Middle East Books

Poles Jews and the Politics of Nationality or The End of Alliances

2009-12-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892-1914

Author: Joshua D Zimmerman

The Jewish experience on Polish lands is often viewed backwards through the lens of the Holocaust and the ethnic rivalries that escalated in the period between the two world wars. Critical to the history of Polish-Jewish relations, however, is the period prior to World War I when the emergence of mass electoral politics in Czarist Russia led to the consolidation of modern political parties. Using sources published in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, Joshua D. Zimmerman has compiled a full-length English-language study of the relations between the two dominant progressive movements in Russian Poland. He examines the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which sought social emancipation and equal civil rights for minority nationalities, including Jews, under a democratic Polish republic, and the Jewish Labor Bund, which declared that Jews were a nation distinct from Poles and Russians and advocated cultural autonomy. By 1905, the PPS abandoned its call for Jewish assimilation, and recognized Jews as a separate nationality. Zimmerman demonstrates persuasively that Polish history in Czarist Russia cannot be fully understood without studying the Jewish influence and that Jewish history was equally infused with the Polish influence.

	Maps, Tables, Figures, and Illustrations
	Acknowledgments
	Note on Transliterations, Dates, and Terms
	Introduction	3
1	Industrialization and the Rise of the Polish Socialist Party in Tsarist Russia, 1892-97	9
2	The First Sproutings of the Jewish Socialist Movement, 1890-95	36
3	Into the Polish Heartland: The Spread of the Jewish Movement to Warsaw, 1895-97	69
4	Organizational Breakthrough: The Formation of the Jewish Labor Bund, 1897-98	83
5	Ideological Transformation: The Turn to a National Program, 1899-1901	106
6	Polish Socialism Responds: The First Years of the PPS Yiddish Press, 1898-1902	126
7	Toward a Recognition of Jewish Nationality: The PPS and Its Jewish Section, 1902-4	165
8	The 1905 Revolution in Russia and the Transformation of PPS-Bund Relations	191
9	From Politics to the New Yiddish Culture: The Bund in the Period of Revolutionary Defeat, 1907-11	227
10	The PPS and the Jewish Question on the Eve of the First World War	255
	Conclusion	273
	Abbreviations	279
	Notes	281
	Bibliography	333
	Index	349

Interesting book: Appetites or Yoga for Living

The End of Alliances

Author: Rajan Menon

Why should the United States cling to military alliances established during the Cold War when the circumstances are now fundamentally different? In The End of Alliances, Rajan Menon argues that our alliances in Europe and Asia have become irrelevant to the challenges we face today. The United States must be actively involved beyond its borders, but by relying on coalitions whose membership varies depending on the issue at hand. While a strategy that ceases to rely on alliances will mark a dramatic shift in American foreign policy, he reminds us that states routinely reassess and reorient their strategies. The United States, which studiously avoided alliances for much of its history only to embrace them during the Cold War, is no exception. The End of Alliances predicts that the coming change in American strategy will force our traditional allies to rethink their choices and create new patterns in world politics. The controversial argument advanced by Menon will provoke debate among foreign policy specialists and the general public.

The New York Times - Mick Sussman

…Menon is a level-headed analyst, and though his prescription for an updated grand strategy is tentative, his diagnosis of the ills besetting the current one is persuasive.

Foreign Affairs

Alliances have been the cornerstone of U.S. foreign relationssince the 1940s. Even now, they remain the foundation for global security cooperation. But in this provocative book, Menon asserts that such formal military ties are destined to fade away. It is not a return to isolationism that will drive the dissolution of alliances but rather a slow -- and, to Menon's mind, welcome -- strategic reorientation of the United States' global position, with more informal and shifting alignments of states. Menon's thesis is based partly on his reading of the past: the United States has always been ambivalent about security commitments and maintaining a long-term overseas military presence, a national orientation only temporarily overcome by the Cold War. The new security environment, Menon goes on to argue, marked by the rise of terrorism and the absence of threatening great powers, makes alliances dispensable. Moreover, Washington's European and Asian allies are now economically revived and able to provide for their own security. In the end, Menon offers a clear picture of the global shifts that have thrown the role of alliances into question, but his argument that the costs of alliances are rising relative to their benefits is less convincing. Nor does he explore the role of the U.S. alliance system in facilitating cooperation among the advanced democracies. Today's alliances may have outlived their historical causes, but their usefulness remains.

Jeffersons Empire or Encyclopedia of the Palestinians

2009-12-04T04:22:00.000-08:00

Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood

Author: Peter S Onuf

Peter S. Onuf's book traces Jefferson's vision of the American future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire. Onuf's recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaborated in an imperialist context yields original interpretations of our national identity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and of American global dominance in the twentieth century." "In Onuf's view, Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalent conceptions of slavery and Native American rights." "Jefferson's ideas about race reveal the limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikingly documents, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire - a regime of peace, prosperity, and union without coercion - continues to define and expand the boundaries of American national identity.

What People Are Saying

McCoy
In this lively and engaging collection of essays that will stimulate scholars and general leaders alike, Peter Onuf succeeds admirably in taking a fresh look at a subject of vital concern in both Jefferson's world and our own. (Drew McCoy, Clark University)

Drew McCoy
In this lively and engaging collection of essays that will stimulate scholars and general leaders alike, Peter Onuf succeeds admirably in taking a fresh look at a subject of vital concern in both Jefferson's world and our own. (Drew McCoy, Clark University)

Pauline Maier
This thought—provoking study of Jefferson's vision for the American nation is an important contribution to contemporary historical scholarship. It forces readers to ask whether in multiracial, cosmopolitan America, tolerant of cultural differences and at home with partisan conflict, can in any sense be called 'Jeffersonian.'
—(Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Joyce Appleby
Peter Onuf has written a fine study of Jefferson's political thought approached as a coherent body of principles and affirmations formed during the critical years between his entering the lists as a polemicist for the patriot cause and his move to form an opposition to the Federalist policies in Washington's administration twenty years later. Jefferson's Empire is tightly argued, forcefully written, and intellectually challenging.
—(Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles)

Lance Banning
Jefferson's Empire is brilliant work by the historian best qualified to give us a new and thorough analysis of Jefferson's concepts of empire, nation, and union. It offers both a fresh angle of vision on Jefferson himself and a superb contribution to the renewed understanding of the importance of Federalism to the founding generation.
—(Lance Banning, University of Kentucky)

New interesting textbook: Keep Your Kids Safe on the Internet or The Dream of Eternal Life

Encyclopedia of the Palestinians

Author: Philip Mattar

The Palestinian people and their region are continually in the news and at the forefront of international diplomacy. Yet much about their history remains obscure.

The Encyclopedia of the Palestinians objectively details the historical and political factors behind such controversial topics as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Coverage concentrates primarily on the modern era—from the beginning of the late Ottoman period to the present. The ancient and medieval history of the region is also explored.

Led by Philip Mattar, Ph.D. andexecutive director of the Institute for Palestinian Studies, a distinguished group of 50 scholars and regional experts has contributed more than 350 alphabetically arranged articles to create this book.

These fully crossreferenced entries cover:

• Politics:
"National Bloc Party," "Palestinian National Charter," "Palestinian National Council," "Reform Party," "United Nations and the Palestinians," "Liberal Party," "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine"

Library Journal

The Palestine conflict has been at the core of the Arab-Israeli dispute for over half a century. There are numerous fine books on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Palestinian issues have received extensive media coverage throughout the world. Yet misperceptions about the Palestinian people and their history abound in both popular and, to some extent, scholarly circles in the West. The editor, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian American, is the executive director of the American branch of the Institute for Palestine Studies and deputy director of the Journal of Palestine Studies. In this solid reference work, the editor and approximately 50 other scholars have put together extremely useful entries on all aspects of historical and contemporary issues affecting the Palestinian people. The topics covered include politics, culture, society, history, economics, and geography. Also included are significant events and biographies of important individuals whose lives have shaped the contours of modern Palestinian history. This encyclopedia will remain a definitive work on Palestine for years to come. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.--Nader Entessar, Spring Hill Coll., Mobile, AL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Journal Library

In this solid reference work the editor and 50 other scholars have put together extremely useful entries on all aspects of historical and contemporary issues affecting the Palestinian people. . . . this encyclopedia will remain a definitive work on Palestine for years to come. Highly recommended. (May 1, 2000)

Securing Americas Future or The Priestly Tribe

2009-12-02T23:10:00.000-08:00

Securing America's Future: A Bold Plan to Preserve and Expand Social Security

Author: Max J Skidmor

About the Author:
Max J. Skidmore is Thomas Jefferson Fellow and the Curators' Professor or Political Science at the University of Missouri at Kansas City

Foreword   George McGovern     vii
Introduction     1
The Forgotten Piece of National Security: Franklin D. Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights     5
Misinformation about Social Security: It Ain't What People Don't Know ...     15
The Gospel of Wealth: Amid Acres of Diamonds     39
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Plan and Its Enemies Emerge     49
From Miss Fuller's First Check     61
Frightening Facts or Persistent Politics?     77
A New Plan that Truly Would Improve Social Security     93
The Enemies Regroup: Rallying 'Round Reagan     101
Presidential Attitudes toward Social Security: "Only Desperate Men with Their Backs to the Wall"     127
The Special Problem of Health Care: The Fortunes to Be Made     151
Some Final Words to Sum It All Up     163
Text of Recording of "Operaton Coffeecup"     169
Internet Nonsense about Social Security     177
Social Security and Ponzi Schemes     185
Bibliography     189
Index     197
About the Author     205

Interesting textbook: Astrological Gastronomy or Opaa Greek Cooking Detroit Style

The Priestly Tribe: The Supreme Court's Image in the American Mind

Author: Barbara A A Perry

Perry illuminates the Supreme Court's unique advantages in sustaining a noble public image by its stewardship of the revered Constitution, its constant embrace of the rule of law, the justices' life tenure, its symbols of impartiality and integrity, and a resolute determination to keep its distance from the media. She argues that the Court has bolstered these advantages to avoid traps that have marred Congressional and presidential images, and she demonstrates how the Court has escaped the worst of media coverage.

All American Monster or Your Fathers Voice

2009-12-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

All-American Monster: The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh

Author: Brandon M Stickney

At 9:02 A.M. on April 19, 1995, the serenity of America's heartland was destroyed when a massive explosion leveled one side of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the reality of terrorism shocked the nation. Damage from the blast covered many city blocks; 168 men, women, and children were killed; and an estimated 500 were injured. On April 21, Timothy McVeigh was formally charged as a suspect in the bombing. More than a year after the bombings, as the wheels of justice grind slowly toward a trial, the nation, in its shock and horror, still asks: Who is Timothy McVeigh? Why would anyone commit such a horrible act? What turned a seemingly ordinary small-town boy - a decorated former soldier and war hero - into an alleged mass murderer and the most hated man in America? Journalist Brandon M. Stickney answers many of the compelling questions surrounding McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, and puts this critical information into the broader perspective of McVeigh's childhood, his educational and military service, and his efforts to find meaning and purpose in life. In this thoroughly researched and sensitively written biography, the author, a reporter and native of the western New York area where McVeigh was born and raised, draws on his own personal experience, available documents, and numerous interviews with McVeigh's family, friends, and associates to offer intimate details of McVeigh's life - factors that contributed to his startling transformation from all-American boy to "All-American Monster."

Journal of Psychohistory

The raging part of McVeigh often made him seem like two people, similar to people who have multiple personality disorders...

Publishers Weekly

A reporter for the Lockport, N.Y., Union-Sun and Journal, Stickney is well suited to write a biography of accused Oklahoma City bombing suspect and Lockport native McVeigh, since he is a lifelong resident of the area. He utilizes that advantage in this admirable search for the influences that shaped the personality of his subject. Stickney reveals a young man of average abilities and no particular distinction except for a fascination with guns and comic books, distraught by the divorce of his parents and the exposure of widespread corruption among government officials in his home county. McVeigh served in the Army and participated in Desert Storm but failed to stay the course in training for the Special Forces. After leaving the service, he was drawn into the orbit of the radical right. It is clear that Stickney considers McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols guilty of the bombing, but he admirably retains his focus on the formative factors in his subject's development. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Booknews

Stickney, a reporter, answers many of the questions surrounding McVeigh and the Oklahoma bombing and puts this information into the broader perspective of McVeigh's childhood, education, and military service. Utilizing little-known information and an exclusive interview with McVeigh's younger sister, Stickney speculates about McVeigh's thoughts, feelings, and motivations in connection with the bombing. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Book review: Learning in Real Time or Exploiting Software

Your Father's Voice: Letters for Emmy about Life with Jerem...and without Him after 9/11

Author: Lyz Glick

On September 11, 2001, Jeremy Glick boarded United Flight 93 only because a fire at Newark Airport had prevented him from flying out the day before. That morning, he called his wife, Lyz, to tell her the plane had been hijacked and that he and a group of others were going to storm the cockpit, an effort that doomed Glick and his fellow passengers, yet doubtless saved lives on the ground and instantly became known worldwide as a heroic moment of resistance. But Lyz wanted the couple’s daughter, Emmy, only three months old when the plane crashed, to learn much more of her father’s story than just the ending.
Your Father’s Voice narrates Lyz’s struggle to come to grips with her husband’s death in a series of letters from Lyz to Emmy that give a wrenching but clear-eyed account of Lyz’s first years without Jeremy.
Through it all, Lyz pragmatically details the challenges of a single parent raising a daughter in the aftermath of horrific tragedy, and urges Emmy to listen for what Lyz can still hear when the wind is right: her father’s voice.

Publishers Weekly

This unflinching and emotionally powerful portrayal of Jeremy Glick's life and role as one of the passengers on United's flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa., on 9/11, takes the form of a series of letters to the Glicks' daughter, who was three months old when Jeremy died. Out of her grief, Lyz has produced this beautiful book memorializing her husband, who became a media hero for his role in the probable attack on the hijackers. She relates their precious last words when he called from the plane and describes the ways Jeremy's unique background prepared him well for that day's terrible challenges. Jeremy was a huge and powerful man (a judo champion, too), and a tender, caring father who deeply loved his high school sweetheart and their tiny daughter. With this book, Lyz Glick gives their daughter (and readers) an honest look at the daily trials she continues to face: unwelcome media attention, repeated political tributes and group meetings with the coroner. Lyz's epistolary account will comfort others dealing with loss; by book's end, it's clear she's begun the daunting task of moving on, but never forgetting. Photos. (Sept.) Forecast: Glick's book is bound to receive media attention, as its publication date coincides with the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman or Secret Empire

2009-11-30T12:35:00.000-08:00

Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman

Author: Abbie Hoffman

The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman tells the story of one of America's most influential and imaginative dissidents, a major figure in the 1960s counterculture and anti-war movement who remained a dedicated political organizer right up until his death in 1989. With his unique brand of humor, wit, and energetic narrative, Abbie Hoffman describes the history of his times and provides a first-hand account of such memorable actions as the "levitation" of the Pentagon, the dropping of dollar bills onto the New York Stock Exchange floor, and the Chicago 8 Trial, which followed the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention, as well as his friendships with Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Allen Ginsberg, and many others. Originally published in 1980 as Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, this memoir has been out of print for nearly 10 years. This edition includes a new selection of photographs chosen by his widow, Johanna Lawrenson, as well as a new afterword by Howard Zinn celebrating Hoffman's enduring activist legacy.

New interesting book: Belleza universal or YMCA Healthy Back Book

Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage

Author: Philip Taubman

In a brief period of explosive, top-secret innovation during the 1950s, a small group of scientists, engineers, businessmen, and government officials rewrote the book on airplane design and led the nation into outer space. Led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, they invented the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and the first reconnaissance satellites that revolutionized spying, proved that the missile gap was a myth, and protected the United States from Soviet surprise nuclear attack. They also made possible the space-based mapping, communications, and targeting systems used in the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Veteran New York Times reporter and editor Philip Taubman interviewed dozens of participants and mined thousands of previously classified documents to tell this hidden, far-reaching story. He reconstructs the crucial meetings, conversations, and decisions that inspired and guided the development of the spy plane and satellite projects during one of the most perilous periods in our history, a time when, as President Eisenhower said, the world seemed to be "racing toward catastrophe."

This is the story of these secret heroes, told in full for the first time.

The New York Times

Secret Empire, by Philip Taubman, a longtime correspondent for The New York Times and now its deputy editorial page editor, chronicles the development of these ''national technical means,'' the euphemism for overhead reconnaissance, both aerial and space-based. Concentrating on the Eisenhower years, Taubman celebrates ''the inventors and risk-takers who revolutionized spying'' and calls for a new generation of technological swashbucklers to create tools for the perils facing the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. — Alex Roland

The Los Angeles Times

For more than half a century, small teams of engineers, physicists, mathematicians and scientists have spent their working lives in virtual anonymity building America's vast arsenal of overhead spy machines. Sealed in windowless rooms behind cipher-locked doors, they exist in an "Alice in Wonderland" world of code words, black budgets and retina scanners. The early pioneers of this strange land are the subject of Philip Taubman's Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage.

Taubman, a New York Times editor, discovered while on the paper's spy beat that most of America's intelligence came not from agents but from supersophisticated machines, many located high above. "The massing of Soviet forces on the Afghan border in 1979 -- the indication that an invasion was imminent -- had been tracked by spy satellite," he writes. "When Soviet troops assembled for a possible invasion of Poland in December 1980, satellite photographs helped to alert Washington." — James Bamford

The Washington Post

The book is mostly small-bore, resolutely sticking to a step-by-tiny-step history of the program. Frequently, the only obvious point seems to be to get it all down on paper. The result, unfortunately, is often something only a satellite buff, or perhaps a product manager, could love. — Eric Umansky

Publishers Weekly

In this exciting, meticulously researched spy story, Taubman takes readers behind the closed doors of the Eisenhower administration to tell about the small group of Cold Warriors whose technological innovations-including the U2 spy plane and Corona, the country's first spy satellite-revolutionized espionage and intelligence gathering. The author, an award-winning New York Times editor who has reported on national security issues for more than two decades, gives an account drawn from previously classified documents, oral history archives and scores of interviews with the men who were there. The new technology was driven by the need for safer ways to spy on the Soviet Union-hundreds of pilots had been killed or lost in aerial reconnaissance missions-and, as Taubman argues, it served as a peacekeeper by eliminating the fear of surprise attack. Through the U2 program, CIA analysts determined that the U.S.S.R. was neither outpacing the U.S. in the manufacture of long-range bombers nor fielding hundreds of intercontinental missiles as feared. This book functions marvelously as a history of science, detailing the research, engineering and policy decisions behind the U2 and Corona, but it's also an excellent social history of the Cold War in the 1950s and early '60s. It's a page-turner as well, notably with Taubman's narratives of the first U2 flight, Sputnik and the downing of Francis Gary Powers's U2 over the Soviet Union and the resulting blow to the Eisenhower administration's credibility. Taubman sheds light on a era when the nation's lawmakers were regularly kept in the dark about CIA and other spy agency activities. In an epilogue, the author addresses some unintended consequences in light of September 11, exploring the neglect of conventional manned spying. Agent, Amanda Urban. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the development of first the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and then spy satellites transformed the world of intelligence. Although the outlines of this story are well known, particularly concerning the U-2, Taubman provides a wealth of detail on all aspects of these projects, based on many interviews and copious research. He weaves together complex strategic, organizational, and engineering issues, managing to convey the drama and excitement of a race to find some way of getting consistent and reliable intelligence on Soviet nuclear missiles at a time when the United States was widely assumed to be falling behind. The story shows Dwight Eisenhower at his most decisive and shrewd, ready to listen to the advice of tough-minded outsiders, such as James Killian of MIT and Edwin Land of Polaroid, and to hand over critical projects to the CIA.2

Library Journal

Taubman, deputy editorial page editor for the New York Times, knows how to tell a good story. And what a story it is! Eisenhower, who was often accused of "putting and puttering" and "goofing and golfing," is portrayed here as a remarkable risk taker who supported the creation of highly sophisticated spy-satellite and spy-plane technology by going around the stodgy Pentagon bureaucracy and using the best minds he could find. Although Taubman's is not the first account of this subject to appear recently (Curtis L. Peebles's The Corona Project and Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites, edited by Dwayne A. Day, both tell the same story), it displays his impressive skills at writing crackling prose while juggling numerous details. This excellent book is recommended for all collections.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

New York Times editorial-page editor and Polk Award-winner Taubman delivers an expertly related, accessible account of a turning point in American intelligence, when on-the-ground spying gave way to a belief that technology could cure all ills. Having been caught unawares at the Battle of the Bulge by a lack of reliable information about German troop movements, Dwight Eisenhower had long been determined to improve American capabilities. The death of Josef Stalin in 1953, however, saw the US again caught off guard; as Eisenhower complained, "Ever since 1946, I know that all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies and what we, as a nation, should do about it. Well, he's dead. And you can turn the files of our government inside out-in vain-looking for any plans laid. We have no plan." Demanding better and timelier information about Soviet military capabilities and deployments, Eisenhower authorized the development of two innovations: high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U2 and SR-71, which enabled "timeliness, geographical coverage, accepted accuracy"; and supposedly secret satellites that could photograph every inch of the Soviet empire. Those goals were met, but only after severe technical obstacles were overcome by throwing millions and billions of dollars at them. The results were both good and bad, Taubman writes. Eisenhower and his successors had the benefit of better information about such things as missile silos and moving tank columns, but in the end they would also have to contend with "distortions in the nation's intelligence agencies, including an overreliance on dazzling machines and a shortage of resources in moretraditional fields like the recruitment and training of spies"-a shortcoming recently and keenly underscored by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Absorbing throughout, and meaty stuff for intelligence and aviation buffs.

Asymmetrical Warfare or The Opium Season

2009-11-29T07:23:00.000-08:00

Asymmetrical Warfare: Today's Challenge to U. S. Military Power

Author: Roger W Barnett

In this concise and penetrating study, Roger Barnett illuminates the effect of operational, organizational, legal, and moral constraints on the ability of the U.S. to use military force. As the tragic events of September 11 demonstrated, potential adversaries can take advantage of these limitations, thus spawning "asymmetrical warfare." Barnett defines asymmetrical warfare as not simply a case of pitting one's strength against another's weakness but rather of taking the calculated risk to exploit an adversary's inability or unwillingness to prevent, or defend against, certain actions. For instance, launching chemical, biological, or suicide attacks; taking indiscriminate actions against critical infrastructure; using hostages or human shields; deliberately destroying the environment; and targeting noncombatants all constitute possible asymmetrical warfare scenarios. Against these acts, the U.S. has not prepared any response in kind. Indeed it either cannot or will not undertake such responses, thus making these attacks especially difficult to counter. This refusal to retaliate in an "eye for an eye" fashion complicates the dilemma of American policymakers who seek to wield power and influence on the world stage while simultaneously projecting a peaceful and benign image. Barnett concludes that the U.S. must create a formal system of selectively eliminating the constraints that dictate our response to certain situations or scenarios. Failure to make such changes will only increase paralysis and, when the use of force is required, contribute to the already heightened risks.

Foreign Affairs

If the United States can threaten force only in terms that the political marketplace can bear — in line with international law, moral precepts, the sensitivities of allies, and a determination to avoid casualties — then how can it practice deterrence against contemporary enemies that take advantage of these constraints? This to Barnett is the challenge of asymmetrical warfare today, which he believes can be overcome only by a readiness to transcend these constraints, accepting the full nastiness of war while seeking to bolster deterrence by improving strategic defenses. The argument is vigorous and challenging, although Barnett provides few grounds for supposing that political and military leaders will adopt as robust an approach as he would wish. More seriously, he does not adequately address the role of alliances in isolating enemies nor the question of whether America's enemies will really adopt the appropriate asymmetrical strategies he fears — inflicting maximum harm on noncombatants and civil society.

The Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier

Author: Joel Hafvenstein

Joel Hafvenstein was hired for perhaps the most undesired job in the world today: join a team of contractors in Afghanistan’s harsh and brutal Helmand Province seeking to convince local farmers to stop growing poppies, the source of opium. Helmand, one of the world’s largest opium-producing areas, is also home to a large base of Taliban and AK-47 toting drug lords-all of whom harbored great enmity toward the West and Americans in particular.
THE OPIUM SEASON is a story of intrigue,excitement, success and heartbreaking failure at the far edge of the world.
At the height of the program’s success, the Taliban attacked, killing two close friends of the author and nine other men associated with our work. The ambushes destroyed our project and heralded a new Taliban onslaught across south Afghanistan, targeting anyone seen to be supporting the new government – aid workers, teachers, officials, religious leaders.
In the tradition of Walking Across Afghanistan and The Kite Runner, OPIUM SEASON describes the odyssey of an American in the midst of chaos, with a high-minded goal but far from reason and order. This is a riveting story that will draw national attention from the media, and from book readers hungry to know more about what it is that keeps Afghans pulled apart by so many influences.

Joel Hafvenstein, a graduate also of Yale University, works in London for a global reforestation program. His work has appeared in the Yale Journal of Ethics and Oxblog. This is his first book.

The New York Times - William Grimes

The sobering dispatches in Opium Season, a wrenching account of lofty hopes and bitter disappointments, shed a dismal light on American efforts to improve the lot of ordinary Afghans. All over the country development projects are under way aimed at winning over the Afghan people, depriving the Taliban of popular support and propping up Hamid Karzai's government. The obstacles are as steep as the surrounding mountains, as Mr. Hafvenstein discovered and ruefully recounts in this bitter but affectionate book about his three stints in Afghanistan from October 2003 to May 2005.

Publishers Weekly

In May 2005, four employees of Chemonics International, a Washington, D.C.-based contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, were among 11 Afghans killed in two separate attacks on aid workers operating in Afghanistan's Helmand province. First-time author Hafvenstein was then a young administrator for Chemonics, having eagerly joined in 2003 a small team working on U.S.A.I.D.'s Alternative Incomes Project, aiming to create thousands of jobs building a new infrastructure to offset planned eradication of the opium poppy, the mainstay of the rural economy and the raw basis for heroin sold around the world. Beginning with the news of his colleagues' deaths, Hafvenstein retraces his rapid immersion into the deeply fractured and danger-strewn politics and society of post-Taliban Afghanistan. His personal narrative gracefully introduces this complex and troubled land, measuring the impact of warlordism and police corruption on what he comes to see as the ultimately misguided U.S. emphasis on poppy eradication. While that conclusion will hardly surprise those following the escalating violence since 2005, Hafvenstein offers a revealing if narrowly critical insider perspective on the workings of U.S.-sponsored international development schemes in Afghanistan and worldwide. (Nov.)

Nader Entessar - Library Journal

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 has resulted in another wretched chapter in the recent history of that volatile country. Six years after the overthrow of its fundamentalist Taliban government, chaos and uncertainty characterize daily life there. Notwithstanding elections that have led to the establishment of a nominal central government in Kabul, the country continues to exhibit all the hallmarks of a failed state. The opium trade has once again become the most important source of revenue in Afghanistan, where a combination of opium growers and the so-called warlords exercise more political and socioeconomic control than do the country's elected officials and its government. This very readable and engaging book recounts the harshness of daily life in Afghanistan, as seen from the vantage point of an American who spent a year in the country's rugged Helmand province for an aid organization seeking to train farmers to cultivate other crops than opium. The author, who has published articles on Afghanistan, describes in a diary format his experience of violent political intrigue and criminal alliances resulting in the murderous drug trafficking, and the impossibility of his mission, in that country. Recommended for public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Long-winded, superfluously stuffed account of the author's vain attempts to induce the Afghans to give up their primary cash crop. From November 2004 to May 2005, Hafvenstein worked as a development coordinator for Chemonics International, a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in the military outpost of Lashkargah near the Helmand River, deep in the heart of opium-growing country. His urgent assignment was to wean the growers from poppy while the Afghan government supposedly pushed for its eradication. The USAID team was charged with creating enough temporary paying jobs to cushion the economic damage to opium farmers. However, the scale of the 2004 harvest was hugely lucrative; the Afghans produced a whopping 87 percent of the world's illegal opium. The author and his colleagues faced an arduous, dangerous task: to manage the walis (provincial governors) as well as the tribal groups and the remnants of Taliban rebels, while securing the safety of the agency's personnel. They learned that this area was the site of a previous American reconstruction effort in the 1940s, the damming of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers by American engineering company Morrison-Knudsen, one of the contractors on the Hoover Dam. Hafvenstein's team insinuated itself into the powerful Afghan government agency controlling the rivers' modern irrigation system in order to secure local jobs clearing drainage ditches. They were threatened by warlords still tied to the Taliban and ultimately defeated by the government's halfhearted commitment to eradication. Kidnapping and murders forced out the American agency, overwhelmed by the scale and significance of the project. Not likely towin any new converts to America's cowboys-and-Indians approach to fixing foreign countries' deep-seated problems.

Democracys Discontent or The World of Mexican Migrants

2009-11-28T02:11:00.000-08:00

Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy

Author: Michael J Sandel

The defect, Sandel maintains, lies in the impoverished vision of citizenship and community shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. American politics has lost its civic voice, leaving both liberals and conservatives unable to inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that self-government requires.

In search of a public philosophy adequate to our time, Sandel ranges across the American political experience, recalling the arguments of Jefferson and Hamilton, Lincoln and Douglas, Holmes and Brandeis, FDR and Reagan. He relates epic debates over slavery and industrial capitalism to contemporary controversies over the welfare state, religion, abortion, gay rights, and hate speech. Democracy's Discontent provides a new interpretation of the American political and constitutional tradition that offers hope of rejuvenating our civic life.

Booknews

Sandel (government, Harvard U.) adds his views to the growing recognition that beneath American affluence and social justice lies a suspicion of government, a lack of control of our lives, and the unraveling of the moral fabric. He traces the problem to an impoverished vision of citizenship and community and a loss of a civic voice that prevents both liberals and conservatives from inspiring a sense of community and civil engagement that self- government requires. He calls for storytellers who can create an inspiring and convincing society to strive toward. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

George F. Will

American political discourse has become thin gruel because of a deliberate deflation of American ideals. So says Michael Sandel in [this] wonderful new book, ...Sandel's book will help produce what he desires -- a quickened sense of the moral consequences of political practices and economic arrangements. -- George F. Will, Newsweek

Kirkus Reviews

A wide-ranging critique of American liberalism that, unlike many other current books on the matter, seeks its restoration as a guiding political ethic.

"Despite the achievements of American life in the last half-century," political theorist Sandel (Harvard) writes, "our politics is beset with anxiety and frustration." He suggests that the growing public mistrust in the federal government, whose manifestations range from the conservative sweep of Congress in the last election to the Oklahoma City bombing, can be addressed only by reevaluating the liberal assumption that "government should be neutral on the question of the good life," and by putting in its place a social-democratic concern for the spiritual well-being of the citizenry. The "utilitarian calculus" of the past has helped preserve individual liberties, Sandel observes, but it finds little room for weighing the finer questions of morality in recommending action. (For instance, Sandel remarks, minimalist liberalism of the sort that is practiced today could scarcely find room for the antislavery arguments of the abolitionists a century and a half ago, relying as those arguments did on "appeals to comprehensive moral ideals.") This indifference to the character of the citizenry, Sandel adds, is not the province of liberalism alone; where liberals have defended abortion rights on the grounds that government has no place in moral issues, conservatives have likewise argued for laissez-faire economic policies, claiming "government should be neutral toward the outcomes" of a market economy. Sandel is strong on tracking the history of this value-neutralization of government; he is less successful in identifying the particulars of a practical yet value-laden ethic that can "repair the civic life on which democracy depends" while not trampling on anyone's liberties—one of the thorny dilemmas of current reformist politics.

A book rich in ideas, if not in blueprints for action.

New interesting book: Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent or A Handbook of Invalid Cooking

The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place

Author: Judith Adler Hellman

By the acclaimed author of the bestselling Mexican Lives, a surprising, behind-the-headlines look at the lives of Mexican migrants, in the tradition of Oscar Lewis's classic Five Families

"Either you work, or you work. Those are the two choices!"—Sara, a street vendor in East Los Angeles

In her groundbreaking book Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman profiled fifteen Mexicans, both poor and rich, each of whom was struggling to survive the radical economic and political shifts of Mexico in the 1990s.

The World of Mexican Migrants looks at the aftereffects of these changes through the eyes of those who, no longer able to eke out even a modest living in their homeland, have come to the United States. In New York and Los Angeles, we meet, among others, construction workers, restaurant staff, sweatshop laborers, and street vendors. We encounter deliverymen who race through the streets to bring us our food. We hear stories of astonishing border crossings—including one man's journey riding suspended from the undercarriage of a train, and another's deadly three-day trek across the desert. Back in Mexico, Hellman visits family members of migrants who live on remittances from their husbands and relatives al Norte.

Drawing on five years of in-depth interviews, Hellman offers a much-needed humanizing perspective on the estimated 6 million undocumented Mexican migrants living in the United States, people whose voices are rarely heard in the din of angry political debate and talk-radio rhetoric on immigration.

Kirkus Reviews

A sympathetic, wide-ranging portrait of the lives of Mexicans on both sides of the border. Go to the Mexican consulate in Tucson, Ariz., and you'll be among the few waiting for services; go to the same consulate in New York City, and you'll join a line a block long. That may seem odd, but to Hellman (Political Science/York Univ.; Mexican Lives, 1994, etc.) it speaks volumes about how central New York has become to border-crossers: "Mexicans-depending on whether we count both documented and undocumented people-have one of the highest, if not the highest, birthrates of any national group in the city." But why travel so far from the border? For one thing, there are jobs available, even if too many of them require workers to swallow their pride, since protesting unfair conditions can lead to deportation. Yet there are other considerations, Hellman observes. It's possible to get around by public transportation, which removes the need for private transportation and thus registrations, licenses and other things that require identification. Thus Staten Island and Long Island are full of esquineros, the men who wait on the corner for odd jobs and daily construction work. Meanwhile, down at the border, the Border Patrol is concerned not just with stemming the tide, but with triage. Says one top officer, "economic migrants are just the clutter that we need to brush away so we can get at the really bad guys . . . meaning the dope smugglers and the people smugglers." The presence of so many Mexicans may make some Anglos nervous, but their self-appointed guardians in the so-called Minutemen aren't much help; as critics note, they make big noise but mostly sit in lawn chairs and drink beer while thealambristas hop the fence to become esquineros and do the jobs no one else wants. Humane and helpful, Hellman removes the shrillness from the border debate to show what the crossers do and why they do it-and why most Americans don't object to their presence.

Acknowledgments     ix
Prologue     xiii
Introduction     1
The Rock
Beto: Those Not with Us     17
Nopal Verde: The Life of a Town     23
San Rafael: A Life of Cooperation     35
Marta: The Tyranny of In-Laws     45
Dolores: "We Only Speak on Sundays"     57
The Journey
Tomas: Traveling in Style     65
Elena: "Absolutely Still"     77
Angel: Cat and Mouse     83
Fernando: "A Snake's Breakfast"     87
The Tucson Consulate     93
No More Deaths     99
Shanti and Daniel     107
"Walking Around, Living Their Lives"     113
The Hard Place
Carlos: Names and Networks     119
Sara: "Ten Words in Ten Years"     137
Francisco: The Hardest Place     145
To Stay or to Return Home
Julio: A Quick Exit     169
Manuel: Life After Amnesty     177
Patricia: Weighing the Good and the Bad     191
Conclusion     211
A Note on Methodology     233
Notes     243
Glossary     247
Suggested Reading     251

GUILTY or Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony

2009-11-26T20:59:00.000-08:00

GUILTY: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America

Author: Ann Coulter

In her most controversial and fiercely argued book yet, Ann Coulter calls out liberals for always playing the victim - when in fact, as she sees it, they are the victimizers. In GUILTY, Coulter explodes this myth to reveal that when it comes to bullying, no one outdoes the Left. GUILTY is a mordantly witty and shockingly specific catalog of offenses which Coulter presents from A to Z. And as with each of her past books, all of which were NYT bestsellers, Coulter is fearless in her penchant for saying what needs saying about politics and culture today.

Go to: The Hidden Pattern or Black White Photography Techniques with Adobe Photoshop

Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866-1873, Vol. 2

Author: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Against An Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873 is the second of six planned volumes of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The entire collection documents the friendship and accomplishments of two of America's most important social and political reformers. Though neither Stanton nor Anthony lived to see passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, each of them devoted fifty-five years to the cause of woman suffrage.

The second volume picks up the story of Stanton and Anthony at the end of 1866, when they launched their drive to make universal suffrage a priority of Reconstruction. Through letters, speeches, articles, and diaries, this volume recounts their years as editor and publisher of the weekly paper the Revolution, their extensive travels, and their lobbying with Congress. It touches on the bitter division that occurred among suffragists over such controversial topics as marriage and divorce, and a national debate over the citizenship of women under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. By the summer of 1873, when this volume ends, Anthony stood convicted of the federal crime of illegal voting. An irate Stanton warned, "I felt afresh the mockery of this boasted chivalry of man toward woman."

What People Are Saying

Geoffrey C. Ward
This volume, masterfully edited by Ann D. Gordon, lays bare some of the most dramatic- and most painful- years in the struggle for woman rights...
—(Geoffrey C. Ward, author of Not For Ourselves Alone: Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony)

Anne Firor Scott
Meticulously edited, these are among the most significant surviving documents for our understanding of the changing world of the nineteenth century.
—(Anne Firor Scott, author of Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History)

Lynn Sherr
In this rich and important collection, Ann Gordon applies a scholar's integrity, a woman's sensitivity, and a personal curiosity to the works that define these cherished foremothers...
—( Lynn Sherr, ABC News correspondent and author of Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words)

Christine Stansell
Christine Stansell, Princeton University

A captivating and enchanting book, beautifully edited, full of rich brilliantly chosen selections.

Ellen Carol Dubois
Ellen Carol Dubois, UCLA

The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. It has restored these unparalleled historical figures to their deserved national reputations...

Means without End or The Psychology of Working A New Perspective for Career Development Counseling and Public Policy

2009-11-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

Means Without End: Notes on Politics

Author: Giorgio Agamben

An essential reevaluation of the proper role of politics in contemporary life. A critical rethinking of the categories of politics within a new sociopolitical and historical context, this book builds on the previous work of the distinguished political philosopher Giorgio Agamben to address the status and nature of politics itself. Bringing politics face-to-face with its own failures of consciousness and consequence, Agamben frames his analysis in terms of clear contemporary relevance. He proposes, in his characteristically allusive and intriguing way, a politics of gesture-a politics of means without end.

Among the topics Agamben takes up are the "properly" political paradigms of experience, as well as those generally not viewed as political. He begins by elaborating work on biopower begun by Foucault, returning the natural life of humans to the center of the polis and considering it as the very basis for politics. He then considers subjects such as the state of exception (the temporary suspension of the juridical order); the concentration camp (a zone of indifference between public and private and, at the same time, the secret matrix of the political space in which we live); the refugee, who, breaking the bond between the human and the citizen, moves from marginal status to the center of the crisis of the modern nation-state; and the sphere of pure means or gestures (those gestures that, remaining nothing more than means, liberate themselves from any relation to ends) as the proper sphere of politics. Attentive to the urgent demands of the political moment, as well as to the bankruptcy of political discourse, Agamben's work brings politics back to life, and life back topolitics.

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Language and Death (1991), Stanzas (1992), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Vincenzo Binetti is assistant professor of Romance languages and literature at the University of Michigan. Cesare Casarino teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

Theory Out of Bounds Series, volume 20

Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

	Preface
	Form-of-Life	3
	Beyond Human Rights	15
	What Is a People?	29
	What Is a Camp?	37
	Notes on Gesture	49
	Languages and Peoples	63
	Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle	73
	The Face	91
	Sovereign Police	103
	Notes on Politics	109
	In This Exile (Italian Diary, 1992-94)	121
	Translators' Notes	143
	Index	147

New interesting textbook: Sendo Preto, Vivendo na Vermelhidão - Corrida, Prosperidade, e Política Social na América

The Psychology of Working A New Perspective for Career Development, Counseling, and Public Policy

Author: David Blustein

In this original and major new work, David Blustein places working at the same level of attention for social and behavioral scientists and psychotherapists as other major life concerns, such as intimate relationships, physical and mental health, and socio-economic inequities. He also provides readers with an expanded conceptual framework within which to think about working in human development and human experience. As a result, this creative new synthesis enriches the discourse on working across the broad spectrum of psychology's concerns and agendas, and especially for those readers in career development, counseling, and policy-related fields. This textbook is ideal for use in graduate courses on counseling and work or vocational counseling.

Breaking of Nations or Major Problems in the History of American Workers

2009-02-22T00:12:00.000-08:00

Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Robert Cooper

In this landmark book, Robert Cooper sets out his radical interpretation of our new international order. He argues that there are now three types of state: lawless "pre-modern" states; "modern" states that are fiercely protective of their sovereignty; and "post-modern" states such as those that operate on the basis of openness, law, and mutual security. The United States has yet to decide whether to embrace the "post-modern" world of interdependence, or pursue unilateralism and power politics.

Cooper shows that the greatest question facing our post-modern nations is how to deal with a world in which missiles and terrorists ignore borders and where Cold War alliances no longer guarantee security. When dealing with a hostile outside enemy, should civilized countries revert to tougher methods from an earlier era - force, preemptive attack, deception - in order to safeguard peaceful coexistence throughout the civilized world? The Breaking of Nations is a prescient examination of international relations in the twenty-first century.

THe New York Times

On the toughest issues, the trans-Atlantic divide really may be unbridgeable, at least until Tony Blair becomes president of Europe and installs Robert Cooper as his national security adviser. — Max Boot

Publishers Weekly

Cooper, a senior member of Tony Blair's cabinet, worries that the 21st century may wind up being the worst era in European history, as Western governments continue to lose control over the technology of mass destruction. Advocating "better politics rather than better technology" to combat the encroaching chaos created by unstable nation-states and rising terrorist organizations, he lays out a cogent argument for why the governments of Europe should present a united front and take an active role in promoting geopolitical stability, perhaps even through increased military presence. Only by pooling their resources, he suggests, can European nations offer a viable alternative to American policy mandates. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

The United States has Fukuyama, Huntington, and Kagan as its prophets of the coming world order. Who does Europe have? The answer is Robert Cooper, a former adviser to Tony Blair and an EU diplomat. This small book of essays offers a sweeping interpretation of today's global predicament. Cooper argues that two revolutionary forces are transforming international relations: the breakdown of state control over violence, reflected in the growing ability of tiny private groups to wield weapons of mass destruction, and the rise of a stable, peaceful order in Europe that is not based on either the balance of power or the sovereignty of independent states. In this scheme, the Westphalian system of nation-states and power politics is being undermined on both sides — by a postmodern Europe and a premodern world of failed states and post-imperial chaos.

Cooper makes a good case that the growing threat of terrorism necessitates new forms of cooperation and a reconstructed international order that goes beyond the balance of power or hegemony. Stable order in the new age must be built on legitimate authority and more inclusive political identities. But apart from these postmodern urgings, Cooper's vision remains sketchy.

Kirkus Reviews

A slender but not slight consideration of Europe's future on a hostile planet. British diplomat Cooper, once the UK's ambassador to West Germany and now head of the government's Defence and Overseas Secretariat, posits a world divided not into first, second, and third parts, pace Chairman Mao, but into "pre-modern," "modern," and "postmodern": the first made up of such hopelessly backward, even failed states like Afghanistan, the next of distinct nation-states such as China, and the last of super, or perhaps supra, states-those that make up the European Union. These states coexist uneasily, pre-modern Rwanda alongside modern Argentina alongside postmodern Japan ("Unfortunately for Japan it is a postmodern country surrounded by states firmly locked into an earlier age," each with its own sense of destiny). The US stands apart, in its way, if only because it has vastly outspent the rest of the world militarily-and then, Cooper writes, spent more efficiently-so that "were all the rest of the world to mount a combined attack on the United States they [sic] would be defeated." Problem is, the world is changing; the most dangerous enemies of the peace are not states but nongovernmental groups, the most common wars civil and not imperial or state against state-and in any event, the world is probably no safer with one superpower than with many ("However admirable the United States may be-and for many it is the embodiment of freedom and democracy-would those qualities survive a long period of unilateral hegemony?"). In these three essays, Cooper wrestles with the implications, concluding that if Europe is to hold its own in this new world, it will have to have America's ear: "And that means weshall need more power, both military power and multilateral legitimacy." Recommended reading for policy wonks, realpolitikers, and other students of the modern (and pre-modern, and postmodern) world.

Major Problems in the History of American Workers: Documents and Essays

Author: Eileen Boris

This text, designed for courses in US labor history or the history of American workers, presents a carefully selected group of readings that allow students to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw their own conclusions. Major Problems in the History of American Workers follows the proven Major Problems format, with 14-15 chapters per volume, a combination of documents and essays, chapter introductions, headnotes, and suggested readings.

The Irony of Democracy or Refuge Denied

2009-02-20T19:00:00.000-08:00

The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics

Author: Thomas R Dy

While most American politics texts address American politics from a pluralist perspective, THE IRONY OF DEMOCRACY: AN UNCOMMON INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN POLITICS, Fourteenth Edition, approaches the subject by addressing the theme of elitism and contrasting it with democratic theory and modern pluralist theory. Its key question is, "How democratic is American society?"

New interesting textbook: A Theory of Incentives in Regulation and Procurement or Applied Economics

Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust

Author: Sarah A Ogilvi

In May of 1939 the Cuban government turned away the Hamburg-America Line’s MS St. Louis, which carried more than 900 hopeful Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany. The passengers subsequently sought safe haven in the United States, but were rejected once again, and the St. Louis had to embark on an uncertain return voyage to Europe. Finally, the St. Louis passengers found refuge in four western European countries, but only the 288 passengers sent to England evaded the Nazi grip that closed upon continental Europe a year later. Over the years, the fateful voyage of the St. Louis has come to symbolize U.S. indifference to the plight of European Jewry on the eve of World War II.

Although the episode of the St. Louis is well known, the actual fates of the passengers, once they disembarked, slipped into historical obscurity. Prompted by a former passenger’s curiosity, Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum set out in 1996 to discover what happened to each of the 937 passengers. Their investigation, spanning nine years and half the globe, took them to unexpected places and produced surprising results. Refuge Denied chronicles the unraveling of the mystery, from Los Angeles to Havana and from New York to Jerusalem.

Some of the most memorable stories include the fate of a young toolmaker who survived initial selection at Auschwitz because his glasses had gone flying moments before and a Jewish child whose apprenticeship with a baker in wartime France later translated into the establishment of a successful business in the United States. Unfolding like a compelling detective thriller, Refuge Denied is a must-readfor anyone interested in the Holocaust and its impact on the lives of ordinary people.

Publishers Weekly

The doomed ship St. Louis-carrying German-Jewish refugees and refused permission to dock in Cuba and Florida in 1939-became a potent symbol of global indifference to the fate of European Jewry on the eve of the Holocaust. While 288 of the more than 900 passengers found sanctuary in Great Britain, 620 were forced to return to mainland Europe, and close to half of those passengers sent to Belgium, France and Holland were murdered during the Holocaust. Among the survivors, a Miami-area retired baker and Korean War veteran, Herbert Karliner, got through WWII posing as a Catholic and working as a hired hand for a pro-Vichy farmer near Lyon. Another, Hannelore Klein, who in her 70s confesses to still feeling like a displaced person, was 12 when she was sent to Holland, survived Auschwitz (her mother was gassed) and returned to Amsterdam to live with her grandparents, Theresienstadt survivors. Prodigiously researched and generously illustrated with photographs-most from the St. Louis and the Westerbork internment camp-this valuable contribution to Holocaust studies provides emotionally satisfying closure as the authors, staffers at D.C.'s U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, track the passengers and give a human face to mass tragedy. (Oct. 20) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Killing the Black Body or Ellis Islands Famous Immigrants

2009-02-19T13:48:00.000-08:00

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Author: Dorothy Roberts

In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts gives a powerful and authoritative account of the on-going assault - both figurative and literal - waged by the American government and our society on the reproductive rights of Black women. From an intersection of charged vectors (race, gender, motherhood, abortion, welfare, adoption, and the law), Roberts addresses in her impassioned book such issues as: the notion of prenatal property imposed upon slave women by white masters; the unsavory association between birth control champion Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement of the 1920s; the coercive sterilization of Black women (many of whom were unaware that they had undergone the procedure) under government welfare programs as late as the 1970s; the race and class implications of distributing risky, long-acting contraceptives, such as Norplant, through Medicaid; the rendering of reproduction as a crime of prosecuting women who expose their fetuses to drugs; the controversy over transracial adoption; the welfare debate (who should pay for reproduction?); and the promotion of the new birth technology (in vitro fertilization and egg donation) to serve infertile white couples.

Library Journal

From forced breeding and involuntary sterilization to the use of invasive methods of birth control (Norplant and Depo-Provera) and more recently welfare reform legislation, Rutgers law professor Roberts traces the history of social policies used by the dominant power structure to control black women's reproductive freedom. Her well-documented work convincingly reveals why black people, and women in particular, have reason to mistrust the medical establishment and government programs, especially those related to family planning. Roberts argues for an expanded concept of liberty that will "facilitate the processes of choice and self-determination" as well as protect individuals against government coercion. -- Faye Powell, Portland State University Library, Oregon

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Roberts's exploration of the history of African-American women and reproductive rights is brilliant, controversial, and profoundly valuable. The author, a professor of law (Rutgers University), brings forth a view of black women wholly ignored by mainstream America. Beginning with slavery and moving to the present day, she argues that white America has perpetuated a legacy of pathological social violence against black women and their reproductive capabilities. Female slaves, Roberts asserts, were often bought with the express purpose of using them as breeders; white males profited by raping black women and selling their children. Later, in the first half of the 20th century, the eugenics movement turned contraception from a tool of women's liberation into a tool of control to cut birth rates among southern blacks, and as late as the 1970s black women were routinely sterilized by hysterectomies that were not medically necessary. More recently, poor black women living in urban areas have been forced by courts, doctors, and health care organizations to be implanted with the Norplant birth-control device; doctors frequently refuse to remove it on request. Roberts's arguments are especially convincing because they are so well researched and thoroughly dissected. Drawn from documented cases, African-American theorists, and media reports, Roberts's knowledge of her subject is total. Instead of painting black women as passive victims of this reproductive racism, she represents them through the image offered by a former slave, Anna Julia Cooper, who characterizes the black woman fighting to protect the bodies of her daughters as "an entrapped tigress." Roberts outlines an agenda for change in thefinal chapter, positioning the book as an important stepping-stone toward transforming the way black women and their children are treated in America."The denial of Black reproductive autonomy serves the interests of white supremacy," Roberts states, and she demands her reader rethink the relationship between race and reproduction.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	3
Ch. 1	Reproduction in Bondage	22
Ch. 2	The Dark Side of Birth Control	56
Ch. 3	From Norplant to the Contraceptive Vaccine: The New Frontier of Population Control	104
Ch. 4	Making Reproduction a Crime	150
Ch. 5	The Welfare Debate: Who Pays for Procreation?	202
Ch. 6	Race and the New Reproduction	246
Ch. 7	The Meaning of Liberty	294
	Notes	313
	Index	358

Books about: Organisations

Ellis Island's Famous Immigrants (Images of America Series)

Author: Barry Moreno

Since 1776, millions of immigrants have landed at America's shores. To this day, their practical contributions are still felt in every field of endeavor, including agriculture, industry, and the service trades. But within the great immigrant waves there also came plucky and talented individualists, artists, and dreamers. Many of these exceptional folk went on to win worldly renown, and their names live on in history. Ellis Island's Famous Immigrants tells the story of some of the best known of these legendary characters and highlights their actual immigration experience at Ellis Island. Celebrities featured within its pages include such entrepreneurs as Max Factor, Charles Atlas, and "Chef Boyardee"; Hollywood icons Pola Negri, Bela Lugosi, and Bob Hope; spiritual figures Father Flanagan and Krishnamurti; authors Isaac Asimov and Kahlil Gibran; painters Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst; and sports figures Knute Rockne and Johnny Weissmuller.

Virginia in the Vanguard or Imperial Life in the Emerald City

2009-02-18T05:09:00.000-08:00

Virginia in the Vanguard: Political Leadership in the 400-Year-Old Cradle of American Democracy, 1981-2006

Author: Frank B Atkinson

Virginia in the Vanguard continues the story begun in The Dynamic Dominion, detailing the resurgence of Virginia's Democratic Party in the 1980s and the Republicans' efforts to turn back the gains made by Chuck Robb and Douglas Wilder. It closes with Democrat Tim Kaine taking the governor's seat and former Republican and Democratic governors George Allen and Mark Warner poised to enter the 2008 presidential primaries.

	Preface : flood tide of freedom
I	Robb, Wilder, and the Democratic decade : 1981-1992
1	Reversal of fortune : the Democratic Southern strategy	3
2	The watershed Robb victory of 1981	17
3	Improbable journey : Wilder's way to the top	47
4	Swinging suburbs : making money and making history	83
II	George Allen and the "Virginia renaissance" : 1993-1999
5	Reagan populism and the positive politics of reform	123
6	From insurgent to insider : the 1993 Allen landslide	153
7	John Warner and the politics of independence	179
8	New world : America's oldest legislature transformed	217
III	Mark Warner and the "sensible center" : 2000-2006
9	Taxing times and the tactic of bipartisanship	261
	Epilogue : a concluding reflection on Virginia's legacy of freedom	297

Interesting textbook: War on the Middle Class or Coloniality at Large

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Author: Rajiv Chandrasekaran

The Green Zone, Baghdad, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies.

In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Chandrasekaran, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post and the paper's former Baghdad bureau chief, spent nearly two years reporting from Iraq, and in Imperial Life in the Emerald City he draws a vividly detailed portrait of the Green Zone and the Coalition Provisional Authority…that becomes a metaphor for the administration's larger failings in Iraq…By focusing closely on the goals, initiatives and missteps of individuals involved in the Coalition Provisional Authority, Mr. Chandrasekaran is able to re-examine the mix of motives involved in the American invasion and the roles that hubris, idealism and denial played in shaping the occupation. His book gives the reader a visceral—sometimes sickening—picture of how the administration and its handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq, showing how decisions made in that period contributed to a burgeoning insurgency and growing ethnic and religious strife.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Goldfarb

It would have been worthwhile if Chandrasekaran had given us a greater sense of what he thought about overthrowing Hussein and, more to the point, what he felt upon returning to Washington after having seen the bloody result of its policies. But that is a philosophical difference I have with the author. This is a clearly written, blessedly undidactic book. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq.

Publishers Weekly

As the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, Chandrasekaran has probably spent more time in U.S.-occupied Iraq than any other American journalist, and his intimate perspective permeates this history of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquartered in the Green Zone around Saddam Hussein's former palace. He presents the tenure of presidential viceroy L. Paul Bremer between May 2003 and June 2004 as an all-too-avoidable disaster, in which an occupational administration selected primarily for its loyalty to the Bush administration routinely ignored the reality of local conditions until, as one ex-staffer puts it, "everything blew up in our faces." Chandrasekaran unstintingly depicts the stubborn cluelessness of many Americans in the Green Zone-like the army general who says children terrified by nighttime helicopters should appreciate "the sound of freedom." But he sympathetically portrays others trying their best to cut through the red tape and institute genuine reforms. He also has a sharp eye for details, from casual sex in abandoned offices to stray cats adopted by staffers, which enable both advocates and critics of the occupation to understand the emotional toll of its circuslike atmosphere. Thanks to these personal touches, the account of the CPA's failures never feels heavy-handed. (Sept. 22) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

"Rajiv Chandrasekaran has not given us "another Iraq book." He has given us a riveting tale of American misadventure. . . . He shows us American idealism and voyeurism, as well as the deadly results of American hubris. And by giving us the first full picture from inside the Green Zone, he depicts a mission doomed to failure before it had even been launched."
---Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

"This is a dazzling, important, and entertaining work of reportage about the American civilians who tried to remake Iraq, and about the strange, isolated city-state in Baghdad where they failed. Every American who wants to understand how and why things went so badly wrong in Iraq should read this book."
---Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars

"This amazing book pulls back the curtains of deception and reveals in stunning fashion what really went on inside the Emerald City in the crucial year after the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Chandrasekaran's reporting is vivid and relentless as he documents the mix of idealism, confidence, energy, hubris, political miscalculation, cultural blindness, and fantastical thinking of those who came to save Iraq yet made a difficult situation worse."
---David Maraniss, author of They Marched Into Sunlight

"An extraordinarily vivid and compelling anatomy of a fiasco. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an indispensable saga of how the American liberation of Iraq turned to chaos, calamity, and civil war. Chandrasekaran takes us inside Baghdad's Green Zone as no one else has."
---Rick Atkinson, author of The Long Gray Line

Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration or The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements

2009-02-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration

Author: John Lock

Among the most influential writings in the history of Western political thought, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration remain vital to political debates today, more than three centuries after they were written. The complete texts appear in this volume, accompanied by interpretive essays by three prominent Locke scholars. Ian Shapiro's introduction places Locke's political writings in historical and biographical context. John Dunn explores both the intellectual context in which Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration and the major interpretive controversies surrounding their meaning. Ruth Grant offers a comprehensive discussion of Locke's views on women and the family, and Shapiro contributes an essay on the democratic elements of Locke's political theory. Taken together, the texts and essays in this volume offer invaluable insights into the history of ideas and the enduring influence of Locke's political thought.

Author Biography: Ian Shapiro is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor and chair, Department of Political Science, Yale University. John Dunn is professor of social and political science at Cambridge University. Ruth Grant is professor of political science at Duke University.

Rethinking the Western Tradition Series

Look this: Open Source for the Enterprise or Managing Industrial Knowledge

The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements

Author: David A Snow

The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements is a compilation of original, state-of-the-art essays by internationally recognized scholars. Covering a diverse range of topics in the field of social movement studies, this volume offers an illuminating guide to understanding the dynamics and operation of social movements within the modern, global world.

The abundance of social movement activity throughout the world, both violent and nonviolent, has made the study of social movements a valuable resource for helping students and scholars to engage and understand their own social world. Issues covered in this one volume include: historical, political, and cultural contexts; leadership; organizational dynamics; social networks and participation; consequences and outcomes; and synthetic overviews of major social movements, including labor, anti-war, women’s, religious, ethnic and national, and environmental movements.

	Contributors
	Acknowledgments
1	Mapping the Terrain	3
2	Protest in Time and Space: The Evolution of Waves of Contention	19
3	The Strange Career of Strain and Breakdown Theories of Collective Action	47
4	Political Context and Opportunity	67
5	The Cultural Contexts of Collective Action: Constraints, Opportunities, and the Symbolic Life of Social Movements	91
6	Resources and Social Movement Mobilization	116
7	Beyond the Iron Law: Rethinking the Place of Organizations in Social Movement Research	155
8	Leadership in Social Movements	171
9	Movement Allies, Adversaries, and Third Parties	197
10	Policing Social Protest	217
11	Bystanders, Public Opinion, and the Media	242
12	"Get up, Stand up": Tactical Repertoires of Social Movements	262
13	Diffusion Processes within and across Movements	294
14	Transnational Processes and Movements	311
15	Networks and Participation	339
16	The Demand and Supply of Participation: Social-Psychological Correlates of Participation in Social Movements	360
17	Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields	380
18	Emotional Dimensions of Social Movements	413
19	Collective Identity, Solidarity, and Commitment	433
20	The Legislative, Organizational, and Beneficiary Consequences of State-Oriented Challengers	461
21	Personal and Biographical Consequences	489
22	The Cultural Consequences of Social Movements	508
23	The Consequences of Social Movements for Each Other	531
24	The Labor Movement in Motion	555
25	Feminism and the Women's Movement: A Global Perspective	576
26	Environmental Movements	608
27	Antiwar and Peace Movements	641
28	Ethnic and Nationalist Social Movements	666
29	Religious Movements	694
	Index	717

There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster or Americas Presidents

2009-02-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina

Author: Gregory Squires

There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster is the first critical scholarly book on the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. The disaster will go down in record as one of the worst in American history, not least because of the government's generally inept and cavalier response. But it's also a huge story for other obvious reasons. Firstly, the impact of the hurricane was uneven, and race and class (and tied to this, poverty) were deeply implicated in the unevenness. It was not by accident that the poorest and blackest neighborhoods were the ones that were buried under water. Secondly, the response underscored the impoverishment of social policy (or what passes for it) in both George W. Bush's America and more specifically the Republican-dominated South. Thirdly, New Orleans is not just any place - it's a great American city with a rich and unique history. People care about the place and what happens there. Fourthly, what happened and what will happen there can tell us a greatdeal about the state of urban and regional planning in contemporary America.
The book, edited by two eminent scholars/authors, gathers together ten excellent scholars to put forth a multifaceted portrait of the social implications of the disaster. And the disaster was primarily social in nature, as the title reminds us. The book covers the response to the disaster and the roles that race and class played, its impact on housing, the historical context of urban disasters in America, the nature of contemporary metropolitan planning, what the hurricane has taught us about planning, the role of the vast prison system in all of this, the future of economic development, the roles of businessand the media, and how the hurricane disproportionately impacted female headed households. In total, it offers a critical and comprehensive social portrait of the disaster's catastrophic effects on New Orleans.

America's Presidents: Facts, Photos, and Memorabilia from the Nation's Chief Executives

Author: Chuck Wills

Colorful images, removable memorabilia, and authoritative but easy-to-understand text combines to tell the story of all of America's Commanders in Chiefs from George Washington to George W. Bush-their personalities, their politics, and their significant contributions.

Naked Public Square or The Broken Branch

2009-02-14T13:32:00.000-08:00

Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America

Author: Richard John Neuhaus

Underlying the many crises in American life, writes Richard John Neuhaus, is a crisis of faith. It is not enough that more people should believe or that those who believe should believe more strongly. Rather, the faith of persons and communities must be more compellingly related to the public arena. "The naked public square"—which results from the exclusion of popular values from the public forum—will almost certainly result in the death of democracy.

The great challenge, says Neuhaus, is the reconstruction of a public philosophy that can undergird American life and America's ambiguous place in the world. To be truly democratic and to endure, such a public philosophy must be grounded in values that are based on Judeo-Christian religion. The remedy begins with recognizing that democratic theory and practice, which have in the past often been indifferent or hostile to religion, must now be legitimated in terms compatible with biblical faith.

Neuhaus explores the strengths and weaknesses of various sectors of American religion in pursuing this task of critical legitimation. Arguing that America is now engaged in an historic moment of testing, he draws upon Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish thinkers who have in other moments of testing seen that the stakes are very high—for America, for the promise of democratic freedom elsewhere, and possibly for God's purpose in the world.

An honest analysis of the situation, says Neuhaus, shatters false polarizations between left and right, liberal and conservative. In a democratic culture, the believer's respect for nonbelievers is not a compromise but a requirement of the believer's faith. Similarly, the democratic rights of those outside the communities of religious faith can be assured only by the inclusion of religiously-grounded values in the common life.

The Naked Public Square does not offer yet another partisan program for political of social change. Rather, it offers a deeply disturbing, but finally hopeful, examination of Abraham Lincoln's century-old question—whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

Wall Street Journal

Richard John Neuhaus addresses the relationship of religion and democracy with a steadiness and vitality rare in such discussions....The Naked Public Square challenges us to consider afresh the relationship of religion and public life. This book is elegant in execution and sweeping in scope.

Choice

For those interested in the role of religion in American life, this book is a must.

New York Times Book Review

"A substantial book. It should be read by anyone concerned with the current debates over the emergence of the "new Christian right.""

Commentary

This is a large-minded book, and its sophistication and intelligence advance our understanding of the religion/politics issue far beyond the confusions and incomprehensions that dominate most discussions of the subject.

Theology Today

Whether readers support or oppose his major contentions, Neuhaus has skillfully produced a lively forum for our moral discourse regarding church-state relations and democratic values.

George F. Will

The book from which further debate about church-state relations should begin.

Books about: Managing Business Relationships 2nd Edition or Economics of the Law

The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track

Author: Thomas E Mann

Congress is the first branch of government in the American system, write Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, but now it is a broken branch, damaged by partisan bickering and internal rancor. The Broken Branch offers both a brilliant diagnosis of the cause of Congressional decline and a much-needed blueprint for change, from two experts who understand politics and revere our institutions, but believe that Congress has become deeply dysfunctional.
Mann and Ornstein, two of the nations most renowned and judicious scholars of government and politics, bring to light the historical roots of Congress's current maladies, examining 40 years of uninterrupted Democratic control of the House and the stunning midterm election victory of 1994 that propelled Republicans into the majority in both House and Senate. The byproduct of that long and grueling but ultimately successful Republican campaign, the authors reveal, was a weakened institution bitterly divided between the parties. They highlight the dramatic shift in Congress from a highly decentralized, committee-based institution into a much more regimented one in which party increasingly trumps committee. The resultant changes in the policy process--the demise of regular order, the decline of deliberation, and the weakening of our system of checks and balances--have all compromised the role of Congress in the American Constitutional system. Indeed, Speaker Dennis Hastert has unabashedly stated that his primary responsibility is to pass the president's legislative program--identifying himself more as a lieutenant of the president than a steward of the house. From tax cuts to the war against Saddam Hussein to a Medicare prescriptiondrug benefit, the legislative process has been bent to serve immediate presidential interests and have often resulted in poorly crafted and stealthily passed laws. Strong majority leadership in Congress, the authors conclude, led not to a vigorous exertion of congressional authority but to a general passivity in the face of executive power.
A vivid portrait of an institution that has fallen far from the aspirations of our Founding Fathers, The Broken Branch highlights the costs of a malfunctioning Congress to national policymaking, and outlines what must be done to repair the damage.

The Washington Post - Robert G. Kaiser

… it is easy to recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Congress, how it works and how it should work. [Dennis] Hastert would be particularly well-served by spending a few hours with The Broken Branch.

Publishers Weekly

Until recently, one could be forgiven for thinking that the present Congress is essentially an arm of the Bush administration, according to Mann and Ornstein, nationally renowned congressional scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively. Their book argues persuasively that relentless partisanship and a disregard for institutional procedures have led Congress to be more dysfunctional than at any time in recent memory. Looking back to the arbitrary and sometimes authoritarian leadership of Democratic speaker Jim Wright and the Abscam scandals of the 1980s, the authors demonstrate how they presage the much worse abuses of power committed by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. In outlining more than 200 years of congressional history, Mann and Ornstein sometimes allow just a sentence or two to explain the policies and philosophies of an important politician or even an entire party, even as they catalogue deviations from obscure points of procedure in extensive detail. Their book may be useful and enjoyable to the specialist, though recent conservative pushback on issues from the Harriet Miers nomination to warrantless wiretapping and immigration will make some wish the authors had had the opportunity to add a postscript. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The United States Congress has ceased to be a deliberative body, according to two eminent political scientists with some ideas about how to fix it. Mann (Brookings Institution) and Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute), both of whom arrived on Capitol Hill in 1969 with fellowships to study Congress, and have been doing so ever since, here review the evolution of Congress from the republic's founding to early 2006. Bipartisanship was already waning in the final years of the era of Democratic dominance, they argue. The Republican leadership, which was trying to be provocative in order to "nationalize" Congressional races, was often denied a role in drafting important legislation, while the Democrats used the rules to pass bills with little discussion. The authors note that Speaker Newt Gingrich's initiatives after the Republican landslide of 1994 were in the spirit of earlier reforms, de-emphasizing seniority and seeking to foster bipartisanship-but this attempt was abandoned. When George W. Bush won the presidency, House majority leaders saw themselves as mere agents of presidential policy. Party-line votes on important matters have since become the norm. Members of Congress now seem to feel they are in Washington to vote rather than to adequately discuss policy. Key pieces of legislation are badly written because amendments are not allowed. When they can, many Congressmen stay in Washington only three days a week, resulting in a decline in the quantity and quality of their work. Members of Congress have little interest in overseeing the executive branch or in how Congress functions; the latter neglect has occasioned a host of ethics scandals, which the authors discuss in detail. Theyalso suggest independent oversight of lobbyists and five-day congressional workweeks, while recognizing that polarization in Congress reflects polarization in the country as a whole. Most of the criticism here goes to Republicans-largely because they are in power-but the wealth of detail offered by Mann and Ornstein gives partisanship a good name.

Sovereignty or L branos del mal La escalofriante historia del secuestro de las hermanas de Thal a

2009-02-13T08:18:00.000-08:00

Sovereignty: God, State, and Self

Author: Jean Bethke Elshtain

Throughout the history of human intellectual endeavor, sovereignty has cut across the diverse realms of theology, political thought, and psychology. From earliest Christian worship to the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, the debates about sovereignty—complete independence and self-government—have dominated our history.
In this seminal work of political history and political theory, leading scholar and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the origins and meanings of “sovereignty” as it relates to all the ways we attempt to explain our world: God, state, and self. Examining the early modern ideas of God which formed the basis for the modern sovereign state, Elshtain carries her research from theology and philosophy into psychology, showing that political theories of state sovereignty fuel contemporary understandings of sovereignty of the self. As the basis of sovereign power shifts from God, to the state, to the self, Elshtain uncovers startling realities often hidden from view. Her thesis consists in nothing less than a thorough-going rethinking of our intellectual history through its keystone concept.
The culmination of over thirty years of critically applauded work in feminism, international relations, political thought, and religion, Sovereignty opens new ground for our understanding of our own culture, its past, present, and future.

C. Robert Nixon - Library Journal

Elshtain (social & political ethics, Univ. of Chicago; Just War Against Terror) deals here with the origins and development of our current concept of political and personal sovereignty, tracing its history from Augustine to Nietzsche and noting the move toward absolute autonomy of the state and the individual. According to Elshtain, even individual sovereignty becomes tyranny without relationships and community. We are created to love and that puts a limit on our sovereignty, she writes; "if we refuse to observe a limit, we are destroyers." Elshtain reexamines the relevant writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and many others in light of her philosophical analysis. She also applies her insight to postmodernism, radical feminism, and other modern movements, showing in her approach a deep knowledge of her subject matter. An excellent scholarly, philosophical analysis of a difficult concept that Elshtain makes surprisingly accessible to readers outside her field; recommended primarily for academic and large public libraries.

Lнbranos del mal. La escalofriante historia del secuestro de las hermanas de Thalнa

Author: Ernestina Sodi

Uno de los secuestros que mayor consternaciуn ha causado en la opiniуn pъblica mexicana fue el de la escritora Ernestina Sodi y su hermana, la actriz Laura Zapata, perpetrado por la banda de secuestradores "Los Tiras", quienes se encuentran tras las rejas a raнz de la denuncia que ambas presentaron despuйs de su liberaciуn.

Las hermanas fueron privadas de su libertad la noche del 22 de septiembre de 2002 a la salida de un teatro, despuйs de asistir a un ensayo de la actriz; golpeadas y amedrentadas, fueron trasladadas a una casa que los secuestradores adaptaron para retener a sus vнctimas y donde permanecieron encerradas, con los ojos vendados, mientras los secuestradores iniciaban las negociaciones para pedir su rescate. Despuйs de transcurridos 18 dнas, y al no obtener respuesta de los familiares de sus vнctimas, los secuestradores liberaron a Laura Zapata. Sin embargo, Ernestina Sodi permaneciу cautiva durante tres meses, hasta que su hermana menor, la cantante y actriz Thalнa, completу la suma exigida.

Esos dнas Ernestina Sodi estuvo sometida a maltratos fнsicos y psicolуgicos que dejaron heridas importantes en su vida y la de su familia. Este libro es el recuento doloroso de su encierro. A travйs de sus pбginas penetramos en el mundo oscuro, violento, sin piedad de la delincuencia organizada; presenciamos la desesperaciуn, la impotencia, la rabia, el miedo infi nito, pero tambiйn la esperanza luminosa de la libertad. Acompaсamos a la autora, asidos a su escritura нntima y serena, en su firme caminar por la lнnea frбgil que separa la cordura de la demencia, la vida de la muerte. Somos testigos, ademбs, de su reconstrucciуn anнmica y corporal que comienza penosa, lenta, pero plena.

Democracy and Social Ethics or Legal Environment of Business

2009-02-12T03:06:00.000-08:00

Democracy and Social Ethics

Author: Jane Addams

Much more than a social worker, more than a political activist, Jane Addams was a giant in the civic life of America. She was the founder of the founder of Chicago's Hull House. Through her efforts of delivering social services, she recognized both the incredible potential of our democracy and the challenges of living up to it. Democracy and Social Ethics, published in 1902, articulates the quandary that American democracy is forever trying to solve: how to deliver the promise to every American.

Legal Environment of Business

Author: Nancy K Kubasek

This is the only textbook that helps students develop a thorough understanding of the legal environment of business and enhances their ability to engage in critical thinking and ethical analysis.

The legal environment of business is thoroughly treated in an extremely reader-friendly manner; various topics include: the American legal system, dispute resolution, constitutional principles, cyberlaw, white-collar crime, contracts, sales, product and service liability, the law of property, agency law, labor-management relations, environmental law, securities trading and issuance, antitrust laws, and debtor-creditor relations.

An excellent desk reference for the legal departments of any business, this book also provides an interesting read for anyone interested in business and ethics.

The Stones Cry Out or Pilgrims Path

2009-02-10T21:54:00.000-08:00

The Stones Cry Out: A Cambodian Childhood, 1975-1980

Author: Molyda Szymusiak

In 1975, Molyda Szymusiak (her adoptive name), the daughter of a high Cambodian official, was twelve years old and leading a relatively peaceful life in Phnom Penh. Suddenly, on April 17, Khme Rouge radicals seized the capital and drove all its inhabitants into the countryside. The chaos that followed has been widely publicized, most notably in the movie The Killing Fields. Murderous brutality coupled with raging famine caused the death of more than two million people, nearly a third of the population. This powerful memoir documents the horror Cambodians experienced in daily life.

From the start, the author kept her identity a secret, assuming a "revolutionary" name to avoid being branded as an aristocrat. Her father, mother, aunt, and uncle struggled to save the 20 members of their two families, but one by one they starved or were executed, until only Molyda and three younger cousins survived.

Pilgrim's Path: Freemasonry and the Religious Right

Author: John J Robinson

It's a masterpiece...if you're interested in American Masonry and its impact on our country, this book is for you.--Brent Morris, The Scottish Rite Journal

Cicero or Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

2009-02-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

Cicero: On Duties

Author: Marcus Tullius Cicero

De Officiis (On Duties) is Cicero's last theoretical work and contains his analysis, in a Greek theoretical framework, of the political and ethical values of the Roman governing class in the late Republic. It has often been treated merely as a key to the Greek philosophical works that Cicero used, but this volume aims to render De Officiis, which had a profound impact upon subsequent political thinkers, more intelligible by explaining its relation to its own time and place. All the standard series features are present, including a wholly new translation, a concise introduction by a leading scholar, select bibliography, chronology, notes on vocabulary and brief biographies of the most prominent individuals mentioned in the text.

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Gender and American Culture Series)

Author: Ransby

One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives.

A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white.

In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations or The One Percent Doctrine

2009-02-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations

Author: Christian Reus Smit

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of International Relations. The Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spectrum of methods, addresses the relationship between scholarship and policy making, and examines the field's relation with cognate disciplines. In so doing the Handbook gives readers authoritative and critical introductions to the subject and establish a sense of the field as a dynamic realm of argument and inquiry.
The Handbook has two key and distinctive organizing principles. The first is its ground-breaking approach to the normative component in theorizing about International Relations. Earlier volumes have concentrated almost exclusively on theories as purely empirical or positive theories, with small sub-sections left for 'ethics and International Relations'. But all International Relations theories have both empirical and normative aspects; even methodological choices entail implicit normative commitments. Without this understanding, some of the arguments in International Relations are routinely miscast. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers a comprehensive survey of the field that deepens our understanding of how empirical and normative theorizing interact to constitute International Relations as a field of study.
A second organizing principle is the analysis of how different perspectives have developed in relation to one another. Previous overviews of the field have treated contending theories and methods as isolated bodies of thought, or organized them into stylized 'great debates'. Butthese approaches obscure the dynamic interplay, conversation, and contestation between different perspectives. The Handbook examines this interplay, with chapter authors probing how their theory or approach has been affected by contestation with, and borrowing from, other approaches. In doing so it shows how diversity within International Relations has promoted, or perhaps sometimes stultified, progress in the field.
The Oxford Handbook of International Relations advances a markedly different perspective on the field of International Relations and will be essential for reading for those interested in the advanced study of global politics and international affairs.

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11

Author: Ron Suskind

and/or stickers showing their discounted price. More about bargain books

The Great Unraveling or The Politics of United States Foreign Policy

2009-02-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century

Author: Paul Krugman

In this long-awaited work, award-winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman challenges us to take on George Bush and the radical right. Drawing from his New York Times columns, he chronicles how the boom economy unraveled: how exuberance gave way to pessimism, how the age of corporate heroes gave way to corporate scandals, and how fiscal responsibility collapsed. Krugman asks how it was possible for a country with so much going for it to head downhill so fast and finds the answer in the agenda of the Bush Administration.

Krugman began writing his New York Times column in 2000, demonstrating that he is one of the most well-informed and trenchant commentators in America. From his account of the secret history of the California energy crisis to his devastating dissections of the Bush Administration's dishonesty on everything from tax cuts to the war on terrorism, Krugman tells the uncomfortable truth about how the United States lost its way amid economic disappointment, bad leadership, and deceit. This unprecedented work of social and political history sets the first years of the Twenty-first Century in a stark, new light.

New York Review of Books

....It seems slightly scandalous that Krugman has persisted in noting that the present administration has been moving the lion's share of the money to an array of corporate interests distinguished by the greed of their CEOs, an indifference toward their workers, and boardroom conviction that it is the welfare state that is ruining the country. Krugman has been strident. He has been shrill. He has lowered the dignity of the commentariat. How refreshing.
— Russell Baker

The New York Times

Krugman's best columns showcase his fluency in economics, analytical power and willingness to go out on a limb.—Peter Beinart

Publishers Weekly

"This is not, I'm sorry to say, a happy book," says Krugman in the introduction to this collection of essays culled from his twice-weekly New York Times op-ed column, and indeed, the majority of these short pieces range from moderately bleak political punditry to full-on "the sky is falling" doom and gloom. A respected economist, Krugman dissects political and social events of the past decade by watching the dollars, and his ideas are emphatic if not always well argued. He has a somewhat boyish voice and a pleasingly enthusiastic tone, although his enthusiasm sometimes leads him to take liberties with punctuation. The essays are grouped thematically instead of chronologically, which gives this audio adaptation a scattershot feel. Since these pieces were written over a long stretch of time, certain key ideas recur quite often-political reporters don't pay enough attention to the real news, the Bush administration is dishonest, big corporations are inherently untrustworthy-and can become tedious. To his credit, Krugman is not entirely partisan-he reveals himself to be a free-market apologist-and even listeners who disagree with most of the things he says will likely be taken in by his warm and energetic delivery. Simultaneous release with the Norton hardcover (Forecasts, Aug. 18). (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

A Princeton economist turned New York Times columnist, Krugman combines colorful writing with astute economic analysis. This book is a collection of his columns from 2000 to 2003 (plus some earlier articles written for non-economists) with new introductory commentary. Krugman is a self-conscious outsider, an iconoclast who offers trenchant commentary on bad policy and bad business behavior, and much of the material here concerns what he considers the Bush administration's systematic deception of the public. In the introduction, he posits the existence of a revolutionary right-wing conspiracy — a term he does not use lightly. His commentary ranges from developments in Japan and Europe to financial crises and foreign trade policy, areas in which Krugman has made important contributions as an economist. He emerges as a strong, insightful critic of an unqualified "market-knows-best" world view.

Library Journal

Krugman, twice-weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Times and a Princeton economics teacher, shares his take on President Bush and the radical right and how the United States has "lost its way amid economic disappointment, bad leadership, and deceit." The book contains more than 100 of the author's Times columns published between January 2000 and January 2003 and a few extras published in Fortune magazine and at Slate.com, plus his added commentary that freshens the material. The articles cover the gamut of national economic and political issues that dominated the period, including the California energy crisis, the Bush administration's tax cuts, and the war on terrorism. Krugman, who is adamantly anti-right-wing, draws on his solid economics training and experience in these credible pieces, which transcend the rant that sadly fills today's political commentaries. Highly recommended for university and larger public libraries.-Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Paul A. Samuelson
The new Krugman book documents why this top-drawer academic economist deserves at least one Pulitzer Prize for his accurate Times op-ed columns that are a lone voice, telling things as they are and debunking Washington policies that are neither compassionate nor conservative. Plutocratic democracy is in the saddle. Rx. Krugman twice a week and in this coherent sum-up on relevant 2003-2010 economics. Buy. Read. Ponder. Benefit.

Molly Ivins
You need to read this book, and when you do, you'll have only one response: it's time to get mad, for most of the media are in denial about how far the takeover of this country by the radical right has already progressed.

Anthony Lewis
Paul Krugman is the indispensable American columnist, a voice of truth in a political world of lies and calculated injustice. This book is even better. It makes the case, unrestrained by deference, that a revolutionary right-wing movement is out to transform the United States-and is succeeding, rolling over a supine press and political opposition.

James Carville
If I had a tenth of Paul Krugman's brain and a twentieth his courage, I'd be the happiest person on the face of the Earth!

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Paul Krugman is the great discovery of recent American journalism. Lively, lucid, witty, superbly informed, his commentary on the state of the union is required reading for anyone concerned about the American future.

David Levering Lewis
The title of Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling might well have been The Great Usurpation. In a republic hijacked by the radical right whose leaders reject the legitimacy of our current political system, Paul Krugman's coruscant book calls for a "great revulsion" across the land before it is too late.

Book review: Seven Secrets to Raising a Happy and Healthy Child or Tattoos Desire and Violence

The Politics of United States Foreign Policy

Author: Jerel A Rosati

The definitive work on how U.S. foreign policy is made, THE POLITICS OF UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY utilizes three levels of analysis demonstrating how government, society, and the historical-global environment impact the real world of politics and the policymaking process. Completely revised, updated, and condensed to integrate coverage of the George W. Bush Administration years, September 11th, the war on terror, and the Iraq War, this new edition blends substance, history, and theory in a lively narrative that is comprehensive, accessible, and informative. Chapters focus on significant topics such as the military, the intelligence community, foreign economic policymaking, civil liberties vs. national security, and the impact of electoral politics (such as the controversial 2000 presidential elections) on foreign policy. THE POLITICS OF UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY has been used throughout Europe and Asia as well as in such prestigious U.S. programs as the National War College, the Foreign Service Institute, and the U.S. Fulbright American Studies Institute on U.S. Foreign Policy, "It is really the best single source on all aspects of the policy process." -- Robert Soofer, Professor of National Security Strategy, National War College, Washington, D.C. "This is the single best textbook for one-stop shopping on the making of American foreign policy after 9/11, not just for American students, but for students around the world." -- Andrew Bennett, Professor of Government, Georgetown University and former Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

Pt. I	Introduction	1
1	The Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy	2
Pt. II	The Government and the Policymaking Process	25
2	The Paradox of Presidential Power	26
3	Presidential Management and the NSC Process	72
4	The State Department at Home and Abroad	107
5	The Military Establishment	134
6	The Intelligence Community	183
7	The Foreign Economic and Cultural Bureaucracy	229
8	Executive Branch Policymaking	249
9	Congress and Legislative-Executive Relations	278
10	The Rest of Government	335
Pt. III	The Society and Domestic Politics	357
11	The Public and Its Beliefs	358
12	Political Participation and Electoral Politics	407
13	Group Politics	428
14	National Security and the Exercise of Civil Liberties	471
15	The Media and the Communications Process	489
16	The Domestic Political Process	546
Pt. IV	The Global Environment and Future Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy	567
17	The Global Environment and American Power	568

The Case of Abraham Lincoln or Unconventional Wisdom

2009-02-06T01:04:00.000-08:00

The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder and the Making of a Great President

Author: Julie M Fenster

The year 1856 was a pivotal one for this country, witnessing the birth of the Republican Party as we know it. But it was also a critical year in the troubled political life of Abraham Lincoln. As a lawyer, he tried his most scandalous murder case. At the same time, he made a decision which unleashed his soaring abilities for the first time, a decision which reverberates to this day: whether or not to join the new Republican Party. The Case of Abraham Lincoln offers the first-ever account of the suspenseful Anderson Murder Case, and Lincoln's role in it. Bestselling historian Fenster not only examines the case that changed Lincoln's fate, but portrays his day-to-day life as a circuit lawyer and how it shaped him as a politician. In a book that draws a picture of Lincoln in court and at home during that memorable season of 1856, Fenster also offers a close-up look at Lincoln's political work, much of it masterful, some of it adventurous, in building the party that would change his fate - and that of the nation.

Booklist

Fenster's absorbing chronicle follows two tracks: Lincoln's reentry into the tumultuous political wars in Illinois, as Democrats, Know-Nothings, and the newly formed Republican Party vied for power; and how the death of a Springfield blacksmith evolved into a sensational murder trial. When the two tracks merge, Fenster illustrates Lincoln's emergence as a cagey politician and eloquent antislavery voice with an enhanced national reputation. This is a worthy addition to our ever-expanding knowledge concerning America's secular saint.

Randall M. Miller - Library Journal

Fenster uses the new complete edition of Lincoln's legal papers, as well as newspapers, letters, and memoirs, to weave a spellbinding tale of alleged adultery, murder, legal practices, personal rivalries, and political ambitions in the mid-1850s-and of Lincoln's emergence as a national political figure. In doing so, she brings us as close to the social and political culture of the day as possible. Although she relies too much on memoirs to depict a Lincoln much admired as a lawyer of ready wit, unimpeachable integrity, and astute judgment, she also mines the sources deeply to discover a small-town America unsure about male-female relationships, strangers in town, and "truth." As in Brian Dirck's Lincoln the Lawyer, among other recent works, she shows how Lincoln's studying of human nature, reading, and time on the legal circuit prepared him for public life. More important, she makes the most persuasive case yet that Lincoln's argument on the need to face down Southern threats of disunion was essential to holding together the disparate elements of the rickety new Republican Party and gave Lincoln national prominence before the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Her analysis of Lincoln's "lost speech" of 1856 is simply brilliant. The verdict: a captivating and compelling book that's highly recommended for public and academic libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Through the lens of a sensational 1856 Springfield, Ill., murder case, a historian focuses on Abraham Lincoln the lawyer and politician, four years before his election to the presidency. Was blacksmith George Anderson slowly poisoned by his adulterous wife before her lover, Anderson's own impatient nephew, finally finished him off with a bloody hammer? The local citizenry certainly thought so. After declining an offer to aid the beleaguered state's attorney, Lincoln joined the defense and devised the crucial strategy that kept questions about possible adultery out of the trial, destroying the prosecution's theory about motive and ultimately freeing the defendants. This lurid case was one of many in the prairie lawyer's crowded practice, and Fenster (Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Automobile Race, 2005, etc.) follows Lincoln and other colorful members of the Illinois Bar as they trail after the traveling Circuit Court. Simultaneously, the author charts a second, more fateful, track: the speech-making tour that resuscitated Lincoln's political career. Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act-which nullified the Missouri Compromise and destroyed the Whig Party-and beginning with his stirring "Lost Speech" at the state's Anti-Nebraska Bloomington Convention, Lincoln traveled throughout Illinois on behalf of John C. Fremont, candidate of the nascent Republican Party, attempting to thread the needle among outright abolitionists, pro-slavery Buchanan Democrats and the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party headed by former President Millard Fillmore. He couldn't persuade the critical swing state to go for his candidate, but this tourturned him into the Party's premier Western spokesman, put him first in line to challenge popular Senator Stephen A. Douglas and ultimately led to his nomination for president. Already a successful, mature attorney whose talent and insight tipped the balance in People v. Anderson and Anderson, Lincoln began in 1856 his transformation into a master politician whose deep understanding of our founding documents and whose genius at translating their meaning for his fellow countrymen would make an even greater difference for the nation. An unexpected, odd-angle approach to Lincoln that proves marvelously insightful. First printing of 75,000

What People Are Saying

Richard Carwardine
"As a leading lawyer and an architect of the new Republican party in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln rarely felt the twin demands of electoral politics and the law more forcefully than in 1856, or met them with more purpose. Julie Fenster tells the interwoven story of that year's election campaign and the lurid case of a murdered Springfield blacksmith with compelling verve."--(Richard Carwardine, award-winning author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power)

Richard E. Hart
"A real page-turner, bringing alive Lincoln's world before his national fame. Fenster transports us to 1856 Illinois, describing the colorful life of Lincoln and his fraternity of circuit riding lawyers as they try cases and help birth the Republican Party. The suspense and storytelling are remarkable. Interwoven is a murder mystery -- the story of an adulterous wife, the murder of her blacksmith husband and Lincoln's defense. Looking for the emergence of Lincoln? Look here."--(Richard E. Hart, President, Abraham Lincoln Association)

Book review: Middle Path Cookbook or Margaret Fultons Kitchen

Unconventional Wisdom: Facts and Myths about American Voters

Author: Karen M Kaufmann

Late deciders go for the challenger; turnout helps the Democrats; the gender gap results from a surge in Democratic preference among women--these and many other myths are standard fare among average citizens, political pundits, and even some academics. But are these conventional wisdoms--familiar to anyone who watches Sunday morning talk shows--really valid?
Unconventional Wisdom offers a novel yet highly accessible synthesis of what we know about American voters and elections. It not only provides an integrated overview of the central themes in American politics--parties, polarization, turnout, partisan bias, campaign effects, swing voters, the gender gap, and the youth vote--it upends many of our fundamental preconceptions. Most importantly, it shows that the American electorate is much more stable than we have been led to believe, and that the voting patterns we see today have deep roots in our history. Throughout, the book provides comprehensive information on voting patterns; illuminates (and corrects) popular myths about voters and elections; and details the empirical foundations of conventional wisdoms that many understand poorly or not at all.
Written by three experts on American politics, Unconventional Wisdom serves as both a standard reference and a concise overview of the subject. Both informative and witty, the book is likely to become a standard work in the field, essential reading for anyone interested in American politics.

Preface     vii
Facts and Myths about American Voters: An Introduction     3
Americans Hate to Love Their Party, but They Do!     19
Are American Voters Polarized?     47
Who Swings?     67
Soccer Moms and Other Myths about the Gender Gap     93
The Young and Not-So-Restless Voters     115
The Partisan Bias of Turnout     145
Campaign Effects in the Twenty-First Century     163
Hard Facts and Conventional Wisdom as We Look to the Future     191
Appendices     201
Notes     217
Bibliography     237
Index     257

James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights or Five Years of My Life

2009-02-04T19:50:00.000-08:00

James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights

Author: Richard Labunski

Today we hold the Constitution in such high regard that we can hardly imagine how hotly contested was its adoption. Now Richard Labunski offers a dramatic account of a time when the entire American experiment hung in the balance, only to be saved by the most unlikely of heroes--the diminutive and exceedingly shy James Madison.
Here is a vividly written account of not one but several major political struggles which changed the course of American history. Labunski takes us inside the sweltering converted theater in Richmond, where for three grueling weeks, the soft-spoken Madison and the charismatic Patrick Henry fought over whether Virginia should ratify the Constitution. Madison won the day by a handful of votes, mollifying Anti-Federalist fears by promising to add a bill of rights to the Constitution. To do this, Madison would have to win a seat in the First Congress, which he did by a tiny margin, allowing him to attend the First Congress and sponsor the Bill of Rights.
Packed with colorful details about life in early America, this compelling and important narrative is the first serious book about Madison written in many years. It will return this under-appreciated patriot to his rightful place among the Founding Fathers and shed new light on a key turning point in our nation's history.

The New York Times - Gary Rosen

A virtue of Labunski's account is the generous attention he gives to Anti-Federalist luminaries like Henry, George Mason and Richard Henry Lee - figures too often overlooked in our reverential regard for the founding. For those used to thinking of the Bill of Rights as carved in stone, it is also instructive to see just how large a role accident played in its creation. The 10 amendments familiar to us started off as 17 in the House and were reduced to 12 by the Senate. The first two of these - on the size of the House and Congressional pay - didn't pass muster in the states, and so the third recommended amendment became, as if by fate, our famous First.

Publishers Weekly

It will come as little surprise to learn that Poe is a veteran Broadway performer: in reading Labunski's chronicle of James Madison's efforts to ratify the Constitution and pass the Bill of Rights, his voice echoes with effortless assurance, carrying into the virtual back row of any room. Thankfully, Poe mostly avoids the vocal equivalent of theatrical preening and posing. His reading is careful, unassuming and avoids wholly unnecessary showboating. Labunski's narrative revolves around Madison's struggle with fellow Virginian Patrick Henry over ratification, and Poe does a fine job of conveying the steadily ratcheting tension of their battle. Poe colors Labunski's tale with an appropriate array of significant pauses, emphases and hushed mock-whispers, bringing his book to life without resorting to overworked theatrical tricks. He may be a stage veteran, but Poe's reading is anything but stagy. Simultaneous release with the Oxford hardcover (Reviews, May 8). (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

James Madison played an important role in both the development of the U.S. Constitution and the creation of its first ten amendments, i.e., the Bill of Rights. Relying on primary sources, Labunski (Sch. of Journalism & Telecommunications, Univ. of Kentucky: The Second Constitutional Convention: How the American People Can Take Back Their Government) carefully and lucidly examines how Madison and his political supporters and opponents (mostly Anti-Federalists) shaped the initial parameters of the Constitution and then further expressed their constitutional philosophies in the amendments that followed. Seven of the ten chapters focus on activities prior to the introduction of the Bill of Rights. In his thorough coverage of the activities of the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Labunski offers intriguing discussions of constitutional debates and provides an understanding of the political and social context of the early constitutional polity. He finds that Madison and other Federalists used strategies that would ensure adoption of constitutional ideas in both Virginia and other parts of the nation. He then goes on to examine Madison's transformation from opponent of amendments to the Constitution to a central advocate in the U.S. House of Representatives for passage of what would become the Bill of Rights. A highly recommended analysis that will be useful for public and academic libraries. Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

1	The Philadelphia Convention	3
2	The reluctant candidate	24
3	The road to Richmond	48
4	The Virginia ratifying convention	67
5	The ratification vote	96
6	The anti-federalists fight back	120
7	The election	147
8	Madison introduces the Bill of Rights	178
9	Congress proposes the Bill of Rights	213
10	Ratification of the Bill of Rights	242
11	Epilogue	256

Go to: Angel behind the Rocking Chair or Congratulations You Have Cancer

Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo

Author: Murat Kurnaz

In October 2001, nineteen-year-old Murat Kurnaz traveled to Pakistan to visit a madrassa. During a security check a few weeks after his arrival, he was arrested without explanation and for a bounty of $3,000, the Pakistani police sold him to U.S. forces. He was first taken to Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was severely mistreated, and then two months later he was flown to Guantanamo as Prisoner #61. For more than 1,600 days, he was tortured and lived through hell. He was kept in a cage and endured daily interrogations, solitary confinement, and sleep deprivation. Finally, in August 2006, Kurnaz was released, with acknowledgment of his innocence. Told with lucidity, accuracy, and wisdom, Kurnaz's story is both sobering and poignant--an important testimony about our turbulent times when innocent people get caught in the crossfire of the war on terrorism.

The Washington Post - Juliet Wittman

Kurnaz's account of his imprisonment is almost unbearably painful to read, precisely because his tone is so measured and low-key. He endured beatings, waterboarding, electric shock, isolation and the disruption of all sense of time and space. He was asked the same meaningless questions again and again…It is tempting to think of Kurnaz's story as exaggerated, but almost everything he describes jibes with the reports of other detainees and of human rights groups. This is a book politicians should read, and it should inspire anguished soul-searching among the rest of us.

Rivers of Empire or Development Geography and Economic Theory

2009-02-03T14:38:00.000-08:00

Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West

Author: Donald Worster

When Henry David Thoreau went for his daily walk, he would consult his instincts on which direction to follow. More often than not his inner compass pointed west or southwest. "The future lies that way to me," he explained, "and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side." In his own imaginative way, Thoreau was imitating the countless young pioneers, prospectors, and entrepreneurs who were zealously following Horace Greeley's famous advice to "go west." Yet while the epic chapter in American history opened by these adventurous men and women is filled with stories of frontier hardship, we rarely think of one of their greatest problems--the lack of water resources. And the same difficulty that made life so troublesome for early settlers remains one of the most pressing concerns in the western states of the late-twentieth century.
The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power. In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome. He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land. He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West. Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises,Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high. Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing. As a result, the future of this "hydraulic West" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.
Rivers of Empire represents a radically new vision of the American West and its historical significance. Showing how ecological change is inextricably intertwined with social evolution, and reevaluating the old mythic and celebratory approach to the development of the West, Worster offers the most probing, critical analysis of the region to date. He shows how the vast region encompassing our western states, while founded essentially as colonies, have since become the true seat of the American "Empire." How this imperial West rose out of desert, how it altered the course of nature there, and what it has meant for Thoreau's (and our own) mythic search for freedom and the American Dream, are the central themes of this eloquent and thought-provoking story--a story that begins and ends with water.

New interesting book: My Kitchen in Spain or Floyds India

Development, Geography, and Economic Theory

Author: Paul Krugman

Why do certain ideas gain currency in economics while others fall by the wayside? Paul Krugman argues that the unwillingness of mainstream economists to think about what they could not formalize led them to ignore ideas that turn out, in retrospect, to have been very good ones.

Krugman examines the course of economic geography and development theory to shed light on the nature of economic inquiry. He traces how development theory lost its initial influence after it became clear that many of the theory's main insights could not be clearly modeled, and concludes with a commentary on areas where further inquiry looks most promising.

The Ohlin Lectures

Booknews

Consists of heavily revised versions of three lectures the author (economics, Stanford U.) delivered at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1992, concerning the fall and rise of development economics, the problems of economic geography, and models and metaphors. 5.5x8". Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Strangers in the House or Mexifornia

2009-02-02T09:24:00.000-08:00

Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine

Author: Raja Shehadeh

This revealing story of a father-son relationship, the first memoir of its kind by a Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories, is set against the backdrop of Middle East hostilities and more than thirty years under military occupation. Marked by a sense of loss and impermanence and embroiled in political conflict, it is the family drama of a difficult relationship between an idealistic son and his politically active father-Aziz Shehadeh, who, in 1967, was the first Palestinian to advocate a peaceful, two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute-a situation further complicated by the arbitrary humiliations of living under the occupier's law. Above all, it is a moving description of the daily lives of those who have chosen to remain on their land.

Publishers Weekly

Palestinian perspectives on the Middle East conflict don't often reach the West and today they are more relevant than ever. In this fascinating memoir, leading Palestinian lawyer Shehadeh offers a chilling and moving view of life inside the Occupied Territories. He was born into a prominent family around the time of Israel's establishment in 1948. As Shehadeh recounts his relationship with his parents, his first love, intellectual experiments in college, world travels, law career and human rights work, his struggles under Israeli occupation distinguish his story. Shehadeh names his father, Aziz, also a prominent attorney, as the first Palestinian in the late 1960s to advocate recognizing Israel and adopting a peaceful two-state solution. The author gives a gripping narrative regarding Aziz's murder and the Israeli authorities' sluggish investigation; it's widely assumed that Aziz's killer was a Palestinian who disapproved of his willingness to compromise with Israel. More broadly, Shehadeh deftly renders the Israeli government's systematic harassment and humiliation of the Palestinians, ranging from constant surveillance at checkpoints to random searches in homes and offices. Such situations, Shehadeh makes clear, account for the powerlessness, frustration and anger experienced by most Palestinians. His deliberate analysis of the expansion of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, a major obstacle to the peace process, is especially intriguing. The author argues that these settlements are illegal under international law, but have slowly and surely been aligned with Israeli legal statutes. Anyone seeking a nuanced view of Palestinian experience should read this brave and lyrical book. B&w photos. (Jan. 2) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Claire Rosser - KLIATT

On the cover is a photograph of Raja as a student at the American University of Beirut in 1971. This memoir he has written is subtitled "coming of age," but in fact this is an intricate, complex autobiography that may appeal to only those YAs with a serious interest in Palestine and Israel. Raja was born several years after his family left Jaffa when Israel became an independent state in 1948. He grew up in Ramallah (so often in the news today) on the West Bank, with his father (educated in England) working as a lawyer. In the war of 1967, when the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, Raja's father saw then that the solution would be to establish two parallel states—Israel and Palestine. This position caused him to be considered a traitor by other Palestinians and the greater Arab world, for compromising with the Israelis. Raja too was educated as a lawyer in England and returned to live in the occupied territories, working at his father's law firm. But the two men didn't agree, and the struggle of father and son becomes the central story of this memoir. The father felt that Raja should marry and have a family and continue with rather safe legal work in the family firm. In fact, Raja established a human rights group, El Haq, and monitored the torture and ill treatment of Palestinian prisoners by the Israeli military. In this way, he continued the struggle, even after his father was murdered. Although this is as much about fathers and sons as it is about the politics of an exceedingly complex region, it is poignantly about loss, as the Palestinians since 1948 have increasingly lost more and more of their land and their autonomy. There is so much sadness and hopelessness in this onefamily's story, and events in our daily headlines tell us of endless more sorrow experienced by so many families living in that place. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Penguin, 238p. illus.,

Library Journal

In this autobiography of a Palestinian living in Israel, Shehadeh, a lawyer and founder of Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, reminisces about growing up "in the shadow of home" and coming to terms with the political situation in which he was born. It wasn't until he was an adult that he finally understood the work of his father, Aziz, an early advocate of the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who was murdered in 1985. In a strong voice that is without diatribe, melodrama, or anger, Shehadeh describes the uncertainties of life during a period of national difficulty. Readers will get a glimpse into the emotional and political turmoil of the region and possibly form a better understanding of the troubles in the Middle East. This book also shares the insight of one man's journey and the maturity that allowed him to see his life in context. Recommended for public and academic libraries with Middle Eastern collections or biography collections that extend beyond the famous. Naomi Hafter, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore, MD Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A former political activist in the occupied territories looks back on his youthful struggle to come to terms with his father, as well as with an idealized Palestinian past and an unrealized Palestinian future. Shehadeh, a lawyer and a writer who now lives quietly in the West Bank town of Ramallah, founded the internationally respected human rights organization Al Haq, which mounted legal challenges to Israeli settlements on the West Bank and exposed the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Raja's father, Aziz Shehadeh, was also a prominent lawyer and a political activist. A refugee from Jaffa following the 1948 conflict, Aziz came to believe that recognizing Israel was the only way to maintain a Palestinian nation. He was condemned by Arab nationalists and also drew fire when he became the defense attorney for those accused of assassinating King Abdullah of Jordan. He was murdered in 1985, not for his political beliefs but probably over a minor legal wrangle. All this lays the foundation for Raja's reflections on his childhood, during which family members incessantly recalled their former comforts and refused to confront the reality of the Israeli takeover. Chapters about Raja's education in London and India reveal the emotional conflict between father and son, as well as Raja's efforts to find a role for himself in the political struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. Partly as a result of his disillusionment with the Israeli investigation of his father's murder, he affiliated with the first intifada and became a legal advisor to the Palestinians at the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He left "in despair a year after they began." Shehadeh also describes eloquently thedevastation of the biblical hills surrounding his home as Israeli bulldozers make room for settlements. A memoir both political and personal, offering a human and humane perspective on one Palestinian's life. (b&w photographs)

New interesting textbook: Festivals of Lite or Cooking the Middle Eastern Way

Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

Author: Victor Davis Hanson

This book is part history, part political analysis and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter century.

The Los Angeles Times

Hanson's primary worry is steadily rising illegal immigration into a welfare state with expanding entitlements and waning commitment to the history and virtues of Western civilization, an admittedly imperfect, coercive consensus that nonetheless held together a uniquely successful, multiethnic nation. The emerging Mexifornia is becoming "not quite Mexico and not quite America either." — Frederick R. Lynch

To Do Justice or Batmans Guide to Crime and Detection

2009-02-01T04:11:00.000-08:00

To Do Justice: A Guide For Progressive Christians

Author: Rebecca Todd Peters

Encouraging Christians to call for public policies to benefit those most vulnerable in our nation, To Do Justice offers tools for studying complex domestic social problems and serves as a guidebook to becoming involved in social action. Rooted in Christian tradition, each essay analyzes a contemporary problem from social, biblical, and theological perspectives before providing directions for public policy.

These engaged ethicists from across the mainline denominations provide concrete examples of how progressive-minded Christians can work for justice in response to these moral dilemmas. With discussion questions in each chapter, it is an excellent resource for classrooms-both in colleges and in churches.

Contributors     vii
Preface     ix
Introduction   Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty   Rebecca Todd Peters     xiii
For Workers   Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty     1
For Families   Gloria H. Albrecht     12
For Those Affected by Drugs   Darryl M. Trimiew     21
For Prisoners and Our Communities   Elizabeth M. Bounds     31
For Public Education That Practices and Promotes Peace   Marcia Y. Riggs     41
For Healing and Wholeness   Aana Marie Vigen     52
For Financial Security in All Stages of Life   Johnny B. Hill     63
For Immigrants   Miguel A. De La Torre     73
For People Lacking Affordable Housing   Rosetta E. Ross     85
For All Creation   Grace Y. Kao     97
For Alternatives to War and Militarism   Gary Dorrien     108
For Funding Our Values   Rebecca Todd Peters     118
Advocacy Advice     128
A Social Creed for the Twenty-first Century$dNational Council of Churches     134
AGAPE document (Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth)$dWorld Council of Churches     137
Accra Confession(Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth)$dWorld Alliance of Reformed Churches     142
Glossary     149
Index     151

New interesting book: Sports Nutrition Energy Metabolism and Exercise or The Wounded Warrior

Batman's Guide to Crime and Detection (DK Readers Series)

Author: Michael Teitelbaum

The Dark Knight of Gotham, the world's greatest detective, takes readers behind-the-scenes in the world of law enforcement, showing how the world's police catch the bad guys.

Sara and Eleanor or Americas Christian Heritage

2009-01-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

Sara and Eleanor: The Story of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Her Daughter-in-Law, Eleanor Roosevelt

Author: Jan Pottker

We think we know the story of Eleanor Roosevelt--the shy, awkward girl who would redefine the role of First Lady, becoming a civil rights activist and an inspiration to generations of young women. As legend has it, the bane of Eleanor's life was her demanding and domineering mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt. Biographers have overlooked the complexity of a relationship that had, over the years, been reinterpreted and embellished by Eleanor herself.

Through diaries, letters, and interviews with Roosevelt family and friends, Jan Pottker uncovers a story never before told. The result is a triumphant blend of social history and psychological insight--a revealing look at Eleanor Roosevelt and the woman who made her historic achievements possible.

Publishers Weekly

Pottker (Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) has made a specialty of tell-alls about the wealthy and the powerful, from the Mars family to Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. But in Sara and Eleanor a study of the complex, sometimes supportive, sometimes contentious relationship between FDR's wife and mother Pottker embarks upon serious historical waters. Navigating across a story already well traversed by such superb writers and researchers as Blanche Wiesen Cook, Geoffrey Ward and Betty Boyd Caroli (the latter in 1998's The Roosevelt Women), Pottker unfortunately, despite her protestations, has nothing new to add to the well-worn tale of these two fascinating ladies. One comes away from Pottker's book wondering why she believed another retelling (one that comes at the story far less eloquently and authoritatively than previous efforts) to be necessary in the first place. The answer lies, apparently, in Pottker's revisionist tack when it comes to key details. For example, Pottker somewhat astonishingly in the face of much testimony to the contrary discounts the notion of Franklin ever having had a true affair with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer. But the revision in question is purely speculative on Pottker's part, not based on evidence. Both Eleanor and Sara deserve and have gotten in the past far more accurate accounts of themselves. Readers should refer to those. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Mel Berger, William Morris. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Pottker (Janet and Jackie; Dear Ann, Dear Abby) considers another power relationship, that of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. Contrary to popular belief, she would have readers believe that Sara was not a gorgon, a racist, an anti-Semite, or a snob; she supported FDR's political career and treated her moody daughter-in-law warmly. At most, Pottker concedes that Sara was something of a meddler. Moreover, Eleanor owed Sara her marriage because Sara apparently warned Franklin that a divorce from Eleanor meant the end of Sara's largesse. Accordingly, Eleanor comes off less well. Emerging from her painful childhood to become a depressed and emotionally unavailable mother, she is shown initially welcoming Sara's extravagant attentions to her and Franklin's children and then carping about them in retrospect. Pottker has extensively researched this book and filled it with convincing and engaging details to make her case for Sara. She takes a defensive tone-not surprising considering that Sara has taken it on the chin from Dore Schary (in Sunrise at Campobello) and Eleanor herself, whose retrospective criticism of her mother-in-law has informed recent scholarship. So perhaps Pottker's sympathetic portrait is overdue. For public libraries.-Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A thoroughly researched, though highly chatty and oddly superficial, attempt to rehabilitate the image of FDR's mother, which was besmirched, the author argues, by less sympathetic Roosevelt biographers. Pottker (Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, 2001, etc.) writes for the Princess Di set, for lovers of royals and riches and American dynasties. Here are accounts of who was wearing cream taffeta at which Roosevelt wedding; here are six pages devoted to the 1939 visit to Hyde Park of Queen Elizabeth and King George VI and the spats between Eleanor and Sara about the menu. Here is such a concern for the exteriors of people's lives (what they wore, where they lived, how their homes were decorated, what they drove, where they traveled, what they bought) that interior lives must almost always be inferred, and then only with difficulty. Pottker just doesn't want to get into it. Neither, in this strangely prudish account, does she wish to be more than coy about sexual issues. The author tells us that the teenaged Eleanor installed triple interior locks on her bedroom door because of drunken uncles. What does that mean? You won't find the answer here. Nor does the author give credence to stories that FDR and Lucy Mercer actually had sexual relations. No, she claims, it was just an intimate relationship. Pottker tries to focus on the stories of the two titular women, but that's hard to do with FDR filling the stage with his charm, his polio, his political successes. And, besides, the author's principal intent is to reinstall Sara Delano Roosevelt on her pedestal-Sara, the woman who was on the cover of Time before her son (or daughter-in-law), the woman who was the heart andsoul and financial officer for the Roosevelt clan. In short: the mother of all matriarchs. Skims across the surface of a very deep lake. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen) Agent: Mel Berger/William Morris

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America's Christian Heritage

Author: Gary DeMar

From Plymouth Rock to Independence Hall and beyond, the dates of American history overflow with evidence of the profound role Christianity has played in our nation. The historical record fully documents the claim that America was founded by Christians to be a biblical "city on a hill." Sadly, however, that record is rarely consulted... As a result, the once self-evident assertion that America was founded as a Christian nation is mocked by academic and media elites. Author Gary DeMar answers secular denials of America's Christian heritage as he presents evidence from a broad range of historical sources and lets the record speak for itself. Consider, for example, the following: In 1892, the Supreme Court of the United States declared, "This is a Christian nation." French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville concluded in 1831 that "[T]here is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than America." Woodrow Wilson said in 1911 that "America was born a Christian nation." The New England Confederation said the purpose of the colonies was "to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace."

	Introduction: America's Christian Heritage: Fact or Fiction?	7
1	"By the Providence of Alimighty God" Christianity in Colonial America	13
2	"Through Divine Goodness" Christianity in the Colonial Constitutions	23
3	"In the Year of Our Lord" Christianity and the Constitution	31
4	"To Lay Christ at the Bottom" Christianity in the Colleges	39
5	"In God We Trust" Christianity in our Nation's Capitol	49
6	The Separation Myth Christianity and the First Amendment	61
7	The Ten Commandments on Trial A Supreme Legal Fight	69
8	"God Bless America" Giving Thanks to God in America	77
	Conclusion: God Governs in the Affairs of Men	81
	Epilogue	85

Mr Jeffersons Women or Captive Mind

2009-01-29T17:46:00.000-08:00

Mr. Jefferson's Women

Author: Jon Kukla

From the acclaimed author of A Wilderness So Immense comes a pioneering study of Thomas Jefferson's relationships with women, both personal and political.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote the words “all men are created equal,” was surprisingly uncomfortable with woman. In eight chapters, Kukla examines the evidence for the founding father's youthful misogyny, beginning with his awkward courtship of Rebecca Burwell, who declined Jefferson's marriage proposal, and his unwelcome advances toward the wife of a boyhood friend. Subsequent chapters describe his decade-long marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, his flirtation with Maria Cosway, and the still controversial relationship with Sally Hemings. A riveting study of a complex man, Mr. Jefferson's Women is sure to spark debate.

Publishers Weekly

This highly insightful study by Kukla (A Wilderness So Immense), director of the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation, investigates Thomas Jefferson's relationships with women, from Elizabeth Moore Walker, the married neighbor with whom Jefferson may have had an affair, to Sally Hemings, the slave whose children he purportedly fathered. One of the most fascinating chapters examines the young Jefferson's failed attempts to woo a classmate's sister, Rebecca Burwell, whose rejection of his marriage proposal may have incited the misogyny found throughout his writings. Perhaps the least satisfying section studies Jefferson's relationship with his wife, Martha: since Jefferson destroyed their private correspondence after she died, Kukla's re-creation of their relationship is necessarily sketchy. The conclusion moves to a larger argument concerning Jefferson's thinking about women as citizens. Kukla shows that Jefferson was much less open to women's political participation and education than were contemporary Enlightenment thinkers, and his "definition of America as a white male polity" was "rooted in his personal discomfort with women." This is one of the most discerning and provocative studies of Jefferson in years. B&w illus., map. (Oct. 12)

Thomas J. Schaeper - Library Journal

It is hard to dislike a book that, like this one, starts off with a discussion of how J. Peterman Company shirts are related to Thomas Jefferson. Kukla (director, Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation; A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America) not only knows his subject well but writes in a fluid and sparkling style. His basic thesis is that Thomas Jefferson grew increasingly uncomfortable with women as he aged, becoming misogynistic and predatory. Three of the four women to whom he made early romantic advances turned him down, and the fourth (his wife) hurt him by dying. Thereafter Jefferson was on his guard, not wanting to be wounded again. When he formed a relationship with his slave Sally Hemings he was in a position of power, as he owned her and could not be rejected. Kukla's research is impeccable, and his voluminous notes are a treasure trove. Nonetheless, this reviewer fails to be persuaded by his overly negative interpretation. He reaches too many conclusions based on supposition rather than solid evidence. Sure to spark heated debate, this book is recommended for academic and public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Enticing, relentlessly driving expose of a Founding Father's private and public misogyny. After a stormy scholarly conference about Thomas Jefferson's long affair with his slave Sally Hemings, Virginia historian Kukla (A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America, 2003, etc) looked for a book about Jefferson's relations with women in general, assuming that it already existed. Instead, he ended up writing it, and his conclusions are dismaying. Kukla asserts that after belle Rebecca Burwell rejected his proposal when he was 20, Jefferson demonstrated throughout his adult life predatory urges toward women, a fear of disruptive female influences (exacerbated by the alarming conduct of women during the French Revolution) and a distasteful endorsement of the master-slave model for male-female relations. Despite his friendship with Abigail ("Remember the Ladies") Adams, Jefferson remained adamant about excluding women from the liberties of the new American republic. He needed to control the women in his life, Kukla argues. Before his happy 11-year marriage to the widow Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772, the young lawyer repeatedly attempted to seduce Elizabeth Walker, the wife of his best friend. Marriage to Martha, the perfect domestic partner, solidified Jefferson's patriarchal ideal of gender roles. Marooned at her death, he later futilely flirted with a married Englishwoman in Paris and back home in Monticello took up for the rest of his life with the much younger, attractive and light-skinned Hemings, who was actually the half-sister of his dead wife. Their six children were emancipated in his will, although he never mentions Hemings by name. Closing with a grimlitany of his subject's consistent opposition to "any departure from an exclusively domestic role as republican wives and mothers," Kukla concludes that "Jefferson's personal aversion to and fear of women in public life shaped American laws and traditions in ways that echo into the twenty-first century."Necessary reading-but an awful revelation of a great man's failings. First printing of 40,000

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Captive Mind

Author: Czeslaw Milosz

The best known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

What People Are Saying

Jerzy Kosinski
A faultlessly perceptive analysis of the moral and historical dilemma we all face...as timely today as when it was first written.

Shadow of Pearl Harbor or Obligations

2009-01-28T12:33:00.000-08:00

Shadow of Pearl Harbor: Political Controversy over the Surprise Attack, 1941-1946

Author: Martin V Melosi

The Japanese surprise attack on U.S. forces in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, came as a tremendous shock to Americans. Accustomed to success and victory in every aspect of life, they found the Pearl Harbor disaster nearly impossible to understand. Thus, almost immediately the search began for a simple explanation why the United States was unprepared and why it should succumb in battle to a foe long considered inferior.

The Shadow of Pearl Harbor analyzes the resulting controversy, which pitted the Democratic administration against congressional Republicans. In an atmosphere of insecurity and suspicion brought on by the greatest naval defeat ever suffered by the United States, Roosevelt's critics demanded a full public disclosure of information about the causes of the debacle.

Fearing a volatile partisan confrontation that such public disclosure might inspire, the Democratic administration tried to silence its critics by shelving the issue for the duration of the war and by keeping national attention fixed on the war effort. Retreating behind the veil of "national security," the executive branch initiated a cover-up of the Pearl Harbor case, sustained by the conclusions of pro-administration investigations, and made scapegoats of the Hawaiian commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short.

Martin V. Melosi has studied in detail each of those investigations and the political infighting between the administration and its opponents. His focus is the extent to which Roosevelt and his high officials succeeded, or failed, to minimize the domestic impact of the Pearl Harbor defeat and keep blame away from themselves.

	Preface	ix
	Acknowledgments	xiii
Chapter 1.	Shock Waves in December	3
Chapter 2.	A Policy of Evasion	17
Chapter 3.	Hasty Investigation	31
Chapter 4.	Cover-up!	45
Chapter 5.	New Battle Lines	56
Chapter 6.	A Republican Assault Falls Short	71
Chapter 7.	Threat to the Official Line	89
Chapter 8.	Prying Open Pandora's Box	111
Chapter 9.	Hope and Trepidation	132
Chapter 10.	Conclusion	161
	Bibliography	169
	Index	178

Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship

Author: Michael Walzer

In this collection of essays, Michael Walzer discusses how obligations are incurred, sustained, and (sometimes) abandoned by citizens of the modern state and members of political parties and movements as they respond to and participate in the most crucial and controversial aspects of citizenship: resistance, dissent, civil disobedience, war, and revolution. Walzer approaches these issues with insight and historical perspective, exhibiting an extraordinary understanding for rebels, radicals, and rational revolutionaries. The reader will not always agree with Walzer but he cannot help being stimulated, excited, challenged, and moved to thoughtful analysis.

The Commanders or The Good Life

2009-01-27T07:21:00.000-08:00

The Commanders

Author: Bob Woodward

It is impossible to examine any part of the war on terrorism in the twenty-first century without seeing the hand of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell or one of their loyalists. The Commanders, an account of the use of the military in the first Bush administration, is in many respects their story -- the intimate account of the tensions, disagreements and debates on the road to war.

Library Journal

Wars make great fiction and even better fact. But best of all is the realm in between. So it is with journalistic histories like Woodward's latest book. YOU ARE THERE: in the inner sanctums of the Pentagon and the White House. YOU HEAR ALL: the privileged conversations, the promises to Kuwait, the military plans. From Panama to Riyadh, from Noriega to Saddam, Woodward bombards you with unrelentless, highly placed gossip, the brew of 400-plus unnamed tattletalers WHO WERE THERE, or so we are told. Sans footnotes, this book will torture scholars for centuries. Truth or embellishment, the glimpses of the pinnacle of power fascinate. Other more scholarly histories of this period will come, better written and more exegetical. Hopefully we will know the source of their tales. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/91.-- John Yurechko, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C.

New interesting book: Interventions or Vietnam Wars 1945 1990

The Good Life

Author: Van Alen Institut

A ball and a wall used to be all you needed for hours of entertainment. But these days, when good design is an expected component of almost every experience, that's just not enough. The right color and composition can make all the difference. Fortunately, architects and landscape designers have answered the call and produced an amazing array of public spaces for recreation. The Good Life shows the best new designs from around the globe in one colorful collection. From Acconci Studio's Skateboard Park in San Juan, to ShoP's East River Project in New York City, to Ken Smith's Railyard Park in Santa Fe, to muf Art and Architecture's Barking Town Square in London, these spaces are some of the most imaginative work around. Stripped from the structural constraints and serious programs of so many building types, the projects here are designed for fun.
The Good Life was organized by Zoë Ryan, Senior Curator at Van Alen Institute and editor of this volume. A broad team of creative experts, including Paola Antonelli, Janet Abrams, Michael Bierut, and Diana Balmori have contributed their thoughts in a series of roundtable discussions, printed in this publication. The list of contributors reads like a who's who of design: Stan Allen, Martha Schwartz, Diller Sco?dio + Renfro, David Adjaye, and many more. An exhibition of the work will take place on New York's waterfront beginning in September 2006.

Interventions or Vietnam Wars 1945 1990

2009-01-26T02:07:00.000-08:00

Economic History of Puerto Rico - Instiutional Change and Capitalist Development

Author: Noam Chomsky

Interweaving findings of the 'new' Puerto Rico historiography with those of earlier historical studies, and using the most recent theoretical concepts to interpret them, James Dietz examines the complex manner in which productive and class relations within Puerto Rico have interacted with changes in its place in the world economy.

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Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990

Author: Marilyn Young

The first book to give equal weight to the Vietnamese and American sides of the Vietnam war.

Publishers Weekly

In this dark account of the political and diplomatic sides of the Vietnam wars and the psychic aftermath, the author contends that the Indochina experience refuted (temporarily) the simplistic assumptions that in foreign policy America always ``meant well'' and that communism was always ``bad.'' The epithets popularly employed to characterize the enemy in Vietnam--``indifferent to human life,'' ``dishonest,'' ``ruthless''--came to characterize our own actions as well. From counterinsurgency expert Edward Lansdale's ``cheerful brutalization of democratic values'' to President Nixon's attempt to ``make war look like peace,'' the moral breakdown is assessed here in disturbing detail. Young goes on to argue that more recent U.S. intervention in Lebanon, Libya, Grenada and Panama suggests that few lessons were learned in Vietnam--indeed, that the past decade has seen a dangerous resurgence of native faith in the benevolence of American foreign meddling. This, she maintains, goes hand in hand with a renewed commitment to use force in a global crusade against Third World revolutions and governments. Young, a history professor at New York University, paints a grim picture of our part in the Indochina war and its excoriating effects on the nation. Photos. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Two new books join the many which try to summarize and analyze the Vietnam War, its precedents, and its epilog, with differing approaches and results. Young (history, NYU) coauthored, along with William G. Rosenberg, Transforming Russia & China ( LJ 1/1/82). Her current study focuses on the American experience, while touching on the periods before and after direct American involvement. She provides some useful insights, and details debates among American leaders, but she draws predominantly on published sources and offers little new information. More significantly, her arguments are heavily biased (she seems to think that only the American and South Vietnamese military and governments demonstrated cruelty, corruption, deception, and destruction), leading to some troubling conclusions (e.g., that U.S. bombing of Cambodia may have been responsible for the later horrors of the Khmer Rouge), and leaving the reader unable to place events in any kind of valid historical perspective. In stark contrast to Young's black-and-white picture, Olson and Roberts (history, Sam Houston State Univ. and Purdue Univ., respectively) paint a picture of many colors. This successful popular history of the war is less scholarly, less detailed than The Vietnam Wars , but the better-balanced coverage throughout yields a more insightful, instructive history. At times the authors' emotionalism (e.g., the account of the My Lai massacre) clouds their presentation, and the otherwise fascinating discussion of the postwar media's depiction of the war is not up to date, but general readers will find their book to be a helpful and accessible introduction to the complexities of the Vietnam experience.-- Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.

Booknews

A history of the war the US fought in Indochina, beginning with the aid the Americans gave to the French to recover control of their former colony, and also a history of the war of resistance the Vietnamese fought, which was by turns, and sometimes simultaneously, a struggle against foreign aggression and for a socialist revolution. Includes two 16-page photo inserts. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

Michael H. Hunt
"Unmatched in its striking juxtaposition of the Vietnamese revolution with American Cold War policy and ideology, and in its sensitivity to the human dimension of the conflict on both sides."

George MC. Kahin
"A first-rate synthesis of the vast literature on the Vietnam War which effectively interweaves U.S. involvement in Indochina with relevant developments on the domestic front in a way that makes both more understandable."

Three Early Modern Utopias or The Birth of the Modern World 1780 1914

2009-01-24T20:47:00.000-08:00

Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines

Author: Thomas Mor

With the publication of Utopia (1516), Thomas More provided a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well as a playful text. This edition reprints Ralph Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin together with letters and illustrations that accompanied early editions of Utopia.
This edition also includes two other, hitherto less accessible, utopian narratives. New Atlantis (1627) offers a fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary ideal of the role that science should play in the modern society. Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a precursor of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engages with some of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the end of the early modern period. Bringing together these three New World texts, and situating them in a wider Renaissance context, this edition--which includes letters, maps, and alphabets that accompanied early editions--illustrates the diversity of the early modern utopian imagination, as well as the different purposes to which it could be put.

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The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons

Author: C A Bayly

This thematic history of the world from 1780 to the onset of the First World War reveals that the world was far more ‘globalised’ at this time than is commonly thought.

• Explores previously neglected sets of connections in world history.

• Reveals that the world was far more ‘globalised’, even at the beginning of this period, than is commonly thought.

• Sketches the ‘ripple effects’ of world crises such as the European revolutions and the American Civil War.

• Shows how events in Asia, Africa and South America impacted on the world as a whole.

• Considers the great themes of the nineteenth-century world, including the rise of the modern state, industrialisation and liberalism.

• Challenges and complements the regional and national approaches which have traditionally dominated history teaching and writing.

The Great Theft or Rites of Peace

2009-01-23T15:34:00.000-08:00

The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists

Author: Khaled M Abou El Fadl

Despite President George W. Bush's assurances that Islam is a peaceful religion and that all good Muslims hunger for democracy, confusion persists and far too many Westerners remain convinced that Muslims and terrorists are synonymous. In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent bombings in London, an unprecedented amount of attention has been directed toward Islam and the Muslim world. Yet, even with this increased scrutiny, most of the public discourse regarding Islam revolves around the actions of extremist factions such as the Wahhabis and al-Qa'ida. But what of the Islam we don't hear about?

As the second-largest and fastest-growing religion in the world, Islam is deemed by more than a billion Muslims to be a source of serenity and spiritual peace, and a touchstone for moral and ethical guidance. While extremists have an impact upon the religion that is wildly disproportionate to their numbers, moderates constitute the majority of Muslims worldwide. It is this rift between the quiet voice of the moderates and the deafening statements of the extremists that threatens the future of the faith.

In The Great Theft, Khaled Abou El Fadl, one of the world's preeminent Islamic scholars, argues that Islam is currently passing through a transformative period no less dramatic than the movements that swept through Europe during the Reformation. At this critical juncture there are two completely opposed worldviews within Islam competing to define this great world religion. The stakes have never been higher, and the future of the Muslim world hangs in the balance.

Drawing on the rich tradition of Islamichistory and law, The Great Theft is an impassioned defense of Islam against the encroaching power of the extremists. As an accomplished Islamic jurist, Abou El Fadl roots his arguments in long-standing historical legal debates and delineates point by point the beliefs and practices of moderate Muslims, distinguishing these tenets from the corrupting influences of the extremists. From the role of women in Islam to the nature of jihad, from democracy and human rights to terrorism and warfare, Abou El Fadl builds a vital vision for a moderate Islam. At long last, the great majority of Muslims who oppose extremism have a desperately needed voice to help reclaim Islam's great moral tradition.

Publishers Weekly

El Fadl, professor of Islamic law at UCLA and Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, is the academic voice of the world's majority-moderate Muslims. His strong credentials and thoughtful approach set him apart from his peers. Here, he successfully argues that the extremist sects of Islam, mainly Wahhabism, blatantly defy the true values of Islam. He clarifies that Wahhabism was once an unpopular, fringe, cultlike movement, which only grew through a chance partnership with the Saudi Arabian ruling family. The discovery of oil created an unprecedented infusion of petro-dollars into the fledgling, conservative belief system. The point of the book, El Fadl writes, is to define "the reality of Muslim thought as it currently exists." He focuses on the extremists' "puritan" view, exposing the hypocrisies and inconsistencies inherent in their "imagined Islam." He doesn't offer specific solutions, but he raises the issues carefully and well. Though the writing can be dry and portions read like a law school lecture, overall El Fadl's book is a fulfilling read for moderate Muslims concerned about conservative leadership and any non-Muslims who want to inform themselves about the extremists' misuse of Islam. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Is Islam the solution or part of the problem? Abou El Fadl depicts an ongoing struggle between puritans and moderates to define and apply Islam today. Those he labels puritans embrace an absolutist and intolerant orientation. The moderates draw on the more humanistic heritage hammered out by generations of ulama (religious scholars). That heritage has been badly undermined in modern times by the replacement of Islamic legal thought and institutions with Western courts and codes, but most of all by the intolerant doctrines of the Wahhabis, spread with the help of Saudi oil revenues, and of those groups known as Salafis, whose ideology stems in part from Wahhabism. The moderate Muslim outlook that Abou El Fadl champions can, however, build on that battered tradition — through a dynamic process engaged with a changing world, not through restoration of a supposed lost golden age. A scholar trained in both Islamic and Western law, Abou El Fadl presents a brilliant brief for that humanistic Islamic tradition while getting in some well-placed blows against those puritans. He takes on tough issues such as Islam and human rights, the status of women, and jihad. In the process, he serves up one of the more engaging primers on Islam available.

Library Journal

Islamist jurist and Western law scholar El Fadl's (law, UCLA; U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom) objective is to address some of the difficulties currently facing Islam by distinguishing between what he refers to as Muslim "puritans" and "moderates" (i.e., the extremists and the moderate majority), portraying the context in which each group has developed and describing the distinctions on each side. He thereby provides a useful introduction and background on the subject for interested readers. He is especially concerned about whose voice currently represents Islam, believing it is politics that distorts its message and gives the West a perspective of a faith filled with violence. Further, he expresses a bias against Islamic purists because he feels they detract from Islam and argues for the moderate majority to engage in a counter-jihad. Since it focuses on Muslim extremists, this book affords readers an opportunity to better evaluate the current situation of Islam to which they are exposed. It will have broad public appeal and is appropriate for libraries where interest exists.-Naomi Hafter, Baltimore Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

Author: Adam Zamoyski

In the wake of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, the French emperor's imperious grip on Europe began to weaken, raising the question of how the continent was to be reconstructed after his defeat. While the Treaty of Paris that followed Napoleon's exile in 1814 put an end to a quarter century of revolution and war in Europe, it left the future of the continent hanging in the balance.

Eager to negotiate a workable and lasting peace, the major powers—Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—along with a host of lesser nations, began a series of committee sessions in Vienna: an eight-month-long carnival that combined political negotiations with balls, dinners, artistic performances, hunts, tournaments, picnics, and other sundry forms of entertainment for the thousands of aristocrats who had gathered in the Austrian capital. Although the Congress of Vienna resulted in an unprecedented level of stability in Europe, the price of peace would be high. Many of the crucial questions were decided on the battlefield or in squalid roadside cottages amid the vagaries of war. And the proceedings in Vienna itself were not as decorous as is usually represented.

Internationally bestselling author Adam Zamoyski draws on a wide range of original sources, which include not only official documents, private letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, but also the reports of police spies and informers, to reveal the steamy atmosphere of greed and lust in which the new Europe was forged. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, and featuring a cast of some of the most influential and powerful figures in history, including Tsar Alexander, Metternich, Talleyrand,and the Duke of Wellington, Rites of Peace tells the story of these extraordinary events and their profound historical consequences.

Jim Doyle - Library Journal

Freelance historian Zamoyski (Moscow 1812) offers a penetrating account of Europe's first summit meeting. In September 1814, Austria, Russia, Prussia, England, and many lesser political entities convened in Vienna to restore order to a Europe that had endured 25 years of bloody warfare. Napoléon had been defeated and shipped off to Elba, of course to return during the Hundred Days, but this did not deter the conferees from carving up Europe into compliant properties for the victors. The key players in what amounted to a high-stakes poker game were Metternich (Austria), Hardenberg (Prussia), Castlereagh (Britain), and Alexander I (Russia). But just about every European aristocrat seemed to have congregated in Vienna to advance agendas and to party. Zamoyski stresses that the Congress of Vienna was a bacchanalian extravaganza where affairs of state became entwined with affairs of the heart, and until the 1950s most historians condemned it as nothing more than the restoration of the ancien régime. Then in 1957 Henry Kissinger posited in his published doctoral thesis, A World Restored, that the congress epitomized the virtues of realpolitikand brought a century of peace to Europe. Zamoyski will have none of this revisionist interpretation and maintains that the congress left a negative legacy that haunted Europe well into the 20th century. His book is a superb example of diplomatic history and belongs in every Modern European history collection.

Kirkus Reviews

The allied powers gathered in Vienna to negotiate and celebrate after Napoleon's defeat were self-interested, but they took some tentative steps toward the sort of multilateral negotiations that have characterized international relations in the ensuing centuries. So concludes Zamoyski, whose previous shelf-benders (Moscow 1812, 2004, etc.) have illuminated various aspects of 19th-century Europe's military and political landscape. His newest artfully blends geography, politics, military matters and bedroom manners in a highly readable account. Some of history's most famous men pace the author's stage: Napoleon, Wellington, Castlereagh, Tallyrand, Metternich and the rising martial star from Russia, Tsar Alexander. In Zamoyski's capable hands, these are more than mere names. Motives become more understandable, successes more exciting, failures more wrenching. The narrative opens with Napoleon's bashing by the Russian winter of 1812 and his frantic attempts over the course of 1813 and early 1814 to keep his enemies at bay until he could rebuild the French army. But Alexander, unlike his Prussian, Austrian and British allies, wanted to march into Paris; the tsar saw the struggle in its most primal, good-versus-evil aspect. Still, animated by what he said was a Christian impulse of forgiveness, he made a deal with Napoleon (others wanted him executed) and sent him off to Elba in April 1814. The Congress of Vienna, which began five months later, confronted the victors with some difficult issues: What to do about Poland? Germany? Italy? How and if and why to divide or unite them? What about the Scandinavian countries? And Switzerland? England wanted to abolish the slave trade, but found fewlisteners. Some wanted to punish France severely; others feared that excessive sanctions would do more harm than good. It wasn't all work, though. For months the parties ran late into the night, and the delegates played Musical Bedchambers with various women. Then Napoleon escaped . . . First-rate popular history with obvious contemporary relevance.

List of Illustrations     vii
List of Maps     xi
Introduction     xiii
The Lion at Bay     1
The Saviour of Europe     15
The Peacemakers     35
A War for Peace     49
Intimate Congress     64
Farce in Prague     82
The Play for Germany     98
The First Waltzes     118
A Finger in the Pie     137
Battlefield Diplomacy     151
Paris Triumph     169
Peace     185
The London Round     204
Just Settlements     218
Setting the Stage     238
Points of Order     260
Notes and Balls     280
Kings' Holiday     296
A Festival of Peace     314
Guerre de Plume     329
Political Carrousel     341
Explosive Diplomacy     358
Dance of War     371
War and Peace     385
The Saxon Deal     404
Unfinished Business     420
The Flight of the Eagle     442
The Hundred Days     455
The Road to Waterloo     470
Wellington'sVictory     487
The Punishment of France     499
Last Rites     515
Discordant Concert     531
The Arrest of Europe     550
Notes     571
Bibliography     599
Index     619

Plato or Liberty

2009-01-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

Plato: The Republic, Volume 6, Books 6-10 (Loeb Classical Library)

Author: Plato

Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BCE. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates' execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of 'advanced' democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates' mind fused with Plato's thought.

In Laches, Charmides, and Lysis, Socrates and others discuss separate ethical conceptions. Protagoras, Ion, and Meno discuss whether righteousness can be taught. In Gorgias, Socrates is estranged from his city's thought, and his fate is impending. The Apology (not a dialogue), Crito, Euthyphro, and the unforgettable Phaedo relate the trial and death of Socrates and propound the immortality of the soul. In the famous Symposium and Phaedrus, written when Socrates was still alive, we find the origin and meaning of love. Cratylus discusses the nature of language. The great masterpiece in ten books, the Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). Of the six so-called dialectical dialogues Euthydemus deals with philosophy; metaphysical Parmenides is about general concepts and absolute being; Theaetetus reasons about the theory ofknowledge. Of its sequels, Sophist deals with not-being; Politicus with good and bad statesmanship and governments; Philebus with what is good. The Timaeus seeks the origin of the visible universe out of abstract geometrical elements. The unfinished Critias treats of lost Atlantis. Unfinished also is Plato's last work of the twelve books of Laws (Socrates is absent from it), a critical discussion of principles of law which Plato thought the Greeks might accept.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.

New interesting book: The Differentiated Network Organizing Multinational Corporations for Value Creation or Financial Management

Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty

Author: Isaiah Berlin

Liberty is a revised and expanded edition of the book that Isaiah Berlin regarded as his most important--Four Essays on Liberty, a standard text of liberalism, constantly in demand and constantly discussed since it was first published in 1969. Writing in Harper's, Irving Howe described it as "an exhilarating performance--this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be." Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has revised the text, incorporating a fifth essay that Berlin himself had wanted to include. He has also added further pieces that bear on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are at last available together in one volume. Finally, in an extended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlin's unpublished writings, he exhibits some of the biographical sources of Berlin's lifelong preoccupation with liberalism. These additions help us to grasp the nature of Berlin's "inner citadel," as he called it--the core of personal conviction from which some of his most influential writing sprang.

The Editor's Tale

Five Essays on Liberty

Introduction

Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century

Historical Inevitability

Two Concepts of Liberty

John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life

From Hope and Fear Set Free

Other Writings on Liberty

Liberty

The Birth of Greek Individualism

Final Retrospect

Autobiographical Appendices

The Purpose Justifies the Ways

A Letter to George Kennan

Notes on Prejudice

Berlin and his Critics by Ian Harris

Index

War and Decision or The Seventeen Traditions

2009-01-21T05:08:00.000-08:00

War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism

Author: Douglas J Feith

Of all the players in the planning and evolution of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism, few were more integral -- or more controversial -- than Douglas Feith, the chief strategist on Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon policy team. A highly influential international policy analyst for more than a quarter century before joining the Bush Administration in 2001, Feith worked closely with Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Cheney, and President Bush in defining the U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 -- from the successful war on Afghanistan to the more challenging invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Now, in this candid and revealing memoir, Feith -- a founding member of the "neoconservative" movement and an architect of the administration's preventive strategy in the war on terrorism -- offers the most in-depth and authoritative account yet of the Pentagon's evolving stance during one of the most controversial eras of American history. Drawing upon a unique trove of documents and records, this extraordinary chronicle will put the reader in the room for scores of previously unreported senior-level meetings, showing how hundreds of critical decisions were made in defense of American interests during and after the crisis of 9/11 -- decisions both successful and controversial. Where journalists like Bob Woodward could only speculate, Feith is the first inside player to reveal the inner workings of the Pentagon, at a time when history hung in the balance.

As the political battles over Iraq and the Bush administration surge onward, one thing has been missing: A fair and accurate assessment of how the battles were joined, from inside the team that planned them. With this exceptional work of history, Douglas Feith contributes the only thing that can change the course of the debate: the truth.

New interesting book: The Hormone of Desire or Bra Talk

The Seventeen Traditions

Author: Ralph Nader

By the legendary activist and humanitarian: A surprising and moving look back at a small-town family and the traditions that shaped a childhood.

Ralph Nader is known for his lifetime of progressive activism and fearless critique of corruption in American politics and society. Yet in this fresh and inspiring new book, Nader takes a look backward - at a serene and enriching childhood spent in bucolic Winsted, Connecticut, and at the traditions he absorbed within his family. From listening to learning, from patriotism to argument, from work to simple enjoyment, Nader revisits seventeen traditions he learned from his parents, his siblings, and the people in his community, and draws from them inspiring lessons for today's society. Blending memoir and thoughtful inspiration, Nader offers readers a chance to look back on a time in American history when the family and the natural world were central in a child's understanding of how to be a conscientious adult.

Among the seventeen traditions he celebrates:

* The Tradition of Listening
* The Tradition of Charity
* The Tradition of Civics
* The Tradition of Work
* The Tradition of Patriotism
* The Tradition of Simple Enjoyment

In his warmest and most personal writing to date, Nader fondly describes his father's restaurant business and how it taught him about work, community and how to share in the spirits of others; the value of his mother's ethnic cooking and how it defined his relationship with his heritage, and the hours he spent as a child wondering through the undeveloped forests of Connecticut where he learned the value of solitude. In doing so, he reawakens our own memories of the blessings of a simpler time-and of the enduring values of family, community, and love that gave him the courage to lead a meaningful life.

La agonia erotica or Pasteurs Quadrant Basic Science and Technological Innovation

2009-01-20T02:17:00.000-08:00

La agonia erotica: De Bolivar, el amor y la muerte

Author: Victor Paz Otero

Of all possible literary histories, none reveals its subject more intimately than the epistolary, as is made evident in this collection of love letters written by Simón Bolívar to Manuelita Sáenz. The liberator and founding father of a good portion of Latin America, Bolívar was also a heartened and bold warrior in love—in the arms of his lover Bolívar found his only refuge from the war surrounding him. De todos los medios posibles de entender la historia, ninguno encierra tanta intimidad como las cartas, una observación que está muy evidente en esta colección de cartas de amor escritas por Simón Bolívar para su querida Manuelita Sáenz. El libertador de América, Bolívar fue también un aguerrido combatiente en el amor que desafió las convenciones de la guerra y la sociedad, para encontrar en los brazos de Manuelita Sáenz el último refugio en medio de una guerra.

Interesting book: Le Secteur À but non lucratif :un Manuel de Recherche

Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation

Author: Donald E Stokes

The author recasts the widely accepted view of the tension between scientific understanding and use and builds a convincing case that by recognizing the importance of use-inspired basic research, we can frame a new contract between science and government.

Lion in the White House or The Boys from Dolores

2009-01-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt

Author: Aida D Donald

New York State Assemblyman, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, Vice President and, at forty-two, the youngest President ever—in his own words, Theodore Roosevelt “rose like a rocket.” He was also a cowboy, a soldier, a historian, an intrepid explorer, and an unsurpassed environmentalist. In Lion in the White House, historian Aida Donald masterfully chronicles the life of this first modern president.

TR’s accomplishments in office were immense. As President, Roosevelt redesigned the office of Chief Executive and the workings of the Republican Party to meet the challenges of the new industrial economy. Believing that the emerging aristocracy of wealth represented a genuine threat to democracy, TR broke trusts to curb the rapacity of big business. He built the Panama Canal and engaged the country in world affairs, putting a temporary end to American isolationism. And he won the Nobel Peace Prize—the only sitting president ever so honored.

Throughout his public career, TR fought valiantly to steer the GOP back to its noblest ideals as embodied by Abraham Lincoln. Alas, his hopes for his party were quashed by the GOP’s strong rightward turn in the years after he left office. But his vision for America lives on.

In lapidary prose, this concise biography recounts the courageous life of one of the greatest leaders our nation has ever known.

Publishers Weekly

In this brisk biography, Donald, former editor-in-chief of Harvard University Press, ascribes Teddy Roosevelt's popularity to his combination of charisma and substance; he was an "electrical, magnetic" speaker, according to one contemporary newspaper account, and he hit themes that resonated with ordinary folks, such as honesty in government and opportunity for all. In the White House, Roosevelt established a model of "positive, active governance" and insisted that the president was more powerful than any business tycoon. Donald pays particular attention to Roosevelt's pioneering conservancy efforts, and she suggests that one of his most important acts was to appoint Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to the Supreme Court. Donald also touches on the personal: his grief when his first wife died, and his passionate love for his second wife, with whom he set a new standard for presidential domestic life, entertaining with a gusto unmatched until the Kennedys. The book is refreshingly slim, but sometimes-as in the brief discussion of Roosevelt's appointments of African-Americans to government jobs-one wishes for more. Indeed, there's not much here that readers won't find in other studies of Roosevelt, but Donald's swift prose makes this a satisfying read. Photos. History Book Club main selection.(Nov.)

William D. Pederson - Library Journal

Donald (former editor in chief, Harvard Univ. Press) here provides an accessible biography of Theodore Roosevelt (TR), who is receiving renewed attention during the centennial of his presidency (1901-09). America's last Renaissance president, TR led multiple lives: he was a rancher, soldier, historian, explorer, conservationist, hunter, and politician. Most scholars rank him at the top of the near-great presidents. Donald, who only briefly notes his faults, ranks him even higher. She not only shows how he propelled the United States from provincial status into a world power but also sheds light on how much he identified with his chief political hero, Abraham Lincoln. TR, who was given a ring by Lincoln's former private secretary to wear during his inauguration, often tried to define Lincoln as a progressive, a concept his Republican Party rejected. Ironically, it was TR's distant nephew Franklin who patterned his political life on TR to such a degree that Lincoln eventually morphed into a New Deal Democrat. Donald's account, although covering familiar territory, will appeal to a broad array of readers, both those already admiring the man and those new to him.

Kirkus Reviews

A compact biography of the genuine cowboy president. Donald undertakes a daunting task: compressing the crowded life of Theodore Roosevelt into fewer than 300 pages, where any year-indeed, almost any episode (see Candice Millard's thrilling The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, 2005)-merits book-length treatment. Donald offers glimpses of Roosevelt in his many guises: the sickly youth, the Harvard swell, the cowboy rancher, the frontier deputy sheriff, the amateur scientist, the historian and author, the avid hunter and explorer, the conservationist, the Rough Rider, the devoted family man. She pays a bit more attention to his deeds in public office, from his early days as an Albany legislator, to his term as civil-service commissioner under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland, to his stint as police commissioner of New York City. She turns a larger spotlight on Roosevelt the assistant secretary of the navy, the New York governor, the McKinley vice president and, of course, the inventor of the modern presidency. Donald duly notes Roosevelt's magnificent public deeds-storming San Juan Hill, busting the trusts, launching the Great White Fleet, building the Panama Canal, waging the valiant Bull Moose campaign-and takes care also to mark his failures-his mishandling of the Brownsville, Texas, army affair and his failure to challenge the 1902 Chinese Exclusion Act. Indeed, no important aspect of the life goes unexplored, but the galloping pace leaves little time for the color this subject demands. Donald fares much better with her sensitive and informed discussion of Roosevelt's political philosophy. She ably demonstrates how his life shaped his public policy, how he actedwisely and moderately on a reformist agenda and how Lincoln's example informed his presidency, the high watermark of Republican progressivism. His increasingly "radical" positions-actually nothing more than an extension of his abiding belief in the efficacy of active government-finally alienated him from the Party he so briefly defined. Although readers seeking rich detail, a portrait in full, will continue to consult Edmund Morris's exquisite two-volume biography, Donald's work serves as a fair introduction to Roosevelt's life and a fine appreciation of his politics.

New interesting book: Dirección de Mercadotecnia

The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Classmates from Revolution to Exile

Author: Patrick Symmes

From the author of Chasing Che, the remarkable tale of a group of boys at the heart of Cuba's political and social history. The Boys from Dolores illuminates the elite island society from which Fidel Castro and his brother Raul emerged.
The Colegio de Dolores was a Jesuit boarding school in Santiago, Cuba's rich and ancient second city, where Fidel and Raul were educated in the 1930s and '40s. Patrick Symmes begins his story here, tracking down dozens of Fidel's schoolmates glimpsed in a single period photograph. And it is through their stories--their time at the Colegio; the catastrophic effects of the revolution on their lives; their fates since--that Symmes opens a door onto a Cuba, and a time in Castro’s life, that have been deliberately obscured from us. Here too is the elusive Raúl Castro, a cipher destined to rule Cuba in Fidel’s place.
We see Castro in his formative youth, an adolescent ruling the classrooms of the Colegio and running in the streets of Santiago. Symmes traces the years in which the revolution was conceived, won, and lost, describing the changes it wrought in Santiago and in the lives of Fidel’s own classmates: we follow them through the maelstrom of the 1960s, as most fight to leave Cuba and a few stay behind. And here, in Santiago today, Symmes finds Castro’s most lasting achievement, the creating and sustaining of a myth-soaked revolutionary idealism amid the harshest realities of daily life.
Wholly original in its approach, The Boys from Dolores is a powerfully evocative, eye-opening portrait of Cuba--and of the Castro brothers--in the twentieth century.

The New York Times - William Grimes

Patrick Symmes, the author of Chasing Che, returns to Cuba in fine style with The Boys From Dolores. Sneaking up on his subject sideways, he uses the Colegio de Dolores and its graduates as the starting point for creating an atmospheric, richly evocative history of modern Cuba: the Cuba that produced Fidel; the Cuba that might have been, had the Dolorinos and their ideals prevailed; and the sorry, compromised Cuba of today, charismatic even in decay…Mr. Symmes digs like a reporter and writes like a novelist. As he makes his rounds, chasing down leads, pestering recalcitrant Cuban bureaucrats, grabbing his opportunities when they come, keeping his eyes and ears open all the time, he accumulates a fat dossier of vivid impressions. These feed into extended dramatic scenes and lightning-quick vignettes…

The New York Times Book Review - Guy Martin

…[a] masterly account of Cuba's pathology…Symmes has luxuriously researched this book over a period of years, commuting to Havana and Miami to track down the people with the goods. He's also a rarity among journalists, humorous and wise enough to report the historiographical obstacles he faced. As a result, he brings us a ground truth, apolitical in the best sense, and a great depth of vision.

The Washington Post - Wendy Gimbel

"Symmes is a staccato historian, a storyteller on speed. One minute he's dancing at Santiago's Carnaval, and suddenly he's flying on a rickety plane to an interview in Puerto Rico. Now he's climbing four flights of crumbling stairs in Havana, and, at the Dolorinos' reunion, he's doing an exuberant cha cha cha. But Symmes is also a superb journalist. His interviews with the Dolorinos form a priceless archive of the Cuban diaspora and argue for the importance of the storyteller's art."

Boyd Childress - Library Journal

Castro's tale has been told from all angles, but journalist Symmes (Chasing Che) attacks from a new direction. The author writes of Castro's schoolmates from Dolores, the private Jesuit academy in Santiago de Cuba on the island's eastern end, and he visits several of them. Many are in exile, and a handful remain in Cuba. Among the Dolores students were Castro's brothers Raul and Ramon and a future star in North American television, Desi Arnaz. But it is Cuban intellectuals like Lundy Aguilar to whom Symmes turns for insights into Cuba before and after Castro's revolution. The result is a remarkable account of the country and its people. The lengthy chapter on the Bay of Pigs and its aftermath is evocative and powerful, easily the equal of any contemporary writings on Cuba. The book certainly dispels the myth of a romantic revolution with egalitarian goals. As Symmes puts it, "Within the Revolution, everything. Outside the Revolution, nothing." Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ3/15/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

A searching story of Cuba's revolutionary generation, now almost gone. There was a time when Fidel Castro was a guileless schoolboy, one who in 1940 wrote to Franklin Roosevelt and asked for a handout: "[I]f you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american, in the letter, because never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them." It is worth considering that Castro soon complained, "The Americans are assholes. I asked for ten dollars and they didn't send me a cent," the birth of a lifelong grudge. With his classmates at Colegio de Dolores, an elite Jesuit school, Castro learned revolutionary discipline if not revolutionary politics; indeed, said one of those classmates many years later, "To think and work. That's what they taught. Some learned it, others didn't. The pre-revolutionary society owed a lot to the Jesuits." The famed, ill-fated attack on the Moncada Barracks took place just a few blocks from the school; when Castro and his brother Raul fled the scene, it was down familiar alleys. One by one, their classmates left, even as other intellectual admirers streamed in to join the revolution; a Cuban who stayed for a time after the revolution, Guillermo Cabrera Infante was shocked when a visiting Turkish writer who had spent years in prison warned him that his turn was coming, that dictatorship was looming, as the heartbroken exiles knew. It's a strange dictatorship at that: Symmes (Chasing Che, 2000) observes that in Castro's Cuba everyone can read, but almost no one is allowed to. And when Fidel dies, as most of his classmates already have? Then Raul-whose classmates nicknamed him La Pulgita, the little flea-will take charge. Notes theauthor: "If he has any instinct for survival, he will announce the day after Fidel's funeral that nothing is going to change, and then start changing everything."Essential for Cuba watchers.

Domination and the Arts of Resistance or The God Strategy

2009-01-19T04:51:00.000-08:00

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts

Author: James C Scott

The purpose of this book is to suggest how we might more successfully read, interpret, and understand the often fugitive political conduct of subordinate groups. A comparison of the hidden transcript of the weak with that of the powerful and of both hidden transcripts to the public transcript of power relations offers a substantially new way of understanding resistance to domination.

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The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America

Author: David Scott Domk

In The God Strategy, David Domke and Kevin Coe offer a timely and dynamic study of the rise of religion in American politics, examining the public messages of political leaders over the past seventy-five years--from the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt to the early stages of the 2008 presidential race. They conclude that U.S. politics today is defined by a calculated, deliberate, and partisan use of faith that is unprecedented in modern politics.
Sectarian influences and expressions of faith have always been part of American politics, the authors observe, but a profound change occurred beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. What has developed since is a no-holds-barred religious politics that seeks to attract voters, identify and attack enemies, and solidify power. Domke and Coe identify a set of religious signals sent by both Republicans and Democrats in speeches, party platforms, proclamations, visits to audiences of faith, and even celebrations of Christmas. Sometimes these signals are intended for the eyes and ears of all Americans, and other times they are distinctly targeted to specific segments of the population. It's an approach that has been remarkably successful, utilized first and most extensively by the Republican Party to capture unprecedented power and then adopted by the Democratic Party, most notably by Bill Clinton in the 1990s and by a wide range of Democrats in the 2006 elections.
"For U.S. politicians today, having faith isn't enough; it must be displayed, carefully and publicly. This is a stark transformation in recent decades," write Domke and Coe. With innovative, accessible research and analytical verve, they document how thishas occurred, who has done it and why, and what it means for the American experiment in democracy.

L. Kriz - Library Journal

Religion has always been a part of the political subtext in the United States, but it is now a defining fault line, with Democratic and Republican leaders undertaking partisan use of faith. Domke and Coe, both in communication programs at universities, use texts of presidential speeches and other documents to show how politicians craft text to demonstrate their idea of religious faith. Asserting that the turning point for political religious language started with Ronald Reagan in 1981, the authors analyze and graph the language of faith and God of presidents from the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the beginnings of the 2008 presidential race. Their findings are part of the "God strategy" in which the nation is invoked, set apart, renewed, and sanctified with God's blessings in speeches. The conclusion: except for the malaise in the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the remaining presidents-Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush-have reached new heights in speaking the language of faith and fusing God and country. A worthy work for most libraries presenting a new way to listen to the presidential speeches in the upcoming election.

Introduction: A New Religious Politics     3
One Nation under God, Divisible     11
Political Priests     29
God and Country     49
Acts of Communion     71
Morality Politics     99
Religious Politics and Democratic Vitality     129
Epilogue: Act II     151
Acknowledgments     157
Notes     159
Index     225

Chomsky Foucault Debate or Treason

2009-01-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

Author: Noam Chomsky

In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world's leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to debate an age-old question: is there such a thing as "innate" human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?

What People Are Saying

"[Chomsky is] arguably the most important intellectual alive."
---THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Foucault . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged."
---EDWARD SAID

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Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism

Author: Ann Coulter

Liberals' loyalty to the United States is off-limits as a subject of political debate. Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for rational discussion?"

In a stunning follow-up to her number one bestseller Slander, leading conservative pundit Ann Coulter contends that liberals have been wrong on every foreign policy issue, from the fight against Communism at home and abroad, the Nixon and the Clinton presidencies, and the struggle with the Soviet empire right up to today's war on terrorism. "Liberals have a preternatural gift for always striking a position on the side of treason," says Coulter. "Everyone says liberals love America, too. No, they don't." From Truman to Kennedy to Carter to Clinton, America has contained, appeased, and retreated, often sacrificing America's best interests and security. With the fate of the world in the balance, liberals should leave the defense of the nation to conservatives.

Reexamining the sixty-year history of the Cold War and beyond-including the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss affair, Ronald Reagan's challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," the Gulf War, and our present war on terrorism-Coulter reveals how liberals have been horribly wrong in all their political analyses and policy prescriptions. McCarthy, exonerated by the Venona Papers if not before, was basically right about Soviet agents working for the U.S. government. Hiss turned out to be a high-ranking Soviet spy (who consulted Roosevelt at Yalta). Reagan, ridiculed throughout his presidency, ended up winning the Cold War. And George W. Bush, also an object of ridicule, has performed exceptionally in responding to America's newest threats at home and abroad.

Coulter, who in Slander exposed a liberal bias in today's media, also examines how history, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century, has been written by liberals and, therefore, distorted by their perspective. Far from being irrelevant today, her clearheaded and piercing view of what we've been through informs us perfectly for challenges today and in the future.

The New Yorker

Coulter's thesis has the force of simplicity: liberals detest America and prefer to side with the "Third World savages" who attack it. In her view, American critics of the War on Terror are the intellectual progeny of the Soviet sympathizers rooted out by Senator McCarthy and HUAC. Joe Stalin may have given way to Osama Bin Laden, but the fellow-traveling habit is unchanged. The result is a strangely lopsided book, which spends a lot of time going over ground -- the Venona transcripts, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs -- that has been well covered in recent years and asserting, for the umpteenth time, the guilt of people whom few liberals today would try to defend. Coulter does better when sending up the post-colonial pieties of liberals and "their cheese-tasting friends," and probably owes her widespread popularity more to her skill as a social satirist than to any real acumen as a political commentator.

1	Fifty years of treason	1
2	Alger Hiss, liberal darling	17
3	No Communists here!	35
4	The indispensable Joe McCarthy	55
5	Victims of McCarthyism - the liberals' Mayflower	73
6	But were there Communists in the State Department?	95
7	Vietnam: oh, how they Miss Saigon	125
8	How Truman won the Cold War during the Reagan administration	145
9	Liberals in love: MASH notes to the Kremlin	167
10	Cold War epitaph: the Hiss affair at the end of the Cold War	191
11	Neville Chamberlain had his reasons, too: trembling in the shadow of Brie	203
12	North Korea - another opportunity for surrender	231
13	Celebrity traitors: "Now that I'm sober I watch a lot of news"	245
14	Modern McCarthyism: this is what it meant in the fifties, too	259
	Conclusion: why they hate us	285
	Notes	293
	Index	341

Crimes Against Nature or Secrets

2009-01-18T04:26:00.000-08:00

Crimes Against Nature

Author: Jr Robert F Kennedy

In this powerful and far-reaching indictment of George W. Bush's White House, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the country's most prominent environmental attorney, charges that this administration has taken corporate cronyism to such unprecedented heights that it now threatens our health, our national security, and democracy as we know it. In a headlong pursuit of private profit and personal power, Kennedy writes, George Bush and his administration have eviscerated the laws that have protected our nation's air,water, public lands, and wildlife for the past thirty years, enriching the president's political contributors whilelowering the quality of life for the rest of us.

Kennedy lifts the veil on how the administration has orchestrated these rollbacks almost entirely outside of public scrutiny -- and in tandem with the very industries that our laws are meant to regulate, the country's most notorious polluters. He writes of how it has deceived the public by manipulating and suppressing scientific data, intimidated enforcement officials and other civil servants, and masked its agenda with Orwellian doublespeak. He reports on how the White House doles out lavish subsidies and tax breaks to the energy barons while excusing industry from providing adequate security at the more than 15,000 chemical and nuclear facilities that are prime targets for terrorist attacks. Kennedy reveals an administration whose policies have "squandered our Treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks, and increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own people."

Crimes Against Nature is ultimately about the corrosive effect of corporate corruption on our core American values -- free-market capitalism and democracy. It is about an administration, the author argues, that has sacrificed respect for the law, public health, scientific integrity, and long-term economic vitality on the altar of corporate greed. It is a book for both Democrats and Republicans, people like the traditionally conservative farmers and fishermen Kennedy represents in lawsuits against polluters. "Without exception," he writes, "these people see the current administration as the greatest threat not just to their livelihoods but to their values, their sense of community, and their idea of what it means to be American."

Interesting book: Cisco CallManager Fundamentals or PowerPoint for Teachers

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

Author: Daniel Ellsberg

In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers-a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam-to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man's exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad.

Howard Zinn

If our nation could absorb its lessons we might all face a better future.

Seymour Hersh

It is a chilling tale of life at the bureaucratic top, and what profound compromises it takes to stay there.

Daniel Schorr

This is an honestly and lucidly told narrative by someone who single-handedly changed the course of history.

John Kerry

[Ellsberg's] story reminds us that to fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship is to always ask questions and demand the truth.

Washington Post - Ben Bagdikian

...written with breathtaking excitement...

Martin Sheen

The most important expose of Washington since the Pentagon Papers themselves, Secrets is essential reading for any American who wants to understand true patriotism.

A. J. Langguth

...timeless...

Publishers Weekly

Ellsberg's transformation from cold warrior and Defense Department analyst to impassioned antiwar crusader who released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in June 1971 makes a remarkable and riveting story that still shocks 30 years later. Avoiding, for the most part, self-justification and self-aggrandizement, he clearly relates the experiences that led him to reject as arrogant lies the premises six presidents presented to the public and Congress to secure support for the Vietnam War. He describes the disjunction between what he saw during visits to Vietnam in the early and mid-'60s, driving through dangerous Viet Cong-held territory, and what was told to the press and public. And he recalls his first reading of the classified documents later known as the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the motives, in his view unprincipled, behind American involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg creates page-turning human drama and suspense in both his descriptions of his early experience accompanying U.S. combat missions in Vietnam and his days spent underground evading an FBI manhunt after the Times's publication of the Papers. Another strength of this memoir is Ellsberg's vivid recollections of meetings with prominent policymakers, from Henry Kissinger to Senator William Fulbright, that re-create the deep tensions of the Vietnam era. Ellsberg raises serious ethical questions about how citizens, politicians, the press and officials act when confronted with government actions they consider immoral and perhaps illegal. Ellsberg's own answer is history. (Oct. 14) Forecast: Broad and prominent review coverage is guaranteed, and boomers, especially those who opposed the war, will grab this. But it remains to be seen whether a post-Vietnam generation will be similarly moved.

Foreign Affairs

Ellsberg's memoir recounts the story of how he came to leak the Pentagon Papers (the history of the American intervention in Vietnam) to The New York Times in 1971 and how his subsequent trial unfolded. Ellsberg draws attention to the need for public servants to guard against government mendacity and speak out against reckless policies instead of confining their doubts to safe internal channels. The bulk of the book, however, is a candid and detailed account of Ellsberg's own involvement in the Pentagon's policymaking during the critical years of the Johnson administration and the early deliberations of the Nixon administration. He paints a striking picture of intelligent people persevering and tinkering with a war policy that could never be successful, given the inherent limitations of the U.S. military and its South Vietnamese ally. He also describes the complex interaction between the various forms of opposition to the war as it continued under Richard Nixon, and how the president's fury with Ellsberg's own act of dissent led to Watergate and to the added bonus — in addition to Ellsberg's own acquittal — of Nixon's resignation.

Library Journal

Before leaking the Pentagon Papers, which documented U.S. foreign-policy failures and deceit in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968, Ellsberg was a gung-ho advisor to the State and Defense departments. One fascinating part of this story is his growing disenchantment with the war during these years. He came to believe that leaking the top-secret papers and other classified documents was a patriotic act that could help end the war. Other fascinating aspects of this account include Ellsberg's frustrated attempts to find a member of Congress who would accept and use the papers to build a case against the war as well as his growing role in the antiwar movement. President Nixon failed in his strong-arm tactics to discredit Ellsberg, and the case against him was dismissed because of the illegal break-in at the office of Dr Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Interestingly, Ellsberg speculates that the break-in by Nixon's "Plumbers" was as much an attempt to blackmail Fielding as it was a gambit to stop Ellsberg. The book suffers somewhat from the overabundance of detail and repetition that also flawed Tom Wells's Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg. However, Ellsberg's autobiographical account provides insight into the disturbing abuses of presidential power that plagued the Vietnam/Watergate era. Recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/02.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A well-crafted, windmill-tilting autobiography by the famed cold warrior turned antiwar activist. A former Marine officer and civilian employee in Vietnam, Ellsberg knew early on that the war would lead to heartache for America; as early as the fall of 1961, he recalls, he believed "that nothing we were trying to do was working or was likely to get better." Armed with "go-anywhere" clearance and allied with the likes of John Paul Vann (the subject of Neal Sheehan's A Bright, Shining Lie, 1988), Ellsberg had ample opportunities to prove himself right. What is more, he writes here, just about everyone in the American command knew full well that the Vietnam War was a senseless slaughter, the product of think-tankers' fond wishes and blind faith in American might and technological prowess; still, the habitually blundering leadership ignored clear signs of disaster, and when it did, Ellsberg writes, "I foresaw very strong tendencies to try to recoup early failures and break out of a stalemate by expanding the war still further." Determined to bring this folly to a conclusion, Ellsberg, by the late 1960s an analyst for the Rand Corporation, decided to expose more than 7,000 pages of secret material that provided "documentary evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder." When portions of the so-called Pentagon Papers were released by the New York Times and other publications, he writes, sitting president Richard Nixon at first seemed happy to have support for his don't-blame-me argument, then worried that secret documents from his own administration would be leaked to the media-which, Ellsberg writes, set inmotion the chain of spying that ended in the Watergate affair and Nixon's resignation. Throughout, Ellsberg is convinced of the justice of his cause-as will be many of his readers, on seeing the evidence amassed here of the criminality of our recent politics. Thoughtful, full of righteous indignation-rightly so-and likely to be of great interest to students of the Vietnam War and domestic resistance thereto.

Useful Idiots or Monetary Policy Strategy

2009-01-17T16:13:00.000-08:00

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First (Harper Perennial Series)

Author: Mona Charen

Meet the "Useful Idiots" Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson, Madeleine Albright, Katie Couric, Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, and all the other liberals who were -- and are -- always willing to blame America first and defend its enemies as simply "misunderstood."

Now that the Cold War has been won, these liberals, amazingly, are proud to claim credit for the victory -- conveniently forgetting their apologies for the Communists and their spluttering attacks on Cold Warriors like Ronald Reagan.

But nationally syndicated columnist Mona Charen isn't about to let them rewrite history. From politicians and professors to entertainers and journalists, she exposes the useful idiots for all the world to see in this arresting New York Times bestseller.

I prayed that such a book would be written but doubted anything so wonderfully readable and instructive at the same time would come along. But here is Mona Charen's great explication of the central conflict of our times.—National Review

Publishers Weekly

Syndicated columnist and CNN commentator Charen offers a moral indictment of those public figures-politicians, entertainers and professors-who, she says, stubbornly refused to see communism for what it was: a brutal, dictatorial death machine. Throughout the Cold War, some public figures and activists cheered the Communist movement and berated America for its capitalist ways. Famous actors traveled to Cuba to smoke a cigar with their favorite dictator; posters of Che Guevara, Castro's military leader, adorned college dorms during the '60s; the Soviet Union was praised and defended for its social progress. Charen particularly singles out the media as having played a significant role in distributing tendentious if not false accounts of world events. One example tells of Katie Couric's visit to Cuba in 1992. Upon her return, according to Charen, Couric raved about Cuba's "terrific health-care system," but uttered not a word about the men and women detained in Cuban prisons. The author highlights the kind of historical revisionism and self-hatred that marked some of America's most noted public figures and warns that the lessons learned from communism are just as relevant today. The tragedy of September 11, Charen says, has produced a cadre of left-leaning pundits who wasted no time in blaming America for the violence perpetrated by terrorism. Charen is operating as a polemicist here, and some readers will object to her tarring all liberals with the same brush. But there is a strong market for conservative polemics today, and many readers will cheer Charen on. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

	Introduction to the Perennial Edition
	Introduction: None Dare Call It Victory	1
Ch. 1	The Brief Interlude of Unanimity on Communism	11
Ch. 2	The Consensus Unravels	23
Ch. 3	The Bloodbath	55
Ch. 4	The Mother of All Communists: American Liberals and Soviet Russia	77
Ch. 5	Fear and Trembling	119
Ch. 6	Each New Communist Is Different	171
Ch. 7	Post-Communist Blues	231
	Epilogue	259
	Notes	265
	Acknowledgments	287
	Index	291

Go to: Nicht Behaltene Versprechungen: Armut und Der Verrat der Entwicklung der Dritten Welt

Monetary Policy Strategy

Author: Frederic S Mishkin

This book by a leading authority on monetary policy offers a unique view of the subject from the perspectives of both scholar and practitioner. Frederic Mishkin is not only an academic expert in the field but also has been a high-level policymaker. He is especially well positioned to discuss the changes in the conduct of monetary policy in recent years, in particular the turn to inflation targeting. Monetary Policy Strategy describes his work over the last ten years, offering published papers, new introductory material, and a summing up, "Everything You Wanted to Know about Monetary Policy Strategy, But Were Afraid to Ask," which reflects on what we have learned about monetary policy over the last thirty years.

Mishkin blends theory, empirical evidence, and extensive case studies of monetary policy in advanced and emerging market and transition economies. Throughout, his focus is on these key areas: the importance of price stability and a nominal anchor; fiscal and financial preconditions for achieving price stability; central bank independence as an additional precondition; central bank accountability; the rationale for inflation targeting; the optimal inflation target; central bank transparency and communication; and the role of asset prices in monetary policy.

Six Great Ideas or Arts Inc

2009-01-17T06:01:00.000-08:00

Six Great Ideas

Author: Mortimer Jerome Adler

Each summer, Mortimer J. Adler conducts a seminar at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. At the 1981 seminar, leaders from the worlds of business, literature, education, and the arts joined him in an in-depth consideration of the six great ideas that are the subject of this book: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty - the ideas we judge by; and Liberty, Equality and Justice - the ideas we act on. The group discussions and conversations between Dr. Adler and journalist Bill Moyers were filmed for broadcast on public television, and thousands of people followed their exploration of these important ideas. Discarding the out-worn and off-putting jargon of academia, Dr. Adler dispels the myth that philosophy is the exclusive province of the specialist. He argues that "philosophy is everybody's business," and that a better understanding of these fundamental concepts is essential if we are to cope with the political, moral, and social issues that confront us daily.

Interesting book: Stephanie Oakes Burn Off 10 Pounds a Month or Change Your Mind Change Your Weight

Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights

Author: Bill Ivey

In this impassioned and persuasive book, Bill Ivey, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, assesses the current state of the arts in America and finds cause for alarm. Even as he celebrates our ever-emerging culture and the way it enriches our lives here at home while spreading the dream of democracy around the world, he points to a looming crisis. The expanding footprint of copyright, an unconstrained arts industry marketplace, and a government unwilling to engage culture as a serious arena for public policy have come together to undermine art, artistry, and cultural heritage--the expressive life of America. In eight succinct chapters, Ivey blends personal and professional memoir, policy analysis, and deeply held convictions to explore and define a coordinated vision for art, culture, and expression in American life.

The Cultural Bill of Rights     ix
Preface     xi
Introduction     1
Heritage     27
Artists     57
A Creative Life     94
America, Art, and the World     124
Art of Lasting Value     155
Strong, Responsible Institutions     184
The Failure of Government     222
Conclusion: Bridging the Cultural Divide     261
Acknowledgments     297
Notes     299
Bibliography     323
Index     329

Cold War or The Challenge

2009-01-16T16:48:00.000-08:00

Cold War

Author: Robert J McMahon

The massive disorder and economic ruin following the Second World War inevitably predetermined the scope and intensity of the Cold War. But why did it last so long? And what impact did it have on the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Third World? Finally, how did it affect the broader history of the second half of the twentieth century--what were the human and financial costs? This Very Short Introduction provides a clear and stimulating interpretive overview of the Cold War, one that will both invite debate and encourage deeper investigation.

	Preface
	List of illustrations
	List of maps
1	World War II and the destruction of the old order	1
2	The origins of the Cold War in Europe, 1945-50	16
3	Towards 'Hot War' in Asia, 1945-50	35
4	A global Cold War, 1950-8	56
5	From confrontation to detente, 1958-68	78
6	Cold wars at home	105
7	The rise and fall of superpower detente, 1968-79	122
8	The final phase, 1980-90	143
	Further reading	169
	Index	175

Interesting textbook: New Holland Professional or Down That Aisle in Style

The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power

Author: Jonathan Mahler

An inspiring legal thriller set against the backdrop of the war on terror, The Challenge tells the inside story of a historic Supreme Court showdown. At its center are a Navy JAG and a young constitutional law professor who, in the aftermath of 9/11, find themselves defending their nation in the unlikeliest of ways: by suing the president of the United States on behalf of an accused terrorist in order to prevent the American government from breaking the law and violating the Constitution.

Jonathan Mahler traces the journey of their client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, from the Yemeni mosque where he was first recruited for jihad in 1998, through his years working as a driver for Osama bin Laden, to his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001 and his subsequent transfer to Guantanamo Bay. It was there that Hamdan was designated by President Bush to be tried before a special military tribunal and assigned a military lawyer to represent him, a thirty-five-year-old graduate student of the Naval Academy, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift.

No one expected Swift to mount much of a defense. Not only were the rules of the tribunals, America’s first in more than fifty years, stacked against him, his superiors at the Pentagon were pressuring him to persuade Hamdan to plead guilty. But Swift didn’t believe that the tribunals were either legal or fair, so he enlisted a young Georgetown law professor named Neal Katyal to help him sue the Bush administration over their legality. In the spring of 2006, Katyal, who had almost no trial experience,took the case to the Supreme Court and won. The landmark ruling has been called the Court’s most important decision ever on presidential power and the rule of law.

Written with the cooperation of Swift and Katyal, The Challenge follows the braided stories of Swift’s intense, precarious relationship with Hamdan and the unprecedented legal case itself. Combining rich character portraits and courtroom drama reminiscent of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action with sophisticated yet accessible legal analysis, The Challenge is a riveting narrative that illuminates some of the most pressing constitutional questions of the post-9/11 era.

The New York Times - Jonathan Turley

With an engaging writing style and eye to detail, Mr. Mahler…takes the reader through Mr. Hamdan's evolution from a street urchin to one of a handful of "high value" enemy combatants…The Challenge is not just a very readable account of an important case. It is also an intimate account of the lawyers who overcame personal conflicts, animus and flaws to produce a decision for the ages. It is an intriguing tale of how a unique convergence of personalities propelled an unlikely dabab driver from Yemen to international prominence.

Publishers Weekly

In this account of the momentous Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Mahler (Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning) profiles key figures of the defense: JAG lawyer Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, constitutional law professor Neal Katyal and the defendant, Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver. The book chronicles this legal odd couple-Swift, the gregarious blowhard, and Katyal, the diligent straight man-as they struggle to keep their client alive in Guantánamo Bay and craft a case challenging the legality of President George W. Bush's military tribunals. The author narrates their burgeoning relationship with each other and their client-in one endearing passage, Swift seeks counseling for his relationship with Hamden at the same time that he seeks therapy to save his marriage. While Mahler skillfully humanizes the characters and institutions at the heart of the case, the book sags under detailed forays into arcane aspects of the American justice system and irrelevant personal vignettes that feel forced and slow the pace. For whatever dramatic tension the book lacks, Mahler amply conveys the heroism of his protagonists. (Aug. 13)

Bob Nardini - Library Journal

In the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld(2006), the Supreme Court ruled that military tribunals established by the U.S. government to try its Guantánamo Bay detainees were unconstitutional. Mahler (New York Times magazine; Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning) bases this book largely on interviews with the two principal defense attorneys, Neal Katyal, a Georgetown University constitutional law professor, and Charles Swift, of the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps. Mahler does an excellent job of presenting the complex legal issues surrounding the case in a highly readable manner, but at the book's heart are his characterizations of Katyal and Swift and their relationship with each another, with their families, with the military, and with their client, Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni man captured in 2001, as they worked passionately, and against high odds, to win the case. While the book is a great read, its impact may be diluted because the further fate of the military tribunals, and of Hamdan himself, remains unclear, matters of decision in subsequent litigation. Highly recommended for all law, public, and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ4/15/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Near-exhaustive account of what some Supreme Court watchers consider "the most important decision on presidential power ever."Three days after 9/11, George Bush set in motion a program to try suspected terrorists as war criminals, not civilians, through military tribunals. The tribunals would be convened abroad, not just for security reasons but also to keep strict control over what information could leave the courtroom. An air base in Germany was considered and rejected, lest the Germans "try to exert a degree of authority over the facility," as New York Times Magazine contributor Mahler (Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, 2005) notes. The Marshall Islands and other Pacific outposts lacked sufficient infrastructure. But Guantanamo Bay served well-it was remote from the press, yet accessible to the mainland. Up early for trial was a Yemeni jihadist named Salim Hamdan, initially recruited to go to Tajikistan and join an Islamic insurgency against the Russian-backed government. Instead, he fell in with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and worked as his bodyguard and driver. Captured in the American invasion, Hamdan was transferred to Cuba in December 2003. He made an ideal, low-hanging-fruit kind of defendant, since, among other things, he hadn't been rendered to a third country for interrogation, "which would open the door for his defense attorney to raise questions about his treatment." His defense attorney was a troubled naval officer who both belonged to the ACLU and recognized that he was committing career suicide, and who drew on a wide network of legal allies to press a constitutional case that argued, at its basis, that the president was overstepping the bounds of hisauthority. The argument made for strange allies (Ken Starr, anyone?) and an impressive array of foes, but it worked, convincing even a conservative Supreme Court. Naturally, the military and administration are working to get around the Court's decision, but for a brief moment, Mahler concludes, "the system worked."Though sometimes bogged down in legal minutia, quite understandably, Mahler's fluent account of events is essential reading for students of constitutional law-and anyone concerned with civil rights.

The Courage to Survive or A World of Trouble

2009-01-16T06:35:00.000-08:00

The Courage to Survive

Author: Dennis J Kucinich

Destined to be one of most important and talked-about books of the year, "The Courage to Survive" is must reading for anyone who wants to know where Dennis Kucinich believes America must go and how we can get there. It is a book that sets the tone for the national debate as we choose new leadership in a time of great crisis and great opportunity.

Publishers Weekly

Former Cleveland mayor, current Congressional representative and Democratic presidential candidate Kucinich presents an absorbing, fluid memoir of his first 21 years. Coming of age in inner-city Cleveland in the 1950s, Kucinich was the eldest child of a large Catholic family that often struggled to stay afloat. His early experiences taught him to persevere, to utilize all available opportunities, to work hard and to reach out: "It is in extending your hand that you affirm your existence." Working from a young age to help pay the family bills, Kucinich was inspired by John F. Kennedy and other politicians, "developing a powerful sense of mission, to be of service to God and humanity." Kucinich's is a familiar but engaging story of lessons learned and obstacles overcome (poverty, family illness and his notably short stature), set in a carefully observed time of great social change. Taking readers through numerous family moves, multiple schools and neighborhoods, several jobs and his first, unsuccessful campaign for city council with lyrical finesse and a sure voice, Kucinich is a natural writer; moreover, he wisely avoids any kind of preaching, judging or politicking, allowing the story to speak for itself. This view on youth in the 1950s and the making of a conscientious leader should be of interest to a wide audience, regardless of personal politics. (Nov.)

Interesting textbook: Lei, Negócio, e Sociedade

A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East--from the Cold War to the War on Terror

Author: Patrick Tyler

The White House and the Middle East—from the Cold War to the War on Terror

The Middle East is the beginning and the end of U.S. foreign policy: events there influence our alliances, make or break presidencies, govern the price of oil, and draw us into war. But it was not always so—and as Patrick Tyler shows in this thrilling chronicle of American misadventures in the region, the story of American presidents’ dealings there is one of mixed motives, skulduggery, deceit, and outright foolishness, as well as of policymaking and diplomacy.

Tyler draws on newly opened presidential archives to dramatize the approach to the Middle East across U.S. presidencies from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. He takes us into the Oval Office and shows how our leaders made momentous decisions; at the same time, the sweep of this narrative—from the Suez crisis to the Iran hostage crisis to George W. Bush’s catastrophe in Iraq—lets us see the big picture as never before. Tyler tells a story of presidents being drawn into the affairs of the region against their will, being kept in the dark by local potentates, being led astray by grasping subordinates, and making decisions about the internal affairs of countries they hardly understand. Above all, he shows how each president has managed to undo the policies of his predecessor, often fomenting both anger against America on the streets of the region and confusion at home.

A World of Trouble is the Middle East book we need now: compulsively readable, free of cant and ideology, and rich in insight about the very human challenges a new president will face as he or she tries to restoreAmerica’s standing in the region.

Publishers Weekly

In this epic, remarkably readable history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East from Eisenhower to Bush II, Washington Post reporter Tyler uses an up-close, journalistic style to depict the power struggles and compromises that have defined the past half-century. Tyler focuses on key turning points in U.S.-Middle East relations and documents the conversations and real-time decision-making processes of the presidents, cabinet members and other key figures. Readers are treated to an intimate view of Eisenhower's careful, steady diplomacy during the Suez crisis, Kissinger's egocentric and fateful decision to fully arm Israel in the October war of 1973 while Nixon struggled through the Watergate scandal, and the tangled web of communication and intentional deceit during the Reagan administration that led to the Iran-Contra scandal. Tyler makes the issues and relationships clear without resorting to oversimplification or ideological grandstanding, and his journalistic instincts steer him toward direct quotation and telling anecdotes rather than generalization. Readers in the market for an examination of how leadership has embroiled the U.S. in the Middle East are well-advised to consult this riveting text. (Jan.)

Kirkus Reviews

A veteran journalist chronicles 60 years of U.S. fecklessness in the Middle East. The colorful narrative opens in 2004 with CIA Director George Tenet drunk and angry during a post-midnight swim in a Saudi royal family pool, a perfect metaphor for American floundering in the Middle East for the past few decades. Almost nothing that follows dispels this image of the United States, bitter and baffled by the ceaseless problems posed by this region. Tyler (A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigatory History, 1999, etc.) uses the frame of the presidency to survey America's involvement in a place that, because of its oil resources, the ideological challenge of Islamic extremism and America's ties to Israel, demands the attention of the nation's "highest political authority." Since Eisenhower, the White House has grappled with an unrelenting parade of Middle East conflicts: Gamal Nasser's 1956 seizure of the Suez Canal; the 1967 Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the takeover of Tehran's American embassy; the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the 1987 Intifada in the Gaza Strip; the eight-year Iran-Iraq war beginning in 1988; the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein; the second Intifada; and the 2003 still-unresolved American invasion of Iraq. Tyler demonstrates how American presidents' responses to these and countless lesser eruptions have been shaped by Cold War strategies, War on Terror exigencies, shifting alliances among Arab leaders and a variety of other factors that have consistently frustrated American attempts at peacemaking. Although the has a few kind words for Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, nopresident escapes Tyler's criticism for mostly fumbling attempts to deal-or not deal-with the region that continues to pose the greatest threat to world peace. The heroes here (Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin) are few, the successes (Camp David Accords) rare, the villains and rogues many. With his reporter's instinct for telling detail, Tyler offers a history that makes for enlightening, if depressing, reading. A superb, evenhanded account of America's role in a continuing tragedy. Agent: Bob Bernstein/D4EO Literary Agency

T R or Takeover

2009-01-14T09:20:00.000-08:00

T. R.: The Last Romantic

Author: H W Brands

In his time, there was no more popular national figure than Theodore Roosevelt. It was not just the energy he brought to every political office he held or his unshakable moral convictions that made him so popular, or even his status as a bonafide war hero—the man who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American war. Most important, Theodore Roosevelt was loved by the people because this scion of a privileged New York family loved America and Americans.And yet, according to Bill Brands, if we look at the private Roosevelt without blinders, we see a man whose great public strengths hid enormous personal deficiencies. His highly exaggerated, and often uncompromising ways drove many of his business and personal friends crazy. His historical writings, which Brands quotes from extensively, are nothing if not a portrait of a boy’s endless macho fantasies. He was often so full of himself that his speeches and writings were the frequent subject of fierce satire in their time.Even more revealing, according to Brands, was Roosevelt as son, brother, husband, and father. According to Brands, to understand both the public and private Roosevelt one must understand the impact of his father’s death while he was still a child, denying him the opportunity to come to terms with his own manhood. When his first wife Alice died of complications from childbirth, leaving behind a baby daughter Alice, his response was to run away to shoot Buffalo in the west, leaving the newborn infant to the care of his unmarried sister Bamie. When his second wife Edith was seriously, perhaps fatally ill, he left her to fight in the Spanish-American war. His only concern when hisbrother Elliot, who had been his only friend as a child, became an alcoholic was to hide the news from the public. Determined that his four sons would not dishonor his belief that men, to achieve their manhood, must test themselves in war, he arranged for each to serve, often in the frontlines, during WWI. His youngest son Quentin would die in that cause.Beautifully written, powerfully moved by its subject, TR is nonetheless a biography more appropriate to today’s critical times.

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy

Author: Charlie Savag

In 1789, the Founding Fathers came up with a system of checks and balances to keep kingly powers out of the hands of American presidents. But in the 1970s and '80s, a faction of Republican loyalists, outraged by the fall of them imperial presidency after Watergate and the Vietnam War, abandoned conservatives' traditional suspicion of concentrated government power. These men hatched a plot that would allow the White House to return to, or even surpass, the virtually unchecked powers that Richard Nixon had briefly tried to wield. Congress would be defanged, and the commander in chief would be able to assert a unilateral dominance both at home and abroad.

Today, this plot is coming to fruition. As Takeover reveals, the Bush-Cheney administration has succeeded in seizing vast powers for the presidency by throwing off many of the restraints placed upon it by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution. Charlie Savage's timely book unveils the secret machinations behind the headlines, explaining the links between warrantless wiretapping and President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, between the unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department and the torture debate, between the White House's use of "signing statements" to assert a right to defy new laws and its efforts to impose greater control over career military JAG lawyers, and between the secrecy surrounding Vice President Cheney's energy task force and the holding of U.S. citizens without trial as "enemy combatants." It tells, for the first time, the full story of a hidden agenda three decades in the making, laying out how a group of true believers undertook to establish monarchical executive powers that, in the words of one conservative critic, "will lie around like a loaded weapon," ready to be picked up by any future president--liberal or conservative.

Brilliantly reported and deftly told, Takeover is a searing investigation into how the constitutional balance of our democracy is in danger of being permanently altered. For anyone who cares about America's past, present, and future, it is essential reading.

The Washington Post - James Bamford

In his illuminating and biting new book, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage shows how Cheney has emerged as Bush's Richelieu, the most powerful vice president in history.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

…important reading for anyone interested in how the current administration has amped up presidential power while trying to undermine Congress's powers of oversight and the independence of the judiciary. Many aspects of this subject have been examined in newspaper and magazine articles and earlier books, and Mr. Savage leans heavily at times on the work of other reporters as well as his own groundbreaking work for The Globe, owned by The New York Times Company. But this volume is distinguished by his ability to pull together myriad story lines into a succinct, overarching narrative that is energized by his own legal legwork and interviews with key figures like John C. Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, and Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to the first President Bush.

The New York Times Book Review - Emily Bazelon

Savage, the national legal affairs writer for The Boston Globe…has a real gift for amassing detail so as to reveal the thread that connects separate news stories. Savage is particularly good on the subject for which he won a Pulitzer Prize: presidential signing statements.

Publishers Weekly

Savage, who won a Pulitzer for his Boston Globearticles about the signing statements George W. Bush used to negate legislation limiting presidential authority, gives that issue a key part in this account of the Bush administration's efforts to increase executive power. Covering constitutional issues as well as the political backgrounds of former White House attorneys like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, this detailed report traces their concerted effort, from the moment Bush took office in 2001, to "[leave] the presidency in better shape than he [Bush] found it." The authorization to use force against Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg. Bush has already gone so far as to declare himself able to negate treaties with other nations at will, Savage reports. He also demonstrates how many of the administration's most controversial acts have their roots in Dick Cheney's experiences in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This incisive analysis of congressional and judicial efforts to check the administration's power grabs adds up to a searing indictment. (Sept. 5)

Inside the Bunker     3
The Fall of the Imperial Presidency and the Rise of Dick Cheney: 1789-1976     10
"A Cabal of Zealots": 1977-2000     38
The Agenda     70
"Behind Closed Doors": Secrecy I     85
The Unleashing: Laws and Treaties I     119
"A Hollow Shell": Secrecy II     160
Pushback and Purge: Laws and Treaties II     177
The Torture Ban     209
Power of the Pen: Signing Statements     228
"To Say What the Law Is": The Supreme Court     250
Centralize and Control: The Executive Branch     279
The Politics of Presidential Power     308
Afterword     331
Acknowledgments     351
Notes     353
Index     403

With Honor or Censoring Science

2009-01-13T21:47:00.000-08:00

With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics

Author: Dale Van Atta

In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, centrist Congressman Melvin Laird (R-WI) agreed to serve as Richard Nixon's secretary of defense. It was not, Laird knew, a move likely to endear him to the American public—but as he later said, “Nixon couldn’t find anybody else who wanted the damn job.” For the next four years, Laird deftly navigated the morass of the war he had inherited. Lampooned as a “missile head,” but decisive in crafting an exit strategy, he doggedly pursued his program of Vietnamization, initiating the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel and gradually ceding combat responsibilities to South Vietnam. In fighting to bring the troops home faster, pressing for more humane treatment of POWs, and helping to end the draft, Laird employed a powerful blend of disarming Midwestern candor and Washington savvy, as he sought a high moral road bent on Nixon's oft-stated (and politically instrumental) goal of peace with honor.
The first book ever to focus on Laird's legacy, this authorized biography reveals his central and often unrecognized role in managing the crisis of national identity sparked by the Vietnam War—and the challenges, ethical and political, that confronted him along the way. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Laird, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, and numerous others, author Dale Van Atta offers a sympathetic portrait of a man striving for open government in an atmosphere fraught with secrecy. Van Atta illuminates the inner workings of high politics: Laird's behind-the-scenes sparring with Kissinger over policy, his decisions to ignore Nixon's wilder directives, his formative impact on arms control andhealth care, his key role in the selection of Ford for vice president, his frustration with the country's abandonment of Vietnamization, and, in later years, his unheeded warning to Donald Rumsfeld that “it's a helluva lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one.”

Bob Nardini - Library Journal

The two key contenders for influence in the Nixon administration were "the equally matched Laird and Kissinger," writes Van Atta (Trust Betrayed: Inside the AARP). Today, Nixon's first-term secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, is the less familiar of the duo. Wisconsin's Laird entered Congress in 1952 and was instrumental there in the growing federal support for medical research. He took the defense post in 1969 and, according to Van Atta, was more responsible than Nixon or Kissinger for withdrawing U.S. troops through his "Vietnamization" policy. In this authorized biography, Laird also gets credit for ending the draft and, later, for engineering the choice of Gerald Ford for vice president and the appointment of Leon Jaworski as Watergate special prosecutor. Van Atta now works at Reader's Digest, where Laird has been a contributor since leaving politics. The length of this book will deter many readers, and its sunny style will put off some scholars. Still, in placing Laird at the center of the era, Van Atta has made a significant contribution. His research is based on hundreds of interviews with subjects including Kissinger and Laird's friend and political ally the late President Ford, who contributed the foreword. Recommended for larger academic and public libraries and essential for any Wisconsin library.

New interesting book: Making Herbal Dream Pillows or Before She Gets Her Period

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Surprising Truth About Global Warming

Author: Mark Bowen

From acclaimed writer and physicist Mark Bowen, Censoring Science tells the true story of the Bush administration's censorship of the world's preeminent climatologist, and the science behind global warming that they do not want you to know.

The facts don't lie:
• 2005 was the warmest year since the invention of the thermometer.
• 2006 is on track to become the hottest year ever recorded in the United States.
• The six hottest years on record have occurred in the last eight years, and the twenty-two hottest years on record have occurred in the last twenty-six years.

Preeminent climatologist and leading NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen has been studying climate for over three decades. It was his testimony to a Senate committee in 1988 that first brought the threat of global warming to the world's attention. In January 2006, news broke that the Bush administration had been attempting to censor Dr. Hansen-obscuring his message and suppressing the vast body of his scientific work, which unequivocally demonstrates the reality and immense danger of global warming.

Now, for the first time and with unfiltered access, writer and physicist Mark Bowen finally tells the exclusive story of Hansen's decades-long battle to bring the truth about global warming to light. Censoring Science illuminates the real science behind global warming and maintains that we can still prevent environmental disaster, while both strengthening our economy and our national security. In the tradition of Ron Suskind's blockbuster bestseller, The Price of Loyalty, Censoring Science exposes the truth behind the administration's spin doctors, and shares theinside story of one of the most important and influential scientists of our time.

Jeffrey Beall - Library Journal

Science journalist Bowen (Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains) tells the story of Dr. James Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and his suppressed attempts to warn the public about global warming and climate change. Bowen details how NASA's press office, under pressure from the Bush administration, censored or toned down press releases and prevented scientists from speaking to the media. In rambling and digressive detail, the author recounts how a Bush political appointee redacted scientific reports to describe global warming as an unproven theory. This work is partly a biography of Hansen and partly an explanation of climatology, and it shows what goes wrong when science and politics mix. The bleak subject matter-global warming and censorship-makes for depressing reading. Bowen's seemingly endless descriptions of NASA's office politics beg for editing, and his text, which is not organized chronologically, reads as if it were stitched together from shorter pieces. Recommended only for larger research libraries. [For better accounts on the Bush administration's attacks on science, see Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Scienceand Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming.-Ed.]

Kirkus Reviews

An eye-opening account of government efforts to silence the nation's leading climate scientist. Hansen, long-time director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, made headlines in early 2006 when he refused to buckle under government pressure to soft-pedal warnings on the dangerous reality of global warming. In this understated but important book, author and physicist Bowen (Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains, 2005) demonstrates how science news makes its way into the media from deep within the labyrinthine space agency. Since the agency's founding in 1958, reporters have had direct access to NASA scientists. That changed in recent years, writes Bowen, when high-level NASA political appointees began trying to control scientists' conversations with the media, especially about climate science and global warming. Drawing on interviews, e-mails and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Bowen tells a chilling story of deliberate efforts by senior NASA managers, acting in concert with the Bush White House, to play up uncertainties and minimize dangers regarding global warming. Never made in writing, directives were generally issued orally, and in closed-door meetings, to NASA public-affairs officers, who were asked to act against their own principles and obtain approval from appointees before scientists could speak to the media. Hansen spoke out on 60 Minutes, noting government efforts to restrict his statements on 2005 as the warmest year on record. Bowen details the manipulations; shows how conservative NASA press officer GeorgeDeutsch was scapegoated as a rogue trying to control Hansen (while higher-ups declared an open-door media policy); and reveals how the White House "orchestrated" censorship on climate science at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and elsewhere. Amid the attack on credible, unbiased science, writes Bowen, Hansen despairs that no real progress is being made on global warming. A must-read not just for environmentalists but for all politically conscientious readers.

The Cardinal Rule     1
This Is Coming from the Top     27
A Dirty Little Secret     51
... Because the White House Has a No Surprises Rule     64
Gretchen, Do Not E-mail Me on This     98
A Theory of Government We Must Vociferously Oppose     143
Congratulations for Your "Non Award"     162
The Veil of Venus     191
A Logical, Well-Reasoned Conclusion     221
Me, Too     264
Sources and Suggested Reading     307
Acknowledgments     309
Index     313

The Next American Century or My Life as a Traitor

2009-01-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise

Author: Nina Hachigian

The rise of other global powers is most often posed as a sorry tale, full of threats to America's primacy, prosperity, and way of life. The potential loss of our #1 status implies a blow to our safety, economy, and prestige.

But this is a rare moment in history: none of the world's big powers is our adversaries. In The Next American Century, Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen show that the "pivotal powers" -- China, Europe, India, Japan, and Russia -- seek greater influence, but each has an enormous stake in the world economy and a keen desire to thwart common threats. India is a key ally in the struggle against terrorism. China's help is essential to containing pandemic disease. Russia is leading an effort to keep nuclear devices out of terrorists' hands. Japan and Europe are critical partners in tackling climate change. None of these countries is a direct military or ideological challenger. In fact, their gains largely help, rather than hurt, America's continuing prosperity, growth, and, to some extent, even its values. Will we have conflicts with these powers? Definitely. Some will be serious. But, by and large, they want what we want: a stable world and better lives for their citizens. We live in an era of opportunity, not of loss.

To take advantage of this moment, the United States must get its own house in order, making sure that American children can compete, American workers can adjust, America's military remains cutting-edge, and American diplomacy entices rather than alienates. While America must be prepared for the possibility that a hostile superpower may one day emerge, it has to be careful not to turn a distant, uncertain threat into an immediate one.Washington should welcome the pivotal powers into a vigorous international order to share the burden of solving pressing global problems of peace, climate, health, and growth.

The avenue to a truly safer and more prosperous world runs through the pivotal powers. With them, we can build a world where Americans will thrive, today and tomorrow.

Publishers Weekly

With a major shift in American foreign policy, the U.S. can step into a new leadership role in the world, argue Hachigian and Sutphen in this lucid and compelling book. Drawing on their experiences working for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, as well as a variety of studies, public opinion polls and scholarly work, their central thesis rests on the assertion that the United States must pursue "strategic collaboration" with the "pivotal powers"-China, European Union, India, Japan and Russia. In making this recommendation, the book surveys the major threats facing the United States and the pivotal powers, the ideological tensions between the U.S. and these powers, and attitudes within the powers toward America. Unsurprisingly, given their résumés, Hachigian and Sutphen explicitly criticize the Bush administration's record. But their approach to policy is pragmatic-for example, while the authors acknowledge legitimate concerns about engaging with China, they offer convincing evidence against containment as a viable alternative. Synthesizing a vast amount of material while advancing their arguments, the authors have produced a persuasive text. (Jan.)

Kirkus Reviews

Two former National Security Council staffers chart a course for U.S. success in the 21st century. Playing off Henry Luce's famous phrase, Hachigian and Sutphen imagine a very different next century, in which a successful America must eschew dominance in favor of shared billing with the "pivotal powers"-Russia, India, China, Japan and the European Union-which, together with the United States, make up more than half the world's population and three-quarters of the global economy. Without wholly discounting the possibility of future armed conflict, the authors argue that in a world where all pivotal powers are dependent on free trade and global stability for economic growth, the United States should assume long-term relationships with each and explore avenues of constructive cooperation. With all powers vulnerable to the same security threats-jihadists, infectious disease, loose nukes-the United States will find safety in numbers through creative alliances. Abandoning the temptation to act unilaterally will not be easy in a country where domestic problems are too often blamed on foreign scapegoats, where Congress focuses on narrow constituent interests and where the media boils over with often uninformed opinion. Still, the authors insist, "Joe Six-Pack" is really on their side, weary of America going it alone and eager for an unprecedented level of international cooperation. Their argument, conducted in the tone of an earnest college term paper, features a conventional critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy and implicitly calls for the restoration of the Clinton/Albright/Berger perspective on world affairs. Strong American leadership, they aver, must tend first to thecountry's own domestic problems-inadequate worker protection, a broken healthcare system, crumbling infrastructure, underperforming educational institutions, etc.-and then allow the other pivotal powers a larger voice in the new world order, recognizing their legitimate desires for prestige, influence and freedom to maneuver. Hachigian and Sutphen effectively outline the benefits of this new, multipolar world even as they soft-peddle its many hazards. A useful summary of conventional Democratic Establishment foreign-policy thinking, likely to gain currency as the race for the White House heats up. Agent: Andrew Wylie/Wylie Agency

Book review: Qualitätsmanagement in den Bildaufbereitungswissenschaften

My Life as a Traitor

Author: Zarah Ghahramani

At the age of twenty, an Iranian student named Zarah Ghahramani was swept off the streets of Tehran and taken to the notorious Evin prison, where criminals and political dissidents were held side by side in conditions of legendary brutality. Her crime, she asserts, was in wanting to slide back her headscarf to feel the sun on a few inches of her hair.

That modest desire led her to a political activism fueled by the fearless idealism of the young. Her parents begged her to be prudent, but even they could not have imagined the horrors she faced in prison. She underwent psychological and physical torture, hanging on to sanity by scratching messages to fellow prisoners on the latrine door. She fought despair by recalling her idyllic childhood in a sprawling and affectionate family that prized tolerance and freedom of thought. After a show trial, Ghahramani was driven deep into the desert outside Tehran, uncertain if she was to be executed or freed. There she was abandoned to begin the long walk back to reclaim herself. In prose of astonishing dignity and force, Ghahramani recounts the ways in which power seduces and deforms.

A richly textured memoir that celebrates a triumph of the individual over the state, My Life as a Traitor is an affecting addition to the literature of struggle and dissent.

The New York Times - William Grimes

With her collaborator, the Australian novelist Robert Hillman, Ms. Ghahramani writes in a spare, eloquent prose style that reflects both her child's view of the world before arriving at Evin and the pared-down perceptions of her prison experience.

The New York Times Book Review - Sarah Wildman

The details here are sharp, evocative—and angry…Ghahramani's descriptions of torture are described unsparingly.

Publishers Weekly

The second-year Iranian college student in 2001 knew "that making that speech meant trouble," but she "had no real expectation of being kidnapped in the heart of Tehran and hustled off" to the notorious Evin Prison. Eventually, the 20-year-old Ghahramani is sentenced to 30 days and a few days-and several beatings-later is dumped in a vacant countryside to make her way home. Scenes from a happy family life (crippled by the Iran-Iraq war) and a spirited adolescence (cut short by a repressive regime) alternate with the prison experiences in this multilayered account. Ghahramani, daughter of a Muslim father and Zoroastrian mother, both Kurdish, dips with brevity and grace into personal family history and public political history. Graphic and powerful as her treatment of torturous imprisonment is, Ghahramani retains an irrepressible lightness, perhaps born of knowing that "[a] sense of justice can always benefit from a complementary sense of the ridiculous." Her painfully acquired knowledge of "how easy it is to reduce a human being to the level of animal" does not keep her from "wondering if I'll ever be pretty again." Nothing, however, dilutes the bare bones prison experience. Her straightforward style, elegant in its simplicity, has resonance and appeal beyond a mere record. (Jan.)

School Library Journal

Adult/High School -Ghahramani was a 20-year-old university student in Tehran when she was arrested. In Evin prison, she was subjected to verbal, psychological, and physical abuse over a period of weeks, and then taken to a courtroom and convicted of a long list of crimes, including writing and speaking against the government and encouraging other students to cancel classes and participate in protests. Her memoir intersperses descriptions of her time in jail with reflections on her life growing up in Iran in a prosperous family that encouraged learning and political discussion. She muses on the beauty of the Farsi language and on her own teenage love of philosophy and literature. She remembers incidents from her childhood and inspiring teachers, and examines her relationships with family and friends. She ranged from defiance to despair as she underwent senseless and sadistic interrogation and torture. This compelling book is a coming-of-age story in which the author examines her beliefs and emotions while she tells of a country in turmoil.-Sarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, CA

Kirkus Reviews

Determinedly self-critical memoir of an Iranian student's incarceration and torture in Evin Prison. Born in 1981, two years after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, Ghahramani grew up fairly privileged in a fashionable Tehran neighborhood. Her father, a well-educated Kurdish Muslim, had been a high-ranking military officer under the shah. Her mother still practiced Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion suppressed with varying degrees of severity ever since invading Arabs imposed Islam on Persia in the seventh century. The author lived in two worlds, publicly demonstrating loyalty to the state and dutifully wearing "basic black from the head downward" in school, while at home she could wear what she liked and freely inquire into any subject. In 2001, she was seized off a street in Tehran, blindfolded and driven to the dreaded Evin Prison. Writing in English with the help of journalist Hillman, Ghahramani alternates a grim portrait of her incarceration with happy memories of her youth. She avidly read Garc'a Lorca, embraced Persian culture and the Farsi language and broke up with a young businessman who insisted she wear a chador to a friend's wedding. In jail, interrogated by a series of odious tormentors whose identity she could only guess by the sound of their voice and their smell, she was beaten with a studded belt, her hair brutally shaved off. The terrified young woman wasn't heroic enough to withstand torture; she identified her friends in photos taken by the police. Conversations through a fan grille with a crazy prisoner in the cell above her somewhat assuaged her grief and guilt at having become "a trained rat" for her jailers. Eventually, the author was dumped in a Tehransuburb and returned to her family. She now lives in Australia, but her burning passion for her language and culture remain. Ghahramani's shockingly honest recollections grimly complement Marina Nemat's account of her ordeal at Evin in the early 1980s (Prisoner of Tehran, 2007), reminding us how little has changed for women in Iran.

Practical Aspects of Interview and Interrogation Second Edition or HR from the Heart

2009-01-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

Practical Aspects of Interview and Interrogation, Second Edition

Author: David E Zulawski

Written by two experts who have conducted more than 15,000 interviews and interrogations from theft to homicide, this book covers the entire sequence of events that occur during the interview and interrogation process. The authors present their method in a cookbook fashion, allowing the flexibility to select a number of different paths to interrogating a suspect.

Booknews

Opens with an overview of the interview and interrogation process and descriptions of approaches such as the good guy/bad guy, factual, and emotional approaches. Later chapters detail each step of the process, covering preparation and strategy, legal aspects, interpretation of verbal and physical behavior, causes of denials, establishing credibility, reducing resistance, rationalization, obtaining the admission, development of the admission, the statement, and ending the interview. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

HR from the Heart: Inspiring Stories and Strategies for Building the People Side of Great Business

Author: Libby Sartain

Human resources professionals are entrusted, perhaps more than any other corporate designates, with the well-being of their organization's population. They bridge the gaps between the individual and the collective, the person and the purpose. The most successful and effective HR professionals see their careers as a calling, and their work, though driven by corporate goals, is graced by a sense of purpose, a profound generosity, and a love for what they do and the constituencies they serve.HR from the Heart is a book for HR practitioners who love their jobs -- or want to. Libby Sartain, one of the country's top human resources executives, reveals how HR professionals create a synergy between business objectives and the needs and wants of employees. This inspiring book is equal parts motivational message and how-to, confessional and career guide. Filled with stories from Sartain's considerable experience, HR from the Heart offers a first-hand perspective on forging relationships, selling HR to the company, taking diversity beyond "by the book," keeping policy in perspective, and more -- all while making the right career moves, staying engaged, and forwarding the strategic goals of the company.

Libby Sartain (Woodside, CA) is senior vice president of human resources at Yahoo! and was previously vice president of people at Southwest Airlines, consistently ranked among the best places to work in America. Martha I. Finney (Los Gatos, CA) is a veteran HR journalist, consultant, and author whose books include In the Face of Uncertainty (0-8144-7161-7).

Charlotte Area SHRM, SPHR , President - Tim Taylor

Recommend that you pick up a copy of HR from the Heart. I'd lend you mine but with all the highlighting and margin notes, it's beginning to look like a used college textbook!

Foreword by Susan R. Meisinger, President, Society for Human Resource Management1. What's Love Got to Do With It? 2. The Sacred Trust That is HR 3. Six Essential Ingredients of Every Great HR Career 4. Sure It Looks Great, But Does It Fit? 5. Not Everyone Will President of Your Fan Club 6. Great Relationships Are More About What You Give Than About What You Get. 7. Pull Up a Chair (How to Know You're Really Ready for a Seat at the Table) 8.. And Have a Seat (What to Do Once You Finally Get There!) 9. From the Heart Doesn't Mean From the Bleeding Heart 10. Know Your Stuff and Know That You Know Your Stuff (And Don't Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise) 11. Just Because They're The Experts Doesn't Make Them More Right Than You 12. Question Authority 13. Start Your Own Hole-In-the-Wall Gang 14. The Dais of Our Lives 15. Can This Marriage Be Saved? 16. How to Know When It's Time to Leave 17. How to Get a Job That Is Far Better that the One You Wanted 18. Is That New Job You're Considering in an HR-Friendly Company? 19. Welcome Abroad! (And Watch Your Step!) 20. It's About People, Not Widgets! 21. The Nuts and Bolts of the Talent Machine 22. HR Does Not Create Culture 23. Internal Branding: The Enchanting Power of the People Promise 24. The Power of People to Make Your HR Branding Work 25. Who Is Really HR's Customer? 26. How to Make Your Company a Great Customer Service Company 27. Eight Ways to Sell the Value of Your Department 28. The Truth Behind Those Best Employers Lists: This Ain't No Beauty Contest! 29. Congratulations! You May Have Already Won! 30. Show Them The Money 31. Using Benefits to Build Relationships 32. Rewards, Recognition, Fun: The Triple Crown of Employee Engagement 33. Managing Expectations 34. Soothing the Savage Skeptic

Understanding International Conflicts or All Too Human

2009-01-12T11:07:00.000-08:00

Understanding International Conflicts

Author: Joseph S Ny

Part of the “Longman Classics in Political Science” series, Nye's best-selling text has been completely updated with new discussions about Middle East politics, including the Israel-Palestine dispute and the Iraq war, terrorism in general and radical Islamic terrorism in particular, the global politics of oil, and much more. Replete with illustrative examples and written in a lively, engaging manner, this is a brief, inexpensive book that students will buy and actually enjoy reading. It deftly balances theory and history to help students develop a well-rounded, informed framework for analyzing the international issues confronting us at the beginning of the 21st Century.

All Too Human: A Political Education

Author: George Stephanopoulos

"So this is it. This is how the big guys talk to each other. I'd been behind my share of closed doors on Capitol Hill, but this was different -- more self-conscious, almost cinematic, as if everyone was aware of playing a part in a drama that was being written as they spoke. This was the classic smoke-filled room, minus the smoke. I watched and listened and tried to look cool, too dumbstruck to say a sensible word and half-convinced that somebody would look up any minute and say, 'Hey, what are you doing here?"
For four years in the White House and one year of campaigning before that, George Stephanopoulos was rarely more than a few steps from Bill Clinton. As the President's Senior Adviser, he saw it all - the endless arguments, the back hall scheming, the protracted decisions, the last minute flip flops that somehow produced real accomplishments, but also set in motion an almost tragic series of events that placed the fate of the President in the hands of the Senate. Now, with the natural ease of a born storyteller and the sensitive eye for fine detail of a novelist, Stephanopoulos tells an extraordinarily gripping story of human foible and frailty in high places that is destined to be one of the great political memoirs of our times. When Stephanopoulos first met Bill Clinton in September of 1991, he was 30, and like so many others before and since, he was dazzled by the brilliance, charisma, lofty ambitions and astonishing empathy of this remarkably gifted man. Here was the perfect star for an ambitious young man to hitch himself to, yet little did he anticipate what an amazing roller coaster ride it would be - both for the administration and for Stephanopoulos. Throughout the chaos and camaraderie, the breathtaking triumphs and disasters, Stephanopoulos clung to the vision of what a Clinton Presidency could be, even as he began to see the hidden, dark compartments in the man that would bring him and the nation to such grief. In addition to the complex portrait of the President, here are brilliant, nuanced sketches of all the key players, including Al Gore, Dick Morris, and Hillary Clinton, whose combative, litigator instincts were, sadly, behind many of her husband's missteps. Here too is a candid, sometimes merciless, self-portrait of the author, whose drives, vanities, and insecurities, along with everyone else's, peppered the playing field of the biggest game in town. All Too Human is a book for the ages.

New York Magazine - Walter Kirn

[Stephanopoulos] tells his calculated story well, with a novelist's flair for sketching scenes and characters.

New York Observer - Jonathan Alter

Mostly this is welcome confession, and not just because it has the benefit of sounding sincere. The reflective, honest tone makes this book essential for anyone trying to understand life inside big-time politics. It's free of the too-tidy anecdotes that clog most political memoirs. The stories ring real, and they're well rendered.

Fortune

...Stephanopoulos is admirably blunt....But he lacks skepticism about the class of permanent, pompous Washingtonians he has now joined in all but his address.

The New York Times Book Review - Garry Wills

In his self-flagellating self-promotion — a way of climbing on his knees — Stephanopoulos regrets that his vanity at times made it harder for him to advance his sound views.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

...[C]andid and highly readable....a far cry from the devastating indictments of previous administrations offered by other insiders....fueled less by any score-settling agenda than by an insider's preoccupation with process and a natural storyteller's fondness for vivid characters and anecdotes...

National Review - Dick Morris

...[T]he most gripping tale of a man's successful battle against his conscience since Albert Speer's cliffhanger Inside the Third Reich....[T]he real tragedy of Stephanopoulos' book [:] He is unhappy in his own skin....He should be very proud of his abilities. Instead, he aspires to a sainthood that he will never reach.

KLIATT

This best-selling memoir of Stephanopoulos's experiences in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, and as an aide to Clinton in his first term, is a compelling political story. It is an intelligent, emotional examination of an intense experience by a young man, just in his early 30s, who helps put a man in the White House and then is part of the group that shapes and molds policy once there. So much has been written and spoken about these experiences, there is little reason to rehash details in this review. What is important to think about is how Stephanopoulos's personal story will resonate among students. I believe that those who take politics seriously, who hope someday to work in the political system for programs and policies they hold dear, will find these memoirs riveting. Stephanopoulos bares his heart. He isn't some political hack or bureaucrat, he isn't a middle-aged politician—he is a young idealistic man, with an immigrant heritage that molds his character and ideas; he is haunted by fears of rejection and highly critical of mistakes. Although he is intelligent and wise, he is inexperienced. The pressure led him to depression and anxiety; stressed out, he got out five years after he got in—a classic burnt-out case. This could well turn out to be a classic work of political writing, late 20th century. KLIATT Codes: A*—Exceptional book, recommended for advanced students, and adults. 1999, Little Brown/Back Bay, 456p, 21cm, illus, bibliog, 99-13817, $14.95. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: Claire Rosser; May 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 3)

Library Journal

National fame came early to Stephanopoulos, who by age 31 was President Clintons first director of communications until he was promoted to the vaguely defined, vulnerable position of senior advisor. He views Clinton as the best politician he has ever known, who could have accomplished much more if he were a better person. First Lady Hillary Clinton is portrayed as fiercely loyal and at times inflexible and ambitious. Ultimately, Stephanopolous fell out of favor for being a traditional liberal in an administration that increasingly believed that the era of big government was dead and also because he was a reputed news leaker, a charge he denies. The strengths of the book are also its weaknesses. An engaging, self-deprecating style, similar to that of Robert Reich, Clintons first secretary of labor (Locked in the Cabinet, LJ 4/1/97), is marred by an overabundance of italicized comments representing rejoinders that could have been used with devastating effect in confrontations but werent. A forthright honesty about his own faults dissolves into self-pity during an extended section on his fights with his major political foe, Dick Morris, the pollster who was brought on board to improve Clintons image but departed when his telephone antics with a prostitute were discovered. Stephanopoulos resigned at the end of the first term and recently condemned the Lewinsky affair as Clintons abandonment of presidential policies and more than a few trusted advisors in order to save himself. Overall, a fascinating if controversial insiders account of life inside the Clinton pressure cooker administration during its early years. A required purchase for public libraries.Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

The New Republic - Katha Pollitt

Stephanopoulos's account of White House misadventures is just as self-serving as [Monica's Story], but his book, while much better written, is a little harder to take....[D]id Stephanopoulos betray the President by writing this book? There is certainly something distasteful about the whole project.

Commentary - Gabriel Schoenfeld

The book may not tell us anything wholly new about the Clinton presidency, but it does...[add] authoritative emphases that could come only from one who saw it up close....For...what [it reveals] of the abysses to which the American political class has sunk, we owe a small measure of debt to George Stephanopoulos's...confessions.

People Magazine - Alex Tresniowski

...[A]s a knowing, slightly cynical treatise on modern politics, All Too Human really hums....a classic morality tale.

The Christian Science Monitor - James N. Thurman

No doubt anecdotally significant to historians, the book for present-day news junkies will be interesting reading....[C]onveys a lukewarm scolding to a gifted and idealistic President whom Stephanopoulos believes wasted a golden opportunity.

The American Spectator - Byron York

...[A]t least we now have what all those subpoenas couldn't unearth: George Stephanopoulos's memories of life with Bill Clinton. Whether we have the real story is another question altogether...."[W]hen I worked for Clinton I had been willing to suspend my disbelief about some of his more suspect denials," [he writes]. Perhaps the most astonishing thing...is that Stephanopoulos apparently expects us to believe that.

Give Me Liberty or Ethical Decisions for Social Work Practice

2009-01-11T18:13:00.000-08:00

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Vol. 1

Author: Eric Foner

Adopted at over 600 universities, colleges, and schools across the country, Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty! is making a difference in the American history survey course. Featuring a single author and a single, comprehensive theme, Give me Liberty! presents American history with unparalleled clarity and coherence. The study tools in the book and the companion print and electronic package ensure student success in the course.

The Second Edition builds on the success of the first, retaining the unifying theme of freedom while becoming more comprehensive, and adding stronger coverage of Native American and immigration history. In addition, the pedagogy has been strengthened with new Voices of Freedom-paired primary sources in each chapter, chapter-opening chronologies, key terms, and more. Overall the presentation remains concise and crisp, free of the encyclopedic detail that clogs so many other survey textbooks.

Interesting textbook: Managing the Organizational Melting Pot or Crimes of Outrage

Ethical Decisions for Social Work Practice

Author: Ralph Dolgoff

With the eight edition of ETHICAL DECISIONS FOR SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE, you'll learn to recognize ethical issues and dilemmas, reason carefully about ethical issues, clarify your ethical aspirations at the level demanded by the profession, and achieve a more ethical stance in your practice. This classic social work text places ethical decision-making within the context of professional ethics and provides useful guidelines, including two ethical screens to help social work practitioners identify priorities among competing ethical obligations. Developed specifically for social workers, the text features numerous case-like exemplars based on real-world practice and drawn from a variety of social work settings.

Preface. Part 1: INTRODUCTION TO ETHICAL DECISION MAKING. 1. Ethical Choices in the Helping Professions. 2. Values and Professional Ethics. 3. Guidelines for Ethical Decision Making: Concepts, Approaches, and Values. 4. Guidelines for Ethical Decision Making. Part 2: ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE. 5. Confidentiality and Informed Consent. 6. Client Rights and Professional Expertise. 7. Value Neutrality and Imposing Values. 8. Equality, Inequality, Limited Resources, and Advocacy. 9. The Professional Relationship: Limits, Dilemmas, and Problems. 10. Organizational and Work Relationships. 11. Social Work with Selected Client Groups. 12. Changing World/Changing Dilemmas. 13. Whose Responsibility Are Professional Ethics? Appendix A: Additional Exemplars. Appendix B: Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

U S Citizenship Test or Garibaldi

2009-01-11T08:01:00.000-08:00

U. S. Citizenship Test

Author: Edward Swick

Your guide to passing the U.S. Citizenship Test and becoming a citizen

Why CliffsTestPrep Guides?

Go with the name you know and trust

Get the information you need—fast!

Written by test prep specialists

About the contents:

This guide helps you learn about the history and government of the United States and improve your English skills. As you review the information and practice answering questions, you will become more comfortable taking the written and oral U.S. Citizenship tests in English.

Introduction

• Information on how to become a U.S. citizen

• Understanding, speaking, reading, and writing English

• Types of questions, including written or oral question/answer, sentence writing, multiple choice, multiple choice completion, completions, and substitutions

Subject Review

• An overview of the history of the United States, including the New World, independence, the Constitution and founding fathers, the Civil War, and more

• An overview of the government of the United States, including leaders, the executive, legislative and judicial branches, bills and laws, patriotism, capital cities, and more

The Oral Interview

• What you need to know

• Sample questions

Four Full-Length Practice Tests with Answers

Test Prep Essentials from the Experts at CliffsNotes®

Introduction.

The Pre-Test.

The New World.

Independence.

A New Nation.

The Father of Our Country.

The First President.

The Nation Grows.

The Nation Dissolves.

A Nation of Immigrants.

Leaders.

Patriotism.

A Land of Laws.

Responsibilities.

Justice for All.

A Great Nation.

Your Oral Interview.

Practice Test 1.

Practice Test 2.

Practice Test 3.

Practice Test 4.

Irregular Past Tense Forms and Irregular Past Participles.

Your New Words.

A Timeline of American History and World Events.

Answer Key.

New interesting book: Working Well Living Well or Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay

Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero

Author: Lucy Riall

Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary leader and popular hero, was among the best-known figures of the nineteenth century. This book seeks to examine his life and the making of his cult, to assess its impact, and understand its surprising success.
For thirty years Garibaldi was involved in every combative event in Italy. His greatest moment came in 1860, when he defended a revolution in Sicily and provoked the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy, the overthrow of papal power in central Italy, and the creation of the Italian nation state. It made him a global icon, representing strength, bravery, manliness, saintliness, and a spirit of adventure. Handsome, flamboyant, and sexually attractive, he was worshiped in life and became a cult figure after his death in 1882.
Lucy Riall shows that the emerging cult of Garibaldi was initially conceived by revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the status quo, that it was also the result of a collaborative effort involving writers, artists, actors, and publishers, and that it became genuinely and enduringly popular among a broad public. The book demonstrates that Garibaldi played an integral part in fashioning and promoting himself as a new kind of “charismatic” political hero. It analyzes the way the Garibaldi myth has been harnessed both to legitimize and to challenge national political structures. And it identifies elements of Garibaldi’s political style appropriated by political leaders around the world, including Mussolini and Che Guevara.

Publishers Weekly

With his trademark red cape, full beard and regal bearing, Italian revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi cut a swashbuckling swath through European politics during the mid-19th century. In Riall's (Sicily and the Unification of Italy) exhaustive and sometimes exhausting study of this supremely charismatic man and his tumultuous times, Garibaldi's life and legacy echo through the fascist dictators of the 20th century to the Marxist revolutionaries of the 1970s. Born in Nice in 1807, Garibaldi lived a peripatetic life until he "discovered his true vocation-not as a (failed) merchant sailor nor as a (outlawed) political conspirator, but as a soldier hero" and returned to Italy in 1848, a year of widespread political upheaval in Europe. The Italy that Riall describes is a conflicted place seething with nationalist fervor, waiting for a hero to fan the flames and lead the people to their rightful place among nations. As much a product of behind-the-scenes manipulations as his own desires and ambitions, Garibaldi became that hero. A deeply researched and resourced scholarly text, this is not for the general reader. Riall's extensive use of contemporary primary source material makes for some heavy sledding. Still, for the 19th-century European history buff or the revolutionary hero completist, this is a useful and illuminating read. (June)

Basic Brown or Triumph and Tragedy

2009-01-10T12:27:00.000-08:00

Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times

Author: Willie Brown

To The Washington Post, he's "The Last Political Showman of the 20th Century."
Bill Clinton has called him "the real Slick Willie."
Ronald Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz called this famously liberal politician "a man of his word" and endorsed his successful candidacy for mayor of San Francisco.
Indeed Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both called upon him for advice and help. He is Willie L. Brown, Jr., and he knows how to get things done in politics, how to work both sides of the aisle to get results. Compared to him, Machiavelli looks meek. And drab.
In Basic Brown, this product of rural, segregated Texas and the urban black neighborhoods of San Francisco tells how he rose through the civil rights movement to become the most potent black politician in America through his shrewd understanding and use of political power and political money. He adapts the lessons he has learned so they can be used by anyone -- black, female, male -- intent on acquiring political power.
And this master of the political deal demonstrates why deals are not enough, and that political power grows only when public good is being done. Willie Brown shows how some of the most far-reaching and socially advanced legislation in American history -- like gun control, legalized abortion, gay rights, and school funding -- was carried out under his guidance and on his watch, and tells of the ingenuity, the political machinations, and the personal perseverance that were required to enact what now seems to many to be obvious legislation. These are stories of breathtaking, sometimes hilarious ruses and gambits that show that even the most high-minded legislation needsthe assistance of the skills of a shark, which is what Willie Brown often sees himself as.
Basic Brown is a compendium of insights and stories on the real forces governing power in American political life that will leave you looking at politics anew. It is also the inspiring and funny story of the rise of a gawky teenager in mail-order shoes and trousers who rose to entertain royalty and schoolchildren, superstars and supersize egos, the saintly and the scholarly, while working to transform and open American politics. If you ever wanted to learn how to be slick, a shark, a do-gooder, and a man of your word, Willie L. Brown, Jr., is the storyteller for you.

The Washington Post - Ron Fimrite

…[an] engaging autobiography…[Brown's] roguish ways are reminiscent of such other flashy mayors as Marion Barry of Washington and Jimmy Walker of New York. Like them, he makes no pretense of piety. But unlike them, he's never run afoul of the law. He has so nimbly crossed racial barriers that he stands as something of a pioneer, and yet he has demonstrated no particular desire to be remembered as an African American leader. Indeed, many of his closest friends are white. So let's just say this man is one of a kind, and be done with it.

The New York Times - Matt Bai

Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times is less Brown's memoir than a West Coast version of Machiavelli's Prince, a seminar for young politicians by a master of the craft…in this charming memoir by a charming man, exaggeration is part of the fun. The book roughly approximates the experience of sitting across from Willie Brown over a long breakfast, refilling one's coffee as he works his way through the tall tales and tangents that made him one of the great machinators of his age. Like the man himself, Brown's version of the political memoir is always engaging, sometimes confounding and never the least bit slow.

Publishers Weekly

Brown, "[b]lack, urban, flamboyant, politically adroit," is part hardworking politician and part legend. "A political career [had] never entered [his] mind," when the teenaged Texas country boy arrived in San Francisco in 1951. Thirty years later, Brown became Speaker of the California Assembly, a triply historic event: he won with bipartisan support, was the first African-American to do so and served longer than any else in the position; then from 1996 to 2003, he was San Francisco's mayor. Brown's autobiography is a candid and fascinating how-to-succeed-in-politics, crammed with down-to-earth reality tips not common in civics texts. He advises how to dress, work a party and manage one's own scandals. But Brown did not achieve political power by merely window dressing and shares his mastery of the finer and lesser points of political strategy. He revisits the major controversies of his reign in the assembly and the successes of which he is most proud. "The real Slick Willie," Clinton called him; Brown says simply, "I'm unique." His always lively and often self-serving account is a candid tutorial for aspiring politicians and ordinary folk who enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at how local (and sometimes national) government works. Illus. (Feb.)

Ann Burns - Library Journal

Once labeled "the real Slick Willie" by Bill Clinton, Brown, now heading his own Institute on Politics and Public Service, served 30 years in the California State Assembly and in 1996 became the first African American mayor of San Francisco. Here, he offers anecdotes of his days as a politician along with some piercing commentary on the 2008 elections.

Kirkus Reviews

The legendary California politician and power broker struts his stuff. A credentials battle and an electrifying speech to the 1972 National Democratic Convention shone the national spotlight on Brown, and he's warmed himself in its glow ever since. As the first African-American and longest-tenured speaker of the California Assembly and as two-term mayor of San Francisco, he displayed all the talents common to political genius: He was a charismatic speaker, a prodigious fundraiser and a consummate insider who mastered the rules of any office he held and never lost the common touch. He fought successfully against limitations imposed by the white community by never styling himself as merely a minority spokesman. Brown operated with a panache normally associated with big-city mayors from a bygone era. Like New York's Jimmy Walker and Boston's James Michael Curley, he was famed as a clotheshorse, a gourmand, a showman (he had a cameo in The Godfather: Part III), an inveterate partygoer, table-hopper and ladies' man, despite his 50-year marriage. His altogether unique style inspired his supporters and confounded his enemies. Convinced that anyone so powerful had to be corrupt, the FBI tried unsuccessfully for years to get something on him. Even after finally achieving a majority in the Assembly, Republicans proved unable to oust him as speaker. Brown retells with relish his political battles, including his efforts to restore San Francisco's City Hall, and drops allusions to giants of California politics, including former Speaker Jesse Unruh, former SF Mayor George Moscone, congresswoman Maxine Waters, gay-rights activist Harvey Milk and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Herb Caen. His memoirincludes just enough biographical information about his modest origins to place his spectacular career in impressive relief. The scattershot narrative, breakneck gallop through topics large and small, seductive name-dropping and, above all, Brown's impregnable self-confidence add up to what feels like a genuine encounter with an unforgettable character.

Triumph and Tragedy, Vol. 6

Author: Winston S Churchill

From the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944 the Second World War had only fourteen months to run. This final volume of the account covers events right up to the unconditional surrender of Japan.

The New Yorker

Churchill is artist enough to realize that these huge final chords must be simple. He gives us a magnificently muted close.

Book I	The Tide of Victory
Chapter I	D Day	3
Chapter II	Normandy to Paris	15
Chapter III	The Pilotless Bombardment	34
Chapter IV	Attack on the South of France?	50
Chapter V	Balkan Convulsions. The Russian Victories	63
Chapter VI	Italy and the Riviera Landing	75
Chapter VII	Rome. The Greek Problem	92
Chapter VIII	Alexander's Summer Offensive	104
Chapter IX	The Martyrdom of Warsaw	113
Chapter X	The Second Quebec Conference	129
Chapter XI	Advance in Burma	143
Chapter XII	The Battle of Leyte Gulf	153
Chapter XIII	The Liberation of Western Europe	165
Chapter XIV	Prelude to a Moscow Visit	180
Chapter XV	October in Moscow	197
Chapter XVI	Paris	213
Chapter XVII	Counter-stroke in the Ardennes	229
Chapter XVIII	British Intervention in Greece	247
Chapter XIX	Christmas at Athens	267
Book II	The Iron Curtain
Chapter XX	Preparations for a New Conference	287
Chapter XXI	Yalta: Plans for World Peace	302
Chapter XXII	Russia and Poland: The Soviet Promise	319
Chapter XXIII	Yalta: Finale	340
Chapter XXIV	Crossing the Rhine	353
Chapter XXV	The Polish Dispute	367
Chapter XXVI	Soviet Suspicions	386
Chapter XXVII	Western Strategic Divergences	399
Chapter XXVIII	The Climax: Roosevelt's Death	412
Chapter XXIX	Growing Friction with Russia	424
Chapter XXX	The Final Advance	440
Chapter XXXI	Alexander's Victory in Italy	454
Chapter XXXII	The German Surrender	463
Chapter XXXIII	An Uneasy Interlude	480
Chapter XXXIV	The Chasm Opens	495
Chapter XXXV	The End of the Coalition	508
Chapter XXXVI	A Fateful Decision	520
Chapter XXXVII	The Defeat of Japan	532
Chapter XXXVIII	Potsdam: The Atomic Bomb	545
Chapter XXXIX	Potsdam: The Polish Frontiers	560
Chapter XL	The End of My Account	578
	Appendices
A.	List of Abbreviations	587
B.	List of Code-Names	588
C.	Prime Minister's Directives, Personal Minutes, and Telegrams, June 1944-July 1945	589
D.	The Attack on the South of France	656
E.	Monthly Totals of Shipping Losses, British, Allied, and Neutral, June 1944-August 1945	665
F.	Prime Minister's Victory Broadcast, May 13, 1945	666
G.	The Battle of the Atlantic: Merchant Ships Sunk by U-boat: The Last Phase	674
H.	Ministerial Appointments, June 1944-May 1945	675
	Index	679
	Maps and Diagrams
	North-West Europe	22
	Normandy	29
	Operations on the Russian Front, June 1944-January 1945	73
	Northern Italy	77
	"Anvil"	89
	Burma, July 1944-January 1945	151
	Battle for Leyte Gulf, Philippines: Approach and Contact, October 22-24, 1944	158
	Battle for Leyte Gulf: The Decisive Phase, October 25, 1944	160
	Battle for Leyte Gulf: The Pursuit, October 26-27, 1944	162
	The South-West Pacific	163
	The Pursuit	169
	South Holland	173
	The Gothic Line	193
	The Frontier Regions	232
	Rundstedt's Counter-Offensive	246
	Greece	281
	Crossing the Rhine	355
	The Northern Crossing	358
	Occupation Zones in Germany, as Agreed at Quebec, September 1944	438
	The Invasion of Germany	454
	The Battle of the River Po	457
	Merchant Vessel Losses by U-boat, January 1940-April 1945	473
	The Withdrawal of the Western Allies, July 1945	526
	Central Burma	537
	The Last Phase in the Pacific War	542
	Occupation Zones in Germany and Austria, as Finally Adopted, July 1945	566
	The Frontiers of Central Europe	678

Simon Bolivar or Operation Homecoming

2009-01-10T02:15:00.000-08:00

Simon Bolivar: A Life

Author: John Lynch

Simón Bolívar was a revolutionary who freed six countries, an intellectual who argued the principles of national liberation, and a general who fought a cruel colonial war. His life, passions, battles, and great victories became embedded in Spanish American culture almost as soon as they happened. This is the first major English-language biography of “The Liberator” in half a century. John Lynch draws on extensive research on the man and his era to tell Bolívar’s story, to understand his life in the context of his own society and times, and to explore his remarkable and enduring legacy.

The book illuminates the inner world of Bolívar, the dynamics of his leadership, his power to command, and his modes of ruling the diverse peoples of Spanish America. The key to his greatness, Lynch concludes, was supreme will power and an ability to inspire people to follow him beyond their immediate interests, in some cases through years of unremitting struggle. Encompassing Bolívar’s entire life and his many accomplishments, this is the definitive account of a towering figure in the history of the Western hemisphere.

The New Yorker

The first major English biography of Bolívar in fifty years parses the complex history of the Venezuelan aristocrat who liberated six South American countries from Spanish rule. A cult figure after his death, in 1830, El Libertador led a life that defies easy analysis: although influenced by Enlightenment ideas of equality, he rejected total democracy, fearing anarchy in the “ignorant” lower classes; determined to create strong central government, he institutionalized rule by local warlords; acutely aware of the factionalism rampant in postwar society, he was bewildered when it eventually forced him to leave his homeland. In Lynch’s view, the key to Bolívar lies in his pragmatism. Leaders who have invoked his name to serve their political agendas have obscured the fact that his policies followed no single path and are meaningless out of historical context. The so-called “Bolivarian revolution” of the populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is “a modern perversion of the cult.”

Library Journal

This solid but uninspiring biography details the political and intellectual history of one of Latin America's most famous figures: El Libertador, Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), who led revolutions against Spanish rule in his native Venezuela as well as what are now Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Panama. Lynch (Latin American history, emeritus, Univ. of London) describes Bolivar's childhood, education, political development, intellectual influences, economic and social thought, friendships, and personal highs and lows. Rather than lingering on the features of his personal life, however, Lynch presents him as a public person, political thinker, and philosopher-general, focusing on his role as a liberator of Spanish colonies. In particular, we are shown the importance of Rousseauan thought and some ideals of the French Revolution in shaping Bolivar's outlook. Although Lynch argues in his preface that his examination of Bolivar as a leader is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand 19th-century Latin American history, there are many similarly competent biographical studies of Bolivar, and only serious scholars are likely to read Lynch's with any fervor. An optional addition to academic libraries.-Emily-Jane Dawson, Multnomah Cty. Lib., Portland, OR Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Nations and Firms in the Global Economy or Adam Smiths Marketplace of Life

Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families

Author: Andrew Carroll

Operation Homecoming is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Mark Bowden, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into extraordinary lives and are an unforgettable contribution to wartime literature.

State of the World 2008 or Mr Jeffersons Women

2009-01-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

State of the World 2008: Toward a Sustainable Global Economy

Author: Worldwatch Institut

"Comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible."—Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson

Growing evidence suggests that the global economy, rooted in ideas and assumptions that were progressive two hundred years ago, is now destroying its own ecological base and offering little to billions of impoverished people. In response, pioneers are creating the architecture of sustainable economies, one innovation at a time. State of the World 2008 describes these innovations—from microfinance to closed-loop manufacturing and the use of trusts to protect common resources—as well as identifying the obstacles that prevent a critical mass of people and organizations from moving toward sustainability, and rallying coalitions of stakeholders that can produce win-win solutions and strategies for achieving specific sustainability goals.

Book review: Damaged Angels or Migraine

Mr. Jefferson's Women

Author: Jon Kukla

Publishers Weekly

Thomas J. Schaeper - Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Nonviolence or Sweet Caroline

2009-01-09T02:50:00.000-08:00

Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea

Author: Mark Kurlansky

In this timely, highly original, and controversial narrative, New York Times bestselling author Mark Kurlansky discusses nonviolence as a distinct entity, a course of action, rather than a mere state of mind. Nonviolence can and should be a technique for overcoming social injustice and ending wars, he asserts, which is why it is the preferred method of those who speak truth to power.

Nonviolence is a sweeping yet concise history that moves from ancient Hindu times to present-day conflicts raging in the Middle East and elsewhere. Kurlansky also brings into focus just why nonviolence is a “dangerous” idea, and asks such provocative questions as: Is there such a thing as a “just war”? Could nonviolence have worked against even the most evil regimes in history?

Kurlansky draws from history twenty-five provocative lessons on the subject that we can use to effect change today. He shows how, time and again, violence is used to suppress nonviolence and its practitioners–Gandhi and Martin Luther King, for example; that the stated deterrence value of standing national armies and huge weapons arsenals is, at best, negligible; and, encouragingly, that much of the hard work necessary to begin a movement to end war is already complete. It simply needs to be embraced and accelerated.

Engaging, scholarly, and brilliantly reasoned, Nonviolence is a work that compels readers to look at history in an entirely new way. This is not just a manifesto for our times but a trailblazing book whose time has come.

Publishers Weekly

Kurlansky applies the microhistorical approach of his bestellers (Cod; Salt) to the loftier subject of nonviolence-which, he observes, is so "profoundly dangerous" to the powers that be that it has never existed as an idea in and of itself, only as the absence of violence. "Active practitioners of nonviolence are always seen as a threat," he says, and the conflict between authority and nonviolent resistance becomes a "moral argument" that, all too often, the nonviolent lose by abandoning their ideal in the name of self-defense. But as he studies the history of nonviolence from the dawn of Christianity to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kurlansky can also point to prominent victories, like Gandhi's quest for Indian independence and the Eastern European resistance to the Soviets. There are plenty of missed opportunities, too; the American Revolution, he suggests, need not have escalated into war; "protest and economic sabotage" might have forced Britain to withdraw from the colonies. Sometimes, Kurlansky's impassioned rhetoric turns argumentative, and his "lessons"-e.g., "behind every war there are always a few founding lies"-offer scant practical guidance to those wanting to take up the nonviolent mantle themselves. (Sept. 5) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Look this: Das Werden ein Helfer

Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot

Author: Christopher P Andersen

She is the heiress to a legacy of power, wealth, unfulfilled promise, and unspeakable tragedy. Her father was gunned down before a stunned world forty years ago, forever changing the course of history. Her mother became the most celebrated American woman of the twentieth century -- an icon of style, glamour, and personal courage. Her brother was the most promising Kennedy of his generation -- a global heartthrob who was killed when his plane crashed within sight of his mother's estate on Martha's Vineyard. Through it all, the sole surviving member of Camelot's First Family, Caroline Kennedy, has remained largely a mystery. Until now. In the manner of his #1 New York Times bestsellers The Day Diana Died and The Day John Died, as well as his other bestselling books on the Kennedys, Jack and Jackie and Jackie After Jack, Christopher Andersen draws on important sources -- many speaking here for the first time -- to provide a full, compelling portrait of Caroline, the young wife and mother left to carry on in her legendary family's name. Among the revelations:

New details about life inside the Kennedy White House -- and the events surrounding JFK's assassination -- from Caroline's unique perspective.
A spellbinding account of the surreal years she spent as the stepdaughter of Aristotle Onassis.
Caroline's own battles with a variety of harrowing personal problems, both physical and emotional.
The times she, too, cheated death; the stalkers who have caused her to fear for her life.
Her often frustrating attempts to carve out an identity for herself in the shadow of her famous mother.
Her loves, and the enigmaticcharacter she chose to marry.
The way she coped with the heartbreaking losses of her father, mother, and brother -- as well as the countless catastrophes that have plagued the Kennedy family over the last half-century and the demons that haunt her to this day.
How she is raising her children, and what lessons she is teaching them about love -- and loss.

Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot is an often moving, always captivating look at the life of one little girl who was handed more than her share of heartache -- and has not only survived but flourished. It is the story of America's daughter.

	Acknowledgements
	Preface
Pt. 1	The Condition of the World	1
1	The Old World Order	7
2	The New World Order	16
3	Security in the New World	55
Pt. 2	The Conditions of Peace: Twenty-First Century Diplomacy	81
Pt. 3	Epilogue: Europe and America	153
	Notes	173
	Index	176

	Foreword
1	The Exodus	3
2	Daughters of Pol Pot	45
3	The Agony	87
4	Time Worn Away	141
5	Wolves Among Themselves	177
6	Strangers in Our Own Land	213
	Epilogue: Orphans in Search of a Family	239
	Historical Note	247

	Introduction	1
Ch. 1	Operational Constraints	25
Ch. 2	Organizational Constraints	49
Ch. 3	Legal Constraints	61
Ch. 4	Moral Constraints	83
Ch. 5	Effects	93
Ch. 6	Remedies	133
Ch. 7	Conclusion	149
	Selected Bibliography	157
	Index	173
	About the Author	183

	Introduction to the Illinois Edition
	Prefatory Note	3
	Introduction	5
1	Charitable Effort	11
2	Filial Relations	35
3	Household Adjustment	48
4	Industrial Amelioration	63
5	Educational Methods	80
6	Political Reform	98
	Index	121

Middle East Books

Poles Jews and the Politics of Nationality or The End of Alliances

Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892-1914

Table of Contents:

The End of Alliances

The New York Times - Mick Sussman

Foreign Affairs

Jeffersons Empire or Encyclopedia of the Palestinians

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What People Are Saying

Encyclopedia of the Palestinians

Library Journal

Journal Library

Securing Americas Future or The Priestly Tribe

Securing America's Future: A Bold Plan to Preserve and Expand Social Security

Table of Contents:

The Priestly Tribe: The Supreme Court's Image in the American Mind

All American Monster or Your Fathers Voice

All-American Monster: The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh

Journal of Psychohistory

Publishers Weekly

Booknews

Your Father's Voice: Letters for Emmy about Life with Jerem...and without Him after 9/11

Publishers Weekly

Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman or Secret Empire

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Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage

The New York Times

The Los Angeles Times

The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

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Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Asymmetrical Warfare or The Opium Season

Asymmetrical Warfare: Today's Challenge to U. S. Military Power

Foreign Affairs

Table of Contents:

The Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier

The New York Times - William Grimes

Publishers Weekly

Nader Entessar - Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Democracys Discontent or The World of Mexican Migrants

Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy

Booknews

George F. Will

Kirkus Reviews

The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place

Kirkus Reviews

Table of Contents:

GUILTY or Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony

GUILTY: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America

Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866-1873, Vol. 2

What People Are Saying

Means without End or The Psychology of Working A New Perspective for Career Development Counseling and Public Policy

Means Without End: Notes on Politics

Table of Contents:

The Psychology of Working A New Perspective for Career Development, Counseling, and Public Policy

Breaking of Nations or Major Problems in the History of American Workers

Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century

THe New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Foreign Affairs

Kirkus Reviews

Table of Contents:

Major Problems in the History of American Workers: Documents and Essays

The Irony of Democracy or Refuge Denied

The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics

Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust

Publishers Weekly

Killing the Black Body or Ellis Islands Famous Immigrants

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Library Journal

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Table of Contents:

Ellis Island's Famous Immigrants (Images of America Series)

Virginia in the Vanguard or Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Virginia in the Vanguard: Political Leadership in the 400-Year-Old Cradle of American Democracy, 1981-2006