In My TBR Stack:

This Machine Kills Secrets: How Wikileakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information
by Andy Greenberg

Dutton / Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

At last, the first full account of the cypherpunks who aim to free the world’s institutional secrets, by Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg who has traced their shadow history from the cryptography revolution of the 1970s to Wikileaks founding hacker Julian Assange, Anonymous, and beyond.

WikiLeaks brought to light a new form of whistleblowing, using powerful cryptographic code to hide leakers’ identities while they spill the private data of government agencies and corporations. But that technology has been evolving for decades in the hands of hackers and radical activists, from the libertarian enclaves of Northern California to Berlin to the Balkans. And the secret-killing machine continues to evolve beyond WikiLeaks, as a movement of hacktivists aims to obliterate the world’s institutional secrecy.

This is the story of the code and the characters—idealists, anarchists, extremists—who are transforming the next generation’s notion of what activism can be.

With unrivaled access to such major players as Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and WikiLeaks’ shadowy engineer known as the Architect, never before interviewed, reporter Andy Greenberg unveils the world of politically-motivated hackers—who they are and how they operate.

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 Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century."
—Rachel Maddow, author of Drift

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters.

Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.

In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good—or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary—and dangerous—science.

Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.

With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.

On My Radar:

The Dangerous Animals Club
by Stephen Tobolowsky
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

If you ran into Stephen Tobolowsky on the street, you would not be mistaken: Yes, you’ve seen him before. A childhood dentist? A former geometry teacher? Your local florist? Tobolowsky is a character actor, one of the most prolific screen and stage presences of our time, having appeared in productions that range from Deadwood to Glee, from Mississippi Burning to Groundhog Day.

But Stephen Tobolowsky, it turns out, is not just an actor; he is also a dazzlingly talented storyteller and writer. He has earned a devoted base of fans for his original stories, told in front of live audiences as well as in a popular podcast. Now, for the first time, he has assembled those stories here. The result is creative mitzvah, a work of art, and a narrative feat that combines biography and essay, ranging in tone from the hilarious to the introspective.

To read these pages is to enter an astonishing world that, like all art, is universal yet individual, familiar yet disquieting. A dangerous world, indeed.

On My Radar:

Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates
by Jim Lehrer
Random House

Trade paperback

From the publisher website;

With an update by the author for the 2012 election

A veteran newsman who has presided over eleven presidential and vice-presidential debates, Jim Lehrer gives readers a ringside seat for some of the epic political battles of our time, shedding light on all of the critical turning points and rhetorical faux pas that helped determine the outcome of America’s presidential elections. Drawing on his own experiences as “the man in the middle seat,” in-depth interviews with the candidates and his fellow moderators, and transcripts of key exchanges, Lehrer illuminates what he calls the “Major Moments” and “killer questions” that defined the debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain. In this paperback edition, he also offers his expert analysis of the 2012 Republican primary debates.

Asked to sum up his experience as a participant in high-level televised debates, President George H. W. Bush memorably likened them to an evening in “tension city.” In Jim Lehrer’s absorbing account, we find out that truer words were never spoken.

“A brisk and engaging memoir.”—The Washington Post

“Enthralling . . . remarkable . . . a wonderful political memoir.”—Bookreporter

“A really good read . . . [There is] no debating quality of Jim Lehrer’s book.”—Associated Press

“Jim Lehrer is a national monument, and this riveting book shows how he became America’s moderator.”—Michael Beschloss, author of Presidential Courage

“A political junkie’s backstage pass.”—The Capital Times

New in Paperback:

Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life
by Michael Moore
Grand Central Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Michael Moore-Oscar-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, and the nation's official provocateur laureate-is back, this time taking on an entirely new role, that of his own meta-Forrest Gump. Smashing the autobiographical mold, Moore presents twenty-four far-ranging, irreverent, and stranger-than-fiction vignettes from his own early life. One moment he's an eleven-year-old boy lost in the U.S. Senate and found by Bobby Kennedy; and in the next, he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with a dazed and confused Ronald Reagan. Fast-forwarding to 2003, he stuns the world from the Oscar stage by uttering the words "We live in fictitious times . . . with a fictitious president" in place of the usual "I'd like to thank the Academy." And none of that even comes close to the night the friendly priest at the seminary decides to show him how to perform his own exorcism. Capturing the zeitgeist of the past fifty years, yet deeply personal and unflinchingly honest, HERE COMES TROUBLE takes readers on an unforgettable, take-no-prisoners ride through the life and times of Michael Moore. Alternately funny, eye-opening, and moving, it's the book he has been writing-and living-his entire life.

On My Radar:

Conning Harvard: Adam Wheeler, the Con Artist Who Faked His Way Into the Ivy League
by Julie Zauzmer
Lyons Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Conning Harvard tells the story of Adam Wheeler’s lie-filled path into Harvard, his compulsive conning of grant and scholarship boards after enrolling, and the eventual discovery of his fraudulent past.

On My Radar:

Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps
by Greg Palast & Ted Rall
Seven Stories Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 

With complete comic book by Ted Rall

A close presidential election in November could well come down to contested states or even districts—an election decided by vote theft? It could happen this year.
Based on Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s investigative reporting for Rolling Stone and BBC television, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps might be the most important book published this year—one that could save the election.

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits names the filthy-rich sugar-daddies who are super-funding the Super-PACs of both parties—billionaires with nicknames like “The Ice Man,” “The Vulture” and, of course, The Brothers Koch. Told with Palast’s no-holds-barred, reporter-on-the-beat style, the facts as he lays them out are staggering. What emerges in B&BB is the never-before-told-story of the epic battle being fought behind the scenes between the old money banking sector that still supports Obama, and the new hedge fund billionaires like Paul Singer who not only support Romney but also are among his key economic advisors. B&BB exposes the previously unreported details on how operatives plan to use the hundreds of millions in Super-PAC money pouring into this election. We know the money is pouring in, but Palast shows us the convoluted ways the money will be used to suppress your vote.

The story of the billionaires and why they want to buy an election is matched with the nine ways they can steal the election. His story of the sophisticated new trickery will pick up on Palast’s giant New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
For more information go to www.ballotbandits.org or www.gregpalast.com. 

REVIEWS

"A 48-page comic book, 'Tales from the Crypt of Democracy,' brilliantly illustrated by the award-winning artist Ted Rall, summarizes the bleak horrors detailed in Billionaires and Ballot Bandits. Palast reaches out to all of us with his revelations in a nutshell. Years from now we can turn to it and remember and marvel in our triumph that such atrocities once dominated the human landscape, here and throughout the world."--Op-Ed News

About Greg Palast and Ted Rall

GREG PALAST, a resident of New York City, is an investigative reporter for the BBC’s Newsnight and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a book Michael Moore has called “courageous reporting.” He is also the author of The Joker's Wild: Dubya's Trick Deck with Robert Grossman.

Twice the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, TED RALL is a political cartoonist, opinion columnist, graphic novelist and occasional war correspondent whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times. He is also the author of The Anti-American Manifesto and The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.

On My Radar:

Irregular Army: How the U.S. Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror
by Matt Kennard
Verso Books
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

     Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - now the longest wars in American history - the U.S. military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard's explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, criminals of all stripes, the overweight, and the mentally ill. Based on several years of reporting, Irregular Army includes extensive interviews with extremist veterans and leaders of far-right hate groups - who spoke openly of their eagerness to have their followers acquire military training for a coming domestic race war.  As a report commissioned by the Department of Defense put it, "Effectively, the military has a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy concerning extremism."

     Irregular Army connects some of the War on Terror's worst crimes to this opening-up of the U.S. military. With millions of veterans now back in the U.S. and domestic extremism on the rise,  Kennard's book is a stark warning about potential dangers facing Americans - from their own soldiers.

On My Radar:

The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down
by Andrew McCarthy
Free Press / Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

WITH AN IRREPRESSIBLE TASTE for adventure, candor, and a vivid sense of place, award-winning travel writer and actor Andrew McCarthy takes us on a deeply personal journey played out amid some of the world’s most evocative locales.

Unable to commit to his fiancée of nearly four years—and with no clear understanding of what’s holding him back—Andrew McCarthy finds himself at a crossroads, plagued by doubts that have clung to him for a lifetime. Something in his character has kept him always at a distance, preventing him from giving himself wholeheartedly to the woman he loves and from becoming the father that he knows his children deserve. So before he loses everything he cares about, Andrew sets out to look for answers.

Hobbling up the treacherous slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, dodging gregarious passengers aboard an Amazonian riverboat, and trudging through dense Costa Rican rain forests—Andrew takes us on exotic trips to some of the world’s most beautiful places, but his real journey is one of the spirit.

On his soul-searching voyages, Andrew traces the path from his New Jersey roots, where acting saved his life—and early fame almost took it away—to his transformation into a leading travel writer. He faces the real costs of his early success and lays bare the evolving nature of his relationships with women. He explores a strained bond with his father, and how this complex dynamic shapes his own identity as a parent. Andrew charts his journey from ambivalence to confidence, from infidelity and recklessness to acceptance and a deeper understanding of the internal conflicts of his life.

A gifted writer with an unsparing eye, Andrew relishes bizarre encounters with the characters whom he encounters, allowing them to challenge him in unexpected ways. He gets into peculiar, even dangerous situations that put him to the test—with mixed results. Disarmingly likable, Andrew is open, honest, and authentic on every page, and what emerges is an intimate memoir of self-discovery and an unforgettable love song to the woman who would be his wife.

New Books: Random House Edition

The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court
by Jeffrey Toobin
Doubleday / Random House

Hardcover

From the publisher website:

From the prizewinning author of The Nine, a gripping insider's account of the momentous ideological war between the John Roberts Supreme Court and the Obama administration.

From the moment John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, blundered through the Oath of Office at Barack Obama's inauguration, the relationship between the Supreme Court and the White House has been confrontational. Both men are young, brilliant, charismatic, charming, determined to change the course of the nation—and completely at odds on almost every major constitutional issue. One is radical; one essentially conservative. The surprise is that Obama is the conservative—a believer in incremental change, compromise, and pragmatism over ideology. Roberts—and his allies on the Court—seek to overturn decades of precedent: in short, to undo the ultimate victory FDR achieved in the New Deal.

   This ideological war will crescendo during the 2011-2012 term, in which several landmark cases are on the Court's docket—most crucially, a challenge to Obama's controversial health-care legislation. With four new justices joining the Court in just five years, including Obama's appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, this is a dramatically—and historically—different Supreme Court, playing for the highest of stakes.

   No one is better positioned to chronicle this dramatic tale than Jeffrey Toobin, whose prize-winning bestseller The Nine laid bare the inner workings and conflicts of the Court in meticulous and entertaining detail. As the nation prepares to vote for President in 2012, the future of the Supreme Court will also be on the ballot. 

- - - - - - - - - -

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
by Tom Reiss

Crown Publishing / Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Here is the remarkable true story of the real Count of Monte Cristo – a stunning feat of historical sleuthing that brings to life the forgotten hero who inspired such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.

Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.

Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution, in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East – until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.

The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son. 

In My TBR Stack:

Larceny in my Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education
by Matthew Parker

Gotham Books / Penguin 
Paperback Graphic Novel

From the publisher website:

A fully illustrated graphic memoir of a child of the '60s who was raised into a life of crime and addiction —but graduated into freedom.

Matthew Parker was in his mid-forties when he started college. He’d been sidetracked: Eleven years were eaten up by serving time in various county jails, state penitentiaries, and federal prison. He’d been arrested more than thirty times, racking up eight felonies in a crime career that began at age thirteen, when he started dealing pot. When he got out of prison for the last time and kicked his heroin addiction, he was determined to spend the next chapter of his life in the classroom. And he did just that, going on to complete a master’s degree from Columbia University’s highly competitive creative writing program.

Through captivating black-and-white illustrations drawn in a distinctively primitive style, Larceny in My Blood flashes back on Parker's childhood, with memories of a loving but lawless mother teaching him that breaking the law was the way to survive. From there it moves to an account of Parker’s lost decades, where he resorted to petty crime to support a heroin habit. After years of fighting the system, Parker sees the light and Larceny in My Blood becomes a poignant portrait of a man trying to find his way in the straight and narrow. A unique memoir, Parker’s images and words form a mesmerizing road to redemption.

On My Radar:

Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work
by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Five hundred feet underground, Jeanne Marie Laskas asked a coal miner named Smitty, “Do you think it’s weird that people know so little about you?” He replied, “I don’t think people know too much about the way the whole damn country works.”

Hidden America intends to fix that. Like John McPhee and Susan Orlean, Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven narratives that are gripping, funny, and revelatory. In Hidden America, the stories are about the people who make our lives run every day—and yet we barely think of them.

Laskas spent weeks in an Ohio coal mine and on an Alaskan oil rig; in a Maine migrant labor camp, a Texas beef ranch, the air traffic control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, a California landfill, an Arizona gun shop, the cab of a long-haul truck in Iowa, and the stadium of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders. Cheerleaders? Yes. They, too, are hidden America, and you will be amazed by what Laskas tells you about them: hidden no longer.