Below is a selected list of 10 books suggested by Bill Moyers Journal staff that will keep you informed and engaged in your democracy between the dog days of summer and the election in November.
(in no particular order)

THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy By William Greider Capitalism produces “greater inequalities, generation after generation,” and is “gradually killing nature,”

…so argues veteran journalist William Greider in his insightful exploration of how ordinary people can change American society and reform American business to achieve a more “healthy, balanced, and humane future.” It is an optimistic account of how citizens of every stripe—who Greider refers to as “active pioneers”—are attempting to change capitalism in promising ways, and are not waiting on politicians to make progress.

Watch an interview with William Greider on Wall Street, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: July 18, 2008

RECLAIMING CONSERVATISM: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost - And How It Can Find Its Way Back By Mickey Edwards “Americans will soon vote in one of the most important elections in the nation’s history. And it will not involve Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John McCain. This is the reality of American ‘exceptionalism,’ a unique form of divided powers in which a president is the nation’s “head of state” but neither head of government nor head of the government’s lawmaking — and thus priority-setting — branch,”

…says the former Republican congressman and leading figure in the American conservative movement Mickey Edwards. Edwards argues that conservatives have abandoned their core principles of checks and balances and due process in favor of an “imperial” presidency. From Goldwater to Reagan, conservatives tried to protect citizens from government intrusion; now they see few limits on what government can do. The book concludes that the conservative movement is at odds with American’s civil liberties, and that the movement will have serious ramifications for the next administration– and beyond.

Watch an interview with Mickey Edwards and Ross Douthat on the Conservative Heart, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: July 11, 2008

OUR DAILY MEDS By Melody Petersen “Could drugs be killing people but escaping all blame, leaving them to harm even more Americans until someone, finally, catches on?”

This question stirred Petersen to write this book. Having spent four years as a reporter covering the drug industry for The New York Times, Petersen investigates and documents a drug industry whose core drive is profit, and one that has insinuated itself, through money, into every level of drug research. This book illustrates not only the questionable behavior of the drug companies but also the serious consequences of Americans’ dependency on prescription drugs.

Watch an interview with Melody Petersen about her new book Our Daily Meds, and how drug companies market medication, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: July 11, 2008

RAISE THE FLOOR: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us By Holly Sklar, Laryssa Mykyta, and Susan Wefald “Our minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s, and why is it? One of the things going on is that income and wealth inequality have gone back to the 1920s. We are back at levels that we saw right before the Great Depression.”

According to Sklar, the U.S. has become the most unequal nation in the Western world. Documented with more than 50 tables and charts, Sklar shows that good wages mean good business—and lead to a path of long-term success, this book challenges us with a mission to change direction, and ultimately to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

Watch an interview with Holly Sklar on Wages and Work, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: June 13, 2008

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality By Martha Nussbaum “If you look into the religions, they have this deep idea of human dignity and the source of dignity being conscience. This capacity for searching for the meaning of life. And that leads us directly to the idea of respect. Because if conscience is this deep and valuable source of searching for meaning, then we all have it whether we’re agreeing or disagreeing. And we all ought to respect it and respect it equally in one another.”

Nussbaum traces the separation of state and religion throughout our history, and demonstrates the possibility of accommodating religious differences on equal terms with equal respect. The book also covers attempts at suppressing the religious worship of various groups in the U.S., including the Amish, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Native Americans, and Roman Catholics. She argues that threats to religious liberty are not unique to the U.S., but that its response to these threats since colonial days is unique, and presents us with a model worth adopting elsewhere in the world.

Watch an interview with Martha Nussbaum about church and state, and her newest book, Liberty of Conscience, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: April 18, 2008

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II By Douglas A. Blackmon “The slavery that survived long past emancipation was an offense permitted by the nation, perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the time.”

What Blackmon details in this book is one of the most shameful and unexplored chapters in American history, when a new form of slavery was resurrected from the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans. He describes shocking evidence of free men forced into industrial servitude, faced with subhuman living conditions, and subject to torture. Blackmon orients this narrative toward one family and its descendants, and to one forgotten black man, Green Cottenham. It’s Cottenham’s voice that rests at the center of this groundbreaking historical expose.

Watch an interview with Douglas Blackmon on his book Slavery by Another Name, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: June 20, 2008

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court By Jeffrey Toobin “For a long time, during the middle of the twentieth century, it wasn’t even clear what it meant to be a judicial conservative. Then, with great suddenness, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, judges and lawyers on the right found a voice and an agenda. Their goals reflected and reinforced the political goals of the conservative wing of the Republican Party.”

Just in time for the 2008 presidential election, where the future of the Court could be determined for decades to come, Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition. With possible retirements of Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter in the next term, major changes are in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations. Based on exclusive interviews with the justices themselves, The Nine guides us through the last 15 years of court history. Toobin argues that politics will always be a part of law and that presidents should be chosen with that in mind. The question, he poses, is whose politics will control the future of the Court.

Watch an interview with Jeffrey Toobin on The U.S. Supreme Court, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: May 23, 2008

WALL STREET: America’s Dream Palace By Steve Fraser ”Wall Street had proved itself not only ethically challenged and dangerously omnipotent but, more damning than that, omni-incompetent,”

…so writes historian Fraser about the aftermath of the 1929 crash. The history of Wall Street has alternated between periods of sharp public hostility and good times. The turmoil on Wall Street today is not unlike that of the past, with criminal investigations of mortgage lenders, thousands of job cuts across the financial market, and an economic recession with no end in sight. Drawing on the modern parallels and differences to the first Gilded Age, Fraser illustrates the big disparity between the rich and poor, and the increasing strain on working Americans.

Watch an interview with Steve Fraser on Gilded Ages, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: June 13, 2008

SO WRONG FOR SO LONG: How the Press, the Pundits – and the President – Failed on Iraq By Greg Mitchell “A young reporter in Denver said to me that he thought war reporting was the highest calling for a journalist…I realized he was dead wrong. The highest calling in journalism is not war reporting. It’s finding the story that would help prevent a war. Along the road to Baghdad, we seem to have lost that idea,”

Mitchell writes in one of the eighty columns collected his tell-all book So Wrong For So Long, about how the media failed to properly cover the Iraq War. Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Mitchell traces the conflict — from the “runup” to the “surge” – and explores how we got into the war in Iraq, and why we just can’t seem to get out.

Watch an interview with Greg Mitchell on Media, McClellan, and the War, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: June 6, 2008

TORTURE TEAM: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values By Philippe Sands “Torture at Guantánamo was sanctioned by the most senior advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense,”

…according to the international lawyer and professor of law at University College London and author of Torture Team Philippe Sands. In Torture Team, Sands focuses on the day December 2, 2002, when Donald Rumsfeld signed a memorandum authorizing 18 techniques of interrogation not previously allowed by the United States, and the Justice Department concurred. Sands traces the life of that memo and examines the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the U.S. airbase at Bagram. He draws on official documents and interviews with key players to explain how the U.S. Military went from strict field-manual interrogations to techniques that included sleep deprivation, nudity, stress positions, and water boarding.

Watch an interview with Philippe Sands on his new book Torture Team, originally aired on Bill Moyers Journal: May 9, 2008