Smoothing the Ground - Essays on the Native American Oral Literature by Brian Swann (Editor)

$16.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: good-very good

The World As It Is - Inside the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

$18.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: very good

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From one of Barack Obama's most trusted aides comes a revelatory behind-the-scenes account of his presidency--and how idealism can confront harsh reality and still survive."The closest view of Obama we're likely to get until he publishes his own memoir."--George Packer, The N ew Yorker   For nearly ten years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration--first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President's Daily Briefing, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moments of the presidency. Now he tells the full story of his partnership--and, ultimately, friendship--with a man who also happened to be a historic president of the United States.   Rhodes was not your typical presidential confidant, and this is not your typical White House memoir. Rendered in vivid, novelistic detail by someone who was a writer before he was a staffer, this is a rare look inside the most poignant, tense, and consequential moments of the Obama presidency--waiting out the bin Laden raid in the Situation Room, responding to the Arab Spring, reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran, leading secret negotiations with the Cuban government to normalize relations, and confronting the resurgence of nationalism and nativism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump.   In The World as It Is, Rhodes shows what it was like to be there--from the early days of the Obama campaign to the final hours of the presidency. It is a story populated by such characters as Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, and--above all--Barack Obama, who comes to life on the page in moments of great urgency and disarming intimacy. This is the most vivid portrayal yet of Obama's worldview and presidency, a chronicle of a political education by a writer of enormous talent, and an essential record of the forces that shaped the last decade.   Praise for The World as It Is   "A book that reflects the president Rhodes] served--intelligent, amiable, compelling and principled . . . a classic coming-of-age story, about the journey from idealism to realism, told with candor and immediacy . . . His achievement is rare for a political memoir: He has written a humane and honorable book."--Joe Klein, The New York Times Book Review ...Show more

The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton

$20.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: very good

Trump's National Security Advisor took detailed notes. The result is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump Administration from a senior advisor who had served three previous presidents over 30 years, with stunning revelations about happened inside the most powerful room in the nati on. John Bolton served as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump for 519 days. A seasoned public servant who had previously worked for Presidents Reagan, Bush #41, and Bush #43, Bolton brought to the administration thirty years of experience in international issues and a reputation for tough, blunt talk. In his memoir, he offers a substantive and factual account of his time in the room where it happened. ...Show more

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

$14.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: good-very good

With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency in worse shape than when he found it; and how these profound failures jeopardize our national security. ...Show more

Trump/Russia - A Definitive History by Seth Hettena

$14.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: very good

Is the 45th President of the United States under the control of a foreign power? Award-winning Associated Press reporter Seth Hettena untangles the story of Donald Trump's long involvement with Russia in damning detail - including new reporting never before published. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller' s investigation into the relationship between members of Trump's campaign and Russian operatives continues, there is growing evidence that Trump has spent decades cultivating ties to corrupt Russians and the post-Soviet state. In Trump/Russia- a definitive history, Seth Hettena chronicles the many years Trump has spent wooing Russian money and power. From the collapse of his casino empire - which left Trump desperate for cash - and his first contacts with Russian deal-makers and financiers, on up to the White House, Hettena reveals the myriad of shady people, convoluted dealings, and strange events that suggest how indebted to Russia the forty-fifth US president might be. Using deeply researched reporting, along with newly uncovered information, court documents, and exclusive interviews with investigators and FBI agents, Hettena provides an expansive and essential primer to the Trump/Russia scandal, leaving no stone unturned. ...Show more

Framing American Divorce - From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians by Norma Basch

$14.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: very good

Divorce has become one of the most widely discussed issues in America. In this innovative exploration of the phenomenon of divorce in American society, Norma Basch uses a variety of analytic perspectives to enrich our understanding of the meaning of divorce during the formative years of both the nation and its law, roughly 1770 to 1870. She provides a fascinating, thoughtful look at divorce as a legal action, as an individual experience, and as a cultural symbol in its era of institutionalization and traces the powerful legacy of the first American divorce experiences for us today.Using a unique methodology, Basch fragments her story into three discrete but chronologically overlapping perspectives. In Part I, Rules, she analyzes the changing legal and legislative aspects of divorce and the public response to them. Part II, Mediations, focuses on individual cases and presents a close-up analysis of the way ordinary women and men tested the law in the courts. And Part III, Representations, charts the spiraling imagery of divorce through various fiction and non-fiction narratives that made their way into American popular culture during the nineteenth century.The composite picture that emerges in Framing American Divorce is a vividly untidy one that exposes the gulf between legal and moral abstractions and everyday practices. Divorce, Basch argues, was always a focal point of conflict between the autonomy of women and the authority of men. Tracing the legal, social, and cultural experience of divorce allows Basch to provide a searching exploration of the limits of nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, romantic love, and marriage, and their legacy for us today. She brings her findings up-to-date with a provocative discussion of the current debate over fault or no-fault divorce. ...Show more

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

$10.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: good

'You will not read a more important book about America this year' Economist 'From a former marine and Yale graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. 'Hillbilly Elegy' is a passionate and pers onal analysis of a culture in crisis-that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humour and vividly colourful figures, 'Hillbilly Elegy' is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. ...Show more

Trans America: A Counter-History by Barry Reay

$18.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and earl y 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed transvestism and transsexuality, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s?  Barry Reay explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices. Arguing for the complexity of a trans past and present, Trans America will be a groundbreaking work for the trans community, as well as anyone interested in the history of medicine, sexuality, psychology and psychiatry. ...Show more

Daughters of the Earth - The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women by Carolyn Niethammer

$12.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: good

She was both guardian of the hearth and, on occasion, ruler and warrior, leading men into battle, managing the affairs of her people, sporting war paint as well as necklaces and earrings. She built houses and ground corn, wove blankets and painted pottery, played field hockey and rode racehorses. Freque ntly she enjoyed an open and joyous sexuality before marriage; if her marriage didn't work out she could divorce her husband by the mere act of returning to her parents. She mourned her dead by tearing her clothes and covering herself with ashes, and when she herself died was often shrouded in her wedding dress. She was our native sister, the American Indian woman, and it is of her life and lore that Carolyn Niethammer writes in this rich tapestry of America's past and present. Here, as it unfolded, is the chronology of the native American woman's life. Here are the birth rites of Caddo women from the Mississippi-Arkansas border, who bore their children alone by the banks of rivers and then immersed themselves and their babies in river water; here are Apache puberty ceremonies that are still carried on today, when the cost for the celebrations can run anywhere from one to six thousand dollars. Here are songs from the Night Dances of the Sioux, where girls clustered on one side of the lodge and boys congregated on the other; here is the Shawnee legend of the Corn Person and of Our Grandmother, the two female deities who ruled the earth. Far from the submissive, downtrodden "squaw" of popular myth, the native American woman emerges as a proud, sometimes stoic, always human individual from whom those who came after can learn much. At a time when many contemporary American women are seeking alternatives to a life-style and role they have outgrown, Daughters of the Earth offers us an absorbing--and illuminating--legacy of dignity and purpose. ...Show more

Tree of Rivers - The Story of the Amazon by John Hemming

$30.00 NZD

Category: Travel | Reading Level: very good

This enthralling book brilliantly describes the passionate struggles that have taken place in order to utilize, protect and understand the wonder that is the Amazon. Hemmings riveting account recalls the adventures and misadventures down the centuries of the explorers, missionaries, indigenous Indians, naturalists, rubber barons, scientists, anthropologists, archaeologists, political extremists, prospectors and many more, who have been in thrall to the Amazon, the largest river in the world, with the greatest expanse of tropical rain forest and most luxuriant biological diversity on earth. ...Show more

Conquistadors by Michael Wood

$16.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: very good

Following in the footsteps of the greatest Spanish adventurers, Michael Wood retraces the path of the conquistadors from Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, and from the deserts of North Mexico to the heights of Machu Picchu. As he travels the same routes as Hern

The Journal of Prince Alexander Liholiho by Jacob Adler (ed.)

$20.00 NZD

Category: America | Reading Level: very good