Collection: Politics

"One of the Best Books of the 21st Century."
--The Guardian

"No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium."
--Bill McKibben

"An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways."
--The New Yorker

A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them--and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.

The inside story of how one president forever altered the most powerful legal institution in the country--with consequences that endure today

By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices--the most by any president except George Washington--and handpicked the chief justice.

But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.

The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices--from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR's initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt's former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.

The justices' shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Court's finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloan's intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times.

A groundbreaking examination of a central question in international relations: Do states act rationally?

To understand world politics, you need to understand how states think. Are states rational? Much of international relations theory assumes that they are. But many scholars believe that political leaders rarely act rationally. The issue is crucial for both the study and practice of international politics, for only if states are rational can scholars and policymakers understand and predict their behavior.

John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato argue that rational decisions in international politics rest on credible theories about how the world works and emerge from deliberative decision-making processes. Using these criteria, they conclude that most states are rational most of the time, even if they are not always successful. Mearsheimer and Rosato make the case for their position, examining whether past and present world leaders, including George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, have acted rationally in the context of momentous historical events, including both world wars, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era.

By examining this fundamental concept in a novel and comprehensive manner, Mearsheimer and Rosato show how leaders think, and how to make policy for dealing with other states.

A Living Now Book Awards Gold Medalist, Social Activism/Charity

A practical, shame-free guide for navigating conversations across our differences at a time of rapid social change.

In the current period of social and political unrest, conversations about identity are becoming more frequent and more difficult. On subjects like critical race theory, gender equity in the workplace, and LGBTQ-inclusive classrooms, many of us are understandably fearful of saying the wrong thing. That fear can sometimes prevent us from speaking up at all, depriving people from marginalized groups of support and stalling progress toward a more just and inclusive society.

Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, founders of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law, are here to show potential allies that these conversations don't have to be so overwhelming. Through stories drawn from contexts as varied as social media posts, dinner party conversations, and workplace disputes, they offer seven user-friendly principles that teach skills such as how to avoid common conversational pitfalls, engage in respectful disagreement, offer authentic apologies, and better support people in our lives who experience bias.

Research-backed, accessible, and uplifting, Say the Right Thing charts a pathway out of cancel culture toward more meaningful and empathetic dialogue on issues of identity. It also gives us the practical tools to do good in our spheres of influence. Whether managing diverse teams at work, navigating issues of inclusion at college, or challenging biased comments at a family barbecue, Yoshino and Glasgow help us move from unconsciously hurting people to consciously helping them.

A major collection of essays and speeches from pioneering freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis

For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis's writing over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. In pieces that address the history of abolitionist practice and thought in the United States and globally, the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and stories and lessons of organizing inside and beyond the prison walls, Davis is always curious, always incisive, and always learning.

Rich and rewarding, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises will appeal to fans of Davis, to students and scholars reflecting on her life and work, and to readers new to feminism, abolition, and struggles for liberation.

Across the nation every two years, first-time lawmakers enter state legislatures--institutions steeped in tradition, arcane procedures, and unwritten rules. Although dozens of publications advise candidates on how to run and win campaigns, for those elected, few resources exist. After more than twenty years in the Washington State Legislature, Senator Karen Keiser realized she could address that knowledge gap. Written for legislative newcomers and others interested in state government, her book blends documented research with her personal experiences and observations about how to succeed and achieve real change. She focuses on the culture adjustment and challenges many newly elected lawmakers face, and offers tips and advice to help them achieve their legislative goals.

Discover the incredible story of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who followed her childhood dream of becoming a lawyer and eventually became the first Black woman to sit on the US Supreme Court in this picture book biography.

After 232 years and 115 appointments, Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson became the first Black woman appointed to serve on the US Supreme Court. With Tami Charles's sweeping lyricism and Jemma Skidmore's unforgettable illustrations, readers learn about the narratives that have shaped the Justice's life, and how this historic moment will be impressed upon the minds of the young dreamers of the future.

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.

John Lisle reveals the untold story of the OSS Research and Development Branch--The Dirty Tricks Department--and its role in World War II.

In the summer of 1942, Stanley Lovell, a renowned industrial chemist, received a mysterious order to report to an unfamiliar building in Washington, D.C. When he arrived, he was led to a barren room where he waited to meet the man who had summoned him. After a disconcerting amount of time, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), walked in the door. "You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course," Donovan said as an introduction. "Professor Moriarty is the man I want for my staff...I think you're it."

Following this life-changing encounter, Lovell became the head of a secret group of scientists who developed dirty tricks for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Their inventions included Bat Bombs, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, and camouflaged explosives. Moreover, they forged documents for undercover agents, plotted the assassination of foreign leaders, and performed truth drug experiments on unsuspecting subjects.

Based on extensive archival research and personal interviews, The Dirty Tricks Department tells the story of these scheming scientists, explores the moral dilemmas that they faced, and reveals their dark legacy of directly inspiring the most infamous program in CIA history: MKULTRA.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - John Grisham's first work of nonfiction: a true crime story that will terrify anyone who believes in the presumption of innocence. - LOOK FOR THE NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES

"Both an American tragedy and [Grisham's] strongest legal thriller yet, all the more gripping because it happens to be true."--Entertainment Weekly

In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron's home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death--in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence that would shatter a man's already broken life, and let a true killer go free.

Impeccably researched, grippingly told, filled with eleventh-hour drama, The Innocent Man reads like a page-turning legal thriller. It is a book no American can afford to miss.

Don't miss John Grisham's new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!

How small-town America's surprising success reshapes our understanding of the nation's urban-rural divide, offering "the most balanced and broadest-ranging look at the topic" (Tyler Cowen, George Mason University).

The Next Big Idea Club 2023 Must Read Book

We are frequently told rural America is in crisis. According to many journalists, academics, and politicians, our small towns have been hollowed out by lost jobs, and residents have turned to opioids and right-wing extremism to cope with their pain and resentment. In fact, many rural towns are thriving. Commentators have fixated on the steep decline of one region--Appalachia--and overlooked the millions of rural Americans who are succeeding in the heartland.

In The Overlooked Americans, public policy expert Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reveals that rural America has not been left behind the rest of the nation but instead is surprisingly successful. Drawing on deep research, including data and in-depth interviews, she traces how small towns are doing as well as, or better than, cities by many measures, including homeownership, income, and employment. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values, from opposing racism and upholding environmentalism to believing in democracy. Looking everywhere from Missouri to Minnesota to her hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania, Currid-Halkett ultimately reveals that the nation is less fractured by geography than many believe.

This is an urgent appeal for Americans to reconnect across a rural-urban divide that isn't so wide after all.

The inside story of Biden's foreign policy team and their struggle to restore America's global influence in the aftermath of Trump

When Joe Biden assumed the United States presidency, he brought with him a team of all-star talent, perhaps the most experienced ensemble of policy experts in modern U.S. history. Their mission: repair America's damaged reputation abroad and decide the course of its global future.

The challenges and risks could not have been greater. Around the world, adversaries were consolidating power, allies were drifting away, wars were raging, and climate change was accelerating, all while Russia was disrupting democracies and China was seeking to replace the U.S. as the world's preeminent power. Now for the first time since World War II, the United States risked falling from its unrivaled position. If Biden and his team failed, it would likely mark the end of an American era and the rise of a fractured and autocratic world order.

In The Internationalists, acclaimed national security reporter Alexander Ward takes us behind the scenes to reveal the struggle to enact a coherent and effective set of policies in a time of global crisis. Against the failure of Afghanistan and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Biden's all-star team-of-rivals must band together against incredible odds. Their successes, and their failures, will decide not just Biden's presidency. They will decide the very course of America's global future.

As The Best and The Brightest chronicled the smoke-filled rooms of the Kennedy Administration, and The Rise of The Vulcans detailed the inner workings of George Bush's war machine, The Internationalists takes readers behind the scenes as Joe Biden and his cabinet embark on some of the most ambitious foreign policy initiatives of any president since Richard M. Nixon.

Thanks to rigorous reporting and sources in the rooms where it happened, Ward delivers the first draft of history, the first definitive, unvarnished account of the Biden Doctrine, from the Fall of Kabul to the Rise of Kiev.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like 'foodie, ' but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting." --Molly Young, The New York Times

Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster's pathbreaking tour of the world's vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever.

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these--rice, wheat, and corn--provide 50 percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: 95 percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow, while one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.

In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it's too late. From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods the rest of us have forgotten or didn't know existed. Take honey--not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds to locate bees' nests. Or consider murnong--once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a species now considered crucial to the future of coffee.

Throughout this original and entertaining book, Saladino shows that when foods become endangered, we risk the loss of not only traditional foodways, but also flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our foods has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health--and to the planet. In response, Saladino provides a road map to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.

A fascinating history of the US Post Office for kids, from acclaimed author Linda Barrett Osborne

"In America, one of the first things done in a new State is to have the mail come." --Alexis de Toqueville, 1835

Who's Got Mail? is an intriguing and fact-filled look at how the mail has been delivered in the United States since before the Constitution was even signed. In the United States, the spread of the postal service went hand in hand with the spread of democracy and transportation. As settlement spread west, communication became even more important to let distant residents feel that they were American; no part of the country was too far away, no village or farm too small to have access to the post.

Moreover, the Post Office has always been a public service--it was not originally designed to make a profit or act like a business, but to deliver letters, medical supplies, packages ordered through catalogs, and all the things that Americans need at a reasonable cost. Over the centuries, it has also been one of the largest employers in the United States, particularly as a means for African Americans and women to secure stable, middle-class jobs.

Full of eccentric characters, great stories, and technological achievements, this fun middle-grade narrative nonfiction celebrates one of our oldest and strongest institutions and is a true testament to the spirit of American democracy.

"This book has a miraculous quality.... As a memoir this is hard to put down; if you are seeking a better American future you should pick it up."--Timothy Snyder, New York Times best-selling author of On Tyranny

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A celebrated foreign policy expert and key impeachment witness reveals how declining opportunity has set America on the grim path of modern Russia--and draws on her personal journey out of poverty, as well as her unique perspectives as an historian and policy maker, to show how we can return hope to our forgotten places.

Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father urged her to get out of their blighted corner of northern England: "There is nothing for you here, pet," he said.

The coal-miner's daughter managed to go further than he ever could have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served three U.S. Presidents. But in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave testimony in the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over the brink--and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from Russia's fate. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy.

"Of every book written by anybody associated with the Trump administration, in any way, [this] is absolutely the one to read."--Rachel Maddow

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

In this book from the critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the life of Martin Luther King Jr., the inspiring minister and civil rights activist.

Little Martin grew up in a family of preachers: his dad was a preacher, his uncle was a preacher, his grandfather was a preacher...so maybe he'd become a great preacher too. One day, a friend invited him to play at his house. Martin was shocked when his mother wouldn't let him in because he was black. That day he realized there was something terribly unfair going on. Martin believed that no one should remain silent and accept something if it's wrong. And he promised himself that--when he grew up--he'd fight injustice with the most powerful weapon of all: words. This moving book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the inspiring activist's life.

Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling biography series for kids that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.

This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover and paperback versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the treasuries each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in boxed gift sets. Activity books and a journal provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.

Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!