Here are 98 books that Gonzo Governance fans have personally recommended if you like
Gonzo Governance.
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I am an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice who came of age in the 1960s at the UC Berkeley School of Criminology where I developed a passion for the administration of criminal justice and the securing of human rights. I have authored more than 20 books, including five award winning titles such as: Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). My third book to complete the Trump trilogy is underway, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power.
Not only is Mary L. Trump a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, but she also spent much of her childhood hanging out at her grandparents’ home in Queens, New York, where the president grew up with his four siblings.
Mary has the inside scoop, bringing the reader into several dysfunctional family events, including holiday meals. And she reveals the interfamilial patterns of abuse and neglect that helped shape the polarizing sociopath who now threatens the United States and the world’s well-being and economic security.
* THE INTERNATIONAL AND SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER * In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald's only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who threatened the world's health, economic security and social fabric.
Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents' large, imposing house in New York, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice who came of age in the 1960s at the UC Berkeley School of Criminology where I developed a passion for the administration of criminal justice and the securing of human rights. I have authored more than 20 books, including five award winning titles such as: Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). My third book to complete the Trump trilogy is underway, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power.
The winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting, David Cay Johnston is also a specialist in social inequality, political economy, and taxation who has written several best-selling books on these topics, such as Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill. Johnston has interviewed Trump and has been investigating Donald since the late 1980s.
This book was the first and most inclusive overview of Trump’s shady business career in real estate, highlighting his six casino and hotel bankruptcies in the 1990s and up to his run for the presidency in 2016.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER that connects the dots from Donald Trump's racist background to the Russian scandals
"A searing indictment." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Johnston has given us this year's must-read Trump book." — Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
The international bestseller that brought Trump's long history of racism, mafia ties, and shady business dealings into the limelight. Now with a new introduction and epilogue.
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who had spent thirty years chronicling Donald Trump for the New York Times and other leading newspapers,…
I am an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice who came of age in the 1960s at the UC Berkeley School of Criminology where I developed a passion for the administration of criminal justice and the securing of human rights. I have authored more than 20 books, including five award winning titles such as: Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). My third book to complete the Trump trilogy is underway, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power.
Who better to tell the inside story about the racketeer-in-chief than Trump’s “fixer” Michael Cohen, who for 10 years would have taken a bullet for Donald? Attorney Cohen’s betrayal and insider account of his former Boss is the most informative for understanding Trump’s modus operandi of lawlessness, corruption, and greed.
It also explains how the fraudster-in-chief mafioso style grifted and colluded his way to the White House in 2017.
"I read it cover-to-cover. I did not intend to, but I started at the beginning and didn't put it down until it was over."-Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
This book almost didn't see the light of day as government officials tried to bar its publication. The Inside Story of the Real President Trump, by His Former Attorney and Personal Advisor-The Man Who Helped Get Him Into the Oval Office
Once Donald Trump's fiercest surrogate, closest confidant, and staunchest defender, Michael Cohen knows where the skeletons are buried.
This is the most devastating business and political horror…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I am an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice who came of age in the 1960s at the UC Berkeley School of Criminology where I developed a passion for the administration of criminal justice and the securing of human rights. I have authored more than 20 books, including five award winning titles such as: Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). My third book to complete the Trump trilogy is underway, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power.
Award-winning investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have written a larger-than-life account of the electoral corruption committed by the POTUS and his supporters to overturn the 2020 presidential election with their flagrant disregard for the rule of law and American democracy.
Employing original reporting and exclusive access to thousands of documents, emails, text messages, and a cast of more than 100 characters, Isikoff and Klaidman take the reader behind the scenes of the irreconcilable Teflon Don, his co-conspirators, and their intimidation and threats of violence directed at a range of law-abiding people from ordinary vote counters to high-ranking officials and their families to the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her staff of deputy prosecutors.
In Find Me the Votes, two years of immersive reporting by Isikoff and Klaidman has produced the most authoritative and dramatic account yet of a defeated president's conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and how a local Georgia prosecutor-a daughter of the civil rights movement-decided to indict him and his allies for his desperate attempt to hold on to power. From the beginning, Fani Willis saw Donald Trump's crimes as a voting rights case, and an attempt by the former president to deprive the citizens of Georgia of the franchise, a right for which her forebears had bled.
I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.
This is a book I wish I had written, far and away the best book about coverage of the Second World War in Europe.
It is based on a wealth of archival research and features both celebrated reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow, and less well-known ones like Homer Bigart and Don Whitehead. Although award-winning scholarship, Casey’s work is accessible to any curious reader. Casey is English but understands well the American military, the American press, and American culture generally.
Casey explores the war in the Pacific theater in a subsequent book, The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan.
From the North African desert to the bloody stalemate in Italy, from the London blitz to the D-Day beaches, a group of highly courageous and extremely talented American journalists reported the war against Nazi Germany for a grateful audience. Based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, War Beat, Europe provides the first comprehensive account of what these reporters witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home front's perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American history.
In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative, Steven Casey takes readers from the inner councils…
I'm a scholar with a deep interest in the critical study of propaganda and its role in shaping public perceptions of terrorism, particularly in Spain. My passion for this topic stems from the recognition that propaganda is pervasive in today’s world and that accusations of terrorism are often deployed strategically to delegitimize a society’s political opponents.
By examining how groups are framed as “terrorists” and unlearning the biased narratives that surround them, we can begin to understand their true nature beyond superficial prejudice. This perspective drives my commitment to exploring media, political discourse, and historical context critically, making me well-positioned to recommend works that illuminate the complex interplay between propaganda, terrorism, and societal perception.
This book completely changed how I understand the relationship between media, democracy, and power.
It exposes how supposedly free press can serve elite interests while silencing dissent. I admire its rigor and its relevance—decades later, its "propaganda model" still applies, at least to anything written in the pre-digital era. It gave me the vocabulary to critique mainstream narratives around terrorism.
A detailed and compelling political study of how elite forces shape mass media.
Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky investigate how an underlying elite consensus structures mainstream media. Here they skilfully dissect the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.
This book reveals how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the double standards underlying accounts of free elections, a free press, and governmental repression between Nicaragua and El Salvador; between the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Vietnam; between the genocide in Cambodia under a pro-American government and genocide…
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
I’ve written a couple of books about other subjects, but most of my professional life has been devoted to writing, speaking, and teaching about the South. I’ve been doing it ever since I went north to college and graduate school in the 1960s. My early books and articles were written as a sociologist, mostly for other sociologists, but in the 1970s I started writing what I learned to call “familiar essays” for a more general readership, and lately I’ve been writing about Southern foodways—three books about barbecue (so far), one of them a cookbook. I’ve also written several country songs (only one of them recorded).
Smith, professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, examines the stories that Southerners have told about themselves—the “myths” of the South. The Old South/Lost Cause/New South myths “controlled Southern culture and Southern rhetoric for one hundred fifty years,” he argues, but by the mid-twentieth century, the strain between myth and reality finally became too great and “a period of mythic confusion,” ensued. By the 1970s, however, Southern artists, scholars, journalists, politicians, and preachers—both Black and white—had forged a new myth, based on the themes of distinctiveness, racial civility, and community. When Smith wrote, he was confident that there will always be somemyth of the South, that it won’t become a mere quadrant of the U.S. with a "dysfunctional amythic culture." We shall see.
Having studied statistics in the 1980s and realised that forecasting energy reserves wasn’t for me, I stumbled into a career in market research. A chance reading of a book on psychoanalysis opened my eyes to how little we all understand ourselves and I started to look for better ways to identify how consumers think. After developing techniques from psychoanalysis and behavioural science I started my own consultancy firm in 2005. Over the last seventeen years I’ve been lucky enough to advise some of the world’s biggest brands, make regular appearances in the media discussing consumer affairs and, with my book Consumer.ology, to upset some of the biggest market research companies.
Early in my career I was responsible for running the UK brand tracking and customer experience studies of a global brand. I was constantly battling to reconcile what the research told me with what the real data from the business showed was actually going on. This book, written by someone who was a senior editor at the Gallup market research company for years, helped me appreciate some of the reasons that survey results are inaccurate. It also reveals how opinion polls can be used to distort elections and manipulate people – scary stuff.
Drawing on over a decade's experience at the Gallup Poll and a distinguished academic career in survey research, David W. Moore—praised as a "scholarly crusader" by the New York Times—reveals that pollsters don't report public opinion, they manufacture it. In this highly critical book, he describes the questionable tactics pollsters use to create poll-driven news stories-including force-feeding respondents, slanting the wording of questions, and ignoring public ignorance on even the most arcane issues. More than proof that the numbers do lie, The Opinion Makers clearly and convincingly spells out how urgent it is…
I started worrying about populism in 2008, when vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin chastised the elitists, whom she defined as “people who think they’re better than anyone else.” Meanwhile, she thought she was so much better than anyone else that she could serve as backup leader of the world despite the fact that she believed that the political leader of the United Kingdom is the queen. After she lost she vowed, “I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist.” She was unaware that there is a third option: to study so that you know more than the next person.
If you’ve ever wondered if people today are dumber than people in the past, you should watch Idiocracy. And then read this book. It shows how we’ve devolved into people who look at lists of the best five books and never actually read those books. In 2008, for a column for the L.A. Times, I had her take a quiz from the author of the book How Dumb Are You?: The Great American Stupidity Quiz and she got two wrong. I got 11 wrong. The point is: Read her book instead of mine.
A cultural history of the last forty years, The Age of American Unreasonfocuses on the convergence of social forces—usually treated as separate entities—that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; and the triumph of video over print culture. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of “junk thought” that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
The author of biographies, histories, and true crime books, Howard Sounes is best-known for Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, now in an updated edition; Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life; and Fred & Rose, the bestselling story of married English serial killers Fred and Rose West. Other books include Amy, 27, Seventies, Heist, and biographies of Paul McCartney and Lou Reed.
The best true crime books are similar to any good biography, in that they are crafted, powerfully-researched lives of unusual people. With true crime, the life of the subject usually goes awry, however, by degrees from childhood, culminating in disaster, which affects others. Crime takes different forms. This gripping book charts the downfall of the brilliant but unscrupulous media baron Robert Maxwell, ending in his mysterious death in 1991. Had he lived, he may well have gone to jail, like his daughter, Ghislaine. Author John Peston has an eye for grotesques and a nice sense of humour.
“A portrait of one of the most enigmatic figures in the annals of white-collar crime. . . . A well-researched, compelling book that uncovers many mysteries about a media tycoon.”—Kirkus Reviews
From the acclaimed author of A Very English Scandal, a thrilling and dramatic true-life account of the rise and fall of one of the most notorious media moguls of all time: Robert Maxwell.
In February 1991, Robert Maxwell triumphantly sailed into Manhattan harbor on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to buy the ailing New York Daily News. Taxi drivers stopped…
