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History and Current Events August 2020
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Our Time Is Now by Stacey Abrams What it is: a well-researched history of voter suppression and disenfranchisement in the United States.
Is it for you? Policy wonks and progressives looking for a hopeful rejoinder to current political discourse will be inspired by politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams' proposals to end suppression tactics.
Author alert: 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Abrams made history in 2019 by becoming the first African American woman to deliver the response to the State of the Union address. | |
To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
by
Robert Draper
Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of important new revelations, from the important to the merely absurd. In the spirit of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and MarcBloch's Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective process that arrived at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth--evidence to drive a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
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Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward... by Robert M. Gates What it is: an incisive exploration of the uses and misuses of American power, written by former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.
Topics include: the 2003 invasion of Iraq; China's rise as a global superpower; North Korea's nuclear capabilities; Russia's destabilizing influence.
Reviewers say: "a judicious yet bracingly contrarian take on military and foreign policy from the ultimate insider" (Publishers Weekly). | | Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr What it's about: the underground East German punk movement whose political activism contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Featuring: 15-year-old "Major," the self-proclaimed first punk in East Germany, known for her safety pin-adorned jackets.
Awards buzz: This engaging and richly detailed history was longlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. | |
Spy Dust: Two Masters of Disguise Reveal the Tools and Operations That Helped Win...
by
Antonio J. Mendez
Two veteran CIA technical operatives journey behind the closed doors of the Central Intelligence Agency to describe a deadly battle between the KGB and CIA during the twilight years of the Cold War, detailing the defection of Edward Lee Howard, the betrayal of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, and espionage operations in the wake of the disaster.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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