"A fascinating book. In clear and forceful prose, Becoming Justice Blackmun tells a judicial Horatio Alger story and a tale of a remarkable transformation . . . A page-turner."—The New York Times Book Review In this acclaimed biography, Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times draws back the curtain on America's most private branch of government, the Supreme Court. Greenhouse was the first print reporter to have access to the extensive archives of Justice Harry A. Blackmun (1908–99), the man behind numerous landmark Supreme Court decisions, including Roe v. Wade. Through the lens of Blackmun's private and public papers, Greenhouse crafts a compelling portrait of a man who, from 1970 to 1994, ruled on such controversial issues as abortion, the death penalty, and sex discrimination yet never lost sight of the human beings behind the legal cases. Greenhouse also paints the arc of Blackmun's lifelong friendship with Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, revealing how political differences became personal, even for two of the country's most respected jurists. From America's preeminent Supreme Court reporter, this is a must-read for everyone who cares about the Court and its impact on our lives.

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it.--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself.--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

A collection of "first-rate frontline journalism" from the Spanish Civil War to US actions in Central America "by a woman singularly unafraid of guns" (Vanity Fair). For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn's fearless war correspondence made her a leading journalistic voice of her generation. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the Central American wars of the mid-eighties, Gellhorn's candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people regardless of their political ideology. Collecting the best of Gellhorn's writing on foreign conflicts, and now with a new introduction by Lauren Elkin, The Face of War is a classic of frontline journalism by "the premier war correspondent of the twentieth century" (Ward Just, The New York Times Magazine ). Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same vigorous approach. "I wrote very fast, as I had to," she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place." As Merle Rubin noted in his review of this volume for The Christian Science Monitor, "Martha Gellhorn's courageous, independent-minded reportage breaks through geopolitical abstractions and ideological propaganda to take the reader straight to the scene of the event."

In this intellectual companion piece to his acclaimed autobiography, Radical Son, David Horowitz argues that, even in this supposedly post-ideological, post-Cold War era, the historic themes of that conflict still drive our politics and animate our cultural debates. With keen political insight and a masterly grasp of history, he examines how the political Left, including those who describe themselves as liberals, has refused to learn from the past -- particularly from the checkered records of progressive movements for social justice. This important work is a cohesive and searing document for all who refuse to bury their heads in the sand while American institutions and beliefs are corrupted by the politics of bad faith masquerading under the guise of social justice.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by Bloomberg (Chosen by Philip Tetlock), Booklist ’s Top 10 Science Books of the Year, and Shortlisted for Physics World ’s Book of the Year A Major Biography of the Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist, Enrico Fermi, a Leading Architect of the Atomic Age Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world’s physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called “the Pope” by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics. Fleeing Fascism and anti-Semitism, Fermi became a leading figure in America’s most secret project: building the atomic bomb. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi’s life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century, this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves.

The universe of the mind is a limitless expanse of wonders, filled with worlds and secrets that cannot be fully explored within the pages of a single novel. Avid readers of science fiction have long appreciated the myriad joys of returning to fictional galaxies already experienced. In Far Horizons, a variable "Who's Who" of science fiction's most beloved and highly honored writers once again revisit the remariable worlds they created and made famous. Perhaps the greatest concentration of science fiction talent ever in one volume, this unprecedented masterpiece reopens vast empires of imagination and adventure to new explorations and appreciations. It is a major SF event, sure to bring unparalleled joy to the hearts of serious fans everywhere.

In this illuminating book, the renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin argues that fundamental physics -- the search for the laws of nature -- losing its way. Ambitious ideas about extra dimensions, exotic particles, multiple universes, and strings have captured the public’s imagination -- and the imagination of experts. But these ideas have not been tested experimentally, and some, like string theory, seem to offer no possibility of being tested. Yet these speculations dominate the field, attracting the best talent and much of the funding and creating a climate in which emerging physicists are often penalized for pursuing other avenues. As Smolin points out, the situation threatens to impede the very progress of science. With clarity, passion, and authority, Smolin offers an unblinking assessment of the troubles that face modern physics -- and an encouraging view of where the search for the next big idea may lead.

Though a well-regarded physicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) is best-known as a writer of popular nonfiction and science fiction and as the host of the PBS series Cosmos . Through his writings and spoken commentary, he worked to popularize interests in astronomy, the universe, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. From the beginning of his public career, when he co-wrote Intelligent Life in the Universe to the very end as he worked on the 1997 film adaptation of his novel Contact , these subjects absorbed him. This interest in space was rooted in his understanding of the smallness and vulnerability of humanity measured against the immense size and power of the universe. This profound philosophical humility, mixed with personal exuberance, comes through in Conversations with Carl Sagan . In interviews and profiles, Sagan discusses with verve a wide variety of topics--the environment, nuclear disarmament, religion, politics, extraterrestrial life, astronomy, physics, robotics. Whether he is discussing his science fiction or his well-researched nonfiction works, his voice embraces reason and skepticism. This volume shows how Sagan, a lifelong skeptic, refined his views and expressed amazement that Earth, for all his belief in extraterrestrial life, encompasses everything about which he cared. Tom Head of Jackson, Mississippi, is a writer and poet whose work includes Women and Families (Voices from the Civil War) , Possessions and Exorcisms (Fact or Fiction?) , and 1966 (The Turbulent 60s) .

Theodore H. White's landmark Making of the President series revolutionized American political journalism, investing his subject with both epic scope and a fresh frankness about backroom political strategy that was unlike anything that had come before. In this second volume of his groundbreaking series, White offers an intimate chronicle of the 1964 campaign for the White House, from the earthshaking tragedy of President Kennedy's assassination through the battle for power between Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, whose candidacy paved the way for the modern conservative movement. White reports from within both campaigns, bringing to life a turbulent year in America's history and a furious contest between two tough and seasoned political pros.

"The extraordinary story of the Nazi-era scientific genius who discovered how cancer cells eat-and what it means for how we should. The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg-a cousin of the famous finance Warburgs-was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the twentieth century, a man whose research was integral to humanity's understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it"--

Surviving Auschwitz, 18-year old Elli leaves behind painful memories to start fresh in America in 1951. She faces challenges of creating a new life in hectic New York City. A powerful glimpse of immigrant America through the eyes of this teenager.

The Venona Secrets presents one of the last great, untold stories of World War II and the Cold War. In 1995, secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s that the United States intercepted and eventually decrypted finally became available to American historians. Now, after spending more than five years researching all the available evidence, espionage experts Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel reveal the full, shocking story of the days when Soviet spies ran their fingers through America's atomic-age secrets. Included in The Venona Secrets are the details of the spying activities that reached from Harry Hopkins in Franklin Roosevelt s White House to Alger Hiss in the State Department to Harry Dexter White in the Treasury. More than that, The Venona Secrets exposes: • Information that links Albert Einstein to Soviet intelligence and conclusive evidence showing that J. Robert Oppenheimer gave Moscow our atomic secrets. • How Soviet espionage reached its height when the United States and the Soviet Union were supposedly allies in World War II. • The previously unsuspected vast network of Soviet spies in America. • How the Venona documents confirm the controversial revelations made in the 1940s by former Soviet agents Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. • The role of the American Communist Party in supporting and directing Soviet agents. • How Stalin s paranoia had him target Jews (code-named Rats ) and Trotskyites even after Trotsky’s death. • How the Soviets penetrated America’s own intelligence services. The Venona Secrets is a masterful compendium of spy versus spy that puts the Venona transcripts in context with secret FBI reports, congressional investigations, and documents recently uncovered in the former Soviet archives. Romerstein and Breindel cast a spotlight on one of the most shadowy episodes in recent American history - a past when by our very own government officials, whether wittingly or unwittingly, shielded treason infected Washington and Soviet agents.

America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How did we come to expect no virtue and so much cynicism from our culture, our leaders—and each other? In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, “can’t run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you.” These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid and steady WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture. Imperial academics live in a world of theory; they preach disdain for mere facts and for old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true or false. Schoolchildren are routinely taught theories about history instead of actual history—they learn, for example, that all nations are equally nice except for America, which is nearly always nasty. With academic experts to do our thinking for us, we’ve politely shut up and let second-raters take the wheel. In fact, we have handed the keys to the star pupil and teacher’s pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug. How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver’s seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.

National bestseller: This "harrowing" true story of two Jewish families who survived hiding in the heart of the Nazi capital "honors the human spirit" (Andrea Dworkin). In January 1943, unable to flee Germany, the four members of the Arndt family went underground to avoid deportation to Auschwitz. Ellen Lewinsky and her mother, Charlotte, joined them; a year later, Bruno Gumpel arrived. Hiding in a small factory near Hitler's bunker, without identification cards or food-ration stamps, they were dependent on German strangers for survival. When Russian soldiers finally rescued the group in April 1945, the families were near death from starvation. But their will to live triumphed and two months later, four of the survivors--Erich Arndt and Ellen Lewinsky, and Ruth Arndt and Bruno Gumpel--reunited in a double wedding ceremony. Survival in the Shadows chronicles the previously untold story of the largest group of German Jews to have survived hiding in Berlin through the final and most deadly years of the Holocaust. Relayed to Barbara Lovenheim by three survivors from the group, the riveting story is a touching portrayal of the bravery of these seven Jews, and a heartfelt acknowledgment of the fortitude and humanity of the compassionate Germans who kept them alive.

How did we get into this mess? Every morning, many Americans ask this as, with a cringe, they pick up their phones and look to see what terrible thing President Trump has just said or done. Regardless of what he’s complaining about or whom he’s attacking, a second question comes hard on the heels of the first: How on earth do we get out of this? Alan Wolfe has an answer. In The Politics of Petulance he argues that the core of our problem isn’t Trump himself—it’s that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. It’s in an abdication of valuing the character of would-be leaders; it’s in a failure to acknowledge, even welcome the complexity of government and society; and it’s in a loss of the ability to be skeptical without being suspicious. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively—and mindlessly—accepted. The good news, such as it is, is that we’ve been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues. Wolfe reinvigorates the tradition of public engagement exemplified by midcentury intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling—and he draws lessons from their battles with McCarthyism and conspiratorial paranoia. Wolfe mounts a powerful case that we can learn from them to forge a new path for political intervention today. Wolfe has been thinking and writing about American life and politics for decades. He sees this moment as one of real risk. But he’s not throwing up his hands; he’s bracing us. We’ve faced demagogues before. We can find the intellectual maturity to fight back. Yes we can.

Here is the spine-tingling, true story of that first American blast into the realm of the stars, of the men who underwent rigorous training for that epic mission, and of the one man who made the safe journey. This is the factual account of the history of rocketry, its triumphs and its failures, our shame in the neglect of it, and our pride in its later accomplishments. Here, too, is a glimpse into the future, as only science fiction writer Robert Silverberg could foresee: orbiting space stations, a man on the moon, and more!

With his classics of social commentary "The Geography of Nowhere and "Home from Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great commentators on American space and place. Now, with "The Long Emergency, he offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future. The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind. But the oil age is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance that will collapse. "The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. Are we laboring under a Jiminy Cricket syndrome when we tell ourselves that alternative means of energy are just a few years away? Even once they are developed, will they ever be able to sustain us in the way that fossil fuels once did? What will happen when our current plagues of global warming, epidemic disease, and overpopulation collide to exacerbate the end of the oil age? Will the new global economy be able to persevere, or will we be forced to revert to the more agrarian, localized economy we once knew? Could corporations like Wal-Mart and McDonald's, built on the premise of cheap transportation, become a thing of the past? Will the misguided experiment of suburbia--considered a birthright and a reality by millions of Americans--collapse when the car culturebecomes obsolete? Riveting and authoritative. "The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore. It is bound to become a classic of social science.

Called "one of our best science popularizers" by Publishers Weekly , Amir D. Aczel tackles the cause of one of last century's most destructive events--the scientific discovery of nuclear power. Drawing on his rich storytelling skills, Aczel presents the fascinating and suspenseful story of the scientists who first uncovered the potential of uranium. Uranium Wars takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of 1920s Europe where the scientific elite of the day were embroiled in a fierce rivalry to achieve nuclear fission. Leading us to an understanding of both the processes that take place inside a uranium nucleus and its destructive power are the brilliant men and women at the heart of the race--mammoth figures such as Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner. Enmeshed in the story of scientific intrigue is the complex and ongoing story of uranium itself, which Aczel presents as a dynamic, dual natured force, capable of providing both abundant usable energy and generating unfathomable destructive power. From the nuclear programs in the Middle East to plans for nuclear reactors at home, the element uranium is never far from today's headlines.

This scathing critique of U.S. political culture is a brilliant analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal. Chomsky offers a message of hope, reminding us resistance is possible.

A leading authority's panoramic history compares the experiences of immigrant-ethnic groups, African-Americans, and Native Americans to each other and in relation to the national political culture. Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize (1991) Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration History Society (1993) Do recent changes in American law and politics mean that our national motto — e pluribus unum — is at last becoming a reality? Lawrence H. Fuchs searches for answers to this question by examining the historical patterns of American ethnicity and the ways in which a national political culture has evolved to accommodate ethnic diversity. Fuchs looks first at white European immigrants, showing how most of them and especially their children became part of a unifying political culture. He also describes the ways in which systems of coercive pluralism kept persons of color from fully participating in the civic culture. He documents the dismantling of those systems and the emergence of a more inclusive and stronger civic culture in which voluntary pluralism flourishes. In comparing past patterns of ethnicity in America with those of today, Fuchs finds reasons for optimism. Diversity itself has become a unifying principle, and Americans now celebrate ethnicity. One encouraging result is the acculturation of recent immigrants from Third World countries. But Fuchs also examines the tough issues of racial and ethnic conflict and the problems of the ethno-underclass, the new outsiders. The American Kaleidoscope ends with a searching analysis of public policies that protect individual rights and enable ethnic diversity to prosper. Because of his lifelong involvement with issues of race relations and ethnicity, Lawrence H. Fuchs is singularly qualified to write on a grand scale about the interdependence in the United States of the unum and the pluribus. His book helps to clarify some difficult issues that policymakers will surely face in the future, such as those dealing with immigration, language, and affirmative action.