About this item
In two previous highly regarded books on the U.S. Senate, Ira Shapiro chronicled the institution from its apogee in the 1970s through its decline in the decades since. Now, Shapiro turns his gaze to how the Senate responded to the challenges posed by the Trump administration and its prospects under President Biden. The Founding Fathers gave the US Senate many functions, but it had one fundamental responsibility - its raison d'etre: to provide the check against a dangerous president who threatened our democracy. Two hundred and thirty years later, when Donald Trump, a potential authoritarian, finally reached the White House, the Senate should have served as both America's first and last lines of defense. Instead, we had the nightmare scenario: today's Senate, reduced through a long period of decline to a hyper-partisan, gridlocked shadow of its former self, was unable to meet its fundamental responsibility.
About the Author
Ira Shapiro has a lot of experience changing careers. He is an author and book publisher who started as a science textbook editor and financial public relations man after hitchhiking around America for five months, joining the Army and earning paratrooper wings. With his wife, Jacqueline Dedell, he has become an angel investor, land preservationist, residential real estate renovator, tableware manufacturer and farmer/breeder raising 150 animals. Ira and Jacqueline are co-founders of Take Two Interactive, which owns the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise. They also co-founded Phizzle, a software company that has a unique edge computing solution and an in-memory database architecture that can analyze large volumes of real-time transactions per second and advance the Internet of Things unlike any other company in the world. Ira was the catalyst and associate publisher of the best-selling photo book, A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, which he helped create to ease tensions between the "Evil Empire" Soviet Union and the rest of the world during the Cold War of the 80s. Other companies he founded published an avant garde art book that was adopted as a college text and numerous picture books related to commercial photography, illustration and graphic design.In addition to speaking engagements, he recently launched a free newsletter at theundercoverroad.com to supplement the ideas and strategies for a better life revealed in his book, The Undercover Road.Learn more at theundercoverroad.com
