascinating and challenging book, which raises gravely important issues for the present…Given the state of the world, The Internationalists has come along at the right moment” (The Financial Times).

Published in 1922 during those dark and dreary years of socialism’s near-complete triumph, Socialism stunned the socialist world. Mises has given us a profoundly important treatise that assaults socialism in all its guises, a work that discusses every major aspect of socialism and leaves no stone unturned. A few of the numerous topics discussed include the success of socialist ideas; life under socialism: art and literature, science and journalism; economic calculation under socialism; the ideal of equality; and Marx’s theory of monopolies.

With this monumental work, Mises laid the foundations for free society. Socialism has influenced scores of influential thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman. It is read over and over again today, all over the world, inspiring throngs of new defenders of freedom.

The long-awaited new book on how to fix our broken government by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia.

In his #1 bestsellers Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia, Mark R. Levin has all but predicted the current assault on our individual liberties, state sovereignty, and the social compact–the inevitable result of an all-powerful, ubiquitous central government. Fortunately, such dire circumstances were anticipated by the Founding Fathers, who gave us the means to amend the Constitution in order to preserve our rights and prevent governmental behemoths. Here, Levin turns to the Constitution and its Framers to lay forth eleven specific prescriptions, thoughtfully constructed within the Framers’ design, for restoring the American Republic. His proposals are pure common sense, ideas shared by many–such as term limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices and limits on federal taxing and spending–that draw on the wisdom of James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others. With The Liberty Amendments, the American people can take the first step toward reclaiming what belongs to them.

From “the great storyteller of Russian history” comes a brilliantly colored account of the myths that have shaped and reshaped Russia’s identity and politics from its founding

Who were the Rus, the ancient tribe from which the Russians trace their origins? Were they Baltic Slavs, hailing from within the territory that would become Russia? Or were they Vikings from Scandinavia, who came in from the outside to organize chaotic warring groups? Russians initially embraced the former theory, following a surge in nationalist sentiment, but autocrats, including Catherine the Great, came to trumpet the latter, which supported the notion that the Russian people are incapable of self-governance. Both sides were using history to create myths, narratives of national identity that could be deployed for their own political ends.

The Story of Russia is about how the Russians defined themselves–and repeatedly reinvented such definitions along the way. Moving from Russia’s agrarian beginnings in the first millennium to subsequent periods of monarchy, totalitarianism, and perestroika, all the way up to Vladimir Putin and his use of myths of Russian history to bolster his regime, celebrated historian Orlando Figes examines the ideas that have guided the country’s actions: the need for autocracy to rule Russia’s vast land; the veneration of the “Holy Tsar” and the cult of the leader; the belief in an essentially Russian collectivist spirit; and the oscillation between Russia’s European and Eurasian character.

With beautiful writing and alluring perspectives, The Story of Russia is as much about the myths and ideologies that have shaped Russian history–about the ways the Russians have interpreted their past–as it is about the events, institutions, social groups, and leaders that have made that history. And as modern Russia retreats from Europe, this authoritative account of Russia’s past might well elucidate its future.

In his book debut, Newsmax TV anchor and WABC Radio host Greg Kelly delivers a stirring defense of American law enforcement and a warning about what happens when they are defunded and derided.

As the son of celebrated NYPD commissioner, Ray Kelly, and a former lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, Greg Kelly has had a firsthand look at the critical importance of law enforcement in America. From police to border control and beyond, these men and women provide a fundamental service for our country. In a nation divided, progressives want to abolish the very organizations that keep us safe. Kelly expertly reveals their indispensability. Both a celebration and a call to action, Justice for All is perfect for fans of Mark Levin, Greg Gutfield, and Sean Hannity.

Over recent years, Kelly has followed the mounting attack on law enforcement in his reporting, and he’s felt its effects in his own life and family. Now, he stands up to the mob calling to defund the police and offers a galvanizing voice for police officers, veterans, and all agents of law and order and their families. Justice For All delivers a passionate defense of service, and an impossible to ignore examination of how critical law enforcement is for America’s survival, and how foolish it is to defund, malign, and delegitimize it.

Geert Wilders is a hunted man. He lives in a heavily protected safe house that is bombproof and bulletproof. Why? Because Geert Wilders is marked for death by Islamic extremists. In his new book, Marked for Death, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders tells his never-before-published story about the jihad being waged against him—and the West. Revealing how he has been censored, bullied, threatened, and even banished from the UK for politically opposing Islam and for telling the truth about its violent history and nature, Wilders explains why what has happened to him is happening all across the West—and why Americans need to stop the infiltration of radical Islam now. Marked for Death is an eye-opening account of a man who has sacrificed life as he knew it to tell the truth about radical Islam.

This title offers a withering and clear-eyed critique about–but not for–intellectuals that explores their impact on public opinion, policy, and society at large.

The thesis ofIntellectuals and Societystates that the influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers.It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals.Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by them.

Intellectuals and Societynot only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated, but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged.One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proven not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society–and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

Alice Walker made history in 1982 when she became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, both for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan Era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the jazz-age novel tells the story of an African-American woman haunted by domestic and sexual violence.

Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel, showing how it has influenced and been informed by the zeitgeist of the time. The Color Purple received both praise and criticism upon publication, and the conversation it sparked around race and gender still continues today. It has been adapted for an Oscar-nominated film and a hit Broadway musical.

Through interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and others, as well as archival research, Tillet studies Walker’s life and the origins of her subjects, including violence, sexuality, gender, and politics. Reading The Color Purple at age fifteen was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her–as a sexual-violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic. Provocative and personal, In Search of the Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual.

How should society be organized? Most of us would point to the necessity of a traditionally structured government comprising trustworthy elected representatives who watch over the masses almost like responsible parents. However, throughout history we’ve seen such governments abuse their power to enact incalculable damage. In the most extreme cases, governments have been responsible for brainwashing, slavery, and genocide; and in more subtle instances, civil liberties are slowly eroded. Democracies aren’t immune from these dangers, either.

In An End to Upside Down Liberty, award-winning author Mark Gober explains why the institution of government–a monopolistic body with which citizens have no explicit contractual relationship–is inherently hazardous to our freedom. He explores an alternative governing framework that stresses the importance of private-property rights and voluntary exchanges and examines the potential to privatize the government’s poorly managed public sector. But unlike most political and economic discussions, Gober goes a step further by introducing metaphysics into the mix. He draws from the extensive body of scientific evidence covered in his two previous books–including near-death-experience research–to explore the nature of reality, consciousness, and why we exist. This comprehensive approach can be used to steer humanity’s future away from enslavement … and toward liberty. The stakes are high, and the message is urgent. You won’t look at the world the same way after reading this book.

Debtors have been mocked, scolded, and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority of people into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: where would the money go and who would benefit from the bailout?The truth is that there has never been a lack of money for things like housing, education, and health care. Millions of people never needed to be forced into debt for those things in the first place.Armed with this knowledge, a militant debtors movement has the potential to rewrite the contract and assure that no one has to mortgage their future to survive.

Debtors of the world must unite.

As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful.

In his acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller, Mark R. Levin explores the psychology, motivations, and history of the utopian movement, its architects–the Founding Fathers, and its modern-day disciples–and how the individual and American society are being devoured by it.

Levin asks, what is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? Levin digs deep into the past and draws astoundingly relevant parallels to contemporary America from Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, as well as from the critical works of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other philosophical pioneers who brilliantly diagnosed the nature of man and government. As Levin meticulously pursues his subject, the reader joins him in an enlightening and compelling journey. And in the end, Levin’s message is clear: the American republic is in great peril. The people must now choose between utopianism or liberty.

President Ronald Reagan warned, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Levin agrees, and with Ameritopia, delivers another modern political classic, an indispensable guide for America in our time and in the future.

New York Times bestselling journalist John Stossel shows how the expansion of government control is destructive for American society.

Politicians–and we voters–can dream of guaranteed incomes or green energy. But the mature response to cries of “Yes, we can!” should be “No, we can’t”–not when “we” means government. There is nothing that government can do that we cannot do better as free individuals. –John Stossel in No, They Can’t

John Stossel debunks the most revered of society’s sacred cows in this spirited New York Times bestseller: our belief that government can solve our problems. Stossel insists that we discard the myth of the “perfect” government–left or right–and retrain our brain to rethink our lives as independent individuals in light of such topics as

HEALTH CARE * DEFENSE SPENDING

JOB CREATION * GUN CONTROL

PUBLIC EDUCATION * ENERGY

MINIMUM-WAGE LAWS * CLIMATE CHANGE

THE NATIONAL DEBT * POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

THE ASSAULT ON FOOD . . . and much more!

What happened to Rudy Giuliani?

Andrew Kirtzman, who has been following Giuliani since the 1990s, answers that question in this “masterful and engrossing” (The Guardian) biography that “cuts through the myth and caricature that has too often defined Giuliani” (Los Angeles Times).

Rudy Giuliani was hailed after 9/11 as “America’s Mayor,” a national hero who, at the time, was more widely admired than the pope. He was brilliant, accomplished–and complicated. He conflated politics with morality, made reckless personal choices, and engaged in self-destructive behavior. A series of disastrous decisions and cynical compromises, coupled with his need for power, money, and attention gradually ruined his reputation, cost him political support, and ultimately damaged the country.

Kirtzman, who was with Giuliani at the World Trade Center on 9/11, conducted hundreds of interviews to give us an insightful portrait of this polarizing figure from the beginning of his rise to his high-profile role as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. Giuliani was a celebrated prosecutor, a transformative New York City mayor, and a contender for the presidency. But by the end of the Trump presidency, he was reviled and ridiculed after a series of embarrassing errors and misjudgments. He was a significant figure in both of Trump’s impeachments and ended up widely ostracized, facing both legal jeopardy and financial ruin.

This is the “lively new biography” (The New Yorker) of how it all began and how it came crashing down.

In Goliath, New York Times bestselling author Max Blumenthal takes us on a journey through the badlands and high roads of Israel-Palestine, painting a startling portrait of Israeli society under the siege of increasingly authoritarian politics as the occupation of the Palestinians deepens.

Beginning with the national elections carried out during Israel’s war on Gaza in 2008/9, which brought into power the country’s most right-wing government to date, Blumenthal tells the story of Israel in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo peace process.

As Blumenthal reveals, Israel has become a country where right-wing leaders like Avigdor Lieberman and Bibi Netanyahu are sacrificing democracy on the altar of their power politics, where the loyal opposition largely and passively stands aside and watches the organized assault on civil liberties, where state-funded Orthodox rabbis publish books that provide instructions on how and when to kill gentiles, where half of Jewish youth declare their refusal to sit in a classroom with an Arab, and where mob violence targets Palestinians and African asylum seekers scapegoated by leading government officials as “demographic threats.”

Immersing himself like few other journalists inside the world of hardline political leaders and movements, Blumenthal interviews the demagogues and divas in their homes, in the Knesset, and in the watering holes where their young acolytes hang out, and he speaks with those political leaders behind the organized assault on civil liberties. As his journey deepens, he painstakingly reports on the occupied Palestinians challenging schemes of demographic separation through unarmed protest. He talks at length to the leaders and youth of Palestinian society inside Israel now targeted by security service dragnets and legislation suppressing their speech and provides in-depth reporting on the small band of Jewish Israeli dissidents who have shaken off a conformist mind-set that permeates the media, schools, and the military.

Through his far-ranging travels, Blumenthal illuminates the present by uncovering the ghosts of the past–the histories of Palestinian neighborhoods and villages now gone and forgotten, how that history has set the stage for the current crisis of Israeli society, and how the Holocaust has been turned into justification for occupation.

A brave and unflinching account of the real facts on the ground, Goliath is an unprecedented and compelling work of journalism.

Economic Facts and Fallacies is designed for people who want to understand economic issues without getting bogged down in economic jargon, graphs, or political rhetoric. Writing in a lively manner that does not require any prior knowledge of economics, Thomas Sowell exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues, including many that are widely disseminated in the media and by politicians: fallacies about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, academia, race, and Third World countries. Many of these fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power, making it necessary—and sometimes humorous—to carefully examine their flaws. Sowell holds these beliefs under the microscope and draws conclusions that are sure to inspire rigorous debate.

Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. Yet the world’s oldest continuously operating democracy guarantees no one, not even citizens, the opportunity to elect a government. In this rousing work, the bestselling author of The Case for Impeachment calls attention to the founders’ crucial error: leaving the franchise to the discretion of individual states.

For most of US history, America’s political leaders have considered suffrage not a natural right but a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. As a result, the right to vote has both expanded and contracted over time, depending on political circumstances. In the nineteenth century, states eliminated economic qualifications for voting, but the ideal of a white man’s republic persisted through much of the twentieth century. And today, voter identification laws, political gerrymandering, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of American citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box.

We cannot blame the founders alone for America’s embattled vote. Allan Lichtman, who has testified in more than ninety voting rights cases, notes that subsequent generations have failed to establish suffrage as a universal right. The players in the struggle for the vote have changed over time, but the arguments remain familiar. Voting restrictions impose a grave injustice on the many disenfranchised Americans and stunt the growth of our democracy.

*Nominated for a 2018 Grammy for spoken word album*

This program is read by the author and Mark Ruffalo, an award-winning actor, director, producer, and social activist.

When Bernie Sanders began his race for the presidency, it was considered by the political establishment and the media to be a “fringe” campaign, something not to be taken seriously. After all, he was just an independent senator from a small state with little name recognition. His campaign had no money, no political organization, and it was taking on the entire Democratic Party establishment.

By the time Sanders’s campaign came to a close, however, it was clear that the pundits had gotten it wrong. Bernie had run one of the most consequential campaigns in the modern history of the country. He had received more than 13 million votes in primaries and caucuses throughout the country, won twenty-two states, and more than 1.4 million people had attended his public meetings. Most important, he showed that the American people were prepared to take on the greed and irresponsibility of corporate America and the 1 percent.

In Our Revolution, Sanders shares his personal experiences from the campaign trail, recounting the details of his historic primary fight and the people who made it possible. And for the millions looking to continue the political revolution, he outlines a progressive economic, environmental, racial, and social justice agenda that will create jobs, raise wages, protect the environment, and provide health care for all–and ultimately transform our country and our world for the better. For him, the political revolution has just started. The campaign may be over, but the struggle goes on.