The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It

By Timothy Noah
"In this comprehensive, fair-minded, and lucid account, based on his award-winning articles for Slate, New Republic columnist Noah examines growing income inequality in the U.S., where for 33 years, the wealthy have acquired a growing share of the nationas income while the middle class saw its share shrink. Noah synthesizes work by economists, sociologists, and political scientists to explain the phenomenon to nonexperts. He shows how income inequality first came to be measured in the early 20th century, and relates the perspectives of scholars and politicians at a time when the share of the nationas income going to the wealthy either shrank or remained stable during the 1930s through the late 1970s, before powerfully reversing course in the 1980s. Noah studies the contributing factors (immigration, the shortage of better-educated workers, trade with low-wage nations, globalization, the fall of the labor movement, and government policy), and considers the vast changes in the corporate and financial industry that led to a agrossly misshapena wage structure, where a CEO now makes 262 times more than the average worker. While this affects many industrialized democracies, income inequality is far greater in the U.S., resulting in a less upwardly mobile society. Noah makes a convincing and passionate case for why rising inequality harms a working democracy, and suggests sensible, though not always politically viable, solutions."  (Publishers Weekly)  Check Our Catalog

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles

By Ruchir Sharma
"Sharma, prominent emerging-markets investor, offers his tour of the world in search of investments, providing facts and figures that guide his firm's investment decisions; he spends a week each month in a particular emerging-market country kicking the tires to understand the economic and political forces. We learn about breakout nations that have many competitors, but only a few win: The rare breakout nations . . . beat the game by growing faster than rivals in their own income class and if per capita income is under $5,000 it competes with rivals in that class for beating expectations and . . . peers. He concludes that China is too big and middle-aged to keep growing at previous rates, and its slowdown will move India into the top growth spot. Nevertheless, he explains why he gives India only a 50-50 chance as a breakout nation; Brazil's and Russia's stars will dim. All will not agree with Sharma, but he provides valuable perspective for investors and all others who seek to understand today's global world."  (Booklist)  Check Our Catalog

The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family

By Liza Mundy
"Nearly 40 percent of married women in the U.S. earn more than their husbands. They exemplify a trend that has been increasing and promises major changes in the economy, the workplace, and the home. In the future, women will make the major decisions in corporate America and at home as they wield their greater spending power and authority at work. How will men react? Mundy interviewed women and men of various backgrounds, across the U.S. and abroad, to establish that the trend has caught many off guard. Having grown up expecting that the man would be the major breadwinner, those in higher-earning-woman couples are adjusting to a new reality. Mundy profiles couples coping with higher-earning women and stay-at-home dads to show how role reversal has strained some relationships and strengthened others. She explores the reasons behind the trendthe decline of male-dominated job sectors; the rising education of womenand the ultimate impact on greater society. With women earning more than men, will we value money less and childrearing more? Will the war between the sexes escalate? A fascinating look at a trend that promises major social changes."  (Booklist)   Check Our Catalog

The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

By Victor Cha
"From the former director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, an eye-opening view of the closed, repressive dictatorship of North Korea. Cha (Foreign Service/Georgetown Univ.; Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, 2008, etc.) first visited North Korea during George W. Bush's second term with then-governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson to try to defuse nuclear-testing tensions. The author was amazed at the chasm between party haves and everybody else, confirming all that he knew about the authoritarian country. Cha aims to get at some of the pressing questions since Kim Jong-il's death and the succession of the utterly unknown younger son, Kim Jong-un--e.g., what happened to this once-vigorous dictatorship, and why does the populace do nothing about it? How can the West know so little about what really goes on there? For Cha, the key that unlocked the regime's secrets was its nostalgia for the good old days of the 1950s and '60s, when China and the Soviet Union were bolstering North Korean industry and military, while the South was still an agrarian backwater. American aggression during the Korean War left a lasting bitterness, and while the South was grappling with American ambivalence toward its leaders, the North under Kim Il-sung embraced the ideology of juche, or self-reliance, and the cult of the Great Leader. As a result, writes Cha, the North Koreans are simply too oppressed to revolt--not to mention the devastating effects from "Olympic envy" of trying to catch up to Seoul's 1988 hosting, and the terrible famine of the mid '90s. The author looks closely at the Kim family, the terrible economic decisions that plunged the country into poverty, the shocking gulag system, its paranoid nuclear proliferation program and the tenuous relations with South Korea. A useful, pertinent work for understanding the human story behind the headlines."  (Kirkus Reviews)  Check Our Catalog

The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back

"Nattrass (economics, Univ. of Cape Town) here exposes the antiscience consequences of AIDS denialism and AIDS conspiracy theories. By claiming that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, denialists undermine HIV prevention work and cause more infections among adherents by influencing them not to take precautions against HIV. Thousands died in South Africa when President Thabo Mbeki advised citizens not to take antiretroviral drugs. Nattrass describes the strong social components of AIDS denialism, which typically centers on four players: the hero scientist (e.g., denialist Peter Duesberg), the "cultropreneur" (e.g., those who exploit HIV patients by condemning antiretroviral medicine and selling herbal remedies instead), the living icon (HIV-positive people who offer themselves as proof that HIV doesn't cause AIDS), and the praise singer, such as those who produce films praising the denialism. VERDICT Focusing mostly on the United States and South Africa, this book is readable and compelling though written in a scholarly style. A remarkably well-argued case against unscientific approaches to AIDS and a brilliant defense of evidence-based medicine. A must-read for all who study AIDS history.-"  (Library Journal)  Check Our Catalog

Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama's Dream of the Socialist States of America

Host of the No. 3 radio program in the nation, heard by nearly eight million listeners a week and syndicated across the United States in over 300 markets, Savage continues his rant against "Barack Lenin." Not a book to make everyone happy, but the 250,000-copy first printing and one-day laydown on April 3 indicates that the audience will be large.(Library Journal)  Check Our Catalog

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

"On her MSNBC show, Maddow delights in reminding viewers that she's an infrastructure geek. Now, regarding two manifestations of U.S. infrastructure--the Constitution and our underlying methods, post-JFK, of supporting U.S. military incursions--she shows how we have drifted away from established templates outlining how this country goes to war. She begins with LBJ in Vietnam (he used only active duty servicemen--thus the draft--to avoid Guards and Reserves bringing the war home around the country). From President Carter she segues to President Reagan, studying aspects of his military (mis)deeds in four core chapters. After an analysis of George H.W. Bush and Desert Shield comes her look at "Doing More with Less (Hassle)," a particularly horrifying study of what our outsourcing of military "quality of life services" has wrought. Maddow wears her expertise lightly, counterbalancing hard details with phrases (e.g., "the lemons-into-lemonade-moment" or "the sliding-off-the-aircraft-carrier-thing") that keep her narrative invigorating even as she offers the occasional periodic sentence that would make Gibbon proud. VERDICT Maddow can be sassy, but she's deadly serious. Having noted our executive branch's growing disregard for "the disincentives to war deliberately built into our American system of government," she ends with a to-do list for finding our way back to a reasonable national security state. Highly recommended to all readers engaged in the world today and with how we got here."  (Library Journal)   Check Our Catalog

Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing as We Know It

By Arlen Spector
"Though the winners generally write the history of events, Specters account of the campaign loss that ended his 30-year Senate career is proof that a few parting words can serve as a pointed political epitaph. In this engaging, but heavy-handed look at the disappearance of the center in Republican party politics, Specter (Never Give In: Battling Cancer in the Senate) lays bare his resentments, and offers his knowledgeable, withering critique of brutal partisanship in national politics. After five terms as a liberal Republican, Specter famously and critics said, desperately switched parties and ran for re-election as a Democrat in 2010, prompting one disgruntled voter to call him a political transvestite as he headed to an electoral defeat. Describing the GOPs decades-long rightward drift, Specter engages in much score-settling and self-justification, from noting that Richard Nixon urged civility in his 1969 inaugural address to dismissing Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) as a scorched earth partisan, and suggesting that his successor, Sen. Pat Toomey has a reputation, as being, foremost, out for himself. Specters basic message, though, is one of concern. The vitriol and hatred on all sides is overwhelming, he writes, and from a man overwhelmed by heightened partisanship, the warning carries the weight of experience." (Publishers Weekly)  Check Our Catalog

Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

By Paul Mason
"A first-hand witness to the protests in Cairo, Mason (Live Working or Die Fighting) dissects the revolutionary events of 2011 in Egypt, Britain, Greece, and America, before moving on to discuss the history, sociology, economics, and politics of unrest. From the 1848 "wave of revolutions" across Europe, to the French, Czechoslovakian, and American protests of 1968, Mason posits a common cause: the disconnect between the masses and the political systems and power structures. At the forefront of these modern uprisings are unemployed youth, the urban underclass, and organized labor. Armed with technology and social mediaa cell phone video cameras, Twitter, YouTube, etc.a protestors are able to mobilize sans central leadership, broadcast without Big Media mitigating their message, anda perhaps most importantlya use digital space to take to the physical streets. Mason gets bogged down in discussing the sociology of poverty and enumerating individual cases of the poor struggling to succeed, but overall his study stands as a good primer on a young revolution and its predecessors, and where we might go from here."  (Publishers Weekly)  Check Our Catalog