Government Theory

When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand’s own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God’s will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflictmuch less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events.

Three and a half years ago, David Sanger’s book The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power described how a new American president came to office with the world on fire. Now, just as the 2012 presidential election battle begins, Sanger follows up with an eye-opening, news-packed account of how Obama has dealt with those challenges, relying on innovative weapons and reconfigured tools of American power to try to manage a series of new threats.

From the New York Times’s Business Investigations Editor and #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers comes a long-overdue exposé of the astonishing yet shadowy power wielded by the world’s largest law firms, following the narrative arc of Jones Day, the firm that represented the Trump campaign and much of the Fortune 500, as a powerful encapsulation of the changes that have swept the legal industry in recent decades.

Eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi himself; the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life; and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world.

Jon Meacham, in American Lion, has delivered the definitive human portrait of a pivotal president who forever changed the American presidency and America itself. Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency.

The U.S.-backed military invasion of Cuba in 1961 remains one of the most ill-fated blunders in American history, with echoes of the event reverberating even today. Despite the Kennedy administration’s initial public insistence that the United States had nothing to do with the invasion, it soon became clear that the complex operation had been planned and approved by the best and brightest minds at the highest reaches of Washington, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President John F. Kennedy himself.

Once upon a time, any mention of California triggered unpleasant reminders of Ronald Reagan and right-wing tax revolts, ballot propositions targeting undocumented immigrants, and racist policing that sparked two of the nation's most devastating riots. In fact, California confronted many of the challenges the rest of the country faces now - decades before the rest of us. Today, California is leading the way on addressing climate change, low-wage work, immigrant integration, overincarceration, and more.

In The Plot to Betray America, New York Times best-selling author and renowned intelligence expert Malcolm Nance reveals exactly how President Trump and his inner circle conspired, coordinated, communicated, and eventually strategized to commit the greatest acts of treachery in the history of the United States: Compromising the presidential oath of office in exchange for power and personal enrichment.

In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill gives us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken system at the heart of our society. He shows us how, over the last half-century, America's core values - meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even democracy itself - have somehow managed to power its decline into dysfunction.

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora. He was not only a witness of a Pan-African and socialist internationalism, but a prime actor in mass organization, catalyzing rebellious ferment, and theorizing an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation. This volume demonstrates the unbending consistency that unites his life and work: the ongoing reinvention of living conception of Marxism, and a respect for the still untapped potential of mass self-rule.

Investigative journalist Lee Smith's The Plot Against the President tells the story of how Congressman Devin Nunes uncovered the operation to bring down the commander-in-chief. While popular opinion holds that Russia subverted democratic processes during the 2016 elections, the real damage was done not by Moscow or any other foreign actor. Rather, this was a slow-moving coup engineered by a coterie of the American elite, the "deep state," targeting not only the president, but also the rest of the country.

On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there's a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them. Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders traveled to Tehran....

The 1968 US presidential election was the young Lawrence O'Donnell's political awakening, and in the decades since it has remained one of his abiding fascinations. For years he has deployed one of America's shrewdest political minds to understanding its dynamics, not just because it is fascinating in itself but because in it is contained the essence of what makes America different and how we got to where we are now.

This is a study of how intellectuals as a class affect modern societies by shaping the climate of opinion in which official policies develop, on issues ranging from economics to law to war and peace. You will hear a withering and clear-eyed critique about (but not for) intellectuals that explores their impact on public opinion, policy, and society at large.

The Sexual Politics of Meat is Carol Adams’ inspiring and controversial exploration of the interplay between contemporary society’s ingrained cultural misogyny and its obsession with meat and masculinity. First published in 1990, the book has continued to change the lives of tens of thousands of people into the second decade of the 21st century.

The complete rankings of our best - and worst - presidents, based on C-SPAN's much-cited Historians Surveys of Presidential Leadership. Over a period of decades, C-SPAN has surveyed leading historians on the best and worst of America's presidents across a variety of categories - their ability to persuade the public, their leadership skills, their moral authority, and more. The crucible of the presidency has forged some of the very best and very worst leaders in our national history, along with everyone in between.

Written by cohosts of the hit Death Panel podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as "surplus," regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the "unfit" to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this "surplus" population.

As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.

Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Matthews pulls back the curtain on the public and private worlds of Robert Francis Kennedy. He shines a light on all the important moments of his life, from his early years and his start in politics to his crucial role as attorney general in his brother's administration and his tragic run for president. This definitive book brings Bobby Kennedy to life like never before and is destined to become a political classic.

The Constitution is the most significant document in America. But do you fully understand what this valuable document means to you? In How to Read the Constitution - and Why, legal expert and educator Kimberly Wehle spells out in clear, simple, and common-sense terms what is in the Constitution and most importantly, what it means. In compelling terms and including text from the United States Constitution, she describes how the Constitution’s protections are eroding.