Sh*t My Dad Says - Justin Halpern

Publisher: It Books; First Printing edition (May 4, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780061992704
ISBN-13: 978-0061992704
ASIN: 0061992704


Sh*t My Dad Says is f______ great!...Very funny, very irreverent, very real. It’s refreshing at a time when we’re all choking to death on political correctness and can go for days without meeting a single person with common sense.” (Janet Evanovich, Time Magazine )

“If you’re wondering if there is a real man behind the quotes on Twitter, the answer is a definite and laugh-out-loud yes.” (Christian Lander, New York Times bestselling author of Stuff White People Like )

“Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching—and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.” (Laurie Notaro, New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club )

“This book is ridiculously hilarious, and makes my father look like a normal member of society.” (Chelsea Handler )

“Shoot-beer-out-your-nose funny.” (Maxim )

“Read this unless you’re allergic to laughing.” (Kristen Bell )

“Justin Halpern’s dad is up there with Aristotle and Winston F*cking Churchill. He’s brilliant, and his son’s book is absolutely hilarious.” (A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All )

“A fun gift book that is bound to crack up anyone who flips through it.” (Los Angeles Times )

Download: Sh*t My Dad Says - Justin Halpern

Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power - John Yoo

Publisher: Kaplan Publishing (January 5, 2010)
Language: English

• ISBN-10: 9781607145554

ISBN-13: 978-1607145554
ASIN: 1607145553

In this contentious study, Berkeley law prof and former Justice Department official Yoo reprises the brief for expansive presidential power that made him one of the Bush administration's most controversial aides. He focuses on a handful of presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR—who, he argues, extended executive authority in novel ways to surmount crises without letting an inherently slow, disorganized, corrupt, and pusillanimous Congress get in the way. In his account, these great presidents started wars without congressional authorization, suspended habeas corpus, detained security risks, secretly wiretapped, remade the economy, and unilaterally interpreted the Constitution. All of this, he insists, comports with the Constitution's grant of broad, ambiguous powers to a unitary executive and, usually, with congressional consensus and public well-being. His analysis culminates in a defense of Bush administration policies on warrantless wiretapping, coercive interrogation, enemy combatants, and Iraq, and a denunciation of Obama's deviations from them. Yoo's chronicle cogently fits in Bush's initiatives with previous presidential arrogations of power. But his tacit premise that the open-ended, ill-defined war on terror compares to previous crises like the Civil War and requires similarly drastic responses will be strongly disputed by civil libertarians. 

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The Pelican Brief - John Grisham

Publisher: Dell (January 5, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0440245931
ISBN-13: 978-0440245933

John Grisham's head was full of movies when he wrote The Pelican Brief, which is such a brisk page-turner you could use it to dry your hair. He had Julia Roberts in mind for the heroine, Darby Shaw, a brilliant Tulane law student who comes up with an ingenious theory to explain the baffling assassinations of two Supreme Court justices in one day. They were shot and strangled by ace international terrorist Khamel, who loves the film Three Days of the Condor, but government gumshoes don't get what connects the deaths. Silly government guys! They died so the conservative president, who just wants to be left alone to play golf, will appoint new, conservative justices who will help out a case involving an industrialist who is the enemy of pelicans and other living things. It's all spelled out for them in Darby's brief. She likes to do legal feats to impress her boyfriend, her boyish law prof Thomas (who, like Grisham, prefers to shave at most once a week, and is cool, smart, and antiauthoritarian). The prof likes to paint her toes red, in homage to Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham. (Sarandon also starred in the film version of Grisham's The Client.)

But when Thomas gets splattered by a car bomb meant for Darby, she escapes the hospital and hooks up with a Washington Post reporter, Gray Grantham, who sleuths like the guys in All the President's Men.

Grisham wishes he hadn't written The Pelican Brief quite so quickly (his first novel, A Time to Kill, went through dozens of drafts), but Pelican's very breathlessness contributes to its dreamy, cinematic chase-o-rama atmosphere.

Download: The Pelican Brief - John Grisham