Primære faneblade

  • Laurence Smith: The New North
    Af Laurence Smith (2011)
    Summary: The New North is a book that turns the world literally upside down. Analysing four key 'megatrends' - population growth and migration, natural resource demand, climate change and globalisation - UCLA professor Larry Smith projects a world that by mid-century will have shifted its political and economic axes radically to the north. The beneficiaries of this new order, based on a bonanza of oil, natural gas, minerals and plentiful water will be the Arctic regions of Russia, Alaska and Canada, and Scandinavia. Meanwhile countries closer to the equator will face water shortages, aging populations, crowded megacities and coastal flooding. Smith draws on geography, economics, history, earth and climate science, but what makes his arguments so compelling is that he has spent many months exploring the region, talking to people in once-inaccessible Arctic towns, noting their economies, politics and stories

  • Jessica Bruder: Snowden's Box : Trust in the Age of Surveillance
    Af Jessica Bruder (2020)
    Summary: One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn't know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden's box-printouts of documents proving that the US government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people-and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras. Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden's leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating essay on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance

  • David Frum: Trumpocracy : The Corruption of the American Republic
    Af David Frum (2018)
    Summary: A New York Times Bestseller! Bestselling author, former White House speechwriter, and Atlantic columnist and media commentator David Frum explains why President Trump has undermined our most important institutions in ways even the most critical media has missed, in this thoughtful and hard-hitting book that is a warning for democracy and America's future. "From Russia to South Africa, from Turkey to the Philippines, from Venezuela to Hungary, authoritarian leaders have smashed restraints on their power. Media freedom and judicial independence have eroded. The right to vote remains, but the right to have one's vote counted fairly may not. Until the US presidential election of 2016, the global decline of democracy seemed a concern for other peoples in other lands. . . . That complacent optimism has been upended by the political rise of Donald Trump. The crisis is upon Americans, here and now." Quietly, steadily, Trump and his administration are damaging the tenets and accepted practices of American democracy, perhaps irrevocably. As he and his family enrich themselves, the presidency itself falls into the hands of the generals and financiers who surround him. While much of the country has been focused on Russia, David Frum has been collecting the lies, obfuscations, and flagrant disregard for the traditional limits placed on the office of the presidency. In Trumpocracy, he documents how Trump and his administration are steadily damaging the tenets and accepted practices of American democracy. During his own White House tenure as George W. Bush's speechwriter, Frum witnessed the ways the presidency is limited not by law but by tradition, propriety, and public outcry, all now weakened. Whether the Trump presidency lasts two, four, or eight more years, he has changed the nature of the office for the worse, and likely for decades. In this powerful and eye-opening book, Frum makes clear that the hard work of recovery starts at home. Trumpocracy outlines how Trump could push America toward illiberalism, what the consequences could be for our nation and our everyday lives, and what we can do to prevent it

  • David Runciman: How Democracy Ends
    Af David Runciman (2018)
    Summary: 'Scintillating ... thought-provoking ... one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject.' Andrew Rawnsley, Observer Democracy has died hundreds of times, all over the world. We think we know what that looks like: chaos descends and the military arrives to restore order, until the people can be trusted to look after their own affairs again. However, there is a danger that this picture is out of date. Until very recently, most citizens of Western democracies would have imagined that the end was a long way off, and very few would have thought it might be happening before their eyes as Trump, Brexit and paranoid populism have become a reality. David Runciman, one of the UK's leading professors of politics, answers all this and more as he surveys the political landscape of the West, helping us to spot the new signs of a collapsing democracy and advising us on what could come next

  • Michael I. Days: Obama's Legacy : What He Accomplished as President
    Af Michael I. Days (2016)
    Summary: As President Obama's time in the White House draws to a close, this celebratory book documents his transformative accomplishments. Evidence indicates President Barack Obama has been tremendously successful and effective by objective measures. On economic indicators alone, he is credited with the longest streak of job growth in U.S. history, a two-thirds reduction in the federal budget deficit, and the rebounding of the stock market to record highs following the record lows of the recession under his predecessor. His victories have come against a backdrop of criticism and sometimes open defiance from conservatives, lack of cooperation in Congress, and racially tinged commentary in traditional and social media. Through it all, the President who campaigned on a slogan of 'Yes, We Can!' has persevered in his determination to make a difference and left an indelible mark on American politics and the world. Legacy is a commemoration of his eight years in the White House

  • Aaron Sahr: Keystroke Capitalism : How Banks Create Money for the Few
    Af Aaron Sahr (2022)
    Summary: Contemporary capitalism produces more and more money, debt, and inequality. These three trends have a common cause: the privilege of private banks to create money by means of accounting - by the stroke of a key. Why was this privilege not addressed politically for so long - and who benefited from it? At the heart of the answer lies the realization that the power to create money has been hidden by the way we commonly think and talk about capitalism. The book traces the omission of money creation from theories of capitalism and maps its consequences. By expanding the manoeuvring space for the banks to use their privilege, the capitalist countries have financed a transformation of the economy known as financialization. As a result, the real economy and private households became a debt supplier to a monetary system whose returns accumulate at the top. It is not simply "the markets" but money itself that transfers economic benefits from the masses to a minority. Increasing inequality of income and wealth can therefore only be combated if one does not only correct distributive results of markets-redistribution-, but addresses pre distribution: the modalities of money creation

  • Jonathan Karl: Tired of Winning : Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party
    Af Jonathan Karl (2023)
    Summary: THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The most important thing that has been written to date about what is in front of the American people in the next presidential election." —Nicolle Wallace An extraordinary view into the politics of our times, Tired of Winning explores how Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his own image—and the wreckage he’s left in his wake. Packed with new reporting, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party tracks Trump’s improbable journey from disgraced and defeated former president to the dominant force, yet again, in the Republican Party.   From his exile in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump has become more extreme, vengeful, and divorced from reality than he was on January 6, 2021. His meddling damaged the GOP’s electoral prospects for third consecutive election in 2022. His legal troubles are mounting. Yet he re-emerged as the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.   Jonathan Karl has known Donald Trump since his days as a New York Post reporter in the 1990s, and he covered every day of Trump’s administration as ABC News’s chief White House correspondent. No one is in a better position to detail the former president’s quest for retribution and provide a glimpse at what the GOP would be signing up for if it once again chooses him as its standard bearer.   In 1964, Ronald Reagan told Americans it was “a time for choosing.” Sixty years later, Republicans have their own choice to make: Are they tired of winning?

  • Rowan Moore: Property : The myth that built the world
    Af Rowan Moore (2023)
    Summary: A powerful examination of how property shaped the modern world - and why it now threatens the freedoms and stability it was meant to sustain. Property carries a great promise: that it will make you rich and set you free. But it is also a weapon, an agent of displacement and exploitation, the currency of kleptocrats and oligarchs. In Britain, it has led to a new class division between those who own and those who don't. Property is a vivid, far-reaching analysis of our concept of property ownership, from 16th-century enclosures to the present day. It tells powerful stories - of life in the developer-led boomtown of Gurgaon in India, of the struggles to form Black communities in Missouri and Georgia, of a giant experiment in co-operative living in the Bronx, of the impacts of Margaret Thatcher's "property-owning democracy." Above all, Property asks how we have come to view our homes as investments - and it offers hope for how things could be better, with reform that might enable the social wealth of property to be returned to society

  • Ron DeSantis: The Courage to Be Free : Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival
    Af Ron DeSantis (2023)
    Summary: No American leader has accomplished more for his state than Governor Ron DeSantis. Now he reveals how he did it. He played baseball for Yale, graduated with honours from Harvard Law School and served in Iraq and in the halls of Congress. But in all these places, Ron DeSantis learned the same lesson: he didn't want to be part of the leftist elite. His heart was always for the people of Florida, one of the most diverse and culturally rich states in the union. Since becoming governor of the Sunshine State, he has fought – and won – battle after battle, defeating not just opposition from the political left, but a barrage of hostile media coverage proclaiming the end of the world. In 2022, the governor delivered a historic, record-setting victory, winning by nearly 20 points and more than 1.5 million votes. A first-hand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr Fauci, The Courage to Be Free is a rallying cry for everyone who wishes to preserve their liberties

  • Steven L. Taylor: 30-Second Politics : The 50 most thought-provoking ideas in politics, each explained in half a minute
    Summary: You may be OK with standard stuff like Conservatism and Democracy, but do you really know what Patrimonialism is? And what about Oligarchy? Anarcho-syndicalism? Politics is, we are willing to bet, the most passionately argued-over subject matter, and yet how many of us flounder around in confrontational debates because we have no grip on political theory, just a vague notion that they are all out to get us? 30-Second Politics will help dispel this fog mistrust and paranoia. It challenges political theorists of all colors to come up with no-frill, no-spin, tell-it-like-it-is explanations of the 50 most important political -isms, -archies, and -ocracies that have pertained since the time of Periclean Athens. At no public expense, the book explains each political theory in nothing more than two pages, 300 words, and some propaganda-style imagery, for we all know that a picture opportunity is worth a thousand words of dull interview

  • Emanuele Ottolenghi: Iran : the Looming Crisis: Can the West live with Iran's nuclear threat?
    Summary: In August 2002 the National Council of the Resistance in Iran (NCRI) revealed in Washington to a stunned world how advanced Iran's nuclear programme was. And in September 2009 US President Barack Obama exposed yet another clandestine nuclear site there, bringing the possibility of a nuclear arsenal ever closer. For seven fruitless years the international community has been too divided to counter this threat. Russia and China view Iran as a tool to counter US influence. US efforts to engage Iran have yielded no results. Sunni Arab governments fear Iran, but are powerless to keep it in check. And Israel, fearing that the bomb will be used against them, might decide on a pre-emptive strike, with drastic consequences for the region. Preventing Iran from building a nuclear arsenal is a European priority. But the EU is Iran's biggest commercial partner: Europe's strategic and economic interests collide. Iran: the Looming Crisis is a new and completely revised edition of Emanuele Ottolenghi's well-received Under a Mushroom Cloud (2009). Fully updated to take account of the current diplomatic stalemate, the latest developments in Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, Obama's diplomatic overtures, the re-election of President Ahmadinejad, and mounting protest within Iran against oppression, this uncompromising analysis offers a compelling answer to the dilemmas facing the West

  • Eric Bolling: The Swamp : Washington's Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It
    Af Eric Bolling (2017)
    Summary: This program is read by the author. When Washington D.C. was first built, it was on top of a swamp that had to be drained. Donald Trump says it's time to drain it again. In The Swamp, bestselling author and Fox News Channel host Eric Bolling presents an infuriating, amusing, revealing, and outrageous history of American politics, past and present, Republican and Democrat. From national political scandals to tempests in a teapot that blew up; bribery, blackmail, bullying, and backroom deals that contradicted public policies; cronyism that cost taxpayers hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars; and personal conduct that can only be described as regrettable, The Swamp is a journey downriver through the bayous and marshes of Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom. The presidential election of 2016 was ugly, but it exposed a political, media, industry, and elite establishment that desperately wanted to elect a politician who received millions of dollars from terror-funding states over a businessman willing to tell the corrupt or incompetent, "You're fired." The audiobook concludes with a series of recommendations for President Trump: practical, hard-headed, and concise ways to drain the swamp and force Washington to be more transparent, more accountable, and more effective in how it serves those who have elected its politicians and pay the bills for their decisions. Last year President Trump declared Wake Up America to be a "huge" book; Eric Bolling's second audiobook is surely to build on that success. Entertaining and timely, The Swamp is the perfect audiobook for today's political climate