"From the former secretary of state and bestselling author -- a sweeping look at the global struggle for democracy and why America must continue to support the cause of human freedom. From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the ongoing struggle for human rights in the Middle East, Condoleezza Rice has served on the front lines of history. As a child, she was an eyewitness to a third awakening of freedom, when her hometown...

Here's something true for almost every American. The democracy you live in today is different, completely different, than the democracy born into. Since 1980, the number of Americans legally barred from voting has more than doubled. Since the 1990s, odds of living in a competitive Congressional district have fallen by more than half. In the twenty-first century alone, the amount of money spent on Washington lobbying has increased by more than 100...

"We are in the midst of a full-scale attack on our nation's commitment to public education. From funding, to vouchers, to charter schools, public education policy has become a political football, rather than a means of fulfilling the most basic obligation of government to its citizens. As Derek W. Black vividly illustrates, this assault threatens not just public education, but democracy itself. Black offers both an illuminating history of our nation's...

"From the New York Times's Global Economics Correspondent, a masterwork of reporting and explanatory journalism that exposes how billionaires' systematic plunder of the world has transformed 21st century life and dangerously destabilized democracy"-- The history of the last half century in America, Europe, and other major economies is in large part the story of wealth flowing upward. The most affluent people emerged from capitalism's triumph in the...

In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead. They arrived in New York City in May of that year...

"End the filibuster. Abolish the Senate. Make everyone vote. Only if we do this (and then some), says Thomas Geoghegan, might we heal our fractured democracy. In 2008 Geoghegan, then an established labor lawyer and prolific writer, embarked on a campaign for the U.S. House. A political neophyte, he avidly knocked on doors, shook hands at train stations, and raised money--and on election night he lost, badly. But out of this humbling experience came...

""Giroux refuses to give in or give up. The Violence of Organized Forgetting is a clarion call to imagine a different America--just, fair, and caring--and then to struggle for it."--Bill Moyers "Giroux is society's teacher and conscience."--Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina The Toronto Star has named Henry Giroux "one of the twelve Canadians changing the way we think." "America has become amnesiac," says Henry Giroux, "a country in...

Presents the history of the United States from the point of view of those who were exploited in the name of American progress.

"An urgent and deeply necessary work, Dear Zealots offers three ... essays that speak directly to our present age, on the rise of zealotry in Israel and around the world. From the incomparable Amos Oz comes a series of three essays: on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures, on the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for a secular pride in Israel, and on the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally....