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Autobiography of Hall of Fame basketball star Clyde Drexler, one of basketball history's most dynamic players. Through his fifteen-year career as an NBA player, Clyde Drexler played with elegance and flair, leadership and poise, integrity and an ability to come through in the clutch. He led the Portland Trail Blazers to the NBA Finals twice and helped the Houston Rockets win the NBA championship in 1995. A ten-time All-Star, a member of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team, and now a member of basketball’s Hall of Fame, Drexler reached the top of his profession without revealing many of his inner thoughts on himself or the game.

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood.

Like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin is an American legend for his longevity and success across a garden variety of different platforms. Martin began as a nightclub singer, performed in a comedy act, starred in films, recorded hit albums, and capped his career by serving as a television host. In fact there may be no star who was better able to transcend the different avenues of entertainment.

In a powerful blend of history and contemporary reporting, New York Times reporter David Philipps traces the rich history of wild horses in America: their introduction by the Spanish conquistadors, their role in the epic battles between Native Americans and settlers, their vital place in American self-mythology. He travels through some of the most remote parts of the American West, known as Wild Horse Country, to investigate the wild horse's current dilemma, caught between the clashing ideals of ranchers, scientists, and more.

The first lady of the United States of America and the first African-American in that position. A huge advocate of women. One of the most iconic and fascinating people of our times. Michelle Obama talks about her life with honesty and humor, in the same way she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revealing, Becoming is an intimate account by a sensitive and strong woman who consistently rose above the expectations of others. Her story inspires to do the same.

At the start of 1932, the nation's worst economic crisis has left one-in-four workers without a job, countless families facing eviction, banks shutting down as desperate depositors withdraw their savings, and growing social and political unrest. Amid this turmoil, a political decision looms that will determine the course of the nation. It's a choice between two men with very different visions of America: Incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover and New York's Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

What did the US Constitution originally mean, and how can we recover the intentions of its framers? These questions, which resound throughout today’s most heated legal and political controversies, lie at the heart of Jack N. Rakove’s splendidly readable work of historical analysis. In Original Meanings, he traces the complex weave of ideology and interests from which the Constitution emerged and shows how Americans have attached different meanings to their founding document from the moment it was published.

Until recently, propaganda was a top-down, elite-only system of communication control used largely by state actors. Today, as Samuel Woolley argues, social media has democratized propaganda, allowing nearly anyone to launch a fairly sophisticated, computationally enhanced, propaganda campaign. Woolley shows how social media, with its anonymity and capacity for automation, allows political groups to create the illusion of popularity through computational tools.

No subject is more hotly debated than the extreme measures that our government has taken after 9/11 in the name of national security. Torture, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, secret detention centers (or "black sites"), massive surveillance of citizens. But while the press occasionally exposes the dark side of the war on terror, and congressional investigators sometimes raise alarms about the abuses committed by US intelligence agencies and armed forces, no high US official has been prosecuted for these violations.

Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism — Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today.

Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald's story has become a key to American culture and American life itself.

Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870-2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.

In March 1997, 39 people in Rancho Santa Fe, California, ritually terminated their lives. To outsiders, it was a mass suicide. To insiders, it was a graduation. Benjamin Zeller not only explores the question of why the members of Heaven's Gate committed ritual suicides, but interrogates the origin and evolution of the religion, its appeal, and its practices. By tracking the development of the history, social structure, and worldview of Heaven's Gate, Zeller shows that the movement was both a reflection and a microcosm of larger American culture.

Woodstock, the moon landing, Charles Manson, Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and more. A must-have for baby boomers and the generations that came after! In this rich and comprehensive narrative, Rob Kirkpatrick chronicles an unparalleled year in American society in all its explosive ups and downs.

Can't get enough of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? Wondering if you missed something important in one of the chapters? Dive a little deeper into her world, discover hidden treasures, and hang out with Jem and Scout just a little longer with this sidekick.

Three years after his death at 91, J.D. Salinger remains our most mythic writer. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) became an American classic, and he was for a long time the writer for The New Yorker. Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters introduced, by way of the Glass family, a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, voluble cast of characters whose stage is the Upper East Side of New York. But fame proved a burden, and in 1953 Salinger fled to New Hampshire, spending the next half century in isolation.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud has long been the most famous vendetta of the southern Appalachians. Over the years it has become encrusted with myth and error. Scores of writers have produced accounts of it, but few have made any real effort to separate fact from fiction. Novelists, motion picture producers, television script writers, and others have sensationalized events that needed no embellishment. Using court records, public documents, official correspondence, and other documentary evidence, Otis K. Rice presents an account that frees, as much as possible, fact from fiction, event from legend.

Expanded from the original, Yes We Can! offers highlights from speeches by Barack Obama and includes his entire inaugural address as an added bonus. For this collection, speeches were chosen to showcase President Obama's powerful, inspiring rhetoric of hope and change and to represent his stands on issues such as climate, energy, service, and the Iraq war.

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty.