Dark Government

With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit 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 knowledge of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues 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.

As cyber attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers join the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan.

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.

Following his book Captured on corporate capture of regulatory and government agencies, and his years of experience as a prosecutor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here turns his attention to the right-wing scheme to capture the courts, and how it influenced the Trump administration's appointment of over 230 "business-friendly" judges, including the last three justices of the United States Supreme Court.

On September 17, 1787, at the State House in Philadelphia, 39 men from 12 states, after months of often bitter debate, signed America's Constitution. Yet very few of the delegates, at the start, had had any intention of creating a nation that would last. Most were driven more by pragmatic, regional interests than by idealistic vision. Lawrence Goldstone chronicles the forging of the Constitution through the prism of the crucial compromises made by men consumed with the needs of the slave economy.

In July 1995, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb found the Big One - the blockbuster story every journalist secretly dreams about - without even looking for it. A simple phone call concerning an unexceptional pending drug trial turned into a massive conspiracy involving the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, L.A. and Bay Area crack cocaine dealers, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations.

The Dark Side is a narrative account of the decisions the U.S. made after September 11, decisions that not only violated the Constitution, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, Jane Mayer relates specific cases, shown in real time against the larger tableau of Washington, looking at the intelligence gained and the price paid. In all cases, there were incalculable losses in terms of moral standing, our country's place in the world, and its sense of itself.

Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a sweeping critical analysis of Western colonialism, its foundational beliefs in militarism, patriarchy, Christianity, and white supremacy; and its destructive impact on the nations of Southeast Asia and, ultimately, America. Valentine focuses on the “dark arts” of empire: the black bag of CIA covert operations, including bribery, right-wing coups, assassinations, disinformation, and intimate relationships with drug, sex, and artifact traffickers.

The American empire emerged from the shadows of World War II. As the nation's influence swept the globe with near impunity, a host of evil forces followed—from racism, exploitation, and military invasion to killer clowns, flying saucers, and monsters borne of a fear of the other. By viewing American imperial history through the prism of the horror genre, Dark Carnivals lays bare how the genre shaped us, distracted us, and gave form to a violence as American as apple pie.

The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.

On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. In the Balkans half a century later, a Serb from the war-blasted city of Vukovar defies his superiors in order to save the lives of Croats. At the height of the Second Intifada, a member of Israel's most elite military unit informs his commander he doesn't want to serve in the occupied territories.

Beautiful Souls explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention.

Once the world's bastion of liberal, democratic values, Europe is now having to confront demons it thought it had laid to rest. The old pathologies of anti-Semitism, populist nationalism, and territorial aggression are threatening to tear the European postwar consensus apart. Based on extensive firsthand reporting, this book is a provocative, disturbing look at a continent in unexpected crisis.

Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.

Fans of Blake Crouch, Tananarive Due and Paul Tremblay won't want to miss this electrifying thriller, where family, power, and the relentless pursuit of justice collide in a world turned upside down. DHS Special Agent Ruth Baker's life spirals into chaos when a subway hijacking reveals a cryptic countdown and chilling disappearances. Teaming up with Detective Rafiq Husain, who shares her unnerving experiences, they unearth a sinister conspiracy tied to a quantum virus named Vinash, engineered by Ruth's late husband, Ashwin. Summoned to the White House, Ruth uncovers the horrifying truth: ...

New York Times best-selling author David Horowitz exposes not only the progressive war against Christianity but also a war against America and its founding principles - which are Christian in their origin. Dark Agenda is about an embattled religion, but, most of all, it is about our imperiled nation. Tackling a broad range of issues from prayer in the schools to the globalist mindset, Horowitz traces the anti-Christian movement to its roots in communism.

It’s a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used, and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society.

Edward Snowden touched off a global debate in 2013 when he gave Barton Gellman, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald each a vast and explosive archive of highly classified files revealing the extent of the American government’s access to our every communication. They shared the Pulitzer Prize that year for public service. For Gellman, who never stopped reporting, that was only the beginning.

This gripping book traces the evolution of brainwashing from its beginnings in torture and religious conversion into the age of neuroscience and social media. When Pavlov introduced scientific approaches, his research was enthusiastically supported by Lenin and Stalin, setting the stage for major breakthroughs in tools for social, political, and religious control.

In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.