Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in United States

Is America a source of pride, as Americans have long held, or shame, as Progressives allege? Beneath an innocent exterior, are our lives complicit in a national project of theft, expropriation, oppression, and murder? Or is America still the hope of the world? New York Times best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza says these questions are no mere academic exercise.

Listener beware: Kevin D. Williamson - the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for The Atlantic to handle - comes to bury democracy, not to praise it. With electrifying honesty and spirit, Williamson takes a flamethrower to mob politics, the “beast with many heads” that haunts social media and what currently passes for real life. It’s destroying our capacity for individualism and dragging us down “the Road to Smurfdom, the place where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age finds itself feeling small and blue.”

In 1990, Peter Larson, with his team of commercial fossil hunters from the Black Hills Institute, discovered the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen in history. He dubbed it "Sue" after the field paleontologist who first saw it sticking out of a sandstone cliff on the ranch of Maurice Williams, a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe member in South Dakota's badlands. Because the skelton was 90% complete, its study promised to yield up priceless information on the life and habits of the T Rex.

Award-winning historian David Pietrusza unpacks the most ingloriously iconic headline in the history of presidential elections - DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN - to reveal the 1948 campaign's backstage events and recount the down-to-the-wire brawl fought against the background of an erupting Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, the birth of Israel, and a post-war America facing exploding storms over civil rights and domestic communism.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016, like most of his campaign, came as a shock to many Americans. How could a man so lacking in capacity, so void of any intellectual heft, become the president of the United States? How could a man with no detectable personal qualities outside of resentment and the will to dominate appeal to millions of Americans, enough so that he was able to win the highest office in the land? With this book, journalist Amanda Marcotte will outline how Trump was the inevitable result of American conservatism’s degradation into an ideology of blind resentment.

According to the media, Donald Trump could never become president. Now many are on a mission to prove he shouldn't be president. The Trump administration and the press are at war - and as in any war, the first casualty has been truth. Bestselling author Howard Kurtz, host of Fox News's Media Buzz and former Washington Post columnist, offers a stunning exposé of how supposedly objective journalists, alarmed by Trump's success, have moved into the opposing camp.

Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn’t just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond’s effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces.

American Exceptionalism and American Innocence examines the stories we’re told that lead us to think that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, regardless of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, and the more than a century’s worth of imperialist war that the U.S. has wrought on the planet. Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong detail just what Captain America’s shield tells us about the pretensions of U.S. foreign policy, how Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates engage in humanitarian imperialism, and more.

The Jihadi Next Door provides unprecedented information that can be used to actually combat terrorism. By laying bare the tactics used by ISIS to deceive and exploit new recruits and exposing the veneer these extremists operate under, Dr. Mehlman-Orozco hopes to empower listeners with the knowledge needed to prevent future recruitment and thereby preventing acts of terrorism.

This book is the compelling story of President Obama’s domestic policy decisions made between September 2008 and his inauguration on January 20, 2009. Unlike all other presidents except Abraham Lincoln - who decided not to allow slavery to expand westward before he was sworn in - Barack Obama determined the fate of his presidency before he took office. The results of these fateful decisions led to Donald Trump taking his place eight years later. This book describes how and why these decisions were made, and discusses whether the outcomes could have been different.

A book for this moment: Both an assessment of our current political leadership and a vision of those who can bring substantive change. Who are the new progressive leaders emerging to lead the post-Trump return to democracy in America? National political correspondent and award-winning author D.D. Guttenplan's The Next Republic is an extraordinarily intense and wide-ranging account of the recent fall and incipient rise of democracy in America. The Next Republic profiles nine successful activists who are changing the course of American history right now.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result, America has been insane since the Reagan era. But the election of Donald Trump is certainly not like what America has done before. The media delights in diagnosing President Trump as “mad” - but what if he’s actually the cure for a country who’s been going mad for years?

Veteran White House reporter April Ryan thought she had seen everything in her two decades as a White House correspondent. And then came the Trump administration. In Under Fire, Ryan takes us inside the confusion and chaos of the Trump White House to understand how she and other reporters adjusted to the new normal. She takes us inside the policy debates, the revolving door of personnel appointments, and what it is like when she, as a reporter asking difficult questions, finds herself in the spotlight, becoming part of the story.

Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico. Yet he has come under partisan fire for applying those same principles to Donald Trump during the course of his many appearances in national media outlets as an expert resource on civil and constitutional law. The Case Against Impeaching Trump seeks to reorient the debate over impeachment to the same standard that Dershowitz has continued to uphold for decades: the law of the United States of America, as established by the Constitution.

The Plot to Destroy Trump exposes the deep state conspiracy to discredit and even depose the legitimately elected President Donald J. Trump with the fabricated Russian dossier, including: how the unsubstantiated accusations of collusion began with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, and the Democratic National Convention on behalf of Hillary Clinton; the opportunistic role played by Russia’s FSB and former KGB agents, according to Putin’s strategy to create chaos in the West; and much more.

In this candid oral history of a presidential tenure, author Brian Abrams reveals the behind-the-scenes stories that illuminate the eight years of the Obama White House through more than one hundred exclusive interviews. Among those given a voice in this extraordinary account are Obama’s cabinet secretaries; his teams of speechwriters, legal advisers, and campaign strategists; as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who fought for or against his agenda. They recall the early struggles of an idealistic outsider candidate and speak openly about the exacting work that led to cornerstone legislation.

One year into Donald Trump's presidency, the US 2016 presidential election is still being fought by both parties. As the case of Russian hacking and collusion is investigated, and Hillary Clinton desperately attempts to explain what happened to her and why she lost, a more important question, one haunted by shadowy tactics and campaign double-dealing, rings out: what happened to Bernie Sanders?

This grippingly intimate and heartbreaking book provides a portrait of the walking wounded who make up the base of the Trump movement. Desperate and angry, these are the Americans of the vanishing industrial heartland, depressed Appalachian coal country, and the no-man's land along the Southwestern border. These are coal miners, out-of-work construction workers, and small business owners who have watched their fortunes dwindle with each passing year.

Thanks to one reporter's skill, we can fix the exact moment on November 22, 1963 when the world stopped and held its breath: At 12:34 p.m. Central Time, UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith broke the news that shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade. Most people think Walter Cronkite was the first to tell America about the assassination. But when Cronkite broke the news on TV, he read from one of Smith's dispatches.

First published in the early days of the Iraq War, Why Are We at War? is an explosive argument about the American quest for empire that still carries weight today. Scrutinizing the Bush administration's words and actions, Mailer unleashes his trademark moral rigor: "Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered.... To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad."