Author: Alexander Keyssar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067497414X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
A New Statesman Book of the Year “America’s greatest historian of democracy now offers an extraordinary history of the most bizarre aspect of our representative democracy—the electoral college...A brilliant contribution to a critical current debate.” —Lawrence Lessig, author of They Don’t Represent Us Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose their presidents through an arcane institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Congress has tried on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral College, and in this master class in American political history, a renowned Harvard professor explains its confounding persistence. After tracing the tangled origins of the Electoral College back to the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Keyssar outlines the constant stream of efforts since then to abolish or reform it. Why have they all failed? The complexity of the design and partisan one-upmanship have a lot to do with it, as do the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments and the South’s long history of restrictive voting laws. By revealing the reasons for past failures and showing how close we’ve come to abolishing the Electoral College, Keyssar offers encouragement to those hoping for change. “Conclusively demonstrates the absurdity of preserving an institution that has been so contentious throughout U.S. history and has not infrequently produced results that defied the popular will.” —Michael Kazin, The Nation “Rigorous and highly readable...shows how the electoral college has endured despite being reviled by statesmen from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson to Edward Kennedy, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford.” —Lawrence Douglas, Times Literary Supplement
Author: Alex Wagner
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0812987500
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
From the host of MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight, “a rich and revealing memoir” (The New York Times) about her travels around the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people? “A thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are . . . and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans.”—Barack Obama The daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up thinking of herself as a “futureface”—an avatar of a mixed-race future when all races would merge into a brown singularity. But when one family mystery leads to another, Wagner’s post-racial ideals fray as she becomes obsessed with the specifics of her own family’s racial and ethnic history. Drawn into the wild world of ancestry, she embarks upon a quest around the world—and into her own DNA—to answer the ultimate questions of who she really is and where she belongs. The journey takes her from Burma to Luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records written on banana leaves to Mormon databases, genetic labs, and the rest of the twenty-first-century genealogy complex. But soon she begins to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our enduring obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble it’s caused us? Wagner weaves together fascinating history, genetic science, and sociology but is really after deeper stuff than her own ancestry: in a time of conflict over who we are as a country, she tries to find the story where we all belong. Praise for Futureface “Smart, searching . . . Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagner’s own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves.”—Maud Newton, The New York Times Book Review “Sincere and instructive . . . This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus exposé of DNA ancestry testing, deserves a wide audience.”—Library Journal “The narrative is part Mary Roach–style participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. . . . The journey is worth taking.”—Kirkus Reviews “[A] ruminative exploration of ethnicity and identity . . . Wagner’s odyssey is an effective riposte to anti-immigrant politics.”—Publishers Weekly
Author: Alex Nunns
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 1682191052
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 582
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Book Description
Drawing on first-hand interviews with those involved in the campaign, including its most senior figures, Nunns traces the origins of Jeremy Corbyn’s remarkable ascent in British politics.
Author: Alex Banayan
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 080413667X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
FORBES #1 CAREER BOOK TO READ IN 2018 The larger-than-life journey of an 18-year-old college freshman who set out from his dorm room to track down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and dozens more of the world’s most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers. The Third Door takes readers on an unprecedented adventure—from hacking Warren Buffett’s shareholders meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga—as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door. Life, business, success… it’s just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There’s the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always… the Third Door. It’s the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen—there’s always a way in. Whether it’s how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.
Author: Tananarive Due
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1786188570
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Octavia E. Butler said, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” New Suns 2 brings you fresh visions of the strange, the unexpected, the shocking—breakthrough stories, stories shining with emerging truths, stories that pierce stale preconceptions with their beauty and bravery. Like the first New Suns anthology (winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, IGNYTE, and British Fantasy awards), this book liberates writers of many races to tell us tales no one has ever told. Many things come in twos: dualities, binaries, halves, and alternates. Twos are found throughout New Suns 2, in eighteen science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories revealing daring futures, hidden pasts, and present-day worlds filled with unmapped wonders. Including stories by Daniel H. Wilson, K. Tempest Bradford, Darcie Little Badger, Geetanjali Vandemark, John Chu, Nghi Vo, Tananarive Due, Alex Jennings, Karin Lowachee, Saad Hossain, Hiromi Goto, Minsoo Kang, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Malka Older, Kathleen Alcalá, Christopher Caldwell and Jaymee Goh with a foreword by Walter Mosley and an afterword by Dr. Grace Dillon.
Author: Michelle Alexander
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620971941
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Author: Alex Dolan
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1626815488
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
“Much more than a brilliant debut thriller. Dolan’s mile-a-minute story also gets at one of our species’ most important issues―can we choose how to die?” (Dylan Schaffer, author of I Right the Wrongs) In this auspicious debut, Alex Dolan announces himself as a virtuoso of psychological suspense and a rightful heir to masters of the genre like Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott. Kali helps to end the lives of people with terminal diseases, her reasons her own. But she just helped the wrong person. Leland Moon is an FBI agent who couldn’t stop the abduction of his own son. He ropes Kali into a plot to avenge his son and help other victims, putting into a motion a mesmerizing cat-and-mouse game with two ruthless predators. Their mission will make Kali question everything she ever thought she know about herself. And the last life she ends may be her own . . . “Grabbed me from the first page and showed no signs of letting go. Dark and sinewy, topical and timeless, laced with rich characterization and gallows humor, it showcases Dolan as a thriller writer to watch and follow.” —Louis Bayard, bestselling author of Courting Mr. Lincoln “Alex Dolan makes an engrossing debut with The Euthanist . . . Dolan hooks readers from the very start, ratcheting up the tension and suspense until the shocking ending. As a thriller writer, Alex Dolan is set to be one of the best.” —Fresh Fiction “[An] action-packed story . . . Arriving with eerily uncanny timing, Alex Dolan’s debut novel, The Euthanist, tackles the prickly topic of death with dignity.” —San Jose Mercury News
Author: Angela Carstensen
Publisher: American Library Association
ISBN: 083899315X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
More than simply a vital collection development tool, this book can help librarians help young adults grow into the kind of independent readers and thinkers who will flourish at college.
Author: Alex Cuadros
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812996763
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
When Bloomberg News invited the young American journalist Alex Cuadros to report on Brazil's emerging class of billionaires at the height of the historic Brazilian boom, he was poised to cover two of the biggest business stories of our time: how the giants of the developing world were taking their place at the center of global capitalism, and how wealth inequality was changing societies everywhere. The billionaires of Brazil and their massive fortunes resided at the very top of their country's economic pyramid, and whether they quietly accumulated exceptional power or extravagantly displayed their decadence, they formed a potent microcosm of the world's richest .001 percent. They held sway over the economy, government, media, and stewardship of the environment; they determined the spiritual fates and populated the imaginations of their countrymen. In 2012, Eike Batista ranked as the eighth-richest person in the world, was famous for his marriage to a beauty queen, and was a fixture in the Brazilian press. But by 2015, Batista was bankrupt, his son Thor had been indicted for manslaughter, and Brazil--its president facing impeachment, its provinces combating an epidemic, and its business and political class torn apart by scandal--had become a cautionary tale of a country run aground by its elites. Over four years, Cuadros reported on media moguls and televangelists, energy barons and shadowy figures from the years of military dictatorship, soy barons who lived on the outskirts of the Amazon, and new-economy billionaires spinning money from speculation. His zealous reporting takes us from penthouses to courtrooms, from favelas to art fairs, from scenes of unimaginable wealth to desperate, massive street protests. Within a business narrative that deftly dramatizes the volatility of the global economy, Cuadros offers us literary journalism with a grand sweep.--Adapted from dust jacket.
Author: Alex Marlow
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982160764
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
From the editor in chief of Breitbart News, the New York Times bestselling “must-read” (Sean Hannity) investigation into how the establishment media became weaponized against Donald Trump and his supporters on behalf of the political left. In this timely and “important book” (Glenn Beck), Marlow explains how the establishment press destroyed its own credibility with a relentless stream of “fake news” designed to smear Donald Trump and his supporters while advancing a leftist agenda. He also reveals key details on how our information gatekeepers truly operate and why America’s “fake news” moment might never end. Breitbart—and Trump—began banging the drum about “fake news” during the 2016 election, and it resonated with millions of voters because they intuitively knew the corporate media was willing to say or write anything to achieve their political ends. It’s a battle cry that continues to this day. Deeply researched and eye-opening, Breaking the News rips back the curtain on the inner workings of how the establishment media weaponizes information to achieve their political and cultural ends.
