About this product: The image of the FBI Special Agent, since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, has been carefully crafted as being polite, clean shaven young men and pleasantly smiling women whose hallmarks are polite words and good manners. Author Jack Owens goes behind that facade and shares the human side of the FBI. With a breezy sweep of the 30 years of his life as a Special Agent, Owens, with his remarkable wit, introduces the reader to a new type of FBI Agent- one who could appreciate the irony and humor of life and laughed and "cussed," yes "cussed", as he met those ironies and idiosyncrasies in the field in Alabama. Owens' shares his unique perspective with the reader from his early days as an FBI trainee through chasing spies, terrorists and assorted "bad guys," putting down a prison riot and setting up roadblocks for desperadoes where, occasionally, he encountered some good people too.
About this product: Quentin Skinner is one of the foremost historians in the world, and in Hobbes and Republican Liberty he offers a dazzling comparison of two rival theories about the nature of human liberty. The first originated in classical antiquity, and lay at the heart of the Roman republican tradition of public life. Thomas Hobbes was the most formidable enemy of this pattern of thought, and his successive attempts to discredit it constitute a truly epochal moment in the history of Anglophone political thought. Hobbes and Republican Liberty develops several of the themes announced by Quentin Skinner in his celebrated inaugural lecture on Liberty before Liberalism of 1997. Cogent, engaged, accessible, and indeed exhilarating, this new book will appeal to readers of history, politics, and philosophy at all levels from upper-undergraduate upwards, and provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of the most celebrated thinkers of our time.
About this product: In the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic party ended twelve years of electoral humiliation by seizing back Congress and putting an end to Republican rule. The Thumpin’ is the story of that historic victory and the man at the center on whom Democratic hopes hinged: Congressman Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).
Chicago Tribune reporter Naftali Bendavid had exclusive access to Emanuel and the DCCC in the year and a half leading up to the elections and ended up with the story of a lifetime, the thrilling blow-by-blow account of how Emanuel remade the campaign in his own ferocious image. Responsible for everything from handpicking Congressional candidates to raising money for attack ads, Emanuel, a talented ballet dancer better known in Washington for his extraordinary intensity and his inexhaustible torrents of profanity, threw out the playbook on the way Democrats run elections.
Instead of rallying the base, Rahm sought moderate-to-conservative candidates who could attract more traditional voters. Instead of getting caught in the Democrats’ endless arguments about their positions, he went on the attack, personally vilifying Republicans from Tom DeLay to Christopher Shays. And instead of abiding by the gentlemen’s agreements of good-old-boy Washington, he broke them, attacking his counterpart in the Republican party and challenging Howard Dean, the chairman of his own party.
In 2005, no one believed victory was within the Democrats’ grasp. But as the months passed, Republicans were caught in wave after wave of scandal, support for the war in Iraq steadily declined, and the president’s poll numbers plummeted. And in Emanuel, the Democrats finally had a killer, a ruthless closer like Karl Rove or Lee Atwater, poised to seize the advantage and deliver what President Bush would call “a thumpin.’”
Taking its cues from classic political page-turners like Showdown at Gucci Gulch and documentaries like The War Room, The Thumpin’ takes us inside the key races and the national strategy-making that moved the Democrats from forecasted gains of three seats in 2005 to a sweeping gain of thirty seats when the votes were finally counted. Through this masterful account of Rahm’s rout, Bendavid shows how the lessons the Democrats learned in 2006—to fight for every vote, to abandon litmus tests, and to take no prisoners—will be crucial to the party’s future electoral success, and shape the political course the nation will take in the twenty-first century.
About this product: Between 327 and 70 B.C. the Romans expanded their empire throughout the Mediterranean world. This highly original study looks at Roman attitudes and behavior that lay behind their quest for power. How did Romans respond to warfare, year after year? How important were the material gains of military success--land, slaves, and other riches--commonly supposed to have been merely an incidental result? What value is there in the claim of the contemporary historian Polybius that the Romans were driven by a greater and greater ambition to expand their empire? The author answers these questions within an analytic framework, and comes to an interpretation of Roman imperialism that differs sharply from the conventional ones.
About this product: Was Abraham Lincoln influenced by communism when the Union condemned the rights of Southern states to express their independence? It’s shocking to think so.
But that’s precisely what Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson Jr. assert in Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists. The pair completely reassess this tumultuous time in American history, exposing the “politically correct” view of the War for Southern Independence as nothing less than the same observation announced by Marx himself. During the American Civil War, Marx wrote about his support of the Union Army, the Republican Party, and Lincoln himself. In fact, he named the president as “the single-minded son of the working class.” In addition to shedding light on this little-known part of our history, Kennedy and Benson also ask pertinent questions about the validity of today’s federal government and why its role seems so much larger than the liberty found in the states it represents.
Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists is a bold undertaking, but it’s one that needs our immediate and absolute attention.
About this product: As the GOP leader in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell is the highest-ranking Republican in America. But surprisingly little is known about this skilled and powerful politician. Now, fellow Kentuckian and political columnist John David Dyche offers an engrossing inside look at Senator McConnell's unlikely rise. From McConnell's childhood in the Democrat-dominated Deep South - where he was stricken with polio and endured a long and painful recovery - through his political coming of age in the civil rights and Goldwater eras, through his ascendance during the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, and up through the present, Dyche chronicles both the senator's increasing conservatism and his considerable strategic and tactical talents. The author also reveals how McConnell carefully crafted a strong statewide GOP structure in long-Democratic Kentucky - a structure that remained intact in 2008 even as Republicans nationwide were being trounced at the polls. "Republican Leader" provides a fascinating look into the values, opportunities, and successes, as well as the setbacks and compromises, of one of America's most influential politicians.
About this product: This is part cookbook, part how-to for non-Republicans, part payback ("Thanks, Mom, for all the swell tricks with Lipton Onion Soup Mix"), and part sheer revenge, as in for one horrifying night when the author was invited to dinner by a coven of Democrats under the pretext of eating a decent whole roasted prime tenderloin and was cruelly served a whole roasted baby tuna. Her date, a Republican fish-hater (a Republican redundancy, by the way, see Chapter 3, Fish), memorably reacted by getting dead drunk and passing out at the table with his face in the tuna. This capriciously-organized collection of the kinds of homey recipes Republicans grow up on pays little regard to attribution, since, in the words of the author, "Nobody ever remembers where the recipe originally came from anyway."
About this product: When he set out on his road to rebellion, Michael Ford only wanted to keep the foxes out of Hannon's Glen. But before he was done, he found himself exchanging rifle fire with the British army, with an unlikely ally in the form of Annabel Love, the squire's daughter. "Michael's War" tracks the course of revolution and civil war that rended Ireland from 1916 to 1923. It ends with its hero escaping to America--but what sweetheart will he ask to join him in the new world? A conflicted love story set during the Irish rebellion and civil war, early in the 20th century.
The Machiavellian Moment is a classic study of the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. J.G.A. Pocock suggests that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, and which he calls the "Machiavellian moment."
After examining this problem in the thought of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican thought in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance. He relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in the thought of the eighteenth century.
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