The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe

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"Shore's Europe is populated with prostitutes and pimps, street urchins and skinheads; the landscape is "cold and gray... burnt to ashes and rebuilt in Stalinist architecture." The National Jewish Book Award winner's newest (after Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918 1968) begins and ends with the suicide of a friend, an emigre who returned to Prague only to find that the city he remembered no longer exists, and many of the characters who fill its pages are ghosts refugees of time and ideology, unable to make peace with the capitalist theme park that replaced their homelands. A historian of the Holocaust and of communism, Shore journeys through Eastern Europe probing the wounds left by the twin disasters of the 20th century. A mix of memoir, travelogue, and philosophical treatise, her book is above all an anthropological study of a people living in a world obscured by cobwebs, more mindful of yesterday than today, where the future cannot be realized until the deaths of all those who witnessed the abyss. The one who makes such observations can only be an outsider, or in the words of one of Shore's interlocutors one who knows "too much and not enough, and nothing." Challenging and sometimes maddening, but also warm and compassionate, the resulting work is an examination of what it means to live in a society where "the realm of the not possible expansive" and where history, "proceeding inexorably and inevitably, " shapes identity."   (Publisher's Weekly)

Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment

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"With America's epidemic of gun violence showing no sign of ebbing, it likely that Whitney's book-length op-ed on gun control will remain relevant for years. A career New York Times reporter and editor, now retired, Whitney has previously written on such diverse subjects as pipe organs (in 2004's All The Stops) and claims no special expertise in constitutional law or firearms. Instead, he writes as a concerned citizen. His primer on gun law history sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae, but also produces fascinating tidbits like the decidedly nonprogressive bent of some early gun control legislation, namely toward African Americans. Less scholarly but still valuable are his memories of when firearms did not divide right and left, and when the NRA was mostly associated with safety training. The book's subtitle does its argument a disservice by implying that Whitney's concern is with defending the Second Amendment, when instead he is against liberals' common resort to the "well-regulated militia" language to claim a constitutional lack of protection for individual gun use. Opposed to arbitrary restrictions, reckless loopholes, NRA fear-mongering, and liberal intolerance of gun culture's law-abiding side, Whitney's presentation of firearm ownership as a protected area of U.S. common, if not Constitutional, law, strikes a conciliatory note that sadly stands little chance of being heeded."

The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America

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"Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon initiated a military offensive against his country s powerful drug cartels in December 2006, some 44,000 people have perished, and the drugs continue to flow. The growing violence has created concerns that Mexico could become a failed state, as U.S. political leaders also worry that the corruption and violence is seeping across the border into the United States. But, as detailed by Ted Galen Carpenter in his compelling new book, The Fire Next Door, the current U.S.-backed strategies for trying to stem Mexico s drug violence have been a disaster. Carpenter details the growing horror overtaking Mexico and makes the case that the only effective strategy is to de-fund the Mexican drug cartels. Boldly conveyed in The Fire Next Door, such a blow requires the U.S., the principal consumer market for illegal drugs, to abandon its failed drug prohibition policy, thereby eliminating the lucrative black-market premium and greatly reducing the financial resources of drug cartels. A refusal to renounce prohibition, demonstrates Carpenter, means that Mexico s agony will likely worsen and pose even more significant problems for the United States."  (Publisher Description)

Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran

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" Here, "going to Tehran" does not mean going to do battle. The authors, esteemed Middle East analysts who have worked in both the Bush "père" and the Clinton administrations, argue that aggression will fail; Iran is a stable regime, still supported by much of its population, and is central to progress in the Middle East. Our goal should instead be to effect a rapprochement, as Nixon did with China. Good debate from an imprint that handles political issues gleamingly."  (Library Journal)

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

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"Exploration of the increase in global economic inequality. You don't need a CPA to know which way the wind blows. Unless you're one of the rich or superrich, the 1 percent or the 1 percent of the 1 percent, then you won't be comforted to know that it blows against you: The rich are getting richer, and the rest of us...well, not so much. Thus the overarching theme of Thomson Reuters digital editor Freeland's (Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution, 2000) latest book, much of which, at least superficially, isn't really news. Dig deeper, though, and the author offers fresh takes on many key points. Are the rich happy? You'd think that all that money would take some of the burden off, but income inequality is an uncomfortable subject even for them. "That's because even--or perhaps particularly--in the view of its most ardent supporters," she writes, "global capitalism wasn't supposed to work quite this way." Level playing field? No way: The playing field is landscaped so that money rolls toward those who already have it. Equal opportunity? See the preceding point. Yet, Freeland continues, the switcheroo that robbed the middle class of its gains in the transition to "the America of the 1 Percent" is so new that our ways of talking and thinking about capitalism haven't caught up to reality, so that "when it comes to income inequality, Americans think they live in Sweden--or in the late 1950s." Smart, talking-point-friendly and full of magazine-style human-interest anecdotes, Freeland's account serves up other news, including the grim thought that recovery may never come for those outside the favored zone, as well as some provocative insights on how the superaffluent (don't say rich, say affluent--it avoids making the rich feel uncomfortable) view the rest of us. Not exactly the Communist Manifesto, but Freeland's book ought to make news of its own as she makes the rounds--well worth reading."  (Kirkus Reviews)

What's the Matter with White People?: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was

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"In "What's the Matter with White People?," popular "Salon" columnist Joan Walsh argues that the biggest divide in America today is not about party or ideology, but about two competing narratives for why everything has fallen apart since the 1970s. One side sees an America that has spent the last forty years bankrupting the country providing benefits and advantages to the underachieving, the immoral, and the undeserving, no matter the cost to Middle America. The other sees an America that has spent the last forty years bankrupting the country providing benefits and advantages to the very rich, while allowing a measure of cultural progress for the different and the downtrodden. It matters which side is right, and how the other side got things so wrong.
Walsh connects the dots of American decline through trends that began in the 1970s and continue today--including the demise of unions, the stagnation of middle-class wages, the extension of the right's "Southern Strategy" throughout the country, the victory of Reagan Republicanism, the increase in income inequality, and the drop in economic mobility.
Citing her extended family as a case in point, Walsh shows how liberals unwittingly collaborated in the "us vs. them" narrative, rather than developing an inspiring, persuasive vision of a more fair, united America. She also explores how the GOP's renewed culture war now scapegoats even segments of its white base, as it blames the troubles of working-class whites on their own moral failings rather than on an unfair economy.
"What's the Matter with White People?" is essential reading as the country struggles through political polarization and racial change to invent the next America in the years to come." (Publisher Description)

Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands

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" There are so many layers to this touching book. At its most basic level, it is about the relationship between a father and a son, but it is also about the complex political situation unraveling in Pakistan, and, subsequently, about the irrevocable rift between the same father and son. It is also about the idea of Pakistan, which inevitably means, Taseer explains, its opposition to India. He chronicles a poignant pilgrimage because his account is also about the loss of his father. Salman Taseer, the governor of the province of Punjab, was assassinated by his bodyguard for being an enemy of the Muslim faith. His crime was defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. In addition, Stranger to History is a prophetic book. As Taseer recalls his eight-month journey in Pakistan, Turkey, Syria, and Iran, he witnesses intimations of turmoil to come: the anger leading up to the Arab Spring, the faces of the now suppressed Green Revolution following the disputed election of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the atrocities of the Assad regime. Moving and exceedingly relevant"  (Booklist)