A sequel to Street’s Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, this new book documents and assesses Obama’s newly emergent record on domestic and foreign politics against his original agenda for change. Although mainstream journalists have noted discrepancies between Obama’s original vision and reality, Paul Street uniquely measures Obama’s record against the expectations of the truly progressive agenda many of his supporters expected him to follow. Taken together, the list of Obama’s weakened policies is startling: his business-friendly measures with the economy, the lack of support for the growing mass of unemployed and poor, the dilution of his health reform agenda, the passage of a record-setting Pentagon budget, and the escalation of U.S. military violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Street’s account reveals these and many other indications of how deeply beholden Obama is to existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines. His new book yields a perspective on Obama and current politics that is scarcely found in mainstream media. No progressive reader will want to miss it!

Paul Street is an independent journalist, policy adviser, and historian. Formerly he was Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League. Among his recent books are Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (Routledge, 2005). His many articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune; In These Times; Dissent; Z Magazine; Black Commentator; Monthly Review, Journal of American Ethnic History; Journal of Social History, and other publications. (Paradigm Publications)

Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Spreading epidemics. Drought. Rising sea levels. Plummeting agricultural yields. Crashing economies. Political extremism. These are some of the expected consequences of runaway climate change in the decades ahead, and any of them could tip the world towards conflict. Prescient, unflinching, and based on exhaustive research and interviews, Climate Wars promises to be one of the most important books of the coming years.

Gwynne Dyer has served in the Canadian, British and American navies. He holds a Ph.D. in war studies from the University of London, has taught at Sandhurst and served on the Board of Governors of Canada’s Royal Military College. Dyer writes a syndicated column that appears in more than 175 newspapers around the world. (Barnes & Noble)

The United States was born as a Republic. The individual was the center of society and rule of law was King. Neutrality and non-entanglements were the North Stars of foreign policy. Preemptive wars were feared as precursors to executive tyranny. The Republic would not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Transparency was the rule and secrecy the rare exception. And the thrill of self-government was the utmost good. Since the emergence of Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War, the United States has progressively degenerated into an arrogant, swaggering Empire featuring hundreds of military bases abroad with defense commitments to foreigners. The degeneration was accelerated by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and 9/11. Bush, Cheney, and Obama are a philosophical triumvirate in national security matters. The Empire is earmarked by perpetual and global warfare unilaterally initiated by the President for the sake of domination; unchecked executive power; the crucifixion of the rule of law on a national security cross; the diminishment of Congress to a constitutional ink blot; secret government; unsustainable trillion dollar budget deficits; and, a craving by the public for risk-free lives more than freedom itself. The Republic can be regained if a President emerges who renounces executive usurpations and secrecy, terminates all U.S. military bases abroad and revokes all defense treaties or executive agreements, immediately ends the Afghan, Iraq, international terrorism wars, and makes the rule of law the nation’s civic religion. (Barnes and Noble)

Bruce Fein is a columnist for The Washington Times, an attorney, and a political critic. He was part of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and appears regularly on CNN, NPR, and the BBC.

The Backlash, which looks at how the conservative media is driving the Tea Party movement.”

Will Bunch is author of 2009’s Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, which was published by Free Press and has just been released in a paperback edition. The book examines the calculated effort by the modern conservative movement to canonize the 40th president, and the harmful effect on everything from runaway debt to failed energy policies to unchecked greed on Wall Street. His new book — tentatively titled The Backlash and looking at the right-wing reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama — is to be published by Harper in August.

He is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog, Attytood. He was named the city’s best blogger by Philadelphia Magazine in 2008 and best columnist by the same publication in 2009.

Bunch has won numerous journalism awards, including a share of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting when he worked for New York Newsday. He has also worked for Newsday on Long Island, the Birmingham (Ala.) News and the Washington (Pa.) Observer-Reporter. His articles have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, American Prospect, American Journalism Review, Salon.com, and elsewhere. He is author of one other book.from 1994: Jukebox America: Down Back Streets and Blue Highways in Search of the Country’s Greatest Jukebox. He lives with his family in the Philadelphia suburbs. (http://mediamatters.org/press/releases/201002160026)

From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day.

From the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, the first real factories in America, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the con­test between labor and capital for their share of American bounty has shaped our national experience. Philip Dray’s ambition is to show us the vital accomplishments of organized labor in that time and illuminate its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. There Is Power in a Union is an epic, character-driven narrative that locates this struggle for security and dignity in all its various settings: on picket lines and in union halls, jails, assembly lines, corporate boardrooms, the courts, the halls of Congress, and the White House. The author demonstrates, viscerally and dramatically, the urgency of the fight for fairness and economic democracy—a struggle that remains especially urgent today, when ordinary Americans are so anxious and beset by eco­nomic woes.

PHILIP DRAY is the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, and the coauthor of the New York Times Notable Book We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. He lives in Brooklyn. (Barnes and Noble)

Over the past two decades, a select group of small but highly effective grassroots organizations have achieved remarkable success in protecting endangered species and forests in the United States. The Rebirth of Environmentalism tells for the first time the story of these grassroots biodiversity groups.

Author Douglas Bevington offers engaging case studies of three of the most influential biodiversity protection campaigns—the Headwaters Forest campaign, the “zero cut” campaign on national forests, and the endangered species litigation campaign exemplified by the Center for Biological Diversity—providing the reader with an in-depth understanding of the experience of being involved in grassroots activism.

Based on first-person interviews with key activists in these campaigns, the author explores the role of tactics, strategy, funding, organization, movement culture, and political conditions in shaping the influence of the groups. He also examines the challenging relationship between radicals and moderate groups within the environmental movement, and addresses how grassroots organizations were able to overcome constraints that had limited the advocacy of other environmental organizations.

Filled with inspiring stories of activists, groups, and campaigns that most readers will not have encountered before, The Rebirth of Environmentalism explores how grassroots biodiversity groups have had such a big impact despite their scant resources, and presents valuable lessons that can help the environmental movement as a whole—as well as other social movements—become more effective.

Douglas Bevington is the forest program director for Environment Now, a grantmaking foundation based in California. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on social movement studies. (Island Press)

It’s not an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated as an Edsel with an eight-track player. That the United States of America is in danger of becoming a third world nation.

The evidence is all around us:

Our industrial base is vanishing, taking with it the kind of jobs that have formed the backbone of our economy for more than a century; our education system is in shambles, making it harder for tomorrow’s workforce to acquire the information and training it needs to land good twenty-first century jobs; our infrastructure—our roads, our bridges, our sewage and water, our transportation and electrical systems—is crumbling; our economic system has been reduced to recurring episodes of Corporations Gone Wild; our political system is broken, in thrall to a small financial elite using the power of the checkbook to control both parties.

And America’s middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation – that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did.

It’s the dark flipside of the American Dream – an American Nightmare of our own making.

Arianna Huffington, who, with the must-read Huffington Post, has her finger on the pulse of America, unflinchingly tracks the gradual demise of America as an industrial, political, and economic leader. In the vein of her fiery bestseller Pigs at the Trough, Third World America points fingers, names names, and details who’s killing the American Dream.

Finally, calling on the can-do attitude that is part of America’s DNA, Huffington shows precisely what we need to do to stop our freefall and keep America from turning into a third world nation.

Third World America is a must-read for anyone disturbed by our country’s steady descent from 20th century superpower to backwater banana republic.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON is the cofounder and editor in chief of the Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and the author of thirteen books. She is also the cohost of Left, Right & Center, public radio’s popular political roundtable program. She was named to the Time 100, Time magazine’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential people, and to the Financial Times’s list of fifty people who shaped the decade. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with an MA in economics. (Barnes & Noble)

Is the United States Congress dead, alive, or trapped in a moribund cycle? When confronted with controversial policy issues, members of Congress struggle to satisfy conflicting legislative, representative, and oversight duties. These competing goals, along with the pressure to satisfy local constituents, cause members of Congress to routinely cede power on a variety of policies, express regret over their loss of control, and later return to the habit of delegating their power. This pattern of institutional ambivalence undermines conventional wisdom about congressional party resurgence, the power of oversight, and the return of the so-called imperial presidency.

In Congressional Ambivalence, Jasmine Farrier examines Congress’s frequent delegation of power by analyzing primary source materials such as bills, committee reports, and the Congressional Record. Farrier demonstrates that Congress is caught between abdication and ambition and that this ambivalence affects numerous facets of the legislative process.

Explaining specific instances of post-delegation disorder, including Congress’s use of new bills, obstruction, public criticism, and oversight to salvage its lost power, Farrier exposes the tensions surrounding Congress’s roles in recent hot-button issues such as base-closing commissions, presidential trade promotion authority, and responses to the attacks of September 11. She also examines shifting public rhetoric used by members of Congress as they emphasize, in institutionally self-conscious terms, the difficulties of balancing their multiple roles. With a deep understanding of the inner workings of the federal government, Farrier illuminates a developing trend in the practice of democracy.

Jasmine Farrier, associate professor of political science at the University of Louisville, is the author of Passing the Buck: Congress, the Budget, and Deficits. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. (Barnes and Noble)

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this–or any other–year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about–or prevent–the End of All Things.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux–better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens–human and otherwise–are…

China Miéville is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, which won the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, which won the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; and a collection of short stories, Looking for Jake. He lives and works in London.

Everything we know about drugs-from acid to epidemics to DARE and salvia-turns out to be wrong

Stock up on munchies and line up your water bottles: journalist Ryan Grim will take you on a cross-country tour of illicit drug use in the U.S.-from the agony (the huge DEA bust of an acid lab in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas) to the ecstasy (hallucinogens at raves and music festivals). Along the way, Grim discovers some surprising truths. Did anti-drug campaigns actually encourage more drug use? Did acid really disappear in the early 2000s? And did meth peak years ago? Did our Founding Fathers-or, better yet, their wives-get high just as much as we do?

* Traces the evolution of United States’s long and twisted relationship with drugs
* Gives surprising answers to questions such as: how did heroin become popular, when did the meth epidemic peak, and has LSD gone the way of Quaaludes
* Based on solid reporting and wide-ranging research-including surveys, reports, historical accounts, and more

Not since Eric Schlosser ventured underground to marijuana’s black market in Reefer Madness has a reporter trained such a keen eye on drugs and culture. A powerful and often shocking history of one of our knottiest social and cultural problems, This is Your Country on Drugs leads you on a profound exploration of what it means to be an American.

Ryan Grim is the Huffington Post’s senior congressional correspondent and has written for Slate, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and the Washington Post. (Barnes & Noble)

In Fortunes of Change, David Callahan contends that something big is happening among the rich in America: they’re drifting to the left.

When Callahan set out to write a book on the new upper class, he expected to profile a greedy and reactionary elite—the robber barons of a second Gilded Age. Instead, he discovered something else. While many of the rich still back a GOP that stands against taxes and regulation, liberalism is spreading fast among the wealthy.

In Fortunes of Change, we meet an upper class increasingly filled with super-educated professionals and entrepreneurs who work in “knowledge” industries and live in the bluest parts of America. This cosmopolitan elite takes for granted such key liberal ideas as multiculturalism and active government, and have ever less in common with an extremist GOP based in small-town America and dominated by Tea Party activists and the likes of Sarah Palin.

With groundbreaking research and profiles of key wealthy liberals, Callahan explains why the ranks of the liberal rich will keep growing, thanks to ongoing changes in the economy and the liberalism of elite educational institutions, and why this group will become ever more powerful. In the process, he busts myths, slays sacred cows, and topples the conventional wisdom about who really runs America and what they think.

Fortunes of Change will cause heated debate as many Republicans find their biases confirmed and debate how to recapture an upper class that used to side squarely with the GOP. Liberal activists will read the book with excitement, but also apprehension, as they grapple with new allies who may care more about polar bears than janitors, or more about legalizing gay marriage than controlling CEO pay.

Packed with surprising facts and behind-the-scene stories, Fortunes of Change is a must-read book if you want to understand how America’s politics and culture are changing—and what the future may hold.

DAVID CALLAHAN is a cofounder of the think tank Demos, where he is now a senior fellow. He is the author of several books, including The Cheating Culture. His articles have been published in such places as USA Today, the New York Times, the Nation, and the Washington Monthly.

In Jeff Sharlet’s bestselling book, The Family, he wrote about the “C Street House,” a Washington, D.C., Christian fellowship home shared by a number of conservative politicians. In the summer of 2009, the house became infamous as the center of sex scandals involving three of its residents: Senator John Ensign, Governor Mark Sanford, and Congressman Chip Pickering.

Sharlet is the leading expert on “the Family,” and his undercover research and investigative work answers some of the country’s biggest questions: how political fundamentalism endures in America; why, despite the collapse of the old Christian Right, it is as big a threat to democracy as ever before; and where, in a time of political upheaval and culture wars, fundamentalist politicians really intend to lead the country.

Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Family, is a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone, the coauthor, with Peter Manseau, of Killing the Buddha, and the editor of The Revealer.org. He has written for Mother Jones, the Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and many other magazines and newspapers, and he has commented on religion and politics for NBC Nightly News, The Daily Show, the Rachel Maddow Show, Fresh Air, Morning Edition, and more. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Barnes & Noble)

A thought-provoking look at the big business and immoral practices behind professional sports by acclaimed sportswriter Dave Zirin, hailed as the “Conscience of American Sportswriting” (The Washington Post)

The fastest-growing sector of today’s sports audience is the alienated fan. Complaints abound: from inflated ticket prices, $6 hot dogs, and $9 beers to owners endlessly demanding new multimillion-dollar stadiums funded by public tax dollars. Those sitting in the owners’ boxes are increasingly placing profit over players’ performances and fan loyalty. Bad Sports cuts through the hype and bombast to zero in on tales of abusive, dictatorial owners who move their teams thousands of miles away from their fan base, use their stadiums as religious and political platforms, or hold communities ransom for millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fund their gargantuan stadiums.

As the multibillion-dollar sports-industrial complex continues to lumber along, Dave Zirin is the voice in the wilderness, speaking out for the common fan with a tough, passionate, and intelligent voice that will remind readers that there is more to sportswriting than glowing athlete profiles.

Dave Zirin was named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by Utne Magazine. He writes about the politics of sports for the Nation magazine, and is their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of Sirius XM satellite’s popular weekly show, “Edge of Sports Radio,” as well as a columnist for SLAM Magazine, the Progressive, and a regular op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times. Zirin’s previous books are What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States; Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports; The Muhammad Ali Handbook; and A People’s History of Sports in the United States. (Barnes and Noble)

After the 2004 election, the Republican Party held the White House, both houses of Congress, twenty-eight governorships, and a majority of state legislatures. One-party rule, it seemed, was here to stay.

Herding Donkeys tells the improbable tale of the grassroots resurgence that transformed the Democratic Party from a lonely minority to a sizable majority. It chronicles the inside story of Howard Dean’s visionary yet deeply controversial fifty-state strategy, charting his unpredictable journey from insurgent presidential candidate, to front-running flameout, to chairman and conscience of the Democratic Party in an unexpected third act. Ari Berman reveals how the Obama campaign built upon Dean’s strategy when others ridiculed it, expanding the ranks of the party and ultimately laying the groundwork for Obama’s historic electoral victory—but also sowing the seeds of dissent that would lead to legislative stalemate and intraparty strife.

Revelatory and entertaining, in the vein of Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus and Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, Herding Donkeys combines fresh reportage with a rich and colorful cast of characters. It captures the untold stories of the people and places thatreshaped the electoral map, painting a vivid portrait of a shiftingcountry while dissecting the possibility and peril of a new era in American politics.

ARI BERMAN is a political correspondent for The Nation and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at the Nation Institute. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and National Public Radio. He lives in New York City. (Amazon.com)

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America’s political institutions underwent radical changes as they adapted to comprehensive security reforms. While the media exhaustively covered new security protocols in the executive office, little attention was paid to other federal agencies and branches that overhauled their systems to accommodate heightened security requirements.

As a congressional fellow living in Washington, D.C., Jocelyn Jones Evans was an eyewitness to the institutional culture of Capitol Hill before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as well as during the subsequent anthrax scare. In One Nation Under Siege: Congress, Terrorism, and the Fate of American Democracy, Evans uses her personal experiences as the foundation for a richly researched analysis of how Congress changed as an institution and a national symbol in the wake of 9/11. Evans reveals not only physical transformations but also internal policy shifts that threaten democracy by limiting citizens’ access to their elected leaders.

The only comprehensive study of the effects of terrorism on the nation’s capital, One Nation Under Siege provides a detailed investigation of how the nation’s intricate political system adapted in times of crisis. It covers an essential chapter in the social and political history of the United States.

Jocelyn Jones Evans, assistant professor in the Department of Government at the University of West Florida, is the author of Women, Partisanship, and the Congress. She lives in Pensacola, Florida.

Can torture ever be justified? When is eavesdropping acceptable? Should a kidnapper be waterboarded to reveal where his victim has been hidden? Ever since 9/11 there has been an intense debate about the government’s application of torture and the pervasive use of eavesdropping and data mining in order to thwart acts of terrorism. To create this seminal statement on torture and surveillance, Charles Fried and Gregory Fried have measured current controversies against the philosophies of Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Machiavelli, and against the historic decisions, large and small, of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Pope Sixtus V, among many others. Because It Is Wrong not only discusses the behavior and justifications of Bush government officials but also examines more broadly what should be done when high officials have broken moral and legal norms in an attempt to protect us. This is a moral and philosophical meditation on some of the most urgent issues of our time.

Gregory Fried, is chair of the Philosophy Department at Suffolk University. His books include Heidegger’s Polemos.

Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor Law at the Harvard Law School, has taught and written about legal philosophy and constitutional law for over forty years. He served as solicitor general of the United States in the Reagan administration and as a judge on the highest court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. His books include Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government, Right and Wrong, and (with his son, Gregory Fried) Because It Is Wrong.

Economist Raghuram Rajan warned about the global financial crisis long before it hit, but few listened. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it’s tempting to blame the crisis on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren’t fixed. Can we risk not listening to him a second time? Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown—made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners—were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a system overly dependent on American consumption to power the world economy and stave off a global downturn; a system where America’s thin social safety net has created tremendous political pressure to keep job creation robust, because jobs are the primary provider of health and other benefits; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world. Rajan demonstrates how inequalities in U.S. incomes, education, and health care are putting all of us into deeper financial peril, and he outlines sensible reforms to ensure a more stable world economy and to restore lasting prosperity.

Raghuram G. Rajan is the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is the coauthor of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity” (Princeton).

Praise for Ted Rall:

“Rall is known first and foremost for his political cartoons, but, man, he knows how to tell a story, too.”—Publishers Weekly

“As tangible and real of a story as was ever put on paper. Raw, honest and completely visceral, [The Year of Loving Dangerously] is a book for the ages.”—Comics Waiting Room

In arguably his most radical book published in decades, cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall has produced the book he was always meant to write: a new manifesto for an America heading toward economic and political collapse. While others mourn the damage to the postmodern American capitalist system created by the recent global economic collapse, Rall sees an opportunity. As millions of people lose their jobs and their homes, they and millions more are opening their minds to the possibility of creating a radically different form of government and economic infrastructure.

But there are dangers. As in Russia in 1991, criminals and right-wing extremists are best prepared to fill the power vacuum from a collapsing United States. The best way to stop them, Rall argues, is not collapse—but revolution. Not by other people, but by us. Not in the future, but now.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and twice the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist, opinion columnist, graphic novelist and occasional war correspondent whose work appears in hundreds of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times.

Twice the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Ted Rall is a political cartoonist, opinion columnist, graphic novelist and occasional war correspondent whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times.(Seven Stories Press)

The first real look inside Team Obama—due just before the 2010 elections—mixes political warfare and big business shakeups in equal proportions, and comes from a uniquely informed source. Steve Rattner is not just the man brought in by the president to save the auto industry, he is a former New York Times financial reporter who also earned a place among the top tier of Wall Street’s most informed investment bankers and corporate experts. Now, from his vantage point at the helm of the historic auto-industry intervention, Rattner crafts a tightly plotted narrative of political brinkmanship, corporate mismanagement, and personalities under pressure in a high-stakes clash between Washington and Detroit. He also explains the tough choices he and his team made, working against a ticking clock and facing vocal opposition from free market champions, to keep Chrysler and General Motors in operation.

As the economy faced free fall, Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and economic advisor Larry Summers—all revealingly described—faced the possibility of more than a million lost jobs and the astonishing wreckage of GM (a nightmare of huge proportions, caused by terrible management) and Chrysler (a company so close to death it was nearly sacrificed). Rattner’s book—which will take the story up to the fall of 2010—is a gripping account of one of the severest crises of President Obama’s first year in office, with lessons relevant for all managers and executives.

As Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Rattner led the Administration’s efforts to restructure the auto industry. Prior to that, he was Managing Principal of Quadrangle Group, LLC. At Lazard Fr?res & Co. he was Deputy Chairman/Deputy Chief Executive Officer, after tenures at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. He was also employed by the New York Times for nearly nine years, principally as an economic correspondent. He continues to write for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Financial Times. He lives in New York. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

On July 7, 2009, Al Franken was sworn in as Minnesota’s junior U.S. senator-eight months after Election Night. In the chill of November 2008, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman led by a slim 215 votes, a margin that triggered an automatic statewide recount of more than 2.9 million ballots. Minnesota’s ensuing recount, and the contentious legal and public relations battle that would play out between the Franken and Coleman lawyers and staff, simultaneously fascinated and frustrated Minnesotans and the nation-all while a filibuster-proof Senate hung in the balance.

This Is Not Florida is the behind-the-scenes saga of the largest, longest, and most expensive election recount in American history. Reporter Jay Weiner covered the entire recount process-for which he was honored with Minnesota’s most prestigious journalism award-following every bizarre twist and turn and its many colorful personalities. Based on daily reporting as well as interviews with more than forty campaign staffers and other participants in the recount, This Is Not Florida dives into the motivations of key players in the drama, including the exploits of Franken’s lead attorney Marc Elias, some of the mistakes made by Coleman advisers, and how the Franken team’s devotion to data collection helped Franken win the recount by a mere 312 votes.

In a fascinating, blow-by-blow account of the historic recount that captivated people nationwide, Jay Weiner gets inside campaign war rooms and judges’ chambers and takes the reader from the uncertainties of Election Night 2008, through the controversial State Canvassing Board and a grueling eight-week trial, to an appeal to Minnesota’s Supreme Court, and finally to Al Franken’s long-awaited and emotional swearing-in.

This Is Not Florida presents an important and unforgettable moment in political history that proved that it’s never really over until it’s actually over.

Jay Weiner’s coverage of the 2008 U.S. Senate recount and election contest between Norm Coleman and Al Franken earned him the 2008 Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award, Minnesota’s highest journalism honor. A sports journalist with the Minneapolis Star Tribune for twenty-eight years, he has written for the Twin Cities-based news Web site MinnPost.com since 2007 and is the author of Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles, also from the University of Minnesota Press. He lives and works in St. Paul. (University of Minnesota Press)

The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Despite what is often reported, new mothers don’t “opt out” of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today’s workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children.

Conventional wisdom attributes women’s decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men—both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it—as well as women. Faced with masculine norms that define the workplace, women must play the tomboy or the femme. Both paths result in a gender bias that is exacerbated when the two groups end up pitted against each other. And although work-family issues long have been seen strictly through a gender lens, we ignore class at our peril. The dysfunctional relationship between the professional-managerial class and the white working class must be addressed before real reform can take root.

Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families.

Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law, 1066 Foundation Chair, and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. (Harvard University Press)

“The Mendacity of Hope should help wake up all those Obama-voters who’ve been napping while the wars escalate, the recession deepens, and the environment goes straight to hell.” —Barbara Ehrenreich

From the former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine comes a bold manifesto exposing President Obama’s failure to enact progressive reform at home and abroad. National Magazine Award finalist Roger Hodge makes a hard-hitting case against Obama’s failure to deliver on the promises of his campaign. The first book-length critique of the Obama’s presidency from a prominent member of the left, The Mendacity of Hope will strike a chord with anyone stirred by the words of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Frank Rich. It’s the book that every frustrated progressive in America has been waiting to read.

A fearless and incisive manifesto that exposes the real causes of President Obama’s failure to enact liberal reform, by the former editor of Harper’s Magazine

Americans find themselves in genuine confusion and dismay concerning the actions of President Obama’s administration, especially when it comes to the financial crisis and health care. Obama’s reform packages, passed with great fanfare, ignore the most significant perils facing the United States. In The Mendacity of Hope, Roger D. Hodge makes the provocative case that substantive reform was never even on the table. Behind the euphoria of Obama’s victory was in fact a business-as-usual corporate machine, a bloc of political investors, campaign contributors, and lobbyists expecting big returns on their investments. And what a return they have received: in one bailout after another, for the health insurance industry as well as for Wall Street, Obama made sure that the Democratic Party’s most powerful investors made out like bandits.

None of Obama’s most important campaign promises—ending the Iraq war, abolishing torture, closing Guantánamo, changing Washington’s culture of corruption—has come to pass. Instead, he has escalated the conflict in Afghanistan, bailed out the bankers, and institutionalized the civil rights abuses of the Bush regime.

Another president might have played the forces of corporate interest differently, but Hodge argues that the fantasy of American politics is that a different kind of president is possible without a fundamental reform of our political system. Americans bought into the delusion that one man could bring change to Washington, but instead of reform we’ve seen a continuation of George W. Bush’s assault on the Constitution. Obama’s presidency has demonstrated that mere hope is never enough, that change will come only when the American people take charge of their own politics. A brilliantly crafted call to arms, The Mendacity of Hope offers an essential analysis of the American political system and the powerful interests that control our government.

Roger D. Hodge was the editor in chief of Harper’s Magazine from 2006 to 2010. He joined the staff of Harper’s in 1996, created the magazine’s “Findings” column, as well as the online “Weekly Review,” and was a National Magazine Award finalist for Reviews and Criticism in 2006. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two sons. (HarperCollins Publishers)