The Architects of Toxic Politics in America: Venom and Vitriol explains the history of poison politics in America by profiling some of the key political “attack dogs” who have shaped the modern landscape. Comparing and contrasting the Trump and Biden presidencies with administrations of the past, the book explains the unique character of the current toxic political moment and the forces that have created it. The book also focuses quite extensively on “non-presidential” architects of toxic politics: other politicians, campaign strategists, activists, and media figures (and a few key figures that have fulfilled two or more of these roles). Drawing on his long career as a journalist specializing in presidential coverage, Kenneth T. Walsh argues that due to the complex, often conflicting nature of American government, the angriest, most decisive voices can command media, voter, and legislative attention and thereby maintain and consolidate power. This results in frustration, alienation, and cynicism—and ultimately, a diminishment of voter participation that can reinforce the vicious cycle and lead to electoral disaster. For anyone interested in politics, media, and the culture of “gotcha” journalism, this book will also be a valuable addition to undergraduate and graduate courses on politics, the presidency, political and media ethics, campaign history and government.

Every campaign season, more trash talk and attack ads dominate the airwaves and more voters subsequently turn off to politics. Why do so many races degenerate into name-calling and negativism? What is the effect on our democracy - our ability to make the right political and policy choices? Poison Politics: Are Negative Campaigns Destroying Democracy? tackles these vital questions.

One morning in 2000, Dr. Jane Hightower walked into her exam room to find a patient with disturbing symptoms she couldn’t explain. The woman was nauseated, tired, and had difficulty concentrating, but a litany of tests revealed no apparent cause. She was not alone. Dr. Hightower saw numerous patients with similar, inexplicable ailments, and eventually learned that there were many more around the nation and the world. They had little in common—except a healthy appetite for certain fish. Dr. Hightower’s quest for answers led her to mercury, a poison that has been plaguing victims for centuries and is now showing up in seafood. But this “explanation” opened a Pandora’s Box of thornier questions. Why did some fish from supermarkets and restaurants contain such high levels of a powerful poison? Why did the FDA base its recommendations for “safe” mercury consumption on data supplied by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist extremists? And why wasn’t the government warning its citizens? In Diagnosis: Mercury, Dr. Hightower retraces her investigation into the modern prevalence of mercury poisoning, revealing how political calculations, dubious studies, and industry lobbyists endanger our health. While mercury is a naturally occurring element, she learns there’s much that is unnatural about this poison’s prevalence in our seafood. Mercury is pumped into the air by coal-fired power plants and settles in our rivers and oceans, and has been dumped into our waterways by industry. It accumulates in the fish we eat, and ultimately in our own bodies. Yet government agencies and lawmakers have been slow to regulate pollution or even alert consumers. Why? The trail of evidence leads to Canada, Japan, Iraq, and various U.S. institutions, and as Dr. Hightower puts the pieces together, she discovers questionable connections between ostensibly objective researchers and industries that fear regulation and bad press. Her tenacious inquiry sheds light on a system in which, too often, money trumps good science and responsible government. Exposing a threat that few recognize but that touches many, Diagnosis: Mercury should be required reading for everyone who cares about their health.

"Beltway doyenne Samantha Calhoun has learned many lessons in a lifetime of politics, and she relishes teaching certain young congressmen everything she knows. But when her latest fling, married U.S. Rep. Quentin Wilson, is found dead in Samantha's home, she turns to longtime friend Molly Malone for support."--

"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf."

This comparative history examines the divergent paths taken by Britain and France in managing opiate abuse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though the governments of both nations viewed rising levels of opiate use as a problem, Britain and France took opposite courses of action in addressing the issue. The British sanctioned maintenance treatment for addiction, while the French authorities did not hesitate to take legal action against addicts and the doctors who prescribed drugs to them. Drawing on primary documents, Howard Padwa examines the factors that led to these disparate approaches. He finds that national policies were influenced by shifts in the composition of drug-using populations of the two countries and a marked divergence in British and French conceptions of citizenship. Beyond shared concerns about public health and morality, Britain and France had different understandings of the threat that opiate abuse posed to their respective communities. Padwa traces the evolution of thinking on the matter in both countries, explaining why Britain took a less adversarial approach to domestic opiate abuse despite the productivity-sapping powers of this social poison, and why the relatively libertine French chose to attack opiate abuse. In the process, Padwa reveals the confluence of changes in medical knowledge, culture, politics, and drug-user demographics throughout the period, a convergence of forces that at once highlighted the issue and transformed it from one of individual health into a societal concern. An insightful look at the development of drug discourses in the nineteenth century and drug policy in the twentieth century, Social Poison will appeal to scholars and students in public health and the history of medicine.

Each week the oil and gas fields of sub-Saharan Africa produce well over a billion dollars' worth of oil, an amount that far exceeds development aid to the entire African continent. Yet the rising tide of oil money is not promoting stability and development, but is instead causing violence, poverty, and stagnation. It is also generating vast corruption that reaches deep into American and European economies. In Poisoned Wells, Nicholas Shaxson exposes the root causes of this paradox of poverty from plenty, and explores the mechanisms by which oil causes grave instabilities and corruption around the globe. Shaxson is the only journalist who has had access to the key players in African oil, and is willing to make the connections between the problems of the developing world and the involvement of leading global corporations and governments.