Looking for great books to read this summer? Feed your brain while you catch some rays this summer with this assortment of great books that will be as provocative as they are entertaining.
1. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books (April 3, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0525574468
ISBN-13: 978-0525574460
With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States.
Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself. The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies.
In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.
Available formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook
2. To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment by Laurence Tribe, Joshua Matz
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Basic Books (May 15, 2018)
ISBN-10: 1541644883
ISBN-13: 978-1541644885
To End a Presidency addresses one of today's most urgent questions: when and whether to impeach a president. Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz provide an authoritative guide to past impeachments and a bold argument about its proper role today. In an era of expansive presidential power and intense partisanship, we must rethink impeachment for the twenty-first century.
Available formats: Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook
3. Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself by Amanda Marcotte
Hardcover: 216 pages
Publisher: Hot Books (April 24, 2018)
ISBN-10: 1510737456
ISBN-13: 978-1510737457
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. For years now, the purpose of right wing media, particularly Fox News, has not been to argue for traditional conservative ideals, such as small government or even family values, so much as to stoke bitterness and paranoia in its audience. Traditionalist white people have lost control over the culture, and they know it, and the only option they feel they have left is to rage at a broad swath of supposed enemies -- journalists, activists, feminists, city dwellers, college professors -- that they blame for stealing "their" country from them.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook
4. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; 1 edition (April 16, 2018)
ISBN-10: 022652454X
ISBN-13: 978-0226524542
Political polarization in America is at an all-time high, and the conflict has moved beyond disagreements about matters of policy. For the first time in more than twenty years, research has shown that members of both parties hold strongly unfavorable views of their opponents. This is polarization rooted in social identity, and it is growing. The campaign and election of Donald Trump laid bare this fact of the American electorate, its successful rhetoric of “us versus them” tapping into a powerful current of anger and resentment.
With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one other with distrust and to work for party victory over all else. Although the polarizing effects of social divisions have simplified our electoral choices and increased political engagement, they have not been a force that is, on balance, helpful for American democracy. Bringing together theory from political science and social psychology, Uncivil Agreement clearly describes this increasingly “social” type of polarization in American politics and will add much to our understanding of contemporary politics.
Available formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle
5. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
Paperback: 528 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (February 12, 2013)
ISBN-10: 0307455777
ISBN-13: 978-0307455772
As America descends deeper into polarization and paralysis, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done the seemingly impossible—challenged conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to everyone on the political spectrum. Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, he shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
Available formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook
6. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Amistad (May 8, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0062748203
ISBN-13: 978-0062748201
A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook
7. It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America by David Cay Johnston
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (January 16, 2018)
ISBN-10: 1501174169
ISBN-13: 978-1501174162
Bestselling author and longtime Trump observer David Cay Johnston shines a light on the political termites who have infested our government under the Trump Administration, destroying it from within and compromising our jobs, safety, finances, and more.
No journalist knows Donald Trump better than David Cay Johnston, who has been following him since 1988. It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America goes inside the administration to show how the federal agencies that touch the lives of all Americans are being undermined.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook
8. The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham
Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Random House (May 8, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0399589813
ISBN-13: 978-0399589812
Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear—a struggle that continues even now.
Available formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook
9. Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television by Joy Press
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Atria Books (27 Feb 2018)
ISBN-10: 1501137719
ISBN-13: 978-1501137716
Joy Press examines the feminist cultural revolution that has been happening on our small screens since the late '80s, when Roseanne Barr and Murphy Brown's Diane English openly questioned and redefined the role of women on their respective, controversial sitcoms. Since then, more and more women have made waves behind the scenes as writers, producers, and showrunners, ultimately changing how women are depicted on television and in the culture at large.
Available Formats: Kindle, Hardcover, Audio CD and Audiobook
10. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Press; Reprint edition (January 16, 2018)
ISBN-10: 1250171083
ISBN-13: 978-1250171085
Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin’s killer went free, Patrisse’s outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi.
When They Call You a Terrorist is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele’s reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.
Available formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, Audiobook and Audio CD
11. In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Viking; First Edition edition (March 20, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0525559442
ISBN-13: 978-0525559443
"There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it." When Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of New Orleans in May 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve nationally, and his speech has now been heard or seen by millions across the country. In his first book, Mayor Landrieu discusses his personal journey on race as well as the path he took to making the decision to remove the monuments, tackles the broader history of slavery, race and institutional inequities that still bedevil America, and traces his personal relationship to this history. His father, as state legislator and mayor, was a huge force in the integration of New Orleans in the 1960s and 19070s. Landrieu grew up with a progressive education in one of the nation's most racially divided cities, but even he had to relearn Southern history as it really happened.
Available Formats: Kindle, Hardcover, and Audiobook
12. Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (April 10, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0062802186
ISBN-13: 978-0062856524
A Fascist, observes Madeleine Albright, “is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”
The twentieth century was defined by the clash between democracy and Fascism, a struggle that created uncertainty about the survival of human freedom and left millions dead. Given the horrors of that experience, one might expect the world to reject the spiritual successors to Hitler and Mussolini should they arise in our era. In Fascism: A Warning, Madeleine Albright draws on her experiences as a child in war-torn Europe and her distinguished career as a diplomat to question that assumption.
Fascism, as she shows, not only endured through the twentieth century but now presents a more virulent threat to peace and justice than at any time since the end of World War II. The momentum toward democracy that swept the world when the Berlin Wall fell has gone into reverse. The United States, which historically championed the free world, is led by a president who exacerbates division and heaps scorn on democratic institutions. In many countries, economic, technological, and cultural factors are weakening the political center and empowering the extremes of right and left. Contemporary leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are employing many of the tactics used by Fascists in the 1920s and 30s.
Fascism: A Warning is a book for our times that is relevant to all times. Written by someone who has not only studied history but helped to shape it, this call to arms teaches us the lessons we must understand and the questions we must answer if we are to save ourselves from repeating the tragic errors of the past.
Available Formats: Kindle, Hardcover, Audio CD and Audiobook
Classics that are always worth reading:
13. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Paperback: 311 pages
Publisher: Anchor; 1st Anchor Books edition (March 16, 1998)
ISBN-10: 038549081X
ISBN-13: 978-0385490818
A society traumatized by terror falls under the sway of a brutal regime that holds to allegedly Old-Testament Christian values. In Handmaid Offred’s world, women’s rights have been relinquished for the promise of law and order, and her role is simply asa vessel to produce a baby. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the mono-theocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives.
Available Formats: Kindle, Hardcover, Paperback and Audiobook
Watch The Handmaid's Tale TV series is you can. It is a chilling look a possible American future and it's also very good show.
14. It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics) by Sinclair Lewis
Series: Signet Classics
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Signet; Reprint edition (January 7, 2014)
ISBN-10: 0451465644
ISBN-13: 978-0451465641
It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Available Formats: Kindle, Hardcover, Paperback and Audiobook