Newsmax Rising Bestsellers – Week of Feb. 7, 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. 7, 2022:

1. “Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East’’ by David Friedman (Broadside Books) The Trump administration’s peace agreements in the Middle East are considered by many to be the greatest foreign policy accomplishment in decades. Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, explains how the administration pulled it off by tossing the State Department playbook aside and incorporating insights from his many years as a negotiator in the American private sector. It resulted in the Abraham Accords: a historic series of peace deals between Israel and the five Muslim nations. (Nonfiction)

2. “The Thin Blue Lie: An Honest Cop vs the FBI’’ by Greg Dillon (Bombardier Books) Dillon, a veteran state investigator and former FBI agent, was assigned to a federal fugitive task force in Connecticut when he inadvertently uncovered a pattern of misconduct and falsified affidavits. But after reporting his concerns to the politically connected chief state’s attorney, the whistleblower found himself being investigated, transferred, demoted and threatened. With the help of legendary whistleblower Frank Serpico, he takes on both the state of Connecticut and the Department of Justice, resulting in an explosive verdict. (Nonfiction)

3. “True Identity: Cracking the Oldest Kidnapping Cold Case and Finding My Missing Twin’’ by Paul Joseph Fronczac and Alex Tresniowski (Post Hill Press) When he was 10 years old, Paul Fronczak was snooping around for Christmas presents in a crawl space in his family’s Chicago home. There, he found hundreds of old newspaper clippings about the kidnapping of a day-old infant in a hospital in 1964. He also learned, two years later, the boy was found and returned to his family — and that the boy was him. Nearly 50 years later, Paul, acting on long-held suspicions, took a DNA test that proved he was not the kidnapped boy. In an instant, he found himself at the center of two half-century-old mysteries — who was he, and where was the real Paul? (Nonfiction)

4. “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media’’ by Jacob Mchangama (Basic Books) A global history of free speech from the ancient world to today — tracing the legal, political, and cultural history of this idea, through stories of its many defenders, from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and 9th century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists. The author, founder of Justitia, a free speech think tank, argues the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet, he says, the desire to restrict speech, too, is constant and even its champions can be led down this path when the rise of new and contrarian voices challenge power and privilege of all stripes. (Nonfiction)

5. “Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It’’ by John Abramson, M.D. (Mariner Books) A veteran Harvard medical professor argues that Big Pharma’s relentless pursuit of ever-higher profits corrupts medical knowledge — misleading doctors, misdirecting American health care, and harming our health. As a result, the United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries — yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world.  Abramson suggests ways the system can be fixed. (Nonfiction)