{ "item_title" : "To Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Soul of America", "item_author" : [" Sue B. Howell "], "item_description" : "The United States spends more on healthcare than any developed nation and still bankrupts the people it treats. Its Supreme Court sits at a forty-year approval low. Ninety thousand separate governments set your child's curriculum and your water bill, and no one ever taught you most of their names.To Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Soul of America is a thirty-volume essay collection written for the country's 250th anniversary: a close, honest look at the institutions, habits, and unresolved arguments that actually run American life. Every essay is commissioned from a scholar or journalist (several publish under this collection's single byline, by request) and written for a general reader - no jargon, no throat-clearing, and no obligation to land on one side of an argument rather than describe it fairly.Volume One opens with the body, and the body politic. Ten essays, each independently sourced, each built to stand alone: The American Healthcare System - why medical debt is the nation's leading cause of bankruptcy, and why the U.S. stands alone among wealthy countries in allowing itThe Broken Bench - the Supreme Court's legitimacy crisis, from the Garland vacancy to the undisclosed gifts that went unexamined for twenty yearsThe Zip-Code Lottery - how funding schools through property taxes guarantees unequal educations by designThe Local Government Labyrinth - the 90,000 governments nobody teaches you about, and the elections that decide them at 10 percent turnoutThe Hit That Wouldn't Stay Buried - the NFL's fifteen-year campaign against its own brain scienceThe American Adoption System - power, family, and the search for origins in the DNA ageThe Culture War - critical race theory, book banning, and the fight over wokeCapes and Crusaders - the superhero as American mythologyAmerican BBQ - regional rivalries and the politics of pit cultureThe Last Holdout - America and the metric system it never quite adoptedNone of these essays set out to prove the same point, and none of them do. Read together, though, they trace a single mechanism at work across very different rooms: an American institution built for a reason that once made sense, left running long after the reason expired, and defended now mostly by the fact of its own persistence.This is Book One of a planned thirty-volume series marking America's 250th anniversary. Twenty-nine more institutions are waiting.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/676/9798186765660_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.99", "online_price" : "29.99", "our_price" : "29.99", "club_price" : "29.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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