Newsmax Rising Bestsellers - Week of Jan. 13, 2020

The Newsmax Rising Bestsellers list will do more than stimulate your mind. These reads may challenge your beliefs, broaden your perspectives, excite your curiosities or widen your imagination.

These books may not necessarily appear on the official New York Times list of bestsellers, but they’re the ones our Newsmax audience is reading, talking about, sharing with friends and even buying.

Here are the Newsmax Rising Bestsellers for the week of Jan. 13th, 2020:

1. “The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians,’’ by David M. Rubenstein (Simon & Schuster)
   If you want the straight dope on the most influential Americans over the past 243 years, Rubenstein’s lively chats with these top historians is a great place to start. There’s David McCullough on John Adams, Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson, Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton, Walter Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin, Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln, A. Scott Berg on Charles Lindbergh, Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King, Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson, Bob Woodward on Richard Nixon and many others, including a special conversation with Chief Justice John Roberts and a foreword by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and first African American to lead America’s national library. Rubenstein, a philanthropist and co-founder of The Carlyle Group knows his stuff and his conversations with the experts are lively – and timely – as they review U.S. history from the Founding Era to the late 20th century. (Non-fiction)
    
2. "Trump's World: GEO DEUS," by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch and Felipe Cuello (Humanix Books).
   President Trump is a disrupter on every front, his unique style can be defined a chaos management, with the president listening to many points of view, playing them off each other and then deciding which best fits the situation. The authors take readers inside his presidency and populist outlook for a unique understanding of what shapes Trump's mind and his foreign affairs policies. The president's motivations are examined and the reader gains an understanding of his political thinking, economic model and more. It's a unique tour inside Trump's world. The book is "a must read for those who desire to understand how we got her and where we are headed," writes Steve Bannon. (Nonfiction)
    
3. “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,’’ by Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn (Alfred A. Knopf)
   These two Pulitzer Prize winners team up again to explore the tragic community of Yamhill, Oregon, where Kristol grew up – an area devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared and about 25 percent of the kids he rode the bus with have died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. They also explore similar problems in Dakotas, New York and Virginia. The authors do find some hope – like the work of Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teens navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor and Daniel McDowell, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests there are ways to solve the nation's drug epidemic. It’s also illustrated with photos by searing images by acclaimed photographer Lynsey Addario. (Non-fiction)
    
4. “Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East,’’ by Kim Ghattas (Henry Holt and Co.)
   Ghattas, a BBC journalist and a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explores how the modern Middle East unraveled, starting in the pivotal year of 1979. She weaves history, geopolitics and culture together to tell the inside story of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran -- born via the 1979 Iranian revolution and fueled by American policy. Ghattas also introduces us to a cast of fascinating characters, including a Pakistani TV anchor who defied her country’s dictator, an Egyptian novelist thrown in jail for indecent writings and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. (Non-fiction)
    
5. “Guilt by Association: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo,” by Alan Dershowitz. (Hot Books)
   The renowned civil-rights attorney takes on one of the most challenging cases of his illustrious career – defending himself against lurid accusations of sex with a minor. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who says she was Jeffrey Epstein’s teenage “sex slave,” claims the billionaire pedophile lent her to Dershowitz for sex and is suing him for defamation for calling her a liar. The Harvard Law Professor Emeritus, who’s countersuing, categorically denies Giuffre’s charges and in this short, powerful book, presents an in‑depth analysis of the accusations, alongside the exculpatory evidence he says proves his account, including emails from his accuser and an admission of his innocence from her lawyer David Boies. Dershowitz also examines the current attitudes toward charges of sexual misconduct, which are today, in the age of #MeToo, he argues, accepted as implicit truth without giving the accused a fair chance to defend themselves. (Non-fiction)