{"title":"Books by Sasha Abramsky","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781645030430","title":"Chaos Comes Calling","description":"\u003cb\u003eA harrowing tale of how political polarization threatens America’s social fabric, told through the differing fates of two communities riven by ideological and partisan battles\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory set off a reign of demagoguery and—ten months into a pandemic—an incitement to violence that led a mob of thousands to descend on the Capitol in Washington, DC. Fueled by suspicion, conspiracy, and bigotry, extremists fought to seize control of the country. Many years and a reelection later, local communities around the United States continue to feel the ricochet effect of these events.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eChaos Comes Calling\u003c\/i\u003e, Sasha Abramsky tells the parallel stories of two communities, Shasta County, California and Sequim, Washington, where toxic alliances of QAnoners, anti-vaxxers, Christian nationalists, militia supporters, and other denizens of the far-right have worked to take control of the levers of government power. While Sequim ultimately recalibrated in 2021, returning to rationality, Shasta County has descended further into a climate of intolerance and toxic divisiveness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e By illuminating how national political polarization has seeped into local affairs, Abramsky vividly captures how extremism has transformed the country’s politics and continues to upend life at every level. His reporting provides a sobering preview of America’s future if extremism is not reined in.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302881177973,"sku":"9781645030430","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781645030430_48f26dee-36a0-4e57-9084-ed5c0a70e7ff.jpg?v=1786024914"},{"product_id":"9781905559640","title":"The House of Twenty Thousand Books","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis is the story of Sasha Abramsky's grandparents, Chimen and Miriam Abramsky, and of their unique home at 5 Hillway, around the corner from Hampstead Heath.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn their semi-detached house, so deceptively ordinary from the outside, the Abramskys created a remarkable House of Books. It became the repository for Chimen's collection of thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and other printed, handwritten and painted documents, representing his journey through the great political, philosophical, religious and ethical debates that have shaped the western world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChimen Abramsky was barely a teenager when his father, a famous rabbi, was arrested by Stalin's secret police and sentenced to five years hard labour in Siberia, and fifteen when his family was exiled to London. Lacking a university degree, he nevertheless became a polymath, always obsessed with collecting ideas, with capturing the meanderings of the human soul through the world of great thoughts and thinkers. Rejecting his father's Orthodoxy, he became a Communist, made his living as a book-dealer and amassed a huge, and astonishingly rare, library of socialist literature and memorabilia. Disillusioned with Communism and belatedly recognising the barbarity at the core of Stalin's project, he transformed himself once more, this time into a liberal and a humanist. To his socialist library was added a vast trove of Jewish history volumes. Chimen ended his career as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at UCL, London and rare manuscripts expert for Sotheby's.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith his wife Miriam, Chimen made their house a focal point for left-wing intellectual Jewish life: hundreds of the world's leading thinkers, from Isaiah Berlin to Eric Hobsbawm, dined at their table. \u003ci\u003eThe House of Twenty Thousand Books\u003c\/i\u003e brings alive this latter-day salon by telling the story of Chimen Abramsky's love affair with ideas and with the world of books and of Miriam's obsession with being a hostess and with entertaining. Room by room, book by book, idea by idea, the world of these politically engaged intellectuals, autodidacts and dreamers is lovingly resurrected.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this extraordinary elegy to a lost world, Sasha Abramsky's passionate narrative brings to life once more not just the Hillway salon, but the ideas, the conflicts, the personalities and the human yearnings that animated it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308291043701,"sku":"9781905559640","price":14.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781905559640_6358f483-53ee-42f9-b031-376013b1d6a2.jpg?v=1786029157"},{"product_id":"9781682196762","title":"American Carnage","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA gripping narrative of federal workers caught in Trump’s second-term purge, and the devastating consequences for American democracy.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAmerican Carnage\u003c\/em\u003e follows eleven federal workers, in eight government agencies, from the time they were told they were fired in the early weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration through to the summer of 2025. With Trump having empowered the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his Department of Government Efficiency, to make dramatic cuts to many of the country’s most important agencies, what unfolded in these months was a cascading tragedy of historic proportions.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTheir stories, which show a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation, are America’s stories. What happened to them—the bullying, the intimidation, the deliberate removal of financial stability—also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees. A fierce reckoning with the intimate and far-reaching effects of these layoffs, both on the individuals who lost their jobs and on the millions of Americans who found their access to basic government services curtailed, \u003cem\u003eAmerican Carnage\u003c\/em\u003e is the first book-length account of how these cuts dulled and denuded our city on the hill, leaving a morally impoverished landscape in their wake.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56369119199605,"sku":"9781682196762","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781682196762_0fc1b506-b6b0-4fc5-8246-3b85bf33ad04.jpg?v=1786024256"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-sasha-abramsky.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}