"John and John Quincy Adams: rogue intellectuals, unsparing truth tellers, too uncensored for their own political good. They held that political participation demanded moral courage. They did not seek popularity (and it showed). They lamented the fact that hero worship in America substituted idolatry for results, and they made it clear that they were talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. John and...

There is a mystery surrounding Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman, a pillar of his parish, come to embrace one of the most radical ideas in the history of human thought? Darwin risked a great deal in publishing his theory of evolution, so something very powerful--a moral fire--must have propelled him. That moral fire, argue authors Desmond and Moore, was a passionate hatred of slavery. They draw on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, correspondence,...

The Democratic presidential candidate, popular senator, and respected economist traces the first year of the Trump administration and what Sanders and his followers are doing to reinforce the progressive movement.

"When Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election, they represented not only different political parties but vastly different approaches to the question of the day: How could the nation recover from the Great Depression? As historian Eric Rauchway shows in Winter War, FDR laid out coherent, far-ranging plans for the New Deal in the months prior to his inauguration. Meanwhile, still-President Hoover, worried about FDR's abilities...

"Johnny Cash was an American icon, known for his level bass-baritone voice and somber demeanor, for huge hits like 'Ring of Fire' and 'I Walk the Line.' He's one of the best-selling musicians of all time, and his crossover appeal earned him inductions into the Country Music, Gospel Music, and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame. But he was also the most prominent political artist in the United States, even if he wasn't recognized for it in his own lifetime,...

This is an unashamedly opinionated film. In Gore Vidal's America, the political coup has already happened. The right have triumphed and the human values of the liberals have been consigned to history. But how did this happen and who organized it? In this film Gore Vidal's acerbic, opinionated and informed approach rips away at the facade of the new America. The film dramatizes Gore's political views and his concern at the present state of American...

"Mikhail Sholokhov is one of the most contested recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature in the history of the award. As a young man Sholokhov's epic Quiet Flows the Don -- originally Quiet Don -- became an unprecedented overnight success. Yet he struggled to complete a second novel for Stalin and his feud with Boris Pasternak made international headlines. Rich with intrigue and set during the most tumultuous years of the Soviet Union, [this book]...

Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age onto a life of intellectual conflict and engagement. Tony Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explaining both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments.--[book jacket]

"Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager-and thus a letter writer-for his entire adult life. The letters collected in I Embrace You with All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967 range from letters home during his Motorcycle Diaries trip, to the long letter to Fidel after the success of the Cuban revolution in early 1959 (from which the book's title comes), from the most personal to the intensely political, revealing someone who not only thought deeply...