This Book Listing is in order of its first use in the series. To learn more about each book, click on the red title.
1. THE NAKED COMMUNIST by W. Cleon Skousen (1958 – it is now in its 11th printing the latest being in 2017). W. Cleon Skousen is best remembered as a national bestselling author, speaker, and teacher who lectured in every state and province in North America, and in more than sixty countries worldwide. He received his JD from George Washington University and was a lifelong scholar of history and law. After graduation, he began a 16-year career with the FBI in 1935. In 1945 he wrote a public relations document called “the Story of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” It was produced as an official publication of the FBI which was printed in the millions. Skousen’s regular duties brought him into contact with Communists and Communist sympathizers as well as FBI agents. In 1958 he completed writing The Naked Communist. The American Bar Association recommended it in its 1958 Annual Report. The U.S. Army Intelligence School listed it as recommended reading. Congressmen, senators, schools and universities across the land wrote to express gratitude and endorse Skousen’s book. Of Skousen, Ronald Reagan wrote in 1964, “No one is better qualified to discuss the threat to the nation from Communism.” The “45 Goals of Communism” were included in the eighth edition that was published in March 1961. Two years later those same 45 goals were read into the Congressional record. It is now approaching two million in sales. A project left unfinished when Skousen passed away in 2006 was the real story of socialism entitled The Naked Socialist. This book was completed in 2014 by his son Paul B. Skousen.
2. THE NAKED SOCIALIST by Paul B Skousen (2014).The Naked Socialist is the third in a series of books written to unmask the human combines of control and power that have labored for millennia to enslave others. The first two works, The Naked Communist (1958) and The Naked Capitalist (1970), by W. Cleon Skousen dealt with the ugly aftermath of those forces in modern times. The Naked Socialist goes further, all the way back to the beginning to explain in layman terms how elitist minorities have always managed to take charge over everybody else. It’s a modern phenomenon that began 6,000 years ago – and has failed to achieve its promised goals each and every time.
4. OUR REVOLUTION by Bernie Sanders (2016). Bernie Sanders ran as a Democratic candidate for president of the United States in 2015 and 2016. He served as mayor of Burlington Vermont’s largest city, for eight years before defeating an incumbent Republican to be the sole congressperson for the state in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990. He was elected to the Senate in 2006 and is now in his second term, making him the longest-serving Independent in the history of the Congress. Sanders was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Presidency in 2016.
5. THE ESSENTIAL BERNIE SANDERS and his VISION FOR AMERICA by Jonathan Tasini (2015). Jonathan Tasini is a writer, an organizational strategist, and an economics and political analyst. He is the author of It’s Not Raining, We’re Being Peed On; The Scam of the Deficit Crisis; The Audacity of Greed; Free Markets, Corporate Thieves, and the Looting of America; The Get Cake, We Eat Crumbs; The Real Story behind Today’s Unfair Economy; and The Edifice Complex: Rebuilding the American Labor Movement to Face the Global Economy. He has been widely published, including The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Playboy Magazine, Washington Post, New York Time, Los Angeles Times, and CNBC. He is the founder, editor, and publisher of “Working Life,” a leading progressive blog on work and the economy. He served as president of the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) for thirteen years.
6. THE PROBLEM WITH SOCIALISM by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (2016). Thomas J. DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola University, Maryland, and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Washington Post, USA Today and many other publications and is the author of several popular books, including Hamilton’s Curse, The Real Lincoln, and How Capitalism Saved America.
7. THE ANTI-CAPITALISTIC MENTALITY by Ludwig von Mises (1956 reprinted 2016). Mises emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1940. Since the mid-20th century the libertarian movement in the United States has been strongly influenced by Mises” writings. Mises has been described as having approximately seventy close students in Austria and the Austrians as the insiders of the Chicago school of economics. The Ludwig von Mises Institute was founded in the United States to continue his teachings. He died in 1973 at the age of 92.
8. THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE TO SOCIALISM by Kevin D. Williamson (2011). Kevin D. Williamson is deputy managing editor of the National Review, a columnist for The New Criterion, and an adjunct professor at The King’s College, New York City. A frequent commentator on politics and economics, he has appeared on the Glenn Beck Show, the Kudlow Report, the CBS Evening News, BBC, Power & Politics, and dozens of talk-radio programs.
9. THE HEALING OF AMERICA by T. R. Reid (2010). T. R. Reid is an American reporter, documentary film correspondent, and author. He is a graduate of Princeton University, served as a naval officer, taught at Princeton and the University of Michigan, before working for The Washington Post. He has written several books including A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System; The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution; Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West. He has also been a frequent guest on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.
10. AMERICA’S BITTER PILL by Steven Brill (2015). Steven Brill has been a journalist and media entrepreneur for more than thirty years. He founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer Magazine, ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he has written The Teamsters; After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era; Class Welfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools. He also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative to encourage and enable talented young people to become journalists. The Initiative has trained and motivated more than one hundred Yale Journalism Scholars, who are employed at some of the world’s most prestigious news organizations.
11. REINVENTING AMERICA’S SCHOOL SYSTEM by David Osborne (2017). David Osborne is the author or coauthor of five nonfiction books: Laboratories of Democracy, Reinventing Government (a New York Times best seller), Banishing Bureaucracy, The Reinventor’s Fieldbook, and The Price of Government. In February 2017 he published his first historical novel, The Coming. He has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, Education Week, and many others. Osborne is currently a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, directing the Reinventing America’s Schools Project.
13. THE TEACHER WARS: A HISTORY OF AMERICA’S MOST EMBATTLED PROFESSION by Dana Goldstein (2014). Dana Goldstein comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwartz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.
14. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848). Karl Marx (born May 5, 1818 and died March 14, 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. In addition to The Communist Manifest he also wrote the three volume Das Kapital. His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory. Marx’s theories about society, economics, and politics are collectively understood as Marxism. Frederick Engels (born November 20, 1820 and died August 5, 1895) was a German philosopher, communist, social scientist, journalist, and businessman. Engels founded Marxist theory together with Karl Marx. Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto and supported Marx financially to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx’s death, Engels edited the second and third volumes.
15. HAVANA REAL: ONE WOMAN FIGHTS TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT CUBA TODAY BY Yoani Sanchez (2011). Yoani Sanchez, a University of Havana graduate in philology, emigrated to Switzerland in 2002. Two years later, she decided to return to Cuba, but promised herself she would live there as a free person and started her blog, Generation Y, upon her return. In 2008 Time Magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World: it named Generation Y one of the “Best Blogs” of 2009. Spain honored her with its highest award for digital journalism, the Ortega y Gasset Prize. She has also been named one of the “100 Most Notable Hispanic Americans: by El Pais (Spain). In 2010 she received the World Press Freedom Hero award from the International Press Institute and was named a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum. In 2009 she became the first – and so far, only – blogger to interview President Barack Obama, who commented that her blog “provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba,” and applauded her efforts to “empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology.” She lives with her husband, independent journalist Reinaldo Escobar and their son Teo in a high-rise apartment in Havana, overlooking Revolution Square.
16. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF A RISING POWER: CHINA WAKES by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn (1998). Nicholas D. Kristof graduated from Harvard College in three years, Phi Beta Kappa, then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. After graduating with first class honors, he studied Arabic for a year in Cairo and joined The New York Times in 1984 as an economics reported. In 1986 he became the Hong Kong bureau chief and Beijing bureau chief in 1988. Sheryl WuDunn graduated with honors from Cornell University and worked as an international loan officer for Bankers Trust Company for three years. She then went to Harvard Business School, where she earned her M.B.A. and then to Princeton University, where she earned a master’s of public administration in international affairs. Her interests switched to journalism, and she worked for several major newspapers before joining The New York Times as a correspondent in Beijing. Kristof and WuDunn were married in 1988. They won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen protests in China, becoming the first married couple ever to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Their China coverage also won them the George Polk Award for international reporting and the Overseas Press Club Award for foreign reporting.
17. GREAT LEAP FORWARD by Mao Min (2017). This is topic 4 of the Selected Topics from the book entitled “The Revival of China.” The full book is about the revival of China in the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. This topic is about what happened before, during and after the Great Leap Forward initiated by Mao Zedong.
18. THE PARTY: THE SECRET WORLD OF CHINA’S COMMUNIST RULERS by Richard McGregor (2010). Richard McGregor was born in Sydney, Australia and is a reporter for the Financial Times and the publication’s former China bureau chief. He has reported from North Asia for nearly two decades working for the International Herald Tribune, the Australian, BBC, and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
19. AGE OF AMBITION: CHASING FORTUNE, TRUTH, FAITH IN THE NEW CHINA by Evan Osnos (2014). Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker where he served as the China correspondent from 2008 to 2013. He is the winner of the National Book Award, two Overseas Press Club awards, and the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia. Previously, he worked at the Chicago Tribune, where he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2008.
20. DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA by Ezra F. Vogel (2011). Ezra F. Vogel is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard and former Director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and the Asia Center. He taught at Harvard starting in 1964 and became a tenured professor in 1968. Vogel succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director (1972-1977) of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center and Second Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He was Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980-1987) and, since 1987, Honorary Director. He was Chairman of the undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. He was Director of the Asia Center (1997 – 1999). He retired from teaching in 2000. He has authored 16 different books all focused on East Asia.
21. CHINA IN TEN WORDS by Yu Hua (2011). Yu Hua is the author of four novels, six collections of stories and three collections of essays. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2002, he became the first Chinese writer to win the James Joyce Award. His novel Brothers was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and awarded France’s Prix Courrier International. To Live was awarded Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour and To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant were ranked among the ten most influential books in China in the 1990s by Wen Hui Bao, the largest newspaper in Shanghai. Yu Hua lives in Beijing. 22. UNLEARNING LIBERTY by Greg Lukianoff (2014). Greg Lukianoff is an attorney and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). His writings on campus free speech have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, in addition to dozens of other publications. A regular columnist for the Huffington Post, he is a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and has made numerous television appearances, including on the CBS Evening News and Stossel. He received the 2008 Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE. Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. In this book he states, “One thing that makes this book a little different than one might expect is that I am not your stereotypical social-conservative critic of ‘political correctness run amok.’ I am a lifelong Democrat and something of a liberal pedigree. I have never voted for a Republican, nor do I plan to. I believe passionately in gay marriage, abortion rights, legalizing marijuana, and universal health care. I have been a regular blogger for the Huffington Post since 2007.”
23. The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism by Kevin A. Hassett (2021). Kevin Hassett, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and managing director of The Lindsey Group, served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019. Returning to the White House as a senior advisor to President Trump, he helped guide the economic response to the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to his White House service, Hassett was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior economist for the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Columbia University and the New York University of Law. He is the author of the bestsellers Dow 36,000 and Bibbleology.