In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to today, reveals the roots of our debacle. From the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self; from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace–the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives. Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business.

Ten years in the making, Lift Every Voice is the first major history of America's oldest civil rights organization and destined to be a classic in the field. Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) got its start as an elite organization dominated by white reformers at a time when segregation had triumphed in the South and the color line was tightening its hold in the North. By the end of World War I, the NAACP had become a mass-black membership organization reaching from Boston to Los Angeles and into the Mississippi Delta; after World War II, it had become synonymous with the freedom movement itself.

Historian Patricia Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP's activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. The book then moves into the critical postwar era, when, with a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board, the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow. An epic narrative of struggle against injustice, Lift Every Voice lays a new foundation for understanding the modern civil rights movement.

George W. Bush's presidency has helped accelerate a renewed interest in the legal or formal bases of presidential power. It is now abundantly clear that presidential power is more than the sum of bargaining, character, and rhetoric. Presidential power also inheres in the Constitution or at least assertions of constitutional powers. Judging Executive Power helps to bring the Constitution and the courts back into the study of the American presidency by introducing students to sixteen important Supreme Court cases that have shaped the power of the American presidency. The cases selected include the removal power, executive privilege, executive immunity, and the line-item veto, with particularly emphasis on a president's wartime powers from the Civil War to the War on Terror. Through introductions and postscripts that accompany each case, landmark judicial opinions are placed in their political and historical contexts, enabling students to understand the political forces that frame and the political consequences that follow from legal arguments and judgments.

Pulitzer-winning historian Burns gives a brisk, readable tour of the history of the appointment of Supreme Court justices since 1789. In this respect, the book is fresh and compelling. But Burns (Running Alone) has another aim. Particularly aggrieved by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, he argues that every president since Washington has sought to fill the Court with justices who think as he does; that judicial review is unconstitutional; that the unelected Court has never been politically accountable to the American people;and that a courageous president (like Barack Obama, he suggests) should simply announce that, like Andrew Jackson, he won't abide by Supreme Court rulings that invalidate laws enacted by Congress and signed by him. Known for the liberal flags he flies, Burns runs up the radical pennant here. There's no evidence that the American people are as aggrieved over the Court as Burns is. And the term packing should be reserved, as until now it has been, for extreme manipulative efforts like FDR's. This is a terrific little book—save for its politics run amok. (June)

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