NCW Libraries

By legitimizing bigotry and redefining so-called American values, a revived Klan in the 1920s left a toxic legacy that demands reexamination today.
Boasting 4 to 6 million members, the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s dramatically challenged our preconceptions of hooded Klansmen, who through violence and lynching had established a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South. Responding to the "emergency" posed by the flood of immigrant...

From Bob Beckel, the popular co-host of "The Five" on Fox News Channel, a deeply moving, redemptive memoir about his life as a political operative and diplomat, his long struggle with alcohol and drugs, and his unlikely journey to finding faith. Growing up poor in an abusive home, Bob Beckel learned to be a survivor: to avoid conflict, mask his feelings, and to lie--all skills that served him well in Washington, where he would become the youngest-ever...

A New York Times Book Review New and Noteworthy Book
This collection of 19 essays on democracy, equal justice, and citizenship “exhorts Americans to love the nation they have by becoming the nation they want” (The Washington Post).
What does it mean to be an engaged American in today’s divided political landscape, and how do we restore hope in our country? In a collection of “civic sermons”...

"Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was among the most influential intellectuals of the latter half of the twentieth century, a thinker whose pragmatist philosophy ranged effortlessly across literature, politics, history, and poetry. To today's wider public Rorty is best known as the philosopher who forewarned of the 2016 US presidential outcome almost two decades in advance when he presciently predicted that a portion of the electorate would "start looking...

"An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change breaking over today's world, creating both opportunity and peril--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth. The twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment defined by chaos and uncertainty, as one emergency cascades into another, underscoring the larger...

"At a time of bitter national polarization, there is a critical need for leaders who can help us better communicate with one another. Written as a series of back-and-forth exchanges, this engaging book illustrates a model of civil debate between those with substantial, principled differences. It is also a powerful meditation on where 21st-century school improvement can and should go next"--

Using his experience as a journalist in Russia, Feifer explains the seeming paradoxes of Russian life by unraveling the nature of its people: what is it in their history, their desires, and their conception of themselves that makes them baffling to the West?

Discusses the failure of America's political elites to recognize how group identities drive politics both at home and abroad, and outlines recommendations for reversing the country's foreign policy failures and overcoming destructive political tribalism at home. "Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most--the ones that people will kill and die for--are ethnic, religious, sectarian,...

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as bestselling historian Rick Shenkman shows in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. This isn't because we aren't smart. Instead, modern cues are setting off ancient, instinctive responses that worked to keep us safe in the Stone Age but lead us astray today. Pop culture tells...

Throughout history, kings and emperors have promised "freedoms" to their people. Yet these freedoms were really only permissions handed down from on high. The American Revolution inaugurated a new vision: people have basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and government must ask permission from them. Sadly, today's increasingly bureaucratic society is beginning to turn back the clock and to transform America into a nation where...