Progressive Reading List
Explore our Progressive Reading List featuring must-read books that inspire critical thinking and social change. Discover titles that challenge norms and promote progressive ideals for a better world.
Book
Worse Than Watergate
by John Wesley Dean
The former counsel to President Nixon provides a critique of the Bush administration, its obsession with secrecy, and its willingness to deceive the American people.
Book
The Family
by Kitty Kelley
They have wielded enormous financial power and dominated world politics for more than half a century. They have been appointed to positions of great power and have been elected as governors, congressmen, senators and presidents. They have shaped our past and, with our country at war under the leadership of their number one son, they are, more critically than ever, shaping our future. As the Bush family has risen to dominance, so too they have been master orchestrators of their own public image, acting and operating under the shield of privacy their money and status have always afforded them. Until now. Number One bestselling author and investigative biographer Kitty Kelley has closely examined the lives of Jacqueline Onassis, Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and the British Royal family. Now the First Lady of unauthorized biography reckons with the first family of the United States—and the result is at once a rich and shocking history and a very human portrait of the world’s most powerful dynasty. An important work on wealth, power, and class in America,The Familyis rich in texture, probing in its psychological insight, revealing in its political and financial detail, and stunning in the patterns that emerge and expose the Bush dynasty as it has never before been exposed. Ms. Kelley takes us back to the origins of the family fortune in the Ohio steel industry at the turn of the last century, through the oil deals and international business associations that have maintained and increased their wealth over the past hundred years. The book leads us through Prescott Bush’s first entrée into government at the state level in 1950s’ Connecticut, to George Herbert Walker Bush’s long and winding road to the White House, to his son’s quick sweep into the same office. Along the way, we see the complex relationships the Bushes have had with the giants of the century—Eisenhower, Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, Kissinger, Reagan, Clinton—as well as the often ruthless methods used to realize their goals. Perhaps most impressive—and surprising—is the way the book delves behind the obsessively protected public image into the family’s intimate private lives: the matriarchs, the mistresses, the marriages, the divorces, the jealousies, the hypocrisies, the golden children, and the black sheep. At a crucial point in American history, Kitty Kelley is the one person to finally tell all about the family that has, perhaps more than any other, defined our role in the modern world. This is the book the Bushes don’t want you to read. This isThe Family.
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Crimes Against Nature
by Robert Francis Kennedy
A case study of the link between money and political power charges the Bush administration with compromising mainstream America through its proposed changes to environmental laws.
Book
The Politics of Truth: A Diplomat's Memoir
by Joseph Wilson
Through the last three presidential administrations and two wars with Iraq, no one has personally witnessed, influenced, or fueled news over more history-making events than Joseph Wilson. The last American diplomat to sit face-to-face with Saddam Hussein, he is a consummate insider who has the intelligence, principles, and independence to examine current American foreign policy and the inner workings of government and to form a candid assessment of the United States' involvement in the world. In February 2002, Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate claims that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium in that country. Wilson's report, and two from other American officials, conclusively negated such rumors, yet all were brushed aside by the White House. Startled by the infamous words uttered by George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union Address: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Wilson decided to reveal the truth behind the initiation of the Iraq war. The Politics of Truth is an explosive and revelatory book by a man who stands for the accurate recording of history against those forces bent on fabricating truth.