American Politics: a Primer
Discover essential American politics books in this curated primer, from Machiavelli's *The Prince* and Sun Tzu's *The Art of War* to modern takes by Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand.
Book
The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavelli
Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince . . . a king . . . a president. When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion. Today, this small sixteenth-century masterpiece has become essential reading for every student of government, and is the ultimate book on power politics.
Book
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus: a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy...why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction...why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph...why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill. Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.
Book
Discipline and Punish
by Michel Foucault
A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
Book
Slander
by Ann H. Coulter
“The immutable fact of politics in America is this: liberals hate conservatives.” Ann Coulter, whose examination of the Clinton impeachment was a major national bestseller and earned widespread praise, now takes on an even tougher issue. At a time when Democrats and Republicans should be overwhelmingly congenial, American political debate has become increasingly hostile, overly personal, and insufferably trivial. Whether conducted in Congress or on the political talk shows, played out at dinners or cocktail parties, politics is a nasty sport. At the risk of giving away the ending: It’s all liberals’ fault. Cultlike in their behavior, vicious in their attacks on Republicans, and in almost complete control of mainstream national media, the left has been merciless in portraying all conservatives as dumb, racist, power hungry, homophobic, and downright scary. This despite the many Republican accomplishments of the last few decades, as well as the Bush administration’s expert handling of the country’s affairs in the wake of the worst attacks on American soil and of the war that followed. With incisive reasoning and meticulous research, Ann Coulter examines the events and personalities that have shaped modern political discourse—the bickering, backstabbing, and name-calling that have made cultural mountains out of partisan molehills. She demonstrates how the media, especially, are biased—and usually wrongheaded—and have done all in their power to obfuscate the issues and the people behind them, bending over backward to villainize and belittle the right, while rarely missing an opportunity to praise the left. Perhaps if conservatives had had total control over every major means of news dissemination for a quarter century, they would have forgotten how to debate, too, and would just call liberals stupid and mean. But that’s an alternative universe. In this universe, the public square is wall-to-wall liberal propaganda. Refreshingly honest and unerringly timely, Slander continues where Bernard Goldberg’s number one bestselling Bias left off. From the Hardcover edition.
