CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (SelectBooks, 2013), constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead’s chilling portrait of a nation in the final stages of transformation into a police state, complete with surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, SWAT team raids, roadside strip searches, blood draws at DUI checkpoints, mosquito drones, tasers, privatized prisons, GPS tracking devices, zero tolerance policies, overcriminalization, and free speech zones, has been named a finalist in the Foreword Book of the Year Awards. Winners of the independent publishing award will be announced later this year.

Whitehead, whose best-selling book lays bare the inner workings of an increasingly pervasive surveillance state, including the NSA’s program to track the communications of all Americans and map the daily activities of all people in the United States, will be appearing at the Virginia Festival of the Book on Thursday, March 20, 2014, to speak on the themes within A Government of Wolves and how they pertain to a nation at war with itself. Whitehead’s session, “Wars Within and Without Ends,” will take place at 12 pm EST at the UVa Bookstore in Charlottesville, Va.

A Government of Wolves is now available for purchase online at Amazon.com and in stores. Review copies are available to members of the media upon request.

“John Whitehead is one of the most eloquent and knowledgeable defenders of liberty, and opponents of the growing American police state, writing today,” stated Ron Paul, a twelve-term US congressman and former presidential candidate. “I am pleased to recommend A Government of Wolves to anyone interested in learning how modern America increasingly resembles a dystopian science fiction film instead of a Constitutional Republic.”

A Government of Wolves has been hailed by those on the left and right of the political spectrum and at every point in between, for its masterful chronicling of America’s shift away from the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, which historically shielded us from government abuses. Drawing on his vast knowledge of history, culture, and law, Whitehead compellingly argues that fiction has now become fact. Indeed, with sci fi movies such as Minority Report, 1984, The Matrix, They Live, and V for Vendetta pointing the way, America has become that futuristic society of celluloid fantasies in which a passive, uninformed populace gives rise to an overbearing, out-of-control government. This is the future George Orwell warned against. This is the present that Whitehead cautions could become an endless nightmare from which there is no awakening unless we act now. As American historian and nationally syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff notes in his special introduction to A Government of Wolves: “We have been through some troubling times before in our nation’s history. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 . . . the Red Raids in the early 1920s . . . the Japanese internment camps of World War Two . . . What we have now may be more insidious. Indeed, I believe we are in a worse state now than ever before in this country. With the surveillance state closing in on us, we are fighting to keep our country free from our own government.”

John Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated, and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law. A prominent leader in the national dialogue on civil liberties and human rights and a formidable champion of the Constitution, Whitehead’s concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him in 1982 to establish The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the defense of civil liberties and human rights.