"It's been twenty years since 9/11. Two decades since the United States was attacked on home soil and embarked on twenty years of war. The enemy has been patient, learning, and adapting. And the enemy is ready to strike again. A new president offers hope to a country weary of conflict. He's a young, popular, self-made visionary...but he's also a man with a secret. Halfway across the globe a regional superpower struggles with sanctions imposed by the Great Satan and her European allies, a country whose ancient religion spawned a group of ruthless assassins. Faced with internal dissent and extrajudicial targeted killings by the United States and Israel, the Supreme Leader puts a plan in motion to defeat the most powerful nation on earth."--Dust jacket flap.

"Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician he co-founded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning. In The Three Lives of James Madison, Noah Feldman offers an intriguing portrait of this elusive genius and the constitutional republic he created--and how both evolved to meet unforeseen challenges."--Dust jacket.

With the world's largest crude reserves at Lake Maracaibo not far from Congo Mirador, Venezuela was one of Latin America's richest countries through the 1990s. The lake's namesake city was even referred to as "Venezuela's Saudi Arabia." But inequality was high, and the boom time wasn't to last. In 1999, Hugo Chavez took power and launched the Bolivarian Revolution, centralizing power to the state, redistributing wealth and nationalizing industries including oil and banking. His socialist political reforms put him at odds with the United States, and a hostile relationship lasted until his death in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, continued Chavez's legacy, but by 2016, oil prices had fallen by more than 70 percent, plunging the country into a humanitarian crisis. In addition, the Trump administration put sanctions on Venezuela and refused to recognize Maduro's presidency after highly disputed elections in 2018. Suffering from hyperinflation, environmental degradation, and shortage of food and basic necessities, over 4 million Venezuelans left the country in the past few years, and many millions more are expected to continue to flee in what will be the world's worst refugee crisis of modern times... When filmmaker Anabel Rodríguez Ríos visits a remote floating village in Venezuela to see its eternal lightning storms, she discovers another ongoing and alarming situation taking place... Congo Mirador was once a magical, thriving fishing community, built on stilts near Latin American's biggest oil field. But more recently, Venezuela has been spiraling into chaos and violence, and the village itself is literally sinking from pollution and neglect - a prophetic reflection of Venezuela itself. At the center of the village's existential fight stands two female leaders: Mrs. Tamara, the Chavez-worshipping coordinator, not above bribery and intimidation, and Natalie, her most vocal critic and school teacher. As confidence erodes under President Maduro and Venezuela shapes up to become the world's worst refugee crisis in 2020, outpacing the displacement in Syria, will the village find a way to stay afloat or will it become a political and ecological sacrifice? Shot over seven years, ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENEZUELA bears witness to the corrosive consequences of corruption and government neglect that reaches the farthest corners and pits neighbor against neighbor in a struggle for survival.

"In the tradition of Slaves in the Family, the provocative true account of the hanging of four black people by a white lynch mob in 1912--written by the great-granddaughter of the sheriff charged with protecting them. Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men; all of them innocent. For Karen Branan, the great-granddaughter of that sheriff, this isn't just history, this is family history. Branan spent nearly twenty years combing through diaries and letters, hunting for clues in libraries and archives throughout the United States, and interviewing community elders to piece together the events and motives that led a group of people to murder four of their fellow citizens in such a brutal public display. Her research revealed surprising new insights into the day-to-day reality of race relations in the Jim Crow-era South, but what she ultimately discovered was far more personal. As she dug into the past, Branan was forced to confront her own deep-rooted beliefs surrounding race and family, a process that came to a head when Branan learned a shocking truth: she is related not only to the sheriff, but also to one of the four who were murdered. Both identities--perpetrator and victim--are her inheritance to bear. A gripping story of privilege and power, anger, and atonement, The Family Tree transports readers to a small Southern town steeped in racial tension and bound by powerful family ties. Branan takes us back in time to the Civil War, demonstrating how plantation politics and the Lost Cause movement set the stage for the fiery racial dynamics of the twentieth century, delving into the prevalence of mob rule, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the role of miscegenation in an unceasing cycle of bigotry. Through all of this, what emerges is a searing examination of the violence that occurred on that awful day in 1912--the echoes of which still resound today--and the knowledge that it is only through facing our ugliest truths that we can move forward to a place of understanding"--