Collection: Politics

Doctor and social activist Paul Farmer shares a collection of charismatic short speeches that aims to inspire the next generation. One of the most passionate and influential voices for global health equity and social justice, Farmer encourages young people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. Engaging, often humorous, and always inspiring, these speeches bring to light the brilliance and force of Farmer's vision in a single, accessible volume.

A must-read for graduates, students, and everyone seeking to help bend the arc of history toward justice, To Repair the World:

• challenges readers to counter failures of imagination that keep billions of people without access to health care, safe drinking water, decent schools, and other basic human rights
• champions the power of partnership against global poverty, climate change, and other pressing problems today
• overturns common assumptions about health disparities around the globe by considering the large-scale social forces that determine who gets sick and who has access to health care
• discusses how hope, solidarity, faith, and hardbitten analysis have animated Farmer's service to the poor in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Russia, and elsewhere
• leaves the reader with an uplifting vision: that with creativity, passion, teamwork, and determination, the next generations can make the world a safer and more humane place.

This witty, nonpartisan book helps explain the concept of voting to the youngest readers.

I Voted explains the concept of choosing, individually, and as a group, from making a simple choice: "Which do you like better, apples or oranges?", to selecting a class pet, to even more complicated decisions, like electing community representatives.

You may not always get want you want, but there are strategies to better your odds!

Serge Bloch's effortless and charming illustrations paired with Mark Shulman's funny and timely text create a perfect resource for discussing current events with your children. This Spanish-language edition ensures crucial learning is accessible for all our future voters.

Now with added information about mail-in voting! Backmatter includes information about the United States electoral process.

Updated to include the newest research and published in time for the 2024 election cycle, Get Out the Vote will again be the indispensable guide to voter mobilization for campaign managers, consultants, and activists across the political spectrum.

Few Americans and even fewer citizens of other nations understand the electoral process in the United States. Still fewer understand the role played by political parties in the electoral process or the ironies within the system. Participation in elections in the United States is much lower than in the vast majority of mature democracies. Perhaps this is because of the lack of competition in a country where only two parties have a true chance of winning, despite the fact that a large number of citizens claim allegiance to neither and think badly of both. Or perhaps it is because in the U.S. campaign contributions disproportionately favor incumbents in most legislative elections, or that largely unregulated groups such as the now notorious 527 organizations have as much impact on the outcome of a campaign as do the parties or the candidates' campaigns. For instance, in two of the last six presidential elections, the winner of the popular vote lost the election in the Electoral College; in two others, a change of fewer than 100,000 votes in selected states would have led to the same result. These factors offer a very clear picture of the problems that underlie our much trumpeted electoral system.

The third edition of this Very Short Introduction analyzes these issues and more. Accounting for changes in electoral coalitions and the extent to which the American electorate is polarized in the wake of Donald Trump, L. Sandy Maisel explains how the system actually works while shining a light on some of its flaws. He also looks closely at turnout questions; efforts both to ease access to the ballot in some states and to restrict access in others; and the role of social media in campaign strategy.

What happens when you're the threat?

Sergeant John Kelly discovered during his thirty-year career in law enforcement that the biggest threat to his own survival wasn't the multiple attempts on his life, but came from within. When facing external dangers, risks are mitigated, intelligence is gathered, and a plan is devised to address the threat. But when everyone turns to you for answers, and there's nothing left but pain and despair, sometimes heroes need help! This realization led John to develop a program that empowers individuals to address their personal, professional, financial, physical, and mental health.

Through a series of life experiences, John addresses the real issues and threats facing those in the law-enforcement profession. An alcoholic, addict, and adulterer, John tears open his life to expose the man for all his faults and shortcomings. Through the story of his life's journey, difficult topics are examined and discussed, such as relationships, addiction, PTSD, and suicide.

Although written based on John's time in the law enforcement profession, the lessons and life struggles are universal in nature. You can't be there for others if you're not there for yourself; you have to make yourself a priority. There's no world that exists that is better off without you in it! You can survive self-inflicted wounds; let John Kelly show you how.

The story of how a single innocent comment ended up unlocking answers to a lifetime of ancestral inquiries.

Using personal accounts of diaspora, author Katia Tavitian Karageuzian delves into her cultural past to start solving mysteries about her family history with a focus on the Armenian Genocide and the ongoing Karabakh conflict.

Karageuzian thought her journey started with the discovery of long-lost relatives, but instead, that discovery led to a decades-long search to reveal the extensive history of American involvement in the destiny of her homeland and a buried record of those living with generational trauma.

As she slowly uncovers the answers she is looking for, Karageuzian also discovers surprising truths along the way-and an inspiring resilience that readers won't soon forget.

Forbidden Homeland, Story of a Diasporan, is the recipient of the 2023 Golden Literary Titan award.

Now, for the first time, she shares both her research and the answers she dug up in order to expose the geopolitics that consistently bury those truths and muffle the current ongoing wars in Transcaucasia.

Emma Goldman, the anarchist feminist political philosopher, was known throughout her lifetime as the "High Priestess of Anarchy." To the tabloids, she was "Red Emma, Queen of the Anarchists." Today, she is heralded as a founder of anarcha-feminism and remembered for her feminist credo: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution."
Over the course of an extraordinary revolutionary lifetime, Emma Goldman challenged a long list of towering adversaries: the police, the U.S. prison system, Anthony Comstock (champion of the anti-birth control Comstock laws), J. Edgar Hoover, and Vladimir Lenin. She was an early and outspoken critic of homophobia at a time when such a position was rare, including among anarchists, and mentored Margaret Sanger in the fight for birth control access. Her legacy has continued to inspire radical thinkers for a century. Historian Howard Zinn wrote a play about her life; artist Jenny Holzer used her writings in a searing print series. Though we tend to think of the history of radical political thought as overwhelmingly male, Goldman offers a fierce feminist intervention. This anthology organizes her most relevant writings, speeches, and interviews according to her perennial concerns, including marriage, prostitution, prisons and political violence.
This new edition includes a foreword by Vivian Gornick, an interview of Goldman by pathbreaking journalist Nelly Bly, and a biographical timeline.

Here is the explosive story of the Kids for Cash scandal in Pennsylvania, a judicial justice miscarriage that sent more than 2,500 children and teens to a for-profit detention center while two judges lined their pockets with cash, as told by Candy J. Cooper, an award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist.

In the early 2000s, Judge Mark Ciavarella and Judge Michael Conahan of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania were known as no-nonsense judges. Juveniles who showed up in their courtrooms faced harsh words and even harsher sentencing. In the post-Columbine era, many people believed that was just what the county needed to ensure its children and teens stayed on the straight and narrow path. But as more and more children faced shocking sentences for seemingly benign crimes, and a newly built for-profit detention center filled up further and further, a sinister pattern of abuses and bribery emerged. Through extensive research and original reporting leading into contemporary times, award-winning journalist Candy J. Cooper tells the story of a scandal that the Juvenile Law Center calls "one of the largest and most serious violations of children's rights in the history of the American legal system."

Recovering the history of the revolutionary Jewish tradition

Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag.

Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions--a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.

For more than half a century, Big Safari-modified aircraft have performed dangerous and essential missions to collect intelligence, conduct surveillance and reconnaissance, and engage in special operations missions around the globe in the interest of national security. These state-of-the-art aircraft have been flown, operated, and maintained by men and women whose dedication and commitment have made the world a safer place. In The History of Big Safari, author Colonel Bill Grimes, a retired US Air Force officer, presents a history of this program, which has been in existence for more than sixty years. Born as a special acquisition program in 1952, Big Safari has been in a unique position to save lives by rapidly fielding essential systems with a quick-reaction capability to ensure decision makers on the battlefield and at the Pentagon have timely intelligence to plan and execute operations. Grimes shows how, without a special acquisition program such as Big Safari, the nation's ability to react to evolving dangers and threats would be mired in bureaucracy when timely responses are critical. With detailed cutaway illustrations revealing aircraft modifications and mission equipment, The History of Big Safari also includes photographs, sidebars, and anecdotes. It goes behind the scenes with the men and women who participated in the challenging projects and daring missions. It shares the development of cutting-edge technology and special mission aircraft, as well as the global events that necessitated these once-classified programs. Finally, it provides insight into long-veiled projects, operations, and missions that comprise the world under the purview of Big Safari.

A probing work of narrative history that reveals the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, deepening urgent national conversations around migration.

In 2018, many Americans watched in horror as children were torn from their parents at the US-Mexico border under Trump's "family separation" policy. But as historian Ana Raquel Minian reveals in In the Shadow of Liberty, this was only the latest chapter in a saga tracing back to the 1800s--one in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, In the Shadow of Liberty gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee.

As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these "black sites" exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn't have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.

*A Financial Times Best Book of the Year* A "provocative" (Booklist) and compelling look at the powerful global forces that will cause billions of us to move geographically over the next decades, ushering in an era of radical change.In the 60,000 years since people began colonizing the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility--the ever-constant search for resources and stability. Seismic global events--wars and genocides, revolutions and pandemics--have only accelerated the process. The map of humanity isn't settled--not now, not ever. As climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize, and technology disrupts, we're entering a new age of mass migrations--one that will scatter both the dispossessed and the well-off. Which areas will people abandon and where will they resettle? Which countries will accept or reject them? As today's world population, which includes four billion restless youth, votes with their feet, what map of human geography will emerge? In Move, celebrated futurist Parag Khanna provides an illuminating and authoritative vision of the next phase of human civilization--one that is both mobile and sustainable. As the book explores, in the years ahead people will move people to where the resources are and technologies will flow to the people who need them, returning us to our nomadic roots while building more secure habitats. "An urgent, powerful argument for more open international borders" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Move is a fascinating look at the deep trends that are shaping the most likely scenarios for the future. Most important, it guides each of us as we determine our optimal location on humanity's ever-changing map.

In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt served as chairwoman of the United Nations committee to create this declaration of moral conscience, now used by Amnesty International as their founding document. This hardcover edition contains the international document in six languages: English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic.

"When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen." --The New York Times

"A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact." --Interview

As seen on MSNBC's Morning Joe and heard on NPR's All Things Considered the bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.

This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery--and to the hope of what comes next.

Lies with a Straight Face tells the fascinating story of the precipitous rise and fall of the "ex-gay" conversion industry in a manner that is both enlightening and entertaining. This fast-moving, fact-based book is perfect or those who enjoy the marriage of politics, history and current events.

The book features the riveting story of the 1998 Truth in Love ad campaign, where the Religious Right's most prominent organizations joined forces to prove that LGBTQ people could be converted to heterosexuality through prayer and therapy. Their provocative national ad campaign created saturation media coverage, turned "ex-gay" into a household term and sparked innumerable water cooler conversations.

In this book, you'll find out the shocking results of the Truth in Love campaign and learn about what happened to their outspoken "ex-gay" poster boys and girls. Lies with a Straight Face also discusses the contemporary con artists in the "ex-gay" industry and offers tangible ways for today's leaders to fight back.

Lies with a Straight Face is a sequel published on the twenty-year anniversary of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. Nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, Besen's original book documents the history of conversion "cure" programs from the early 20th Century to 2002. His new book discusses what happened from 2003 up to the present day.

"To prevail in our present-day battles, we must learn from our past," said Besen. "Ex-gay conversion programs are a farce that wreck families and destroy lives."

"This playful, though powerful book engages little readers in the tenets of democracy and activism through rhyming text and colorful works of art." --PBS Kids for Parents

"An ideal starting point in helping kids to understand elections and voting." --Today.com

V Is for Voting is an ABC board book that introduces progressive families to concepts like social justice and civil rights and reminds readers that every vote counts!

A is for active participation.
B is for building a more equal nation.
C is for citizens' rights and our duty.
D is for difference, our strength and our beauty.

An engaging introduction to the tenets of democracy, V Is for Voting is a playful, poetic, and powerful primer about the importance of voting and activism. Featuring Kate Farrell's rhyming text and Caitlin Kuhwald's bold art, plus thoughtful back matter, the book is a gorgeous, and crucial, addition to every young reader's library. It makes the perfect gift for fans of A Is for Activist, Woke Baby, and Feminist Baby.

"This ABC-style children's book reinforces every element from A to Z of just how powerful one vote can be." --Romper