America’s founders feared a president like Donald Trump. Through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they erected a fortified but constrained government to secure the benchmarks of our democracy and established the guardrails designed to protect it. But Trump pushed almost every one of the Framers’ safeguards to its limit—most held, but some broke under the weight of presidential abuses even the Framers did not foresee. Thirteen Cracks will be the first book to expose the most vulnerable areas in our democracy, explain in historical context how President Trump uniquely and outrageously exploited these weak spots, and propose a fix for each challenge. Historian Allen J. Lichtman argues that Trump has put us at a pivot point in our history, where the survival of American democracy is at stake. But this is also an historic opportunity to shore up the vulnerabilities and to strengthen our democracy.

A “thought-provoking” look at the psychiatric profession, the overprescribing of pharmaceuticals, and the cost to patients’ health (Booklist). In an effort to enlighten a new generation about its growing reliance on psychiatry, this illuminating volume investigates why psychiatry has become the fastest-growing medical field in history; why psychiatric drugs are now more widely prescribed than ever before; and why psychiatry, without solid scientific justification, keeps expanding the number of mental disorders it believes to exist. This revealing volume shows that these issues can be explained by one startling fact: In recent decades, psychiatry has become so motivated by power that it has put the pursuit of pharmaceutical riches above its patients’ well-being. Readers will be shocked and dismayed to discover that psychiatry, in the name of helping others, has actually been helping itself. In a style reminiscent of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and investigative in tone, James Davies reveals psychiatry’s hidden failings and how the field of study must change if it is ever to win back its patients’ trust.

Life as Clerk-in-Charge of Avocado Preservation in the Mountain City of Axototl was a real cushy number. Hurling a few bones about the place, peering into the future, foreseeing all the forthcoming problems screaming your way and making plans to dodge destiny's hurled brickbats. Piece of cake. Or at least it would have been if Quintzi Cohatl actually possessed anything even remotely resembling foresight. After forty years in the job his lies were getting a bit thin. So when a travelling salesman offered him a bargain crystal (with Scry Movie Channel option) how could he refuse? Certainly Merlot and the proto-mage Hogshead would have preferred it if he had. Then they wouldn't have a clump of murdered wizards dumped in the River Slove on their hands. And as for the folks of Axolotl - they wouldn't have had to discover the amazing explosive potential of a few hundred prize melons.

An “eerie, elliptical masterpiece set in a South African boarding school in the early 1960s. . . . First-rate psychological suspense . . . played out flawlessly” (Kirkus Reviews). The members of an elite girls swim team are the reigning queens at their South African boarding school. And then Italian student Fiamma Coronna joins their ranks. Beautiful, athletic, and suddenly commanding all the coach’s attention, Fiamma is the envy of every girl on the team—until the summer she walks into the rural grasslands surrounding the school and disappears. Forty years later, the former teammates return to the school for a reunion, and the memory of that summer emerges like a long buried secret, the shocking, violent truth of what really happened to Fiamma no longer able to be contained . . . “Riveting . . . while evocative of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Picnic at Hanging Rock, Kohler’s writing is so smoothly confident and erotic that she has produced a tale resonant with a chilling power all its own.” —Elle “A stunning and singular tale of the passion and tribalism of adolescence, Cracks lays bare the violence that lurks in the heart of even the most innocent. Shocking, reminiscent of Lord of the Flies . . . conjures up the wildness of the veld and the passion and drama of adolescence . . . peculiarly satisfying.” —The Times Literary Supplement “A disturbing, note-perfect novel. Dissection of evil has rarely been so extravagantly executed.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Polished, compact and chilling . . . Powerful.” —Publishers Weekly A Library Journal and Newsday Best Book of the Year, now a major motion picture starring Eva Green

When Bull Mastrick and Victor Konig wind up in the same psychiatric ward at age 16, each recalls and relates in group therapy the bullying relationship they have had since kindergarten, but also facts about themselves and their families that reveal they have much in common.