George Packer

Book has a slight bend and pages have underlines, marginalia, and some highlights. 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Illinois

An Inner History of the New America

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ANEW YORK TIMESNOTABLE BOOK
AN NPR BEST BOOK

Selected byNew York Times' critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite Book
AWashington PostBest Political Book
ANew Republic Best Book

A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation.

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. InThe Unwinding, George Packer, author ofThe Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.

The Unwindingjourneys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet's significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.

The Unwindingportrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.

The Unwinding

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Richard Schragger

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Urban Governance in a Global Age

Reigning theories of urban power suggest that in a world dominated by footloose transnational capital, cities have little capacity to effect social change. In City Power, Richard C. Schragger challenges the existing assumptions, arguing that cities can govern, but only if we let them. In the past decade, city leaders across the country have raised the minimum wage, expanded social services, and engaged in social welfare redistribution. These cities have not suffered capital flight. In fact, many are experiencing an economic renaissance. Schragger argues that city policies are not limited by the demands of mobile capital, but instead by constitutional restraints serving the interests of state and federal officials. Maintaining weak cities is a political choice. In this new era of global capital, the power of cities is more relevant to citizen well-being than ever before. A dynamic vision of city politics for our new urban age, City Power reveals how cities can govern despite these constitutional limits - and why we should want them to.

City Power

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The Making of the English Working Class

Mitchell Duneier

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea

Clair Drake, graduate students whose conception of the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked Harlem's slum conditions with the persistence of black powerlessness in the civil rights era, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson redefined the debate about urban America as middle-class African Americans increasingly escaped the ghetto and the country retreated from racially specific remedies. And we trace the education reformer Geoffrey Canada's efforts to transform the lives of inner-city children with ambitious interventions, even as other reformers sought to help families escape their neighborhoods altogether. Ghetto offers a clear-eyed assessment of the thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about urban poverty--and the ghetto.

Ghetto

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J. Anthony Lukas

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

Winner of 3 different awards, this is a story of the busing crisis in Boston.

Common Ground

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Spencer Weber Waller

A Biography

"As the rise of national corporations began to destroy the local businesses that were the core of his legal practice, Arnold turned from the courtroom to the academy, most notably at Yale Law School, where he became one of the leading spokesmen for the legal realism movement. Arnold's work attracted the attention of Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed him to head the Antitrust Division during the New Deal. He went on to establish Arnold, Fortas & Porter, which became the epitome of the modern Washington, DC law firm, and defended pro-bono hundreds of clients accused of Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era."--BOOK JACKET.

Thurman Arnold

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Ibram X. Kendi

The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Stamped from the Beginning

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Alison Flowers

Book cover shows some signs of wear and there’s a pen mark on the first interior blurb page, but the rest of the pages are clean and it really good shape. 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The Fight for Innocence, Independence, and Identity

An in depth and personal look into the lives of four people wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit.

Exoneree Diaries

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Tom Drury

A story alternating between Iowa and Los Angeles follows Joan Gower, a mother who deserted her family but wants a second chance with her son, Micah, who moves with her to L.A. and has trouble adjusting to its fast and furious life of excess.

Pacific

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Richard Russo

Miles Roby tries to hold his family together while working at the Empire Grill in the once-successful logging town of Empire Falls while dealing with the imperious Mrs. Whiting, the heir to a faded logging and textile legacy, in this evocative novel by the author of Nobody's Fool. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.

Empire Falls

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Jonathan Alter

FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

This is the story of a political miracle -- the perfect match of man and moment. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March of 1933 as America touched bottom. Banks were closing everywhere. Millions of people lost everything. The Great Depression had caused a national breakdown. With the craft of a master storyteller, Jonathan Alter brings us closer than ever before to the Roosevelt magic. Facing the gravest crisis since the Civil War, FDR used his cagey political instincts and ebullient temperament in the storied first Hundred Days of his presidency to pull off an astonishing conjuring act that lifted the country and saved both democracy and capitalism.Who was this man? To revive the nation when it felt so hopeless took an extraordinary display of optimism and self-confidence. Alter shows us how a snobbish and apparently lightweight young aristocrat was forged into an incandescent leader by his domineering mother; his independent wife; his eccentric top adviser, Louis Howe; and his ally-turned-bitter-rival, Al Smith, the Tammany Hall street fighter FDR had to vanquish to complete his preparation for the presidency."Old Doc Roosevelt" had learned at Warm Springs, Georgia, how to lift others who suffered from polio, even if he could not cure their paralysis, or his own. He brought the same talents to a larger stage. Derided as weak and unprincipled by pundits, Governor Roosevelt was barely nominated for president in 1932. As president-elect, he escaped assassination in Miami by inches, then stiffed President Herbert Hoover's efforts to pull him into cooperating with him to deal with a terrifying crisis. In the most tumultuous and dramatic presidential transition in history, the entire banking structure came tumbling down just hours before FDR's legendary "only thing we have to fear is fear itself" Inaugural Address.In a major historical find, Alter unearths the draft of a radio speech in which Roosevelt considered enlisting a private army of American Legion veterans on his first day in office. He did not. Instead of circumventing Congress and becoming the dictator so many thought they needed, FDR used his stunning debut to experiment. He rescued banks, put men to work immediately, and revolutionized mass communications with pioneering press conferences and the first Fireside Chat. As he moved both right and left, Roosevelt's insistence on "action now" did little to cure the Depression, but he began to rewrite the nation's social contract and lay the groundwork for his most ambitious achievements, including Social Security.From one of America's most respected journalists, rich in insights and with fresh documentation and colorful detail, this thrilling story of presidential leadership -- of what government is for -- resonates through the events of today. It deepens our understanding of how Franklin Delano Roosevelt restored hope and transformed America.The Defining Momentwill take its place among our most compelling works of political history.

The Defining Moment

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President Obama, Year One

Offers an up-close look at the first year of the Obama presidency, as the chief executive grappled with such problems as the hard-hit economy, the war in Afghanistan, and health-care reform.

The Promise

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Obama and His Enemies

A narrative thriller about the battle royale surrounding Barack Obama's quest for a second term amid widespread joblessness and one of the most poisonous political climates in American history.

The Center Holds

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"In his follow up to The End of Vandalism, Drury depicts a quiet, Midwestern October weekend in the lives of the Darling family, whose members all want something without knowing how to get it: for Charles, an heirloom shotgun; for his wife, Joan, the imaginative life she once knew; for their young son, Micah, a knowledge of the scope of his world, aided by prowling the empty town at night; and for Joan's daughter, Lyris, a stable home where she can begin to grow up. Sometimes together, other times crucially apart, the Darlings move through a series of vivid encounters that demonstrate how even the most provisional family can endure in its own particular way"--Publisher website.

Hunts in Dreams

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Teju Cole

A Novel

A New York Times Notable Book • One of the ten top novels of the year —Time and NPR NAMED A BEST BOOK ON MORE THAN TWENTY END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTS, INCLUDING The New Yorker • The Atlantic • The Economist • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The New Republic • New York Daily News • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Minneapolis Star Tribune • GQ • Salon • Slate • New York magazine • The Week • The Kansas City Star • Kirkus Reviews A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world. Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul. “[A] prismatic debut . . . beautiful, subtle, [and] original.”—The New Yorker “A psychological hand grenade.”—The Atlantic “Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose.”—The Seattle Times “A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation.”—The Economist

Open City

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Alejandro Zambra

Megan McDowell

A brilliant novel from "the herald of a new wave of Chilean fiction" (Marcela Valdes, The Nation) Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middle-class housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized—to what degree, the author isn't sure—with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist—expose the raw suture of fiction and reality. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late—the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.

Ways of Going Home

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Elizabeth Warren

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn't As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher—an ambitious goal, given her family's modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington DC to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws? Thus began an impolite education into the bare-knuckled, often dysfunctional ways of Washington. She fought for better bankruptcy laws for ten years and lost. She tried to hold the federal government accountable during the financial crisis but became a target of the big banks. She came up with the idea for a new agency designed to protect consumers from predatory bankers and was denied the opportunity to run it. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run for elective office and won the most competitive—and watched—Senate race in the country. In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America's government can and must do better for working families.

A Fighting Chance

5877000f-a9e7-4fba-8d44-e3df7803e38e-1

Amanda Anderson

Bleak liberalism -- Liberalism in the age of high realism -- Revisiting the political novel -- The liberal aesthetic in the postwar era: the case of Trilling and Adorno -- Bleak liberalism and the realism/modernism debate: Ellison and Lessing

Bleak Liberalism

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Art Cullen

A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper

Storm Lake

40acf26a-9672-467f-8a09-32cb4912eb16-0

David Mamet

A Play

David Mamet's Oval Office satire depicts one day in the life of a beleaguered American commander-in-chief.

It's November in a Presidential election year, and incumbent Charles Smith's chances for reelection are looking grim. Approval ratings are down, his money's running out, and nuclear war might be imminent. Though his staff has thrown in the towel and his wife has begun to prepare for her post-White House life, Chuck isn't ready to give up just yet.

Amidst the biggest fight of his political career, the President has to find time to pardon a couple of turkeys--saving them from the slaughter before Thanksgiving--and this simple PR event inspires Smith to risk it all in attempt to win back public support.

With Mamet's characteristic no-holds-barred style, November is a scathingly hilarious take on the state of America today and the lengths to which people will go to win.

November

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Eric Lundgren

Written with boundless intelligence and razor-sharp wit, The Facades is a comic and existential mystery that unfolds at the urgent pace of a thriller.

The Facades

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Alexi Zentner

A story inspired by the plot of "King Lear" relates the fortunes of a family who has reaped the sea's bounty on Loosewood Island for three hundred years, but pays for it with the loss of every firstborn son.

The Lobster Kings

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Tim Wu

Promo cover is a little beaten up, but interior cover and the pages are all clean. Because this is an uncorrected proof, the index is not available and is marked as TK (to come).

The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

"From Tim Wu, author of award-winning The Master Switch, and who coined the phrase "net neutrality"--a revelatory look at the rise of "attention harvesting," and its transformative effect on our society and our selves"--

The Attention Merchants (Uncorrected Proof)

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James McBride

A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

An African American man describes life as the son of a white mother and Black father, reflecting on his mother's contributions to his life and his confusion over his own identity

Browse by categories

George Packer

The Unwinding

Richard Schragger

City Power

E.P. Thompson

The Making of the English Working Class

Mitchell Duneier

Ghetto

J. Anthony Lukas

Common Ground

Spencer Weber Waller

Thurman Arnold

Ibram X. Kendi

Stamped from the Beginning

Alison Flowers

Exoneree Diaries

Tom Drury

Pacific

Richard Russo

Empire Falls

Jonathan Alter

The Defining Moment

Jonathan Alter

The Promise

Jonathan Alter

The Center Holds

Tom Drury

Hunts in Dreams

Teju Cole

Open City

Alejandro Zambra; Megan McDowell

Ways of Going Home

Elizabeth Warren

A Fighting Chance

Amanda Anderson

Bleak Liberalism

Art Cullen

Storm Lake

David Mamet

November

Eric Lundgren

The Facades

Alexi Zentner

The Lobster Kings

Tim Wu

The Attention Merchants (Uncorrected Proof)

James McBride

The Color of Water

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