Peak Performance Recommended Books: Politics & Current Affairs

 

From the first thrilling chapter, which takes readers into the White House center of operations on September 11, through his final negative assessment of George W. Bush's post-9/11 war on terror, Clarke, the U.S.'s former terrorism czar, offers a complex and illuminating look into the successes and failures of the nation's security apparatus. Clarke, a veteran Washington insider who has advised presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush, dissects each man's approach to terrorism but levels the harshest criticism at the latter Bush and his advisors.

 

The people of the United States, according to author and filmmaker Michael Moore, have been hoodwinked. Tricked, he says, by Republican lawmakers and their wealthy corporate pals who use a combination of concocted bogeymen and lies to stay rich and in control. But while plenty of liberal scholars, entertainers, and pundits have made similar arguments in book form, Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? stands out for its thoroughly positive perspective. Granted, Moore is angry and has harsh words for George W. Bush and his fellow conservatives concerning the reasoning behind going to war in Iraq, the collapse of Enron and other companies, and the relationship between the Bushes, the Saudi Arabian government, and Osama bin Laden. But his book is intended to serve as a handbook for how people with liberal opinions (which is most of America, Moore contends, whether they call themselves "liberals" or not) can take back their country from the conservative forces in power.

 

Michael Moore, the award-winning provocateur behind Roger & Me and the bestseller Downsize This!, now returns to size up the new century -- and that big, ugly special-interest group that's laying waste to the world as we know it: stupid white men. Whether he's calling for United Nations action to overthrow the Bush Family Junta, calling on African-Americans to place whites only signs over the entrances of unfriendly businesses, or praying that Jesse Helms will get kissed by a man, Stupid White Men is Mike's Manifesto on Malfeasance and Mediocrity. Whatever your politics, Stupid White Men should make you blow your stack.

 

War on Iraq offers a balanced, non-partisan examination of the current debate in Washington and beyond. In this shocking expose on the impending offensive against Iraq, activist, author, and teacher William Rivers Pitt sits down with former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter to expose the truth behind the hawkish rhetoric of the Bush administration. Ritter--ex-Marine, intelligence specialist, expert on Iraqi military strategy, and Gulf War veteran--dismantles the myths surrounding Saddam Hussein's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons capabilities while revealing the neo-conservative forces pushing the White House toward war.

 

This title's accusation bears particular weight coming from the man who warned the super-secretive Richard Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency, and Dean, who was Nixon's White House counsel, makes a strong argument that the secrecy of what he dubs the "Bush-Cheney presidency" is "not merely unjustified and excessive but obsessive," and consequently "frighteningly dangerous." In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution.