"Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang--in a revolution or military coup--but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions,...

"From the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, a magnificent reckoning with how and why the marriage between democracy and capitalism is coming undone all over the world, and what can be done to reverse this terrifying dynamic. TARGET CONSUMER: Readers of Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Tim Snyder. Martin Wolf has long been one of the wisest voices on economic issues on the world stage. He has never been known as a sunny-side-up...

"Merchants of Doubt " tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades that link smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole.

"Today, democracy is the world's only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In [this book], James Miller, author of the classic history of 1960s protest "Democracy Is in the Streets", offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present."--Dust jacket.

"In How Democracy Ends, David Runciman argues that we are trapped in outdated twentieth-century ideas of democratic failure. By fixating on coups and violence, we are focusing on the wrong threats. Our societies are too affluent, too elderly, and too networked to fall apart as they did in the past. We need new ways of thinking the unthinkable--a twenty-first-century vision of the end of democracy, and whether its collapse might allow us to move forward...

"Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment...

"Anchored by an introduction by Jon Meacham, this concise collection of essays, letters, and poems from one of this country's most eminent literary voices sheds much-needed historical context on the state of the nation and offers a ray of hope for the future of our society; for "as long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman...the scene is not desolate.""--

"What is democracy, really? What do we mean when we use the term? And can it ever truly exist? Astra Taylor, hailed as a 'New Civil Rights Leader' by the Los Angeles Times, provides surprising answers. There is no shortage of democracy, at least in name, yet it is in crisis everywhere we look. From a cabal of plutocrats in the White House to gerrymandering and dark-money campaign contributions, it is clear that the principle of government by and for...