Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Political Science

On May 13, 1940, Winston Churchill stood before the House of Commons to deliver his first speech as Prime Minister. Europe was in crisis: three days earlier, Germany had invaded France and the Low Countries. Facing only feeble resistance, Hitler's armies were rapidly sweeping westward. Churchill had little support within the British government when he rose to address it that day.

In this dramatic and fully accessible account of these titans of the early republic and their fiercely held ideas, James F. Simon brings to life the early history of the nation and sheds new light on the highly charged battle to balance the powers of the federal government and the rights of the states. A fascinating look at two of the nation's greatest statesmen and shrewdest politicians, What Kind of Nation presents a cogent, unbiased assessment of their lasting impact on American government.

The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America.

On December 7, 1941, the nation of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and prompted the United States’ entry into the bloodiest war in human history. Americans have long debated the cause of the bombing; many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup or a failure of US intelligence agencies or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a mystery - until now.

This treatise comprises questions 90–97 of the Summa Theologica, in which St. Thomas Aquinas presents a philosophical analysis of the nature and structure of law. Believing that law achieves its results by imposing moral obligations rather than outright force on those subject to it, he proceeds to explore vital questions about the essence of law, kinds of law, effects of law, eternal law, natural law, human law, and changes in law.

This is the remarkable story of the final public and private years of the 37th president, based on full reconstructions of the conversations he had with Monica Crowley, his foreign-policy assistant and personal confidante.

Beginning in January 2009, The Payoff lays bare Washington’s culture of power and plutocracy. It’s the story of the 20-month struggle by Senator Ted Kaufman and Jeff Connaughton, his chief of staff, to hold Wall Street executives accountable for securities fraud, stop stock manipulation by high-frequency traders, and break up too-big-to-fail megabanks. This book takes us inside their dogged crusade against institutional inertia and industry influence as they encounter an outright reluctance.

This is an ideal introduction to the ideas of a man whom many regard as the greatest thinker of our time. Here we encounter the stages in the development of his unique philosophy of consciousness, his key intellectual breakthroughs, his theory of history, and his diagnosis of the political ills of the modern age. The book provides a veritable catalog of the thinkers who created the intellectual foundation of the twentieth century.

Fifty-five men met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a document that would create a country and change a world: the Constitution. Here is a remarkable rendering of that fateful time, told with humanity and humor. Decision in Philadelphia is the best popular history of the Constitutional Convention; in it, the life and times of 18th-century America not only come alive, but the very human qualities of the men who framed the document are brought provocatively into focus - casting many of the Founding Fathers in a new light.

For more than a decade, French journalist Nicolas Hénin has reported from the front lines of conflict in the Middle East, much of his time spent in Iraq and Syria. He witnessed the events leading to the rise of Islamic State, and, in June 2013, he was captured by IS and spent 10 months in captivity with James Foley and others who were beheaded soon after Hénin was released.

This exhilarating Cold War narrative takes listeners from top-secret Cabinet Room meetings to exclusive social clubs, and into the pages of a powerful man's intimate diary. Ike's Mystery Man brings a new dimension to our understanding of the inner-workings of the Eisenhower White House. It also shines a bright light on the indispensable contributions and sacrifices made by patriotic gay Americans. Ike's Mystery Man relies on thousands of personal letters, interviews, and previously classified archives to tell a gripping story that has never before been told.

In the years after World War II, Georgetown's leafy streets were home to an unlikely group of cold warriors: a coterie of affluent, well-educated, and well-connected civilians who helped steer American strategy from the Marshall Plan through McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the endgame of Watergate.

Who’s really to blame for America’s catastrophic financial meltdown and devastating national recession? Contrary to what the “Occupy Movement” might tell you, it’s not greedy Wall Street executives. No, as one of America’s top financial professionals reveals in this shocking book, the real culprit is economic warfare, with our foreign enemies exploiting our lurking financial weaknesses. In Secret Weapon, Kevin Freeman unveils how all the evidence - including motive, means, and opportunity - points to America’s foreign enemies deliberately pushing our economy over the brink.

Author Dirk Eldredge demonstates how the drug war has led only to overcrowded courts and prisons, rising crime, official corruption, eroded civil rights and race relations, and new public-health crises. He makes the case for an alternative strategy: tightly controlled legalization accompanied by expanded drug education, prevention, research, and treatment programs.

Angered by assaults on a nation he knows and admires, the distinguished French intellectual Jean-Francois Revel has come to America's defense in Anti-Americanism, a biting and erudite book that, paradoxically, given his country's especially vehement attack on the U.S., spent several weeks last year at the top of France's best seller list.

In Don't Wait forthe Next War, Wesley K. Clark, a retired four-star general of the US Armyand former Democratic candidate for president, presents a compelling argumentfor continued American global leadership and the basis on which it cansucceed: a new American strategy. America needs both new power and deeperperspective.

A welcome surprise: more than 50 prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America's most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary - appearing in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere - have been parsing the political, artistic, and media idiom for the last three decades.

With Mental Health, Inc., award-winning investigative journalist Art Levine delivers a Shock Doctrine-style exposé of the failures of our out-of-control, profits-driven mental health system, with a special emphasis on the failures of the pharmaceuticals industry, including the treatment of children with antipsychotics and disastrous PTSD protocols for veterans.

Academics, journalists, and popular historians agree: our greatest presidents are the ones who confronted a national crisis and mobilized the entire nation to face it. That’s the conventional wisdom. The chief executives who are celebrated in textbooks and placed in the top echelon of presidents in surveys of experts are the bold leaders - the Woodrow Wilsons and Franklin Roosevelts - who reshaped the United States in line with their grand “vision” for America. Unfortunately, along the way, these “great” presidents inevitably expanded government - and shrank our liberties.

Historian and geopolitical expert Michael Auslin argues that far from being a cohesive powerhouse, Asia is a fractured region threatened by stagnation and instability. Here he provides a comprehensive account of the economic, military, political, and demographic risks that bedevil half of our world, arguing that Asia, working with the United States, has a unique opportunity to avert catastrophe - but only if it acts boldly.