Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Politics & Government

Taking Privacy Seriously offers both a hard-hitting assessment of the origins of today’s privacy-eroding practices and a robust road map for creating individual authority over our personal data. James B. Rule proposes eleven key reforms in the control and use of personal information—including far-reaching new rights for individuals and meaningful responsibilities for data-keeping organizations—all aimed at redressing the balance of power between ordinary citizens and data hungry corporate and government institutions.

Contrary to competing popular beliefs, police violence against African Americans has neither remained unchanged since the era of slavery nor is it a recent phenomenon disconnected from the past. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is not just one of the greatest philosophical texts in the English language; it is one of the most important works in the history of Western political thought. Almost every major tradition in the centuries after Hobbes—from radical democracy to authoritarianism—has been influenced by its arguments. Written in exile in a period of dramatic developments—civil war and regicide—Leviathan is in some ways the product of its own special circumstances. And yet, at the same time, it deals with fundamental issues that matter to all of us today.

For the past several decades, politicians and economists thought that high levels of inequality were good for the economy. But because America’s middle class is now so weak, the US economy suffers from the kinds of problems that plague less-developed countries. As Hollowed Out explains, to have strong, sustainable growth, the economy needs to work for everyone and expand from the middle out. This new thinking has the potential to supplant trickle-down economics―the theory that was so wrong about inequality and our economy―and shape economic policymaking for generations.

As workers attempt new modes of employment in the era of the Great Resignation, they face a labor landscape that is increasingly uncertain and stubbornly unequal. With Handcrafted Careers, sociologist Eli Revelle Yano Wilson dives headfirst into the everyday lives of workers in the craft beer industry to address key questions facing American workers today: about what makes a good career, who gets to have one, and how careers progress without established models.

Shadowy groups are increasingly capable of collective action. Using military-grade encryption, rerouting software, and cryptocurrencies, anonymous and pseudonymous actors can now communicate, solve problems, recruit members, and manage resources across multiple public and semipublic spaces. This swirling mix of secrecy and openness enables people to move through cyberspace like nomads with verifiable personas, which makes them impossible to stop.

Over the past sixty years, businesses and government have increasingly offloaded financial risk onto US households. The toll has pushed tens of millions of people to the financial breaking point, worsened social inequity, and jeopardized US democracy. In Sharing Risk, consumer advocate and scholar Patricia A. McCoy draws on the nation’s traditions of risk sharing to argue that society should lift up families by pooling and spreading the financial risks that they now must bear alone.

In Get Off My Neck, Debbie Hines draws on her unique perspective as a trial lawyer, former Baltimore prosecutor, and assistant attorney general for the State of Maryland to argue that US prosecutors, as the most powerful players in the criminal justice system, systematically target and criminalize Black people. Hines describes her disillusionment as a young Black woman who initially entered the profession with the goal of helping victims of crimes, only to discover herself aiding and abetting a system that prizes plea bargaining, speedy conviction, and excessive punishment above all else.

In the midst of her groundbreaking twenty-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once declared, “Everyone—with the exception of the black woman herself—has been interpreting the black woman.” Edited and introduced by Zinga A. Fraser, Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words gives listeners a rare opportunity to engage with the congresswoman’s powerful ideas in her own voice.