Books about Opposition from Amazon.com

ON the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends, and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly split a city of four million in two. Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: it became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by three hundred watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism that stood for nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West on which rested the fate of all humanity.

In this captivating work, sure to be the definitive history on the subject, Frederick Taylor weaves together official history, archival materials, and personal accounts to tell the complete story of the Wall's rise and fall.

.
Price: $9.42 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From one of America's most respected political commentators, an epic, shrewd, and important big-picture analysis of the forces that have made this era in American politics as divisive and bitterly partisan as any since the Civil War.

Few don't appreciate that in recent years American politics has seemingly become much more partisan, more zero-sum, more vicious, more willing to make mountains out of molehills, and less able to confront the mountains of real problems we face. And yet in poll after poll, the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as either "very conservative" or "very liberal" hasn't budged in more than a generation. What has happened? In The Second Civil War, Ronald Brownstein brilliantly diagnoses the electoral, demographic, and institutional forces that have brought such change over the American political landscape, pulling politics to the margins and leaving precious little common ground for compromise.

Displaying the deep historical perspective for which he is noted, Brownstein begins with a history of the evolving climate for partisanship since the dawn of the modern political era in 1896, presenting a fresh and bold reinterpretation of American politics and the personalities who have shaped it from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Offering both sweeping analysis and intimate detail drawn from exclusive interviews with top officials and strategists in both parties, The Second Civil War captures the currents that have carried America to today's dangerous impasse, from little-understood changes in congressional rules that made it easier for parties to enforce discipline and discourage compromise to the rise of special-interest pressure groups to a vastly changed media environment that has become much more vicious and much less serious.

While there was no Golden Age, and in many respects the increasing plurality of voices that get to have a say in our politics is all to the good, the net-net is a system in which compromise and conciliation are thwarted at almost every turn and big problems that require broad consensus continue to fester ominously, unaddressed and growing more and more painful to face as we approach crisis situations. But Ronald Brownstein ends with a menu of clear and compelling ways out of our collective dilemma, largely centering on the opportunity for unifying leadership. The Second Civil War is not a book for Democrats or Republicans per se but for all Americans who are disturbed by our current political dysfunction and hungry for ways to understand it-and move beyond it..
Price: $6.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Harry Turtledove’s acclaimed alternate history series began with a single question: What if the South had won the Civil War? Now, seventy years have passed since the first War Between the States. The North American continent is locked in a battle of politics, economies, and moralities In a world that has already felt the soul-shattering blow of the Great War, North America is the powder keg that could ignite another global conflict—complete with a new generation of killing machines.

“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” In 1934, the chant echoes across the Confederate States of America, a country born of bloodshed and passion, stretching from Mexico to Virginia. But while people use the word to greet each other in the streets, the meaning of “Freedom” has become increasingly unclear.

Jake Featherston, leader of the ruling Freedom Party, has won power—and is taking his country and the world to the edge of an abyss. Charismatic, shrewd, and addicted to conflict, Featherston is whipping the Confederate States into a frenzy of hatred. Blacks are being rounded up and sent to prison camps, and the persecution has just begun. Featherston has forced the United States to give up its toeholds in Florida and Kentucky, and as the North stumbles through a succession of leaders, from Socialist Hosea Blackford to Herbert Hoover and now Al Smith, Featherston is feeling his might. With the U.S.A. locked in a bitter, bloody occupation of Canada, facing an intractable rebellion in Utah, and fatigued from a war in the Pacific against Japan, Featherston may pursue one dangerous proposition above all: that he can defeat the U.S.A. in an all-out war.

The Victorious Opposition is a drama of leaders and followers, spies and traitors, lovers and soldiers. From California to Canada, from combat on the high seas to the secret meetings where former slaves plot a desperate strategy for survival, Harry Turtledove has created a human portrait of a world in upheaval. The third book in his monumental American Empire series, The Victorious Opposition is a novel of ideas, action, and surprise—and an unforgettable re-imagining of history itself.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $3.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.
In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California's economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results--a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number off incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law--pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state's commitment to prison expansion..
Price: $12.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]

At the beginning of the new millennium, educators, parents, and others should reevaluate what it means for adults and young people to grow up in a world that has been radically altered by a hyper capitalism that monopolizes the educational force of culture as it ruthlessly eliminates those public spheres not governed by the logic of the market. Giroux provides new theoretical and political tools for addressing how pedagogy, knowledge, resistance, and power can be analyzed within and across a variety of cultural spheres, including but not limited to the schools. A new introduction adds much to the well received first edition. The time for radical social change has never been so urgent, since the fate of an entire generation of young people, if not democracy itself, is at stake. Giroux argues that challenge gives new meaning to the importance of resistance, the relevance of pedagogy, and the significance of political agency..
Price: $31.46 [Notify me when price goes down.]