Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in United States

We often think of the US presidents as being above the fray. But the truth is, the presidents are just like us. While some presidents like Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford became wildly successful with money, others like Thomas Jefferson and Joe Biden struggled to sustain their lifestyle. The ability to win the presidency is no guarantee of financial security, although today it’s a much easier path to monetize. In All the Presidents' Money, tax attorney and wealth manager Megan Gorman takes us on a journey to understand the different personal money stories of the presidents

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.

Deemed “the most important campaign effort ever undertaken by the wife of an American president,” the Lady Bird Special was a whistle-stop tour of the South undertaken by Lady Bird Johnson, in a bid for her husband’s reelection in 1964. Never before had a president’s spouse taken to the campaign trail so ambitiously.

Like two intrepid leftist sleuths, Herb Boyd and Don Rojas take a deep dive into the files of the CIA, mainly inspired by Malcolm X's belief that he was under surveillance. They unearth and disclose enough evidence to confirm Malcolm's suspicion as well as to suggest, through circumstantial documentation, at least one agent stalking him. The book offers valuable insight into the history of government agencies spying on Black activists, and targeting Malcolm was just among the most notable of those in the CIA's crosshairs.

Essays discuss the status of the contemporary African American family, examining current concerns and problems, and offering possible solutions to the troubles they face

The indigenous Navajo way of life has been in "survival mode" since the introduction of Eurocentric culture in the Americas. Darryl Benally tells the true story of what it is like growing up Navajo, surviving the challenges of navigating in a multicultural society and an unjust system, while layering the pages with knowledge about the Navajo culture itself. Darryl Benally's story begins with life on a Navajo Reservation with all the cards stacked against him—being exposed to alcoholism, domestic violence, and enduring a government sponsored boarding school.

Good Trouble is the helpful antidote to all the pessimism and name-calling that is permeating today’s political and social dialogues. Revisiting episodes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, it highlights the essential lessons that modern-day activists and the civically minded can extract and embrace in order to move forward and create change.

All-Black institutions and local community groups have been at the forefront of the freedom struggle since the beginning. Lifting the Chains is a history of the Black experience in America since the Civil War, told by one of our most distinguished historians of modern America, William H. Chafe. He argues that, despite the wishes and arguments of many whites to the contrary, the struggle for freedom has been carried out primarily by Black Americans, with only occasional assistance from whites.

Hamilton: The Energetic Founder is a brief introduction to the life, thought, work, and legacy of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), but it is not a traditional biography. Public curiosity about Hamilton, his life, and his work has swelled, particularly among those intrigued by popular-culture portrayals in the Broadway musical Hamilton: An American Musical. This book presents a summary of Hamilton's life and explores his role in revolution, constitutionalism, economics, diplomacy, and war, as well as his relationship to honor culture and dueling. The epilogue considers Hamilton's legacies.

In Madison’s Militia, Carl T. Bogus illuminates why James Madison and the First Congress included the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights. Linking together dramatic accounts of slave uprisings and electric debates over whether the Constitution should be ratified, Bogus shows that—contrary to conventional wisdom—the fitting symbol of the Second Amendment is not the musket in the hands of the minuteman on Lexington Green but the musket wielded by a slave patrol member in the South.

Kevin Powell is one of the most prolific and acclaimed American writers, thinkers, activists, and public speakers of the past three decades. His writings are important contributions to our national conversations on race, gender, class, politics, pop culture, celebrity, hip-hop, and the past, present, and future of the United States.

Against the backdrop of bloody battles and political maneuvering, thousands of African Americans spent the Civil War trying to hold their families together. Whether enslaved or free, they strove not only to survive but also to cultivate bonds of family, friendship, and community. This moving book illuminates that struggle through the letters exchanged by African Americans before, during, and just after the war.

In 2015 and 2016, Baltimore was reeling after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the protests that followed. In the midst of this unrest, the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) roamed the city, robbing people, selling drugs and guns back onto the same streets they were supposed to be policing, and dividing the loot and profit among themselves. Created to trace guns back to the criminals responsible for Baltimore's high crime rates, instead, on March 1, 2017, all members of the GTTF were arrested on federal racketeering charges.

Dr. Sartor wrote an inspiring first-person account of how he treated more than 1,000 patients—and by his reckoning, lost only five—which lay forgotten in a lockbox of family artifacts until it was discovered decades later by his granddaughter, Beth Obermeyer, a journalist and author of three previous books. Beth knew her grandfather through her teenage years and grew up absorbing family stories. Based upon Dr. Sartor’s memoir and her years of research, she vividly reconstructs his life from childhood in Luxembourg to medical school in Chicago, courtship and marriage.

In Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in 11 Pies, food writer Rossi Anastopoulo cracks open our relationship to pie with wit and good humor. She traces the pies woven into our history, following the evolution of our country across centuries of innovation and change and examining how America’s relationship with this iconic dessert impacted culture across eras—and vice versa.

A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the United Nations, he was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten. In The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Kal Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in history.

More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story was ignored, covered up, and diminished by those in power and in a position to preserve the status quo. Blending memoir and immersive journalism, RJ Young shows how, today, Tulsa combats its racist past while remaining all too tolerant of racial injustice.

Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, The Déjà Vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir. As Civil considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals, race at the movies, black feminist legacies, and more, she reflects on her personal losses and desires, speculates on black time, and dreams into expansive black life.

Original, Unconventional & Inconvenient is an analysis of the Donald J. Trump administration and its impact on America’s culture, both party establishments, and a strong but bitterly divided nation. The Trump years were so full of controversy that many observers failed to digest the meaning and impact of the “Make America Great Again” movement. Original, Unconventional & Inconvenient delves into the historic wake-up call that was the Trump administration—and how its leader popularized a uniquely American brand of 21st-century populism.

If we face America’s racial history squarely, will it mean that the American project is a failure? Conversely, if we think the American project is a worthy endeavor, do we have to lie, downplay, or equivocate about our past? In this book, we use the classical liberal lens to ask Americans on the political right to seriously reckon with America’s deep racial pain—much of which arises from violations of rights that conservatives say they deeply value.