Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century
Laura Beers, a British history professor at American University, critically examines Orwell’s enduring relevance through issues like populism, tyranny, and inequality, while challenging the obsession with his famed works, Animal Farm and 1984. She dissects Orwell’s critique of capitalism’s social prejudices and inequality, highlighting his democratic socialism and defense of individual liberty. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War convinced him that violence sometimes has a role in social change but argued that equality ultimately rests on acts aimed at creating social unity. Beers’ analysis seeks to clarify Orwell’s writings in the context of modern events, providing insights that policymakers and political activists would be wise to heed.
Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World At War
What happens when you’re a foreign correspondent, and see the coming of a war – one that America, and much of Europe stubbornly refuse to see? Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, by Deborah Cohen, Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University, tells the story of four European-based American journalists: the Chicago Sun-Times’ John Gunther, Hearst reporter H.R. Knickerbocker, author and journalist Jimmy Sheehan, and the New York Herald Tribune‘s Dorothy Thompson. Vienna’s Hotel Imperial was their watering hole, but their beat was Berlin, Paris, Rome – anywhere where Europe’s slow descent into madness could be documented. It was the 1920s and 30s, as first Mussolini and then Hitler came to power. The four journalist, rivals yet friends, jockeyed for access to interviews in their effort to tell a complacent world that the peace that followed World War I might not hold. Mussolini was the easy interview to get – Knickerbocker alone met with him four times – while Hitler was elusive. Dorothy Thompson finally managed to interview him, and later became the first American correspondent to get thrown out of Germany. Thompson also wrangled an interview with Leon Trotsky, while finding time along the way to leave her husband and marry the Nobel-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. The book exposes personal and political intrigue, while highlighting the best of foreign reporting. It’s a true page turner, the events and personalities unfolding as if in a novel, although it is, in face, a chronicle of a world sliding towards all-out war.
You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.
In You Don’t Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, the expansion into Cambodia, and the American defeat and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Becker writes as a historian and a witness of the times.
What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice. Deeply reported and filled with personal letters, interviews, and profound insight, You Don’t Belong Here fills a void in the history of women and of war.
An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press
In 1943, Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce sponsored the greatest collaboration of intellectuals in the twentieth century. He and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins summoned the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Pulitzer-winning poet Archibald MacLeish, and ten other preeminent thinkers to join the Commission on Freedom of the Press. They spent three years wrestling with subjects that are as pertinent as ever: partisan media and distorted news, activists who silence rather than rebut their opponents, conspiracy theories spread by shadowy groups, and the survivability of American democracy in a post-truth age. The report that emerged, A Free and Responsible Press, is a classic, but many of the commission’s sharpest insights never made it into print. Journalist and First Amendment scholar Stephen Bates reveals how these towering intellects debated some of the most vital questions of their time—and reached conclusions urgently relevant today.
Stephen Bates is an associate professor in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at UNLV. His research focuses on the First Amendment. He is the author of An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press (Yale University Press), as well as books on the history of journalism, political advertising, and religious freedom. His articles have appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Communication Law and Policy, American Journalism, Journalism History, and the International Journal of Communication, as well as the Washington Post Magazine, American Heritage, the Wall Street Journal, and the Wilson Quarterly, where he spent nine years as literary editor. A former board member of the ACLU of Nevada, Bates is a member of the advisory board of the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. He has been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies, and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. He holds an A.B. and a J.D. from Harvard University.
How Democracies Die
Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms.
Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency
In Republic of Spin―a vibrant history covering more than one hundred years of politics―presidential historian David Greenberg recounts the rise of the White House spin machine, from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama. His sweeping, startling narrative takes us behind the scenes to see how the tools and techniques of image making and message craft work. We meet Woodrow Wilson convening the first White House press conference, Franklin Roosevelt huddling with his private pollsters, Ronald Reagan’s aides crafting his nightly news sound bites, and George W. Bush staging his “Mission Accomplished” photo-op. We meet, too, the backstage visionaries who pioneered new ways of gauging public opinion and mastering the media―figures like George Cortelyou, TR’s brilliantly efficient press manager; 1920s ad whiz Bruce Barton; Robert Montgomery, Dwight Eisenhower’s canny TV coach; and of course the key spinmeisters of our own times, from Roger Ailes to David Axelrod.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
Holzer shows us an activist Lincoln through journalists who covered him from his start through to the night of his assassination—when one reporter ran to the box where Lincoln was shot and emerged to write the story covered with blood. In a wholly original way, Holzer shows us politicized newspaper editors battling for power, and a masterly president using the press to speak directly to the people and shape the nation.
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself
Andrew Pettegree investigates who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and journalists trustworthy; and people’s changed sense of themselves as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pettegree concludes, transmission of news had become so efficient and widespread that European citizens—now aware of wars, revolutions, crime, disasters, scandals, and other events—were poised to emerge as actors in the great events unfolding around them.
Who Owns the Future?
Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.
But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.
