Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

Four years after their first meeting at a warehouse under Seattle's Ballard Bridge, Alice in Chains became the first of grunge's big four to get a gold record and achieve national recognition. One of the loudest voices out of Seattle, they became influential and successful. But as the band got bigger, so did its problems. De Sola delves beneath the secrecy, gossip and rumor surrounding the band to tell its full story for the first time.

"Kasischke's verses walk that perfect Plathian line between the everyday...and the eternal." --Time Magazine

From award-winning author Daniel Fox comes a ravishingly written epic of revolution and romance set in a world where magic is found in stone and in water, in dragons and in men–and in the chains that bind them. Deposed by a vicious usurper, a young emperor flees with his court to the small island of Taishu. There, with a dwindling army, a manipulative mother, and a resentful population–and his only friend a local fishergirl he takes as a concubine–he prepares for his last stand. In the mountains of Taishu, a young miner finds a huge piece of jade, the potent mineral whose ingestion can gift the emperor with superhuman attributes. Setting out to deliver the stone to the embattled emperor, Yu Shan finds himself changing into something more than human, something forbidden. Meanwhile, a great dragon lies beneath the strait that separates Taishu from the mainland, bound by chains that must be constantly renewed by the magic of a community of monks. When the monks are slaughtered by a willful pirate captain, a maimed slave assumes the terrible burden of keeping the dragon subdued. If he should fail, if she should rise free, the result will be slaughter on an unimaginable scale. Now the prisoner beneath the sea and the men and women above it will shatter old bonds of loyalty and love and forge a common destiny from the ruins of an empire.

As the world takes a tough turn, Kat's reality is neither here nor there when she becomes incarcerated. After attacking two officers of the law, Kat has no way out. The only thing she could do to help herself was to look within and search for the things that were missing. Kat's journey is harsh and internally brutal. The things that happen while incarcerated become the toughest struggle that Kat must face herself.

It’s time to go now, Alice. Time to dive back into that rabbit hole. Hurry and finish your tea, Alice. Then return to where dark things go. Don’t cry, Alice. You chained and broken girl. You’re not as pure as you were before. You belong in a twisted world. Remember the blood and pain. So sweet are the torturous wails. Succumb to symphonic sighs. Make him believe your tales. It’s time to go now, Alice. You’ve already waited too long. The ethereal realm you miss so much Calls you back with its s*nsual song. Take the good doctor with you, dear. Show him where shattered things go. He’s mad as a loon, but he’ll see soon. Show him Wonderland. Show him home.

This highly thought-provoking, sometimes amusing and always life-affirming novel illustrates one family's experiences with America's criminal justice system. As Penelope searches for the truth about her father, she rattles the skeletons in her family's closet and shakes up the complacency of her community, which has tried to sweep the past under the rug. With both perception and compassion, the author creates a colorful cast of characters while challenging the wisdom of imprisoning the mentally ill. On the cusp of adulthood, Penelope begins to understand that she has grown-up in a web of silence. The denial in her family and small Minnesota hometown is so thick that she does not know how to cut through it, that is, until she begins a seemingly innocuous pen-pal correspondence with someone in another town. Little by little, Penelope unravels the secrets meant to protect her from the truth. She proves herself to be stronger and wiser than anyone could have predicted and leads the way to healing. Through the lives and interactions of the major characters, this story explores the sprawling psychological geography of America's criminal justice system and its profound effect on everyone it touches, even its most ardent proponents. While dealing with a serious, challenging subject, this book is also filled with warmth and likeable characters. The odyssey of Penelope concludes on a faith-affirming note with a parade of surprising revelations.