"From popular TV personality Bob Beckel, a deeply moving, redemptive memoir about his life as a political operative and diplomat, his long struggle with alcohol and drugs, and his unlikely journey to finding faith. Growing up poor in an abusive home, Bob Beckel learned to be a survivor: to avoid conflict, mask his feelings, and to lie--all skills that served him well in Washington, where he would become the youngest-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary...

"A National Public Radio (npr.org/blogs) Mara Liasson Best Book of the Year for 2010" James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and chair of the history department at Harvard University. His books include Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920; The Virtues of Liberalism; and A Companion to American Thought. A leading intellectual historian traces the origins...

"Why has American politics fallen into such a state of horrible dysfunction? Can it ever be fixed? These are the questions that motivate Michael Tomasky's deeply original examination into the origins of our hopelessly polarized nation. Tomasky ranges across centuries and disciplines to show how America has almost always had two dominant parties that are existentially, and often violently, opposed. When he turns to our current era, he does so with...

On 9 October 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard stood up and proceeded to make all present in Parliament House that day pay attention - and left many of them squirming in their seats. The incisive 'misogyny speech', as her words came to be known, challenged not only Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, on his words and actions but, over time, all of us. How had we come to condone the public and private behaviours of some very public men?With contributions...

A new Ku Klux Klan arose in the early 1920s, a less violent but equally virulent descendant of the relatively small, terrorist Klan of the 1870s. Unknown to most Americans today, this "second Klan" largely flourished above the Mason-Dixon Line-its army of four-to-six-million members spanning the continent from New Jersey to Oregon, its ideology of intolerance shaping the course of mainstream national politics throughout the twentieth century. As...

"Brent Cummings, an Iraq war veteran, has come home feeling he survived one war only to find himself in the midst of another one. The country he loves and defended for twenty-eight years seems to be unraveling in front of his eyes. Raised to believe in a vision of America that values fairness, honesty, and respect for others, Cummings is increasingly engulfed by the fear and anger sweeping through his beloved country as he tries to hold onto hope...

"A sweeping 50-year history of how the Baby Boomers took the reforms of the 1960s too far, leading to a multitude of contradictions in American society and values that caused our current political polarization"--

The 1990s was a decade of extreme change. Seismic shifts in culture, politics, and technology radically altered the way Americans did business, expressed themselves, and thought about their role in the world. At the center of it all was Bill Clinton, the talented, charismatic, and flawed Baby Boomer president and his controversial, polarizing, but increasingly popular wife Hillary. Although it was in many ways a Democratic Gilded Age, the final decade...