Newsmax Rising Bestsellers – Week of Feb. 21, 2022

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 buying.

Here are the Newsmax Rising Bestsellers for the week of Feb. 21, 2022:

1. “Who Are You Following? Pursuing Jesus in a Social-Media Obsessed World’’ by Sadie Robertson Huff (Thomas Nelson) “Duck Dynasty” star and motivational speaker Huff explores who we are allowing to influence our daily thoughts and actions amid an online world obsessed with shares and likes. When you follow someone, it’s typically because you want to be like them or live like they do¬ – but who have you placed as your role models?’’ she asks. According to the publisher, the book reveals how Christians can “live a vibrant, bold, and uncompromising life of faith in God by following the Messiah –the ultimate influencer. Discover the love, purpose, and fulfillment that is found only in Jesus.’’

2. “The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley” by Jimmy Soni (Simon & Schuster) A defini-tive look at the origin of PayPal and its founding team, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and many others. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was any-thing but certain. Soni, using his unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today — fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless curren-cy concepts, mobile money transfer — were planted two decades ago by a rare assemblage of talent who came to work together. (Nonfiction)

3. “Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival’’ by Walter Stahr (Simon & Schuster) Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860 — but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presi-dency, were it not for the vital groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speak-ing out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery par-ties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the “attorney general for runaway negroes,” and he fur-thered his reputation as an outspoken U.S. senator and progressive gov-ernor of Ohio. Tapped by Lincoln to become secretary of the treasury, Chase would soon prove vital to the Civil War effort, raising the billions of dollars that allowed the Union to win the war, while also pressing the president to emancipate the country’s slaves and recognize Black rights. (Nonfiction)

4. “April 1945: The Hinge of History’’ by Craig Shirley (Thomas Nel-son) Shirley, renowned presidential historian and longtime Newsmax contributor, presents a compelling account of 1945, detailing how Amer-ica emerged from World War II as a leading superpower. At the start of 1945, America and the world were grieving millions of lives lost in the global conflict. As Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn into his fourth term, optimism over an end to the bloody war had grown. Then, in April, events collided that changed the face of the world forever: the sudden death of Roosevelt; Adolph Hitler's suicide; and the horrific discoveries of Dachau and Auschwitz. Americans doubled down on their completion of the atomic bomb and plans to drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ultimately leading the Japanese Empire to surrender on V-J Day. (Nonfiction)

5. “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” by Laura Shin (PublicAffairs) Shin, a former Forbes editor, looks at the idealists, technologists and opportun-ists fighting to bring cryptocurrency to the masses. She introduces read-ers to such larger-than-life characters as Vitalik

Buterin, the Web3 wunderkind; his short-lived CEO, Charles Hoskinson; and Joe Lubin, a former Goldman Sachs VP who became one of crypto’s most well-known billionaires. Sparks fly as these outsized personalities fight for their piece of a seemingly limitless new business opportunity. (Nonfiction)