Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Political Science

Donald Trump v. The United States tells the dramatic story of those who felt compelled to confront and try to contain the most powerful man in the world as he shredded norms and sought to expand his power. Michael S. Schmidt takes listeners inside the defining events of the presidency, chronicles them up close, and records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia.

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era.

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis.

In this fascinating foray into the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call it a "curiously complicit" alliance.

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen - Winston Churchill first among them - the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins.

First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future.

George Friedman has forecasted the coming trends (politics, technology, population, and culture) of the next century in The Next 100 Years, and focused his predictions on the coming ten years in The Next Decade. Now, in Flashpoints, Friedman zooms in on the region that has, for 500 years, been the cultural hotbed of the world - Europe - and examines the most basic and fascinating building block of the region: culture.

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century.

From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Andrew J. Bacevich, one of the country's most respected voices on foreign affairs, offers an incisive critical history of this ongoing military enterprise - now more than 30 years old and with no end in sight.

Among the many books trying to understand the terrifying rise of ISIS, none has given voice to the women in the organization; but women were essential to the establishment of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s caliphate. Responding to promises of female empowerment and social justice, and calls to aid the plight of fellow Muslims in Syria, thousands of women emigrated to join the Islamic State. Guest House for Young Widows charts the different ways women were recruited, inspired, or compelled to join the militants.

History’s most unlikely friendship - this is the astonishing story of Queen Victoria and her dearest companion, the young Indian Munshi Abdul Karim. In the twilight years of her reign, after the devastating deaths of her two great loves - Prince Albert and John Brown - Queen Victoria meets tall and handsome Abdul Karim, a humble servant from Agra waiting tables at her Golden Jubilee. The two form an unlikely bond and within a year Abdul becomes a powerful figure at court, the Queen’s teacher, her counsel on Urdu and Indian affairs, and a friend close to her heart.

In a narrative that moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan's famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes' detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising - a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.

How did we become a world where facts—shared truths—have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, globally? How have we allowed the proliferation of alternative facts, hoaxes, even conspiracy theories, to destroy our trust in institutions, leaders, and legitimate experts? Best-selling journalist Steven Brill documents the forces and people, from Silicon Valley to Moscow to Washington, that have created and exploited this world of chaos and division—and offers practical solutions for what we can do about it.

A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called "Moneyball for politics," journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigns are navigating the era's most pressing challenge: how to win in a world awash in lies. The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years.

When Rupert Murdoch enlisted Roger Ailes to launch a cable news network in 1996, American politics and media changed forever. With a remarkable level of detail and insight, Vanity Fair magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman puts Ailes’s unique genius on display, along with the outsize personalities - Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Gretchen Carlson, Bill Shine, and others - who have helped Fox News play a defining role in the great social and political controversies of the past two decades.

In Chatter, Patrick Radden Keefe investigates the international eavesdropping alliance known as Echelon, sorting facts from conspiracy theories to determine just how much privacy Americans unknowingly sacrifice in the name of greater security.

There is no better guide than Paul Krugman to basic economics, the ideas that animate much of our public policy. Likewise, there is no stronger foe of zombie economics, the misunderstandings that just won’t die. In Arguing with Zombies, Krugman tackles many of these misunderstandings, taking stock of where the United States has come from and where it’s headed in a series of concise, digestible chapters. Drawn mainly from his popular New York Times column, they cover a wide range of issues, organized thematically and framed in the context of a wider debate.

Preet Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it. Bharara believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, he argues, we must also acknowledge and allow for flaws both in our justice system and in human nature. Bharara uses the many illustrative anecdotes and case histories from his storied, formidable career - the successes as well as the failures - to shed light on the realities of the legal system and the consequences of taking action.

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed.