Best Government

But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”. These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy. "Jane Mayer's Dark Money is utterly brilliant and chilling — no matter how much you think you already know. Lay aside the endless punditry about Donald’s belligerence or Hillary’s ambition; Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting, perhaps not surprising for a journalist who has won most of the awards her profession has to offer.... She’s a pro, and she’s given the world a full accounting of what had been a shadowy and largely unseen force. "The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out. Dark Money emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work. The importance of Dark Money [flows] from its scope and perspective. It is not easy to uncover the inner workings of an essentially secretive political establishment. She makes a formidable argument.” ­—From the cover of the New York. Times Book Review “Revelatory. Only the most thoroughly documented, compendious account could do justice to the Kochs’ bizarre and Byzantine family history and the scale and scope of their influence.” ­— The New York Times.

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" ( The Atlantic ), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. “Masterful…The Rothstein book gathers meticulous research showing how governments at all levels long employed racially discriminatory policies to deny blacks the opportunity to live in neighborhoods with jobs, good schools and upward mobility.”. - Jared Bernstein, Washington Post. “Rothstein’s work should make everyone, all across the political spectrum, reconsider what it is we allow those in power to do in the name of 'social harmony' and 'progress' with more skepticism… The Color of Law shows what happens when Americans lose their natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or in the case of African-Americans, when there are those still waiting to receive them in full.”. - Carl Paulus, American Conservative. “Original and insightful…The central premise of [Rothstein’s] argument…is that the Supreme Court has failed for decades to understand the extent to which residential racial segregation in our nation is not the result of private decisions by private individuals, but is the direct product of unconstitutional government action. “Through meticulous research and powerful human stories, Rothstein reveals a history of racism hiding in plain sight and compels us to confront the consequences of the intentional, decades-long governmental policies that created a segregated America.”. - Sherrilyn A. Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

In fact, Adams’s very exposure to the ideas of the European Enlightenment that had so influenced the Founding Fathers, including their embrace of reason, were hardly shared by his contemporaries, particularly those who could not countenance slaves as equal human beings. With his impassioned public pronouncements and his heroic arguments in the Amistad trial, a defiant Adams was no longer viewed as a failed president but a national, albeit curmudgeonly, hero, who finally collapsed on the floor of the House chamber in 1848 and died in the capital three days later. Long obscured by the towering shadow of his father’s generation on one side and by Andrew Jackson on the other, our sixth president merits more study and credit. “As he did in his prize-winning biography of Jefferson Davis, William J. Cooper here brilliantly balances a perceptive portrait of John Quincy Adams’s personal life and character…with an astute and compelling analysis of his decades-long public career.

But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”. These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy. "Jane Mayer's Dark Money is utterly brilliant and chilling — no matter how much you think you already know. Lay aside the endless punditry about Donald’s belligerence or Hillary’s ambition; Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting, perhaps not surprising for a journalist who has won most of the awards her profession has to offer.... She’s a pro, and she’s given the world a full accounting of what had been a shadowy and largely unseen force. "The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out. Dark Money emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work. The importance of Dark Money [flows] from its scope and perspective. It is not easy to uncover the inner workings of an essentially secretive political establishment. She makes a formidable argument.” ­—From the cover of the New York. Times Book Review “Revelatory. Only the most thoroughly documented, compendious account could do justice to the Kochs’ bizarre and Byzantine family history and the scale and scope of their influence.” ­— The New York Times.

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" ( The Atlantic ), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. “Masterful…The Rothstein book gathers meticulous research showing how governments at all levels long employed racially discriminatory policies to deny blacks the opportunity to live in neighborhoods with jobs, good schools and upward mobility.”. - Jared Bernstein, Washington Post. “Rothstein’s work should make everyone, all across the political spectrum, reconsider what it is we allow those in power to do in the name of 'social harmony' and 'progress' with more skepticism… The Color of Law shows what happens when Americans lose their natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or in the case of African-Americans, when there are those still waiting to receive them in full.”. - Carl Paulus, American Conservative. “Original and insightful…The central premise of [Rothstein’s] argument…is that the Supreme Court has failed for decades to understand the extent to which residential racial segregation in our nation is not the result of private decisions by private individuals, but is the direct product of unconstitutional government action. “Through meticulous research and powerful human stories, Rothstein reveals a history of racism hiding in plain sight and compels us to confront the consequences of the intentional, decades-long governmental policies that created a segregated America.”. - Sherrilyn A. Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

#1 New York Times Bestseller |. Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Esquire • Time Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction | Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction | Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award | Finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize | Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize | An American Library Association Notable Book A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time. Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.” —David Cole, The New York Review of Books “Searing, moving . Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful.” —Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review “Inspiring . Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he’s also a gifted writer and storyteller.” — The Washington Post “As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty.” —The Financial Times “Brilliant.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story.” —John Grisham “Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary. But at the same time that [Bryan] Stevenson tells an utterly damning story of deep-seated and widespread injustice, he also recounts instances of human compassion, understanding, mercy, and justice that offer hope. Just Mercy is a remarkable amalgam, at once a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.” —David Cole, The New York Review of Books. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those who are impoverished, black or both. Injustice is easy not to notice when it affects people different from ourselves; that helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity today. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court. The message of the book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man’s refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.” —Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review “Inspiring . “As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty.” —The Financial Times “Brilliant.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. The stories told within these pages hold the potential to transform what we think we mean when we talk about justice.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow “A distinguished NYU law professor and MacArthur grant recipient offers the compelling story of the legal practice he founded to protect the rights of people on the margins of American society. It is inspiring and suspenseful—a revelation.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns “Words such as important and compelling may have lost their force through overuse, but reading this book will restore their meaning, along with one’s hopes for humanity.” —Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains “Bryan Stevenson is America’s young Nelson Mandela, a brilliant lawyer fighting with courage and conviction to guarantee justice for all. It is as gripping to read as any legal thriller, and what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the soul of a great nation.” —Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" ( The Atlantic ), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. “Masterful…The Rothstein book gathers meticulous research showing how governments at all levels long employed racially discriminatory policies to deny blacks the opportunity to live in neighborhoods with jobs, good schools and upward mobility.”. - Jared Bernstein, Washington Post. “Rothstein’s work should make everyone, all across the political spectrum, reconsider what it is we allow those in power to do in the name of 'social harmony' and 'progress' with more skepticism… The Color of Law shows what happens when Americans lose their natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or in the case of African-Americans, when there are those still waiting to receive them in full.”. - Carl Paulus, American Conservative. “Original and insightful…The central premise of [Rothstein’s] argument…is that the Supreme Court has failed for decades to understand the extent to which residential racial segregation in our nation is not the result of private decisions by private individuals, but is the direct product of unconstitutional government action. “Through meticulous research and powerful human stories, Rothstein reveals a history of racism hiding in plain sight and compels us to confront the consequences of the intentional, decades-long governmental policies that created a segregated America.”. - Sherrilyn A. Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The #1 selling book for Texas government courses, with a new focus on the future of Texas politics. He is the author of Congressman Sam Rayburn, Sam Rayburn: A Bio-bibliography, and Judicial Politics in Texas: Partisanship, Money, and Politics in State Courts.

On one side, there are increased demands to censor hateful, disrespectful, and bullying expression and to ensure an inclusive and nondiscriminatory learning environment. "At a time when freedom of speech on college campuses is under serious attack, Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman offer a concise and powerful defense of academic freedom that every college administrator should read. "Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman have written a concise and valuable history of the evolution of freedom of speech policies and laws in the U.S….A masterful analysis of a cherished American right and a must-read for higher education leaders.

A sweeping and dramatic history of the last half century of conflict in the Middle East from an award-winning journalist who has covered the region for over forty years, The Great War for Civilisation unflinchingly chronicles the tragedy of the region from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution; from the American hostage crisis in Beirut to the Iran-Iraq War; from the 1991 Gulf War to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Combining a novelist's talent for atmosphere with a scholar's grasp of historical sweep, foreign correspondent Fisk ( Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon ) has written one of the most dense and compelling accounts of recent Middle Eastern history yet. In the second, held four years later in Afghanistan, he declared war on the Saudi royal family and America.Fisk, who has lived in and reported on the Middle East since 1976, first for the (London) Times and now for the Independent , possesses deep knowledge of the broader history of the region, which allows him to discuss the Armenian genocide 90 years ago, the 2002 destruction of Jenin, and the battlefields of Iraq with equal aplomb.

#1 New York Times Bestseller |. Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Esquire • Time Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction | Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction | Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award | Finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize | Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize | An American Library Association Notable Book A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time. Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.” —David Cole, The New York Review of Books “Searing, moving . Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful.” —Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review “Inspiring . Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he’s also a gifted writer and storyteller.” — The Washington Post “As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty.” —The Financial Times “Brilliant.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story.” —John Grisham “Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary. But at the same time that [Bryan] Stevenson tells an utterly damning story of deep-seated and widespread injustice, he also recounts instances of human compassion, understanding, mercy, and justice that offer hope. Just Mercy is a remarkable amalgam, at once a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.” —David Cole, The New York Review of Books. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those who are impoverished, black or both. Injustice is easy not to notice when it affects people different from ourselves; that helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity today. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court. The message of the book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man’s refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.” —Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review “Inspiring . “As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty.” —The Financial Times “Brilliant.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. The stories told within these pages hold the potential to transform what we think we mean when we talk about justice.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow “A distinguished NYU law professor and MacArthur grant recipient offers the compelling story of the legal practice he founded to protect the rights of people on the margins of American society. It is inspiring and suspenseful—a revelation.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns “Words such as important and compelling may have lost their force through overuse, but reading this book will restore their meaning, along with one’s hopes for humanity.” —Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains “Bryan Stevenson is America’s young Nelson Mandela, a brilliant lawyer fighting with courage and conviction to guarantee justice for all. It is as gripping to read as any legal thriller, and what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the soul of a great nation.” —Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Updated in its 10th edition, Contemporary Urban Planning provides readers with in-depth coverage of the historic, economic, political, legal, and environmental factors affecting urban planning as well as specific chapters on the various fields of planning. John M. Levy is a Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institution & State University, USA.

But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”. These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy. "Jane Mayer's Dark Money is utterly brilliant and chilling — no matter how much you think you already know. Lay aside the endless punditry about Donald’s belligerence or Hillary’s ambition; Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting, perhaps not surprising for a journalist who has won most of the awards her profession has to offer.... She’s a pro, and she’s given the world a full accounting of what had been a shadowy and largely unseen force. "The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out. Dark Money emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work. The importance of Dark Money [flows] from its scope and perspective. It is not easy to uncover the inner workings of an essentially secretive political establishment. She makes a formidable argument.” ­—From the cover of the New York. Times Book Review “Revelatory. Only the most thoroughly documented, compendious account could do justice to the Kochs’ bizarre and Byzantine family history and the scale and scope of their influence.” ­— The New York Times.