Available Now:

American Resistance:  The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

by David Rothkopf

Public Affairs 

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Each federal employee takes an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic,” but none had imagined that enemy might be the Commander-in-Chief.  With the presidency of Donald Trump, a  fault line between the president and vital forces within his government was established.  Those who honored their oath of office, their obligation to the Constitution, were wary of the president and they in turn were not trusted and occasionally fired and replaced with loyalists.  

American Resistance is the first book to chronicle the unprecedented role so many in the government were forced to play and the consequences of their actions during the Trump administration. From Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny, to  Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, to Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, and the official who first called himself “Anonymous”—Miles Taylor, among others, Rothkopf examines the resistance movement that slowly built in Washington. Drawing from first hand testimonies, deep background and research, American Resistance shows how when the President threatened to run amok, a few key figures rose in defiance. It reveals the conflict within the Department of Justice over actively seeking instances of election fraud and abuse to help the president illegally retain power, and multiple battles within the White House over the influence of Jared and Ivanka, and in particular the extraordinary efforts to get them security clearances even after they were denied to them.   

David Rothkopf chronicles how each person came to realize that they were working for an administration that threatened to wreak havoc – one Defense Secretary was told by his mother to resign before it was too late – in an intense drama in which a few good men and women stood up to the tyrant in their midst. 

On My Radar:

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Public Affairs
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We’ve begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again. Behold the Revenge of Analog.

David Sax has uncovered story after story of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and even big corporations who’ve found a market selling not apps or virtual solutions but real, tangible things. As e-books are supposedly remaking reading, independent bookstores have sprouted up across the country. As music allegedly migrates to the cloud, vinyl record sales have grown more than ten times over the past decade. Even the offices of tech giants like Google and Facebook increasingly rely on pen and paper to drive their brightest ideas.

Sax’s work reveals a deep truth about how humans shop, interact, and even think. Blending psychology and observant wit with first-rate reportage, Sax shows the limited appeal of the purely digital life–and the robust future of the real world outside it.

In My TBR Stack:

All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft
by Geraldine DeRuiter
Public Affairs
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Some people are meant to travel the globe, to unwrap its secrets and share them with the world. And some people have no sense of direction, are terrified of pigeons, and get motion sickness from tying their shoes. These people are meant to stay home and eat nachos.

Geraldine DeRuiter is the latter. But she won't let that stop her.

Hilarious, irreverent, and heartfelt, All Over the Place chronicles the years Geraldine spent traveling the world after getting laid off from a job she loved. Those years taught her a great number of things, though the ability to read a map was not one of them. She has only a vague idea of where Russia is, but she now understands her Russian father better than ever before. She learned that what she thought was her mother's functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called "being Italian." She learned what it's like to travel the world with someone you already know and love--how that person can help you make sense of things and make far-off places feel like home. She learned about unemployment and brain tumors, lost luggage and lost opportunities, and just getting lost in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. And she learned that sometimes you can find yourself exactly where you need to be--even if you aren't quite sure where you are.

BookSpin Giveaway!

Sundays at Eight: 25 Years of Stories from C-Span's Q&A and Booknotes
Brian Lamb
Public Affairs
Hardcover

Public Affairs has graciously provided 3 copies of Sundays at Eight for giveaway on BookSpin.  To enter to win tell me your favorite nonfiction book of all time in a tweet.  My twitter name is @Book_Dude.  US entries only, please.

From the publisher's website:

For the last 25 years, Sunday nights at 8pm on C-SPAN has been appointment television for many Americans. During that time, host Brian Lamb has invited people to his Capitol Hill studio for hour-long conversations about contemporary society and history. In today’s soundbite culture that hour remains one of television’s last vestiges of in-depth, civil conversation.

First came C-SPAN’s Booknotes in 1989, which by the time it ended in December 2004, was the longest-running author-interview program in American broadcast history. Many of the most notable nonfiction authors of its era were featured over the course of 800 episodes, and the conversations became a defining hour for the network and for nonfiction writers.

In My TBR Stack:

Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires
by David Folkenflik
Public Affairs 
Hardcover

Rupert Murdoch is the most significant media tycoon the English-speaking world has ever known. No one before him has trafficked in media influence across those nations so effectively, nor has anyone else so singularly redefined the culture of news and the rules of journalism. In a stretch spanning six decades, he built News Corp from a small paper in Adelaide, Australia into a multimedia empire capable of challenging national broadcasters, rolling governments, and swatting aside commercial rivals. Then, over two years, a series of scandals threatened to unravel his entire creation.

Murdoch's defenders questioned how much he could have known about the bribery and phone hacking undertaken by his journalists in London. But to an exceptional degree, News Corp was an institution cast in the image of a single man. The company's culture was deeply rooted in an Australian buccaneering spirit, a brawling British populism, and an outsized American libertarian sensibility—at least when it suited Murdoch's interests.

David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for NPR News, explains how the man behind Britain's take-no-prisoners tabloids, who reinvigorated Roger Ailes by backing his vision for Fox News, who gave a new swagger to the New York Post and a new style to the Wall Street Journal, survived the scandals—and the true cost of this survival. He summarily ended his marriage, alienated much of his family, and split his corporation asunder to protect the source of his vast wealth (on the one side), and the source of his identity (on the other). There were moments when the global news chief panicked. But as long as Rupert Murdoch remains the person at the top, Murdoch's World will be making news.

Award-winning journalist David Folkenflik has been NPR's media correspondent since 2004. He previously covered media and politics for the Baltimore Sun and edited the 2011 book, Page One: Inside The New York Times and the Future of Journalism. He has covered Murdoch and News Corp extensively and has been a frequent commentator on the hacking scandal in both the U.S. and the U.K. Folkenflik lives with his wife, the radio producer Jesse Baker, and their daughter in New York City.

Out Now:

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
by Radley Balko
Public Affairs
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The American approach to law enforcement was forged by the experience of revolution. Emerging as they did from the shadow of British rule, the country's founders would likely have viewed police, as they exist today, as a standing army, and therefore a threat to liberty. Even so, excessive force and disregard for the Bill of Rights have become epidemic in today's world. According to civil liberties reporter Radley Balko, these are all symptoms of a generation-long shift to increasingly aggressive, militaristic, and arguably unconstitutional policing—one that would have shocked the conscience of America's founders.

Rise of the Warrior Cop traces the arc of U.S. law enforcement from the constables and private justice of colonial times to present-day SWAT teams and riot cops. Today, relentless "war on drugs" and "war on terror" pronouncements from politicians, along with battle-clad police forces with tanks and machine guns have dangerously blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. Balko's fascinating, frightening narrative shows how martial rhetoric and reactionary policies have put modern law enforcement on a collision course with the values of a free society.  

Radley Balko is an award-winning investigative journalist who writes about civil liberties, police and prosecutors, and the broader criminal justice system. He is a senior writer and investigative reporter for theHuffington Post. Previously, he was a senior editor for Reasonmagazine and a policy analyst for the Cato Institute. Balko's 2006 Cato report Overkill is considered the seminal work on the rise of SWAT teams and paramilitary police tactics in America. Follow him on Twitter: @RadleyBalko 

In My TBR Stack:

Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
by Gary Klein

Public Affairs
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Insights—like Darwin's understanding of the way evolution actually works, and Watson and Crick's breakthrough discoveries about the structure of DNA—can change the world. We also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us so that we can more effectively solve problems and get things done. Yet we know very little about when, why, or how insights are formed—or what blocks them. In Seeing What Others Don't, renowned cognitive psychologist Gary Klein unravels the mystery. 

Klein is a keen observer of people in their natural settings—scientists, businesspeople, firefighters, police officers, soldiers, family members, friends, himself—and uses a marvelous variety of stories to illuminate his research into what insights are and how they happen. What, for example, enabled Harry Markopolos to put the finger on Bernie Madoff? How did Dr. Michael Gottlieb make the connections between different patients that allowed him to publish the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic? What did Admiral Yamamoto see (and what did the Americans miss) in a 1940 British attack on the Italian fleet that enabled him to develop the strategy of attack at Pearl Harbor? How did a "smokejumper" see that setting another fire would save his life, while those who ignored his insight perished? How did Martin Chalfie come up with a million-dollar idea (and a Nobel Prize) for a natural flashlight that enabled researchers to look inside living organisms to watch biological processes in action?

Klein also dissects impediments to insight, such as when organizations claim to value employee creativity and to encourage breakthroughs but in reality block disruptive ideas and prioritize avoidance of mistakes. Or when information technology systems are "dumb by design" and block potential discoveries. 

Both scientifically sophisticated and fun to read, Seeing What Others Don't shows that insight is not just a "eureka!" moment but a whole new way of understanding. 

In My TBR Stack:

Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey
by Peter Carlson

Public Affairs 
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The thrilling true story of a pair of reporters swept up in the Civil War, captured, and thrown into jail, and their attempt to escape and return home to file their own extraordinary story 

Albert Richardson and Junius Browne, two correspondents for the New York Tribune, were captured at the Battle of Vicksburg and spent twenty months in horrific prisons before escaping and making their way to Union territory.

Their amazing, long-forgotten odyssey is one of the great escape stories in American history, packed with drama, courage, horrors and heroics, plus many moments of antic comedy. They must endure the Confederacy's most notorious prison; rely on forged passes and the secret signals of a covert pro-Union organization in North Carolina; trust a legendary guerilla leader; and ultimately depend on a mysterious, anonymous woman on a white horse to guide them to safety. They traveled for 340 miles, most of it on foot, much of it through snow, in twenty-six days.

This is a marvelous, surreal voyage through the cold mountains, dark prisons, and mysterious bands of misfits living in the shadows of the Civil War. 

Peter Carlson is the author of K Blows Top, which has been optioned into a feature film. For many years, he was a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post. He has also written for Smithsonianmagazine, American History magazine, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Rockville, MD.

Retro Wednesday:

Little Red: Three Passionate Lives through the Sixties and Beyond

by Dina Hampton
Public Affairs Books
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In the 1960s, a remarkable crop of students graduated from a small, New York City school renowned for progressive pedagogy and left-wing politics: Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School.

Entering college at the peak of the transformative era we now call The Sixties, three of these "Little Redders" would go on to change the course of American history: Angela Davis, African American intellectual activist and Communist Party member; SDS activist and filmmaker Tom Hurwitz; and Elliott Abrams, who would play a key role in the Republican Neoconservative movement.

Based on extensive original interviews and archival research, Little Red follows these characters' divergent, occasionally intersecting, public and private paths through the seminal events and political struggles of the second half of the twentieth century, from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War; the Summer of Love to radical feminism; Iran-Contra to Occupy Wall Street.

Dina Hampton is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and has worked for more than a decade as a reporter and editor for publications including the New York Times and the Daily News. She is a late 1970s graduate of Little Red and also later served as its alumni director and archivist. She lives in New York City.

Summer of '68: The Season that Changed Baseball - and America - Forever
by Tim Wendel

Da Capo Press
Trade Paperback

publisher website

From barnesandnoble.com:

For baseball fans, 1968 was The Year of the Pitcher. The season was dominated by such legends as Don Drysdale, Denny McLain, Luis Tiant, and Bob Gibson. But it was also a season shaped by national tragedy and sweeping change, rocked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and shaken by the violence that erupted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the riots that raged throughout the summer.

For a select few players, the conflicts of ’68 would spur their performance to remarkable heights, elevating the game around them. And in Detroit--which had burned just the summer before during the worst riot in American history--the city rallied behind a Tigers team that would face off against Bob Gibson’s St. Louis Cardinals, the defending champions, in an amazing World Series for the ages.

Soon everything would change--for baseball and America. But for this one unforgettable season, the country was captivated by the national pastime at the moment it needed the game most.

In My TBR Stack:

Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years
by Geoffrey Nunberg

Public Affairs 
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

An attention-grabbing, thought-provoking exploration of the life of the word "asshole," by a renowned linguist and author

It went from the mouths of WWII servicemen to the typewriter of a young Norman Mailer. By the 1970s it had become a staple of Neil Simon plays and Woody Allen movies. In 2000, George W. Bush accidentally uttered it on a live mic and sparked a debate as to whether that made him a man of the people, or just an asshole. Ours is the age of assholism. 

There may be no more assholes in the world now than there ever were, but there are new ways for acting like one. And no less important, we've made the asshole the object of obsessive collective interest, in the way that the phony was in Holden Caulfield's day or the cad was in Trollope's. Over time, the word has become an expression of contemporary American values— about civility, about relationships, about pretension, about class. Yet the media are obliged to bleep it or disguise it with asterisks. And we use it unreflectingly and give it no attention. Considering how important it is to us, it doesn't get the respect it deserves. Until now.

Geoffrey Nunberg is an adjunct full professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, a linguist, and former chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Since 1989, he has done a language feature on NPR's "Fresh Air," and his commentaries have appeared in the New York Times and other publications. A winner of the Linguistic Society of America's Language and the Public Interest Award, he is also the author of Talking Right and Going Nucular. Nunberg lives in San Francisco, California.

On My Radar:

The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers
by James O'Shea

Public Affairs Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

The authoritative account of a catastrophic merger of media empires that symbolizes the crisis in American journalism and the challenges faced by the nation's newspapers in the digital age.

In 2000, after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror Corporation, it comprised the most powerful collection of newspapers in the world. How then did Tribune nosedive into bankruptcy and public scandal? In The Deal From Hell, veteran Tribune and Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea takes us behind the scenes of the decisions that led to disaster in boardrooms and newsrooms from coast to coast, based on access to key players, court testimony, and sworn depositions. The Deal From Hell is a riveting narrative that chronicles how news industry executives and editors—convinced they were acting in the best interests of their publications—made a series of flawed decisions that endangered journalistic credibility and drove the newspapers, already confronting a perfect storm of political, technological, economic, and social turmoil, to the brink of extinction.

James O'Shea, once managing editor of The Chicago Tribune and editor of the The Los Angeles Times, was most recently CEO and editor-in-chief of the Chicago News Cooperative. The author of two acclaimed books, O'Shea was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Harvard in 2009. 

Best of 2011 (Sort of)....

For the last post of 2011, I am revisiting some of my favorite books from the past year.  Feel free to comment with your own reviews or suggestions for BookSpin 2012.

Endgame by Frank Brady

Ice by Ice-T

States of Confusion by Paul Jury

Moscow December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union by Conor O'Clery

Drama: An Actor's Education by John Lithgow

Review: MOSCOW DECEMBER 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union

  Having worked in bookstores for many years, I know that one of the most common requests for help that I received was gift suggestions for, um, older males.  The well-meaning consumers often wanted to buy a book for someone they had never witnessed actually reading.  On these occasions, I always defaulted to history or politics (after carefully trying to determine the particular side of the aisle preferred by the object of our attention).  So it is when I discover a book that fits that niche for the upcoming and rapidly approaching holiday season, I try to point it out here on my little corner of the web.

This year that book is MOSCOW DECEMBER 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union by Conor O'Clery.

O'Clery built his in-depth narrative around the fateful day of December 25, 1991, when Soviet President Gorbachev resigned.  However, the rich detail includes enough Soviet Union history to form a complete picture of the breakup of the geographically large U.S.S.R., as well as the aftermath.

I savored every moment with this book.  I am a history fiend and when a book is clearly researched with passion and fervor, I damn near cuddle with each page.   I only wish my maternal grandfather were still alive to have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union and also to have had the opportunity to read this in-depth history of the behind-the-scenes intrigue.

The detail of the struggle of the former "evil empire" is captivating.  The Shakespearean battle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin is epic.  And, did I mention the detail?

This book should be on the top of your list for anyone, male or female, who enjoys knowing the stories behind the headlines.

I cannot recommend this book enough.



MOSCOW DECEMBER 25, 1991
by Conor O'Clery
Public Affairs
Hardcover