Collection: Politics

Without credentials, connections or a college degree, a hip-hop journalist and community leader conquered her imposter syndrome while landing one of the most exclusive, sought-after and fun positions in the White House.

From the most unlikely person to end up as a senior official to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama comes a candid, incredible and inspiring story. Moved by the election of the country's first Black president, Deesha Dyer applied for a White House internship in 2009 as a thirty-one-year-old part-time community college student, taking a leap that carried her through being hired in a full-time position, followed by two promotions landing her at the epicenter of politics.

But in spite of the little voice in her head telling her she didn't deserve to be there, Deesha thrived and rose to the highly coveted role of White House social secretary, giving her a front row-seat to executing events that communicated defining moments in history while curating some of the flyest parties 1600 Pennsylvania has ever seen. With humor and realness, she peels back the curtain, revealing the hard truth about why she spent years trying to hide behind it. Undiplomatic is a deeply personal narrative about combating the feeling of self-doubt while being on top of the world. Deesha reflects on how imposter syndrome threatened her self-esteem, proven aptitude and survival until she realized that it was neither her fault nor her responsibility.

In this vivid portrayal from a true "around the way girl" on the personal impact of the Obama presidency, Deesha shares her road map from imposter to impact. In Undiplomatic, she invites you on a journey of self-discovery where she overcame doubt, unearthed true love for herself and learned that your unique worth is not something to be earned, but something inherently deserved. Uplifting, funny and candid, Deesha's story shows you how to embrace your authenticity at all costs, and the joy and freedom that awaits on the other side.

In 1775, Paul Revere of Boston made his now-famous horseback ride warning colonists of an impending attack by the British. This event went largely unnoticed in history until Longfellow celebrated it in a poem in 1861. So who was Paul Revere? In addition to being an American patriot, he was a skilled silversmith and made false teeth from hippo tusks! This biography, with black-and-white illustrations throughout, brings to life Paul Revere's thrilling ride as well as the personal side of the man and the exciting times in which he lived.

Redefining UGLY for individual and collective liberation--uplift, glorify, and love yourself in an uglified world.

In a deep analysis of the constructs of uglification and their impact on our social structures, collective psyche, and identities, author Vanessa Rochelle Lewis flips the script on how we think about ugly--what it is, what it means, and how it functions in our culture--and shows readers how to to Reclaim, Uplift, Glorify and Love Yourself. Blending incisive social analysis with personal narrative and joyful self-help magic, Reclaiming UGLY! empowers readers to connect, revolt, and heal from the oppression of uglification with creative prompts, reflective meditations, and guided opportunities for self-love and community-building.

But what is uglification? Uglification is a tool, ideology, and type of oppression. It's ugly weaponized--it designates some bodies as more or less worthy of love, respect, or access. It determines who gets to exist in which spaces, and acts as a tool of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. Like all forms of oppression, uglification is at work on systemic, interpersonal, and internalized levels--painfully interrupting life, love, joy, pleasure, hope, and possibility for those our culture uglifies. Lewis unpacks the insidious impacts of uglification--and shows us how reclaiming ugly is a subversive, empowering act in which we embrace joy, healing, and community. Moving us closer to a collective liberation that takes back what society tells us is ugly and taboo (and what we've told ourselves is ugly and taboo), Lewis' analysis, personal journey, and activity toolkit compassionately guide readers to radical self-acceptance, joyful community-centered healing, and authentic self-love.

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
The Nation's "Most Valuable Book"

"[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right."--The Atlantic

"This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be."--NPR

An explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.

*Now Updated With A New Preface*

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect--the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan--and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into "makers" and "takers." And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

French philosopher Simone Weil's best known work that promotes mindful living and instructs readers how they can once again feel rooted, in a cultural and spiritual sense, to their environment

A Penguin Classic

One of the foremost French philosophers of the last century, Simone Weil has been described by André Gide as "the patron saint of all outsiders" and by Albert Camus as "the only great spirit of our time." In this, her most famous work, she diagnoses the malaise at the heart of modern life: uprootedness, from the past and from community. Written towards the end of World War II for the Free French Army, Weil's work is an indispensable and perpetually intriguing text for readers and students of philosophy everywhere. The book discusses the political, cultural and spiritual currents that ought to be nurtured so that people have access to sources of energy which will help them lead fulfilling, joyful and morally good lives.

In It's Just the Way It Was: Inside the War on the New England Mob and other stories, Joe Broadmeadow and Brendan Doherty take you inside the investigations, covert surveillances, and murky world of informants in the war against Organized Crime.

Make no mistake about it, it was a war targeting the insidious nature of the mob and their detrimental effect on Rhode Island and throughout New England.
Indeed, the book reveals the extensive nature of Organized Crime throughout the United States.

From the opening moments detailing a mob enforcer's near death in a hail of gunfire to the potentially deadly confrontation between then Detective Brendan Doherty and a notorious mob associate, Gerard Ouimette, this book puts you right there in the middle.

Most books on the mob tell a sanitized story of guys who relished their time as mobsters. As Nicholas Pileggi, author of "Wiseguys," put it, "most mob books are the egomaniacal ravings of an illiterate hood masquerading as a benevolent godfather."

This is not that kind of book. This is the story of the good guys.

It's just the way it was.

A vivid historical account of the social world of Rome as it moved from republic to empire. In 49 B.C., the seven hundred fifth year since the founding of Rome, Julius Caesar crossed a small border river called the Rubicon and plunged Rome into cataclysmic civil war. Tom Holland's enthralling account tells the story of Caesar's generation, witness to the twilight of the Republic and its bloody transformation into an empire. From Cicero, Spartacus, and Brutus, to Cleopatra, Virgil, and Augustus, here are some of the most legendary figures in history brought thrillingly to life. Combining verve and freshness with scrupulous scholarship, Rubicon is not only an engrossing history of this pivotal era but a uniquely resonant portrait of a great civilization in all its extremes of self-sacrifice and rivalry, decadence and catastrophe, intrigue, war, and world-shaking ambition.

First published in 1980, Street-Level Bureaucracy received critical acclaim for its insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs. Three decades later, the need to bolster the availability and effectiveness of healthcare, social services, education, and law enforcement is as urgent as ever. In this thirtieth anniversary expanded edition, Michael Lipsky revisits the territory he mapped out in the first edition to reflect on significant policy developments over the last several decades. Despite the difficulties of managing these front-line workers, he shows how street-level bureaucracies can be and regularly are brought into line with public purposes. Street-level bureaucrats--from teachers and police officers to social workers and legal-aid lawyers--interact directly with the public and so represent the frontlines of government policy. In Street-Level Bureaucracy, Lipsky argues that these relatively low-level public service employees labor under huge caseloads, ambiguous agency goals, and inadequate resources. When combined with substantial discretionary authority and the requirement to interpret policy on a case-by-case basis, the difference between government policy in theory and policy in practice can be substantial and troubling. The core dilemma of street-level bureaucrats is that they are supposed to help people or make decisions about them on the basis of individual cases, yet the structure of their jobs makes this impossible. Instead, they are forced to adopt practices such as rationing resources, screening applicants for qualities their organizations favor, "rubberstamping" applications, and routinizing client interactions by imposing the uniformities of mass processing on situations requiring human responsiveness. Occasionally, such strategies work out in favor of the client. But the cumulative effect of street-level decisions made on the basis of routines and simplifications about clients can reroute the intended direction of policy, undermining citizens' expectations of evenhanded treatment. This seminal, award-winning study tells a cautionary tale of how decisions made by overburdened workers translate into ad-hoc policy adaptations that impact peoples' lives and life opportunities. Lipsky maintains, however, that these problems are not insurmountable. Over the years, public managers have developed ways to bring street-level performance more in line with agency goals. This expanded edition of Street-Level Bureaucracy underscores that, despite its challenging nature, street-level work can be made to conform to higher expectations of public service.

Whether Congress is in session or not, here is an enthralling overview about the branch of our government closest to average Americans.

Best-selling adult author and the first woman to become executive editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson is a self-confessed political junkie. Now she has written the book she wishes she'd had as a young reader. Explaining clearly and concisely what exactly Congress does, this book is peppered with fascinating stories, including the bloody beating in the Senate of a lawmaker in pre-Civil War days, the Watergate hearings, and Senator Joe McCarthy's shameful "witch hunt" of Communists. Kids may start considering a career in Congress themselves when they learn fun facts, such as the special "candy desk" in the Senate, and the fact that all lawmakers can bring their dogs to work!

With 80 fun black-and-white illustrations and an engaging 16-page photo insert, readers will be excited to read this latest additon to this #1 New York Times Best-Selling series.

One of the best-selling books on relationships in Europe during the last two years, studied and debated by consensual non-monogamy activists and polyamory discussion groups, has been translated and adapted here to bring to the English-speaking audience a less self-centered and more radical framework for sustainable interpersonal relations based on intense communication and free, conscientious commitments.

The proposal was born in Sweden in 2005, was developed over 15 years, and then this title was originally published in Spain in the spring of 2020. Since then, one edition after another has sold out (in 2023, the fifth Spanish edition will hit the bookstores), and translations into other languages and publishing projects in other countries have been released, showing that there was and still is a global need to know and understand alternative structures when it comes to relating to each other.

The most enthusiastic reception of this monograph has been in those communities already interested in these relational alternatives to the hegemonic monogamous system and groups more focused on lifestyle-politics activism of anti-patriarchal, anarchist and anti-capitalist inspiration. Reading sessions, analysis courses, seminars, and workshops of varied scopes, extensions, and approaches have been organized. Likewise, these topics have been collected in press articles, radio and TV programs, interviews, podcasts, and other digital and printed formats. This translation maintains most of the original content, adapting only the necessary contextual elements so that English-speaking readers can interpret the examples, references, comparisons, and anecdotes with greater familiarity.

The book's audience covers various profiles regarding age, gender, sexual orientation and preferences, geographical and socio-cultural origin, etc. One reason is that the work brings together both visions: political and relational. It historically structures the elements leading to the emergence of this framework, starting with the philosophical and political theoretical foundations, the freethought tradition, social developments, feminist, queer, sex-positive activisms, etc., while also addressing more personal aspects.

The feedback from readers suggests that this volume has inspired and helped them not to "feel like weirdos" and to have pride and confidence in their decisions and choices regarding relationships.

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This book provides vital new information about a form of intimate diversity accelerating rapidly in the twenty-first century. With an ideal balance of critique, intellectual sophistication, and accessibility, the work is sure to be of interest to scholars, students, and everyday practitioners of polyamory and other forms of consensual non-monogamy. It stands out as a very unique and important contribution.

Phillip L. Hammack, PhD. Professor, Director of the Sexual & Gender Diversity Lab.,

University of California, Santa Cruz. USA.

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This book makes a compelling and original argument for relationship anarchy. It uses a mix of examples to apply principles of anarchism to intimate relationships, highlighting the intensely political nature of our intimate lives and their potential as sites of social and cultural change.

Lizzie Seal, PhD. Professor, School of Law, Politics and Sociology,

University of Sussex. UK.

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In writing "Relationship Anarchy. Occupy Intimacy!" Pérez-Cortés presents a valuable and original definition of anarchy as a conceptual framework for reshaping, and providing an alternative to, the personal and social realms as they exist in the present.

Andrew Kolin, PhD. Professor, Department of Social Sciences,

Hilbert College, NY. USA.

"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." -- Langston Hughes

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music--through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."

So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America--not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Impeccably researched, this riveting journalistic investigation separates fact from fiction, and documents the unexplained mysteries of--and government reactions to--actual UFOs.

"A treasure trove of insightful and eye-opening information."--Michio Kaku, PH.D., bestselling author of Physics of the Future

Leslie Kean, a veteran investigative reporter who has spent the past ten years studying the still-unexplained UFO phenomenon, reviewed hundreds of government documents, aviation reports, radar data, and case studies with corroborating physical evidence. She interviewed dozens of high-level officials and aviation witnesses from around the world. Among them, five Air Force generals and a host of high-level sources--including Fife Symington III, former governor of Arizona, and Nick Pope, former head of the British Defence Ministry's UFO Investigative Unit--have written their own breathtaking, firsthand accounts about UFO encounters and investigations exclusively for this book.

With the support of former White House chief of staff John Podesta, Kean lifts the veil on decades of U.S. government misinformation about this mysterious phenomenon and presents irrefutable evidence that unknown flying objects--metallic, luminous, and seemingly able to maneuver in ways that defy the laws of physics--actually exist.

With a Foreword by John Podesta

"The most important book on the phenomenon in a generation."--Journal of Scientific Exploration

"Written with penetrating depth and insight, the revelations in this book constitute a watershed event in lifting the taboo against rational discourse about this controversial subject."--Harold E. Puthoff, PH.D., Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin

"Kean presents the most accurate, most credible reports on UFOs you will ever find. She may not have the final smoking gun, but I smell the gunpowder."--Miles O'Brien, science correspondent for PBS's NewsHour

Short-listed for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award

In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll offers a fresh, provocative account of Appalachia, and why it matters. He begins with the earliest European settlers, whose desire for vast forests to hunt in was frustrated by absentee owners--including George Washington and other founders--who laid claim to the region. Even as Daniel Boone became famous as a backwoods hunter and guide, the economy he represented was already in peril. Within just a few decades, Appalachian hunters and farmers went from pioneers to pariahs, from heroes to hillbillies, in the national imagination, and the area was locked into an enduring association with poverty and backwardness. Stoll traces these developments with empathy and precision, examining crucial episodes such as the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and the arrival of timber and coal companies that set off a devastating "scramble for Appalachia."

At the center of Ramp Hollow is Stoll's sensitive portrayal of Appalachian homesteads. Perched upon ridges and tucked into hollows, they combined small-scale farming and gardening with expansive foraging and hunting, along with distilling and trading, to achieve self-sufficiency and resist the dependence on cash and credit arising elsewhere in the United States. But the industrialization of the mountains shattered the ecological balance that sustained the households. Ramp Hollow recasts the story of Appalachia as a complex struggle between mountaineers and profit-seeking forces from outside the region. Drawing powerful connections between Appalachia and other agrarian societies around the world, Stoll demonstrates the vitality of a peasant way of life that mixes farming with commerce but is not dominated by a market mind-set. His original investigation, ranging widely from history to literature, art, and economics, questions our assumptions about progress and development, and exposes the devastating legacy of dispossession and its repercussions today.

A riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power--and the movement to stop them.

The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. But this crisis didn't begin or end with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift. Ari Berman charts these efforts with sweeping historical research and incisive on-the-ground reporting, chronicling how a wide range of antidemocratic tactics interact with profound structural inequalities in institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to threaten the survival of representative government in America.

"The will of the people," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, "is the only legitimate foundation of any government." But that foundation is crumbling. Some counter-majoritarian measures were deliberately built into the Constitution, which was designed in part to benefit a small propertied upper class, but they have metastasized to a degree that the Founding Fathers could never have anticipated, undermining the very notion of "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Chilling and revelatory, Minority Rule exposes the long history of the conflict between white supremacy and multiracial democracy that has reached a fever pitch today--while also telling the inspiring story of resistance to these regressive efforts.

Ireland was England's oldest colony. Making Empire revisits the history of empire in Ireland--in a time of Brexit, 'the culture wars', and the campaigns around 'Black Lives Matter' and 'Statues must fall'--to better understand how it has formed the present, and how it might shape the future.

Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire re-examines empire as process--and Ireland's role in it--through the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, that equate roughly to the timespan of the First English Empire (c.1550-c.1770s).

Ireland was England's oldest colony. How then did the English empire actually function in early modern Ireland and how did this change over time? What did access to European empires mean for people living in Ireland? This book answers these questions by interrogating four interconnected themes. First, that Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, Second, that the Irish operated as agents of empire(s). Third, Ireland served as laboratory in and for the English empire. Finally, it examines the impact that empire(s) had on people living in early modern Ireland. Even though the book's focus will be on Ireland and the English empire, the Irish were trans-imperial and engaged with all of the early modern imperial powers. It is therefore critical, where possible and appropriate, to look to other European and global empires for meaningful comparisons and connections in this era of expansionism.

What becomes clear is that colonisation was not a single occurrence but an iterative and durable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion and expropriation. Strategies about how best to turn conquest into profit, to mobilise and control Ireland's natural resources, especially land and labour, varied but the reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance and assimilation to resistance.

This book, based on the 2021 James Ford Lectures, Oxford University, suggests that the moment has come revisit the history of empire, if only to better understand how it has formed the present, and how this might shape the future.

Instant Amazon Best Seller and Hot New Release

For readers of Caste and Radical Dharma, an urgent call to action to end caste apartheid, grounded in Dalit feminist abolition and engaged Buddhism.

"Dalit" is the name that we chose for ourselves when Brahminism declared us "untouchable." Dalit means broken. Broken by suffering. Broken by caste: the world's oldest, longest-running dominator system...yet although "Dalit" means broken, it also means resilient.
Caste--one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world--is thriving. Despite the ban on Untouchability 70 years ago, caste impacts 1.9 billion people in the world. Every 15 minutes, a crime is perpetrated against a Dalit person. The average age of death for Dalit women is just 39. And the wreckages of caste are replicated here in the U.S., too--erupting online with rape and death threats, showing up at work, and forcing countless Dalits to live in fear of being outed.
Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts forth a call to awaken and act, not just for readers in South Asia, but all around the world. She ties Dalit oppression to fights for liberation among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, femme, and Queer communities, examining caste from a feminist, abolitionist, and Dalit Buddhist perspective--and laying bare the grief, trauma, rage, and stolen futures enacted by Brahminical social structures on the caste-oppressed.
Soundararajan's work includes embodiment exercises, reflections, and meditations to help readers explore their own relationship to caste and marginalization--and to step into their power as healing activists and changemakers. She offers skills for cultivating wellness within dynamics of false separation, sharing how both oppressor and oppressed can heal the wounds of caste and transform collective suffering. Incisive and urgent, The Trauma of Caste is an activating beacon of healing and liberation, written by one of the world's most needed voices in the fight to end caste apartheid.