Collection: Politics

The life of civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is introduced in this early reader biography.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed it was possible to change the world with peaceful protest. His powerful words and actions helped the civil rights movement achieve many great changes. His incredible leadership is still remembered and celebrated today.

Beginning readers will learn about the milestones in Martin Luther King Jr.'s life in this Level Two I Can Read biography, which combines a traditional, illustrated narrative with historical photographs at the back of book--complete with a timeline, illustrations, and interesting facts.

Martin Luther King Jr.: A Peaceful Leader is a Level Two I Can Read, geared for kids who read on their own but still need a little help.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve deployed an extraordinary range of policy tools that helped prevent the collapse of the financial system and the U.S. economy. Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues lent directly to U.S. businesses, purchased trillions of dollars of government securities, pumped dollars into the international financial system, and crafted a new framework for monetary policy that emphasized job creation.

These strategies would have astonished Powell's late-20th-century predecessors, from William McChesney Martin to Alan Greenspan, and the advent of these tools raises new questions about the future landscape of economic policy.

In 21st Century Monetary Policy, Ben S. Bernanke--former chair of the Federal Reserve and one of the world's leading economists--explains the Fed's evolution and speculates on its future. Taking a fresh look at the bank's policymaking over the past seventy years, including his own time as chair, Bernanke shows how changes in the economy have driven the Fed's innovations. He also lays out new challenges confronting the Fed, including the return of inflation, cryptocurrencies, increased risks of financial instability, and threats to its independence.

Beyond explaining the central bank's new policymaking tools, Bernanke also captures the drama of moments when so much hung on the Fed's decisions, as well as the personalities and philosophies of those who led the institution.

El premiado filósofo, conferenciante internacional y académico Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta nos trae un manifiesto filosófico que pretende animar a los lectores a aprender a pensar por sí mismos y no permitir que la tecnología domine y controle su vida.

En un mundo de servicios de streaming a la carta y de interminables contenidos de TikTok, no es ningún secreto que la tecnología está dominando nuestras mentes y comportamiento, lo que en última instancia conducirá a una dominación social y del pensamiento mundial. Eso, si no lo detenemos ahora. Apaga el celular y enciende tu cerebro es una llamada a vivir la realidad como los seres humanos de pensamiento libre que somos y a evitar caer en el engaño de un mundo virtual que se muestra como una vía de escape fácil de las dificultades de la experiencia humana.

En este libro, el Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta presenta los problemas, la gravedad y los efectos de estar dominado cerebralmente por la tecnología, a la vez que presenta como solución un mundo en el que estos problemas se evitan mediante el control personal sobre la tecnología y la mente.

Este libro aborda temas como:

• Cómo sobrevivir sin tecnología en un mundo tecnológico
• Cómo afectan las pantallas al comportamiento
• La digitalización de la realidad
• Los peligros del metaverso y las comunidades virtuales como vía de escape de la realidad
• El rechazo a la tecnología en los debates contemporáneos
• Cómo podemos recuperar el control sobre nuestros pensamientos, nuestras vidas y nuestra familia

Debemos condicionar la tecnología, no dejar que la tecnología condicione nuestras vidas. Es hora de recuperar el control de tu vida y de tu familia.

Turn off Your Phone and Turn on Your Brain

Award-winning philosopher, international speaker, and scholar Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta brings us a philosophical manifesto that aims to encourage the readers learn to think for themselves and not allow technology to dominate and control their lives.

In a world of on-demand streaming services and never-ending TikTok content, it is no secret that technology is dominating our minds and behaviors, ultimately leading to world-wide social and thought domination. That's if we don't stop it in its tracks right now. Turn off Your Phone and Turn on Your Brain is a call to live reality as the free-thinking human beings we are and avoid falling into the deception of a virtual world that is shown as an easy escape from the difficulties of the human experience.

In this book, Dr. Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta presents the problems, severity, and effects of being cerebrally dominated by technology, while at the same time presenting as a solution a world in which these problems are avoided through personal control over technology and the mind.

This book addresses topics such as:

• How to survive without technology in a technological world
• How screens affect behavior
• The digitalization of reality
• The dangers of the metaverse and virtual communities as an escape route from reality
• The rejection of technology in contemporary discussions
• How we can regain control over our thoughts, our lives, and our family

We must condition technology, not let technology condition our lives. It is time to take back control of your life and your family.

A hack is any means of subverting a system's rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn't computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them "loopholes." We call exploits "tax avoidance strategies." And there is an entire industry of "black hat" hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys.

In A Hacker's Mind, Bruce Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyze the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. He reveals an array of powerful actors whose hacks bend our economic, political, and legal systems to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else.

Once you learn how to notice hacks, you'll start seeing them everywhere--and you'll never look at the world the same way again. Almost all systems have loopholes, and this is by design. Because if you can take advantage of them, the rules no longer apply to you.

Unchecked, these hacks threaten to upend our financial markets, weaken our democracy, and even affect the way we think. And when artificial intelligence starts thinking like a hacker--at inhuman speed and scale--the results could be catastrophic.

But for those who would don the "white hat," we can understand the hacking mindset and rebuild our economic, political, and legal systems to counter those who would exploit our society. And we can harness artificial intelligence to improve existing systems, predict and defend against hacks, and realize a more equitable world.

United Nations Champion of the Earth, climate scientist, and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe changes the debate on how we can save our future in this nationally bestselling "optimistic view on why collective action is still possible--and how it can be realized" (The New York Times).

Called "one of the nation's most effective communicators on climate change" by The New York Times, Katharine Hayhoe knows how to navigate all sides of the conversation on our changing planet. A Canadian climate scientist living in Texas, she negotiates distrust of data, indifference to imminent threats, and resistance to proposed solutions with ease. Over the past fifteen years Hayhoe has found that the most important thing we can do to address climate change is talk about it--and she wants to teach you how.

In Saving Us, Hayhoe argues that when it comes to changing hearts and minds, facts are only one part of the equation. We need to find shared values in order to connect our unique identities to collective action. This is not another doomsday narrative about a planet on fire. It is a multilayered look at science, faith, and human psychology, from an icon in her field--recently named chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy.

Drawing on interdisciplinary research and personal stories, Hayhoe shows that small conversations can have astonishing results. Saving Us leaves us with the tools to open a dialogue with your loved ones about how we all can play a role in pushing forward for change.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2023

Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize

The astonishing story of immigrants lured to the United States from India and trapped in forced labor--an "eye-opening" "must-read" told by the visionary labor leader who engineered their escape and set them on a path to citizenship (The New York Times Book Review). ​

In late 2006, Saket Soni, a twenty-eight-year-old Indian-born community organizer, received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker in Mississippi. He was one of five hundred men trapped in squalid Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Recruiters had promised them good jobs and green cards. The men had scraped up $20,000 each for this "opportunity" to rebuild hurricane-wrecked oil rigs, leaving their families in impossible debt. During a series of clandestine meetings, Soni and the workers devised a bold plan. In The Great Escape, Soni traces the workers' extraordinary escape, their march on foot to Washington, DC, and their twenty-three-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause. Along the way, ICE agents try to deport the men, company officials work to discredit them, and politicians avert their eyes. But none of this shakes the workers' determination to win their dignity and keep their promises to their families.

Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of twenty-first-century forced labor, Soni takes us into the lives of the immigrant workers the United States increasingly relies on to rebuild after climate disasters. The Great Escape is the gripping story of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history--and the workers' heroic journey for justice.

Four starred reviews!

Meet Diane Nash, a civil rights leader who worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, in this "poignant and powerful" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) nonfiction picture book that is "a stunning, little-known story, and a welcome volume" (School Library Journal, starred review) that "highlights major moments in Nash's life" (The Horn Book, starred review).

Diane grew up in the southside of Chicago in the 1940s. As a university student, she visited the Tennessee State Fair in 1959. Shocked to see a bathroom sign that read For Colored Women, Diane learned that segregation in the South went beyond schools--it was part of daily life. She decided to fight back, not with anger or violence, but with strong words of truth and action.

Finding a group of like-minded students, including student preacher John Lewis, Diane took command of the Nashville Movement. They sat at the lunch counters where only white people were allowed and got arrested, day after day. Leading thousands of marchers to the courthouse, Diane convinced the mayor to integrate lunch counters. Then, she took on the Freedom Rides to integrate bus travel, garnering support from Martin Luther King Jr. and then the president himself--John F. Kennedy.

This uplifting collection celebrates inspiring bookish women the world over and their thoughts on life, love, politics, education and beyond.

This uplifting collection celebrates inspiring bookish women the world over and their thoughts on life, love, politics, education and beyond.

From writers, thinkers, leaders, activists and change-makers, each of these quotes demonstrates the power of words and positive thinking in our everyday lives.

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'My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.' - Jane Austen

'Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.' - Frida Kahlo

'It's a sign of your own worth sometimes if you are hated by the right people.' - Miles Franklin

'Nobody's happy all the time. But I work hard at it.' - Dolly Parton

A revealing look at the intersection of wealth, philanthropy, and conservation

Billionaire Wilderness takes you inside the exclusive world of the ultra-wealthy, showing how today's richest people are using the natural environment to solve the existential dilemmas they face. Justin Farrell spent five years in Teton County, Wyoming, the richest county in the United States, and a community where income inequality is the worst in the nation. He conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews, gaining unprecedented access to tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers, and other prominent figures in business and politics. He also talked with the rural poor who live among the ultra-wealthy and often work for them. The result is a penetrating account of the far-reaching consequences of the massive accrual of wealth and a troubling portrait of a changing American West where romanticizing rural poverty and conserving nature can be lucrative, socially as well as financially.

Inspired by the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted by Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger, a chapter book series about women who spoke up and rose up against the odds--including Pura Belpré!

Pura Belpré grew up in Puerto Rico surrounded by stories. When she moved to New York and was offered the chance to work at the New York Public Library, she was thrilled to be able to help share her stories with children--especially multicultural and multilingual children like her. She persisted in bringing Spanish and bilingual storytelling and books to libraries across the city and across the country, and she wrote books and stories of her own to bring even more of her culture to people everywhere. Pura gave Spanish speakers in New York and around the country the opportunity to read and find community in ways they never had before, and she changed the way libraries reach readers even to this day.

In this chapter book biography by bestselling and award-winning author Meg Medina, readers learn about the amazing life of Pura Belpré--and how she persisted.

Complete with an introduction from Chelsea Clinton, black-and-white illustrations throughout, and a list of ways that readers can follow in Pura Belpré's footsteps and make a difference! A perfect choice for kids who love learning and teachers who want to bring inspiring women into their curriculum.

And don't miss out on the rest of the books in the She Persisted series, featuring so many more women who persisted, including Sonia Sotomayor, Diana Taurasi, Malala Yousafzai, and more!

Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine

Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South.

"We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." --Harriet Tubman

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life--to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth--and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.

Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully, Jesmyn Ward's memoir will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

"[Schiller] memorably chronicles why philanthropy is important, how it became flawed and what can be done to transform it for the greater good." -- Tobias Carroll, InsideHook

An attempt to rescue philanthropy from its progressive decline into vanity projects that drive wealth inequality, so that it may support human flourishing as originally intended.

The word "philanthropy" today makes people think big money--Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Andrew Carnegie come to mind. The scope of suffering in the world seems to demand an industry of giving, and yet for all the billions that are dispensed, the wealthy never seem to lose any of their money and nothing seems to change.

Journalist, academic and consultant Amy Schiller shows how we get out of this stalemate by evaluating the history of philanthropy from the ideas of St. Augustine to the work of Lebron James. She argues philanthropy's contemporary tendency to maintain obscene inequality and reduce every cause to dehumanizing technocratic terms is unacceptable, while maintaining an optimism about the soul and potential of philanthropy in principle.

For philanthropy to get back to its literal roots--the love of humanity--Schiller argues that philanthropy can no longer be premised around basic survival. Public institutions must assume that burden so that philanthropy can shift its focus to initiatives that allow us to flourish into happier, more fulfilled human beings. Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.

Studs Terkel's classic oral history of Americans' working lives--and the inspiration for Barack Obama's new Netflix series about work in the twenty-first century

"Reading these stories, I started to consider my own place in the world, and understand how connected we are to one another. [Working] helped inform the choices I made in my own work." --President Barack Obama

Perhaps Studs Terkel's best-known book, Working is a compelling, fascinating look at jobs and the people who do them. Consisting of over one hundred interviews conducted with everyone from gravediggers to studio heads, this book provides a moving snapshot of people's feelings about their working lives, as well as a timeless look at how work fits into American life.

Working received rave reviews upon its initial publication, including from the New York Times Book Review, which praised its "incredible abundance of marvelous beings" and "very special electricity and emotional power," and the Boston Globe, which called it a "magnificent book . . . a work of art," adding, "To read it is to hear America talking."

Nearly fifty years after its initial publication, Working remains a deeply relevant American classic, one of the most important works of oral history ever published.

A powerful and practical guide to help you navigate racism, challenge privilege, manage stress and trauma, and begin to heal.

Healing from racism is a journey that often involves reliving trauma and experiencing feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety. This journey can be a bumpy ride, and before we begin healing, we need to gain an understanding of the role history plays in racial/ethnic myths and stereotypes. In so many ways, to heal from racism, you must re-educate yourself and unlearn the processes of racism. This book can help guide you.

The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You'll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness, and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you'll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination.

This book is not just about ending racial harm--it is about racial liberation. This journey is one that we must take together. It promises the possibility of moving through this pain and grief to experience the hope, resilience, and freedom that helps you not only self-actualize, but also makes the world a better place.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

This sequel to the sensational New York Times bestseller, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, showcases 100 brand-new bedtime stories of incredible women throughout history and around the world.

In this book, readers will embark on an empowering journey through 100 new bedtime stories, featuring the adventures of extraordinary women through the ages, such as:

Agatha Christie, Writer
Angela Merkel, Chancellor
Audrey Hepburn, Actress
Beyoncé, Singer, Songwriter, and Businesswoman
Georgia O'Keeffe, Painter
Katherine Johnson, Computer Scientist
Madam C. J. Walker, Businesswoman
Madonna, Singer, Songwriter, and Businesswoman
Oprah Winfrey, TV Host, Actress, and Businesswoman
Sojourner Truth, Activist

The unique narrative style of Good Night
Stories for Rebel Girls transforms each biography into a fairytale, filling readers with wonder and a burning curiosity to know more
about each hero.

After the release of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, the passionate community of supporters, spanning 70+ countries, wrote in to suggest the Rebel Girls who inspired them. As a result, the stories in Volume 2 are entirely crowd-sourced and boasts a brand-new graphic design, a glossary, and full-page, full-color portraits of each subject, created by the best female artists of our time.

- New York Times bestseller -

The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world

"At this point in time, the Drawdown book is exactly what is needed; a credible, conservative solution-by-solution narrative that we can do it. Reading it is an effective inoculation against the widespread perception of doom that humanity cannot and will not solve the climate crisis. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope." --Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming

"There's been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There remains no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors. At least until now. . . . The public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom." --David Roberts, Vox

"This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook--only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook." --Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA

In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here--some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth's warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being--giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.