Showing titles in Politics & Activism

As soon as the shocking results of Election Day 2016 came in, Americans began looking ahead to 2020, the election that would serve as a national referendum on our new political reality. Already poised to be one of the most consequential presidential elections in modern history, the 2020 race is now unfolding against one of the most disruptive periods in memory. Thrust into a pandemic with a staggering toll on human lives and the economy, America has never seen higher stakes for an election.

Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir will chart how she went from being a shy child from a working-class family in Ayrshire to the steps of Bute House as Scotland’s first female and longest serving First Minister. It will detail her interactions with a range of notable figures, giving her unique in-the-room perspective on the most eventful and tumultuous era in modern Scottish and British politics.

In three decades under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch grew to a staff of more than 500, conducting investigations in 100 countries to uncover abuses—and pressuring offending governments to stop them. Roth has grappled with the worst of humanity, taken on the biggest villains of our time, and persuaded leaders from around the globe to stand up to their repressive counterparts.

Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy. Encompassing the captivating personalities of the era—the bumbling Nicholas, his spiteful wife Alexandra, the family’s faith healer Rasputin—it untangles the dramatic struggle by Russia’s aristocratic, military, and legislative elite to reform the monarchy.

The astonishing story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai, who became one of Hong Kong’s leading activists for democracy and is China’s most famous political prisoner.

As the king’s lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skillful player of the political game, he rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. By the time he was thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings.

On 20th January 2001, after nearly thirty years in politics — eight of them as President of the United States — Bill Clinton was suddenly a private citizen. Only fifty-four years old, full of energy and ideas, he wanted to make meaningful use of his skills, his relationships with world leaders, and all he’d learned in a lifetime of politics, but how? Citizen is Clinton’s front-row, first-person chronicle of his post-presidential years and the most significant events of the twenty-first century.

Citizen is Clinton’s front-row, first-person chronicle of his post-presidential years and the most significant events of the twenty-first century, including 9/11 and the runup to the Iraq War, the Haiti earthquake, the Great Recession, COVID-19, the January 6th insurrection, and the enduring culture wars of our times. Yet Citizen is more than a presidential memoir. This book captures Clinton in a rare and unforgettable light: not only as celebrated former president and foundation leader, but also as a father, grandfather, and husband.

Jürgen Todenhöfer zieht die Bilanz seines ungewöhnlichen Lebens, das oft abseits des Mainstreams verlief und Gefahren und Kontroversen nie auswich. Er schildert seinen lebenslangen Kampf gegen Krieg und Rassismus, gegen politische, religiöse und kulturelle Intoleranz, gegen Ungerechtigkeit und Armut. Todenhöfer nimmt uns mit zu den Krisenherden der Welt, die er in den letzten Jahrzehnten aufgesucht hat, und erzählt davon, wie er seine weltweiten Kontakte nutzte, um vor allem Kindern in Kriegsgebieten zu helfen und weltweit Waisenhäuser, Krankenhäuser und Schulen zu errichten.

Anne Boleyn has mesmerized people for centuries. Her tragic execution, orchestrated by her own husband, the infamous Henry VIII, never ceases to intrigue. How did this courtier's daughter become the queen of England, and what was it that really tore apart this illustrious marriage, making her the whore of England, an abandoned woman executed on the scaffold? While many stories of Anne Boleyn's downfall have been told, few have truly traced the origins of her tragic fate.

Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl “Win” Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China. In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her “Lotus Year,” referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home.

Dubbed by Berlin as the “hostess with the mostess’,” Perle inherited serious money (Texas oil) and married even more money (a Pittsburgh steel magnate). She had a rollicking life outside of Washington, befriending such Broadway legends as Merman, Angela Lansbury and Pearl Bailey. She also had a serious side. A pioneering supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment dating to the 1930’s and influential champion for working women, she was a prodigious Democratic fundraiser and rescued Harry Truman’s financially flailing 1948 campaign.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Our Lady of the Snows and learn about William Neilson.

From renowned biographer­­­ Nigel Hamilton, author of the epic FDR at War trilogy and the bestselling JFK: Reckless Youth, comes the greatest untold story of the Civil War: how two American presidents faced off as the fate of the nation hung in the balance — and how Abraham Lincoln came to embrace emancipation as the last, best chance to save the Union.

More than a century after he dominated American politics, Woodrow Wilson still fascinates. With panoramic sweep, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn reassesses his life and his role in the movements for racial equality and women’s suffrage. The Wilson that emerges is a man superbly unsuited to the moment when he ascended to the presidency in 1912, as the struggle for women’s voting rights in America reached the tipping point.

On 3 April 2016 Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was at the airport in Tehran, getting ready to board her flight with her baby daughter. They'd been visiting family in Iran, and were looking forward to getting home and seeing Richard, who would be there to meet them. When a man suddenly appeared and marched Nazanin away, they couldn't know their family was about to be changed forever. That moment would test their love, confront five foreign secretaries and take an ordinary family behind the curtain of international hostage diplomacy and secret debts.

Alexei Navalny began writing PATRIOT shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted – and will come. Written with the passion, wit, candour and bravery for which he was justly acclaimed, PATRIOT is Navalny’s final letter to the world: a moving account of his last years spent in the most brutal prison on earth.

The year was 1862. The Union’s first large scale offensive, the Peninsula campaign led by Major General George B. McClellan, had been disastrous. Doubt in Congress grew that President Lincoln and his generals could win the war. In Saving the Union, Joe Scarborough analyzes the hard choice Lincoln faced—the debate raging inside him over how quickly to move toward emancipation, if at all.

In 1413, when Henry V ascended to the English throne, his kingdom was hopelessly torn apart by political faction and partisanship. Public finances and law and order were in a state of crisis. Pirates tormented the coast; plots, conspiracies, and heresy threatened society. The lingering effects of the worst pandemic in human history continued to menace daily life. And then, in less than ten years, Henry turns it all around.

Greenberg’s biography traces Lewis’s life through the post-Civil Rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project, which enrolled millions of African American voters across the South. The book reveals the little-known story of his political ascent first locally in Atlanta, and then as a member of Congress. Tapped to be a part of the Democratic leadership in Congress, he earned respect on both sides of the aisle for the sacrifices he had made on behalf of nonviolent integration in the South and came to be known as the “conscience of the Congress.”