A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminalsPunishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans--most of them poor and people of color--are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing.For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides.
Basic Books
|
9780465093793
|
Hardcover
Social Insecurity
By Russell, James W.
How 401(k) s have gutted retirement security, from charging exorbitant hidden fees to failing to replace the income of traditional pensions. Named one of PWs Top 10 for Business & Economics A retirement crisis is looming. In 2008, as the 401(k) fallout rippled across the country, horrified holders watched 25 percent of their funds evaporate overnight. Average 401(k) balances for those approaching retirement are too small to generate more than $4,000 in annual retirement income, and experts predict that nearly half of middle-class workers will be poor or near poor in retirement. But long before the recession, signs were mounting that few people would ever be able to accumulate enough wealth on their own to ensure financial security later in life. This hasnt always been the case.. Each generation of workers since the nineteenth century has had more retirement security than the previous generation. That is, until 1981, when shaky 401(k) plans began replacing traditional pensions. For the last thirty years, weve been advised that the best way to build ones nest egg is to heavily invest in 401(k) -type programs, even though such plans were originally designed to be a supplement to rather than the basis for retirement. . This financial experiment, promoted by neoliberals and aggressively peddled by Wall Street, has now come full circle, with tens of millions of Americans discovering that they would have been better off under traditional pension plans long since replaced. As James W. Russell explains, this do-it-yourself retirement system - in which individuals with modest incomes are expected to invest large sums of capital in order to reap the same rewards as high-end money managers - isnt working. Social Insecurity tells the story of a massive and international retirement robbery - a substantial transfer of wealth from everyday workers to Wall Street financiers via tremendously costly hidden fees. Russell traces what amounts to a perfect swindle, from its ideological origins at Milton Friedmans infamous Chicago School to its implementation in Chile under Pinochets dictatorship and its adoption in America through Reaganomics. Enraging yet hopeful, Russell offers concrete ideas on how individuals and society can arrest this downward spiral.
Beacon Press
|
9780807012567
|
Hardcover
Disaster Preparedness
By Brouhard, Rod
Disaster preparedness is a topic that everyone should consider. No matter where people live, the potential for a natural or manmade disaster exists. Disaster Preparedness: a Living Free Guide, is a practical and essential reference to preparing for the worst. This book teaches you the essentials - producing and conserving drinkable water, generating emergency power, creating and maintaining emergency food supplies, and much more. Written without political or religious bias, Disaster Preparedness is a reference that every home can use before, during, and after a disaster strikes.
Alpha Books
|
9781615643028
|
Paperback
You Never Forget Your First
By Coe, Alexis
"Alexis Coe energetically dusts off an old-boys genre to present a life in full, without sentiment or whitewashing. It's a public service, and it's also a lot of fun." --Irin Carmon, New York Times bestselling co-author of Notorious RBGAlexis Coe takes a closer look at our first--and finds he is not quite the man we rememberYoung George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down--even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won. After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War cast him as the nation's hero, he was desperate to retire, but the founders pressured him into the presidency--twice. When he retired years later, no one talked him out of it. He left the highest office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created. Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty must confront his greatest hypocrisy--what to do with the men, women, and children he owns--before he succumbs to death. With irresistible style and warm humor, You Never Forget Your First combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers--including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads--inhaling every page.
Viking
|
9780735224100
|
Hardcover
Gorbachev
By Taubman, William
The definitive biography of the transformational world leader by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev.When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by Gorbachev's own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel. 90 illustrations
W. W. Norton & Company
|
9780393647013
|
Hardcover
Gorsuch
By Greenya, John
Learn all about Neil Gorsuch, the youngest judge to be nominated to the Supreme Court in twenty-five years, with this comprehensive and fascinating biography.When forty-nine-year-old Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, he was told by a senator, "We need to know what's in your heart." Now, acclaimed author John Greenya seeks to answer that question with this captivating book. Born in Colorado, Gorsuch remains somewhat of a mystery to Democrats and Republicans alike. Based on intense research and interviews with people who have known Gorsuch in all periods of his life, both his opponents and his friends - from his early work as a lawyer and his year as a Justice Department official, to his ten-and-a-half years on the Federal bench, this is the best way to learn more about the conservative replacement to Justice Antonin Scalia.
Threshold Editions
|
9781501180378
|
Hardcover
Addicted to Outrage
By Beck, Glenn
A new and sober Glenn Beck - author of thirteen #1 New York Times bestsellers - issues a startling challenge to people on both sides of the aisle to give up our addiction to hating each other.America is addicted to outrage, we're at the height of a twenty-year bender, and we need an intervention. In Addicted to Outrage, New York Times bestselling author Glenn Beck addresses how America has become more and more divided - both politically and socially. Americans are now less accepting, less forgiving, and have lost faith in many of the country's signature ideals, he says. We are quick to point a judgmental finger at the opposing party, are unwilling to doubt their own ideologies, and refuse to have any self-awareness whatsoever. Beck states that our current downward spiral will ultimately lead to the destruction of everything America has fought so hard to preserve.
Threshold Editions
|
9781476798868
|
Hardcover
Young Castro
By Hansen, Jonathan M.
An intimate, revisionist portrait of the early years of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world.This book will change how you think about Fidel Castro. Until now, biographers have treated Castro's life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don't like or don't understand. This can make for bad history and unsatisfying biography. Young Castro challenges readers to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hot head to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. These pages show Fidel Castro getting his toughness from a father who survived Spain's nasty class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. They show a boy running around that plantation more comfortable playing with the children of his father's laborers than his tony classmates at elite boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. They show a young man who writes flowery love letters from prison and contemplates the meaning of life, a gregarious soul attentive to the needs of strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family. These pages show a liberal democrat who admires FDR's New Deal policies and is skeptical of communism, but is also hostile to American imperialism. They show an audacious militant who stages a reckless attack on a military barracks but is canny about building an army of resisters. In short, Young Castro reveals a complex man. The first American historian in a generation to gain access to the Castro archives in Havana, Jonathan Hansen was able to secure cooperation from Castro's family and closest confidants, gaining access to hundreds of never-before-seen letters and to interviews with people he was the first to ask for their impressions of the man. The result is a nuanced and penetrating portrait of a figure who was determined to be a leader - a man at once brilliant, arrogant, bold, vulnerable and all too human. A man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, was compelled to lead his country to independence.
Simon & Schuster
|
9781476732473
|
Hardcover
Traitor
By Rothkopf, David
Donald Trump is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds. But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the U.S. has had is that he has repeatedly, egregiously, betrayed his country. Regardless of how Senate Republicans have let him off the hook, the facts available to the public show that Trump has met every necessary standard to define his behavior as traitorous. He has clearly broken faith with the people of the country he was chosen to lead, starting long before he took office, then throughout his time in the White House. And we may not yet have seen the last of his crimes. But the story we know so far is so outrageous and disturbing that it raises a question that has never before been presented in American history: is the president of the United States the greatest threat this country faces in the world?We also need to understand how the country has historically viewed such crimes and how it has treated them in the past to place what has happened in perspective.
Punishment Without Crime
By Natapoff, Alexandra
A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminalsPunishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans--most of them poor and people of color--are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing.For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides.
Social Insecurity
By Russell, James W.
How 401(k) s have gutted retirement security, from charging exorbitant hidden fees to failing to replace the income of traditional pensions. Named one of PWs Top 10 for Business & Economics A retirement crisis is looming. In 2008, as the 401(k) fallout rippled across the country, horrified holders watched 25 percent of their funds evaporate overnight. Average 401(k) balances for those approaching retirement are too small to generate more than $4,000 in annual retirement income, and experts predict that nearly half of middle-class workers will be poor or near poor in retirement. But long before the recession, signs were mounting that few people would ever be able to accumulate enough wealth on their own to ensure financial security later in life. This hasnt always been the case.. Each generation of workers since the nineteenth century has had more retirement security than the previous generation. That is, until 1981, when shaky 401(k) plans began replacing traditional pensions. For the last thirty years, weve been advised that the best way to build ones nest egg is to heavily invest in 401(k) -type programs, even though such plans were originally designed to be a supplement to rather than the basis for retirement. . This financial experiment, promoted by neoliberals and aggressively peddled by Wall Street, has now come full circle, with tens of millions of Americans discovering that they would have been better off under traditional pension plans long since replaced. As James W. Russell explains, this do-it-yourself retirement system - in which individuals with modest incomes are expected to invest large sums of capital in order to reap the same rewards as high-end money managers - isnt working. Social Insecurity tells the story of a massive and international retirement robbery - a substantial transfer of wealth from everyday workers to Wall Street financiers via tremendously costly hidden fees. Russell traces what amounts to a perfect swindle, from its ideological origins at Milton Friedmans infamous Chicago School to its implementation in Chile under Pinochets dictatorship and its adoption in America through Reaganomics. Enraging yet hopeful, Russell offers concrete ideas on how individuals and society can arrest this downward spiral.
Disaster Preparedness
By Brouhard, Rod
Disaster preparedness is a topic that everyone should consider. No matter where people live, the potential for a natural or manmade disaster exists. Disaster Preparedness: a Living Free Guide, is a practical and essential reference to preparing for the worst. This book teaches you the essentials - producing and conserving drinkable water, generating emergency power, creating and maintaining emergency food supplies, and much more. Written without political or religious bias, Disaster Preparedness is a reference that every home can use before, during, and after a disaster strikes.
You Never Forget Your First
By Coe, Alexis
"Alexis Coe energetically dusts off an old-boys genre to present a life in full, without sentiment or whitewashing. It's a public service, and it's also a lot of fun." --Irin Carmon, New York Times bestselling co-author of Notorious RBGAlexis Coe takes a closer look at our first--and finds he is not quite the man we rememberYoung George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down--even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won. After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War cast him as the nation's hero, he was desperate to retire, but the founders pressured him into the presidency--twice. When he retired years later, no one talked him out of it. He left the highest office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created. Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty must confront his greatest hypocrisy--what to do with the men, women, and children he owns--before he succumbs to death. With irresistible style and warm humor, You Never Forget Your First combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers--including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads--inhaling every page.
Gorbachev
By Taubman, William
The definitive biography of the transformational world leader by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev.When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by Gorbachev's own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel. 90 illustrations
Gorsuch
By Greenya, John
Learn all about Neil Gorsuch, the youngest judge to be nominated to the Supreme Court in twenty-five years, with this comprehensive and fascinating biography.When forty-nine-year-old Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, he was told by a senator, "We need to know what's in your heart." Now, acclaimed author John Greenya seeks to answer that question with this captivating book. Born in Colorado, Gorsuch remains somewhat of a mystery to Democrats and Republicans alike. Based on intense research and interviews with people who have known Gorsuch in all periods of his life, both his opponents and his friends - from his early work as a lawyer and his year as a Justice Department official, to his ten-and-a-half years on the Federal bench, this is the best way to learn more about the conservative replacement to Justice Antonin Scalia.
Addicted to Outrage
By Beck, Glenn
A new and sober Glenn Beck - author of thirteen #1 New York Times bestsellers - issues a startling challenge to people on both sides of the aisle to give up our addiction to hating each other.America is addicted to outrage, we're at the height of a twenty-year bender, and we need an intervention. In Addicted to Outrage, New York Times bestselling author Glenn Beck addresses how America has become more and more divided - both politically and socially. Americans are now less accepting, less forgiving, and have lost faith in many of the country's signature ideals, he says. We are quick to point a judgmental finger at the opposing party, are unwilling to doubt their own ideologies, and refuse to have any self-awareness whatsoever. Beck states that our current downward spiral will ultimately lead to the destruction of everything America has fought so hard to preserve.
Young Castro
By Hansen, Jonathan M.
An intimate, revisionist portrait of the early years of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world.This book will change how you think about Fidel Castro. Until now, biographers have treated Castro's life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don't like or don't understand. This can make for bad history and unsatisfying biography. Young Castro challenges readers to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hot head to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. These pages show Fidel Castro getting his toughness from a father who survived Spain's nasty class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. They show a boy running around that plantation more comfortable playing with the children of his father's laborers than his tony classmates at elite boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. They show a young man who writes flowery love letters from prison and contemplates the meaning of life, a gregarious soul attentive to the needs of strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family. These pages show a liberal democrat who admires FDR's New Deal policies and is skeptical of communism, but is also hostile to American imperialism. They show an audacious militant who stages a reckless attack on a military barracks but is canny about building an army of resisters. In short, Young Castro reveals a complex man. The first American historian in a generation to gain access to the Castro archives in Havana, Jonathan Hansen was able to secure cooperation from Castro's family and closest confidants, gaining access to hundreds of never-before-seen letters and to interviews with people he was the first to ask for their impressions of the man. The result is a nuanced and penetrating portrait of a figure who was determined to be a leader - a man at once brilliant, arrogant, bold, vulnerable and all too human. A man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, was compelled to lead his country to independence.
Traitor
By Rothkopf, David
Donald Trump is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds. But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the U.S. has had is that he has repeatedly, egregiously, betrayed his country. Regardless of how Senate Republicans have let him off the hook, the facts available to the public show that Trump has met every necessary standard to define his behavior as traitorous. He has clearly broken faith with the people of the country he was chosen to lead, starting long before he took office, then throughout his time in the White House. And we may not yet have seen the last of his crimes. But the story we know so far is so outrageous and disturbing that it raises a question that has never before been presented in American history: is the president of the United States the greatest threat this country faces in the world?We also need to understand how the country has historically viewed such crimes and how it has treated them in the past to place what has happened in perspective.