My Country, the Enemy
Top 10 My Country, the Enemy
: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, A People's History of the United States, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, The Crucible
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
| Author | Dee Brown |
| ISBN | 0805066691 |
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling history The New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down."
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account...
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
| Author | Naomi Klein |
| ISBN | 0805079831 |
In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed...
Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment
| Author | Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston |
| ISBN | 0553272586 |
Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp—with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton...
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
| Author | Andrea Lee Smith |
| ISBN | 0896087433 |
A recognized Native American scholar and co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the largest grassroots, multiracial feminist organization in the country, Andrea Smith (Cherokee) is an emerging leader in progressive political circles. In Conquest, Smith places Native American...
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
| Author | Naomi Klein |
| ISBN | 1451697384 |
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon – it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of...
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Thomas Ricks - image from the Bangor Daily News
Fiasco offers a very detailed look into the disaster that has been the US invasion of Iraq. For those of us who have read more than a few books on the subject there is an unavoidable repetition of information seen elsewhere, but there is sufficient...
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President...
A People's History of the United States
| Author | Howard Zinn |
| ISBN | 0060838655 |
Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s iconic A People's History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s...
| Author | Eugene D. Genovese |
| ISBN | 0394716523 |
A fascinating, but vitally flawed, book, Roll, Jordan, Roll, is part Marxist-leaning polemic and part well-woven narratives of the slave experience in colonial and antebellum America. At just over 800 pages, Genovese's opus has become a classic in the field for its amazing scope and wide-ranging...
| Author | Arthur Miller |
| ISBN | 0142437336 |
"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history," Arthur Miller wrote of his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events,...
| Author | Thomas Keneally |
| ISBN | 0340606517 |
In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland...
| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
| ISBN | 0385333846 |
There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly awful sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.
This is usually based on the following quote.
"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
"I...
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
| Author | Barbara Ehrenreich |
| ISBN | 0805063897 |
Reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity--a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival.
Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join...
| Author | William Golding |
| ISBN | 0140283331 |
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing,...
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
| Author | Douglas S. Massey |
| ISBN | 0674018214 |
This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities.
American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the...
| Author | Dave Eggers |
| ISBN | 1934781630 |
The true story of one family, caught between America’s two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates...
| Author | Thomas Keneally |
| ISBN | 0060122994 |
This must be one of the best things Keneally has ever done and how it avoided winning the Booker is simply mesmerizing. This Australian author really has no right to go about writing on such a closely-studied and well-documented theme as the American Civil War and the various side issues that went along...
| Author | C. Vann Woodward |
| ISBN | 0807118915 |
C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern History remains one of the essential history texts of our time. In it Woodward brilliantly addresses the interrelated themes of southern identity, southern distinctiveness, and the strains of irony that characterize much of the South's historical experience....
| Author | Richard Hofstadter |
| ISBN | 0807055034 |
Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory & the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought & political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer & Wm Graham Sumner...
| Author | Douglas Brinkley |
| ISBN | 0061124230 |
In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast, from Louisiana...
Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography
| Author | Mark Mathabane |
| ISBN | 0684848287 |
The Classic Story of Life in Apartheid South Africa Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness...
| Author | William Styron |
| ISBN | 0679736379 |
”Mercifully, I was at the age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise. But I was an abandoned reader and, besides, outlandishly eclectic, with...
| Author | M.T. Anderson |
| ISBN | 0763624020 |
It sounds like a fairy tale. He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the finest of classical educations. Raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother -- a princess in exile from a faraway land -- are the only persons in their household assigned names....
| Author | David Michie |
| ISBN | 1401940587 |
“‘Oh! How adorable! I didn’t know you had a cat!’ she exclaimed.
I am always surprised how many people make this observation. Why should His Holiness not have a cat?
‘If only she could speak,’ continued the actress. ‘I’m sure she’d have such wisdom to share.’
And...
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
| Author | C. Vann Woodward |
| ISBN | 0195146905 |
C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is pleased to publish this...
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
| Author | John Perkins |
| ISBN | 0452287081 |
From the author of the phenomenal New York Times bestseller, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, comes an exposé of international corruption, and an inspired plan to turn the tide for future generations
With a presidential election around the corner, questions of America's military buildup,...
| Author | Andrew Brown |
| ISBN | 1862079951 |
King Canute in the story allowed the flooding tide to splash about his ankles to show his courtiers the limits of power and authority. There are broader tides to human affairs that wash over kings and queens as much as commoners. Andrew Brown's book is a record of how those broader waves and currents washed...
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
| Author | Michelle Alexander |
| ISBN | 1595581030 |
"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot...
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
| Author | Lothar-Günther Buchheim |
| ISBN | 0304352314 |
It is autumn, 1941, and a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they must brave the stormy waters of the Atlantic in their mission to seek out and destroy British supply ships. But the tide is beginning to turn against...
The Best and the Brightest
| Author | David Halberstam |
| ISBN | 0449908704 |
The Best and the Brightest is David Halberstam's masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy. Using portraits of America's flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding...
