Stephen L. Carter

Stephen L. Carter's brilliant debut, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent eleven week son the New York Times best-seller list. Now, in Jericho's Fall, Carter turns his formidable talents to the shadowy world of spies, official secrecy, and financial fraud in a thriller that rivets the reader's attention until the very last page.In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Wall Street titan, lies dying. He summons to his beside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw away his career years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is visiting to say farewell. Instead, she is drawn into a battle over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to wrest from Jericho before he dies.An intricate and timely thriller that plumbs the emotional depths of a failed love affair and a family torn apart by mistrust, Jericho's Fall takes us on a fast-moving journey through the secretive world of intelligence operations and the meltdown of the financial markets. And it creates, in Beck DeForde, an unforgettable heroine for our turbulent age.From the Hardcover edition.

Bestselling author Stephen L. Carter delivers a gripping political thriller set against the backdrop of Watergate, Vietnam, and the Nixon White House.Philmont Castle is a man who has it all: wealth, respect, and connections. He's the last person you'd expect to fall prey to a murderer, but then his body is found on the grounds of a Harlem mansion by the young writer Eddie Wesley, who along with the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, is pulled into a twenty-year search for the truth. The disappearance of Eddie's sister June makes their investigation even more troubling. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics all the way to the Oval Office and President Nixon himself.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Lemaster Carlyle, the president of the country's most prestigious university, and his wife, Julie, the divinity school's deputy dean, are America's most prominent and powerful African American couple. Driving home through a swirling blizzard late one night, the couple skids off the road. Near the sight of their accident they discover a dead body. To her horror, Julia recognizes the body as a prominent academic and one of her former lovers. In the wake of the death, the icy veneer of their town Elm Harbor, a place Julie calls "the heart of whiteness," begins to crack, having devastating consequences for a prominent local family and sending shock waves all the way to the White House.From the Trade Paperback edition.

n his triumphant fictional debut, Stephen Carter combines a large-scale, riveting novel of suspense with the saga of a unique family. The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the Eastern seabord--families who summer at Martha's Vineyard--and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school. Talcott Garland is a successful law professor, devoted father, and husband of a beautiful and ambitious woman, whose future desires may threaten the family he holds so dear. When Talcott's father, Judge Oliver Garland, a disgraced former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicioius circumstances, Talcott wonders if he may have been murdered. Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle that his father left, Talcott must risk his marriage, his career and even his life in his quest for justice. Superbly written and filled with memorable characters, The Emperor of Ocean Park is both a stunning literary achievement and a grand literary entertainment.

"Was George W. Bush doing something un-American in 1999 when, asked by a reporter what philosopher had influenced him most, he named Jesus? Was Bill Clinton doing something irreligious when, just about a year earlier, he stood before the National Prayer Breakfast and a television audience and sought forgiveness? What about the activist preachers who fight to remake the nation in the image they think God prefers and who, every time an election rolls around, recommend to their congregations how they ought to cast their ballots?". "In God's Name in Vain, Yale Law Professor Stephen L. Carter offers provocative and practical answers. Offering his usual mix of insights from history, theology, politics, philosophy and law, Carter contends that a nation that truly values religious freedom must welcome the religious voice into its political counsels. In God's Name in Vain, written with his usual energy, clarity and wit, Carter offers advice on how politically active religious activists can keep their balance on the tightrope, remaining true to their faith while working for genuine change in their nation."--BOOK JACKET.

Something terrible has happened to civility. We can no longer hold political discussions without screaming at each other, so our democracy is dying. We can no longer look at strangers without suspicion and even hostility, so our social life is dying. We can no longer hold public conversation about morality without trading vicious accusations, so our moral life is dying. All the skills of living a common life - what Alexis de Tocqueville called "the etiquette of democracy" - are collapsing around us, and nobody seems to know how to shore them up again. Basic good manners have become a casualty of our postmodern culture. Yale law professor and social critic Stephen L. Carter, whose 1993 bestseller The Culture of Disbelief changed the way we talk about religion in our national life, argues that civility is disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other, and are awash instead in a sea of self-indulgence.^ Neither liberals nor conservatives can help us much, Carter explains, because each political movement, in a different way, exemplifies what has become the principal value of modern America: think what matters most is not the needs or hopes of others, but simply getting what we want. Taking inspiration from the Abolitionist sermons of the nineteenth century, Carter proposes to rebuild our public and private lives around the fundamental rule that we must love our neighbors, a tenet of all the world's great religions. Writing with his familiar combination of erudition and wit, Carter examines the ways in which an ethic of neighbor-love would alter everything from our political campaigns to our fast food outlets to the information superhighway, from the way we behave in the workplace to the way we drive our cars to the way we argue about constitutional rights.^ He investigates many of the fundamental institutions of society - including the family, the churches, and the schools - and illustrates how each one must do more to promote the virtue of civility. Carter draws on such diverse disciplines as law, theology and psychology, as well as the stories from his own life that his readers have come to expect and to enjoy. Whether tracing the history of the fork and analyzing the Vatican's critique of the advertising industry, Civility is forcefully argued; yet it shows, at all times, respect and even affection for those it criticizes. Through it all, Carter emphasizes that loving our neighbors has little to do with how we feel and everything to do with how we choose to act. The true test of civility is whether, out of love and concern for others, we will discipline our individual desires and work for the common good. -- from dust jacket.

Nearly everyone agrees that we have made a mess of the constitutional process for selecting Supreme Court Justices, cabinet officers, and other top federal officials. From the bitter battle over the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 to the Nanny Problem that trapped so many potential public servants in 1993, we have developed a system in which the only way to defeat a nominee is to prove that he or she is "disqualified" - which means, in practice, finding a way to convince the public that the individual is a dangerous radical or has engaged in scandalous misconduct. In a lively and brilliantly argued work, Stephen L. Carter tells what's wrong with our confirmation process, explains how it got this way, and suggests what we can do to fix it. He reviews the most notorious recent confirmation battles - Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Lani Guinier, among many others - and puts them into historical context, reminding us of the bitter attacks on such nominees as Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall. Carter points out that with our current system, "we talk little about a nominee's qualifications. Instead, today's hearings, when anybody pays attention, are mostly about disqualifications." Our confirmation battles will continue to be bloody until we develop a more balanced attitude toward public service and the Supreme Court and come to recognize that human beings have flaws, commit sins, and can be redeemed. Carter's first two books were widely discussed and debated everywhere from the White House to Mirabella, from the New Republic to the New York Times. One of this country's leading constitutional scholars, Carter is particularly adept at offering a new perspective on issues that have split the country along liberal/conservative lines: affirmative action, religion in public life, and, now with this new book, the federal appointments process.

America, it is often noted, is the most religious nation in the Western world. At the same time, many political leaders and opinionmakers have come to view any religious element in public discourse as a tool of the radical right for reshaping American society. In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, Stephen L. Carter argues, we have constructed political and legal cultures that force the religiously devout to act as if their faith doesn't really matter. This book explains how we can preserve the vital separation of church and state while embracing rather than trivializing the faith of millions of citizens or treating religious believers with disdain. What makes Carter's work so intriguing is that he uses liberal means to arrive at what are often considered conservative ends. Carter explains how preserving a special role for religious communities can strengthen our democracy. The book recovers the long tradition of liberal religious witness (for example, the antislavery, antisegregation, and Vietnam-era antiwar movements), and argues that the problem with the 1992 Republican convention was not the fact of open religious advocacy but the political positions being advocated. A vast array of issues appear in a new light: everything from religion in schools to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's mass weddings, from abortion to the Branch Davidians.

In a climate where whites who criticize affirmative action risk being termed racist and blacks who do the same risk charges of treason and self hatred, a frank and open discussion of racial preference is difficult to achieve. But, in the first book on racial preference written from personal experience, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Stephen L. Carter, Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University and self-described beneficiary (and, at times, victim) of affirmative action, does it.Using his own story of success and frustration as "an affirmative action baby" as a point of departure, Carter, who has risen to the top of his profession, provides an incisive analysis of one of the most incendiary topics of our day--as well as an honest critique of the pressures on black professionals and intellectuals to conform to the "politically correct" way of being black.Affirmative action as it is practiced today not only does little to promote racial equality, Carter argues, but also allows the nation to escape rather cheaply from its moral obligation to undo the legacy of slavery. Affirmative action, particularly in hiring often reinforces racist stereotypes by promoting the idea that the black professional cannot aspire to anything more than being "the best black." Has the time come to abandon these programs? No--but affirmative action must return to its simpler roots, Carter argues: to provide educational opportunities for those who might not otherwise have them. Then the beneficiaries should demand to be held to the same standards as anyone else.

The Dissent of the Governed is a diagnosis of what ails the body politic - the unwillingness of people in power to hear disagreement unless forced to - and a prescription for a new process of response. Carter examines the divided American political character on dissent, with special reference to religion, identifying it in unexpected places, with an eye toward amending it before it destroys our democracy. At the heart of this work is a rereading of the Declaration of Independence that puts dissent, not consent, at the center of the question of the legitimacy of democratic government. Carter warns that our liberal constitutional ethos - the tendency to assume that the nation must everywhere be morally the same - pressures citizens to be other than themselves when being themselves would lead to disobedience. This tendency, he argues, is particularly hard on religious citizens whose notion of community may be quite different from that of the sovereign majority of citizens. With reference to a number of cases, Carter shows that disobedience is sometimes necessary to the heartbeat of our democracy - and that the distinction between challenging accepted norms and challenging the sovereign itself, a distinction crucial to the Declaration of Independence, must be kept alive if we are to progress and prosper as a nation.

"From the best-selling author of The Emperor of Ocean Park and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln-a new novel of terrific suspense and surprise: a brilliant amalgam of fact and fiction about a young black woman on whom the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis depends. October 1962. In Cuba: Soviet ships off-load what intelligence reveals to be nuclear missiles. In Washington, President Kennedy and his advisers are in furious debate over how long they can wait to discover what the Soviets intend before dropping the first bomb. And, in Ithaca, New York, Margo Jensen-a nineteen-year-old Cornell sophomore-is swept up in a "bizarre concatenation of circumstances" that will make of her the "back channel" liaison between Soviet Premier Khrushchev and Kennedy. Events unfold too quickly for her even to ask "why me?" But the stunning answer is revealed bit by bit as she races from Ithaca to Bulgaria to Washington, D.C., drawn ever more deeply into the crossfire-figurative and literal-of infighting between governmental agencies, both American and Soviet; into the confidence and-unsettlingly-the affection of the president of the United States; into desperate negotiations to avoid nuclear war; and, finally, into the secrets of the extraordinary legacy-of honor and bravery-she inherited from the father she never knew"--

Presents an analysis of Barack Obama's views on war and the military in the first two years of his presidency, discussing his evolution from being a peace candidate to being a president conducting two wars and how this change affects national security and the nation's future.

"For two months, small-town lawyer Bethany Barclay has been mourning the hit-and-run death of her enigmatic best friend, Annabelle Seaver. Then the son of her wealthiest client is found murdered in her kitchen. When Bethany herself becomes the leading suspect, she must flee both the authorities and a mysterious killer. But there is more at stake than she knows: Bethany is caught in the web of a shadowy organization determined to destroy Christianity"--Dust jacket back.

"TO FIND AN ANGEL, HE MADE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL. Pericles "Perry" Christo is a PI with a past--a former cop, who lost his badge and his family when a corruption scandal left him broke and disgraced. When wealthy Upper East Side matron Julia Drusilla summons him one cold February night, he grabs what seems to be a straightforward (and lucrative) case. The socialite is looking for her beautiful, aimless daughter, Angelina, who is about to become a very wealthy young woman. But as Christo digs deeper, he discovers there's much more to the lovely "Angel" than meets the eye. Her father, her best friend, her boyfriends all have agendas of their own. Angel, he soon realizes, may be in grave danger. and if Christo gets too close, he just might get caught in the crossfire. This classic noir tale twists and turns down New York's mean streets and along Hamptons' beaches and back roads during a bitterly cold and gray winter where nothing is as it seems and everyone has something to hide. In an inventive storytelling approach, each writer brings his or her distinctive voice to a chapter of Inherit the Dead, building the tension to a shocking, explosive finale"--