The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business, and politics

“Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian is much more than a consistently shocking biography of Peter Thiel, the most important investor in tech and a key supporter of the Donald Trump presidency. It’s also a disturbing history of Silicon Valley that will make you reconsider the ideological foundations of America’s relentless engine of creative destruction.”—Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound

Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of our contemporary way of life, from the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.

In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator’s singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, including funding the lawsuit that destroyed the blog Gawker and strenuously backing far-right political candidates, notably Donald Trump for president in 2016.

Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

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Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda by Jean Guerrero

Jeanguerrero.com

“A vital book for understanding the still-unfolding nightmare of nationalism and racism in the 21st century.” –Francisco Cantu, author of The Line Becomes a River

Stephen Miller is one of the most influential advisors in the White House. He has crafted Donald Trump’s speeches, designed immigration policies that ban Muslims and separate families, and outlasted such Trump stalwarts as Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions. But he’s remained an enigma.

Hatemonger unveils the man driving some of the most divisive confrontations over what it means to be American––and what America will become.

Jean Guerrero is the PEN-winning author of CRUX and the forthcoming biography of Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller, Hatemonger. Her writing is featured in The Best American Essays 2019. She is an Emmy-winning investigative reporter for KPBS, contributing to NPR and the PBS NewsHour. She started her career at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as a foreign correspondent in Mexico.

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The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship by Nate Klemp PhD, Kaley Klemp

An accessible, transformative guide for couples seeking greater love, connection, and intimacy in our modern world

Nate and Kaley Klemp were both successful in their careers, consulting for high-powered companies around the world. Their work as mindfulness and leadership experts, however, often fell to the wayside when they came home in the evening, only to end up fighting about fairness in their marriage. They believed in a model where each partner contributed equally and fairness ruled, but, in reality, they were finding that balance near impossible to achieve.

From this frustration, they developed the idea of the 80/80 marriage, a new model for balancing career, family, and love. The 80/80 Marriage pushes couples beyond the limited idea of “fairness” toward a new model grounded on radical generosity and shared success, one that calls for each partner to contribute 80 percent to build the strongest possible relationship. Drawing from more than one hundred interviews with couples from all walks of life, stories from business and pop culture, scientific studies, and ancient philosophical insights, husband-and-wife team Nate and Kaley Klemp pinpoint exactly what’s not working in modern marriage. Their 80/80 model of marriage provides practical, powerful solutions to transform your relationship and open up space for greater love and connection.

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Don’t Be a Dick Manager: The Down & Dirty Guide to Management by James Monroe

Take a successful employee, promote them into management but give them no management training and there’s a very good chance you’ll create a defensive, insecure, unsuccessful, dick manager.Here is the management training you never got! This honest, straightforward guide reveals the things nobody talks about–knowledge that only comes from real-world experience in the management trenches. It will change the way you look at yourself, your job and your career and it will enable you to be a successful leader and mentor.Most importantly, it will help you avoid becoming a dick manager (or, if it’s too late, to reform) so you can enjoy the personal and financial rewards of being a great manager.Discover the power of the Laws of Management and understand the personal characteristics you must have to excel as a manager.Learn how to deal with non-communicative, mean, micromanaging, bully bosses, and how to figure out when it’s time for you to leave an impossible situation.Find out how to deal with ambitious employees and how to turn around hostile, jaded ones. And be warned about the one type of employee who must go, no matter what.Filled with anecdotes from more than 20 years of management experience, this book takes a frank look at the author’s mistakes and triumphs, his great bosses and his dick managers and the lessons learned from all of them.

About James Monroe I became a manager at the age of 29. It was a big job. I had a lot of autonomy, a good-sized team and no management training whatsoever. And the moment I walked into my fancy new office, my education began. I’d been working since the age of 11 and I’d had eight bosses by then. All I knew about management was that I wanted to copy the good things I’d seen and avoid the bad. Fortunately, I had a supportive boss and a forgiving team. I made some mistakes, but I learned from them, as I have in every job since. I went on to manage teams in large media companies like CBS and NBC (while it was owned by both GE and Comcast) and in tiny Silicon Valley tech startups. I’ve worked in government as well as the service, consumer product, media and technology industries. Though every company was different, the great managers I knew-and there were very few of them-all had something in common: they had very specific personal characteristics that enabled them to be great. Few people are born with these characteristics, but many more can acquire them if they work at it. These are things nobody talks about, which is a shame because I wish I’d known about them much sooner. This is my attempt to help other mangers, particularly those who are early in their careers, make fewer mistakes and enjoy long, rewarding, successful management careers. This book isn’t based on academic studies or on one person’s unusual, one-of-a-kind experience. It’s based on working in the trenches year after year, learning as I went and eventually understanding what it takes to be a great manager.

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Brad Kearns Co-Author Interview: Two Meals a Day: The Simple, Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from Diet Frustration Forever

The New York Times bestselling author of The Primal Blueprint and The Keto Reset Diet, Mark Sisson, turns his health and fitness expertise to the latest diet trend, which he has coined, “intermittent eating!”

Are you sick and tired of struggling through regimented diets that work for a minute and then become unsustainable? Are you confused about the changing fads and ongoing controversy over what’s healthy and what’s not? It’s time to embrace a simple, scientifically validated plan that transcends gimmicks and avoids the stress of regimented macros and mealtimes.

Health and fitness expert Mark Sisson presents a comprehensive lifestyle approach based on the principles of intermittent fasting. He’ll teach you how to gracefully burn body fat while keeping your energy, focus, and positive attitude.

In TWO MEALS A DAY, you’ll implement an eating style that’s incredibly nourishing and easy to adhere to for a lifetime, dial-in a winning fitness routine, prioritize recovery, and learn powerful strategies for overcoming self-limiting beliefs and behaviors. When you’re ready to level up, you’ll implement some cutting-edge techniques to achieve stunning body composition breakthroughs. Packed with forty-two delicious meals in a variety of categories, TWO MEALS A DAY has everything you need to hit the ground running and pursue enjoyable and lasting lifestyle transformation.

About Brad Kearns
Brad Kearns, 55, is a New York Times bestselling author, Guinness World Record setting Speedgolfer, #1 ranked USA Masters Track&Field age 55-59 high jumper, and former national champion and #3 world-ranked professional triathlete. He has worked with Mark Sisson to promote the Primal Blueprint lifestyle with books, seminars, retreats, and online multimedia educational courses. In 2017, their book, The Keto Reset Diet, became New York Times bestseller, and briefly held the #1 ranked overall bestselling book position on amazon.com.

Brad hosts the award-winning Get Over Yourself podcast, covering health, fitness, peak performance, personal growth, happiness, relationships and longevity, with humor and a little spice. He also hosts weekly shows on the Primal Blueprint Podcast. Brad’s athletic achievements and devotion to healthy eating and a stress balanced lifestyle comprise what he calls the “MOFO Mission” (bradkearns.com/mofo): a commitment to age gracefully, preserve passion and competitive intensity throughout life, optimize testosterone, and have fun along the way.

In 2018, Brad broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest single hole of golf ever played (minimum hole length of 500 yards). Playing with a single club (3-wood) and sprinting full speed between shots, Brad played a 503-yard hole in Los Angeles in 1 minute, 38 seconds, scoring a birdie four (Search YouTube For “Brad Kearns Speedgolf World Record”). Brad is 4-time top-20 finisher in the World Professional Speedgolf Championships, and a top-10 finisher in the 2019 USA Professional Speedgolf Championships. He placed third in the 2017 California Professional Speedgolf Championships, shooting 78 on a championship course in 47 minutes for his best Speedgolf score (adding together strokes and minutes) of 125.

During his nine-year career as a triathlete, Brad was one of the world’s top ranked professionals, amassing 30 wins worldwide on the pro circuit. Career highlights include a remarkable streak of seven victories in a row (’91-’92), a world duathlon series championship, two national triathlon championships, and a #3 world ranking in 1991. Brad is the last American professional male in to place in the top-5 in the ITU World Championships (1992) and still holds the Hawaii Ironman 24&under age division American record at 8:57 (1989).

In early 2020 at age 55, Brad high jumped 5’0″ (1.52m) to top the early-season USA Masters Rankings and reach a #3 world ranking. In 2016 at the age of 51, Brad high jumped 5’5″ (1.65m) at a practice session, equivalent to an All-American and top-10 national ranking in the 50-54 age group. At age 50, he ran a 400-meter time trial in 59.8. – running in the 50s, in his 50s!

Brad lives in Stateline, Nevada and likes to take a daily cold plunge, either in his chest freezer (search YouTube for Brad Kearns Chest Freezer Cold Plunge), or in the frigid lake in wintertime.

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The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau’s Code of Excellence by Frank Figliuzzi

“A must read for serious leaders at every level.” —General Barry R. McCaffrey (Ret.)

The FBI’s former head of counterintelligence reveals the Bureau’s field-tested playbook for unlocking individual and organizational excellence, illustrated through dramatic stories from his own storied career

Frank Figliuzzi was the “Keeper of the Code,” appointed the FBI’s Chief Inspector by then-Director Robert Mueller. Charged with overseeing sensitive internal inquiries and performance audits, he ensured each employee met the Bureau’s exacting standards. Now, drawing on his distinguished career, Figliuzzi reveals how the Bureau achieves its extraordinary track record of excellence—from the training of new recruits in “The FBI Way” to the Bureau’s rigorous maintenance of its standards up and down the organization.

All good codes of conduct have one common trait: they reflect the core values of an organization. Individuals, companies, schools, teams, or any group seeking to codify their rules to live by must first establish core values. Figliuzzi has condensed the Bureau’s process of preserving and protecting its values into what he calls “The Seven C’s”. If you can adapt the concepts of Code, Conservancy, Clarity, Consequences, Compassion, Credibility, and Consistency, you can instill and preserve your values against all threats, internal and external. This is how the FBI does it.

Figliuzzi’s role in the FBI gave him a unique opportunity to study patterns of conduct among high-achieving, ethical individuals and draw conclusions about why, when and how good people sometimes do bad things. Unafraid to identify FBI execs who erred, he cites them as the exceptions that prove the rule. Part pulse-pounding memoir, part practical playbook for excellence, The FBI Way shows readers how to apply the lessons he’s learned to their own lives: in business, management, and personal development.

About Frank Figliuzzi
Frank Figliuzzi was the FBI’s Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and served 25 years as a Special Agent. In his current role as a respected National Security Analyst, Frank regularly appears on live television for NBC and MSNBC news. Frank held senior FBI leadership positions in major American cities and was appointed the FBI’s Chief Inspector by then Director Robert Mueller to oversee sensitive internal inquiries, shooting reviews, and performance audits. Following his FBI career, Frank became a corporate security executive for a Fortune 10 company and led global Investigations, Insider Threat, Workplace Violence Prevention, and Special Event security for 300,000 employees in 180 countries.

As the Bureau’s head of Counterintelligence, Mr. Figliuzzi directed all espionage investigations across the U.S. government. Frank frequently briefed the White House, Congress, and the Attorney General. During Frank’s FBI career, he led the FBI’s Cleveland Field Office, was the second ranking official in the FBI’s Miami Division, ran squads in San Francisco, and worked investigations in Atlanta. Mr. Figliuzzi directed an FBI internal disciplinary unit in the Office of Professional Responsibility and adjudicated allegations of serious misconduct against FBI personnel.

Frank is most noted for his clear and compelling television commentary regarding the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign. His FBI career highlights include: Leading the FBI’s efforts to counter economic espionage in Silicon Valley, California; Overseeing major financial crimes and public corruption investigations in Miami, Florida, and Cleveland, Ohio; Serving as on-scene commander of the largest HAZMAT evidence recovery effort in FBI history at the Boca Raton, Florida, site of the nation’s first anthrax murder; and, Publicly explaining the FBI’s successful operation against ten Russian sleeper agents inside the United States.

Mr. Figliuzzi earned a Juris Doctorate cum laude from the University of Connecticut School of Law, and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature from Fairfield University. Frank completed certificate programs at the Harvard University National Security Program for Senior Executives in Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and at Northwestern University’s executive course on Leading Strategic Change at the Kellogg School of Management. He is a sought-after speaker, panelist and instructor on violence prevention, risk management, and the external and internal threats facing the United States.

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Fool’s Errand by Jeffrey S. Stephens

https://amzn.to/3pIPYn5

Years after the death of his gangster father, a young man discovers a letter that sends him reluctantly defying the mob as he races to locate a hidden treasure. It’s been six years since the untimely death of Blackie—a charming rogue who endlessly pursued “The Big Deal”—when his son discovers an enigmatic letter telling of a cache of stolen money. Feeling no choice but to pursue his father’s dream, he embarks on a search that leads from New York, to the Strip in Las Vegas, and ultimately to the south of France. Along this life-altering journey, he is confronted by the dangers of his father’s past as he unravels a decades-old mystery, while revealing other long-buried secrets as well.

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Operation Vengeance: The Astonishing Aerial Ambush That Changed World War II by Dan Hampton

The New York Times bestselling author of Viper Pilot delivers an electrifying narrative account of the top-secret U.S. mission to kill Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander who masterminded Pearl Harbor.

In 1943, the United States military began to plan one of the most dramatic secret missions of World War II. Its code name was Operation Vengeance. Naval Intelligence had intercepted the itinerary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, whose stealth attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated America’s entry into the war. Harvard-educated, Yamamoto was a close confidant of Emperor Hirohito and a brilliant tactician who epitomized Japanese military might. On April 18th, the U.S. discovered, he would travel to Rabaul in the South Pacific to visit Japanese troops, then fly to the Japanese airfield at Balalale, 400 miles to the southeast.

Informed by deep archival research and his experience as a decorated combat pilot, Operation Vengeance focuses on the mission’s pilots and recreates the moment-by-moment drama they experienced in the air. Hampton recreates this epic event in thrilling detail, and provides groundbreaking evidence about what really happened that day.

About Dan Hampton
Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Dan Hampton flew 151 combat missions during his twenty years (1986-2006) in the United States Air Force. For his service in the Iraq War, Kosovo conflict, and first Gulf War, Col. Hampton received four Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor, a Purple Heart, eight Air Medals with Valor, five Meritorious Service medals, and numerous other citations. He is a graduate of the USAF Fighter Weapons School, USN Top Gun School (TOGS), and USAF Special Operations School. A frequent guest analyst on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC discussing foreign affairs, military, aviation, and intelligence issues, he has published in Aviation History, the Journal of Electronic Defense, Air Force Magazine, Vietnam magazine, and Airpower magazine, and written several classified tactical works for the USAF Weapons Review. He is the author of the national bestsellers Viper Pilot and Lords of the Sky, as well as a novel, The Mercenary.

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The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter by Brian Sonia-Wallace

Rentpoet.com

Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.

In The Poetry of Strangers, Brian tells the story of his cross-country journey in a series of heartfelt and insightful essays. From Minnesota to Tennessee, California to North Dakota, Brian discovered that people aren’t so afraid of poetry when it’s telling their stories. In “dying” towns flourish vibrant artistic spirits and fascinating American characters who often pass under the radar, from the Mall of America’s mall walkers to retirees on Amtrak to self-proclaimed witches in Salem.

Thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening, The Poetry of Strangers is an unforgettable portrait of America told through the hidden longings of one person at a time, by one of our most important voices today. The fault lines and conflicts which divide us fall away when we remember to look, in every stranger, for poetry.

Brian Sonia-Wallace is a street poet and performance artist who challenges notions of art and value. He began RENT Poet, an experiment in paying his rent through writing poems for passersby on the street and at events, in September, 2014. Since then, he’s written for tech companies and governments, toured nationally and internationally, and been nominated for a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award. Brian is a Partner at the Melrose Poetry Bureau and lives in Los Angeles.

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The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery (The Wellness Code) Dr. Jason Fung

Author of the international bestsellers The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code Dr. Jason Fung returns with an eye-opening biography of cancer in which he offers a radical new paradigm for understanding cancer—and issues a call to action for reducing risk moving forward.

Our understanding of cancer is slowly undergoing a revolution, allowing for the development of more effective treatments. For the first time ever, the death rate from cancer is showing a steady decline . . . but the “War on Cancer” has hardly been won.

For hundreds of years, cancer has been portrayed as a foreign invader we’ve been powerless to stop. By reshaping our view of cancer as an internal uprising of our own healthy cells, we can begin to take back control. The seed of cancer may exist in all of us, but the power to change the soil is in our hands.

Author of the international bestsellers The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code Dr. Jason Fung returns with an eye-opening biography of cancer in which he offers a radical new paradigm for understanding cancer—and issues a call to action for reducing risk moving forward.

Our understanding of cancer is slowly undergoing a revolution, allowing for the development of more effective treatments. For the first time ever, the death rate from cancer is showing a steady decline . . . but the “War on Cancer” has hardly been won.

For hundreds of years, cancer has been portrayed as a foreign invader we’ve been powerless to stop. By reshaping our view of cancer as an internal uprising of our own healthy cells, we can begin to take back control. The seed of cancer may exist in all of us, but the power to change the soil is in our hands.

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White Hot Light: Twenty-Five Years in Emergency Medicine by Frank Huyler

Emed.unm.edu

Another “pitch-perfect book of short essays” (New York Times Book Review) from the acclaimed author of Blood of Strangers, this one exploring the contemporary practice of medicine from the perspective of a doctor with 25 years of experience in the ER.

In the late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, published a stunning memoir of his experiences in the highly charged world of the ER. Presented in a series of powerful, poetic vignettes, The Blood of Strangers became an instant classic.

Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from the trenches—this time from the perspective of middle age. In portraits visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor’s edge between life and death.

From the doomed, like the Iraq vet with a brain full of shrapnel, to the self-destructive, like the young woman who inserts a sewing needle into her heart, to the transcendent, like the homeless Navajo artist whose sketches charm the nurses, Huyler assembles a profound mosaic of human suffering and grace, complemented by episodes from his personal life: the hail that fell the night his wife gave birth, his drive through a snowstorm to see his father in a Colorado ER, the beautiful wedding of his childhood friend with terminal cancer. Melding hard-earned wisdom with a poet’s crystalline vision, Huyler evokes the awesome burden of responsibility, the exhaustion, the relief of a costume disco nurse party, and those rare occasions when the confluence of luck and science yield, in the author’s words, “moments of breathtaking greatness.”

White Hot Light offers an unforgettable portrait of a field that illuminates society at its most vulnerable, and its most elemental.

Frank Huyler is an emergency physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the author of the The Blood of Strangers, The Laws of Invisible Things, and Right of Thirst. His poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, and Poetry, among others.

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A Constructive Conversation with Dr. Ashlee and Dr. Chatters: Privilege, Awareness and Journey Toward Advocacy

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White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones

PRRI.org

Drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience, Robert P. Jones delivers a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for white Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation.

As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians—from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast—have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story.

6.

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The Boy in the Field: A Novel by Margot Livesey

Margotlivesey.com

The New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy delivers another “luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered” (Dennis Lehane) novel—a poignant and probing psychological drama that follows the lives of three siblings in the wake of a violent crime.

One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy’s life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed.
Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim’s brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford, looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back. Duncan, the youngest, who has seldom thought about being adopted, suddenly decides he wants to find his birth mother. Overshadowing all three is the awareness that something is amiss in their parents’ marriage. Over the course of the autumn, as each of the siblings confronts the complications and contradictions of their approaching adulthood, they find themselves at once drawn together and driven apart.

Written with the deceptive simplicity and power of a fable, The Boy in the Field showcases Margot Livesey’s unmatched ability to “tell her tale masterfully, with intelligence, tenderness, and a shrewd understanding of all our mercurial human impulses” (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

Margot Livesey is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The House on Fortune Street won the 2009 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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Before You Go: A Novel by Tommy Butler

A big, rich, life-affirming debut that explores the most perplexing questions of existence: purpose, the pain of loneliness, the desire for happiness, and the price we pay as we search for fulfillment.

In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake—if it was a mistake—until too late.

Profound yet playful, Before You Go is a beautiful, imaginative journey into the ache and wonder of being human, and the quest for a meaningful life.

Tommy Butler was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, and has since called many places home, including New Hampshire, San Diego, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, he was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and is an alumnus of the Screenwriters Colony. His feature screenplay, ETOPIA, was the winner of Showtime’s Tony Cox Screenplay Competition at the Nantucket Film Festiv

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Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams by Heidi Helfand

Heidihelfand.com

Your team will change whether you like it or not. People will come and go. Your company might double in size or even be acquired. In this practical book, author Heidi Helfand shares techniques for reteaming effectively. Engineering leaders will learn how to catalyze team change to reduce the risk of attrition, learning and career stagnation, and the development of knowledge silos.

Based on research into well-known software companies, the patterns in this book help CTOs and team managers effectively integrate new hires into an existing team, manage a team that has lost members, or deal with unexpected change. You’ll learn how to isolate teams for focused innovation, rotate team members for knowledge sharing, breakthrough organizational apathy, and more.

You’ll explore:

Real-world examples that demonstrate why and how organizations reteam
Five reteaming patterns: One by One, Grow and Split, Isolation, Merging, and Switching
Tactics to help you master dynamic reteaming in your company
Stories that demonstrate problems caused by reteaming anti-patterns

About Heidi
Heidi Helfand is author of the book Dynamic Reteaming.

She coaches software development teams using practical, people-focused techniques, with the goal of building resilient organizations as they double and triple in size.

Heidi is currently Director of R&D Excellence at Procore Technologies. She draws on her vast experience from coaching there, as well as at AppFolio and Citrix Online, where Heidi was on the original development team that invented GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Heidi is based in Southern California.

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Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

KatherineEban.com

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2019

New York Public Library Best Books of 2019

Kirkus Reviews Best Health and Science Books of 2019

Science Friday Best Books of 2019

New postscript by the author

From an award-winning journalist, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals fraud and life-threatening dangers on a global scale—The Jungle for pharmaceuticals

Many have hailed the widespread use of generic drugs as one of the most important public-health developments of the twenty-first century. Today, almost 90 percent of our pharmaceutical market is comprised of generics, the majority of which are manufactured overseas. We have been reassured by our doctors, our pharmacists and our regulators that generic drugs are identical to their brand-name counterparts, just less expensive. But is this really true?

Katherine Eban’s Bottle of Lies exposes the deceit behind generic-drug manufacturing—and the attendant risks for global health. Drawing on exclusive accounts from whistleblowers and regulators, as well as thousands of pages of confidential FDA documents, Eban reveals an industry where fraud is rampant, companies routinely falsify data, and executives circumvent almost every principle of safe manufacturing to minimize cost and maximize profit, confident in their ability to fool inspectors. Meanwhile, patients unwittingly consume medicine with unpredictable and dangerous effects.

The story of generic drugs is truly global. It connects middle America to China, India, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and represents the ultimate litmus test of globalization: what are the risks of moving drug manufacturing offshore, and are they worth the savings?

A decade-long investigation with international sweep, high-stakes brinkmanship and big money at its core, Bottle of Lies reveals how the world’s greatest public-health innovation has become one of its most astonishing swindles.

About Katherine Eban
Katherine Eban, an investigative journalist, is a Fortune magazine contributor and Andrew Carnegie fellow. Her narrative, deeply reported articles on pharmaceutical counterfeiting, gun trafficking, and coercive interrogations by the CIA, have won international attention and numerous awards. She lectures frequently on the topic of pharmaceutical integrity. Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, which she worked on for five years and reported on four continents, is her second book. Educated at Brown University and Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two daughters and Newfoundland dog Romeo.

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Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas by Roberto Lovato

Robertolovato.com

An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time—and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.

The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent history.

In Unforgetting, Roberto interweaves his father’s complicated history and his own with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the United States. In doing so he makes the political personal, revealing the cyclical ways violence operates in our homes and our societies, as well as the ways hope and tenderness can rise up out of the darkness if we are courageous enough to unforget.

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A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany K. Barnett

Brittanykbarnett.com
Buriedaliveproject.org
Girlsembracingmothers.org

An urgent call to free those buried alive by America’s legal system, and an inspiring true story about unwavering belief in humanity—from a gifted young lawyer and important new voice in the movement to transform the system.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY USA TODAY AND NEWSWEEK • “An essential book for our time . . . Brittany K. Barnett is a star.”—Van Jones, CEO of REFORM Alliance, CNN Host, and New York Times bestselling author

Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever—that of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and, like Brittany, Black daughter of the rural South. A victim of America’s devastating war on drugs, Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole—for a first-time drug offense. In Sharanda, Brittany saw haunting echoes of her own life, both as the daughter of a formerly incarcerated mother and as the once-girlfriend of an abusive drug dealer. As she studied this case, a system came into focus: one where widespread racial injustice forms the core of America’s addiction to incarceration. Moved by Sharanda’s plight, Brittany set to work to gain her freedom.

This had never been the plan. Bright and ambitious, Brittany was a successful accountant on her way to a high-powered future in corporate law. But Sharanda’s case opened the door to a harrowing journey through the criminal justice system. By day she moved billion-dollar deals, and by night she worked pro bono to free clients in near-hopeless legal battles. Ultimately, her path transformed her understanding of injustice in the courts, of genius languishing behind bars, and the very definition of freedom itself.

Brittany’s riveting memoir is at once a coming-of-age story and a powerful evocation of what it takes to bring hope and justice to a system built to resist them both.

Brittany K. Barnett is an award-winning attorney and entrepreneur focused on social impact investing. She is dedicated to transforming the criminal justice system and has won freedom for numerous people serving life sentences for federal drug offenses–including seven clients who received executive clemency from President Barack Obama. Brittany is founder of a series of social enterprises, including XVI Capital Partners, Milena Reign LLC, the Buried Alive Project, and Girls Embracing Mothers. She has earned many honors, including being named one of America’s most Outstanding Young Lawyers by the American Bar Association.

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On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist by Clarissa Ward

The recipient of multiple Peabody and Murrow awards, Clarissa Ward is a world-renowned conflict reporter. In this strange age of crisis where there really is no front line, she has moved from one hot zone to the next. With multiple assignments in Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan, Ward, who speaks seven languages, has been based in Baghdad, Beirut, Beijing, and Moscow. She has seen and documented the violent remaking of the world at close range. With her deep empathy, Ward finds a way to tell the hardest stories. On All Fronts is the riveting account of Ward’s singular career and of journalism in this age of extremism.

Following a privileged but lonely childhood, Ward found her calling as an international war correspondent in the aftermath of 9/11. From her early days in the field, she was embedding with marines at the height of the Iraq War and was soon on assignment all over the globe. But nowhere does Ward make her mark more than in war-torn Syria, which she has covered extensively with courage and compassion. From her multiple stints entrenched with Syrian rebels to her deep investigations into the Western extremists who are drawn to ISIS, Ward has covered Bashar al-Assad’s reign of terror without fear. In 2018, Ward rose to new heights at CNN and had a son. Suddenly, she was doing this hardest of jobs with a whole new perspective.

On All Fronts is the unforgettable story of one extraordinary journalist—and of a changing world.

Clarissa Ward is CNN’s chief international correspondent based in London.

For more than 15 years Ward has reported from front lines across the world from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen to Ukraine to Georgia — during the Russian incursion in 2008 — and Iran.

Named 2019 Reporter/Correspondent of the Year by the Gracies, she is the author of the upcoming book, ‘On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist’ (Penguin Press), that details her singular career as a conflict reporter and how she has documented the violent remaking of the world from close range.

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The Infinite Desire for Growth by Daniel Cohen

Why society’s expectation of economic growth is no longer realistic

Economic growth–and the hope of better things to come—is the religion of the modern world. Yet its prospects have become bleak, with crashes following booms in an endless cycle. In the United States, eighty percent of the population has seen no increase in purchasing power over the last thirty years and the situation is not much better elsewhere. The Infinite Desire for Growth spotlights the obsession with wanting more, and the global tensions that have arisen as a result. Amid finite resources, increasing populations, environmental degradation, and political unrest, the quest for new social and individual goals has never been so critical.

Leading economist Daniel Cohen provides a whirlwind tour of the history of economic growth, from the early days of civilization to modern times, underscoring what is so unsettling today. The new digital economy is establishing a “zero-cost” production model, inexpensive software is taking over basic tasks, and years of exploiting the natural world have begun to backfire with deadly consequences. Working hard no longer guarantees social inclusion or income. Drawing on economics, anthropology, and psychology, and thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Keynes and Easterlin, Cohen examines how a future less dependent on material gain might be considered and, how, in a culture of competition, individual desires might be better attuned to the greater needs of society.

At a time when wanting what we haven’t got has become an obsession, The Infinite Desire for Growth explores the ways we might reinvent, for the twenty-first century, the old ideal of social progress.

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Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

**Longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award**

From award-winning Wall Street Journal reporters Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope (coauthor of Billion Dollar Whale), this revelatory look at the world’s most powerful ruling family reveals how a rift within Saudi Arabian royalty produced Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a charismatic leader with a ruthless streak.

Thirty-five-year-old Mohammed bin Salman’s sudden rise stunned the world. Political and business leaders such as former UK prime minister Tony Blair and WME chairman Ari Emanuel flew out to meet with the crown prince and came away convinced that his desire to reform the kingdom was sincere. He spoke passionately about bringing women into the workforce and toning down Saudi Arabia’s restrictive Islamic law. He lifted the ban on women driving and explored investments in Silicon Valley.

But MBS began to betray an erratic interior beneath the polish laid on by scores of consultants and public relations experts like McKinsey & Company. The allegations of his extreme brutality and excess began to slip out, including that he ordered the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. While stamping out dissent by holding three hundred people, including prominent members of the Saudi royal family, in the Ritz-Carlton hotel and elsewhere for months, he continued to exhibit his extreme wealth, including buying a $70 million chateau in Europe and one of the world’s most expensive yachts. It seemed that he did not understand nor care about how the outside world would react to his displays of autocratic muscle-what mattered was the flex.

Blood and Oil is a gripping work of investigative journalism about one of the world’s most decisive and dangerous new leaders. Hope and Scheck show how MBS’s precipitous rise coincided with the fraying of the simple bargain that had been at the head of U.S.-Saudi relations for more than eighty years: oil in exchange for military protection. Caught in his net are well-known US bankers, Hollywood figures, and politicians, all eager to help the charming and crafty crown prince.

The Middle East is already a volatile region. Add to the mix an ambitious prince with extraordinary powers, hunger for lucre, a tight relationship with the White House through President Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner, and an apparent willingness to break anything — and anyone — that gets in the way of his vision, and the stakes of his rise are bracing. If his bid fails, Saudi Arabia has the potential to become an unstable failed state and a magnet for Islamic extremists. And if his bid to transform his country succeeds, even in part, it will have reverberations around the world.

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Expand the Power of Your Subconscious Mind by C. James Jensen, Dr. Joseph Murphy

cjamesjensen.com

Harness the wisdom of your subconscious with this modern interpretation of the timeless teachings featured in Dr. Joseph Murphy’s definitive classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind—now with expanded commentary and updated practices, providing a practical toolkit to help you manifest your deepest desires.

Since its publication in 1963, Dr. Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind has sold millions of copies worldwide and continues to draw new generations of fans every year. Now, life coach and consultant C. James Jensen supplements Dr. Murphy’s authoritative book with fresh lessons and a modern toolkit of practices—such as affirmation, visualization, meditation, and leadership skills—to help you harness your subconscious to live your best life.

About C. James Jensen
C. James “Jim” Jensen began his career as a salesman with Encyclopedia Britannica in his senior year of college. Within seven years he had become International Sales Manager in charge of worldwide sales. At the age of 28, he became Senior Vice President and CEO of Great Books of the Western World, a division of Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this same year (1969) Jim and his wife, Jeri, attended a 4-day seminar that would have an incredible impact on their lives forever. As is written in the Introduction, Jim became both a voracious student and, ultimately, teacher of many of the principles written in his book, Expand the Power of Your Subconscious Mind.

Jim also became President and CEO of two additional companies that each became the leading company within its respective industry. Jim attributes much of the success of those companies to the management and employees embracing many of the principles taught in his book.

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Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Kristindumez.com/

A scholar of American Christianity presents a seventy-five-year history of evangelicalism that identifies the forces that have turned Donald Trump into a hero of the Religious Right.

How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate’s staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne, which delves beyond facile headlines to explain how white evangelicals have brought us to our fractured political moment. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values.

A much-needed reexamination, Jesus and John Wayne explains why evangelicals have rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for the Washington Post, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, Christian Century, and Religion & Politics, and has been interviewed on NPR, CTV, the CBC, and by CNN, the New York Times, the Economist, the Christian Post, PBS News Hour, and the AP, among other outlets, and she blogs at Patheos’s Anxious Bench.

Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

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Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States Samuel L. Perry (Co-Author) Interview

Why do so many conservative Christians continue to support Donald Trump despite his many overt moral failings? Why do many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a border wall with Mexico? Why do many Americans seem so unwilling to acknowledge the injustices that ethnic and racial minorities experience in the United States? Why do a sizeable proportion of Americans continue to oppose women’s equality in the workplace and in the home?

To answer these questions, Taking America Back for God points to the phenomenon of “Christian nationalism,” the belief that the United States is-and should be-a Christian nation. Christian ideals and symbols have long played an important role in American public life, but Christian nationalism is about far more than whether the phrase “under God” belongs in the pledge of allegiance. At its heart, Christian nationalism demands that we must preserve a particular kind of social order, an order in which everyone–Christians and non-Christians, native-born and immigrants, whites and minorities, men and women recognizes their “proper” place in society. The first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States, Taking America Back for God illustrates the influence of Christian nationalism on today’s most contentious social and political issues.

Drawing on multiple sources of national survey data as well as in-depth interviews, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry document how Christian nationalism shapes what Americans think about who they are as a people, what their future should look like, and how they should get there. Americans’ stance toward Christian nationalism provides powerful insight into what they think about immigration, Islam, gun control, police shootings, atheists, gender roles, and many other political issues-very much including who they want in the White House. Taking America Back for God is a guide to one of the most important-and least understood-forces shaping American politics.

Bio: Samuel Perry is an associate professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. A former minister and a graduate of the University of Chicago, Sam is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed articles and 3 books including his most recent book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, which he co-authored with Andrew Whitehead.

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The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers by Eric Weiner
ericweinerbooks.com

The New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss embarks on a rollicking intellectual journey, following in the footsteps of history’s greatest thinkers and showing us how each—from Epicurus to Gandhi, Thoreau to Beauvoir—offers practical and spiritual lessons for today’s unsettled times.

We turn to philosophy for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a dif­ferent perspective, to unearth hidden beauty, and to find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.

Eric Weiner combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pil­grimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from great thinkers around the world, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, Confucius to Simone Weil. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport), he journeys thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi, Wyoming, Coney Island, Frankfurt, and points in between to recon­nect with philosophy’s original purpose: teaching us how to lead wiser, more meaningful lives. From Socrates and ancient Athens to Simone de Beauvoir and twentieth-century Paris, Weiner’s chosen philosophers and places provide important signposts as we navigate today’s chaotic times.

In The Socrates Express, Weiner invites us to voyage alongside him on his life-changing pursuit of wisdom and discovery as he attempts to find answers to our most vital questions.

Eric Weiner is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God and, his latest book, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers. A former foreign correspondent for NPR, he has reported from more than three dozen countries. His work has appeared in the New Republic, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and the anthology “Best American Travel Writing.” He lives in Silver Spring, MD with his wife and daughter.

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The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart

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For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America’s religious nationalists aren’t just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.

Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today’s Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding anti-democratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America’s past. It forms a common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals.

The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart’s probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.

Katherine Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, NBC, and the New Republic

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American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People by Jared Yates Sexton

Jysexton.com

From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes a journey through the history of the United States, from the nation’s founding to the twenty-first century, which examines and debunks the American myths we’ve always told ourselves.

In recent years, Americans have faced a deluge of horrifying developments in politics and culture: stolen elections, fascist rallies, families torn apart and locked away. A common refrain erupts at each new atrocity: This isn’t who we are.

In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton upends those convenient fictions by laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of our collective American imagination. From the very origins of this nation, Americans in power have abused and subjugated others; enabling that corruption are the many myths of American exceptionalism and steadfast values, which are fed to the public and repeated across generations. Working through each era of American growth and change, Sexton weaves together the origins and perpetuation of these narratives still in the public memory, and the acts we have chosen to forget.

Stirring, deeply researched, and disturbingly familiar, American Rule is a call to examine our own misconceptions of what it means, and has always meant, to be an American.

About Jared Yates Sexton
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Politico, and elsewhere. He is the author of three books of short fiction, a novel, The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage, an examination of the 2016 Presidential Election, The Man They Wanted Me To Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making, a dissection of American masculinity, and, most recently, American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, published by Dutton/Penguin-Random House.

Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.

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When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse by Chuck DeGroat

Chuckdegroat.net

Why does narcissism seem to thrive in our churches? We’ve seen the news stories and heard the rumors. Maybe we ourselves have been hurt by a narcissistic church leader. It’s easy to throw the term around and diagnose others from afar. But what is narcissism, really? And how does it infiltrate the church? Chuck DeGroat has been counseling pastors with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, as well as those wounded by narcissistic leaders and systems, for over twenty years. He knows firsthand the devastation narcissism leaves in its wake and how insidious and painful it is. In When Narcissism Comes to Church, DeGroat takes a close look at narcissism, not only in ministry leaders but also in church systems. He offers compassion and hope for those affected by its destructive power and imparts wise counsel for churches looking to heal from its systemic effects. DeGroat also offers hope for narcissists themselves―not by any shortcut, but by the long, slow road of genuine recovery, possible only through repentance and trust in the humble gospel of Jesus.

About Chuck DeGroat
Chuck DeGroat is Professor of Pastoral Care and Christian Spirituality at Western Theological Seminary, MI, and Senior Fellow at Newbigin House of Studies, San Francisco. He is an author, speaker, consultant, and therapist. Chuck is married to Sara and has two teenage daughters.

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The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future by Chris Whipple

Chriswhipple.net

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers, a remarkable, behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to run the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, and how the CIA is often a crucial counterforce against presidents threatening to overstep the powers of their office.

Only eleven men and one woman are alive today who have made the life-and-death decisions that come with running the world’s most powerful and influential intelligence service. With unprecedented, deep access to nearly all these individuals plus several of their predecessors, Chris Whipple tells the story of an agency that answers to the United States president alone, but whose activities—spying, espionage, and covert action—take place on every continent. At pivotal moments, the CIA acts as a brake on rogue presidents, starting in the mid-seventies with DCI Richard Helms’s refusal to conceal Richard Nixon’s criminality and continuing to the present as the actions of a CIA whistleblower have ignited impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.

Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has been a powerful player on the world stage, operating largely in the shadows to protect American interests. For The Spymasters, Whipple conducted extensive, exclusive interviews with nearly every living CIA director, pulling back the curtain on the world’s elite spy agencies and showing how the CIA partners—or clashes—with counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Topics covered in the book include attempts by presidents to use the agency for their own ends; simmering problems in the Middle East and Asia; rogue nuclear threats; and cyberwarfare.

A revelatory, behind-the-scenes look, The Spymasters recounts seven decades of CIA activity and elicits predictions about the issues–and threats—that will engage the attention of future operatives and analysts. Including eye-opening interviews with George Tenet, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus, as well as those who’ve just recently departed the agency, this is a timely, essential, and important contribution to current events.

About Chris Whipple
Chris Whipple is an acclaimed writer, documentary filmmaker, and speaker. He is the author of the upcoming book, ‘The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future,’ to be published by Scribner on September 15, 2020. Highly anticipated, ‘The Spymasters’ is the most thorough and illuminating portrait ever of America’s CIA directors–based on extensive interviews with the directors themselves–those upon whom the country depends to prevent another Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or deadly pandemic. Epic in scope, spanning seven decades of intelligence gathering, espionage and covert warfare, and intimate in detail, featuring indelible portraits of the directors, this is the definitive story of the men–and, currently, the woman–who keep the secrets.

Whipple’s previous book, ‘The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,’ was a critically acclaimed, New York Times bestseller. The first in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the men who have been the president’s closest advisers, ‘The Gatekeepers’ was named by both Amazon and Apple as one of their “best books of the year.” The Huffington Post compared it to “classic works by Richard Neustadt, Theodore White and other White House chroniclers.”

A frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN, Whipple has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Politico, the Daily Beast, and many other publications. He is the chief executive officer of CCWHIP Productions, and executive producer of the Showtime film, ‘The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs.’ Whipple was educated at Deerfield Academy and received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in history from Yale College. He lives in New York City with his wife Cary.

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Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer

The definitive history of the covert struggle between Russia and America to influence elections, why the threat to American democracy is greater than ever in 2020, and what we can do about it.

Russia’s interference in 2016 marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations–by the KGB, the CIA, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia–to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from leading officials in both the Trump and Obama administrations, to CIA and NSA directors, to a former KGB general.

What Americans should make of Russia’s attack in 2016 is still hotly debated, even after the Mueller report and years of media coverage. Shimer shows that Putin’s operation was, in fact, a continuation of an ongoing struggle, using familiar weapons radically enhanced by new technology. Throughout history and in 2016, both Russian and American operations achieved their greatest success by influencing the way voters think, rather than tampering with actual vote tallies.

Casting aside partisanship and sensationalism, Rigged reveals new details about what Russia achieved in 2016, how the Obama administration responded, and why Putin has also been interfering covertly in elections across the globe in recent years, while American presidents have largely refrained from doing so. Shimer also makes disturbingly clear that this type of intrusion can be used to harm Democrats and Republicans alike. Russia’s central aim is to undermine and disrupt our democracy, to the detriment of all Americans.

Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to understanding the critical threat currently posed to America’s electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID SHIMER is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an Associate Fellow at Yale University. His reporting and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. He is pursuing a doctorate in international relations at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and he received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in history from Yale University.

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Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right by Anne Nelson

Anne-nelson.com

In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council’s early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.

In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition’s key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy’s information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data – outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.

In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading

Anne Nelson is an award-winning author and playwright who has written extensively about human rights and the defiance of totalitarian regimes. Her most recent work is “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.” Her previous book, “Suzanne’s Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris”, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, was published in eight countries. “Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler” (2009) was named Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of “Murder Under Two Flags: The US, Puerto Rico, and the Cerro Maravilla Cover-up.”

Her play “The Guys,” which premiered in 2001 with Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray, has been produced in all 50 states and 15 countries. Her screenplay of “The Guys” was produced as a feature film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia. Her play “Savages,” an exploration of military occupation, was described by the New Yorker as a work of “lacerating beauty.”

Nelson’s writing has been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, and she has appeared on CBS “Sunday Morning” and The PBS “Newshour,” as well as the BBC, CBC and NPR. She has received the Livingston Award for International Journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Bellagio Fellowship. Nelson is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a research fellow at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs in New York City.

Nelson lectures frequently on human rights, authoritarian regimes, and the role of the media.
She is represented by Ethan Bassoff of the Ross Yoon Agency, and Authors Unbound speaker agency.

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Pelosi by Molly Ball Interview

Time.com/author/molly-ball

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

An intimate, fresh perspective on the most powerful woman in American political history, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by award-winning political journalist Molly Ball

She’s the iconic leader who puts Donald Trump in his place, the woman with the toughness to take on a lawless president and defend American democracy. Ever since the Democrats took back the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi has led the opposition with strategic mastery and inimitable elan. It’s a remarkable comeback for the veteran politician who for years was demonized by the right and taken for granted by many in her own party―even though, as speaker under President Barack Obama, she deserves much of the credit for epochal liberal accomplishments from universal access to health care to saving the US economy from collapse, from reforming Wall Street to allowing gay people to serve openly in the military. How did an Italian grandmother in four-inch heels become the greatest legislator since LBJ?

Ball’s nuanced, page-turning portrait takes readers inside the life and times of this historic and underappreciated figure. Based on exclusive interviews with the Speaker and deep background reporting, Ball shows Pelosi through a thoroughly modern lens to explain how this extraordinary woman has met her moment.

Molly Ball was a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she was a leading voice in the magazine’s coverage of U.S. politics, and a CNN political analyst.

Ball has been awarded the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, and the Lee Walczak Award for Political Analysis for her coverage of political campaigns and issues. Ball previously reported for Politico, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and the Las Vegas Sun. She has worked for newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post. She is a graduate of Yale University and was a 2009 recipient of the Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan. In 2007, she won $100,000 on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

Ball grew up in Idaho and Colorado. She lives in Virginia with her husband and three children.

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Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes by Elizabeth Lesser

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers?

Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence.

Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human.

Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate.

Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted.

Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.

ELIZABETH LESSER is the author of several bestselling books, including Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and Marrow: Love, Loss & What Matters Most. Her newest book Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes will be released September 15th. She is the cofounder of Omega Institute, recognized internationally for its workshops and conferences in wellness, spirituality, creativity, and social change. She has given two popular TED talks, and is one of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100, a collection of a hundred leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity.

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The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media from the Founding Fathers to Fake News by Harold Holzer

An award-winning presidential historian offers an authoritative account of American presidents’ attacks on our freedom of the press.

“The FAKE NEWS media,” Donald Trump has tweeted, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” Has our free press ever faced as great a threat? Perhaps not—but the tension between presidents and journalists is as old as the republic itself.

Every president has been convinced of his own honesty and transparency; every reporter who has covered the White House beat has believed with equal fervency that his or her journalistic rigor protects the country from danger. Our first president, George Washington, was also the first to grouse about his treatment in the newspapers, although he kept his complaints private. Subsequent chiefs like John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama were not so reticent, going so far as to wield executive power to overturn press freedoms, and even to prosecute journalists.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to actively manage the stable of reporters who followed him, doling out information, steering coverage, and squashing stories that interfered with his agenda. It was a strategy that galvanized TR’s public support, but the lesson was lost on Woodrow Wilson, who never accepted reporters into his inner circle. Franklin Roosevelt transformed media relations forever, holding more than a thousand presidential press conferences and harnessing the new power of radio, at times bypassing the press altogether. John F. Kennedy excelled on television and charmed reporters to hide his personal life, while Richard Nixon was the first to cast the press as a public enemy. From the days of newsprint and pamphlets to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, each president has harnessed the media, whether intentional or not, to imprint his own character on the office.

In this remarkable new history, acclaimed scholar Harold Holzer examines the dual rise of the American presidency and the media that shaped it. From Washington to Trump, he chronicles the disputes and distrust between these core institutions that define the United States of America, revealing that the essence of their confrontation is built into the fabric of the nation.

About Harold Holzer
Harold Holzer, one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, serves as chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. He has authored, co-authored, and edited forty-two books, including Emancipating Lincoln, Lincoln at Cooper Union, and three award-winning books for young readers: Father Abraham: Lincoln and His Sons, The President Is Shot!, and Abraham Lincoln, the Writer. His awards include the Lincoln Prize and the National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York City.

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First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation.

On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation’s founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders’ thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero. For though much attention has been paid the influence of English political philosophers, like John Locke, closer to their own era, the founders were far more immersed in the literature of the ancient world.

The first four American presidents came to their classical knowledge differently. Washington absorbed it mainly from the elite culture of his day; Adams from the laws and rhetoric of Rome; Jefferson immersed himself in classical philosophy, especially Epicureanism; and Madison, both a groundbreaking researcher and a deft politician, spent years studying the ancient world like a political scientist. Each of their experiences, and distinctive learning, played an essential role in the formation of the United States. In examining how and what they studied, looking at them in the unusual light of the classical world, Ricks is able to draw arresting and fresh portraits of men we thought we knew.

First Principles follows these four members of the Revolutionary generation from their youths to their adult lives, as they grappled with questions of independence, and forming and keeping a new nation. In doing so, Ricks interprets not only the effect of the ancient world on each man, and how that shaped our constitution and government, but offers startling new insights into these legendary leaders.

About the Author Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008 and was on the staff of the Wall Street Journal for seventeen years before that. He reported on American military operations in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he is also the author of several books, including The Generals, The Gamble, Churchill & Orwell, and the number-one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote First Principles while a visiting fellow in history at Bowdoin College.

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Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics Heather Lende

Heatherlende.com

The writer whom the Los Angeles Times calls “part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott” now brings us her quirky and compassionate account of holding local office.

Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines—a place accessible from the nearest city, Juneau, only by boat or plane—isn’t the sleepy town that it appears to be: from a bitter debate about the expansion of the fishing boat harbor to the matter of how to stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street to the recall campaign that targeted three assembly members, including Lende, we witness the nitty-gritty of passing legislation, the lofty ideals of our republic, and how the polarizing national politics of our era play out in one small town.

With an entertaining cast of offbeat but relatable characters, Of Bears and Ballots is an inspirational tale about what living in a community really means, and what we owe one another.

The writer whom the Los Angeles Times calls “part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott” now brings us her quirky and compassionate account of holding local office.

Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines—a place accessible from the nearest city, Juneau, only by boat or plane—isn’t the sleepy town that it appears to be: from a bitter debate about the expansion of the fishing boat harbor to the matter of how to stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street to the recall campaign that targeted three assembly members, including Lende, we witness the nitty-gritty of passing legislation, the lofty ideals of our republic, and how the polarizing national politics of our era play out in one small town.

With an entertaining cast of offbeat but relatable characters, Of Bears and Ballots is an inspirational tale about what living in a community really means, and what we owe one another.

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Dr. Jason Fung Interview The Obesity Code & The Complete Guide To Fasting Books

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The landmark book from New York Times-bestselling author Dr. Jason Fung, one of the world’s leading experts on intermittent fasting for weight-loss and longevity, whose 5-step plan has helped thousands of people lose weight and achieve lasting health.

“Not only full of insights but also surprisingly funny. Read it to understand why the world became fat, how to reverse the epidemic—and how to stay thin yourself.”
—Andreas Eenfeldt, MD, Founder of dietdoctor.com

Everything you believe about how to lose weight is wrong. Weight gain and obesity are driven by hormones—in everyone—and only by understanding the effects of insulin and insulin resistance can we achieve lasting weight loss.

In this highly readable and provocative book, Dr. Jason Fung sets out an original, robust theory of obesity that provides startling insights into proper nutrition. In addition to his five basic steps, a set of lifelong habits that will improve your health and control your insulin levels, Dr. Fung explains how to use intermittent fasting to break the cycle of insulin resistance and reach a healthy weight—for good.

Author of the international bestsellers The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code Dr. Jason Fung returns with an eye-opening biography of cancer in which he offers a radical new paradigm for understanding cancer—and issues a call to action for reducing risk moving forward.

Our understanding of cancer is slowly undergoing a revolution, allowing for the development of more effective treatments. For the first time ever, the death rate from cancer is showing a steady decline . . . but the “War on Cancer” has hardly been won.

For hundreds of years, cancer has been portrayed as a foreign invader we’ve been powerless to stop. By reshaping our view of cancer as an internal uprising of our own healthy cells, we can begin to take back control. The seed of cancer may exist in all of us, but the power to change the soil is in our hands.

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The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit by Ian Buruma

Bard.edu

From one of its keenest observers, a brilliant, witty journey through the “Special Relationship” between Britain and America that has done so much to shape the world, from World War II to Brexit.

It’s impossible to understand the last 75 years of American history, through to Trump and Brexit, without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, and specifically the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Churchill; JFK famously had Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Thatcher, and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair. And now, of course, it is impossible to understand the populist uprising in either country, from 2016 to the present, without reference to Trump and Boris Johnson, though ironically, they are also the key to understanding the special relationship’s demise.

There are few things more certain in politics than that at some point, facing a threat to national security, a leader will evoke Winston Churchill to stand for brave leadership (and Neville Chamberlain to represent craven weakness). As Ian Buruma shows, in his dazzling short tour de force of storytelling and analysis, the mantle has in fact only grown more oppressive as nuanced historical understanding fades and is replaced by shallow myth. Absurd as it is to presume to say what Churchill would have thought about any current event, it’s relatively certain he would have been horrified by the Iraq War and Brexit, to name two episodes dense with “Finest Hour” analogizing.

But The Churchill Complex is much more than a reflection on the weight of Churchill’s legacy and its misuses. At its heart is a series of shrewd and absorbing character studies of the president-prime minster dyads, which in Ian Buruma’s gifted hands serve as a master class in politics, diplomacy and abnormal psychology. It’s never been a relationship of equals: from Churchill’s desperate cajoling and conniving to keep FDR on side in the war on, British prime ministers have put much more stock in the relationship than their US counterparts did. For England, resigned to the loss of its once-great empire and the diminishment of its power, its close kinship to the world’s greatest superpower would give it continued relevance, and serve as leverage to keep continental Europe in its place. As Buruma shows, this was almost always fool’s gold. And now, even as the links between the Brexit vote and the 2016 US election are coming into sharper focus, the Anglo-American alliance has floundered on the rocks of the isolationism that is one of 2016’s signal legacies. The Churchill Complex may not have a happy ending, but as with Ian Buruma’s other works, piercing lucidity and elegant prose is its own form of lasting comfort.

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The Trump Women: Part of the Deal by Nina Burleigh Interview

Ninaburleigh.com

New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist, Nina Burleigh, explores “the stark details of the forces that shaped [Donald] Trump’s thinking about women” (The New York Times) in this comprehensive, provocative, and critical account of the six women who have been closest to Trump. Previously published as Golden Handcuffs.

Has any president in the history of the United States had a more fraught association with women than Donald Trump? He flagrantly cheated on all three of his wives, brushed off multiple accusations of sexual assault, publicly ogled his eldest daughter, bought the silence of a porn star and a Playmate, and proclaimed his now-infamous seduction technique: “grab ’em by the pussy.”

The Trump Women is a provocative and “comprehensive exposé” (Kirkus Reviews) of Trump’s relationship with the women who have been closest to him—his German-immigrant grandmother, Elizabeth, the uncredited founder of the Trump Organization; his Scottish-immigrant mother, Mary, who acquired a taste for wealth as a maid in the Andrew Carnegie mansion; his wives—Ivana, Marla, and Melania (the first and third of whom are immigrants); and his eldest daughter, Ivanka, groomed to take over the Trump brand from a young age. Also examined are Trump’s two older sisters, one of whom is a prominent federal judge; his often-overlooked younger daughter, Tiffany; his female employees; and those he calls “liars”—the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.

Nina Burleigh is a New York Times best-selling author of six lively, acclaimed works of creative nonfiction. Her latest book, on Trump and women, was published in October 2018. She has written hundreds of works of journalism, essays and book reviews, on a wide array of topics including culture, politics, gender issues, science, and the environment.

Her books share a theme of examining the tension between belief and science, religion and rationality in post-Enlightenment life, including 1830s American politics, among post-revolutionary French scientists in Egypt, Cold War era CIA conspiracy theories, fake Biblical archaeology in Jerusalem today, and the role of faith versus science in an Italian courtroom. Two books explore the relationship between art, nature, history, and science. In Mirage, she told the story of the scientists and artists behind the first great study of modern Islam and ancient Egypt, Description de l’Egypte, a landmark work of art and publishing produced by the scientists who went to Egypt with Napoleon in 1800. Her book Unholy Business is a Maltese Falcon style crime caper about a gang of forgers accused of applying new technology to alter and sell archaeological relics.

A fellow of the Explorers Club, she has covered stories on six continents. She has published works about the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Amazon, where she wrote an essay about women, nature, and the human culture along the Amazon River in Peru and ayahuasca culture in Iquitos, posh Lagos, racism and rhino poaching in South Africa. She has written cover stories for Newsweek on Trump and Women, Trump as a tool of the New York billionaires, Trump and Evangelicals, Trump and the Law, Facebook and political big data mining, the #metoo movement, the melting of Antarctica, sea level rise in Florida, asteroid defense schemes and other current events.

She has judged the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for nonfiction, and won several awards for her journalism and books. She was writer in residence at the Siena Art Institute in 2013 attached to the Above/Below Ground project with Mark Dion and Amy Yoes, including a symposium on the Art and Science of The Expedition. She was a Dora Maar Fellow in the arts in Menerbes, France, in 2014, where she worked on a novel. Mirage was selected by The New York Times as an editors’ choice and won the Society of Women Educators’ Award.

Her writing can be found in numerous publications including Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Time, New York, The New York Times, Slate and Bustle. She has appeared on Good Morning America, Nightline, The Today Show, 48 Hours, MSNBC, CNN and C-Span, on NPR and numerous radio programs.

Nina was born and educated in the Midwest, has been based in Washington, D.C., New York, and Paris, and has traveled and reported extensively in the Middle East and lived in Italy and France. She has been an adjunct professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and has lectured around the United States, in Italy, and in Mexico.

Her latest book, Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women, has been covered in The New York Times, New York Post, Entertainment Tonight, BBC, MSNBC, Yahoo and many other media outlets.

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One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

What would actually make America great: more people. If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. We can’t compete with the huge population clusters of the global marketplace by keeping our population static or letting it diminish, or with our crumbling transit and unaffordable housing. The winner in the future world is going to have more—more ideas, more ambition, more utilization of resources, more people. Exactly how many Americans do we need to win? According to Matthew Yglesias, one billion. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must. Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matthew Yglesias co-founded Vox.com with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell in 2014. He’s currently a senior correspondent focused on politics and economic policy, and co-hosts “The Weeds” podcast twice a week. Before launching Vox, he wrote the Moneybox column for Slate and blogged for Think Progress, The Atlantic, TPM, and The American Prospect. Yglesias is the author of two books, most recently The Rent Is Too Damn High about the policy origins of the middle class housing affordability crisis in America. Yglesias was born and raised in New York City, but has lived in Washington DC since 2003.

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60 Stories About 30 Seconds: How I Got Away With Becoming a Pretty Big Commercial Director Without Losing My Soul (Or Maybe Just Part of It) by Bruce Van Dusen

Brucevandusen.com

You’ve probably seen more movies made by Bruce Van Dusen than any other director alive.

1977. New York City. Cool and crime-ridden, cheap and wild. Bruce Van Dusen shows up in town with a film degree and $150 to his name. He wants to make movies. So he does. The only ones anyone will pay him to make? Little ones. Thirty seconds long. Commercials. He has no idea what he’s doing and the money sucks. But he’s a director.

He quickly learns he has the two things he needs to succeed in the fickle world of commercial-making: a talent for telling short, emotional stories, and the hustle to fight for every job no matter how small. He still has no idea what he’s doing—not that anyone needs to know that. He just keeps making it up as he goes along.

He gets hired by a client on life support in the most depressing hospital in New York. Gets peed on by a lion. Abused by Charles Bronson. Explains peristalsis to a Tony winner. Makes a movie and goes to Sundance. Goes back to little movies when it bombs. Keeps hustling, shooting anything. Gets married, has kids. Pushes, shoves, survives. Gets divorced. Survives some more. Is an asshole, pays the price, finally learns when and how to be an asshole and becomes one of the industry’s stars.

Years go by and it’s not what he expected. It’s harder, weirder, and funnier. But it worked out. It worked out great, actually.

About Bruce Van Dusen
Bruce Van Dusen has directed over a thousand commercials, three movies and a documentary. Over the course of his career, all sorts of weird stuff happened to him. Maybe the weirdest was that he had a very productive, four-decade long career. And now he’s written a book about it. 60 Stories About 30 Seconds comes out 9/15/20 from Post Hill/Simon & Schuster.

Van Dusen was born in Detroit and lives in New York City.

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Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind by Kermit Pattison

A decade in the making, Fossil Men is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body: the first full-length account of the discovery of a startlingly unpredicted human ancestor more than a million years older than Lucy

It is the ultimate mystery: where do we come from? In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White uncovered a set of ancient bones in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the resulting skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus—nicknamed “Ardi”—was an astounding 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than the world-famous “Lucy.” The team spent the next 15 years studying the bones in strict secrecy, all while continuing to rack up landmark fossil discoveries in the field and becoming increasingly ensnared in bitter disputes with scientific peers and Ethiopian bureaucrats. When finally revealed to the public, Ardi stunned scientists around the world and challenged a half-century of orthodoxy about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee. But the discovery of Ardi wasn’t just a leap forward in understanding the roots of humanity–it was an attack on scientific convention and the leading authorities of human origins, triggering an epic feud about the oldest family skeleton.

In Fossil Men, acclaimed journalist Kermit Pattison brings us a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including White, an uncompromising perfectionist whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant whose deep expertise about teeth rivaled anyone on Earth; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist with radical insights into human locomotion; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia’s most senior paleoanthropologist; Don Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy, who had a rancorous falling out with the Ardi team; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology.

Based on a half-decade of research in Africa, Europe and North America, Fossil Men is not only a brilliant investigation into the origins of the human lineage, but the oldest of human emotions: curiosity, jealousy, perseverance and wonder.

About Kermit Pattison
Kermit Pattison is the author of Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. He lives with his family in Minnesota.

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VotingSmarter.org CEO/Founder Terry Crandall Interview

Votingsmarter.org
Download the app: https://apple.co/2HalEBs

VotingSmarter is a new educational app which matches voters with their ideal candidates based on issue preferences rather than immutable characteristics or party affiliation. The app was designed to easily educate voters, and to decrease the frequency of voters going on “blind-votes” at the ballot box, because they often end up feeling like they’ve been “catfished” by politicians after election day.

Terry is an educator, an entrepreneur and a licensed California Realtor. He is the Co-founder and CEO of VotingSmarter, and unbiased voter education nonprofit who’s “ dating app for politics” helps voters find their “political match” in a fair, fast and fun way. He has a passion for public policy, politics, public choice, and technology; and currently teaches economics at Loyola Marymount University. He has previously taught graduate and undergraduate economics and finance courses at Chapman University, The University of La Verne, California Baptist University, and California University for Management and Science. He has served on nonprofit boards, advises multiple startups, and provides expert testimony & consulting services. He is the father of twins and married to Bonnie Crandall, a financial adviser at Prudential Financial.

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The Creative Discipline Project: How To Create The Discipline Necessary To Accomplish Your Creative Goals by Christen Rochon

Candidlychristen.com

Most self-help books are created to help facilitate a solution to a problem. The Creative Discipline Project was created to help entrepreneurs and creatives of all kinds get beyond the roadblocks that prohibit accomplishing goals. Filled with interactive pages and planning guides, this book will walk readers through the following chapters that will shift your mindset and redefine productivity in your life.

About the Author

Christen Rochon, M.A. is a serial entrepreneur and author who engages audiences around the world with her genuine approach to leveraging the power of a well-balanced digital lifestyle. She has been recognized by Black Enterprise Magazine, honored by Verizon as Digital Trailblazer, represented the U.S. at the 2012 Olympics as a Samsung Global Blogger, and has been honored by WBLS/Hot 97 ‘Circle of Sisters’ and The Michigan Chronicle’s 40 Under 40 award.

Throughout her 20+ year career in TV and radio, she’s contributed to Essence Magazine, Ebony Magazine, and TV One. Now, as a TV Executive and Creative Accountability Coach, she inspires entrepreneurs and career creatives to maximize their productivity and disciplines to achieve their goals. Her inaugural book, ‘The Creative Discipline Project’ is a testament to her years of research, discovery and will embolden audiences to carve out best practices and disciplines for success.

A proud graduate of Michigan State University, where she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Advertising/Public Relations and Master’s Degree in Strategic Communications – Digital Media Strategies, Christen’s passions also include mentoring young creatives of color and prides herself as a keynote speaker, inspiring others through conferences and workshops across the country.

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You Can Go Home Now: A Novel by Michael Elias Interview

Michaeleliaswriter.com

In this smart, relevant, unputdownable psychological thriller, a woman cop is on the hunt for a killer while battling violent secrets of her own.

“My name is Nina Karim. I am a single thirty-one-year-old woman who likes cats, Ryan Reynolds movies, beautiful sunsets, walking on a wintry beach holding hands with a tall, caring, lightly bearded third-wave feminist. Yeah, right.”

Nina is a tough Queens detective with a series of cold case homicides on her desk – men whose widows had the same alibi: they were living in Artemis, a battered women’s shelter, when their husbands were killed.

Nina goes undercover into Artemis. Though she is playing the victim, she’s anything but. Nina knows about violence and the bullies who rely on it because she’s experienced it in her own life.

In this heart-pounding thriller Nina confronts the violence of her own past in Artemis where she finds solidarity with a community of women who deal with abusive and lethal men in their own way.

For the women living in Artemis there is no absolute moral compass, there is the law and there is survival. And, for Nina, who became a cop so she could find the man who murdered her father, there is only revenge.

About Michael Elias
Michael Elias is an award-winning writer, actor and director who has written film, television, theatre and fiction.

His upcoming novel, You Can Go Home Now, is a timely and addictive psychological thriller featuring a female cop on the hunt for a killer while battling violent secrets of her own. The book will be published by HarperCollins in the U.S. and by Editions du Masque in France in June 2020. He is also the author of The Last Conquistador, published by Open Road Media.

Michael Elias was born and raised in upstate New York, moving to New York City after graduating from St. John’s College in Annapolis to pursue a career in acting. He was a member of the Living Theatre (The Brig) and acted at The Judson Poets Theatre, La MaMa, and Caffé Chino. Elias transitioned to Hollywood and with Frank Shaw wrote the screenplay for The Frisco Kid starring Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford, then Envoyez les Violons with Eve Babitz and began a long partnership with Rich Eustis. Together, they wrote the screenplays for Serial, Young Doctors in Love and created Head of the Class a television series for ABC, partially based on Elias’ experience as a high school teacher in New York City. Elias also worked with Steve Martin, a collaboration that included material for Martin’s comedy albums, network TV specials, and the screenplay for The Jerk.

Elias wrote and directed Showtime’s Lush Life with Forrest Whitaker and Jeff Goldblum. He was nominated for best Director at The Cable Ace Awards that year, and the TV movie has become a jazz film classic. His semi-autobiographical play about a small hotel in upstate New York was directed by Paul Mazursky, ran for four months in Los Angeles, with the LA Weekly naming The Catskill Sonata one of the best ten plays of the year.

Michael Elias lives in Los Angeles and Paris.

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Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

ReevesWiedeman.net

“Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel” (Ken Auletta) ꟷ The inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, which tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history

In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than “elevating the world’s consciousness.”

Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork’s CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann’s relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools.

Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork’s botched IPO and Neumann’s dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company’s desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump’s first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins.

Reeves Wiedeman is a Contributing Editor at New York magazine. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Men’s Journal, and other publications.

Billion Dollar Loser, about the rise and fall of WeWork, is his first book.

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Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth, and the Case of Two Missing Girls by Jax Miller

On December 30, 1999, in rural Oklahoma, sixteen-year-old Ashley Freeman and her best friend, Lauria Bible, were having a sleepover. The next morning, the Freeman family trailer was in flames and both girls were missing.

While rumors of drug debts, revenge, and police corruption abounded in the years that followed, the case remained unsolved and the girls were never found.

In 2015, crime writer Jax Miller–who had been haunted by the case–decided to travel to Oklahoma to find out what really happened on that winter night in 1999, and why the story was still simmering more than fifteen years later. What she found was more than she could have ever bargained for: evidence of jaw-dropping levels of police negligence, entire communities ravaged by methamphetamine addiction, and a series of interconnected murders with an ominously familiar pattern.

These forgotten towns were wild, lawless, and home to some very dark secrets.

About Jax Miller
Jax Miller is an American author. She wrote her first novel, Freedom’s Child, in her twenties while hitchhiking across America, winning the 2016 Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle and earning several CWA Dagger nominations. She has received acclaim from the New York Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, and many more. She now works in the true-crime genre, having penned her much-anticipated book and acting as creator, host, and executive producer on the true-crime documentary series Hell in the Heartland on CNN’s HLN network. Jax is a lover of film and music, and has a passion for writing screenplays and rock ‘n’ roll.

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Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump by Sarah Posner

Sarahposner.com

“In terrifying detail, Unholy illustrates how a vast network of white Christian nationalists plotted the authoritarian takeover of the American democratic system. For anyone wondering what a second Trump administration might bring, there is no more timely book than this one.”—Janet Reitman, author of Inside Scientology

Why did so many evangelicals turn out to vote for Donald Trump, a serial philanderer with questionable conservative credentials who seems to defy Christian values with his every utterance? To a reporter like Sarah Posner, who has been covering the religious right for decades, the answer turns out to be far more intuitive than one might think.

In this taut inquiry, Posner digs deep into the radical history of the religious right to reveal how issues of race and xenophobia have always been at the movement’s core, and how religion often cloaked anxieties about perceived threats to a white, Christian America. Fueled by an antidemocratic impulse, and united by this narrative of reverse victimization, the religious right and the alt-right support a common agenda–and are actively using the erosion of democratic norms to roll back civil rights advances, stock the judiciary with hard-right judges, defang and deregulate federal agencies, and undermine the credibility of the free press. Increasingly, this formidable bloc is also forging ties with European far right groups, giving momentum to a truly global movement.

Revelatory and engrossing, Unholy offers a deeper understanding of the ideological underpinnings and forces influencing the course of Republican politics. This is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

Reporting Fellow with Type Investigations. My investigative reporting and analysis on the religious right in Republican politics has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Vice, HuffPost, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, Talking Points Memo, and many other publications.

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The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy by Victoria De Grazia

Victoriadegrazia.com

“As Fellini did in film, The Perfect Fascist takes us into the dark and complicated heart of Italian fascism…It is an extraordinary story that illuminates the ways in which the all-consuming nature of fascism distorted Italian society and destroyed the lives of individuals. I could not put it down.”
―Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919

“With lyrical precision, The Perfect Fascist reveals how ideology corrupts the truth, how untrammeled ambition destroys the soul, and how the vanity of white male supremacy distorts emotion, making even love a matter of state.”
―Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance

Through the story of one exemplary fascist―a war hero turned commander of Mussolini’s Black Shirts―the award-winning author of How Fascism Ruled Women reveals how the personal became political in the fascist quest for manhood and power.

When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife. In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.

The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man. Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart.

De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.

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