"From the acclaimed author of Kids These Days, this collection of new and selected essays traces how inequality, student debt, and over-work have come to define our culture and our lives. Our economic situation, political discourse, and future prospects have gotten much worse since a guy brought a sign that said SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT to the Occupy Wall Street protests at Zuccotti Park. We all knew what he meant . . . but where are we now? And how did we get here? Malcolm Harris, one of our most exciting young cultural critics, takes on these questions, examining everything from how we've become complicit in lowering the bar for what counts as prosperity; to how we sacrificed privacy so casually we didn't even notice; to the higher education financial bubble that is about to burst. But these funny, voice-driven essays remind us to laugh at the absurdity of all: he cops to being the guy who tricked protestors into thinking Radiohead was playing Occupy Wall Street; he demonstrates how uncannily the Ikea catalog now reflects our worldview; and he assures us Marx saw the necessity of a crisis moment just like the one we're in. This wide-ranging look at the mess we're in shows a versatile cultural critic at the height of his powers"--

Read how the most controversial book in he bible changed the course od western civilization

This is a "historical examination of four specific post-World War II presidential lies whose consequences were greater than could ever have been predicted"--Publisher description.

""The most important voice in the political culture" (Ben Shapiro) reveals the Constitution's remarkable power to repair our broken civic culture, rescue our malfunctioning politics, and unify a fractious America Common ground is hard to find in today's politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives, many people have grown frustrated under a system of government that constantly demands compromise. More and more on both the right and the left have come to blame the Constitution for the resulting discord. But the Constitution is not the problem we face; it is the solution. Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, conservative scholar Yuval Levin's American Covenant recovers the Constitution's true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America's fault lines. Uncovering the framers' sophisticated grasp of political division, Levin showcases the Constitution's exceptional power to facilitate constructive disagreement, negotiate resolutions to disputes, and forge unity in a fractured society. Clear-eyed about the ways that contemporary politics have malfunctioned, Levin also offers practical solutions for reforming those aspects of the constitutional order that have gone awry. Hopeful, insightful, and rooted in the best of our political tradition, American Covenant celebrates the Constitution's remarkable power to bind together a diverse society, reassuring us that a less divided future is within our grasp." -- ONIX annotation.

"A lavishly illustrated, witty, and learned look at the awesome power of the political cartoon throughout history to enrage, provoke, and amuse. As a former editor of The New York Times Magazine and the longtime editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky knows just how incendiary--and transformative--cartoons can be. Here Navasky guides readers through some of the greatest cartoons ever sketched--by George Grosz, David Levine, Herblock, Honore Daumier, Thomas Nast, Ralph Steadman, et al.--as he asks what makes cartoons so uniquely positioned to affect our minds and our hearts. Incorporating neuroscience, psychology, and a sweeping historical view of the cartoon's evolution, The Art of Controversy is a book for all lovers of satire, politics, and the vastly underappreciated and endlessly surprising art form of the political cartoon. "--

One of the leading voices on national security issues in the U.S. Congress demonstrates how words have been sharp and powerful weapons of victory in this compilation of great military speeches that helped turn the tide of history. Among the dozens of inspirational speeches featured are: Moses instructing his followers to cross the Jordan River without him. . . Queen Elizabeth pledging to die with her soldiers as they faced the Spanish Armada. . . Patrick Henry choosing between liberty and death. . . Napoleon exhorting his troops as they marched on Egypt. . . Winston Churchill rallying his nation to victory. . . General Sir Montgomery refusing to retreat from Rommel. . . President Roosevelt preparing the American people for World War II. . . General Eisenhower fortifying his troops for the invasion of Normandy. . . President Reagan demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall. . . President George W. Bush encouraging America after 9/11. . . and more. Congressman Israel has included speeches that have motivated and mobilized, challenged and comforted. Some were blurted in the heat of combat, others were carefully written in places far removed from the brutality of the battlefield, but all will inspire readers with the courage that moved people forward against all odds. Each speech is introduced with an insightful historic context. This dramatic sweep of military history in the words of history's military leaders serves to reinforce the concept that the pen is mightier than the sword.

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's return to memoir, a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents, published in tandem with his classic work of Holocaust literature, When Memory Comes Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedlander returns with WHEN MEMORY COMES: THE LATER YEARS, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics. Friedlander's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedlander goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others. Most importantly, this memoir led Friedlander to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"--

For three short years, from 1968 to 1971, New York's Fillmore East, housed in an abandoned second run movie house on New York's Lower East Side, was the greatest rock palace in the world. The best acts played there; it had its own resident light show presenting some of the most exciting visual images ever seen; and it was managed by the imaginative Bill Graham, who specialized in introducing the audience to new acts. Fans came from around the world and across the neighborhood; one dedicated audience member, then-twenty-eight-year-old performance artist and writer Richard Kostelanetz, attended religiously, keeping notes on the performances, interviewing the musicians, and documenting the shows. Now, he has pulled together these documents, along with original program notes and memories of other regulars, to produce the complete history of the theater. Photographer Raeanne Rubenstein, who got her start as a teenage news photographer, has opened her files to provide many never-before-seen performance photos of the greatest acts. This is a must-have for those who were there and all those who wish they could have been!

A thoroughly researched and vivid re-creation of one of the most critical periods in the history of Western religion The life of Jesus, and the subsequent persecution of Christians during the Roman Empire, have come to define what many of us know about early Christianity. The fervent debate, civil strife, and bloody riots within the Christian community as it was forming, however, is a story that is rarely told. Richard E. Rubenstein takes readers to the streets of the Roman Empire during the fourth century, where a divisive argument over the divinity of Jesus Christ was underway. Ruled by a Christian emperor, followers of Jesus no longer feared for the survival of their monotheistic faith, but they found themselves in different camps--led by two charismatic men--on the topic of Christian theology. Arius, an Alexandrian priest and poet, preached that Jesus, though holy, is less than God, while Athanasius, a brilliant and violent bishop, saw any diminution of Jesus' godhead as the work of the devil. Between them stood Alexander, the powerful Bishop of Alexandria, in search of a solution that would keep the empire united and the Christian faith alive.

"While the major conflicts in American history have become all too familiar, America's "small wars" have played an essential but little-appreciated role in the country's growth as a world power. First published in 2002, The Savage Wars of Peace quickly became a key volume in the case for a new policy of interventionism. Max Boot shows how America's smaller actions--such as the recent conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan--have made up the vast majority of our military engagements, and yet our armed forces do little to prepare for these "low intensity conflicts." A compellingly readable history of the forgotten wars that helped promote America's rise in the last two centuries, The Savage Wars of Peace is now updated with new material on the repercussions of America's far-flung imperial actions and the impact of these ventures in American international affairs"--Amazon.com, viewed April 3, 2014.

A new collection of essays by the legendary literary scholar and critic. In the year of his one-hundredth birthday, preeminent literary critic, scholar, and teacher M. H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats, and Hazlitt. The centerpiece of the volume is Abrams’s eloquent and incisive essay “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem” on the pleasure of reading poems aloud, accompanied by online recordings of Abrams’s revelatory readings of poems such as William Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy,” Alfred Tennyson’s “Here Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” and Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara.” The collection begins with a foreword by Abrams’s former student Harold Bloom.

The popular authority on movies, television, and video now tunes in to the Golden Age of Radio. This fascinating and long-overdue celebration of the way things were includes... -- Behind the scenes stories about Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Kirk Douglas, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and many, many others -- The history of radio soap operas, westerns, variety shows, comedies, and thrillers -- Hundreds of revealing personal interviews with radio legends -- More than 125 rare photographs and illustrations

The 1990s promised prosperity for the world: a new era of unprecedented economic growth, with capitalism American-style reigning supreme. So why did it all go wrong? As chairman of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors and Chief Economist at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz was uniquely placed to watch first-hand as the '90s unfolded. This revealing book rewrites the history of the 1990s to show how a misplaced faith in free market ideology created problems that could cost us all dearly. But more than that, it lays out a blueprint for the future. The '90s, Stiglitz concludes, witnessed a misguided attempt to achieve growth on the cheap - and we must learn from our mistakes or pay the price for years to come.

"An autobiographical meditation on the writing and reading of haiku, the essence of haiku mind, and the country and culture that nurtured the form"--

Limited to 500 signed numbered illustrated copies.

Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her grandmothers: one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide the disastrous effects of a face-lift. There was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction.' But these were the people, along with the ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination.

A distinguished religious leader's "brilliant, urgent" (The Washington Post) case for reconstructing a shared framework of values. With liberal democracy embattled, our public discourse growing increasingly toxic, family life breaking down, and drug abuse and depression on the rise, many fear what the future holds. In Morality , respected faith leader and public intellectual Jonathan Sacks traces today's crisis to our loss of a strong, shared moral code and our elevation of self-interest over the common good. Sacks leads readers from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment to the present day to show that there is no liberty without morality and no freedom without responsibility, arguing that we all must play our part in rebuilding a common moral foundation. A major work of philosophy, this is an inspiring vision of a world in which we can all find our place and face the future without fear.