A witty look at—and an explanation of—the far-right craziness that overtook the conservative movement after Obama became president. Compiling example after example, the editors of Crooks and Liars, a popular blog, examine the torrent of right-wing kookery—the eager willingness of conservatives to fervently believe things that are provably false—and its ramifications both for our national discourse and our national well-being. The authors show how this outlandish, overheated rhetoric – generated in large part by mainstream-media figures like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Lou Dobbs – is accompanied by a wave of lethal right-wing violence and threatening behavior.

John Amato is the founder of Crooks and Liars, named by TIME Magazine as one of the top 25 blogs for 2009. A pioneer of video blogging, he was part of CNN’s election-night coverage in 2006 and has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, and Forbes. John has also appeared as a political pundit on MSNBC, CNN, Current TV, and E Entertainment.

David Neiwert is a freelance journalist and author. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Seattle Magazine, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report. His online reportage for MSNBC on domestic terrorism won a National Press Club Award in 2000. He is the author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (PoliPointPress) and editor of the award-winning weblog Orcinus (http://dneiwert.blogspot.com). (Barnes and Noble)

David Battisti had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, expecting a bloodbath. So had many of the other scientists who had joined him for an invitation-only workshop on climate science in 2007, with geoengineering at the top of the agenda. We can’t take altering the atmosphere seriously, he thought, because there’s no way we’ll ever know enough to control it. But by the second day, with bad climate news piling on bad climate news, he was having second thoughts. When the scientists voted in a straw poll whether to support geoengineering research, filled with fear about the future, Battisti voted in favor of it.

While the pernicious effects of global climate change are clear, efforts to reduce the carbon emissions that cause it have fallen far short of what’s needed. Some scientists have started exploring more direct and radical ways to cool the planet, among them pouring reflective pollution into the upper atmosphere and growing enormous blooms of algae in the ocean. Schemes that were science fiction just a few years ago have become earnest plans being studied by alarmed scientists determined to avoid a climate catastrophe. In Hack the Planet, Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch looks more closely at this array of ideas and characters, asking if these risky schemes will work and just how geoengineering is changing the world.

Scientists are developing geoengineering techniques for worst-case scenarios. But what would those desperate times look like? Kintisch outlines four circumstances in which climate change could be quick and cataclysmic: collapsing ice sheets, megadroughts, a catastrophic methane release, and slowing of the global ocean conveyor belt.

It takes compelling characters to come up with Earth-cooling ideas like making cement from coal-plant exhaust, spraying a fine mist over the entire Middle East, and spraying gas from airplanes to make shade. Kintisch takes readers from a geoengineering expedition on the frigid Southern Ocean to the halls of conservative think tanks to profile the players in this emerging field, including Russia’s Yuri Israel, Edward Teller’s former protégé Lowell Wood, and David Keith and Ken Caldeira, informal coleaders of the Geoclique that conducts and encourages geoengineering research. Kintisch tackles the scientific and geopolitical issues involved—including the dubious arguments for geoengineering in SuperFreakonomics.

As incredible and outlandish as many of these plans may seem, could they soon become our only hope for avoiding calamity, or will the plans of brilliant and well-intentioned scientists cause unforeseeable disasters as they play out in the real world? And does the advent of geoengineering mean that humanity has failed in its role as steward of the planet—or taken on a new responsibility? Kintisch lays out the possibilities and dangers of geoengineering in a time of planetary tipping points. His investigation is required reading as thedebate over global warming shifts to whether humanity should Hack the Planet.

ELI KINTISCH is a reporter for Science magazine. He has also written for Slate, Discover, and the New Republic. He lives in Washington, D.C. (Barnes &B Noble)

Designated by The New York Times Book Review as a must-read in 2008 for the next U.S. president, Lappé’s unique take and laser-like logic invite readers to try on a new, invigorating way of seeing the world. With her characteristic boldness, she takes on a set of disempowering ideas driving economic and ecological crises, challenging readers to rethink the meaning of power, democracy, and hope itself. In her punchy, no-holds-barred style, Lappé weaves together fresh insights, startling facts, and stirring vignettes of regular people pursuing ingenuous solutions. “My book’s intent,” Lappé writes, “is to enable us to see what is happening all around us but is still invisible to most of us — people in all walks of life penetrating the spiral of despair and reversing it with new ideas, innovation and courage.” This updated and revised edition responds to Obama’s presidency and the global financial collapse, concluding with reflection questions that are perfect for book groups. (Barnes &B Noble)

Frances Moore Lappé is the author of 18 books including the three-million copy Diet for a Small Planet. She is the cofounder of three organizations, including Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy and, more recently, the Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education seeking to bring democracy to life, which she leads with her daughter Anna Lappé. Frances and her daughter have also cofounded the Small Planet Fund, which channels resources to democratic social movements worldwide. Frances appears frequently as a public speaker and on radio, and is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and Alternet.

In 1987 Frances received the Right Livelihood Award (considered an “Alternative Nobel”) “for revealing the political and economic causes of world hunger and how citizens can help to remedy them.” Her first book, Diet for a Small Planet, has sold three million copies and is considered “the blueprint for eating with a small carbon footprint since long before the term was coined,” wrote J.M. Hirsch, Associated Press. In 2008 Diet for a Small Planet was selected as one of 75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World by members of the Women’s National Book Association in observance of its 75th anniversary and was named by Gourmet Magazine as one of 25 people (including Thomas Jefferson, Upton Sinclair, and Julia Child), whose work has changed the way America eats. (http://www.smallplanet.org/about/item/frances_moore_lappeacute)

What do young women care about? What are their hopes, worries, and ambitions? Have they heard of feminism, and do they relate to it?

These are just a few of the questions journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz and photographer Emma Bee Bernstein set out to answer in Girldrive. In October 2007, Aronowitz and Bernstein took a cross-country road trip to meet with the 127 women profiled in this book, ranging from well-known feminists like Kathleen Hanna, Laura Kipnis, Erica Jong, and Michele Wallace, to women who don’t relate to feminism at all. The result of these interviews, Girldrive is a regional chronicle of the struggles, concerns, successes, and insights of young women who are grappling—just as hard as their mothers and grandmothers did—to find, define, and fight for gender equity. (Barnes & Noble)

Nona Willis Aronowitz is a 25-year-old journalist and cultural critic and a born-and-bred New Yorker. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2006, with a degree in American Studies and a concentration in Film. She wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on 1970s pornographic movies and their influence on and reflection of the sexual revolution and feminism—and got Wesleyan to pay for every single porn movie she watched.

Nona has written about women, sex, music, technology, film, and youth culture for numerous publications including The Nation, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, Salon, Double X, and Bitch. She has worked for The Village Voice, Salon, Legal Momentum (formerly the NOW Legal Defense Fund), Tango Magazine, and as a photojournalism teacher for Step Up Women’s Network. She recently participated in an online think tank for the Institute for the Future of the Book (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

Nona lives in Chicago and is currently a reporter and editor for TribLocal.com. Her book, Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism was released in November 2009. She is also working on an anthology of her mother Ellen Willis’s rock criticism, called Out of the Vinyl Deeps, slated for fall 2010. (http://www.nonaswriting.com/)

Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Spreading epidemics. Drought. Rising sea levels. Plummeting agricultural yields. Crashing economies. Political extremism. These are some of the expected consequences of runaway climate change in the decades ahead, and any of them could tip the world towards conflict. Prescient, unflinching, and based on exhaustive research and interviews, Climate Wars promises to be one of the most important books of the coming years.

Gwynne Dyer has served in the Canadian, British and American navies. He holds a Ph.D. in war studies from the University of London, has taught at Sandhurst and served on the Board of Governors of Canada’s Royal Military College. Dyer writes a syndicated column that appears in more than 175 newspapers around the world. (Barnes & Noble)

A sequel to Street’s Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, this new book documents and assesses Obama’s newly emergent record on domestic and foreign politics against his original agenda for change. Although mainstream journalists have noted discrepancies between Obama’s original vision and reality, Paul Street uniquely measures Obama’s record against the expectations of the truly progressive agenda many of his supporters expected him to follow. Taken together, the list of Obama’s weakened policies is startling: his business-friendly measures with the economy, the lack of support for the growing mass of unemployed and poor, the dilution of his health reform agenda, the passage of a record-setting Pentagon budget, and the escalation of U.S. military violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Street’s account reveals these and many other indications of how deeply beholden Obama is to existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines. His new book yields a perspective on Obama and current politics that is scarcely found in mainstream media. No progressive reader will want to miss it!

Paul Street is an independent journalist, policy adviser, and historian. Formerly he was Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League. Among his recent books are Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (Routledge, 2005). His many articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune; In These Times; Dissent; Z Magazine; Black Commentator; Monthly Review, Journal of American Ethnic History; Journal of Social History, and other publications. (Paradigm Publications)

The United States was born as a Republic. The individual was the center of society and rule of law was King. Neutrality and non-entanglements were the North Stars of foreign policy. Preemptive wars were feared as precursors to executive tyranny. The Republic would not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Transparency was the rule and secrecy the rare exception. And the thrill of self-government was the utmost good. Since the emergence of Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War, the United States has progressively degenerated into an arrogant, swaggering Empire featuring hundreds of military bases abroad with defense commitments to foreigners. The degeneration was accelerated by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and 9/11. Bush, Cheney, and Obama are a philosophical triumvirate in national security matters. The Empire is earmarked by perpetual and global warfare unilaterally initiated by the President for the sake of domination; unchecked executive power; the crucifixion of the rule of law on a national security cross; the diminishment of Congress to a constitutional ink blot; secret government; unsustainable trillion dollar budget deficits; and, a craving by the public for risk-free lives more than freedom itself. The Republic can be regained if a President emerges who renounces executive usurpations and secrecy, terminates all U.S. military bases abroad and revokes all defense treaties or executive agreements, immediately ends the Afghan, Iraq, international terrorism wars, and makes the rule of law the nation’s civic religion. (Barnes and Noble)

is a columnist for The Washington Times, an attorney, and a political critic. He was part of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and appears regularly on CNN, NPR, and the BBC.

The Backlash, which looks at how the conservative media is driving the Tea Party movement.”

Will Bunch is author of 2009’s Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, which was published by Free Press and has just been released in a paperback edition. The book examines the calculated effort by the modern conservative movement to canonize the 40th president, and the harmful effect on everything from runaway debt to failed energy policies to unchecked greed on Wall Street. His new book — tentatively titled The Backlash and looking at the right-wing reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama — is to be published by Harper in August.

He is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog, Attytood. He was named the city’s best blogger by Philadelphia Magazine in 2008 and best columnist by the same publication in 2009.

Bunch has won numerous journalism awards, including a share of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting when he worked for New York Newsday. He has also worked for Newsday on Long Island, the Birmingham (Ala.) News and the Washington (Pa.) Observer-Reporter. His articles have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, American Prospect, American Journalism Review, Salon.com, and elsewhere. He is author of one other book.from 1994: Jukebox America: Down Back Streets and Blue Highways in Search of the Country’s Greatest Jukebox. He lives with his family in the Philadelphia suburbs. (http://mediamatters.org/press/releases/201002160026)

From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day.

From the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, the first real factories in America, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the con­test between labor and capital for their share of American bounty has shaped our national experience. Philip Dray’s ambition is to show us the vital accomplishments of organized labor in that time and illuminate its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. There Is Power in a Union is an epic, character-driven narrative that locates this struggle for security and dignity in all its various settings: on picket lines and in union halls, jails, assembly lines, corporate boardrooms, the courts, the halls of Congress, and the White House. The author demonstrates, viscerally and dramatically, the urgency of the fight for fairness and economic democracy—a struggle that remains especially urgent today, when ordinary Americans are so anxious and beset by eco­nomic woes.

PHILIP DRAY is the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, and the coauthor of the New York Times Notable Book We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. He lives in Brooklyn. (Barnes and Noble)

Over the past two decades, a select group of small but highly effective grassroots organizations have achieved remarkable success in protecting endangered species and forests in the United States. The Rebirth of Environmentalism tells for the first time the story of these grassroots biodiversity groups.

Author Douglas Bevington offers engaging case studies of three of the most influential biodiversity protection campaigns—the Headwaters Forest campaign, the “zero cut” campaign on national forests, and the endangered species litigation campaign exemplified by the Center for Biological Diversity—providing the reader with an in-depth understanding of the experience of being involved in grassroots activism.

Based on first-person interviews with key activists in these campaigns, the author explores the role of tactics, strategy, funding, organization, movement culture, and political conditions in shaping the influence of the groups. He also examines the challenging relationship between radicals and moderate groups within the environmental movement, and addresses how grassroots organizations were able to overcome constraints that had limited the advocacy of other environmental organizations.

Filled with inspiring stories of activists, groups, and campaigns that most readers will not have encountered before, The Rebirth of Environmentalism explores how grassroots biodiversity groups have had such a big impact despite their scant resources, and presents valuable lessons that can help the environmental movement as a whole—as well as other social movements—become more effective.

Douglas Bevington is the forest program director for Environment Now, a grantmaking foundation based in California. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on social movement studies. (Island Press)

Is the United States Congress dead, alive, or trapped in a moribund cycle? When confronted with controversial policy issues, members of Congress struggle to satisfy conflicting legislative, representative, and oversight duties. These competing goals, along with the pressure to satisfy local constituents, cause members of Congress to routinely cede power on a variety of policies, express regret over their loss of control, and later return to the habit of delegating their power. This pattern of institutional ambivalence undermines conventional wisdom about congressional party resurgence, the power of oversight, and the return of the so-called imperial presidency.

In Congressional Ambivalence, Jasmine Farrier examines Congress’s frequent delegation of power by analyzing primary source materials such as bills, committee reports, and the Congressional Record. Farrier demonstrates that Congress is caught between abdication and ambition and that this ambivalence affects numerous facets of the legislative process.

Explaining specific instances of post-delegation disorder, including Congress’s use of new bills, obstruction, public criticism, and oversight to salvage its lost power, Farrier exposes the tensions surrounding Congress’s roles in recent hot-button issues such as base-closing commissions, presidential trade promotion authority, and responses to the attacks of September 11. She also examines shifting public rhetoric used by members of Congress as they emphasize, in institutionally self-conscious terms, the difficulties of balancing their multiple roles. With a deep understanding of the inner workings of the federal government, Farrier illuminates a developing trend in the practice of democracy.

Jasmine Farrier, associate professor of political science at the University of Louisville, is the author of Passing the Buck: Congress, the Budget, and Deficits. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. (Barnes and Noble)

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this–or any other–year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about–or prevent–the End of All Things.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux–better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens–human and otherwise–are…

China Miéville is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, which won the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, which won the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; and a collection of short stories, Looking for Jake. He lives and works in London.

A THOUGHT-PROVOKING LOOK AT THE BIG BUSINESS AND IMMORAL PRACTICES BEHIND PROFESSIONAL SPORTS BY ACCLAIMED SPORTSWRITER DAVE ZIRIN, HAILED AS THE “CONSCIENCE OF AMERICAN SPORTSWRITING” (THE WASHINGTON POST )

The fastest-growing sector of today’s sports audience is the alienated fan. Complaints abound: from inflated ticket prices, $6 hot dogs, and $9 beers to owners endlessly demanding new multimillion-dollar stadiums funded by public tax dollars. Those sitting in the owners’ boxes are increasingly placing profit over players’ performances and fan loyalty. Bad Sports cuts through the hype and bombast to zero in on tales of abusive, dictatorial owners who move their teams thousands of miles away from their fan base, use their stadiums as religious and political platforms, or hold communities ransom for millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fund their gargantuan stadiums.

As the multibillion-dollar sports-industrial complex continues to lumber along, Dave Zirin is the voice in the wilderness, speaking out for the common fan with a tough, passionate, and intelligent voice that will remind readers that there is more to sportswriting than glowing athlete profiles.

Dave Zirin was named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by Utne Magazine. He writes about the politics of sports for the Nation magazine, and is their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of Sirius XM satellite’s popular weekly show, “Edge of Sports Radio,” as well as a columnist for SLAM Magazine, the Progressive, and a regular op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times. Zirin’s previous books are What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States; Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports; The Muhammad Ali Handbook; and A People’s History of Sports in the United States. (Barnes and Noble)

After the 2004 election, the Republican Party held the White House, both houses of Congress, twenty-eight governorships, and a majority of state legislatures. One-party rule, it seemed, was here to stay.

Herding Donkeys tells the improbable tale of the grassroots resurgence that transformed the Democratic Party from a lonely minority to a sizable majority. It chronicles the inside story of Howard Dean’s visionary yet deeply controversial fifty-state strategy, charting his unpredictable journey from insurgent presidential candidate, to front-running flameout, to chairman and conscience of the Democratic Party in an unexpected third act. Ari Berman reveals how the Obama campaign built upon Dean’s strategy when others ridiculed it, expanding the ranks of the party and ultimately laying the groundwork for Obama’s historic electoral victory—but also sowing the seeds of dissent that would lead to legislative stalemate and intraparty strife.

Revelatory and entertaining, in the vein of Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus and Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, Herding Donkeys combines fresh reportage with a rich and colorful cast of characters. It captures the untold stories of the people and places thatreshaped the electoral map, painting a vivid portrait of a shiftingcountry while dissecting the possibility and peril of a new era in American politics.

ARI BERMAN is a political correspondent for The Nation and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at the Nation Institute. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and National Public Radio. He lives in New York City. (Amazon.com)