Nonfiction

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Filed Under: Books Read

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse, Jeff Cummings
Published by Brilliance Audio on May 3, 2016
Format: audiobook
Genres: Domestic Politics, Nonfiction, Religion
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of “Christian America” is nothing more than a myth—and a relatively recent one at that.

The assumption that America was, is, and always will be a Christian nation dates back no further than the 1930s, when a coalition of businessmen and religious leaders united in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. With the full support of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, these activists—the forerunners of the Religious Right—propelled religion into the public sphere. Church membership skyrocketed; Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s official motto. For the first time, America became a thoroughly religious nation.

Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the comingling of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics today.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

Filed Under: Books Read

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

The Perfect Weapon: How the Cyber Arms Race Set the World Afire by David E. Sanger
Published by Penguin Random House on June 19, 2018
Pages: 384
Format: hardback
Genres: 21st Century U.S. History, Technology, World Politics
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

From the premiere New York Times Washington correspondent, a stunning and incisive look into how cyberwarfare is influencing elections, threatening national security, and bringing us to the brink of global war.

Behind the Russian cyberattacks that may have thrown the 2016 election; behind the Sony hack; behind mysterious power outages around the world and the disappearance of thousands of personnel records from poorly guarded government servers are the traces of a new and powerful weapon, one that has the potential to remake global conflict like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. The Perfect Weapon is the riveting story of how, in less than a decade, cyberwarfare displaced terrorism and nuclear attacks as the greatest threat to American national security.

Cheap to acquire, difficult to defend against, and designed to shield their user's identities so as to complicate retaliation, these weapons are capable of an unprecedented range of offensive tactics; they can take us just short of war, allowing for everything from disruption to theft to the cause of widespread damage of essential infrastructure systems. And the vulnerability of those systems has created a related but equally urgent conflict: American companies like Apple and Cisco must claim allegiance to no government in the name of selling secure products around the globe yet the US intelligence agencies want the help of such companies in defending against future cyberattacks.

Reported and written with unprecedented access by New York Times chief Washington correspondent and bestselling author David Sanger, The Perfect Weapon takes readers inside war rooms and boardrooms, into the secret cyberdens of American and Chinese military, to give the deep-background story of the increasingly pitched battle between nations, their governments, their cyberwarriors, and their corporations.

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

Filed Under: Books Read

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur
Published by HarperAudio on September 12, 2017
Format: audiobook
Genres: 21st Century U.S. History, Domestic Politics, Journalism, Nonfiction
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

7 hours, 46 minutes

Called "disgraceful," "third-rate," and "not nice" by Donald Trump, NBC News correspondent Katy Tur reported on—and took flak from—the most captivating and volatile presidential candidate in American history.

Tur lived out of a suitcase for a year and a half, following Trump around the country, powered by packets of peanut butter and kept clean with dry shampoo. She visited forty states with the candidate, made more than 3,800 live television reports, listened to endless loops of Elton John’s "Tiny Dancer"—a Trump rally playlist staple.

From day 1 to day 500, Tur documented Trump’s inconsistencies, fact-checked his falsities, and called him out on his lies. In return, Trump repeatedly singled out Tur. He tried to charm her, intimidate her, and shame her. At one point, he got a crowd so riled up against her, Secret Service agents had to walk her to her car.

None of it worked. Facts are stubborn. So was Tur. She was part of the first women-led politics team in the history of network news. The Boys on the Bus became the Girls on the Plane--but the circus remained. Through all the long nights, wild scoops, naked chauvinism, dodgy staffers, and fevered debates, no one had a better view than Tur.

Unbelievable is her darkly comic, fascinatingly bizarre, and often scary story of how America sent a former reality show host to the White House. It’s also the story of what it was like for Tur to be there as it happened, inside a no-rules world where reporters were spat on, demeaned, and discredited. Tur was a foreign correspondent who came home to her most foreign story of all.

FROM THE RECIPIENT OF THE  2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism