Wednesday, January 25, 2012

On My Radar: Wednesday Edition

We're With Nobody: Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics
by Alan Huffman & Michael Rejebian
Trade Paperback
William Morrow / Harper Collins

From the publisher website:


We're With Nobody is a thrilling, eye-opening insider’s view of a little-known facet of the political campaign process: the multi-million dollar opposition research industry, or “oppo” as it’s called.  For sixteen years authors Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian have been digging up dirt on political candidates across the country, from presidential appointees to local school board hopefuls. We're With Nobody is a fascinating, riveting, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking look at the unseen side of political campaigning—a remarkable chronicle of a year in the life of two guys on a dedicated hunt to uncover the buried truths that every American voter has a right to know.

Book Description:
In politics, finding the dirt is a multimillion-dollar business.

It’s called opposition research—“oppo” to insiders. Few Americans are aware of its existence, yet oppo has become an integral part of the campaign process, hastening the implosion of countless office-seekers around the country.

For nearly two decades, former journalists Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian have been uncovering the buried truths about political candidates, from presidential appointees all the way down to local school-board hopefuls. We’re with Nobody is the eye-opening account of their life as opposition researchers—a remarkable adventure across the American political landscape and through the often seamy underbelly of U.S. politics. From doing battle with reluctant, sometimes purposefully misleading bureaucrats to arriving in an unmarked police car for a clandestine meeting on the New Jersey waterfront, We’re with Nobody offers readers a revealing slice of national and political life: a close-up look at today’s political process, the fallible men and women we often choose to represent us and the little-understood industry of trying to bring candidates’ weaknesses to light.

Friday, January 20, 2012

On My Radar: Friday Edition

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
by Tobias J. Moskowitz & L. Jon Wertheim
Three Rivers Press / Crown Publishing / Random House
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

In Scorecasting, University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz teams up with veteran Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim to overturn some of the most cherished truisms of sports, and reveal the hidden forces that shape how basketball, baseball, football, and hockey games are played, won and lost.

Drawing from Moskowitz's original research, as well as studies from fellow economists such as bestselling author Richard Thaler, the authors look at: the influence home-field advantage has on the outcomes of games in all sports and why it exists; the surprising truth about the universally accepted axiom that defense wins championships;  the subtle biases that umpires exhibit in calling balls and strikes in key situations; the unintended consequences of referees' tendencies in every sport to "swallow the whistle," and more.

Among the insights that Scorecasting reveals:


  • Why Tiger Woods is prone to the same mistake in high-pressure putting situations that you and I are 


  • Why professional teams routinely overvalue draft picks 


  • The myth of momentum  or the "hot hand" in sports, and why so many fans, coaches, and broadcasters fervently subscribe to it 


  • Why NFL coaches rarely go for a first down on fourth-down situations--even when their reluctance to do so reduces their chances of winning. 

  • In an engaging narrative that takes us from the putting greens of Augusta to the grid iron of a small parochial high school in Arkansas, Scorecasting will forever change how you view the game, whatever your favorite sport might be.

    Thursday, January 19, 2012

    On My Radar: Thursday Edition

    Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant
    by Paul Clemens
    Knopf Doubleday
    Trade Paperback

    From the publisher website:


    Paul Clemens, the author of MADE IN DETROIT, a 2005 New York Times Book Review Notable Book, brings us PUNCHING OUT — an angry, funny, and powerfully evocative elegy about the slow death of a Detroit auto plant and an American way of life.

    Praise for PUNCHING OUT:

    “On the ground, compelling stories about the decline of an American city and industry due to corporate greed… Throughout the narrative, the author proves to be a keen, tireless observer, and he provides vivid portrayals of the many recurring characters from the dismantling crew.” —Kirkus Reviews

    “There’s black humor in Paul Clemens PUNCHING OUT, his year-long, boots-on-the-ground account of the slow death of a once proud Detroit auto plant, and a requiem for the working class.” —Vanity Fair

    Tuesday, January 17, 2012

    On My Radar: Tuesday Edition

    Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People is Greater Than the People in Power - A Memoir
    by Wael Ghonim
    Hardcover
    Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt

    From the book publicity:


    The revolutions that swept the Middle East in 2011 surprised and captivated the world. Brutal regimes that had been in power for decades were overturned by an irrepressible mass of freedom seekers. Now, one of the figures who emerged during the Egyptian uprising tells the riveting inside story of what happened and shares the keys to unleashing the power of crowds.

    Wael Ghonim was a little-known, thirty-year-old Google executive in the summer of 2010 when he anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of one Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page’s following expanded quickly and moved from online protests to a nonconfrontational movement.

    The youth of Egypt made history: they used social media to schedule a revolution. The call went out to more than a million Egyptians online, and on January 25, 2011, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded with calls for change. Yet just as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation. After he was released, he gave a tearful speech on national television, and the protests grew more intense. Four days later, the president of Egypt was gone.
      
    The lessons Ghonim draws will inspire each of us. He saw the road to Tahrir Square built not by any one person, but by the people. In Revolution 2.0, we can all be heroes.

    Monday, January 16, 2012

    On My Radar: Monday Edition

    The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century
    by Carne Ross
    Hardcover
    Blue Rider Press / Penguin USA

    From the book publicity:

    The Leaderless Revolution explains why our government institutions are inadequate to the task of solving major problems and offers a set of steps we can take to create lasting and workable solutions ourselves. In taking these steps, we can not only reclaim the control we have lost, but also a sense of meaning and community so elusive in the current circumstance. In a day and age when things feel bleak and beyond our control, this powerful and personal book will revive one's sense of hope that a better, more just and equitable order lies within our reach-if only we are willing to grasp it.

    Friday, January 13, 2012

    On My Radar: Friday Edition

    Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It
    by Jeffrey D. Clements
    Trade Paperback
    Berrett-Koehler

    From the publisher website:

    • A plain-English guide to the disastrous practical consequences of the bizarre legal doctrine of “corporate personhood”— enshrined most recently in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision
    • Features a constitutional amendment designed to overturn Citizens United and restore the government to the people
    • Includes a “tool kit” to help citizens mount a grassroots campaign to pass the People’s Rights amendment

    The January 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision marked a culminating victory for the legal doctrine of corporate personhood. Corporations, as legal persons, are now entitled to exercise their alleged free-speech rights in the form of campaign spending, effectively enabling corporate domination of the electoral process.

    Jeffrey Clements uncovers the roots, expansion, and far-reaching effects of the strange and destructive idea, which flies in the face of not only all common sense but, Clements shows, most of American legal history, from 1787 to the 1970s. He details its impact on the American political landscape, economy, job market, environment, and public health—and how it permeates our daily lives, from the quality of air we breathe to the types of jobs we can get to the politicians we elect. Most importantly, he offers a solution: a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and tools readers can use to mount a grassroots drive to get it passed.

    Overturning Citizens United is not about a triumph of one political ideology over another—it’s about restoring the democratic principles on which America was built. Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist both vocally opposed the idea of corporate personhood. Community by community, state by state, we can cross party and ideological lines to form a united front against unchecked corporate power in America—and reinstate a government that is truly of, by, and for the people.

    Thursday, January 12, 2012

    On My Radar: Thursday Edition

    Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters and Other Vampires From Sucking America Dry
    by Dylan Ratigan
    Simon & Schuster
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:

    Dylan Ratigan is mad as hell. Infuriated by government corruption and corporate communism, incensed by banksters shaking down taxpayers, and despairing of an ailing health care system, an age-old dependency on foreign oil, and a failing educational system, Ratigan sees an America that has allowed itself to be swindled and robbed. In this book, his first, he rips the lid off our deeply crooked system—and offers a way out.

    This country, now more than ever, needs passionate debate and smart policy, a brazen willingness to scrap what doesn’t work, and the entrepreneurial spirit to try what does. Ratigan has compiled brash and fresh solutions for building a new and better America, and with this book he has started the debate America deserves. With you, he wants to take back the country from the six vampires sucking this nation dry:
    • A political system in which lobbyists write legislation, lawmakers place “secret holds” to create more pork for their districts, and money drives the whole process.

    • A banking system that uses capital for speculation and debt creation, rather than productive investment.

    • A “master-slave” relationship with our Chinese bankers, making our corporations and politicians complicit in a system that rigs our currency and leaves us with permanent joblessness and massive trade deficits.

    • A health care system that is among the priciest and least sustainable in the industrialized world.

    • An educational system that prizes prestige but produces mediocrity.

    • An addiction to foreign oil that has sapped us of our willingness to innovate, made us reliant on inefficient technologies, and left us supportive of corrupt governments.

    To combat these vampires and to isolate the systematic ways in which our once productive industries and our government have been breached, Ratigan does not offer a grab bag of flimsy suggestions or useless hot air. Instead he provides readers with a set of values that together form the answer for how each of us can not only understand what has gone wrong—but join together to make it right.

    Wednesday, January 11, 2012

    On My Radar: Wednesday Edition

    A Bad Idea I'm About to Do: True Tales of Seriously Bad Judgment and Stunningly Awkward Adventure
    by Chris Gethard
    Da Capo Press
    Trade Paperback

    From the publisher website:

    "If you like underdog stories told by a secret comedy superhero, Chris Gethard is your man. Each story is the perfect combination of hilarious and heartbreaking."—Amy Poehler

     "Chris Gethard is comedy in a fighter's crouch."—Seth Meyers

     "There's truly no poorer judgment than not buying this book. Except maybe diving into a swimming pool full of malaria."—Patton Oswalt

     "Chris Gethard stories are like a roller coaster—at times you are scared, shocked, and ultimately exhilarated by the hilarity each story contains—and once you finish one, you wanna hear another one right away."—Paul Scheer, FX's The League and Adult Swim's NTSF: SD: SUV

      "Chris Gethard tells the amazing stories an eccentric old man would tell . . . if that man had lived his f#@king life with any balls. His stories are hilarious and riveting—but more importantly, real."—Rob Huebel, Adult Swim's Childrens Hospital and MTV's Human Giant

    Chris Gethard has often found himself in awkward situations most people, including you, probably would have safely avoided. The good news is now, thanks to this book, you can enjoy the painfully funny consequences of his unfortunate decisions at a safe distance. A Bad Idea I'm About to Do invites readers to join Chris as he navigates an adolescence and adulthood mired in hilariously ill-fated nerdom, and to take comfort in the fact that—as his experiences often prove—things could always be much, much worse

    Tuesday, January 10, 2012

    On My Radar: Tuesday Edition

    King Larry: The Life and Ruins of a Billionaire Genius
    by James D. Scurlock
    Scribner
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:

    King Larry is a three-part journey, beginning with the early years of a mercurial young man who grew up fatherless on a peach farm outside of Fresno, California. Months after graduating from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1969, Hillblom cofounded DHL—three years before FedEx was formed—and it quickly became the fastest-growing corporation in history.

    Hillblom’s expatriate life began twelve years later, when he retreated to a small tax haven in the Western Pacific. There, James Scurlock reveals, Hillblom led the resistance to American meddling in the Mariana Islands, rewrote the tax code and real-estate laws, and became a Supreme Court justice—among other unlikely exploits.

    Hillblom’s voracious appetite for underage prostitutes is another facet of his convoluted story, illuminating the realities of the sex and human-trafficking industries in Southeast Asia. But Hillblom’s amoral, thrill-seeking nature finally caught up with him when his vintage seaplane disappeared off the coast of Anatahan in May 1995, and he left behind an estate worth close to a billion dollars. Weeks later, five impoverished women and their attorneys came forward to challenge Hillblom’s will, his former business partners, and his alma mater, provoking a legal battle that has raged for over fifteen years.

    From Howard Hughes to Mark Zuckerberg, the public has always been fascinated by larger-than-life entrepreneurs and their eccentricities. Now, James Scurlock engages us with the riveting story of one such man, who dressed in rags and lived in relative obscurity, but who has had a profound and lasting influence—a pioneer who shrank the globe, toppled the postal monopoly, anticipated electronic mail, and, most important, envisioned a world driven by economics rather than by laws.

    Monday, January 9, 2012

    On My Radar: Monday Edition

    Crazy Enough
    by Storm Large
    Free Press / Simon & Schuster
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:

    Yes, Storm Large is her real name, though she’s been called many things. As a performer, the majority of descriptions have led with “Amazon,” “Powerhouse,” “a six-foot Vargas pinup come to life.” Playboy called her a “punk goddess.” You’d never know she used to be called “Little S”—the mini-me to her beautiful and troubled mother, Suzi.

    Storm spent most of her childhood visiting her mother in mental institutions and psych wards. Suzi’s diagnosis changed with almost every doctor visit, ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to multiple personality disorder to depression. As hard as it was not having her at home, Storm and her brothers knew that it was a lot safer to have their beautiful but unreliable mom in a facility somewhere. Then one day, nine-year-old Storm jokingly asked one of her mother’s doctors, “I’m not going to be crazy like that, right?” To which he replied, “Well, yes. It’s hereditary. You absolutely will end up like your mother. But not until your twenties.”

    That was the starting gun for a wild race to escape what Storm believed to be her future. Desperate to delay the lonely sickness and sadness that haunted her mother, Storm stomped her size-twelve boots straight toward as much sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll as she could find. Losing her virginity at thirteen, she sprinted through her young life, trying to smoke and fuck and wail away the madness that she feared would catch up to her at any moment. Instead, she found herself deep in a life of craziness of her own making.

    Then, in her twenties, with nothing to live for and a growing heroin addiction, Storm accepted a chance invitation to sing with a friend’s band. That night she reconnected with her long-term love of music, and it dragged her back from the edge. She has been singing and slinging inappropriate banter at audiences worldwide ever since. Storm’s story of growing up with a mental time bomb hanging around her neck veers from frightening to inspiring, sometimes all in one sentence. But her strength, charisma, and raw musical talent gave her the will to overcome it all. With tremendous honesty and tremendous dirty language, Crazy Enough is about an artist’s journey of realizing that the mistakes that make, break and remake us are worth far more than our flailing attempts to live a life we think is “normal.” It is a love song to the twisted, flawed parts in all of us and a nod to the grace we find when things fall apart.

    Friday, January 6, 2012

    On My Radar: Friday Edition

    The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement
    by David Brooks
    Random House
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:

    With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life.

    This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.
     

    Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the “odyssey years” that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility.

    The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

    Thursday, January 5, 2012

    On My Radar: Thursday Edition

    Distrust That Particular Flavor
    by William Gibson
    Putnam
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:


    William Gibson is known primarily as a novelist, with his work ranging from his groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, to his more recent contemporary bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. During those nearly thirty years, though, Gibson has been sought out by widely varying publications for his insights into contemporary culture. Wired magazine sent him to Singapore to report on one of the world's most buttoned-up states. The New York Times Magazine asked him to describe what was wrong with the Internet. Rolling Stone published his essay on the ways our lives are all "soundtracked" by the music and the culture around us. And in a speech at the 2010 Book Expo, he memorably described the interactive relationship between writer and reader.
    These essays and articles have never been collected-until now. Some have never appeared in print at all. In addition, Distrust That Particular Flavor includes journalism from small publishers, online sources, and magazines no longer in existence. This volume will be essential reading for any lover of William Gibson's novels. Distrust That Particular Flavor offers readers a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture.

    Wednesday, January 4, 2012

    On My Radar: Wednesday Edition

    Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right
    by Thomas Frank
    Henry Holt / MacMillan
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:

    From the bestselling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism.

    Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change—or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims and that society's traditional winners receive even grander prizes. The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, was strangely reinvigorated by the arrival of hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system but that we reaffirm our commitment to it. Republicans in Congress embarked on a bold strategy of total opposition to the liberal state. And TV phenom Glenn Beck demonstrated the commercial potential of heroic paranoia and the purest libertarian economics.

    In Pity the Billionaire, Frank, the great chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us the first full diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, reconceived the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous. The understanding Frank reaches is at once startling, original, and profound.

    Tuesday, January 3, 2012

    On My Radar (Tuesday Edition)

    American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History
    by Navy Seal Chris Kyle with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice
    William Morrow / Harper Collins
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:


    "Chris has done and seen things that will be talked about for generations to come, not only by the American military, but by those who stood against us in battle."
    —Marcus Luttrell, (USN Ret.), bestselling author of Lone Survivor

    Gripping, eye-opening, and powerful, American Sniper is the astonishing autobiography of SEAL Chief Chris Kyle, who is the record-holding sniper in U.S. military history. Kyle has more than 150 officially confirmed kills (the previous American record was 109), though his remarkable career total has not been made public by the Pentagon. Kyle shares the true story of his extraordinary decade-long career, including his multiple combat tours in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and elsewhere from 1999-2009. Kyle’s riveting first-person account of how he went from Texas rodeo cowboy to expert marksman and feared assassin offers a fascinating view of modern-day warfare and one of the most in-depth and illuminating looks into the secret world of Special Ops ever written.

    Book Description
    He is the deadliest American sniper ever, called “the devil” by the enemies he hunted and “the legend” by his Navy SEAL brothers . . .

    From 1999 to 2009, U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. The Pentagon has officially confirmed more than 150 of Kyles kills (the previous American record was 109), but it has declined to verify the astonishing total number for this book. Iraqi insurgents feared Kyle so much they named him al-Shaitan (“the devil”) and placed a bounty on his head. Kyle earned legendary status among his fellow SEALs, Marines, and U.S. Army soldiers, whom he protected with deadly accuracy from rooftops and stealth positions. Gripping and unforgettable, Kyle’s masterful account of his extraordinary battlefield experiences ranks as one of the great war memoirs of all time.

    A native Texan who learned to shoot on childhood hunting trips with his father, Kyle was a champion saddle-bronc rider prior to joining the Navy. After 9/11, he was thrust onto the front lines of the War on Terror, and soon found his calling as a world-class sniper who performed best under fire. He recorded a personal-record 2,100-yard kill shot outside Baghdad; in Fallujah, Kyle braved heavy fire to rescue a group of Marines trapped on a street; in Ramadi, he stared down insurgents with his pistol in close combat. Kyle talks honestly about the pain of war—of twice being shot and experiencing the tragic deaths of two close friends.

    American Sniper also honors Kyles fellow warriors, who raised hell on and off the battlefield. And in moving first-person accounts throughout, Kyles wife, Taya, speaks openly about the strains of war on their marriage and children, as well as on Chris.

    Adrenaline-charged and deeply personal, American Sniper is a thrilling eyewitness account of war that only one man could tell.

    Monday, January 2, 2012

    On My Radar (Monday Edition)

    The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right
    by Sally Denton
    Bloomsbury Press
    Hardcover

    From the publisher website:


    An anarchist assassin, demagogues, and a plotted coup d'etat-the forgotten history of the forces that lashed out against FDR as he took the helm of a country on the brink, foreshadowing the bitter politics of today.

    In March 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally became the nation's thirty-second president. The man swept in by a landslide four months earlier now took charge of a country in the grip of panic brought on by economic catastrophe. Though no one yet knew it-not even Roosevelt-it was a radical moment in America. And with all of its unmistakable resonance with events of today, it is a cautionary tale.
    The Plots Against the President follows Roosevelt as he struggled to right the teetering nation, armed with little more than indomitable optimism and the courage to try anything. His bold New Deal experiments provoked a backlash from both extremes of the political spectrum. Wall Street bankers threatened by FDR's policies made common cause with populist demagogues like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin. But just how far FDR's enemies were willing to go to thwart him has never been fully explored.
    Two startling events that have been largely ignored by historians frame Sally Denton's swift, tense narrative of a year of fear: anarchist Giuseppe Zangara's assassination attempt on Roosevelt, and a plutocrats' plot to overthrow the government that would come to be known as the Wall Street Putsch. The Plots Against the President throws light on the darkest chapter of the Depression and the moments when the fate of the American republic hung in the balance.