Though written ten years ago, here's a source of inspiration and integrity tailor-made for our times. Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time is an antidote to the twin scourges of modern life - powerlessness and cynicism. In his evocative style, reminiscent of Thomas Moore and M.Scott Peck, Paul Loeb tells moving stories of ordinary Americans who have found unexpected fulfillment in social involvement. Through their example and Loeb's own wise and powerful lessons, we are compelled to move from passivity to participation. The reward of our action, we learn, is nothing less than a sense of connection and purpose not found in a purely personal life.

"Rich, engaging, clearly written. An essential book for anyone who wants to work for change." - Howard Zinn

In explaining why we had the tremendous rise in housing prices and then the plummeting of housing prices, George Soros, the respected economist, puts the responsibility on the financial industry for the bubble, both the rise and fall of prices. He explains, "Banks give you credit based on the value of the houses. But they don't seem to somehow understand that the value of the houses can be affected by the amount of credit they are willing to give."

George doesn't believe that economies will self-adjust. Nor does he think the financial industry should police itself. He points out that "...this belief that everybody pursuing his self-interests will maximize the common interests or will take care of the common interests is a false idea. It's a suitable idea for those who are rich, who are successful, who are powerful. It suits them to justify you know, enjoying the fruits without paying taxes."

Most commentators agree that the freezing of credit, tied to a lack of confidence in the economy — among banks, investors and consumers alike — are key problems threatening to push the world into a recession. The near-daily, sweeping interventions improvised by governments in the United States and across the globe are attempts to halt the break-down of the financial system and restore the faith needed for credit to start moving again.

In this book, George Soros explains the credit crisis through the lens of his conception of financial markets and human affairs.

In this compelling, optimistic book, Myers calls for a new social contract between the older and younger generations, based on their mutual interests and the moral responsibility of each generation to provide for children and the elderly.

Combining a rich scholarly perspective with keen insight into contemporary political dilemmas, Immigrants and Boomers creates a new framework for understanding the demographic challenges facing America and forging a national consensus to address them.

"We've got some difficult days ahead," civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis's Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968.

"But it really doesn't matter to me now because I've been to the mountaintop... And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

These prophetic words, uttered the day before his assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his "promised land" of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last twelve years of his life.

Kings own words are commemorated here in the only major one-volume collection of this seminal twentieth-century American prophet's writings, speeches, interviews, and autobiographical reflections. A Testament of Hope contains Martin Luther King, Jr.'s essential thoughts on nonviolence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more.

Acclaimed author and Emergent church leader Brian McLaren states, "More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with 'spiritual needs' to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on 'me' and 'my eternal destiny,' but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction."

McLaren asks, "Shouldn't a message purporting to be the best news in the world be doing better than this?" What he sets forth in this provocative, unsettling work is a "form of Christian faith that is holistic, integral, balanced, that offers good news for both the living and the dying, that speaks of God's grace at work both in this life and the life to come, both to individuals and to societies and the planet as a whole."

An impassioned call to action to Americans from all walks of life to restore the checks and balances and our time-honored protections against abuses of power outlined by our Founding Fathers. Our country's founders believed that the proper goal of the State was to make men and women free to develop their faculties and to pursue virtue and wisdom. Our Constitution was built around these principles, protecting civil liberties and developing a careful system of checks and balances which protected our freedom from tyranny.

Naomi Wolf's latest work, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot exposes how the escalation of Executive Power has eroded these core values and systems, limiting our Congress to make laws, and our courts to interpret them - a scenario that our Founding Fathers foresaw and warned against. Wolf outlines in this citizen call to action, reminiscent of Thomas Paine's revered Common Sense, the real threats that exist to our civil liberties and explains how working together we can solve the growing threat.

This wholly original new work by the best-selling author of The Great Unraveling challenges America to reclaim the values that made it great.

With this major new volume, Paul Krugman, "the heir apparent to Galbraith" (Alan Blinder) and, today's most widely read economist, studies the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age to the unraveling of that achievement and the reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s.

Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a "new New Deal," Krugman has created his finest book to date, a work that weaves together a nuanced account of three generations of history with sharp political, social, and economic analysis.

This book, written with Krugman's trademark ability to explain complex issues simply, will transform the debate about American social policy in much the same way as did John Kenneth Galbraith's deeply influential book The Affluent Society.

In a series of focus groups in 2005 and 2006, EPI asked middle-class Americans to discuss their economic insecurities. The discussions revealed not only a profound ambivalence about the economy, but also a widening gap between the ways that everyday Americans and influential elites talk about the economy. Co-authored by David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, and Ruy Teixeira, this book discusses that gap and how to bridge it, allowing for changing economic, social, and political conditions. The study includes a special section that offers 12 suggestions for how to 'speak American' when talking about economics.

"At a time when the tide runs toward a sure conformity, when dissent is often confused with subversion, when a man's belief may be subject to investigation as well as his actions..." (Studs Terkel)

Those words of Terkel have the ring of a modern day mayday call of distress, yet they were written in 1952. Ed Murrow, introducing an assemblage of voices in 2006 in the volume This I Believe, sounded a claxon. It is an old story yet ever-contemporary. In 1791, Tom Paine, the most eloquent visionary of the American Revolution, sounded off:

Freedom has been hunted around the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear made man afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth is that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing... In such a situation, man becomes what he ought to be. He sees his species not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred... (Thomas Paine)

It is the pursuit of this truth that appears to be the common tenor of all the voices you hear in this book. Albert Einstein once observed that westerners have a feeling the individual loses his freedom if he joins, say, a union or any group. Precisely the opposite is the case. Once you join others, even though at first your mission fails, you become a different person, a much stronger one. You feel that you really count, you discover your strength as an individual because you have along the way discovered others share in what you believe, you are not alone; and thus a community is formed.

Americans face prodigious economic and social challenges today, yet nothing unifies the various strategies and causes that attempt to meet these challenges.

Economist Jared Bernstein believes that frames such as "the ownership society" stress an ever-shrinking role for government and an ever-increasing risk for individuals, clearly implying: "You're on your own."

Arguing that this shift toward extreme individualism needlessly reduces the country's economic security and the living standards of most families, he describes the political and economic forces that pushed the country away from collective action and exposes the significant societal costs associated with the shift.