Economics & Politics Books

The New Inquisition or Crashing the Gate

2009-12-05T05:53:00.000-08:00

The New Inquisition: Understanding and Managing Intellectual Freedom Challenges

Author: James LaRu

How can you become an effective advocate for intellectual freedom and patron privacy while maintaining a positive relationship with diverse elements of your community? Drawing on his experience as library director, this author advocates assuming a proactive role in every library function, from collection building to community outreach. This approach helps you understand the people who challenge library materials--as individuals and as members of various groups--turning enemies into allies, and building an intellectual, freedom-friendly community. You'll learn what materials get challenged and why and how you can effectively respond to challenges while meeting diverse community needs. Here are stories from the frontlines, practical guidelines on policies and procedures as well as common-sense tips on how to maintain your cool while dealing with specific groups or individuals--all presented with common sense and humor. If you have been struggling with challenges and wonder how you can uphold your ideals while dealing with harsh realities, this is the book you have been waiting for.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction: The Blue Line     xi
The Need for and Purpose of This Book     xiii
Scope and Audience     xiii
Background: A Historical Perspective     1
History of Censorship: The Burning of Books     1
Definitions     3
The Constitution and the First Amendment: Foundations of Intellectual Freedom     5
The Library Bill of Rights     15
But What about the Children?     19
Obscenity     20
Religion and Libraries     27
Big 16     28
Madonna     30
Focus on the Family     34
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints     44
The Difference between FOF and the Mormons     49
Reading with the Enemy     50
Generations     57
Types and Life Cycles     59
Public Education: A Profile     61
Focus on the Family: Redefining the Mission     65
Anything Goes?     67
Responding to Challenges     71
Who Are They?     71
The Initial Response     74
The Written Responses: Letters     80
When the Issue Doesn't Die     84
Beyond the Basics: Taking It to the Street     89
The Pyramid Model     89
Geographic Information Systems     94
Becoming a Player     95
The Rubber Chicken Circuit     99
Public Speaking and Writing     99
Using Your Reputation     100
Newspaper Columns     101
Other Media     103
Politics     104
Professional Activity     107
Conclusion: The Fourth Turning?     109
Kid Stuff     109
I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag...     109
Tancredo and Immigration     113
There Is Always a New, a Next Inquisition     115
Appendix     117
Letters     117
Columns     144
References and Resources     149
Reference List     149
Intellectual Freedom Resources     150
Index     153

Look this: Implementing Lean Software Development or Mr China

Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics

Author: Jerome Armstrong

Crashing the Gate is a shot across the bow at the political establishment in Washington, DC and a call to re-democratize politics in America.

This book lays bare, with passion and precision, how ineffective, incompetent, and antiquated the Democratic Party establishment has become, and how it has failed to adapt and respond to new realities and challenges. The authors save their sharpest knives to go for the jugular in their critique of Republican ideologues who are now running—and ruining—our country.

Written by two of the most popular political bloggers in America, the book hails the new movement—of the netroots, the grassroots, the unorthodox labor unions, the maverick big donors—that is the antidote to old-school politics as usual. Fueled by advances in technology and a hunger for a more authentic and populist democracy, this broad-based movement is changing the way political campaigns are waged and managed.

A must-read book for anyone with an interest in the future of American democracy. "

About the Authors:
Jerome Armstrong, a pioneer of the political blogosphere, founded one of the first political blogs, MyDD.com, in 2001. The person behind the netroots strategy that used blogs and meetups for Howard Dean's campaign, Jerome works as an internet strategist for advocacy organizations and political campaigns. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Markos Moulitsas Zъniga served in the U.S. Army for three years and later earned two bachelors degrees from Northern Illinois University and a law degree from Boston University. After moving to California to work in the tech industry, Markos started DailyKos.com in May 2002. His blog has had a meteoric rise and now gets more than a million unique visitors each day, making it one of the most popular blogs in the nation. Markos lives in Berkeley, California.

Simon Rosenberg is president and founder of the New Democrat Network, a national membership organization that promotes strategies to modernize progressive politics. Before founding NDN, Rosenberg was a key member of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. He and his family live in Washington DC.

The New York Times - Peter Beinart

Armstrong and Moulitsas may well be right that the next great partisan transformation will be theirs. In Crashing the Gate they have written an insightful guide to how the Democratic Party can retake power. Now all they need to do is figure out why it deserves to.

Library Journal

Armstrong (MyDD.com) and Zuniga (DailyKos.com), both popular liberal political bloggers, offer a critique of Democrats and lay out their strategy to save the party and win back control of government at all levels. They present a blistering attack on the Republican Party's ideological constituencies-the theocons, neocons, corporate cons, etc.-and the policies of the Bush administration, but they move quickly to a lengthy critique of the Democratic Party, which they describe, borrowing from Howard Dean, as a collection of single-issue interest groups (e.g., pro-choice, environmental, big labor, and gun control advocates) unwilling to make concessions for the greater good: the success of the party. The authors also note outdated old-boy systems of raising money, outmoded campaign strategies, and a lack of technological sophistication. The Democrats must nurture places where new ideas germinate, such as the world of the blog. Their plan strikes this reader as na ve, considering that Dean didn't win a single primary and that the Republicans have successfully mobilized large numbers of people in support of their candidates. Moreover, they assume that their progressive ideas are, in fact, what the masses subscribe to. While the book may spark some interest among blog readers and writers, its wider appeal will be limited. Recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries with comprehensive holdings on campaigns and elections. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Reinventing Public Health or Liberty and Power

2009-12-04T00:41:00.000-08:00

Reinventing Public Health: Policies and Practices for a Healthy Nation

Author: Lu Ann Aday

Reinventing Public Health offers guidance for translating the growing body of research on the fundamental social, economic, and ecological determinants of health into innovative programs and policies to improve the health of populations.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer: Ross M. Mullner, PhD, MPH (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Description: This book reconceptualizes the field of public health. It presents a bold new public policy orientation to improve the health of the population of the United States, and to reduce the nation's health disparities. The book also discusses the initiatives taken by several other nations, particularly Canada, to redress social inequities.
Purpose: According to the editor: "The book introduces a framework for identifying, arraying, and evaluating the evidence regarding the fundamental social, economic, and ecological determinants of population health and health disparities; explores the role of related development policies in influencing these fundamental determinants; and suggests alternative models of more health-centered policy and program design incorporating a consideration of the fundamental determinants of health."
Audience: This book is written for graduate students in public health, public policy, medical sociology, and political science. The editor, Lu Ann Aday, is a nationally known, highly respected professor and scholar from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston.
Features: The book consists of seven chapters. Each of the chapters is well crafted and flows nicely into the next with little overlap. A large name and subject index concludes the book.
Assessment: This is a very refreshing new look at public health. Unlike many textbooks in public health which basically repeat what has been said many times before, this book looks at public health from a new and original perspective. It is well organized, well written, and well researched. I highly recommend it!

Rating

4 Stars! from Doody

Liberty and Power: A Dialogue on Religion and U. S. Foreign Policy in an Unjust World

Author: J Bryan Hehir

What role should religion play in shaping and implementing U.S. foreign policy?

The dominant attitude over the last half century on the subject of religion and international relations was expressed well by Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state: "Moral Talk was fine preaching for the Final Day of Judgment, but it was not a view I would entertain as a public servant." Was Acheson right?

How a nation "commits itself to freedom" has long been at the heart of debates about foreign aid, economic sanctions, and military intervention. Moral and faith traditions have much to say about what is required to achieve this end. And after September 11, no one can doubt the importance of religious beliefs in influencing relations among peoples and nations.

The contributors to this volume come at the issue from very different perspectives and offer exceptional and unexpected insights on a question now at the forefront of American foreign policy.

Author Description:
J. Bryan Hehir is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and was formerly the president and CEO of Catholic Charities U.S.A.

Michael Walzer is a leading American political theorist and a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He is the author of several books, including Just and Unjust Wars.

Louise Richardson serves as the executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is an expert in international terrorism and defense policy.

Shibley Telhami is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and a non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of numerous books, including the national bestseller The Stakes (Westview).

Charles Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist at the Washington Post. He contributes frequently to Time Magazine, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, and The National Interest.

James M. Lindsay is vice president and director of studies of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he holds the Maurice R. Greenberg Chair. He was previously deputy director and senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. His books include Agenda for the Nation (Brookings 2003) and Defending America: The Case for Limited National Missile Defense (Brookings 2001). In 1996-97, Lindsay was director for global issues and multilateral affairs on the National Security Council staff.

Developing Global Executives or Faith and the Presidency

2009-12-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

Developing Global Executives: The Lessons of International Experience

Author: Morgan W McCall

In our borderless global economy, companies must ship their executives nearly as far and wide as their products. Whether these far-flung executives soar or land with a thud may make all the difference between a successful international enterprise or a world-class failure -- and it is this crucial difference that Developing Global Executives defines.

Based on a wide-ranging study of veteran global executives, leadership development experts Morgan W. McCall, Jr. and George P. Hollenbeck reveal what it takes for organizations to groom, and individuals to become, successful international executives. The answer sounds deceptively simple: People learn to "be global" from doing global work. But therein lies a tricky distinction -- what specific types of career experiences are the ones that prepare global leaders for their roles? To what extent can individuals seek out -- and companies help orchestrate -- these experiences?

In Developing Global Executives, leading global executives help answer these questions. Through their candid, rich, and varied stories, readers learn who global executives are, what distinguishes them from domestic leaders, and which experiences have been most critical to mastering their extremely demanding careers.

In addition, these "lessons from the field" underscore the key requirements and challenges of effective leadership in a global environment: from the importance of continuous learning and the crucial role of mentors to the difficulties in overcoming "culture shock" and the warning signs of potential derailment. Practical and far-sighted, this book offers a wealth of firsthand insights for aspiring and current international executives and the organizations that employ them.

With today's ever-increasing complexity in business, organizations need to capitalize on every developmental opportunity. Developing Global Executives will help you do just that by providing a thorough itinerary and useful guide for executives moving in the new, completely global environment. On your exploratory journey through the book, you will meet many fascinating people, learn from their stories, and come away with real wisdom.

	Foreword
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
1	Introduction: A World of Possibilities	1
2	What Is a Global Executive?	19
3	Global Journeys: The Lives of Global Executives	41
4	The Lessons of International Experience	77
5	Experiences That Teach Global Executives	107
6	Making Sense of Culture	129
7	When Things Go Wrong	153
8	Developing Global Executives: The Organization's Role	171
9	Building a Global Career: The Individual's Part	197
10	Epilogue	213
	App. A: Interview Questions	219
	App. B: Methodology	223
	App. C: Supplementary Tables	227
	Notes	241
	References	247
	Index	251
	About the Authors	259

Book about: Buckets of Money or Call Me Ted

Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush

Author: Gary Scott Smith

In the wake of the 2004 election, pundits were shocked at exit polling that showed that 22% of voters thought "moral values" was the most important issue at stake. People on both sides of the political divide believed this was the key to victory for George W. Bush, who professes a deep and abiding faith in God. While some fervent Bush supporters see him as a man chosen by God for the White House, opponents see his overt commitment to Christianity as a dangerous and unprecedented bridging of the gap between church and state.
In fact, Gary Scott Smith shows, none of this is new. Religion has been a major part of the presidency since George Washington's first inaugural address. Despite the mounting interest in the role of religion in American public life, we actually know remarkably little about the faith of our presidents. Was Thomas Jefferson an atheist, as his political opponents charged? What role did Lincoln's religious views play in his handling of slavery and the Civil War? How did born-again Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter lose the support of many evangelicals? Is George W. Bush, as his critics often claim, a captive of the religious right? In this fascinating book, Smith answers these questions and many more. He takes a sweeping look at the role religion has played in presidential politics and policies. Drawing on extensive archival research, Smith paints compelling portraits of the religious lives and presidencies of eleven chief executives for whom religion was particularly important.
Faith and the Presidency meticulously examines what each of its subjects believed and how those beliefs shaped their presidencies and, in turn, the course of our history.

Library Journal

Given the separation of church and state specified by the Second Amendment, Americans have both contested and championed the expression of religious faith by their leaders. Smith (history, Grove City Coll.) carefully collects and collates the personal views and attitudes on religion and the relations with religious institutions and constituencies of 11 U.S. Presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, and George W. Bush. "In the final analysis," Scott concludes, "we must be careful not to make too much or too little of the influence of presidents' faith on how they performed their duties. Scholars have tended to take it into account too little; some critics and admirers have given it too much attention." Methodologically, Smith is less than persuasive in his attempts to demonstrate cause-and-effect relationships between faith and policy. But readers need not share his perspective or conclusions in order to thank him for the wealth of source material and historical detail he has amassed on a fascinating and important topic. Recommended for all libraries.-Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Lincoln on Democracy or My Way or the Highway

2009-12-01T14:06:00.000-08:00

Lincoln on Democracy

Author: Mario Cuomo

Back in print after ten years, this unique book brings together 141 speeches, speech excerpts, letters, fragments, and other writings by Lincoln on the theme of democracy. Selected by leading historians, the writings include such standards as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, but also such little-seen writings as a letter assuring a general that the President felt safe-drafted just three days before Lincoln's assassination. In this richly annotated anthology, the writings are grouped thematically into seven sections that cover politics, slavery, the union, democracy, liberty, the nation divided, and the American Dream. The introductions are by well-known historians: Gabor Borritt, William E. Gienapp, Charles B. Strozier, Richard Nelson Current, James M. McPherson, Mark E. Neely, Jr., and Hans L. Trefousse. In addition, each section's title page displays a photograph of Lincoln from the time period covered in that section, with a paragraph describing the source and the occasion for which the photograph was made.

	Preface to the Fordham University Press edition
	Preface
	Introduction
	"Not much of me" : Lincoln's "autobiography," age 50, December 20, 1859
I	"The people's business" : Lincoln and the American dream, 1832-1852
	Introduction	3
	No wealthy ... relations to recommend me	9
	I shall be governed by their will	11
	The people know their rights	12
	Injustice and bad policy	13
	The political religion of the nation	15
	The wealthy can not justly complain	24
	Many free countries have lost their liberty	25
	'God tempers the wind'	26
	The sorrow quenching draughts of perfect liberty	28
	By the fruit the tree is to be known	30
	Useless labour is ... the same as idleness	32
	The right to rise up	34
	No one man should hold the power	36
	There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good	38
	Leaving the people's business in their hands	40
	Go to work, 'tooth and nails'	41
	Valuable to his adopted country	43
	Resolve to be honest	44
	The presidency ... is no bed of roses	46
	Principles held dear	49
	A deep devotion to the cause of human liberty	51
II	"All we have ever held sacred" : Lincoln and slavery, 1854-1857
	Introduction	55
	We proposed to give all a chance	62
	'To do for the people what needs to be done'	63
	Our Republican robe is soiled	65
	No peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect	78
	I am not a know-nothing	80
	This great principle of equality	84
	Free society is not ... a failure	86
	A standard maxim for free society	88
	Not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots	92
III	"Another explosion will come" : Lincoln and the house divided, 1858
	Introduction	97
	Government cannot endure ... half slave and half free	105
	The electric cord in that declaration	114
	Fight this battle upon principle	118
	This expresses my idea of democracy	121
	Return to the fountain	121
	I claim no ... exemption from personal ambition	123
	The moral lights around us	125
	Our reliance is in the love of liberty	127
	Never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife	128
	Give to him that is needy	130
	'He trembled for his country'	132
	The eternal struggle	134
	The fight must go on	136
IV	"Right makes might" : Lincoln and the race for president, 1859-1960
	Introduction	141
	Sole hope of the future	148
	He who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave	154
	Aim at the elevation of men	156
	The moral lights around us	157
	Equality ... beats inequality	159
	Free labor ... gives hope to all	160
	Let us stand by our duty	164
	The laborer can strike if he wants to	175
	Allow the humblest man an equal chance	176
	I accept the nomination	177
	Work, work, work is the main thing	178
	I rejoice with you in the success	179
	The tug has to come	180
V	"Hour of trial" : Lincoln and union, 1861
	Introduction	183
	The principle that clears the path for all	188
	If we surrender, it is the end of us	189
	With a task before me	190
	Liberty, for yourselves, and not for me	191
	There is but little harm I can do	192
	Give the greatest good to the greatest number	193
	The majority shall rule	194
	The ship can be saved, with the cargo	195
	In accordance with the original idea	196
	I would rather be assassinated	198
	Plain as a turnpike road	199
	The momentous issue of Civil War	201
	I hope we have a government and a president	210
	The perpetuity of popular government	211
	We can not permanently prevent their action	213
	Suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus	214
	The central idea pervading this struggle	215
	A Polish gentleman ... highly recommended	216
	This is ... a people's contest	217
	Allow no man to be shot	226
	I cannot assume this reckless position	227
	Wanting to work is so rare	229
	The capacity of man for self-government	230
	The struggle of today ... for a vast future also	231
VI	"Forever free" : Lincoln and liberty, 1862-1863
	Introduction
	The principle of the equal rights of men	243
	Gradual ... emancipation, is better for all	244
	Government was saved from overthrow	246
	Our common country is in great peril	247
	A fit and necessary military measure	249
	Your race are suffering	251
	My paramount object in this struggle	253
	God wills this contest	254
	The time has come now	255
	Thenceforward, and forever free	257
	To suppress the insurrection	260
	Breath alone kills no rebels	262
	A fiery trial	263
	We cannot escape history	264
	The promise must now be kept	269
	Sincerely believed to be ... an act of justice	270
	An instance of sublime Christian heroism	273
	I will risk the dictatorship	275
	Resist ... such recognition	276
	Public safety does require the suspension	277
	The decision is to be made	282
	How long ago is it? - eighty odd years	283
	My 'public-opinion baths'	284
	Those who shall have tasted actual freedom ... can never be slaves	285
	Better prepared for the new	286
	You say you will not fight to free Negroes	288
	The boundless field of absolutism?	292
	Has the manhood of our race run out?	293
	I do not intend to be a tyrant	296
VII	"For us the living" : Lincoln and democracy, 1863-1865
	Introduction	301
	New birth of freedom	307
	You will not find that to be an obstacle	308
	The new reckoning	309
	I have never interfered ... in any church	311
	Common looking people are the best in the world	312
	Universal amnesty ... with universal suffrage	313
	Keep the jewel of liberty	314
	Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another	315
	Never knew a man who wished to be ... a slave	316
	If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong	316
	The limb must be sacrificed	319
	A good definition of the word liberty	320
	So that they can have the benefit	321
	May I have to answer for robbing no man	323
	A fitting, and necessary conclusion	324
	The people's business	325
	I should deserve to be damned	325
	Kindly paying attention	327
	Any one of your children may look to come here	328
	My duty to co-operate	329
	The purposes of the almighty are perfect	330
	Struggling to maintain government, not to overthrow it	331
	Discharge him at once	332
	The election was a necessity	333
	Not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven	335
	The voice of the people	336
	Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist	338
	A king's cure for all the evils	339
	With malice toward none	340
	I have always thought that all men should be free	343
	A righteous and speedy peace	344
	A union of hearts and hands	349
	Afterword : the Abraham Lincoln association	351
	Lincoln, the nation, and the world : a chronology, 1809-1865	355

Go to: New Deal or Raw Deal or Emily Posts the Etiquette Advantage in Business

My Way or the Highway: The Micromanagement Survival Guide

Author: Harry E Chambers

Most people think that micromanagement occurs only in management-employee relationships, but the truth is that it happens everywhere: employees micromanage managers, customers micromanaging vendors, board members micromanaging company leaders, parents micromanage children, governments micromanage citizens, peers micromanage one another, and more. With shoot-from-the-hip style and plenty of real-world examples, My Way or the Highway illustrates how micromanagement interferes with performance and productivity, resulting in huge costs - hidden, direct, and indirect - to individuals and organizations. In highly practical terms, management expert Harry Chambers explains the art of dealing with micromanagers at a personal level and how to introduce the more system-wide changes needed for productive environments. Readers learn valuable strategies for lessening the impact of micromanagers, as well as how to identify and correct their own managerial behaviors.

First in His Class or On Religious Liberty

2009-11-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton

Author: David Maraniss

Who exactly is Bill Clinton, and why was he, of all the brilliant and ambitious men in his generation, the first in his class to reach the White House? Drawing on hundreds of letters, documents, and interviews, David Maraniss explores the evolution of the personality of our forty-second president from his youth in Arkansas to his 1991 announcement that he would run for the nation's highest office. In this richly textured and balanced biography, Maraniss reveals a complex man full of great flaws and great talents. First in His Class is the definitive book on Bill Clinton.

Publishers Weekly

In this incisive, richly textured, fair-minded biography of Bill Clinton, which ends on the night he announced his presidential candidacy, Washington Post reporter Maraniss limns a quintessential politician, "sincere and deceptive at the same time.'' Drawing on interviews with nearly 400 people, including Clinton's closest friends, colleagues and relatives, Maraniss taps two sides of Clinton-one intelligent, empathetic, indefatigable, another petulant, tantrum-prone, indecisive, misleading, too eager to please-and declares that these components of the man are inseparable. There are revealing glimpses of Clinton the semi-bohemian Oxford antiwar activist; the casual, disorganized University of Arkansas law professor; and the Arkansas governor soliciting large contributions from corporate leaders for the public relations arm of his permanent political campaign. Maraniss, whose articles on Clinton's presidential candidacy won a Pulitzer Prize, also illuminates Clinton's pragmatic partnership with Hillary Rodham and their dependence on each other during their long haul from Arkansas to the White House.

Library Journal

Clinton books have been as ubiquitous as photos of the president in jogging shorts and ill-fitting suits. Maraniss's biography similarly suffers more from overexposure than content. Most of the book examines Clinton's educational roots-from high school, where he graduated fourth, not first, in his class through Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale universities. Washington Post reporter Maraniss is at his best portraying Clinton as a product of the 1960s, when his life experiences and views were tempered by liberalism. He was tormented, as were so many of his peers, by the possibility of being drafted to serve in Vietnam; his actions were buffeted by wanting to avoid service without becoming involved in protests that could haunt his political career. This sympathetic portrait concludes with Clinton's decision to seek the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Maraniss's book complements John Brummett's Highwire (LJ 9/15/94), which also sees Clinton as a product of either his educational or geographical roots. The large number of existing Clinton titles and his declining popularity may make this book a tough sell. For public libraries.
-- Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Township Library, King of Prussia, PA

Library Journal

What People Are Saying

Robert A. Caro
David Maraniss has written a compelling, vivid portrait of a very complex man. First in His Class is, moreover, a work of great integrity, notable for the scrupulousness of its documentations, which shines forth from every page.
— Robert A. Caro, author of Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Interesting textbook: Getting Things Done or We Bought a Zoo
On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams

Author: Roger Williams
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. He conducted a lifelong debate over religious freedom with distinguished figures of the seventeenth century, including Puritan minister John Cotton, Massachusetts governor John Endicott, and the English Parliament.
James Calvin Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. For Williams, the enforcement of religious uniformity violated the basic values of Calvinist Christianity and presumed upon God's authority to speak to the individual conscience. He argued that state coercion was rarely effective, often causing more harm to the church and strife to the social order than did religious pluralism.
This is the first collection of Williams's writings in forty years reaching beyond his major work, The Bloody Tenent, to include other selections from his public and private writings. This carefully annotated book introduces Williams to a new generation of readers.

Violent Politics or The CEO of the Sofa

2009-11-29T03:41:00.000-08:00

Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq

Author: William R Polk
In the current Middle East, insurgency tactics are used with frequency and increasing success. But guerrilla war-fare is not just the tool of modern-day terrorists. Its roots stretch back to our very own revolution.

In Violent Politics, William Polk takes us on a concise, brilliant tour of insurgencies throughout history, starting with the American struggle for independence, when fighters had to battle against both the British and the loyalists, those colonists who sided with the monarchy. Instinctively, in a way they probably wouldn't have described as a coherent strategy, the rebel groups employed the tactics of insurgency.

From there, Polk explores the role of insurgency in several other notable conflicts, including the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, the Irish struggle for independence, the Algerian War of National Independence, and Vietnam. He eventually lands at the present day, where the lessons of this history are needed more than ever as Americans engage in ongoing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq—and beyond.

Kirkus Reviews
A captivating but disquieting examination of how insurgencies begin, grow, persist and either succeed or fail. Former State Department advisor Polk (The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution, 2006, etc.) accompanies a dozen accounts of national uprisings with eye-opening and remarkably similar explanations of their history. Initially, insurgents are too few for organized resistance so they fight as terrorists-American colonists' opposition to British taxation in the 1770s qualifies. When the dominant government tries to suppress terrorism, it inevitably disrupts lives and kills innocent bystanders, thereby producing recruits seeking vengeance. Vicious Nazi reprisals, executing hundreds of civilians to avenge a single German soldier, only fed resistance in Yugoslavia, Russia and Greece. Despite a policy of not harming civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, America's immense firepower has accomplished the same thing. To succeed, a growing insurgency must win recognition as the nationalist movement. Ho Chi Minh's forces had achieved this by 1945, Polk concludes, so American intervention was doomed from the start. Insurgents fail if, like the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatists, they don't win over most of their countrymen, and full-blown insurgencies disrupt the administration of the dominant power. By the 1960s, the Viet Cong had murdered so many local officials that South Vietnam's government virtually ceased to function outside Saigon. The American colonies' committees of safety expelled British officials and loyalists and set up their own local governments. After listing insults directed at insurgents (bandits, thugs, terrorists, anarchists, communists,religious fanatics), the author convincingly drives home his point: Nationalism trumps ideology. Marshall Tito in Yugoslavia was communist, but almost all his fighters simply hated Germans. Most Iraqi insurgents are no more religious than the average citizen. Once people see their rulers as foreign or dominated by foreigners, an insurgency that has achieved national acceptance is essentially unbeatable. Readers hoping America can win hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan will find no encouragement here. A lucid, absorbing analysis of the theory and reality underpinning three centuries of insurgent movements.

Go to: Fireside Politics or Perspectives on Organizational Communication
The CEO of the Sofa

Author: P J ORourk
New York Times bestselling author P.J. O'Rourke has toured the fighting in Bosnia, visited the West Bank disguised as P.J. of Arabia, lobbed one-liners on the battlefields of the Gulf War, and traded quips with Communist rebels in the jungles of the Philippines. Now in The CEO of the Sofa, he embarks on a mission to the most frightening place of all - his own home. Ensconced on the domestic boardroom's throne (although not supposed to put his feet on the cushions), he faces a three-year-old who wants a cell phone, a freelance career devoted to writing articles like "Chewing-Mouth Dogs Bring Hope to People with Eating Disorders," and neighbors who smell like Democrats ("That is, using smell as a transitive verb. When I light a cigar they wave their hands in front of their faces and pretend to cough."). Undaunted - with the help of martinis - by middle age, P.J. holds forth on everything from getting toddlers to sleep ("Advice to parents whose kids love the story of the dinosaurs: Don't give away the surprise ending") to why Hillary Clinton's election victory was a good thing ("We Republicans were almost out of people to hate in the Senate. Teddy Kennedy is just too old and fat to pick on").

And P.J. leaps (well, groans and pushes himself up) from the couch to pursue assignments such as a high-speed drive across the ugliest part of India at the hottest time of the year, a blind (drunk) wine tasting with Christopher Buckley, and a sojourn at the U.N. Millennial Summit, where he runs the risk of perishing from boredom and puts readers in peril of laughing themselves to death.
Publishers Weekly
Not content to rest on his laurels, the bestselling humorist O'Rourke (All the Trouble in the World, etc.) instead settles back on his caustic couch to offer a wide-angled worldview from his own living room, his salon of sarcasm. He introduces readers to his assistant, friends, family and smart-aleck babysitter, as he reflects on such topics as cell phones ("People are willing to interrupt anything, including hiding under the bed, to answer a cell phone"), Christmas catalogues, Instant Messaging, MP3s, Nasdaq, toddlers, TV and how the "Gettysburg Address" would have turned out if written on an iMac. On a serious note, he praises the "philosophical legerdemain" of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He also reviews the "profound cogitations" of Hillary Clinton's 1995 It Takes a Village ("Some kinds of stupidity cannot be faked"), compares Vegas's Venetian resort to the real Venice ("Will video poker ever inspire a novella by Thomas Mann?") and contemplates the results of bias-free language ("What a piece of work is person!"). For "senior-management types," one hilarious chapter explains youth culture and current celebs, including Moby, Eminem, Carson Daly, Hilary Swank and Beck: "Beck dropped out of school after junior high so we can't blame the dot-com mess on him personally." Though his vitriolic wit is couched in humor that elicits the gamut from giggles to guffaws, O'Rourke never cushions its impact. The comedic crescendo is his centerpiece, a summary of mankind's achievements at millennium's end. This insightful (yet also funny) essay alone is worth the price of admission. (Sept.) Forecast: The 150,000 first printing is backed up with an appealing cover photo, a $150,000promotional budget, a national ad campaign, an 18-city author tour plus online promotion. O'Rourke will undoubtedly find himself on the bestseller list again. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In The CEO of the Sofa, O'Rourke shows that while he may be having trouble remembering the story of his life, he certainly hasn't lost one iota of his wit. He uses this book to point out, with heaps of sarcasm, the horrors of the cell phone, the UN, MP3 files, and childbirth. When his alterego, the political nut, takes over, you know which way the chad will fall as he discusses the absurdities of recent political history. O'Rourke has a gift for taking a mundane assignment and turning it into the funniest story you've ever heard and he does this nonstop. His tale on traveling through India is worth the price of the program. And who else would think of doing an essay on blind-drunk wine tasting? The author's humor works on both sides of the political aisle, and to make it even better, Dick Hill's performance is perfect. Highly recommended for all libraries we can all use a laugh these days. Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
O'Rourke (Eat the Rich, 1998, etc.), sharpest of the right-wing comic writers-not a populous gang, to be sure-this time stays at home to deliver his caustic, frequently malevolent commentary. The stock characters who help the this domestic Republican Dagwood launch miscellaneous brickbats at "dupes," "bakeheads," "nooky-moochers," "hair farmers," "bird-brains," and a "hay-breath" include a clever spouse, assistant Max, a couple of offspring, and a teenage neighbor. There are a dozen chapters with monthly headings, though there's little relation to monthly events, in which O'Rourke unloads on disparate topics. Of course, there's the UN, Social Security, and Third Way Economics (with help from the Cato Institute). There's much ad hominem about the Clintons. (He alludes to the distaff Clinton as "that she-ape from New York State.") There are digressions regarding drugs, booze, art, and business management as well as connubial and parental matters. For no special reason, there is also a long, patently recycled piece about India. Venice as presented in Las Vegas is preferred to the Italian original. He proposes a campaign for a politically correct cause ("Slogan: 'Alzheimer's-Fergedaboutdit!' ") and waxes kind of enthusiastic about cigars (though a beat behind the craze). Throughout, O'Rourke is as self-assured as any New York mayor, grandly dissing any ideology insufficiently libertarian. Sometimes it's quite funny and sometimes, like the wine-tasting parody, it has no nose, no legs-it's simply jejune. One natural target for any other professional political japester, George W. Bush, is never approached-but no surprise there. By the final entry, for August 2001, the rant is no more thanbile. Conservatively speaking, O'Rourke's current patchwork is not up to his previous entries. But as Dave Barry's goofy, evil twin, he's still funnier than Pat Buchanan or Arianna Huffington. First printing of 150,000; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments XIII
Chapter I September 2000 1
Oliver Wendell Holmes has been agreeing with the CEO's opinions for nearly one hundred and fifty years
The CEO's wife does so less frequently
The CEO speaks on the subject of mobile phones in the manner of a 1959 curmudgeon inveighing against transistor radios
Imagine if cheap devices to broadcast noise for idiots had allowed idiots to broadcast noise in return
The UN is visited--a nice enough place until it was discovered by foreigners
Chapter II October 2000 24
The CEO considers stock market investments and decides that risk may be involved
His wife suggests getting a job but wonders if anything is available in the field of monkey business
The CEO considers employment and decides that work may be involved
He conceives a brilliant idea for making his fortune by thinking like a toddler but cannot find a play group with a wet bar
Chapter III November 2000 44
The candidates for the 2000 presidential election are given a thorough examination although the mainstream media are allowed to do the part involving a check for prostate enlargement
The mainstream media encounter themselves up there
Hillary Clinton is praised for her abilities as a GOP fund-raiser
The Political Nut, who often shows up in the CEO's household during the cocktail hour, thinks eBay could make political corruption more market-oriented
Chapter IV December 2000 62
The CEO argues that Las Vegas is superior to Venice as a vacation destination--having found himself in better shape after being pulled over in traffic by the Nevada Highway Patrol than he was after being pulled out of a canal by the Italian carabinieri
Christmas gifts are chosen
The CEO carefully inspects the catalog from Blunderwear--lingerie that would be a mistake for anyone other than the catalog models
Hillary Clinton is embraced again--not, thank goodness, in her lingerie
The CEO attempts to bring modern ideas of caring and compassion to great works of literature but discovers that banning the death penalty ruins many masterpieces
At the end of A Tale of Two Cities, Sidney Carton has to explain to his parole officer that he's become a better person
Chapter V January 2001 77
Decadence is pondered and found to be a rotten old idea
The CEO begins an essay on how to get properly inebriated but realizes he has important research to do
He embarks, with his friend Chris Buckley, on a blind (drunk) wine tasting, the results of which have to be carried home flat on their backs in an SUV
The Political Nut beats a dead horse but Bill Clinton keeps whinnying
The impeachment is fondly remembered, and plans are made for a Bill Clinton/Ken Starr reunion tour
The CEO meditates upon hypocrisy and decides that you can't fake it
Chapter VI February 2001 108
The CEO is perplexed by the quantitative nature of modern celebrity and wonders how many times Thomas De Quincey would have to be arrested for opium eating to become as famous as Robert Downey, Jr.
The CEO is--thanks to the miracle of modern car alarms--able to teach his teenage godson how to parallel park by sonar
The CEO lectures his young assistant on the virtues of the automobile: Consider having a hot date and needing to borrow your father's feet
Chapter VII March 2001 136
The CEO intends to write his memoirs but forgets
He helps with his godson's homework instead, asking, "What's all this argle-bargle about the loss of certainty in modern mathematics? I was never able to get anything to add up the same way twice."
The CEO explains the concept of "spring break" to his godson who hears the lyrics of "Where the Boys Are" with disbelief and disputes the idea that Connie Francis and George Hamilton were ever teenagers
Chapter VIII April 2001 159
The Democrats next door are vanquished by the CEO's logic and are forced to resort to low political tactics such as not letting the CEO borrow their string trimmer
As an Oprah guest, Hitler is suggested: a larger-than-life personality who wrote a popular book about his struggle with personal issues
The CEO argues against legalizing drugs, now that the statute of limitation has expired on his behavior in the 1960s
Then the CEO argues in favor of legalizing drugs, if the federal government promises not to tell his wife
Chapter IX May 2001 178
A new baby-sitter arrives on the scene causing romantic disturbance--for those in love with Keynesian economic assumptions
The CEO reveals his secret for avoiding stardom as a television commentator
The CEO holds forth on the proponents of Earth Day and declares them "Dirt of the Earth."
Counsel is consulted and a brief is filed on missile defense
The CEO prefers a plea of guilty rather than nolo contendere
The CEO's baby-sitter and young assistant are chastised for swiping tunes with MP3 technology--especially since none of the tunes swiped is "Volare" or "Moon River."
San Francisco passes a law forbidding discrimination against the fat, and the CEO is outraged that the lazy aren't included
Chapter X June 2001 203
A blessed event occurs consisting of the arrival, in plain brown wrapper, of cigars from Cuba
The CEO's wife has a baby, too
The CEO's godson finds there are difficulties in dating a young lady who can do risk-analysis computations
Breast feeding is an excellent method of getting a big baby to sleep, but the CEO is up in the middle of the night anyway
The second anniversary of the air war in Kosovo is celebrated with suitable pomp
The CEO declares the e-mail fad has run its course and buys stock in the Mimeograph corporation
Wives are praised for not killing their husbands, particularly the husband the CEO's wife is married to
Chapter XI July 2001 225
India is traversed and the wild Indians are ... well, let's just say Dancing with Wolves got it all wrong
The CEO proposes that an inexpensive second honeymoon could be had right in the living room if a second bottle of scotch can be procured
The CEO's wife goes in search of the keys to the gun cabinet
Chapter XII August 2001 247
The CEO's godson's sister experiences rather more enlightenment than can stand the light of day
The Political Nut counters with a more sensitive and less judgmental upgrade of the Ten Commandments
Good feelings prevail
The Political Nut decides to apologize for all the horrible things he's said about Democrats--especially the true things
The baby-sitter tutors the CEO's godson in the higher mathematics of: [characters not reproducible]
The CEO's young assistant gets a real job
Hunter S. Thompson is shown, through rigorous textual analysis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to be a heck of a nice guy
The CEO's wife gets the CEO to shut up
A happy ending is had by all

Regions and Powers or Global Oil Market

2009-11-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security

Author: Barry Buzan
Asserting that regional patterns of security are increasingly important in international politics, this study presents a detailed account of relations between global powers. It emphasizes their relationship with the regional security complexes which make up the contemporary international system. The book analyzes Africa, the Balkans, Eastern and Western Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, North America and South Asia, tracing the history of each region through the present.

Go to: The Home Science Cook Book or Amanda Rorys Favorite Recipes
Global Oil Market: Risks and Uncertainties

Author: Anthony H Cordesman
The future of energy is of enormous strategic importance, and the current energy market faces major uncertainties and risks. The goal of this study is to provide a risk assessment of the global oil market. Cordesman and Al-Rodhan study six major oil-producing regions of the world: the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, North America, and South and Central America. In each case, the authors outline national oil developments and focus on four major areas of risks and uncertainties: macroeconomic fluctuations, geopolitical risks, oil production uncertainties, and the nature of resources.
In addition to these uncertainties, the authors study the effect of robust energy modeling by agencies such as the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Agency. They argue that rigorous, transparent, and credible analysis can improve understanding of the global energy markets and help provide policymakers with the tools needed to forge sound and realistic energy policies.
The Global Oil Market is the first study of its kind to look at the totality of production, resource, and geopolitical risks faced by the world's oil-producing regions. In addition, Cordesman and Al-Rodhan look toward the future and how to best manage these uncertainties and risks.

American Media Politics in Transition or Generalist Social Work Practice

2009-11-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

American Media Politics in Transition

Author: Jeremy D Mayer
Part of the McGraw-Hill Critical Topics in American Government series, American Media Politics in Transition blends coverage of the historical evolution of American political journalism with theories about its current practice and the emerging technological changes that have begun to bring media power back to the people. Its flexible, self-contained chapters feature discussion questions, suggestions for further readings, online resources, and a list of key terms and figures - all of which come together to make this an ideal supplement for any introductory American Government course, as well as courses on the media and communications.

Books about: Complete Book of Vegetarian Recipes or Seasoned With Words a Cookbook
Generalist Social Work Practice: An Empowering Approach

Author: Karla Krogsrud Miley
Overview:

The fifth edition of this innovative text continues to emphasize a generalist, empowerment-oriented approach, along with practice strategies and techniques for working toward individual client and social change.

Highlights of the Fifth Edition:

·        The integration of material on practice, human behavior, policy, and research makes this text a unifying piece of any social work curriculum and a good fit for the new CSWE Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards

·        New boxes in each chapter highlight the connection between practice, policy, and research.

·        Sensitizes students to human diversity and ways to increase cultural competence in practice.

·        The comprehensive instructor's manual and test bank, written by the authors, completely outlines the book and offers activities, exercises, and handouts for each chapter.

What Reviewers Are Saying:

“The major strengths of this text include the following: (1) a generalist framework that reflects the multi-faceted nature of contemporary social work practice; (2) an empowerment-orientedapproach that views clients as partners in the helping process; (3) a readable style that is accessible to a broad audience; (4) fundamental concepts that are applicable to a wide range of social work practice environments.”

--Andrew Scharlach, University of California–Berkeley

“Overall, I consider this to be an excellent text. The best one I have yet found for use in teaching generalist practice concepts, process, and methods….”

--Cynthia Bishop, Meredith College

[ ]

Booknews

Focusing on collaboration, a textbook discusses empowering processes that generalist social workers use with clients at the micro-, mid- and macrolevels of practice. Topics include the strengths perspective, cultural sensitivity, the process of creating alliances, ways to identify client system strengths and environmental resources, and methods for implementing and stabilizing change efforts. The authors maintain that an empowerment-based approach can enhance human functioning and promote social justice. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

1	Generalist social work practice	3
2	The ecosystems perspective	24
3	Values and multicultural competence	53
4	Strengths and empowerment	79
5	An empowering approach to generalist practice	103
6	Forming partnerships	129
7	Articulating situations	158
8	Defining directions	189
9	Identifying strengths	219
10	Assessing resource capabilities	248
11	Framing solutions	288
12	Activating resources	319
13	Creating alliances	351
14	Expanding opportunities	384
15	Recognizing success	409
16	Integrating gains	436
App	NASW code of ethics	465

My Rise and Fall or Armed America

2009-11-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

My Rise and Fall

Author: Benito Mussolini

Here for the first time in one volume, are two rare autobiographical works by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), founder of Fascism and Italian dictator for 21 years. The first volume (published in English in 1928 as My Autobiography) describes in the Duce's own inimitable voice his youth, years as an agitator and journalist, experiences in World War I (including his severe wounding), the formation and revolutionary struggles of the Fascist Party, the March on Rome, and his early years in power. The second volume (published in English in 1948 as The Fall of Mussolini) was written during the brief period between his rescue by the Germans in September 1943 and his execution by Italian partisans in April 1945. The Duce retreats to the safe (but psychologically revealing) distance of the third person in describing his last year in power and the coup d'etat that deposed him. My Rise and Fall allows readers to view the dictator from two unique vantage points: Il Duce, eyes on the horizon, chin thrust forward, as he nears his political zenith; and Mussolini at his nadir, a desperate, powerless, sawdust Caesar, soon to be shot and hanged, head down, for all to scorn.

NY Times Book Review

[A work] of extraordinary interest and importance.

NY Times Book Review

[A work] of extraordinary interest and importance.

New interesting book: Gods Long Summer or Financial Institutions Markets and Money 10e

Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie

Author: Clayton E Cramer

In this true story of our nation's love affair with firearms, Clayton E. Cramer debunks the myths and takes readers along a winding historical trail full of surprising revelations and riveting anecdotes, explaining the roots of America's gun culture.

Publishers Weekly

Cramer, an adjunct lecturer in history at Boise State University and George Fox University, took on Michael Bellesiles even before his book Arming America was discredited, and now goes further to prove wrong Bellesiles's claim that guns were uncommon in early America. Cramer finds that guns "were the norm" in that period, people relied on guns to hunt, and gun ownership was key to the success of colonial militias. His most intriguing argument is that, as they became "tied to defending political rights," guns also became a symbol of citizenship. Cramer draws on many primary sources, from newspaper accounts to probate records, and compiles impressive data supporting his case. Still, he misses many opportunities for analysis and interpretation. For example, he finds that it was "not terribly unusual" for free women to own guns, but offers no nuanced discussion of what said gun ownership tells us about gender roles. His attack on academia-which, in Cramer's view, has been blinded by ideology and excludes political conservatives-distracts from his central theme and will only alienate pro-gun-control readers, leaving him with an equally narrow, if opposite, readership. (Feb. 6) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

This House Has Fallen or When States Fail

2009-02-21T20:31:00.000-08:00

This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis

Author: Karl Maier

To understand Africa, you have to understand Nigeria, and few Americans understand Nigeria better than Karl Maier. In the tradition of Philip Gourevitch's bestselling We Regret to Inform You... and Redmond O'Hanlon's No Mercy, This House Has Fallen is a bracing, disturbing, evocative report on the state of Africa's most populous, potentially richest, and most dangerously dysfunctional nation.

Each year, with depressing consistency, Nigeria is declared the most corrupt state in the entire world. A nation into which billions of dollars of oil money flow, Nigeria's per capita income has dramatically fallen in the past two decades. All of the money has been stolen by elites. Also stolen has been democracy. Nigeria's leaders tend to elect themselves, often with the help of a gun. Military coup follows military coup. A rare democratic election is often merely a prelude to the next seizure of power by a general who wants greater access to the state's rapidly depleted vaults. A country of rising ethnic tensions and falling standards of living, Nigeria is a bellwether for Africa. And yet some think it is on the verge of utter collapse, a collapse that could overshadow even the massacres in Rwanda.

A brilliant piece of reportage and travel writing, this book looks into the Nigerian abyss and comes away with insight, profound conclusions, and even some hope.

Africa Confidential - Patrick Smith

Maier deftly combines history, journalism, and a novelist's eye for detail to tell the Nigerian story, but most of all he lets the country's diverse and energetic voices speak for themselves.

Financial Times - Michael Holman

If you care about Africa, if you are fearful for its future, baffled by its complexity, astonished by its resilience, read This House Has Fallen by Karl Maier. Few reporters can match the author's capacity to get to the heart of a nation and assess the hopes and fears of its people.

Booklist

Maier (author of the internationally well-received Into the House of the Ancestors, 1998) explores the promise and paradox of Nigeria, a nation of fractious ethnic groups, legendary corruption, and bountiful resources, overseen by dictators for all but 0 years since its independence in 1960….This is a revealing look at a complex and troubled nation.

Publishers Weekly

Maier puts a human face on a disheartening situation that seems remote and impersonal to most Americans.

The Economist - Richard Dowden

To most of us Nigeria is a mysterious country, hot, scary, and a long way off. Coolly, clearly, Maier tells its extraordinary story; sometimes horrifying, often hilarious, never boring. If it offers little hope for Nigeria, this book inspires admiration for the resilience, resourcefulness, and humanity of Nigerians. The best book on contemporary Africa for years.

Booknews

It has become a clich<'e> that Nigeria is the most corrupt nation in Africa, even in the world <-->a nation receiving billions of petrodollars while 90 percent of the populace slogs through poverty thick as oil; a country so shot through by repeated military coups and political corruption it faces collapse. Maier, a reporter with a respectable list of books and journal articles behind him, introduces readers to Nigeria's military leaders, its soldiers for democracy, and its peoples<-->the Igbos, Yorubas, Hausas, Fulanis, Tivs, and Ijaws. Through them, conflicts are investigated: that between Big Oil and the Ijaw and the Ogoni (recall the story of Ken Saro- Wiwa), between Christians and Muslims in Northern Nigeria over the move to impose Islamic law, and Yoruban youth in Lagos demanding a separate Yoruban state. Geared toward a generally educated, rather than an academic audience. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Financial Times - Michael Holman

If you care about Africa, if you are fearful for its future, baffled by its complexity, astonished by its resilience, read This House Has Fallen by Karl Maier . . . Few reporters can match the author's capacity to get to the heart of a nation and assess the hopes and fears of its people.

Mother Jones

With a firm grasp of Nigeria's embattled past -- military coups, secessionist uprisings, clashes in the oil-rich Niger River Delta -- Maier examines the nation's cracked foundation and broken pillars.

The Economist - Richard Dowden

To most of us Nigeria is a mysterious country, hot, scary and a long way off. Cooly, clearly, Maier tells its extraordinary story; sometimes horrifying, often hilarious, never boring. If it offers little hope for Nigeria, this book inspires admiration for the resilience, resourcefulness and humanity of Nigerians. The best book on contemporary Africa for years.

Business Week

. . . THIS HOUSE HAS FALLEN is the absorbing, heartbreaking story of Nigeria from its creation in 1960 through forty years of failure and disappointment to a time of renewal--apparent renewal, we had better say. Maier's firm grip on history and keen journalistic eye produce an analysis that is grimly realistic. [He] captures the sorrows and laughter of a nation that is desperate and resilient all at once.

Kirkus Reviews

Vivid scenes from a potential meltdown, as veteran Africa reporter Maier (Into the House of the Ancestors, 1997) gives the history of Nigeria and suggests that regional tensions and pervasive corruption threaten its survival. Like many journalists, Maier is at his best when reporting on events or interviewing newsmakers and ordinary citizens. He is less successful at making those incisive connections that transform reportage into history. Nigeria, which he describes as "perhaps the largest failed state in the Third World," was only formed in 1914, when the British united the tribes of the Niger delta with those of the north and central region. These tribes had, and continue to have, little in common: the northerners are mostly Muslim and (because they dominate the military) have led most of the post-independence governments that seized power unconstitutionally. Delta tribes like the Ogoni were once enriched by trade—first in slaves and then in palm oil—but they have lately failed to benefit from the oil discovered in the region. The central tribes, mostly Christian, resent the role of the northerners in the coups that have roiled Nigeria, and their efforts to establish Muslim law—the Sharia. Maier visits each region and talks with its leaders and community activists. He meets General Babangida (whose decision to annul elections in 1993 provoked a national crisis) and the family of noted writer and Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (who was executed in 1995 despite an international outcry). He notes that although Nigeria has earned $280 billion from its oil, at least half the population is poor and lacks access to clean water. Literacy is below that of the DemocraticRepublic ofCongo, and a wealthy ten percent enrich themselves at the expense of the rest. The current ruler, former General Obasanjo, was democratically elected in 1999, and Maier believes (although he is unable to convey much conviction after this depressing litany) that he represents Nigeria's last chance to avoid falling apart. A quick and lively study that doesn't dig too deep.

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When States Fail: Causes and Consequences

Author: Robert I Rotberg

Since 1990, more than 10 million people have been killed in the civil wars of failed states, and hundreds of millions more have been deprived of fundamental rights. The threat of terrorism has only heightened the problem posed by failed states. When States Fail is the first book to examine how and why states decay and what, if anything, can be done to prevent them from collapsing. It defines and categorizes strong, weak, failing, and collapsed nation-states according to political, social, and economic criteria. And it offers a comprehensive recipe for their reconstruction.

The book comprises fourteen essays by leading scholars and practitioners who help structure this disparate field of research, provide useful empirical descriptions, and offer policy recommendations. Robert Rotberg's substantial opening chapter sets out a theory and taxonomy of state failure. It is followed by two sets of chapters, the first on the nature and correlates of failure, the second on methods of preventing state failure and reconstructing those states that do fail. Economic jump-starting, legal refurbishing, elections, the demobilizing of ex-combatants, and civil society are among the many topics discussed.

All of the essays are previously unpublished. In addition to Rotberg, the contributors include David Carment, Christopher Clapham, Nat J. Colletta, Jeffrey Herbst, Nelson Kasfir, Michael T. Klare, Markus Kostner, Terrence Lyons, Jens Meierhenrich, Daniel N. Posner, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Donald R. Snodgrass, Nicolas van de Walle, Jennifer A. Widner, and Ingo Wiederhofer.

Foreign Affairs

The failure of nation-states is nothing new. But in the age of global terrorism, the consequences of state failure for the international order are potentially much more damaging than ever before. This volume brings together experts to explore the problem of weak states in the developing world and to offer ideas about how to strengthen rights and rule. It is most useful in providing a framework for diagnosing the ailments that afflict states in various stages of decay in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: weak states fail to provide key public goods such as security, law, property rights, banks, schools, and hospitals; failed states (Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire, the Taliban's Afghanistan) are characterized by chronic violence, corruption, deteriorating infrastructure, and predatory ruling regimes; and in collapsed states (Lebanon in the 1970s, Somalia in the 1980s, Nigeria and Sierra Leone in the 1990s), rule by the gun wipes away any pretense of public authority.

The authors identify many causes of state failure, but almost all cases are associated with civil violence and the rise of warring nonstate groups flush with revenue from minerals or narcotics. The international community can often help resuscitate failed states by sponsoring elections and committing to long-term security protection. But several contributors warn that, in the worst instances, major powers and the United Nations must be willing to "decertify" failed states while parties disarm and the country is put back together.

	List of Maps
	Preface
1	The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention, and Repair	1
Pt. 1	The Causes and Prevention of Failure	51
2	Domestic Anarchy, Security Dilemmas, and Violent Predation: Causes of Failure	53
3	The Global-Local Politics of State Decay	77
4	The Economic Correlates of State Failure: Taxes, Foreign Aid, and Policies	94
5	The Deadly Connection: Paramilitary Bands, Small Arms Diffusion, and State Failure	116
6	Prevention State Failure	135
Pt. 2	Post-Failure Resuscitation of Nation-States	151
7	Forming States after Failure	153
8	Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration: Lessons and Liabilities in Reconstruction	170
9	Establishing the Rule of Law	182
10	Building Effective Trust in the Aftermath of Severe Conflict	222
11	Civil Society and the Reconstruction of Failed States	237
12	Restoring Economic Functioning in Failed States	256
13	Transforming the Institutions of War: Postconflict Elections and the Reconstruction of Failed States	269
14	Let Them Fail: State Failure in Theory and Practice: Implications for Policy	302
	Contributors	319
	Index	323

Fear of Small Numbers or The Way Home

2009-02-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger

Author: Arjun Appadurai

The period since 1989 has been marked by the global endorsement of open markets, the free flow of finance capital and liberal ideas of constitutional rule, and the active expansion of human rights. Why, then, in this era of intense globalization, has there been a proliferation of violence, of ethnic cleansing on the one hand and extreme forms of political violence against civilian populations on the other?

Fear of Small Numbers is Arjun Appadurai’s answer to that question. A leading theorist of globalization, Appadurai turns his attention to the complex dynamics fueling large-scale, culturally motivated violence, from the genocides that racked Eastern Europe, Rwanda, and India in the early 1990s to the contemporary “war on terror.” Providing a conceptually innovative framework for understanding sources of global violence, he describes how the nation-state has grown ambivalent about minorities at the same time that minorities, because of global communication technologies and migration flows, increasingly see themselves as parts of powerful global majorities. By exacerbating the inequalities produced by globalization, the volatile, slippery relationship between majorities and minorities foments the desire to eradicate cultural difference.

Appadurai analyzes the darker side of globalization: suicide bombings; anti-Americanism; the surplus of rage manifest in televised beheadings; the clash of global ideologies; and the difficulties that flexible, cellular organizations such as Al-Qaeda present to centralized, “vertebrate” structures such as national governments. Powerful, provocative, and timely, Fear of Small Numbers is a thoughtful invitation to rethink what violence is in an age of globalization.

What People Are Saying

Charles Taylor
"Arjun Appadurai is already known as the author of striking new formulations which have greatly illuminated contemporary global developments, notably in Modernity at Large. In this new book, he tackles the most burning and perplexing problems of collective violence which beset us today. The book is alive with new and original ideas, essential food for thought not just for scholars, but for all concerned with these issues."
—author of Modern Social Imaginaries

Partha Chatterjee
"In this book, Appadurai follows up Modernity at Large with a look into the seamy side of globalization. Analysing the growing inequalities and endemic violence of the past decade, he still sees signs of hope in less noticed trends of 'globalization from below.' These are important new thoughts from an influential thinker of our times."
—Director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York

Go to: Geekonomics or Murachs Visual Basic 2005

The Way Home: A German Childhood, an American Life

Author: Ernestine Bradley

In this moving and candid memoir we meet Ernestine Bradley, the wife of former senator and presidential hopeful Bill Bradley. She stood out among Senate wives: a German-born lover of languages and a transplant to America, Ernestine had a full-time career in New Jersey as a professor of comparative literature, commuted weekly to Washington, D.C., and ran two households—she was in constant motion.
As the book opens, Ernestine takes us to the small town of Passau, Germany, her childhood home, offering a vivid picture of ordinary German life during the Nazi period and just after World War II. As kids on the loose while the fathers were away at war and the mothers were working, Ernestine and her pals explored the town’s winding alleys and its three rivers, experiencing a sense of adventure and freedom (despite the privations of war) that would be a touchstone throughout her life. Ernestine vividly describes how she came to see opportunity in defeat as she watched the American troops roll through her little town; this was a primal moment that helped her to face everything that was to come. We follow her as she leaves West Germany, lands a glamorous job as an airline stewardess, and arrives in America, where she marries unhappily and divorces before finally meeting the basketball star and future senator. We watch their romance become an inspiring marriage of equals, his steadiness the perfect complement to her passionate, sometimes flaring nature, as their lives are soon crowded with family, the demands of their individual careers, politics, and, finally, Ernestine’s fight with breast cancer.
This is a wonderful, inspiring story from a woman who hastriumphed—both publicly and personally—against great odds. It is also the introduction to an exuberant voice, one that invites us to reflect on all that we have and on how far we may have to travel to find our way home.

Publishers Weekly

"Memories, to me, are like illuminated islands floating in an ocean of darkness," begins Bradley's memoir. Wife of Bill Bradley, the former senator and candidate for the 2000 presidential election, Ernestine Bradley recounts her rocky childhood in Germany during and after WWII and her move to the U.S. as an adult. Bradley's recollections of her childhood and adolescence in Germany provide an insightful portrait of a family in flux during the Nazi regime, but the flow of emotion is often interrupted by unnecessary parenthetical comments and uncertainty (e.g., "This I don't remember, but it makes sense"). Bradley's parents' intense-and at times unconventional-relationship is a focal point of the author's childhood confusion and adolescent resentment, and inspires heartfelt descriptions. Her strength is apparent as she describes her flight from the confines of her family-appropriately enough as an airline flight attendant-and her subsequent challenges as a wife, mother, academic (in the field of comparative literature) and breast cancer survivor. Her descriptions of her later life are short but accurately relay the difficulties she dealt with as a woman balancing a career and a family during the 1960s and '70s. While at times stiff and defensive, Bradley's memoir is a fine portrait of a childhood spent in wartime and an adult's search for true identity. Illus. Agent, Philippa Brophy. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Penelope Power - KLIATT

Ernestine Bradley's autobiography illustrates the value to the US of immigration. Growing up in Germany during WW II gave her a different outlook; her husband says in his autobiography that his wife "was a child of the defeat." Certainly she had a childhood that no native-born American had to experience. However, the thread throughout her book is not the German experience, but the family experience, a universal story. When she writes about mid-century German history she is clear and concise, as befits a professor of literature. When she writes about her own family, the emotional ties to her mother, father and stepfather, she is not so clear. Certainly her relationship with her mother was the most important influence in her life. The war colored her childhood, even if she did not understand the ramifications of the German defeat until she began teaching at Spellman College in Atlanta, in the early 1960s, after the collapse of her first marriage. She then began to appreciate the universal evil of racism through her growing awareness of the Holocaust: when she was growing up no mention was made of Germany's role in the murder of millions of Jews. The author has had experiences on many fronts, beginning with the care of a younger brother and sister at the end of the war. Breast cancer was diagnosed and treated in the early '90s; she has been cancer-free since. (She continues to talk about breast cancer on the lecture circuit.) She was active and involved in her husband's unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. There is much more to Ernestine Bradley's life than immigration. We do, however, appreciate the determination and contribution of immigrants like her with similarstories to tell. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2005, Random House, Anchor, 259p. illus., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

From a childhood in Nazi Germany to work as an airline stewardess to a professorship in comparative literature and marriage to a basketball-playing senator. With a four-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The spouse of the former senator from New Jersey speaks about her history and emotional life. In an autobiography characterized by such thoughts, Ernestine Bradley reveals that sometimes she thinks of herself as "a mangrove tree with roots hanging in the air," a conceit prompted principally by her childhood in postwar Germany. What with American soldiers, ersatz sausages, lice, and a truck that was fueled by wood, it seems to have been the worst of times for kleine Wuschi and her family in the Bavarian town of Passau. She had, it appears, two fathers. There was the loving biological one, who was a member of the Luftwaffe, and then there was the hairdresser, a member of the Nazi party, who was a temporary loving father of convenience for a while. It's little wonder that an operatic attitude dominates the first part of this before-and-after story. In the 1950s, when she was 21 (and had excellent language skills), Ernestine emigrated to the US and the excitement of New York, working as a Pan Am stewardess. Soon, she was living in Atlanta, the wife of a physician and the parent of a daughter. But that life didn't work out. Next, divorced and back in New York, she met the smart pro basketball player. She joined the academic world and settled in New Jersey, married to terrific Bill Bradley. He is, she assures us, the best of husbands, especially during her victorious bout with breast cancer. There are certain lacunae, to be sure, with virtually nothing relating to Senator Bill's career or his run for the Oval Office. Rather, here's Oprah-style self-awareness, presented with careful skill. It might not have helped a presidential campaign, anyway. With its bit of Teutonic flavor, this isn't thestory of a typical Jersey Girl-nor is it the most unusual or gripping of revelatory journeys.

Women at War or Publics and Counterpublics

2009-02-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

Women at War: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Conflicts

Author: James E Wis

Today, women in all U.S. military services are involved in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They serve as pilots and crewmen of assault helicopters, bombers, fighters, and transport planes, and are frequently engaged in firefights with enemy insurgents while guarding convoys, traveling in hostile territory, or performing military police duties. Like their male counterparts, they carry out their missions with determination and great courage. The advent of the insurgency war, which has no rear or front lines, has made the debate regarding women in combat irrelevant. In such a war zone anyone can be killed or injured at any moment. The stories of these courageous women are told by James E. Wise and Scott Baron, who use a format similar to the one employed with such success in the book Stars in Blue. The profiles of some thirty women and their photographs are included. To record their stories, the authors conducted numerous personal interviews, and in every case Wise and Baron were struck by the women's extraordinary display of dedication to their mission and to the soldiers and sailors with whom they served. Because the service of women in the military has been under reported to date, most of the women included in this book will be unknown to readers and reveal another dimension to the service of women in the desert and the vital role they play in the armed forces. While the book's focus is on today's women in combat, it also reaches back to Vietnam, Korea, and World War II to offer selected stories of inspiring women who served at the "cusp of the spear" as they fought and died for their country.

Book review: The Merry Baker of Riga or Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present

Publics and Counterpublics

Author: Michael Warner

Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?

According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.

Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.

War on the Middle Class or Coloniality at Large

2009-02-18T01:28:00.000-08:00

War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back

Author: Lou Dobbs

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

Acknowledgments     vii
Introduction     1
War on the Middle Class     13
Class Warfare     23
The Best Government Money Can Buy     37
The Politics of Deceit     65
He Says, She Says     76
The Exorbitant Cost of Free Trade     92
Exporting America     108
Broken Borders     131
A Generation of Failure     157
Health Care: It's Enough to Make You Sick     173
The Best of Intentions     186
Taking Back America     197
The Declaration of Independence     215
The Constitution of the United States     221
The Bill of Rights     237
The Constitution: Amendments 11-27     241
Notes     253
Index     269

Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate

Author: Mabel Morana

Postcolonial theory has developed mainly in the U.S. academy, and it has focused chiefly on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century colonization and decolonization processes in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Colonialism in Latin America originated centuries earlier, in the transoceanic adventures from which European modernity itself was born. It differs from later manifestations of European expansionism in other ways as well. Coloniality at Large brings together classic and new reflections on the theoretical implications of colonialism in Latin America. By pointing out its particular characteristics, the contributors highlight some of the philosophical and ideological blind spots of contemporary postcolonial theory as they offer a thorough analysis of that theory's applicability to Latin America's past and present.

Written by internationally renowned scholars based in Latin America, the United States, and Europe, the essays reflect multiple disciplinary and ideological perspectives. Some are translated into English for the first time. The essays include theoretical reflections, literary criticism, and historical and ethnographic case studies focused on Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, the Andes, and the Caribbean. Contributors highlight the relation of Marxist thought, dependency theory, and liberation theology to Latin Americans' experience of and resistance to coloniality, and they emphasize the critique of Occidentalism and modernity as central to any understanding of the colonial project. Analyzing the many ways that Latin Americans have resisted imperialism and sought emancipation and sovereignty over several centuries, they delve into topics includingviolence, identity, otherness, memory, heterogeneity, and language. Contributors also explore Latin American intellectuals' ambivalence about, or objections to, the "post" in postcolonial; to many, globalization and neoliberalism are the contemporary guises of colonialism in Latin America.

Attack the Messenger or By Order of the President

2009-02-16T20:16:00.000-08:00

Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media

Author: Craig Crawford

Attack the Messenger is an objective look at the loss of public trust in the news media-and the resulting threat to American democracy. Biased, sloppy, and sometimes deceitful reporting is partly to blame, but this book primarily examines how politicians declared war on the media's role as an honest broker of information-and won. Craig Crawford takes readers who crave truth in news through the power struggle between the government and mainstream media, as well as directs them on how to avoid political propaganda and find the most reliable news sources.

Acknowledgments     ix
Turning the Tables     1
The Setup     3
The Sting     4
The Fallout     10
Media on the Run     11
Blame the Messenger     15
The Downside of the Media's Fall     17
Bring Back Believable Reporting     19
Arrogance Is a Blinding Weakness     22
Media Wimps     23
Standing Up to Power     25
A President Lies     29
Parse That Sentence     30
Choosing to Lie     32
That Other West Wing Affair     33
"I Did Not Have Sexual Relations..."     37
Spinning Lies     43
Gambling with the Truth     44
The Rewards of Lying     47
The History of Propaganda     49
Spinning the Drug War     50
The Spin Room     52
A War Story     59
A Press Subdued     61
Jefferson and Lincoln against the Press     62
The White House Briefing as Performance Art     64
The TV Generals     65
Who Will Tell the Truth?     73
Losing Public Faith     74
Dropping the Ball     75
Media Glory Days     76
Drawing Conclusions     79
The "Dover Test"     81
The End of an Era     87
Rather Moments     90
Chilling Effect     90
Vietnam Redux     91
The Son Rises     96
Winners and Losers     97
Old Media versus New Media     99
A "Huge Assumption"     101
At the Mercy of Spin     102
Fear in the Newsroom     105
The Politicians Win     107
Media Culpa     109
Struggling to Matter     111
My Hate Mail     113
Getting It Wrong     117
Why I Don't Vote     117
Explaining Ourselves     118
How to Get the Real Story     121
C-SPAN     121
The Associated Press     122
Public Broadcasting     125
Don Imus     126
The Gray Ladies     127
Ombudsmen and Critics     128
The National Networks     128
Opinion as News     129
Shouting the News     131
Cable Watch     132
The Internet      134
Old Media's Comeback Trail     137
What Now?     141
Taking the Lead     142
Acknowledging Bias     144
Politicians on the Loose     145
Let Us Be Rude Again     146
Keep It between the Ditches     148
Poll Watch: Public Confidence in the Press     149
Media Resource Guide     155
Notes     163
Index     173
About the Author     181

Book about: The Ruby Way or Mmixware

By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans

Author: Greg Robinson

On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why.

Robinson traces FDR's outlook back to his formative years, and to the early twentieth century's racialist view of ethnic Japanese in America as immutably "foreign" and threatening. These prejudicial sentiments, along with his constitutional philosophy and leadership style, contributed to Roosevelt's approval of the unprecedented mistreatment of American citizens. His hands-on participation and interventions were critical in determining the nature, duration, and consequences of the administration's internment policy.

By Order of the President attempts to explain how a great humanitarian leader and his advisors, who were fighting a war to preserve democracy, could have implemented such a profoundly unjust and undemocratic policy toward their own people. It reminds us of the power of a president's beliefs to influence and determine public policy and of the need for citizen vigilance to protect the rights of all against potential abuses.

Publishers Weekly

In 1942, FDR authorized the army to evacuate more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans from the Pacific Coast states, stripping them not of their citizenship, which he considered "absolute," but of their civil rights, which he considered "contingent." Robinson, a historian at George Mason University, argues that, because of FDR's deserved reputation as a humanitarian, this action has been treated as an aberration and, therefore, not thoroughly explored. In this lucid, comprehensive and balanced examination, Robinson maintains that Roosevelt's decision was, in fact, "not fundamentally inconsistent with his overall political philosophy and world view." Rather, a deep-seated belief that Japanese-Americans were biologically "incapable of being true Americans" enabled FDR, though he "deplored open prejudice," to be "willingly misled" by bad counsel and misinformation about the perceived Japanese-American threat, despite reliable reports, including one by J. Edgar Hoover, to the contrary. Since boyhood, FDR had admired Japan's naval strength, but following Japan's victory over Russia in 1904-1905 and its invasion of China in the 1930s, Roosevelt saw Japan as a potent economic and political rival. Consequently, after the Pearl Harbor attack incited anti-Japanese hysteria, West Coast politicians and the military pressured FDR to take action at home; the president's racist views, compounded by what Robinson describes as his loose administrative style and lack of moral leadership, contributed to his passive indifference toward the physical and psychological fate of a group of Americans. Robinson's conscientious arguments and meticulous documentation movingly clarify a little-understood failure ofAmerican democracy. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy. (Oct. 26) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Prof. John E. Boyd - KLIATT

Although Roosevelt had maintained a longstanding friendly relationship with Japan, the situation began to change in the 1930s as Japan cast her eye on her resource-rich neighbors. War with Japan seemed to be inevitable but FDR wanted Japan to make the first strike. This book examines the people, places, and events surrounding the internment of West Coast Japanese civilians during WW II. It should appeal to serious future history and political science majors, students of WW II, and others who are interested in learning about the mistreatment and confinement of this segment of the population. Terms like "concentration camp" and "the Japanese problem" may conjure up images of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which provided the legal base for interment. It was met with opposition, its constitutionality was questioned, and there was no evidence that the West Coast Japanese were a danger to the nation. Once the Japanese were interned, it was difficult to reverse the process and the reasons were not only security: prejudice and greed played a part. The author explores FDR's own prejudices and concerns as well as the events following his death in 1945. He concludes that the president could have done more to protect the rights of those of Japanese ancestry. The writing style and format make it unlikely that YAs are the target audience but those with a serious interest in the topic will find it rewarding. Some will be intimidated by the length, fine print and lack of illustrations. Sections could easily be turned into graduate-level lectures. This is definitely not recreational reading but it might serve as a research tool for topics related to Japanese-American relations from1900—1950. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Harvard Univ. Press, 336p. bibliog. index., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

Robinson (J.N.G. Finley Fellow in History, George Mason Univ.) focuses on one aspect of Roosevelt's presidency during World War II, the internment of Japanese Americans. Two recent books, Kenneth S. Davis's FDR: The War President, 1940-43 (LJ 10/15/01) and Thomas Fleming's The New Dealers' War: F.D.R. and the War within World War II (LJ 6/1/01) only briefly mention the internment. Using memos, reports, diary entries, letters, and other documents written by FDR and his staff, this book offers the first in-depth look at the role of Roosevelt and his advisers in making the decision to intern. While racist attitudes were widespread and many people influenced the final decision to issue Executive Order 9066, Robinson also cites Roosevelt's long-held belief that the Japanese were innately different and therefore did not deserve citizenship. This refusal to accept them as citizens along with considerable war hysteria allowed him to strip them of their rights for the duration of the war. The book sheds some light on a dark episode in our history. For academic and large public libraries, especially World War II and constitutional history collections. Katharine L. Kan, Allen Cty. P.L., Fort Wayne, IN Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A thorough, scholarly, and troubling analysis of FDR's decision in the early days of WWII to hold in internment camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans. Robinson (History/George Mason Univ.) begins with an FDR news conference on November 21, 1944, one of the few public occasions when the President even mentioned the internment of tens of thousands of loyal American citizens-a disturbing episode that Robinson calls "a tragedy of democracy." Robinson endeavors to uncover the causes of the decision. He notes that FDR's first government appointment was as an assistant secretary of the Navy, a position that led him to worry about Japanese aggression in the Pacific. In the 1920s, FDR urged a conciliatory position toward the Japanese, hoping that liberal elements in Japanese leadership would be able to soften their government's foreign policy. But in 1924, a US immigration act froze Japanese arrivals, legislation that outraged the Japanese. As their military became more adventurous in the Pacific, anti-Japanese attitudes in America hardened, and racists (especially in California) began to sing their ugly songs. According to Robinson, FDR viewed Japanese-Americans as Japanese first, American second. Despite virulent rumors to the contrary, there was no sabotage of US facilities by Japanese-Americans (as J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly informed FDR), but wartime paranoia (especially after Pearl Harbor) soon held sway. The author also believes political pressures from the West Coast influenced FDR, as did his unenlightened racial views (views not shared by his wife, who crusaded for the release of those interned). The president seems to have been uninterested in hearing contrary opinions-even whenhis principal advisers were urging him to rescind Executive Order 9066, the internment authorization, which he signed on February 19, 1942. It wasn't until late summer of 1944 that the releases began. Splendid scholarship shines a harsh light on one of the darkest episodes in American history.

When Every Moment Counts or Stealing Democracy

2009-02-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

When Every Moment Counts: What You Need To Know About Bioterrorism From the Senate's Only Doctor

Author: Bill Frist

Bioterrorism has quickly become one of the most pressing and disturbing issues of our time. Our nation's leaders warn that the threat of germ weapons by terrorists is real, and, more importantly, that the United States remains highly vulnerable. Such statements have led to a national sense of fear and unease. Every American wants answers--what can we do to protect our families and loved ones? Enter Senator Bill Frist, M.D. At this crucial time, Senator Frist wants to provide all Americans with an accessible and comprehensive guide to dealing with the realistic threat of bioterrorism. Written in an easy-to-use question and answer format, complete with photographs of the varying symptoms and a full index, When Every Moment Counts is an essential manual for every American.

Publishers Weekly

First a Republican senator from Tennessee, brings his experiences as a heart and lung surgeon and a ranking member of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Health to this extremely informative, very approachable guide to coping with the bioterrorism threat, the only such guide available today. The book's linchpin is a chapter called "Safe at Home: A Family Survival Guide, straightforward, q&a-style set of guidelines for everything from choosing a filtration mask and putting together a disaster supply kit to preparing children for emergencies without giving them nightmares. The rest the book, also in q&a format, provides basic information on the most likely bioterrorism agents, such as anthrax, smallpox, plague and botulism. Frist clearly and knowledgeably explains the symptoms, incubation period and available treatments for each ages providing specific details, like the definition of "weaponized" anthrax and the government plan for containing a smallpox of break. Sidebars describe how the organism have been used as weapons in the past. The book also includes a chapter on chemical weapons and one on the food and water supply. Thought his tone is generally optimists Frist is candid about weaknesses in the public health system, such as the dearth of vaccine research on children or the FDA's inability to meet its food inspection goals. He's concerned, above all, about the lack of rapid communication among doctors and health agencies (citing that "one in five public health offices does not have email"), and concludes with his proposals to increase funding for state and local public health organizations and other suggestions for government. This reassuring thorough resource undoubtedly will prove a comfort to many readers-and, in the case of a bioterrorist attack, has the potential to save countless lives. This is an important book and deserves high attention and sales. Color photo insert of organisms and, to aid in diagnosis of skin rashes (comparing for instance smallpox chickenpox). (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Frist, a Republican senator from Tennessee, brings his experiences as a heart and lung surgeon and a ranking member of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Health to this extremely informative, very approachable guide to coping with the bioterrorism threat, the only such guide available today. The book's linchpin is a chapter called "Safe at Home: A Family Survival Guide," a straightforward, q&a-style set of guidelines for everything from choosing a filtration mask and putting together a disaster supply kit to preparing children for emergencies without giving them nightmares. The rest of the book, also in q&a format, provides basic information on the most likely bioterrorism agents, such as anthrax, smallpox, plague and botulism. Frist clearly and knowledgeably explains the symptoms, incubation period and available treatments for each agent, providing specific details, like the definition of "weaponized" anthrax and the government plan for containing a smallpox outbreak. Sidebars describe how the organisms have been used as weapons in the past. The book also includes a chapter on chemical weapons and one on the food and water supply. Though his tone is generally optimistic, Frist is candid about weaknesses in the public health system, such as the dearth of vaccine research on children or the FDA's inability to meet its food inspection goals. He's concerned, above all, about the lack of rapid communication among doctors and health agencies (citing that "one in five public health offices does not have email"), and concludes with his proposals to increase funding for state and local public health organizations and other suggestions for government action. This reassuring, thorough resource undoubtedly will prove a comfort to many readers and, in the case of a bioterrorist attack, has the potential to save countless lives. This is an important book and deserves high attention and sales. Color photo insert of organisms and, to aid in diagnosis, of skin rashes (comparing, for instance, smallpox to chickenpox). (Mar.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

When anthrax began showing up in the mail in fall 2001, one of the most sought-after and frequently seen guests on news shows was Senator Frist (R-TN), a practicing physician. His calm and levelheaded replies to a flurry of questions about anthrax and other potential biohazards reassured a jittery nation. In this book, Frist provides the same quality information in a question-and-answer format that addresses major biological and (to a lesser extent) chemical threats, their signs and symptoms, their transmission, vaccines, and effective treatments. Practical suggestions on preparing a disaster kit, easing children's anxieties, and handling suspicious mail, among other issues, are numerous and well conceived. A list of reliable web sites gives readers access to current information, and color illustrations help with the identification of anthrax and smallpox. The book concludes with an excellent index. While the occasional political point slips in (e.g., Frist advocates antitrust relief to drug companies), this book remains a solid lay reader's guide. A similar title, Dr. Philip Tierno's Protect Yourself Against Bioterrorism (Pocket, 2002), covers much the same ground. Given the high interest, both could be added at a small cost to the library. Anne C. Tomlin, Auburn Memorial Hosp. Lib., New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Book about: Direction de Sécurité Efficace

Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression

Author: Spencer Overton

"A must-read for anyone who is concerned about our deeply flawed electoral system."—Congressman John Conyers Jr.

Politicians spew shallow words describing a self-governing American people, who select their representatives. In reality, politicians maintain power by selecting voters. Elected officials and bureaucrats control thousands of election practices—from district boundaries to English-only ballots—that determine political winners and losers. Through real-life stories, Spencer Overton shows how these practices determine policies on issues that shape our lives, and he provides strategies for restoring government by the people. Overton's compelling case is vital to the future of our democracy. With a new afterword.

Publishers Weekly

Overton takes a wonky but worthy look at the "matrix" of "thousands of election regulations and practices" that can discourage-if not completely suppress-citizens from voting or make their votes count less. A law professor and election reform activist, Overton makes concrete proposals for restoring power to voters. Redistricting, he says, is often conducted in a partisan manner; Overton recommends that the United States assign the responsibility to an independent commission. He calls for federal standards for counting ballots and the provision of voting machines. The much-debated Voting Rights Act, Overton argues, remains vital, though those invoking it should more carefully analyze "practices that disadvantage voters of color." In answer to those bilingual education opponents who might withhold "democracy from Americans with limited English skills," he also argues that bilingual ballots would "advance citizen engagement." Overton warns that a photo ID requirement for voting would exclude those (e.g., the poor, many people of color) who don't have driver's licenses. Citing relatively low voter turnout and lack of centralized election oversight, the author notes how the United States "deviates from democratic norms" of other established democracies, concluding with profiles of activists to inspire the citizens' movement needed to enact the sensible reforms he advocates. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The U.S. Constitution assigns most of the management of elections to the states, which, in turn, allow their two major parties to dictate voting terms. For Overton (George Washington Univ. Law Sch.), a member of the Carter-Baker Election Reform Commission of 2005, the patchwork quilt of 102 party organizations (the Democratic and Republican parties in each state plus the two national committees) has produced a nefarious collection of rules that has suppressed the votes of too many citizens, especially the poor and people of color. He argues that the voting system isn't fair, balanced, efficient, or predictable but is instead controlled by the partisan organizations to keep their own members in office; as in The Matrix, the powers-that-be have manipulated the public into believing that it is in control. While the film analogy may help the book appeal to younger readers, its hint of conspiracy theory lessens the legitimacy of Overton's argument. Furthermore, the organization of elections has been in the hands of the states and political parties since the early 19th century, an arrangement our federal courts have consistently upheld. Nonetheless, Overton's book offers clear and cogent insights into the problems of our voting system. A worthy purchase for all public and academic libraries and essential for any collection that holds the Carter-Baker Commission Report. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Voting rights are under siege in America, declares the author, who proposes several sweeping remedies. With expertise honed while working for the National Voting Rights Institute and the Carter/Baker Election Reform Commission, Overton (Law/George Washington Univ.) explains how democracy can be subverted without citizens even noticing. Disenfranchisement does not always occur at the voting booth, he warns, providing cautionary tales about computer gerrymandering, partisan oversight of elections and systemic discrimination based on race, class, native language and criminal history. At every turn, Overton finds self-interested politicians maneuvering to cut deals, protect their jobs and tip the scales for their allies. Many readers will be sympathetic to reform after reviewing his litany of undemocratic incidents and self-incriminating remarks about rigging elections made by unwary politicos. Overton cites encouraging precedents for major electoral reform, from the intricate case law advancing African-Americans' voting rights to the constitutional amendments enfranchising women, minorities and draft-age Americans. (The 26th Amendment granted the right to vote to those as young as 18 after the Vietnam War.) But he also warns that some enemies of democracy are trying to co-opt reform to reduce voter turnout. Dissenting from the Election Reform Commission on which he served, he skewers new photo-ID requirements as unnecessary barriers to voting and instead advocates universal voter registration. The book's rigid formula-a brief history, recent case study and bite-size solution offered in every chapter-sometimes wears thin. Yet Overton makes a compelling case that beneath the rhetoricalflourishes, American democracy is governed by a flawed election system: often capricious, sometimes unjust and rarely understood by the general public. To change this, Americans will need energy, optimism and "a mindset of resistance and independence."An approachable and constructive work.

Paris After the Liberation 1944 1949 or The Huey P Newton Reader

2009-02-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949

Author: Antony Beevor

In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population, and a growing number of intellectual luminaries and artists- including Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Picasso-contributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment in time.

Library Journal

Beever and Cooper's highly regarded 1994 volume profiles the political fallout in Paris following the defeat of the Nazis and the rise of communism. It was a time when U.S. and other Allied troops were considered by many French citizens to be the new invaders trying to take over their country. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Book about: Manual of Clinical Hospital Psychiatry or American Economic Development Since 1945

The Huey P Newton Reader

Author: Huey P Newton

The First Comprehensive Collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the black liberation era, The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives. Topics include: the formation of the Black Panthers; African Americans and armed self-defense; prison martyr George Jackson; Eldridge Cleaver's controversial expulsion from the Party; FBI infiltration of civil rights groups;the Vietnam War; and the burgeoning feminist movement. Among the new writings that are being published here for the first time from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton'n private collection, are articles on: President Nixon; environmentalism; Pan-Africanism; James Baldwin; and affirmative action.

Library Journal

This is the first collection of writings by the founder of the Black Panther Party since his death in 1989. Ten of the 36 selections were published in To Die for the People, an earlier collection released in 1972; the remainder were written after that publication. The book represents the many transformations of Newton's and the party's political ideologies and motivations, including support of the feminist and gay rights movements. Between the opening coverage of how and why Newton and Bobby Seale mobilized the black community to support a program of armed self-defense to the closing excerpts from Newton's Ph.D. dissertation outlining the FBI's COINTELPRO activities to dismantle the Black Panther Party are passionate and captivating writings that reveal a widely read political theorist committed to putting theory into practice to make a better world. This book is essential reading and primary-source research material for understanding the Black Panther Party, grass-roots organizing at its best, and the black power movement. Suitable for public and academic libraries. Sherri Barnes, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara Libs. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Co-edited by one of Newton's former colleagues in the Black Panther Party, this collection combines published and previously unpublished writings from the founder of the American black liberation organization. After excerpts from Newton's autobiography detail aspects of his early life and the founding of the party, the evolution of his political thought is traced through political tracts, interviews, speeches, and his doctoral dissertation , in which he details the FBI's attempts to suppress the organization through any means necessary, including assassination. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

	Foreword	7
	Introduction	9
	Scoring	25
	Freedom	38
	Bobby Seale	44
	The Founding of the Black Panther Party	49
	Patrolling	53
	Sacramento and the "Panther Bill"	67
	Crisis: October 28, 1967	73
	Trial	79
	Fear and Doubt: May 15, 1967	131
	From "In Defense of Self-Defense" I: June 20, 1967	134
	From "In Defense of Self-Defense" II: July 3, 1967	138
	The Correct Handling of a Revolution: July 20, 1967	142
	A Functional Definition of Politics, January 17, 1969	147
	On the Peace Movement: August 15, 1969	150
	Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?: January 3, 1970	154
	The Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements: August 15, 1970	157
	Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970	160
	Intercommunalism: February 1971	181
	On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community: April 17, 1971	200
	Statement: May 1, 1971	209
	On the Relevance of the Church: May 19, 1971	214
	Black Capitalism Re-analyzed 1: June 5, 1971	227
	Uniting Against a Common Enemy: October 23, 1971	234
	Fallen Comrade: Eulogy for George Jackson, 1971	241
	On Pan-Africanism or Communism: December 1, 1972	248
	The Technology Question: 1972	256
	A Spokesman for the People: In Conversation with William F. Buckley, February 11, 1973	267
	Eldridge Cleaver: He Is No James Baldwin, 1973	285
	Who Makes U.S. Foreign Policy?: 1974	295
	Dialectics of Nature: 1974	304
	Eve, the Mother of All Living: 1974	313
	The Mind Is Flesh: 1974	317
	Affirmative Action in Theory and Practice: Letters on the Bakke Case, September 22, 1977	331
	Response of the Government to the Black Panther Party: 1980	337
	Publication History	360
	Selected Bibliography	361

Jefferson and the Indians or Beyond Slavery

2009-02-13T04:37:00.000-08:00

Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans

Author: Anthony F C Wallac

In Thomas Jefferson's time, white Americans were bedeviled by a moral dilemma unyielding to reason and sentiment: what to do about the presence of black slaves and free Indians. That Jefferson himself was caught between his own soaring rhetoric and private behavior toward blacks has long been known. But the tortured duality of his attitude toward Indians is only now being unearthed.

In this landmark history, Anthony Wallace takes us on a tour of discovery to unexplored regions of Jefferson's mind. There, the bookish Enlightenment scholar—collector of Indian vocabularies, excavator of ancient burial mounds, chronicler of the eloquence of America's native peoples, and mourner of their tragic fate—sits uncomfortably close to Jefferson the imperialist and architect of Indian removal. Impelled by the necessity of expanding his agrarian republic, he became adept at putting a philosophical gloss on his policy of encroachment, threats of war, and forced land cessions—a policy that led, eventually, to cultural genocide.

In this compelling narrative, we see how Jefferson's close relationships with frontier fighters and Indian agents, land speculators and intrepid explorers, European travelers, missionary scholars, and the chiefs of many Indian nations all complicated his views of the rights and claims of the first Americans. Lavishly illustrated with scenes and portraits from the period, Jefferson and the Indians adds a troubled dimension to one of the most enigmatic figures of American history, and to one of its most shameful legacies.

KLIATT

This is not your father's Thomas Jefferson. It might be startling to a reader brought up on the Jefferson of the Declaration of Independence to read an author who, quite early in the text, accuses the third president not only of writing deceptive reports in regard to land dealings, but of being responsible for "ethnic cleansing" in regard to the Native American populations of the eastern coastline. While we have recently become accustomed to accounts of Jefferson's treatment or mistreatment of his slaves, we may still see him as the amateur philosopher-archeologist who collected vocabularies of Native American languages and conducted methodical digs of burial mounds left by eastern tribes. Here Wallace gives us a Jefferson who, while he had a deep objective interest in anthropology, had a land speculator's interest in the territories to the immediate west of the 13 original states. He saw the young nation as an expanding entity, and this growth as impeded by the various tribes then living in the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. His solution: move them west. According to Wallace, as president it was Jefferson's aim to obtain Indian land "at almost any cost." The result of Wallace's extensive research is not, however, a cursory debunking of Jefferson but rather a detailed portrait of a man of his time, flawed and pragmatic. Wallace's prose is smooth and the text is extremely well organized with copious notes, although no separate bibliography. Recommended for all serious students of American history. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1999, Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap, 394p. illus. maps. notes.index. 23cm. 99-21558., $18.95. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Patricia A. Moore; Brookline, MA , July 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 4)

Library Journal

While Bernard W. Sheehan's Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (1974) explores the Jeffersonian period, Wallace, an emeritus anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and recipient of the Bancroft prize for Rockdale, provides a probing intellectual history of Jefferson himself. Jefferson's attitude toward Native Americans reflect his overall complexity as a thinker; he was fascinated by the first Americans but at the same time engaged in "civilizing" them. Wallace traces the context in which Jefferson existed and then examines his political rhetoric; considerable attention is also given to his studies of Indians and his presidential policies toward them. While the absence of citations to sidebar quotations is disappointing and the lack of a bibliography unfortunate, this fascinating account of an unexplored topic is highly recommended.--Daniel D. Liestman, Kansas State Univ. Lib., Manhattan Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

ForeWord - Peter Skinner

The book's great strength stems not only from its compelling narrative, but also from the rich cast of supporting players among whom heroes, saints and sinners abound. Excellent illustrations add to this masterful account.

Kirkus Reviews

Returning to his interest in the native tribes (The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians, 1993, etc.), Bancroft Prize–winning historian Wallace gives us a book that immediately becomes the best among very few other studies of its subject. The author, an anthropologist deeply knowledgeable about American native cultures, reveals his colors early on: Jefferson's acts concerning the Indians were "hypocritical, arbitrary, duplicitous, even harsh," the Squire of Monticello himself a liar and self-serving. While he studied the natives, knew some, and thought carefully about their lives and cultures, he could not rid himself of the conviction that these American tribal peoples must either become "civilized"—give up hunting and gathering, become farmers, and adopt Euro-American ways—or disappear. But Jefferson didn't stop there: throughout his life, he effectually harried the Indians into war, land cessions, or flight and thus, in Wallace's view, must be held responsible both for inaugurating the failed 19th-century policy of removing the Indians to the far west and then onto reservations and for their drastic decline in numbers. This is a harsh indictment, made harsher still by Wallace's inappropriate likening of Jefferson's policies to genocide, a holocaust, and ethnic cleansing. After all, neither Jefferson nor most of his contemporaries sought the Indians' extermination. Yet, fortunately, these overwrought anachronistic charges do not affect much of the book, which otherwise makes clear the complexities of native-European interaction in the post-Revolutionary era. One result is that a reader comes away from the book's pages less critical of Jefferson thanWallace probably wishes, more accepting of the limits upon Jefferson's misguided views, and deflated by a sense of the near inevitability of the Indians' fate. One wishes that Wallace had occasionally lifted his eyes from the details of his subject—to compare, for example, the contributions of Indian removal and slavery to white man's democracy. A searching scholarly study of one of the great American dilemmas. (60 photos, 3 maps)

Go to: Caring and Social Justice or Healing the Heart of the World

Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies

Author: Frederick Cooper

In this collaborative work, three leading historians explore one of the most significant areas of inquiry in modern historiography—the transition from slavery to freedom and what this transition meant for former slaves, former slaveowners, and the societies in which they lived. Their contributions take us beyond the familiar portrait of emancipation as the end of an evil system to consider the questions and the struggles that emerged in freedom's wake.

Thomas Holt focuses on emancipation in Jamaica and the contested meaning of citizenship in defining and redefining the concept of freedom; Rebecca Scott investigates the complex struggles and cross-racial alliances that evolved in southern Louisiana and Cuba after the end of slavery; and Frederick Cooper examines the intersection of emancipation and imperialism in French West Africa. In their introduction, the authors address issues of citizenship, labor, and race, in the post-emancipation period and they point the way toward a fuller understanding of the meanings of freedom.

About the Author:
Frederick Cooper is Charles Gibson Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Thomas C. Holt is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. Rebecca J. Scott is Frederick Huetwell Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

What People Are Saying

Ira Berlin
An extraordinary book of breathtaking scope that addresses matters of signal importance.

David Montgomery
[For] everyone concerned with race, class, and modern intellectual history.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
	The Essence of the Contract: The Articulation of Race, Gender, and Political Economy in British Emancipation Policy, 1838-1866	33
	Fault Lines, Color Lines, and Party Lines: Race, Labor, and Collective Action in Louisiana and Cuba, 1862-1912	61
	Conditions Analogous to Slavery: Imperialism and Free Labor Ideology in Africa	107
	Afterword	151
	Notes	157
	Index	189

America Alone or The Real Odessa

2009-02-11T23:24:00.000-08:00

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

Author: Mark Steyn

In this, his first major book, Mark Steyn--probably the most widely read, and wittiest, columnist in the English-speaking world--takes on the great poison of the twenty-first century: the anti-Americanism that fuels both Old Europe and radical Islam. America, Steyn argues, will have to stand alone. The world will be divided between America and the rest; and for our sake America had better win.

New interesting textbook: Eichmann in Jerusalem or Howard Zinn on Democratic Education

The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina

Author: Uki Goni

Drawing on American and European intelligence documents, Uki Goni shows how from 1946 onward a Nazi escape operation was based at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, harboring such war criminals as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. Goni uncovers an elaborate network that relied on the complicity of the Vatican, the Argentine Catholic Church, and the Swiss authorities. The discoveries made in this meticulously researched book reveal the entangled web of the Nazi regime and its sympathizers and has prompted Argentine officials to demand closed files on the Nazi era from their current government.

	Acknowledgements	vii
	Abbreviations	ix
	Key Players	xi
	Foreword	xix
1	War Games	1
2	Peron Leaps to Power	16
3	Undesirable Immigration	25
4	The Abandonment of Argentina's Jews	45
5	Extortion of the Jews	51
6	The Nazi Escape Begins	63
7	Cardinal Recommendations	93
8	Peron's Odessa	100
9	Digging for Clues	116
10	Criminal Ways	122
11	The Nordic Route	128
12	The Swiss Connection	136
13	The Belgian Way	163
14	The Slovak Committee	193
15	Flight of the Ustashi	200
16	A Roman 'Sanctuary'	229
17	Erich Priebke	252
18	Gerhard Bohne	266
19	Josef Schwammberger	273
20	Josef Mengele	279
21	Adolf Eichmann	292
	Conclusion	320
	Afterword	327
	Notes	349
	Documentary Sources	390
	Bibliography	392
	Index	401

The Echo of Battle or Why Do People Hate America

2009-02-10T18:12:00.000-08:00

The Echo of Battle: The Army's Way of War

Author: Brian McAllister Linn

From Lexington and Gettysburg to Normandy and Iraq, the wars of the United States have defined the nation. But after the guns fall silent, the army searches the lessons of past conflicts in order to prepare for the next clash of arms. In the echo of battle, the army develops the strategies, weapons, doctrine, and commanders that it hopes will guarantee a future victory.

In the face of radically new ways of waging war, Brian Linn surveys the past assumptions—and errors—that underlie the army's many visions of warfare up to the present day. He explores the army's forgotten heritage of deterrence, its long experience with counter-guerrilla operations, and its successive efforts to transform itself. Distinguishing three martial traditions—each with its own concept of warfare, its own strategic views, and its own excuses for failure—he locates the visionaries who prepared the army for its battlefield triumphs and the reactionaries whose mistakes contributed to its defeats.

Discussing commanders as diverse as Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Colin Powell, and technologies from coastal artillery to the Abrams tank, he shows how leadership and weaponry have continually altered the army's approach to conflict. And he demonstrates the army's habit of preparing for wars that seldom occur, while ignoring those it must actually fight. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, The Echo of Battle provides an unprecedented reinterpretation of how the U.S. Army has waged war in the past and how it is meeting the new challenges of tomorrow.

Kirkus Reviews

A history of the U.S. army during peacetime examines the lessons its intellectual leaders learned from previous wars and how they planned for the next. Having read nearly every available report, memoir, article and public speech on the subject, military historian Linn emphasizes that history teaches many lessons, only a few of which turn out to be useful, and that we learn the rare accurate prediction of the future in hindsight. An American military establishment didn't appear until after the War of 1812, but it quickly got down to business, drawing wrong conclusions from the past and preparing for a future war that never happened. Ignoring the embattled frontier, until after 1900, leaders concluded that predatory European powers were our major threat-most likely, a massive cross-ocean invasion by Britain. Since the War of 1812 featured attacks on coastal areas, leaders gave first priority to protecting ports, devoting most of the army's modest budget to constructing defensive coastal fortifications. They played no part in America's next two foreign wars (in 1846 and 1898), which were entirely offensive, and the Confederacy obtained only modest benefit from those it occupied. Examining the enormously increased firepower-machine guns, repeating rifles and rapid-fire artillery, among others-available by the turn of the 20th century, military thinkers concluded that these would make future wars so expensive and destructive that fighting would be short-lived. A minority insisted that the vast destructive power of new weapons made war obsolete, repeating both errors when they considered aircraft a generation later and again with atomic weapons. Fighting terrorism, guerrillas and insurgentforces had ample precedent in campaigns against Indians, Confederate bushwhackers and Philippine rebels, but until the 1990s few thinkers considered this a worthy occupation for a warrior. Now, "irregular warfare" is considered the wave of the future, a disturbing forecast if it is as accurate as previous ones. An unsettling but stimulating review of American military planning.

Why Do People Hate America?

Author: Ziauddin Sardar

The controversial bestseller that caused huge waves in the UK! The Independent calls it "required reading." Noam Chomsky says it "contains valuable information that we should know, over here, for our own good, and the world's." We call it our biggest book so far and will be backing it from day one with guaranteed co-op spending, a national publicity and review blitz, talk radio bookings, various retail sales aids including postcards, and of course the usual full court press on the Web and via email.

This is NOT just another 9/11 book: it is the book for those of us trying to understand why America-and Americans-are targets for hate. Many people do hate America, in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa, as well as in the Middle East. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies explore the global impact of America's foreign policy and its corporate and cultural power, placing this unprecedented dominance in the context of America's own perception of itself. In doing so, they consider TV and the Hollywood machine as a mirror which reflects both the American Dream and the American Nightmare. Their analysis provides an important contribution to a debate which needs to be addressed by people of all nations, cultures, religions and political persuasions-and especially by Americans.

Described by The Times Higher Education Supplement as "packed with tightly argued points," the book is carefully researched and built to withstand the inevitable criticism that will be aimed at it. A book that some reviewers will love to hate and others will praise for its insights, it's guaranteed to cause a stir.

Ziauddin Sardar is a prominent and highly respected journalist andauthor. Prolific and polymath, he is a familiar U.K. television and radio personality.

Merryl Wyn Davies, writer and anthropologist, is a former BBC television producer.

Selections from Moyers on Democracy or Women of Spirit

2009-02-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

Selections from Moyers on Democracy

Author: Bill D Moyers

Bill Moyers on America today:

“Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America’s dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and our politics for a long time to come. In the searching of our souls demanded by this challenge . . . kindred spirits across the nation must confront the most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility—the gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath.
“Although our sojourn in life is brief, we are on a great journey. For those who came before us and for those who follow, our moral, political, and religious duty to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are equal under the law, is in good hands on our watch.”
—from “For America’s Sake”

People know Bill Moyers mostly from his many years of path-breaking journalism on television. But he is also one of America’s most sought-after public speakers. His appearances draw sell-out crowds across the country and are among the most reproduced on the Web. “And one reason,” writes noted journalist Bill McKibben, “is that Moyers pulls no punches. His understanding of America’s history is at least as deep as his understanding of Christian tradition, which is an integral part of his background . . . With his feet firmly planted in the deepestAmerican traditions, Bill Moyers is helping to keep alive an oratorical tradition that is fading after two centuries. Trained by his career in broadcasting, he writes for the ear, his cadences and his repetitions timed to bring an audience to full realization of its role and its power.”
And that is the message of this book. Moyers on Democracy collects many of Bill Moyers’s most moving statements to connect the dots on what is happening to our country—the twinned growth of private wealth and public squalor, the assault on our Constitution, the undermining of the electoral process, the accelerating class war against ordinary (and vulnerable) Americans inherent in the growth of economic inequality, the dangers of an imperial executive, the attack on the independence of the press, the despoiling of the earth we share as our common gift—and to rekindle the reader’s conviction that “the gravediggers of democracy will not have the last word.” Richly insightful and alive with a fierce, abiding love for our country, Moyers on Democracy is essential reading in this fateful presidential year.

Book about: Quick and Easy Cooking or Asian Diet

Women of Spirit: Stories of Courage from the Women Who Lived Them

Author: Katherine Martin

Thirty-five women who succeeded in making a difference in the world relate their experiences in this inspiring collection. Katherine Martin introduces each first-person account with background information on the writer and the obstacles she faced. Lesser-known heroines include Debra Williams, who blew the whistle on medical malpractice in a midwestern prison; Sonya Bell, a blind teenager who became an award-winning runner; and Carrie Barefoot Dickerson, who stopped the construction of a nuclear power plant. Other stories, told in their own words, are about SARK, Judith Light, Julia Butterfly Hill, Joan Borysenko, Geraldine Ferraro, Iyanla Vanzant, and others.

Terrorism As Crime or The Rights of Man

2009-02-08T07:47:00.000-08:00

Terrorism As Crime: From Oklahoma City to Al-Qaeda and Beyond

Author: Mark Hamm

"As a recognized expert in the field, Hamm is eminently qualified to prepare this text on the subject of terrorism from the criminal law perspective. . . . The text is written in a clear, lively manner."
—Choice

"Drawing on six case studies of terrorist attacks by radical Islamists and right-wing racists, Hamm writes that American counterterrorist agencies have neglected some basic insights from scholarly criminology."
—The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Read this book to understand the important nexus between terrorism and crime! This cutting edge analysis suggests a new approach to defeat the terrorist threat to the United States."
—Marc Sageman, author of Understanding Terror Networks

"Hamm's clear writing style, careful research and theoretical insights promise to make this a classic in criminology."
—William J. Chambliss, author of Power, Politics, and Crime

"[Provides] the first detailed account of how crime provides logistical support for terrorist strikes. By blending the study of terrorism and criminology, Hamm offers the possibility of detecting and stopping terrorism through the pursuit of conventional methods of criminal investigation."
—Gary LaFree, Director, START, National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism University of Maryland Department of Criminology/Democracy

Car bombing, suicide bombing, abduction, smuggling, homicide, and hijacking are all profoundly criminal acts. In Terrorism as Crime Mark S. Hamm presents an understanding of terrorism from a criminological point of view, arguing that the most successful way tounderstand, detect, prosecute and deter these acts is to use conventional criminal investigation methods. Whether in Oklahoma City or London, Terrorism as Crime demonstrates that criminal activity is the lifeblood of terrorist groups and that there are simple common denominators at work that can remove the mystery surrounding many of these terrorist groups. Once understood the vulnerabilities of these organizations can be exposed.

This important volume focuses in on six case studies of crimes committed by jihad and domestic right wing groups, including biographies of more than two dozen terrorists along with descriptions of their organizations, strategies, and terrorist plots. Terrorism as Crime offers an original and significant framework for explaining international and domestic terrorism, as well as how future acts might be detected or exposed.

Book about: The Resume Writers or Law and the Information Superhighway

The Rights of Man (Everyman's Library)

Author: Thomas Pain

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The authorities in power in England during Thomas Paine’s lifetime saw him as an agent provocateur who used his seditious eloquence to support the emancipation of slaves and women, the demands of working people, and the rebels of the French and American Revolutions. History, on the other hand, has come to regard him as the figure who gave political cogency to the liberating ideas of the Enlightenment. His great pamphlets, Rights of Man and Common Sense, are now recognized for what they are–classic arguments in defense of the individual’s right to assert his or her freedom in the face of tyranny.

Rightward Bound or Understanding Generalist Practice

2009-02-07T02:35:00.000-08:00

Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in The 1970s

Author: Bruce J Schulman

Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in which the conservative movement became the motive force driving politics for the ensuing three decades.

Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved the way for Reagan’s America. They reveal strains at the heart of the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes, and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs, and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies.

A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It helps us understand how, despite conservatism’s rise, persistent tensions remain today between its political power and the achievements of twentieth-century liberalism.

What People Are Saying

Nelson Lichtenstein
A new generation of American historians demonstrates that the decade of the 1970s proved the crucial seed time for the rise of modern American conservatism. There was nothing inevitable about the nation's march to the right, which makes this book all the more fascinating and necessary for those who want to understand twenty-first century America. --(Nelson Lichtenstein, author of Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century America)

Gary Gerstle
Rightward Bound is the most comprehensive and incisive history to date of the conservative mobilization that surged through and transformed the United States in the 1970s. It will prove essential reading for anyone seeking to understand conservative ideologies, institutions, and organizing strategies as well as the complexities of politics and culture in late twentieth-century America. --(Gary Gerstle, Vanderbilt University)

Laura Kalman
Rightward Bound brilliantly demonstrates how American conservatism emerged as a full-blown movement in the 1970s and, in the process, created the United States of the twenty-first century. It is a wonderful book! --(Laura Kalman, University of California, Santa Barbara)

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction   Bruce J. Schulman   Julian E. Zelizer     1
Mobilizing the Movement
Inventing Family Values   Matthew D. Lassiter     13
The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism   Paul Boyer     29
Make Payroll, Not War: Business Culture as Youth Culture   Bethany E. Moreton     52
Gender and America's Right Turn   Marjorie J. Spruill     71
Civil Rights and the Religious Right   Joseph Crespino     90
The Decade of the Neighborhood   Suleiman Osman     106
Cultural Politics and the Singer/Songwriters of the 1970s   Bradford Martin     128
Financing the Counterrevolution   Alice O'Connor     148
The Battle Over Policies and Politics
The White Ethnic Strategy   Thomas J. Sugrue   John D. Skrentny     171
The Conservative Struggle and the Energy Crisis   Meg Jacobs     193
Turnabout Years: Public Sector Unionism and the Fiscal Crisis   Joseph A. McCartin     210
Detente and Its Discontents   Jeremi Suri     227
Carter's Nicaragua and Other Democratic Quagmires   Derek N. Buckaloo     246
Conservatives, Carter, and the Politics of National Security   Julian E. Zelizer     265
Epilogue   Bruce J. Schulman   Julian E. Zelizer     289
Notes     295
List of Contributors     349
Index     351

Go to: The Pleasures of Eating or Low Cholesterol Low Fat Cooking

Understanding Generalist Practice

Author: Karen K Kirst Ashman

Organized around the authors' coherent and cohesive Generalist Intervention Model, this introductory guide to generalist social work practice gives you the knowledge and skills needed to work with individuals and families, as well as the foundation knowledge from a generalist perspective to work with groups, communities, and organizations. The authors fully explore the interrelationship between micro, mezzo, and macro levels of social work practice. This edition reflects the latest Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards with empowerment and strengths perspectives for partnering with clients.

Booknews

New edition of a text that provides a framework for social work students to view the world from a generalist perspective. Emphasizing a core of micro-skills, Kirst-Ashman (U. of Wisconsin-Whitewater) and Hull (U. of Utah) present 16 chapters that discuss relationship- building, interviewing, and problem-solving abilities necessary for working with individual clients. They also orient students to think not only in terms of individual needs but also of group and community needs. New focus points include cultural competency, empowerment of people with disabilities, interviewing children in the context of abuse, updated information on substance abuse, and confidentiality with respect to electronic record-keeping. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The Private Abuse of the Public Interest or One Man Great Enough

2009-02-05T21:21:00.000-08:00

The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles

Author: Lawrence D Brown

Despite George W. Bush’s professed opposition to big government, federal spending has increased under his watch more quickly than it did during the Clinton administration, and demands on government have continued to grow. Why? Lawrence Brown and Lawrence Jacobs show that conservative efforts to expand markets and shrink government often have the ironic effect of expanding government’s reach by creating problems that force legislators to enact new rules and regulations. Dismantling the flawed reasoning behind these attempts to cast markets and public power in opposing roles, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest urges citizens and policy makers to recognize that properly functioning markets presuppose the government’s ability to create, sustain, and repair them over time.
The authors support their pragmatic approach with evidence drawn from in-depth analyses of education, transportation, and health care policies. In each policy area, initiatives such as school choice, deregulation of airlines and other carriers, and the promotion of managed care have introduced or enlarged the role of market forces with the aim of eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency. But in each case, the authors show, reality proved to be much more complex than market models predicted. This complexity has resulted in a political cycle—strikingly consistent across policy spheres—that culminates in public interventions to sustain markets while protecting citizens from their undesirable effects. Situating these case studies in the context of more than two hundred years of debate about the role of markets in society, Brown and Jacobs call for a renewed focus on public-privatepartnerships that recognize and respect each sector’s vital—and fundamentally complementary—role.

One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln's Road to Civil War

Author: John C Waugh

How did Abraham Lincoln, long held as a paragon of presidential bravery and principled politics, find his way to the White House? How did he become this one man great enough to risk the fate of the nation on the well-worn but cast-off notion that all men are created equal?

Here award-winning historian John C. Waugh takes us on Lincoln’s road to the Civil War. From Lincoln's first public rejection of slavery to his secret arrival in the capital, from his stunning debates with Stephen Douglas to his contemplative moments considering the state of the country he loved, Waugh shows us America as Lincoln saw it and as Lincoln described it. Much of this wonderful story is told by Lincoln himself, detailing through his own writing his emergence onto the political scene and the evolution of his beliefs about the Union, the Constitution, democracy, slavery, and civil war. Waugh brings Lincoln’s path into new reliefby letting the great man tell his own story, at a depth that brings us ever closer to understanding this mysterious, complicated, truly great man.

The Washington Post - Michael F. Bishop

A swift-paced narrative of Lincoln's pre-presidential life, the book is a competent introduction to what George Will once called "the world's noblest political career." Waugh tells a thoroughly familiar story in a breezy, colloquial style.

Publishers Weekly

Former Christian Science Monitorjournalist Waugh is the author of six books on the Civil War, including Re-electing Lincoln, perhaps the most accessible and complete volume on the pivotal presidential election of 1864. In his latest book, Waugh employs the same combination of lively prose backed with solid research to examine Lincoln's life story from birth to his first presidential inauguration, rarely straying from the themes of the future of the Union, impending Civil War and, more importantly, slavery. Waugh covers the events in Lincoln's pre-April 1861 life, making liberal use of Lincoln's own words, primarily from letters and speeches, and the reminiscences of one of Lincoln's closest friends and associates, his former law partner William Herndon. Waugh shows that although Lincoln embraced white supremacy and opposed interracial marriage and black suffrage during his early years as an Illinois state legislator, he managed to separate those views from his strong opposition to the institution of slavery. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," Lincoln later said. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." Waugh is particular adept at weaving details of Lincoln's family life into the narrative, which focuses on decidedly political matters, including the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates and the 1860 presidential election campaign. (Nov.)

Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal

Journalist Waugh sketches Lincoln from his parentage up to the attack on Fort Sumpter. His easy and good-humored style will appeal to many readers. He does not forsake arguably unreliable narrators, such as Lincoln cousin Dennis Hanks and while some scholars might object, others will see the magic in keeping such voices with us in following Lincoln's journey. Recommended for public and undergraduate libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Waugh (On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History, 2003, etc.), a Civil War historian and former bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, offers a lively biography of the Great Emancipator, from birth to first inauguration. Where Julie M. Fenster's recent The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder and the Making of a Great President (2007) considered the personal, legal and political life of Lincoln through the prism of a single criminal case, Waugh's more conventional treatment offers nothing new either in approach or content. Still, his judicious use of the historical record and his dramatic prose make for an enjoyable read. He provides sufficient detail about Lincoln the impoverished youth, the striving young clerk, the busy lawyer and the harried family man, and he pauses frequently to analyze Lincoln's character and mind. But the emphasis here is on Lincoln the political animal, particularly his evolution from a little-known Illinois legislator to a one-term U.S. congressman, to a marginalized Whig Party operator, to national spokesman for and eventual nominee of the newly emerging Republican Party. Waugh presents Lincoln as a special product of mid-century Illinois, that critical swing state, a peculiar amalgam of sophistication and rusticity, of Northern and Southern sensibilities. By 1856, the state had produced only one universally recognized statesman-Stephen A. Douglas, too often portrayed as Lincoln's evil twin, but here rightly regarded as brilliantly able, caught in the same historical vise that held Lincoln fast: how to succeed politically in the face of a single explosive issue, slavery, thatthreatened to sunder the union. The author is especially good on the Lincoln/Douglas dynamic, following their parallel careers from their battles as young lawyers in Springfield to their epic 1858 senate race, to the presidential contest of 1860. In the end, Lincoln's sometimes slow but always careful reasoning, his eloquence and, above all, his ceaseless ambition brought him to power where his talent proved, indeed, great enough to ensure the republic's survival. Unlikely to impress jaded Lincoln devotees, but sure to charm newcomers. Agent: Mike Hamilburg/The Mitchell J. Hamilburg Agency

Prologue: The Uncoiling of the Serpent     1
Who He Was and Where He Came From     5
The Dark and Bloody Ground     7
The Hoosier Years     11
Making His Way     21
New Salem     23
Politics     33
Vandalia     39
The Issue's Dark Side     47
Death in Alton     49
Political Enemies and Female Enigmas     61
Springfield     63
Young Hickory     73
The Ballyhoo Campaign     85
Lincoln in Love     105
On the National Stage     117
The Steam Engine in Breeches and the Engine that Knew No Rest     119
"Who Is James K. Polk?"     129
Laying Congressional Pipe     143
Seeing Spots     153
Eclipse     165
Lincoln's Other Life     167
What He Had Become     183
Tempest     193
Clash of the Giants     201
Lincoln Emerges     203
Political Earthquake     221
At the Crossroads     233
Axe Handles and Wedges     239
A House Divided     249
The Debates     265
On the Glory Road     285
Spreading the Gospel     287
Cooper Union     295
Reaching for the Brass Ring     309
Chicago     319
From Ballots to Bullets     339
The Four Legged Race     341
Firebell in the Night     359
Getting There     377
The War Comes     397
Epilogue: Twilight of the Little Giant     413
In Appreciation     419
Notes     422
Sources Cited     455
Index     464

Freud and the Non European or Imaginary Weapons

2009-02-04T16:09:00.000-08:00

Freud and the Non-European

Author: Edward W Said

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

Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld

Author: Sharon Weinberger

How did a fluke experiment in 1998, involving a used dental X-ray machine and a dubious sample of radioactive material, become the Pentagon's pet weapons project? It had been rejected by one of the Pentagon's most important advisory groups, but the Pentagon found an eccentric scientist who believed that a super "isomer" bomb could be built, and deliver the punch of a two-kiloton nuke packaged in a hand grenade. Ideologues at the Pentagon claimed that the Russians were in the process of building one of their own, and that the weapon was essential to the Pentagon's arsenal. Imaginary Weapons tells the story of the battle that ensued, pitting the nation's leading nuclear physicists against the Pentagon's top brass, and the military against nuclear arms control advocates, as funds and experiments for the "isomer weapon" miraculously reappeared even after the project had been shelved numerous times, even by Congress. This book also illuminates the dangerous trend that the Bush administration continues to follow of putting politics before science. The bomb is imaginary, and the only explosion produced by the "isomer weapon" will leave a hole in the nation's budget and a fallout of the nation's best and brightest scientists.

Publishers Weekly

The Pentagon's fascination with fringe science is old news, writes veteran defense reporter Weinberger in this incisive study, but the Bush administration has pushed it to new levels of wackiness. After reviewing our government's pursuit of antimatter weapons, psychics and telepathy, she focuses on a "nuclear hand grenade" that may cost billions and seems certain to fail. Before the War on Terror and the avalanche of government money for advanced new weapons, few paid attention to physicists who said they could harness the energy of unstable atomic nuclei, or "isomers," through a wildly expensive process involving atomic reactors. But in recent years, a group of fringe scientists aided by defense industry insiders has convinced the Pentagon that America's post-9/11 survival depends on developing an isomer bomb. While proponents compare it to the Manhattan Project, opponents point out that independent researchers have not been able to duplicate the results attained by isomer enthusiasts, and that many assumptions behind the bomb contradict the laws of physics. Though Congress canceled isomer bomb development in 2004, the Department of Energy found $5 million to continue the research. (July 1) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

	Prologue : the gateway
1	Mickey Mouse's hand grenade	1
2	From Romania with love	11
3	The secret life of the isomer weapon	23
4	Deep in the heart of Los Alamos	39
5	The dental X-ray goes to war	51
6	Do you believe in isomers?	65
7	Hafnium comes to Washington	83
8	Scary things come in small packages	95
9	Isomers hit prime time	129
10	A bomb and a prayer	137
11	The mother of all dirty bombs	159
12	Fringe science takes flight	191
13	Welcome to the far side	217
14	Boom or bust	229
	Epilogue : a hafnium ending	251

Agendas and Instability in American Politics or Lincoln the Lawyer

2009-02-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Agendas and Instability in American Politics

Author: Frank R Baumgartner

In this innovative account of the way policy issues rise and fall on the national agenda—the first detailed study of so many issues over an extended period—Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones show that rapid change not only can but does happen in the hidebound institutions of government.

Short-term, single-issue analyses of public policy, the authors contend, give a narrow and distorted view of public policy as the result of a cozy arrangement between politicians, interest groups, and the media. Baumgartner and Jones upset these notions by focusing on several issues—including civilian nuclear power, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety—over a much longer period of time to reveal patterns of stability alternating with bursts of rapid, unpredictable change.

A welcome corrective to conventional political wisdom, Agendas and Instability revises our understanding of the dynamics of agenda-setting and clarifies a subject at the very center of the study of American politics.

New interesting textbook: Ex Boyfriend Cookbook or The New York Times Passover Cookbook

Lincoln the Lawyer

Author: Brian R Dirck

What the law did to and for Abraham Lincoln, and its important impact on his future presidency

Despite historians' focus on the man as president and politician, Abraham Lincoln lived most of his adult life as a practicing lawyer. It was as a lawyer that he fed his family, made his reputation, bonded with Illinois, and began his political career. Lawyering was also how Lincoln learned to become an expert mediator between angry antagonists, as he applied his knowledge of the law and of human nature to settle one dispute after another. Frontier lawyers worked hard to establish respect for the law and encourage people to resolve their differences without intimidation or violence. These were the very skills Lincoln used so deftly to hold a crumbling nation together during his presidency.

The growth of Lincoln's practice attests to the trust he was able to inspire, and his travels from court to court taught him much about the people and land of Illinois. Lincoln the Lawyer explores the origins of Lincoln's desire to practice law, his legal education, his partnerships with John Stuart, Stephen Logan, and William Herndon, and the maturation of his far-flung practice in the 1840s and 1850s. Brian Dirck provides a context for law as it was practiced in mid-century Illinois and evaluates Lincoln's merits as an attorney by comparison with his peers. He examines Lincoln's clientele, his circuit practice, his views on legal ethics, and the supposition that he never defended a client he knew to be guilty. This approach allows readers not only to consider Lincoln as he lived his life--it also shows them how the law was used and developed in Lincoln's lifetime,how Lincoln charged his clients, how he was paid, and how he addressed judge and jury.

Stephen K. Shaw - Library Journal

Dirck (history & political science, Anderson Univ., Indiana; Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809–1865) takes full advantage of the published Lincoln Legal Papers Project to produce this necessary and proper addition to Lincoln collections. Focusing on Lincoln's preparation for a career in law and his subsequent law practice, Dirck argues persuasively that Lincoln possessed an attorney's heart (which he intends as a compliment) and that to grapple effectively with Lincoln and his meaning to the American experiment, one must examine what the practice of law did for and to Lincoln. Scrutinizing Lincoln's legal studies, his various legal partnerships, his career in Springfield, and especially the "riding circuit" with other attorneys, Dirck concludes that Lincoln's legal career equipped him with skills and insights appropriate for a successful political career: an ability to assess human nature, seek alliances, forge compromises, and, essentially, create communities that enable democracy to function. A mixture of legal history, legal studies, and political theory, this book abounds with insightful analysis in spite of its relative brevity, especially notable for such an extraordinarily complex individual as Lincoln. Highly recommended for all libraries.

Preface     ix
Acknowledgments     xiii
Introduction     1
"Great God Almighty"     9
The Brethren     33
Promissory Notes     54
The Energy Men     76
The Show     99
Death and the Maidens     120
Storytelling     138
Grease     154
Conclusion     173
Notes     177
Bibliography and Sources     211
Index     221

Treacherous Alliance or Jesus in Beijing

2009-02-02T05:42:00.000-08:00

Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States

Author: Trita Parsi

In this era of superheated rhetoric and vitriolic exchanges between the leaders of Iran and Israel, the threat of nuclear violence looms. But the real roots of the enmity between the two nations mystify Washington policymakers, and no promising pathways to peace have emerged. This book traces the shifting relations among Israel, Iran, and the United States from 1948 to the present, uncovering for the first time the details of secret alliances, treacherous acts, and unsavory political maneuverings that have undermined Middle Eastern stability and disrupted U.S. foreign policy initiatives in the region.

Trita Parsi, a U.S. foreign policy expert with more than a decade of experience, is the only writer who has had access to senior American, Iranian, and Israeli decision makers. He dissects the complicated triangular relations of their countries, arguing that America’s hope for stability in Iraq and for peace in Israel is futile without a correct understanding of the Israeli-Iranian rivalry.

Parsi’s behind-the-scenes revelations about Middle East events will surprise even the most knowledgeable readers: Iran’s prime minister asks Israel to assassinate Khomeini, Israel reaches out to Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War, the United States foils Iran’s plan to withdraw support from Hamas and Hezbollah, and more. This book not only revises our understanding of the Middle East’s recent past, it also spells out a course for the future. In today’s belligerent world, few topics, if any, could be more important.

Interesting textbook: Censorship Inc or Management Economics

Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China

Author: David Aikman

This book details the great unreported story of the Chinese giant and its enormously rapid conversion to Christianity and what this change means to the global balance of power.

Poverty Knowledge or Crucible of Power Second Edit

2009-02-01T00:29:00.000-08:00

Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History

Author: Alice OConnor

Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare. Poverty Knowledge gives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behinmd these very different views of "the poverty problem," in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shpaed poverty research and policy.

Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass." She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide.

The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims.

Contemporary Sociology - Robert F. Kelly

Poverty Knowledge has many strengths. It is a well-written analysis by a historian with substantial experience in the not-for-profit organizations that funded and substantively influenced much of the production of poverty knowledge over the past two decades. O'Connor's historical tracking of the relative influence of sociology, anthropology, and economics, and their paradigms in the production of poverty knowledge will be essential reading for historians of the social and policy sciences.

What People Are Saying

Michael Katz
Alice O'Connor knows more about the social science literature on poverty than any other historian in America. No one has put the whole story together as she has. Her conclusions emerge as nuanced,sophisticated,and sound. Her book is also written with exceptional clarity and grace. It will supercede all other histories of poverty knowledge in the United States that deal with the twentieth century.

Ira Katznelson
There is nothing like this superb history and assessment of systematic social science concerned with poverty. Written by a historian with uncommon vantages on policy ideas,the book powerfully situates what,and how,we know within the dynamics of ideology,power,and interest that have characterized twentieth-century American liberalism. Richly researched and arrestingly composed,it informs policy history as well as options for the future.

William Julius Wilson
Poverty Knowledge is the most important analysis of the evolution of poverty knowledge ever published. Alice O'Connor's book is must reading for those who seek a comprehensive understanding of past and current social science writings on American poverty. Moreover,it provides a new vision that inextricably links the study of poverty to the broader study of political economy. This book will be discussed and debated for many years.

James T. Patterson
In this strongly argued,deeply researched,and very well-written book,Alice O'Connor lays bare the narrowness of social 'science' concerning poverty in American life since the progressive era. Neither liberals nor conservatives escape her informed,tough-minded critique.

Herbert J. Gans
Poverty Knowledge is an insightful and incisive account of poverty research since the nineteenth century. Alice O'Connor's disgust with the use of research to stigmatize the poor comes through powerfully and clearly. Critical history at its best,the book should also be read by sociologists,anthropologists,political scientists,economists,and welfare and antipoverty researchers--as well as teachers in these fields.

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	3
Part 123
Chapter 1.	Origins: Poverty and Social Science in The Era of Progressive Reform	25
Chapter 2.	Poverty Knowledge as Cultural Critique: The Great Depression	55
Chapter 3.	From the Deep South to the Dark Ghetto: Poverty Knowledge, Racial Liberalism, and Cultural "Pathology"	74
Chapter 4.	Giving Birth to a "Culture of Poverty": Poverty Knowledge in Postwar Behavioral Science, Culture, and Ideology	99
Chapter 5.	Community Action	124
Part 2137
Chapter 6.	In the Midst of Plenty: The Political Economy of Poverty in the Affluent Society	139
Chapter 7.	Fighting Poverty with Knowledge: The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Analytic Revolution in Government	166
Chapter 8.	Poverty's Culture Wars	196
Part 3211
Chapter 9.	The Poverty Research Industry	213
Chapter 10.	Dependency, the "Underclass," and a New Welfare "Consensus": Poverty Knowledge for a Post-Liberal, Postindustrial Era	242
Chapter 11.	The End of Welfare and the Case for a New Poverty Knowledge	284
	Notes	297
	Index	359

New interesting textbook: Hospitality or Beard on Food

Crucible of Power, Second Edit

Author: Howard Jones

In this updated edition of Crucible of Power, Howard Jones has included a number of revisions and additions aimed at making the book more attractive to students, teachers, and general readers. A new final chapter brings the story of America's foreign relations as close to the present as possible by focusing on President George W. Bush and his dealing with 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the global war on terrorism. Among other changes, every chapter now has at least one excerpt from a key document of the period, allowing the reader to examine historical evidence firsthand in hopes of providing a feel for the period involved, promoting an understanding of history through the eyes of its participants, and showing how the historian determines the important facts relevant to reconstructing a meaningful narrative.

About the Author:
Howard Jones is University Research Professor of History at the University of Alabama

Americas Constitution or Imperial Tense

2009-01-30T19:17:00.000-08:00

America's Constitution: A Biography

Author: Akhil Reed Amar

In America’s Constitution, one of this era’s most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of one of the world’s great political texts. Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it.

We all know this much: the Constitution is neither immutable nor perfect. Amar shows us how the story of this one relatively compact document reflects the story of America more generally. (For example, much of the Constitution, including the glorious-sounding “We the People,” was lifted from existing American legal texts, including early state constitutions.) In short, the Constitution was as much a product of its environment as it was a product of its individual creators’ inspired genius.

Despite the Constitution’s flaws, its role in guiding our republic has been nothing short of amazing. Skillfully placing the document in the context of late-eighteenth-century American politics, America’s Constitution explains, for instance, whether there is anything in the Constitution that is unamendable; the reason America adopted an electoral college; why a president must be at least thirty-five years old; and why–for now, at least–only those citizens who were born under the American flag can become president.

From his unique perspective, Amar also gives us unconventional wisdom about the Constitution and its significance throughout the nation’s history. For one thing, we see that the Constitution has been farmore democratic than is conventionally understood. Even though the document was drafted by white landholders, a remarkably large number of citizens (by the standards of 1787) were allowed to vote up or down on it, and the document’s later amendments eventually extended the vote to virtually all Americans.

We also learn that the Founders’ Constitution was far more slavocratic than many would acknowledge: the “three fifths” clause gave the South extra political clout for every slave it owned or acquired. As a result, slaveholding Virginians held the presidency all but four of the Republic’s first thirty-six years, and proslavery forces eventually came to dominate much of the federal government prior to Lincoln’s election.

Ambitious, even-handed, eminently accessible, and often surprising, America’s Constitution is an indispensable work, bound to become a standard reference for any student of history and all citizens of the United States.

The New York Times - James Ryerson

Amar does not present a single, unifying argument; his project is too wide-ranging for that. But he does convey a distinctive attitude toward the Constitution, one that manages to be reverential and celebratory without succumbing to the triumphalism that the often breathless tenor of his prose might lead you to expect. ("America's Constitution beckons," reads the book's sonorous opening sentence, "a New World Acropolis open to all.")

Publishers Weekly

You can read the U.S. Constitution, including its 27 amendments, in about a half-hour, but it takes decades of study to understand how this blueprint for our nation's government came into existence. Amar, a 20-year veteran of the Yale Law School faculty, has that understanding, steeped in the political history of the 1780s, when dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation led to a constitutional convention in Philadelphia, which produced a document of wonderful compression and balance creating an indissoluble union. Amar examines in turn each article of the Constitution, explaining how the framers drew on English models, existing state constitutions and other sources in structuring the three branches of the federal government and defining the relationship of the that government to the states. Amar takes on each of the amendments, from the original Bill of Rights to changes in the rules for presidential succession. The book squarely confronts America's involvement with slavery, which the original Constitution facilitated in ways the author carefully explains. Scholarly, reflective and brimming with ideas, this book is miles removed from an arid, academic exercise in textual analysis. Amar evokes the passions and tumult that marked the Constitution's birth and its subsequent revisions. Only rarely do you find a book that embodies scholarship at its most solid and invigorating; this is such a book. Agent, Glen Hartley. (On sale Sept. 13) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

With so much attention surrounding recent Supreme Court decisions and the nominations of the next Supreme Court justice and federal judges, citizens interested in learning more about the intellectual and political origins of the Constitution are fortunate to have this new book as a resource. Amar (Yale Law Sch.; The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction) has written a lucid and truly engaging history of the Constitution and its amendments. The opening chapter reviews the history of the constitutional convention and ratification process with all the drama of Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia or Richard B. Morris's Witness at the Creation. The remaining chapters review each article or amendment, section by section and occasionally word by word, and explain the ideas behind the words, that is, the historical, intellectual, and political knowledge that the framers drew upon and incorporated in the document. In many ways, the work is like an annotated version of the Constitution itself but in essay form. It may also be seen as a lay reader's edition of Philip B. Kurland's five-volume The Founders' Constitution. An excellent book that provides a real service and deserves a wide audience; highly recommended.-Thomas J. Baldino, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A needed explication of a document that all Americans should know-but that few have ever read. Many professors don't assign the Constitution itself in courses in constitutional law. "The running joke," writes Amar (Law/Yale Univ.; The Bill of Rights, 1998), "is that reading the thing would only confuse students." There is reason to think so, for the Constitution has its confusions and contradictions. Yet, as Amar fluently demonstrates, its flaws are its virtues, for the Constitution does work like no other document of its time: It encodes the self-government of a "continental" nation and people and provides an elaborate system of checks and balances not only of the three branches of federal government, but also of the federal government as against the governments of the various states. In the second matter, Amar notes that the states entered the constitutional convention as sovereign entities but ceased to be so after ratification, for the idea that they comprised "a more perfect union" eliminated the possibilities of the unilateralism contained in the Articles of Confederation. The author charts the arguments advanced by federalists and antifederalists on such philisophical issues as the nature of the presidency and the presumed ability of the federal government to end slavery. The ultimate genius of the document, he suggests, has been its ability to embrace both the will of the state and the will of the people-the "we the people" who demanded more jury safeguards, for instance, than the original Article III offered, and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, and progressive taxation. Among amendments to consider now, he remarks, is a recasting of the rules of succession: "Much asAmericans responded to the tragedy of November 22, 1963 by revising the Constitution's succession system, so Americans in the wake of September 11, 2001 have good reason to rethink our statutory succession system before tragedy strikes again." Data-rich, but seldom ponderous.

Interesting book: Tai CHI according to the I Ching or Scale down Live It up Wellness Workbook

Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire

Author: Andrew J Bacevich

Bacevich has drawn together a stimulating collection of arguments on a subject of compelling current importance.

New York Review of Books

The essays collected...are a curious amalgam of military hubris and cultural anxiety: they dutifully document both America's truly awesome military reach and the widespread national uncertainty about what to do with it.

Virginia Quarterly Review

He has done the ongoing debate about America's role in the world a great service by bringing these pieces together in a convenient package.

Publishers Weekly

There's a host of issues surrounding the U.S. and what many see as its empire as it pushes to confront terrorism-and this balanced collection of mostly scholarly articles addresses many of them. For the most part, the pieces are nuanced, examining subtleties in a world where the U.S. is the sole global power. There are no epiphanies, but pieces discuss such topics as how the U.S. can both confront authoritarian regimes and promote human rights, how American policy should change in order to prevent a further international backlash and whether the U.S. is doomed to fall, like previous empires. Some of the articles gathered by Bacevich (American Empire) hew to familiar arguments-a few, like journalist Charles Krauthammer, argue unabashedly for American power; others seem stuck in a pompous, crude anti-Americanism, as when John Millbank calls on the West "to abandon our global idolatrous worship of sacralized absolute sovereignty, and the formally neutral market." But these pieces are the exceptions. To the editor's credit, the essays appear to be carefully chosen, with an equal number critical and accepting of America's increasing global power. At their best, they display a measure of wit, as when one essayist writes: "Whatever its fate, America, too, will live on-for its Constitution, its movies, and for having placed the first man on the moon." (Sept. 26) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

David Pryce-Jones
Bacevich has performed a valuable service.

Walter Lafeber
First-rate...a most valuable collection.

Richard H. Kohn
This captivating collection addresses the most important issue facing the United States in the coming century. (Richard H. Kohn, University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Former Chief Of Air Force History For The U.S.A.F. (1981-1991))

	Introduction
I	Back to an Imperial Future?
	America's Responsibility, America's Mission	5
	Liberal Imperialism	10
	In Defense of Empires	29
	The Unipolar Era	47
	America's Driver for World Domination	66
II	The Nature of American Empire
	The New Rome	81
	New Rome, New Jerusalem	93
	Universal Nation	102
	Playground Bully	111
	In Search of Absolute Security	119
	An Empire Unlike Any Other	134
	What Empire?	146
III	Imperial Strategies
	Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror	159
	Sheriff and Missionary	172
	Imperial Ambitions	183
	Imperial Limits	202
	Imperial Choices	211
IV	Imperial Prospects
	A Citizen's Response	229
	The Empire's Coming Crisis	238
	Who Will Do the Dirty Work?	245
	Index	261

The Massacre at el Mozote or 1967

2009-01-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

The Massacre at el Mozote

Author: Mark Danner

In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army's select, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women, and children, often by decapitation. Although reports of the massacre — and photographs of its victims — appeared in the United States, the Reagan administration quickly dismissed them as propaganda. In the end, El Mozote was forgotten. The war in El Salvador continued, with American funding.

When Mark Danner's reconstruction of these events first appeared in The New Yorker, it sent shock waves through the news media and the American foreign-policy establishment. Now Danner has expanded his report into a brilliant book, adding new material as well as the actual sources. He has produced a masterpiece of scrupulous investigative journalism that is also a testament to the forgotten victims of a neglected theater of the cold war.

Publishers Weekly

Based in large part on his extensive account published in the December 6, 1993, issue of the New Yorker , National Magazine Award winner Danner's engrossing study reconstructs events that took place some dozen years before. In December 1981, over 750 men, women and children were killed in El Mozote, El Salvador, and the surrounding hamlets. Although at the time it was covered on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post , the reports were not enough to derail Ronald Reagan's push to prove that the El Salvadoran government was ``making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.'' Why the government chose to ignore stories in the nation's two leading newspapers is one part of Danner's sad, well-researched book. The other is why El Mozote was attacked at all. Populated by evangelical Christians who, unlike Catholic neighbors fed on liberation theology, did not abet the rebel FMLN, the people of El Mozote believed they would be spared when the army decided to wipe out insurgents and their supporters. After several days of brutal rapes and murders, a handful of people managed to escape to the rebels, setting in motion press reports and the under-investigated, coyly couched American embassy reply that allowed the U.S. to continue its massive subsidies. Danner has disinterred an event that is an equal indictment of Salvadoran brutality and American blindness. (May)

Library Journal

In October 1992, the international community was shocked to hear of the recovery from shallow graves of 25 bodies, all but two of them children, near the ruined church of Santa Catarina in the village of El Mozote, El Salvador. Shortly thereafter, another 100 corpses were discovered elsewhere in the village. After 11 years of investigation, political pressure, and intense lobbying efforts by human rights groups, civil libertarians, and concerned individuals, the truth of what really happened in 1981 in this remote Salvadoran village finally began to emerge, a flashback to the infamous My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War. The situation in El Mozote was similar: villagers caught in the political crossfire between rival groups during a brutal war, trying to remain on friendly terms with their own soldiers while fearing to alienate the opposition. Danner's well-written account, which first appeared in The New Yorker and has been expanded here, does a good job of presenting evidence based on eyewitness accounts and reveals the callousness of U.S. Central American policy (the killers were American-trained soldiers of the Salvadoran Army). Especially recommended for Latin American collections.-Philip Y. Blue, Dowling Coll. Lib., Oakdale, N.Y.

Book about: Shaking up Parkinson Disease or Molecules at an Exhibition

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East

Author: Tom Segev

“A marvelous achievement . . . Anyone curious about the extraordinary six days of Arab-Israeli war will learn much from it.”—The Economist

Tom Segev’s acclaimed One Palestine, Complete and The Seventh Million overturned accepted views of the history of Israel. Now, in 1967, he brings his masterful skills to the watershed year when six days of war reshaped the country and the entire region.

Going far beyond a military account, Segev re-creates the apocalyptic climate in Israel before the war as well as the country’s bravado after its victory. He introduces the legendary figures—Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Lyndon Johnson—and an epic cast of soldiers, lobbyists, refugees, and settlers. He reveals as never before Israel’s intimacy with the White House, and the political rivalries that sabotaged any chance of peace. Above all, Segev challenges the view that the war was inevitable, showing that behind the bloodshed was a series of disastrous miscalculations.

Vibrant and original, 1967 is sure to stand as the definitive account of that pivotal year.

The New York Times - Ethan Bronner

You need not agree with Mr. Segev's conclusions on how things could have been done differently to benefit from his research and narrative … Mr. Segev makes a compelling and fresh case that the war was at least partly a result of a delicate and vulnerable moment in Israeli history, and his exploration of that moment is — while too long — persuasive and engaging.

The New York Times Book Review - David Margolick

Segev's look into the origins of the occupation is invaluable. His research is prodigious, his intelligence obvious, his ability to reconstruct complex chains of events impressive. He writes clearly and confidently and has an eye for the telling, and often witty, detail.

Foreign Affairs

The author of One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate has written another masterful history. In this case, he covers not a quarter century but roughly a year: the run-up to the June 1967 war, the six days of combat, and the immediate aftermath. Although the actions, and inactions, of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the United States, and others are duly recorded, Segev sticks essentially to the Israeli side of the story, providing a dramatic day-by-day narrative of individual Israelis, the public, and the politicians responding to the crisis set off when Nasser sent troops into the Sinai and announced a blockade of the Strait of Tiran. Segev depicts a cautious old-guard political leadership, seeking to avoid war, or at least postpone war until tangible international support was assured, but ultimately bowing to the demands for an immediate strike by the military leadership (which came to the brink of considering a coup). His carefully drawn portraits of the civilian and military leaders, warts and all, make for an interpretation of "the year that transformed the Middle East" that is less than epic and borders on the tragic. The final section of this big book is tellingly entitled "They Thought They Had Won."<

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

A lucid history of a year that began in agony and self-doubt and ended with a nation made powerful and purposeful. In the mid-1960s, writes Ha'aretz columnist Segev (One Palestine, Complete, 2000, etc.), most Israelis were convinced that the Arab nations surrounding them would one day resume their goal of destroying Israel, and, moreover, "that Israelis could offer nothing to induce them to recognize the state and make peace." At home, Israelis found a fresh enemy in new militant and terrorist Palestinian organizations-but also in inflation and an economy guaranteed to frustrate anyone seeking to grow rich, or even make a living. Televisions and autos were new to many; so was Coca-Cola, that seal of modernity's approval. Israelis, writes Segev, were cautious but enthusiastic travelers, always glad to huddle with other Israelis abroad; yet at home there were considerable divisions and inequalities, political and economic, between Ashkenazi and Sephardim. In short, the nation was undergoing a crisis of confidence fueled by very real threats, but also existential ones. The broad-front attack by Egypt and Syria (and soon Jordan) changed much of that, unifying the nation-and revealing some of the hidden quirks that shape history but are seldom described, such as Ezer Weizman's response to that Jordanian attack. "Israel could have responded by defeating the Jordanian army without taking the West Bank and Jerusalem," Segev charges, but did so because Weizman felt it necessary to humiliate King Hussein. Elsewhere, Segev chronicles war crimes on the part of the Israeli army, documents failed intelligence that cost many lives and recounts unseemly demands on the part of LBJ, all of which add to theoverall newsworthiness of this fine book. What is clear is that Israeli resolve grew-and became more rigid-as a direct result of the 1967 war, which, Segev notes in closing, had a "troublesome permanency; everything that would now happen occurred in its shadow."Absorbing and convincing: an exemplary work of journalistic history. Agent: Deborah Harris/Harris/Elon Literary Agency

At Americas Gates or Criminal Investigation

2009-01-28T08:52:00.000-08:00

At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

Author: Erika Le

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants.
At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before.
Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

Read also The Age Free Zone or Your Heart

Criminal Investigation

Author: James Gilbert

With interest in criminal investigation at an all time high, the newest edition of this popular text is particularly useful. One of the most comprehensive reviews of the investigative process available, it covers the fascinating history and future implications of field. A thorough discussion of cutting-edge investigative methods and technology employed to combat emerging crimes prepares readers to enter the next generation of criminal investigation. Using detailed crime scene examples, it links specific investigative techniques and laboratory techniques that are most effective for each particular crime. Relevant websitesclose each chapter to guide readers to the wealth of Internet resources. Full discussion of methods and technology such as Low Copy DNA, the expanding federal DNA database (CODIS), ballistic fingerprinting, face recognition systems and biometrics.Features a variety of jobs such as a criminal profiler, ATF Special Agent, Gang Investigator, etc. to provide insight into individual job duties and case incidents. Complete exploration of narcotics and dangerous drug investigation. Includes detailed crime laboratory techniques. Links investigative techniques with all major types of property and violent crime. Covers emerging types of criminal activity such as consumer fraud, identity theft, computer crime, stalking, cyberstalking, hate crimes, and the latest drug crimes. Serves as excellent resource for those currently in law enforcement.

Booknews

An introduction for students or practitioners of law enforcement with no prior knowledge of investigation. Develops an analytical understanding of the investigation process by merging theoretical and practical aspects. Between chapters on history and prospects, legally defines each commonly encountered major crime and discusses it in terms of current status, offender characteristics, and investigative techniques. First published in 1980 by Bell & Howell, and updated here from the 1993 Prentice-Hall edition. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

An analytic understanding of the investigative process is the desired goal of this text, achieved through merging theoretical and proven practical aspects of crime detection and solution. This is an appropriate introductory text for students; it's also designed to serve as a reference for law enforcement practitioners. The fifth edition covers newly emerging crimes such as computer crimes, stalking, cyberstalking, gangs, and hate crimes; there is comprehensive treatment of the investigation of narcotics and dangerous drugs, behavioral profiling, crime laboratory techniques, and crime-specific investigative techniques. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ch. 1	Historical origins of criminal investigation	1
Ch. 2	Introduction of basic concepts	31
Ch. 3	The investigative method	48
Ch. 4	Note-taking and reports	66
Ch. 5	The crime scene focus	78
Ch. 6	Interviewing	100
Ch. 7	Traditional sources of information	131
Ch. 8	Computer-aided investigations and computer crime	153
Ch. 9	Burglary	173
Ch. 10	Robbery	208
Ch. 11	Homicide and aggravated assault	236
Ch. 12	Rape and sexual offenses	282
Ch. 13	Larceny	309
Ch. 14	Narcotics and drug investigations	343
Ch. 15	Youth gang investigations	393
Ch. 16	Special investigations	407
Ch. 17	Suspect identification	441
Ch. 18	The investigator in court	467
Ch. 19	The future of criminal investigation	477

Abortion and Life or Our Undemocratic Constitution

2009-01-27T03:37:00.000-08:00

Abortion and Life

Author: Jennifer Baumgardner

"In her role as author and activist, Jennifer Baumgardner has permanently changed the way people think about feminism . . . and will shape the next hundred years of politics and culture."-The Commonwealth Club of California, hailing Baumgardner as one of Six Visionaries for the Twenty-First Century

"If Jennifer Baumgardner ever needs another mom, I'll be the first in line to adopt her. She's smart, fearless, and a formidable force for change."-Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

In Abortion & Life, author and activist Jennifer Baumgardner reveals how the most controversial and stigmatized Supreme Court decision of our time cuts across eras, classes, and race. Stunning portraits by photographer Tara Todras-Whitehill of folk singer Ani DiFranco, authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Gloria Steinem, and others accompany their elucidating accounts of their own abortion experiences.

In this bold new work, Baumgardner explores some of the thorniest issues around terminating a pregnancy, including the ones that the pro-choice establishment has been the least sensitive or effective in confronting.

Jennifer Baumgardner is the producer/creator of the award-winning film I Had an Abortion. She is the co-author (with Amy Richards) of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism (both Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her most recent book is Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics (FSG, 2007). She writes regularly for women's magazines like Glamour, Elle, and Allure, as well as more political outlets such as TheNation, Harper's, and NPR's All Things Considered. She lives in New York City.

Publishers Weekly

Activist, filmmaker (of I Had an Abortion) and co-author (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future) Baumgardner dedicates her work to spreading awareness about abortion. Graced with black and white photo portraits by Tara Todras-Whitehill of women wearing Baumgardner's shirt, reading simply "I had an abortion," the emphasis is on the testimony of these patients, revealing not only how common the procedure is (one in three women, according to the Guttmacher Institute) but how diverse those women and their situations are. Baumgardner begins with a brief history of abortion legislation in America, from pre-Roe v. Wade restrictions to clinic workers and doctors protested, threatened and murdered (as in the case of Buffalo doctor Barnett Slepian). Still, as Baumgardner says, it's the record of "our lives that might provide the best road map to strengthening women's reproductive freedoms." Included is a comprehensive listing of abortion resources, and 10 percent of the book's profits go to the New York Abortion Access Fund.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Ch. 5 Portraits and Stories of Women Who've Had Abortions: Florence Rice, Gloria Steinem, Sally Aldrich, Barbara Ehrenreich, Marion Banzhaf, Loretta Ross, Jackie Wos, Gillian Aldrich, Amy Richards, George Monos and Denise Oswald, Ani DiFranco, Sebastiana Correa, A'yen Tran, Robin Ringleka, and Jenny Egan 73

Ch. 6 Let's Talk 131

Afterword: Truth to Power 141

Resource Guide 145

Appendix 167

Interesting textbook: The Thyroid SourceBook or Taoist Meditation

Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)

Author: Sanford Levinson

Levinson argues that too many of our Constitution's provisions promote either unjust or ineffective government. Under the existing blueprint, we can neither rid ourselves of incompetent presidents nor assure continuity of government following catastrophic attacks. Less important, perhaps, but certainly problematic, is the appointment of Supreme Court judges for life. Adding insult to injury, the United States Constitution is the most difficult to amend or update of any constitution currently existing in the world today. Democratic debate leaves few stones unturned, but we tend to take our basic constitutional structures for granted. Levinson boldly challenges the American people to undertake a long overdue public discussion on how they might best reform this most hallowed document and construct a constitution adequate to our democratic values.

"Admirably gutsy and unfashionable."
--Michael Kinsley, The New York Times

"Bold, bracingly unromantic, and filled with illuminating insights. He accomplishes an unlikely feat, which is to make a really serious argument for a new constitutional convention, one that is founded squarely on democratic ideals."
--Cass R. Sunstein, The New Republic

"Everyone who cares about how our government works should read this thoughtful book."
--Washington Lawyer

Administrative Law for Public Managers or Battle for Social Security

2009-01-25T22:17:00.000-08:00

Administrative Law for Public Managers

Author: David Rosenbloom

This book focuses on the essentials that public managers should know about administrative law—why we have administrative law, the constitutional constraints on public administration, and administrative law’s frameworks for rulemaking, adjudication, enforcement, transparency, and judicial and legislative review. Rosenbloom views administrative law from the perspectives of administrative practice, rather than lawyering with an emphasis on how various administrative law provisions promote their underlying goal of improving the fit between public administration and U.S. democratic-constitutionalism. Organized around federal administrative law, the book explains the essentials of administrative law clearly and accurately, in non-technical terms, and with sufficient depth to provide readers with a sophisticated, lasting understanding of the subject matter.

New interesting textbook: Teams or Toward a Global Business Confederation

Battle for Social Security: From FDR's Vision To Bush's Gamble

Author: Nancy J Altman

This book illuminates the politics and policy of the current struggle over Social Security in light of the program's compelling history and ingenious structure. After a brief introduction describing the dramatic response of the Social Security Administration to the 9/11 terrorist attack, the book recounts Social Securityâs lively history. Although President Bush has tried to convince Americans that Social Security is designed for the last century and unworkable for an aging population, readers will see that the President's assault is just another battle in a longstanding ideological war. Prescott Bush, the current Presidentâs grandfather, remarked of FDR, "The only man I truly hated lies buried in Hyde Park." The book traces the continuous thread leading from Prescott Bush and his contemporaries to George W. Bush and others who want to undo Social Security. The book concludes with policy recommendations which eliminate Social Security's deficit in a manner consistent with the program's philosophy and structure.

The Washington Post - Robert G. Kaiser

The context provided by Altman, who chairs the Pension Rights Center's board, may actually offer the best single explanation for Bush's humiliating failure to "reform" Social Security or even build significant support for his ideas. As she demonstrates, the Social Security program has become a pillar of American life that supports millions of Americans -- one that we take for granted, like death and taxes.

Library Journal

Social Security is still the most relied-upon government program, and one hotly contested by many conservatives. Enacted in 1935 to deal with unemployment, disability, and poverty-especially among the elderly-it included unemployment relief and a longer-term program that grew into compulsory old-age retirement insurance. Politicians have railed at it, boosted benefits before elections, and fought ideological battles as to whether the government should provide insurance at all. Each time Social Security was in "crisis," a consensus was forged to restore its fiscal health. In this timely book, Altman (Harvard Law Sch.), who assisted Alan Greenspan in 1983's Social Security amendments, provides a detailed and fascinating look at the birth, development, and currently endangered status of Social Security, directing fire at President Bush's efforts to undermine Social Security with private accounts, noting that at no time in the past 70 years has any President proposed changes that could destroy it. Private accounts would do nothing about projected deficits, he says, but they would cause benefit cuts both in old-age payments and in programs that aid disabled workers and families that have lost a breadwinner. Altman concludes by offering suggestions that would remedy Social Security's shortfall and ensure that it remains a program of social insurance for all Americans. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-Duncan Stewart, Univ. of Iowa Libs., Iowa City Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Chapter 1: From the Poorhouse to Free Parking.

Chapter 2: Social Security’s Grandfather.

Chapter 3: Essential Insurance, Poor Welfare.

Chapter 4: Bold Woman, Cautious Men.

Chapter 5: A Teeny-Weeny Bit of Socialism.

Chapter 6: Dirty Tricks.

Chapter 7: Ready, Set, Start Again.

Chapter 8: Dr. Win-the-War Replaces Old Dr. New Deal.

Chapter 9: Third Time’s the Charm.

Chapter 10: All American Program (Minus a Tiny Splinter Group).

Chapter 11: Visible Gains, Subterranean Tremors.

Chapter 12: The Sky is Falling and Social Security Is Bust.

Chapter 13: Aging Gracefully.

Chapter 14: A Leninist Strategy.

Chapter 15: The Drumbeat Finds a Drummer.

Chapter 16: The Ideal, Pain-Free (For Almost Everyone) Way to Strengthen Social Security.

Chapter 17: From FDR's Vision to Busg's Gamble.

Acknowledgments.

Notes.

Recommended Reading.

Index.

Mastering Windows Network Forensics and Investigation or Conscience of a Liberal

2009-01-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

Mastering Windows Network Forensics and Investigation

Author: Steve Bunting

This comprehensive guide provides you with the training you need to arm yourself against phishing, bank fraud, unlawful hacking, and other computer crimes. Two seasoned law enforcement professionals discuss everything from recognizing high-tech criminal activity and collecting evidence to presenting it in a way that judges and juries can understand. They cover the range of skills, standards, and step-by-step procedures you’ll need to conduct a criminal investigation in a Windows environment and make your evidence stand up in court.

New interesting textbook: Six Sigma Quality Improvement with MINITAB or Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5

Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda

Author: Paul Wellston

"Never separate the lives you live from the words you speak,” Paul Wellstone told his students at Carleton College, where he was professor of political science.

Wellstone has lived up to his words as the most liberal man in the United States Senate, where for the past decade he has been the voice for improved health care, education, reform, and support for children. In this folksy and populist memoir, Wellstone explains why the politics of conviction are essential to democracy.

Through humor and heartfelt stories, Paul Wellstone takes readers on an unforgettable journey (in a school bus, which he used to campaign for door-to-door) from the fields and labor halls of Minnesota to the U.S. Senate, where he is frequently Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott’s most vocal nemesis. Along the way, he argues passionately for progressive activism, proves why all politics is personal, and explains why those with the deepest commitment to their beliefs win.

Wall Street Journal

Wellstone promised to be what Washingtonians always say their city desperately needs: a colorful character. No one was disappointed. He still considers himself an activist, and his book reads like the work of an activist.

National Journal

A call to arms aimed at politically like-minded Americans, time and again The Conscience of a Liberal argues that a grassroots movement of progressives can defy the odds.

Washington Monthly

Wellstone relishes the role of the lonely hero taking on powerful bullies, and irritates his jaded colleagues with his stubborn stand on principles.

Publishers Weekly

Minnesota Senator Wellstone opens this memoir with his attendance at the funeral service of archconservative Barry Goldwater. Wellstone was there because as a boy he had read Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. Paradoxically, he credits his admiration for Goldwater's political integrity with providing the moral basis for his own liberalism. And he is very liberal, indeed. After reading this lucid and personal book, however, even those of opposite views would find it hard not to admire him. Wellstone presents two propositions. The first, that integrity in politics is essential, will be widely applauded. The second, that liberal political values reflect mainstream American values, will receive a mixed reception. At the core of this account is Wellstone's desire to mobilize voters to organize around issues he believes important to the country's well-being. The litany of societal problems addressed is broad and includes health care, education and testing, economic justice (welfare reform) and campaign finance reform. About each, Wellstone provides cogent and thought-provoking facts, figures and expert opinions, as well as personal stories that humanize the damage and loss of human potential he sees flowing from current public policies. He also offers solutions consistent with his view that government is capable of making a positive difference. The book is, for the most part, pleasantly free of partisan invective; his criticisms are generally oblique. Wellstone's 1996 Senate campaign adds drama. The only senator facing reelection who voted against welfare reform, he survived an extremely negative campaign, even by modern standards. Many readers will be glad he did. (May 22) Forecast: With millions of voters disappointed that their man barely (and, some would argue, unfairly) lost the recent presidential election, Wellstone offers reassurance that liberal values are still alive and well in Washington. As he tours New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles, along with his home state, the senator will surely attract die-hard liberal readers with his concise but thoughtful tome. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An inspiriting call for active citizen politics from Minnesota Senator Wellstone, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose passion for participatory politics is as enlivening as a breath of fresh air and as heart-gladdening as all things generous, inclusive, and discerning have a way of being. Wellstone's is a politics of compassion, in pursuit of "affordable child care, good education for children, health security, living-wage jobs that will support families, respect for the environment and human rights, and clean elections and clean campaigns," for he is a devout believer in electoral politics. His book is anecdotally rich, not in the manner of self-serving testimonials, but rather as examples of how politics can work on the local, personal level, outside the ridiculous folkways of the Senate floor, where issues give way to maneuvering. He is not content here to simply provide a laundry list of American governmental failures—many of which stem from economic injustices, in his opinion—but he endeavors to convey a sense of how grassroots organizing and participatory democracy ("the challenge is to make a place for all Americans at the decision-making table") can educate an electorate still firmly behind the Bill of Rights to demand action on all fronts, from true welfare reform, where market forces aren't left to tend the hen house, to agricultural subsidies going where they are most needed, rather than agribusinesses. He provides insights into the pathetic defeat of health-care reform, a sobering portrait of how the Senate works, and why stumping in the hustings is not just effective politics (his own campaign is a worthy example), but fundamental to democracy. Wellstone also has aremarkable way of making what sounds naïve in other mouths sound sincere and realizable from his: "Politics is not about money and power games. It is about improving people's lives, about making our country better." Running counter to the tide, Wellstone's progressive, populist voice is as rare and bracing as that of our national bird. Author tour

The Revolution Betrayed or Art of Coming Home

2009-01-23T11:52:00.000-08:00

The Revolution Betrayed

Author: Leon Trotsky

Written in 1936 and published the following year, this brilliant and profound evaluation of Stalinism from the Marxist standpoint prophesied the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trotsky employs facts, figures, and statistics to show how Stalinist policies rejected the enormous productive potential of the nationalized planned economy engendered by the October Revolution.

New interesting textbook: Cuidado Dirigido:O que É e Como Ele Trabalha

Art of Coming Home

Author: Craig Storti

Expecting that home will be the way it was when you left? Are you instead shocked to discover that both you and home have changed? The Art of Coming Home offers the solid advice you need to reduce the stress of making the transition home.

Leave-taking, the honeymoon stage, reverse culture shock, and eventual readjustment -- The Art of Coming Home lays out the four stages of the reentry process and details practical strategies for dealing with the challenges you will face each step of the way. Veteran trainer, consultant, and world adventurer Craig Storti sketches the workplace challenges faced by returning business executives as well as the reentry issues of spouses, younger children, and teenagers. He also addresses in detail the special issues faced by exchange students, international volunteers, military personnel and their families, and missionaries and their children.

Whether you are a recent returnee or are just now thinking of moving abroad, The Art of Coming Home sets itself apart as it brings the process of returning home right to the heart of the overseas experience.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

The Challenge Of Living Abroad
Many executives have experienced the combination of anticipation and anxiety as they prepare for a posting abroad. What many executives fail to anticipate is the culture shock they experience on returning home. Cross-cultural specialist Craig Storti addresses these experiences in his clearly written book called The Art of Crossing Cultures.

'It's Not the Heat...'
The expatriate transition will differ greatly, of course, depending on where you are coming from and where you are going. A new and (to the newcomer) uncomfortable climate, doing without ("the list of things 'they don't have here' sometimes seems to have been designed with you personally in mind," Storti notes); the loss of routines; and unfamiliar faces are some of the elements of what Storti labels "country shock."

Country shock, however, is just a sideshow to the main event: culture shock. The weather is one thing. Dealing with "different, deeply held beliefs and instincts about what is natural, normal, right and good" is another.

'The Fried Ants Are Delicious'
The first step in dealing with culture shock, according to Storti, is to abandon expectations of cultural sameness. People in foreign countries are going to act differently. Expatriates must then take steps to learn about the culture around them. They will then come to understand and even expect the behaviors and attitudes of the people in their new country.

"The message of this book," Storti notes, "is not that you must uncritically embrace all local behavior no matter how strange or offensive, but only that you should not reject behaviors before you have understood them."

The result might surprise you. As one foreign aid worker in East Africa wrote, "All in all, [this] is a really nice place to live and work. The people are friendly, the beaches are great, and the fried ants are delicious."

Why Soundview Likes This Book
The Art of Crossing Cultures is typical of the titles published by Intercultural Press, a small Maine publisher that specializes in authoritative, how-to guides on cross-cultural relations. Any person facing the prospect of going abroad would do well to start with this title. Then, request the Intercultural Press catalogue for more detailed guides on specific countries. Copyright (c) 2002 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	xiii
1	Coming Home	1
	The Issues	3
	What the Returnee Can Do	37
2	The Stages of Reentry	45
	Leave-Taking and Departure	47
	The Honeymoon	49
	Reverse Culture Shock	51
	Readjustment	59
3	The Return of the Employee	67
	Issues for the Employee	68
	Issues for the Organization	79
	What the Organization Can Do	82
	What the Employee Can Do	95
	The Stages of Workplace Reentry	98
4	The Return of Spouses and Children	103
	Issues for the Spouse	104
	What Spouses Can Do	111
	Issues for Younger Children	113
	What Parents Can Do for Younger Children	114
	Issues for Teenagers	116
	What Parents Can Do for Teenagers	128
	What Teens Can Do	132
5	Special Populations	137
I.	Exchange Students	138
	The Issues	139
	What Exchange Students and Their Families Can Do	148
II.	International Voluntary Organizations	150
	The Issues	151
	What Returning Volunteers Can Do	158
III.	Military Personnel and Their Families	160
	The Issues	161
	What Military Returnees and Their Families Can Do	169
IV.	Missionaries and Missionary Children	170
	Issues for Missionaries	171
	Issues for Missionary Children	175
	What Missionaries and Their Children Can Do	180
	Epilogue	185
	Useful Resources	189
	Bibliography	193
	Index	199

Turnaround or New Yorks Bravest

2009-01-22T06:39:00.000-08:00

Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games

Author: Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts, built a career turning around troubled companies. As the CEO of Bain Capital and Bain & Company, he and his firm helped propel the success of hundreds of companies, from venture start-ups to the world's largest corporations. In 1999, the Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games Organizing Committee turned to him to take over and run the Salt Lake Olympic Games. Romney was reluctant—and with good reason.

Sullied by scandal, on the brink of financial disaster, and with federal investigators, bankers, and the press at its door, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's senior managers admitted the organization was paralyzed. But Romney had too much American patriotism to let it become a catastrophe for his country. So he accepted the biggest turnaround challenge of his life.

In Turnaround, Romney reveals how he tackled the seemingly insurmountable obstacles facing the Salt Lake Winter Games. In Turnaround, you'll learn how Romney and his management team:

-eliminated a financial crisis and delivered a profitable Olympic Games;
-built a culture of excellence that inspired gold medal performances from the employees;
-skillfully won the support of government officials, corporate sponsors, local residents, athletes and the international Olympic movement.

With Romney at the helm, and through the teamwork, tenacity, and creativity of the staff he assembled and supported, the organizing committee succeeded against the odds in producing one of the finest Olympic Games ever - a proud moment for America, a great installment in Olympic history, and a valuable object lesson in what effective management and leadership can do.

Publishers Weekly

It's not well remembered, but the planned 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics were scandal-ridden and in complete disarray until Romney took over as CEO in early 1999. In this management primer, he makes his rescue job seem very simple: he came in, displayed a positive attitude and hired competent, committed people, and the result was a successful Olympics that few had thought possible. That same attitude is displayed throughout this book, as Romney is quick to credit those around him for the games' success. He's thorough as he details how he revamped the budget, kept costs down and marketed the games to sponsors. His self-deprecating honesty is refreshing and appealing. As he writes after emphasizing the importance of selling the games: "I know there are people out there who love to sell, but it is far from my favorite thing." He's also honest about his criticism of the Salt Lake City leaders who were tainted by their efforts to buy votes from International Olympic Committee members to get the city the games. The same traits that make Romney, now the governor of Massachusetts, an unobtrusive leader don't always serve the book; some readers will want to see more sparks fly. But those looking for a training manual in how to run a high-profile organization will be rewarded. Agent, Mel Berger. (Aug. 4) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Indian Home Cooking or Southern on Occasion

New York's Bravest: Eight Decades of Photographs from the Daily News

Author: Patrice OShaughnessy

On September 11, the world was shown the face of bravery. As one woman so poignantly put it: As we ran out, they ran in. These heroes were doing the job they do each day, protecting more than 8 million residents in the area of 320 square miles that is New York City. That horrible day, we were made heartbreakingly aware of the risks these people take daily; risks their loved ones knew all too well.

First-hand witnesses to the heroism of the FDNY, the photographers of The Daily News knew these risks too. They have been covering the life and death situations the human drama that fire creates since the founding of the The Daily News in 1919.

These seasoned photographers of the Daily News have chased firetrucks in their radio cars since the earliest days of photojournalism, photographing children and animals being rescued from burning buildings, and capturing the disbelief on the faces of those gazing at the remnants of their lives, going up in smoke. These photographers know intimately the faces of those left behind in covering the all too many funerals, mourning with the families a loss felt not only across a city of millions, but acutely within a deeply bonded fraternity across the country.

Culled from the archive of The Daily News, consisting of more than 6 million images, this book represents more than eighty years of the world renowned New York City Fire Department in action, fighting fires, rescuing lives, and bringing peace and order to chaos, fear, and destruction.

In the Fire Department of New York, there are more than 11,400 Fire Officers and Firefighters. In addition, the FDNY includes 2,800 EMS and Paramedics personnel. This book is a tribute to their dedication, bravery, and humanity.

Library Journal

The world discovered New York's firefighters in the thick of their department's greatest single loss and paradoxically one of its greatest achievements-the evacuation of thousands from the burning Trade Center towers. But the courage and skill displayed last September were, argues Golway, the culmination of three centuries of firefighting culture developed doing hazardous work in an increasingly vertical city. Golway is city editor and columnist for the New York Observer and coauthor of The Irish in America, but more to the point for this moving history, he is the son and grandson of New York City firemen and no stranger to the "culture of firefighting." In So Others Might Live, the first full history of the FDNY in 60 years, Golway shows the department's emergence from amateur bucket brigades into the beginnings of a specialized force and up to the present, never letting a memorable figure or vivid moment escape his narrative. The book is simultaneously a social history of the changing city and a dramatic record of the disasters that have assaulted and periodically reshaped it: Manhattan's great fire of 1776 made thousands homeless and leveled a quarter of the city's structures, for instance, while city firefighters played a crucial role during America's worst riot-the draft riots of 1863-before establishing New York's first professional force two years later. Golway's narrative updates a classic history by Costello, Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments Volunteer and Paid, originally published in 1887 and now abridged and republished under a new name. Costello delivers all the sooty romantic lore in high style ("Onward, still onward, swept the fiery bosom of destruction") while detailing the evolution of a firefighting force that is the recognizable progenitor of the one that rushed up into the burning towers. Another worthy companion to Golway's book is New York's Bravest: Eight Decades of Photographs from the Daily News, which records 80 years of New York firefighting through 166 pages of dramatic picture stories-children plucked breathlessly from harm, a building transformed by hosing during a winter fire into a glittering ice palace, the seven-alarm blaze caused by a jet collision over Brooklyn in December 1960-that have been the life's blood of the photo tabloid since its creation in 1919. The book concludes with the department's worst fire of all. "It has been more than two centuries since Benjamin Franklin wrote of the love firefighters had for each other," Golway observes in So Others Might Live. "In the ruins of the Twin Towers, in the memorials for the fallen, in the embraces and salutes and unchanged rituals, the world saw the power of that love."-Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Grants Lieutenants or Sputnik

2009-01-21T01:27:00.000-08:00

Grant's Lieutenants: From Cairo to Vicksburg

Author: Steven E Woodworth

"In the long run, the relationships commanders forge with subordinates are no less important than the decisions they make on a battlefield. Informed, insightful and sometimes surprising, these eleven essays extend and revise our perspective on Grant during the first three years of the Civil War. Highly recommended."—Mark Grimsley, author of The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865

Author Biography: Steven E. Woodworth is associate professor of history at Texas Christian University and author of Jefferson Davis and His Generals, Davis and Lee at War, and While God is Marching On.

Contributors: Stacy D. Allen, Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Blake Dunnavent, William B. Feis, Lesley J. Gordon, Earl J. Hess, John F. Marszalek, Tamara A. Smith, Terrence J. Winschel, Steven E. Woodworth

Sputnik: The Shock of the Century

Author: Paul Dickson

On October 4, 1957, America looked up at the sky and caught its breath. Soaring through space was the Soviet satellite Sputnik. With its launch, the Soviets had won the space race, demonstrated their unsurpassed technology- and struck fear in the heart of a complacent post-war America.

Although Sputnik was unmanned, its story is intensely human. Here, an investigative reporter recounts it all, from the satellite's top-secret creation to the strategic positioning of Soviet spokesmen around the world, which made this the biggest breaking-news event in history. Using declassified documents, Dickson reveals buried Soviet state secrets-and the reason Eisenhower was secretly pleased about the launch. From Cold War bomb raid drills to today's science in the classroom, from the 1960s race to the moon to the birth of the Internet, Sputnik helped shape American life forever

Publishers Weekly

Dickson (The Electronic Battlefield) chronicles in detail the Soviet satellite Sputnik. The Soviet Union was propelled into international prominence on October 4, 1957, by becoming the first nation to successfully launch a satellite, beating the American program by several months. The Soviet spacecraft panicked Americans, who constantly looked up into the sky, spoke in hushed tones and feared that the satellite presaged an atomic attack. President Eisenhower remained calm and tried to lead the country through the media-generated crisis, but the Sputnik "debacle" helped the Democrats in the next election. Dickson chronicles the history of rocket research, including Nazi successes during WWII. American and Soviet troops vied to seize German scientists and hardware. Dickson examines the feuding between the services for control of the space program and candidly exposes the reasons for the lag in American research. Eisenhower gets high marks for his quiet mastery of the situation, pleased that the Soviets were first into space, since that set off a race to improve American education, even as it fueled an outbreak of UFO hysteria. Dickson, whose bibliography runs to 19 pages, completely understands the lure and lore of Sputnik and has done a solid job of synthesizing prior books on the subject. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Space exploration is often portrayed as a U.S.-U.S.S.R. race, with the Soviet Union winning the initial lap by launching Sputnik, the earth's first artificial satellite. Yet as Dickson (The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary) reveals, for the United States, the race was also an internal competition, with the military (particularly Wernher von Braun's rocket team) and the Eisenhower administration grappling for control of the national space program. Eisenhower, who sought to demilitarize space and thereby open the skies to U.S. espionage satellites, eventually triumphed, establishing NASA as a civilian agency and successfully testing a clandestine satellite launch. Focusing on internal rivalries and including pre-Sputnik material, Dickson's book complements Robert A. Divine's The Sputnik Challenge (LJ 3/1/93), which considers the aftermath of Sputnik; James Killian's personal Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (LJ 1/15/78. o.p.); and the scholarly Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (Harwood Academic, 2000; also issued as NASA Technical Memorandum 113448). For public and academic libraries. Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The devastating impact of a Soviet satellite on the American public in the '50s. When Sputnik was put into orbit on October 4, 1957, Leave It to Beaver was first airing on TV. The juxtaposition of these two images-one of Communist technological superiority, the other of American gee-whiz innocence-is journalist Dickson's structural theme here. The US, like the Soviet Union, raided Nazi Germany after 1945, removing scientific equipment and personnel for re-use in the Cold War. That the Soviet Union was the first to exploit this science comes as no surprise to Dickson, who credits Sputnik with giving the complacent US the wakeup call it needed to advance in the space race. American scientists and the US military scoffed at scientist Robert Goddard, who could have vaulted the country in front of all others in the field of rocket technology. While his work was given little support, Germans and Soviets were studying and building on his designs. After the war, as the Americans and Soviets dissected German rockets, the US still didn't take the technology seriously. The army, navy, and air force all had their own missile programs, with the army's team under former Nazi Wernher von Braun probably being the most advanced and the most overlooked. With the launching of Sputnik, everything changed. Whereas US rockets could barely reach the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the Soviet Union had placed in space an object that flew over North America several times a day. In an era when nuclear war seemed imminent, the military saw the importance of such devices for spying on the enemy. Von Braun and others were given the green light. On a larger level, the American public also got into the act: itrejected decadent cars like the Edsel and advocated advanced science curriculums in the schools. The Internet even owes its existence to Sputnik, the author claims-precursors to the Web were created by rocket researchers. An excellent treatment of one of the early chapters of the Cold War.

What People Are Saying

Susan Eisenhower
Dickson's book not only presents a thoughtful analysis of the impact Sputnik had on the dawning of the Space Age, but also serves as a valuable resource for understanding the historical context of the debates now taking place on issues such as National Missile Defense and the future of space.
— Susan Eisenhower, president of the Eisenhower Institute

Walter Cronkite
Paul Dickson's indefatigable research and reportorial lucidity have given us a fascinating history of the event that forever changed our world.

Vinton Cerf
Paul Dickson re-creates the fire, furor, frustration, and flamboyance of the early space age. Sputnik's arrival set off a tidal wave in the affairs of men.
— Vinton Cerf, coinventor of the Internet

Sergei Khrushchev
Sputnik is an insightful look at the way Sputnik changed the world, especially the United States—boosting its education and research (Sergei Khrushchev, author of Nikita Khrushchev; Creation of a Superpower and senior fellow of the Watson Institute of International Studies).

Well written and informative, the book is a magnificent assessment of Cold War history as seen through the advancement of rocketry and space exploration.
— (Francis Gary Powers Jr., founder of the Cold War Museum).

	Introduction	1
1.	Sputnik Night	9
2.	Gravity Fighters	28
3.	Vengeance Rocket	49
4.	An Open Sky	76
5.	The Birth of Sputnik	94
6.	Red Monday	108
7.	Dog Days	134
8.	American Birds	168
9.	Ike Scores	191
10.	Sputnik's Legacy	223
	Epilogue	246
Appendix	Sputnik's Long, Lexical Orbit	249
	Author's Note, Acknowledgments, and Dedication	255
	Notes	258
	Bibliography	276
	Index	294

Scandal of Evangelical Politics or A Second Opinion

2009-01-19T22:35:00.000-08:00

Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World?

Author: Ronald J Sider

Evangelicals today probably have more political influence in the U.S. than at any time in the last century--but they may not be certain what to do with it. It has been difficult to develop a unified voice on pressing issues such as social justice and moral renewal. The Scandal of Evangelical Politics provides evangelical Christians with a systematic political philosophy to guide and sustain political activism. Soundly based in biblical principles and guided by a careful study of society, this book will guide readers into more thoughtful and effective political activity.
Practical, balanced, and nonpartisan, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics will be a welcome resource during the race for the 2008 presidential election.

Publishers Weekly

Sider, author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, offers the most balanced and thoughtful example of the recent spate of books on evangelicals in politics. Rather than telling evangelicals how to vote, he teaches them how to think, using biblical and historical examples as well as contemporary findings to persuade his readers. When evangelicals entered political life in great numbers in the 1970s and '80s, he says, they did so without careful judgment; their approach was "Ready. Fire. Aim." This book can be seen as a kind of remedial course, exploring when and why political action is important for Christians. It offers a methodology of ethical discernment rather than a laundry list of hot-button issues, though Sider does tackle tough questions such as abortion, same-sex marriage, environmentalism and what constitutes a "just" war. While he supports democracy and a free market economy as the two best devices for promoting fundamental human rights for the greatest numbers of people, he argues that Christians need to concern themselves more with "the least of these"-the poor and disabled who often get trampled when materialism is unchecked. Powerful, well-researched and timely, Sider's book has the potential to shape a new generation of evangelical activists. (Feb.)

Library Journal

The "scandal" of Evangelical politics is that there is no comprehensive, consistent Evangelical political philosophy despite extensive Evangelical engagement within politics. Sider (theology, holistic ministry, and public policy, Palmer Theological Seminary) sets out to offer a basic political philosophy that is faithful to Evangelical ideals throughout the political spectrum. This book offers a refreshing willingness to admit the political mistakes of Evangelicals in order to learn from them. The basic question Sider asks is, "What should Evangelicals try to legislate?" He addresses this in two ways. First, he offers a normative framework and methodology based on Evangelical interpretation of biblical principles. Second, he applies this framework to such issues in the Evangelical mindset as the state, justice, human rights, sanctity of life, family, war, environment, and international affairs. Overall, this work represents a worthwhile attempt in seeking a unified Evangelical political voice that is objective and holistic. It is essential reading for American Evangelicals, and it is useful for those trying to understand Evangelical political actions. Recommended for all libraries.-Dann Wigner, Wayland Baptist Univ. Lib., Plainview, TX

Acknowledgments     9
Preface     11
The Scandal of Evangelical Political Engagement
Tragic Failure, New Opportunity     15
A Better Approach
Developing a Faithful Methodology     27
The Biblical Story and Politics     49
Building a Solid Framework: From Biblical Paradigms and Societal Analysis to an Evangelical Political Philosophy
The State: Its Nature, Purpose, and Limits     79
Justice     101
Human Rights, Democracy, and Capitalism     127
The Sanctity of Human Life     145
Marriage and Family     157
Religious Freedom, Church, and State     171
Peacemaking, Just War, and Nonviolence     191
Creation Care     209
Nation-States and International Affairs     219
Loving One's Neighbor through Faithful Political Engagement
Biblical Balance, Historic Opportunity     233
Bibliography     243
Notes     253

New interesting book: Commercio internazionale

A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Healthcare

Author: Arnold S Relman

The U.S. healthcare system is failing. It is run like a business, increasingly focused on generating income for insurers and providers rather than providing care for patients. It is supported by investors and private markets seeking to grow revenue and resist regulation, thus contributing to higher costs and lessened public accountability. Meanwhile, forty-six million Americans are without insurance. Health care expenditures are rising at a rate of 7 percent a year, three times the rate of inflation.

Dr. Arnold Relman is one of the most respected physicians and healthcare advocates in our country. This book, based on sixty years' experience in medicine, is a clarion call not just to politicians and patients but to the medical profession to evolve a new structure for healthcare, based on voluntary private contracts between individuals and not-for-profit, multi-specialty groups of physicians. Physicians would be paid mainly by salaries and would submit no bills for their services. All health care facilities would be not-for-profit. The savings from reduced administrative overhead and the elimination of billing fraud would be enormous. Healthcare may be our greatest national problem, but the provocative, sensible arguments in this book will provide a catalyst for change.

The American Prospect

Arnold Relman has produced a book that is likely the most concise and best analysis of the American health-care debacle now available.

Socialist Worker

A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Health Care makes a concise, convincing case for why we need to eliminate the for-profit health care industry in the U.S. and replace it with a single-payer system.

Publishers Weekly

Relman, a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, offers his diagnosis of what has gone wrong with American health care, along with a radical solution. In clear, eloquent prose, Relman explains how the rush to commercialize medicine harms both physicians and patients. Contrary to free-market dogma, Relman asserts, in medecine the profit imperative "increases costs; it may also jeopardize quality or aggravate the system's inequity." Relman's proposal: a single-payer insurance program supported by an earmarked, progressive health care tax, coupled with a reformed delivery system in which all hospitals would be not-for-profit and most physicians would be salaried employees of not-for-profit prepaid group practices. Relman acknowledges that today's political reality doesn't favor his program. Instead, it is fueling the drive for so-called consumer-driven health care (CDHC); in theory, by forcing consumers to pay for their own health care (for example, through high-deductible catastrophic insurance), CDHC promotes more prudent choices. But Relman calls CDHC "an illusion that bears little resemblance to the realities" for seriously ill patients.. He predicts that in a decade or so, when CDHC has failed to solve the health care crisis, the country may be ready to try his plan. (May 23)

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down or Use of Force

2009-01-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Greatest Closing Arguments Protecting Civil Liberties

Author: Michael S Lief

The second volume in a must-have trilogy of the best closing arguments in American legal history

Every day, Americans enjoy the freedom to decide what we do with our property, our bodies, our speech, and our votes. However, the rights to these freedoms have not always been guaranteed. Our civil rights have been assured by cases that have produced monumental shifts in America's cultural, political, and legal landscapes.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down showcases eight of the most exciting closing arguments in civil law -- from the Amistad case, in which John Quincy Adams brought the injustice of slavery to the center stage of American politics, to the Susan B. Anthony decision, which paved the way to success for women's suffrage, to the Larry Flynt trial, in which the porn king became an unlikely champion for freedom of speech. By providing historical and biographical details, as well as the closing arguments themselves, Lief and Caldwell give readers the background necessary to fully understand these important cases, bringing them vividly to life.

Book review: Windows Server 2008 Server Core or Oracle Database 11g DBA Handbook

Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics

Author: Robert J Art

The fifth edition of this classic text retains the best from earlier editions and adds sixteen new selections that highlight emerging issues, such as NATO expansion, intervention in ethnic conflicts, and the relevance of force in the twenty-first century. Strategies for using force, together with case studies that illustrate the general principles, are hallmarks of the text. A theme that runs throughout the book is the effect of new technologies on military strategy and the utility of force. Praise for previous editions: "The Use of Force" continues to offer a most stimulating blend of contemporary and traditional perspectives on international relations, very valuable for students new to the subject, but essential also for the experienced researcher trying to maintain his or her bearings. The contributions are chosen for their readability and their timelessness. The perspective is always realistic, in the best sense of the term." -George Quester, University of Maryland "A very useful compendium of articles on critical questions of military force in world politics." -Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Harvard University "A very useful and balanced collection that covers many facets of the problem, logically organized by two of the most sensible scholars in the field." -Richard K. Betts, The Brookings Institution

Author Biography: Robert J. Art is professor of international relations at Brandeis University. Kenneth N. Waltz is adjunct professor of political science at Columbia University and research associate of the Institute of War and Peace Studies.

The Future of Reputation or Shanghai Diary

2009-01-19T01:09:00.000-08:00

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

Author: Daniel J Solov

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

Preface     vii
Introduction: When Poop Goes Primetime     1
Rumor and Reputation in a Digital World
How the Free Flow of Information Liberates and Constrains Us     17
Gossip and the Virtues of Knowing Less     50
Shaming and the Digital Scarlet Letter     76
Privacy, Free Speech, and the Law
The Role of Law     105
Free Speech, Anonymity, and Accountability     125
Privacy in an Overexposed World     161
Conclusion: The Future of Reputation     189
Notes     207
Index     237

New interesting book: Name Dropping or NeoVouchers

Shanghai Diary

Author: Ursula Bacon

About the Author

Ursula Bacon is a seasoned author. She has written the popular Nervous Hostess Cookbook and is a publisher and co-founder of BestSeller Consultants Inc..

Kingdom Coming or Age of Reform

2009-01-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism

Author: Michelle Goldberg

"A potent wakeup call to pluralists in the coming showdown with Christian nationalists."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Michelle Goldberg, a senior political reporter for Salon.com, has been covering the intersection of politics and ideology for years. Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. From the classroom to the mega-church to the federal court, she saw how the growing influence of dominionism-the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule nonbelievers-is threatening the foundations of democracy.

In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military retirees pledging to seize the nation in Christ's name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country's social problems.

With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into aChristian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture. In her examination of the ever-widening divide between believers and nonbelievers, Goldberg illustrates the subversive effect of this conservative stranglehold nationwide. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America.

Publishers Weekly

In an impressive piece of lucid journalism, Salon.com reporter Goldberg dives into the religious right and sorts out the history and networks of what to most liberals is an inscrutable parallel universe. She deconstructs "dominion theology," the prevalent evangelical assertion that Christians have a "responsibility to take over every aspect of society." Goldberg makes no attempt to hide her own partisanship, calling herself a "secular Jew and ardent urbanite" who wrote the book because she "was terrified by America's increasing hostility to... cosmopolitan values." This carefully researched and riveting treatise will hardly allay its audience's fears, however; secular liberals and mainstream believers alike will find Goldberg's descriptions of today's culture wars deeply disturbing. She traces the deep financial and ideological ties between fundamentalist Christians and the Republican Party, and discloses the dangers she believes are inherent to the Bush administration's faith-based social services initiative. Other chapters follow inflammatory political tactics on wedge issues like gay rights, evolution and sex education. Significantly, her conclusions do not come off as hysterical or shrill. Even while pointing to stark parallels between fascism and the language of the religious right, Goldberg's vision of America's future is measured and realistic. Her book is a potent wakeup call to pluralists in the coming showdown with Christian nationalists. (May 15) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

American democracy and the Enlightenment itself are menaced by would-be theocrats and their Republican operatives, contends Salon.com reporter Goldberg. The author brands conservative Christian influence in public life as proto-fascist and a Western version of Islamism. In her view, the subversives are everywhere, passing anti-gay-marriage initiatives and lobbying for anti-abortion judges; more subversives are on the way, because homeschooling is simply an incubator for revolution. The menace is "Christian nationalism," a movement whose tenets Goldberg seeks to relate to the Reconstructionist theology of the late R.J. Rushdoony. He was a genuine theocrat, a postmillennialist who held that Christ would return after believers had thoroughly Christianized the world. In contrast, premillennial American evangelicals hold that Christ will return to a collapsing world, which implies that political reform by believers would ultimately be futile. One of the great stories in the history of the past generation has been the search of newly vibrant American evangelicalism for a political theory. The author infers that Reconstructionism is the new master philosophy, in part because conventional politicians and religious leaders sometimes appear at the same public events as Reconstructionists; she makes no mention of the systematic efforts by some evangelicals to engage Catholic social theory. Goldberg does provide some good reporting, however. She shows that the fiscal controls on the Bush Administration's faith-based initiatives are loose. During her investigation of abstinence-only sex education, she allows its proponents to make a case she finds unpersuasive but plausible. Nonetheless, the authordeclares that now is the time to fight the Christian nationalists, not to placate them. She ends by exhorting her readers to retake the country from the grassroots up. If you think that Christianity is the new Communism, then this is the book for you.

Age of Reform

Author: Richard Hofstadter

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A classic study of American political thought that analyzes the passion for progress and reform from 1890 to 1940.

Artwise Rome Museum Map Laminated Museum Map of Rome Italy Streetwise Maps or God and Gold

2009-01-18T00:44:00.000-08:00

Artwise Rome Museum Map - Laminated Museum Map of Rome, Italy - Streetwise Maps

Author: Streetwise Maps

2007 UPDATED Artwise Rome Museum Map - Laminated Museum Map of Rome, Italy - Streetwise Maps

This travel map covers the following areas:
Main Rome Map 1:17,000
Rome Metro Map
Rome Museum Index

About STREETWISE® Maps

STREETWISE® is the first map to be designed with modern graphics and is the originator of the laminated, accordion-fold map format. We've set the standard that every map company has imitated but never duplicated. Our mission is to make you feel comfortable, to make you feel safe in a place where you've never been before and to enable you to experience a familiar place more fully.

The company was founded in 1984 by Michael Brown, who had been in international publishing for many years, setting up subsidiaries for textbook publishers. In the 1970's, Brown traveled extensively throughout Africa, India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Brown would take a large paper map, cut out the city center, folded it up and slip it into his pocket, thus preventing him from looking like a tourist in areas where discretion is the better part of travel. This was his tool for surviving.

After many years on the road, Brown settled back in New York and decided to start his own business, based on the adaptations he had made to maps in his travels. His goal was to give someone the ability to navigate easily in unfamiliar terrain.

He started with a new map format: the accordion fold. Such a simple idea, but at the time it was revolutionary. No more struggling to fold an awkward, oversized paper map. This new format would enable the user to blend in like a native, instead of stick out like a tourist. Brown then added lamination to ensure that the mapwould be a lasting tool.

More important than the format was the design of the map itself. It had to be a map that not only succeeded above and beyond any map he had used, but was esthetically appealing as well. The look of it had to be as striking as the functionality. Color was introduced in a way that was never seen before in a map - vivid purple for water, soothing gray for the background of street grids, gold to highlight elements of the map. Clarity, conciseness and convenience in a very stylish package.

Building the business was a 24 hour job. Brown sold the maps during the day, zipping around Manhattan making deliveries on his Harley Davidson. At night he packed the orders and did the design work. More titles were added, each title requiring months of research and design.

Today, STREETWISE® produces over 130 titles for major destinations, regions and countries throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia. We have grown from the back of a motorcycle to selling millions of maps around the world.

Yet each title is still painstakingly researched and updated. STREETWISE® is one of the only, if not THE only map company that conducts research by walking or driving an area to ensure accuracy. After all, what good is the map if what you hold in your hands doesn't match what you see on the street sign? This lengthy fact checking results in superior accuracy; in effect, we've done the work, now you have the adventure.

In the end, it's not about the map, it's about getting out and finding your own authentic experience wherever you go. It's about being in a city or a region and discovering things that you never thought you would find. You can do this if you have confidence and you have confidence if you have a great map. STREETWISE® is the great map that you need.

The New York Times

"Don't leave home without STREETWISE."

Travel + Leisure Magazine

"STREETWISE is an absolute travel essential."

Book review: The Craving Cure or Or Perish in the Attempt

God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

Author: Walter Russell Mead

A stunningly insightful account of the global political and economic system, sustained first by Britain and now by America, that has created the modern world.

The key to the two countries' predominance, Mead argues, lies in the individualistic ideology inherent in the Anglo-American religion. Over the years Britain and America's liberal democratic system has been repeatedly challeged—by Catholic Spain and Louis XIV, the Nazis, communists, and Al Qaeda—and for the most part, it has prevailed. But the current conflicts in the Middle East threaten to change that record unless we foster a deeper understanding of the conflicts between the liberal world system and its foes.

Kirkus Reviews

A Council on Foreign Relations scholar examines the biggest geopolitical story of modern times: the birth, rise and continuing growth of Anglo-American power. For the past 400 years, notwithstanding the continually renewed opposition from the rest of the world, the Anglo-Americans, with the British handing the baton to the United States, have emerged from every conflict more powerful. Meanwhile, they view themselves as virtuously defending and advancing liberty, protecting the weak, providing opportunity to the poor, introducing principles of democracy and creating more just societies, even as their enemies see only cruelty and greed and a ruthless plot against decency and morality. Mead (Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, 2004, etc.) explains all this and more in his ingenious critique of the brilliantly successful methods and the occasional madness of the English-speaking peoples, from Cromwell to Reagan, Berkeley to Bush. Detailing first the common cultural heritage, he then demonstrates how they have dominated in warfare. He outlines the reasons for their global success (sea power has been the core geopolitical strategy) and analyzes the synthesis of historical experience and religious belief that accounts for their unique and powerful ideology. Finally, he explains why they have been so consistently wrong in believing that their mix of commerce, Christianity, the English language and democratic institutions would convert all opponents and put an end to all strife. He frankly assesses how things stand in the world and how they got this way. Yet, while generally approving of the Anglo-American enterprise, Mead avoids triumphalism. He correctlyacknowledges and explains the resentments and fears of those unable or unwilling to play by the sometimes confusing and often frightening rules of the Anglo-American system. In less skillful hands, this thesis might have drowned in abstruse reasoning or academic jargon, but Mead enlivens the text with numerous amusing and illustrative anecdotes, artful literary allusions and helpful invocations of great historians and philosophers. A remarkable piece of historical analysis bound to provoke discussion and argument in foreign-policy circles. First printing of 40,000

Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation or Gaming the Vote

2009-01-17T12:31:00.000-08:00

Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation

Author: Barry A J Fisher

This latest edition of Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation examines concepts, field-tested techniques and procedures, and technical information concerning crime scene investigation. It has been widely adopted by police academies, community colleges, and universities and is recommended for preparation for certification exams. Written in an easy-to-read style, this comprehensive text offers up-to-date technical expertise that the author has developed over many years in law enforcement. Includes check-off lists, case studies, and 16 pages of full-color illustrated photos. Also included is an appendix on equipment for crime scene investigations.

	Foreword
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	The Author
	Prologue
1	Introduction	1
2	First Officer at the Crime Scene	25
3	The Crime Scene Investigator	43
4	Specialized Personnel at the Crime Scene	57
5	Processing the Crime Scene	75
6	Establishing Identity	93
7	Trace Evidence and Miscellaneous Material	149
8	Blood and Other Biological Evidence	199
9	Impression Evidence	221
10	Firearms Examination	257
11	Arson and Explosives	287
12	Illicit Drugs and Toxicology	311
13	Investigating Sexual Assault and Domestic Abuse Crimes	327
14	Burglary Investigation	341
15	Motor Vehicle Investigation	357
16	Homicide Investigation	379
App. A	Equipment for Crime Scene Investigations	459
App. B	Forensic Science-Related Websites	463
App. C	Terrorism and Domestic Preparedness Websites	469
	Bibliography	475
	Index	499

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)

Author: William Poundston

Our Electoral System is Fundamentally Flawed, But There’s a Simple and Fair Solution

At least five U.S. presidential elections have been won by the second most popular candidate. The reason was a “spoiler”—a minor candidate who takes enough votes away from the most popular candidate to tip the election to someone else. The spoiler effect is more than a glitch. It is a consequence of one of the most surprising intellectual discoveries of the twentieth century: the “impossibility theorem” of Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow. The impossibility theorem asserts that voting is fundamentally unfair—a finding that has not been lost on today’s political consultants. Armed with polls, focus groups, and smear campaigns, political strategists are exploiting the mathematical faults of the simple majority vote. In recent election cycles, this has led to such unlikely tactics as Republicans funding ballot drives for Green spoilers and Democrats paying for right-wing candidates’ radio ads. Gaming the Vote shows that there is a solution to the spoiler problem that will satisfy both right and left. A system called range voting, already widely used on the Internet, is the fairest voting method of all, according to computer studies. Despite these findings, range voting remains controversial, and Gaming the Vote assesses the obstacles confronting any attempt to change the American electoral system. The latest of several books by William Poundstone on the theme of how important scientific ideas have affected the real world, Gaming the Vote is a wry exposé of how the political systemreally works, and a call to action.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

William Poundstone's Gaming the Vote arrives amid unusually high reader interest in equitable voting. And Mr. Poundstone is a clear, entertaining explicator of election science. He easily bridges the gaps between theoretical and popular thinking, between passionate political debate and cool mathematical certainty.

Publishers Weekly

Behind the standard one man-one vote formula lies a labyrinth of bizarre dysfunction, according to this engaging study of the science of voting. America's system is "the least sensible way to vote," argues Poundstone (Fortune's Formula), prone to vote-splitting fiascoes like the 2000 election. Unfortunately, according to the author, a famous "impossibility theorem" states that no voting procedure can accurately gauge the will of the people without failures and paradoxes. (More optimistically, Poundstone contends that important problems are solved by "range voting," in which voters score each candidate independently on a 1-10 scale.) Poundstone provides a lucid survey of electoral systems and their eccentric proponents (Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, loved voting novelties), studded with colorful stories of election skullduggery by campaign consultants, whom he likens to "terrorists... exploiting the mathematical vulnerabilities of voting itself." His lively, accessible mix of high theory and low politics merits a thumbs-up. Illus. (Feb.)

Donna L. Davey, Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal

The concept of fair elections is considered a hallmark of democratic society, but sometimes it's just a concept. With zeal and style, Poundstone digs into a long-term problem and suggests strategies for improving the system now. For example, he discusses range voting, where balloters rank the candidates rather than casting one vote. For political science collections in public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/15/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

Why the United States's pluralistic voting system doesn't always pick the "right" winner-and, more importantly, what could be done to make it better. Vote splitting, the phenomenon in which two candidates of similar political persuasion "split" the support of like-minded voters and put the least-popular candidate in office, is common in the United States, argues Poundstone (Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street, 2005, etc.). Under the current one-person-one-vote, plurality-based system in place, it's also virtually inevitable. By his calculation, in the 45 presidential elections since 1828, at least five (11 percent) have been won by the second most popular candidate because of a "spoiler." Is it possible to come up with a fairer voting method? He explores an array of alternatives that might be bewildering in less capable hands: Borda voting (ranking all candidates from most to least preferred); Condorcet voting (holding a succession of two-way votes between every possible pair of candidates); instant-runoff voting (a series in which the least popular candidates are successively eliminated); and proportional representation (an offshoot of instant-runoff that attempts to reproduce the diversity of the electorate on the smaller scale of the legislature). Poundstone concludes that the only system that can't be manipulated so that the "wrong" candidate wins is one called "range voting," in which voters assign rankings to candidates and the one with the most "points" wins. According to Poundstone, computer simulations have shown that range voting produces a higher level of voter satisfaction: the feeling that, regardless ofan election's outcome, they would not change their vote. The dilemma, he acknowledges, is that our current, "unfair" system is supported by a wide variety of candidates, strategists and party hacks with a strong interest in retaining a two-party, winner-take-all system. This makes adopting, or even discussing, a new system a formidable challenge. Convincing, entertaining and authoritative overview of voting systems and their pitfalls.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone or Conflict after the Cold War

2009-01-17T02:18:00.000-08:00

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Author: Lee Iacocca

The most widely recognized business executive of all time asks the tough questions that America's leaders must address:

What is each of us giving back to our country?
Do we truly love democracy?
Are we too fat and satisfied for our own good?
Why is America addicted to oil?
Do we really care about our children's futures?
Who will save the middle class?

Lee Iacocca believes that leaders are made in times of crisis—such as today. He has known more leaders than almost anybody else—including nine U.S. presidents, many heads of state, CEOs of the nation's top corporations, celebrities, and even a pope—and is uniquely suited to share his wisdom, knowledge, and wit about the leadership of America. Lee Iacocca does not mince words, and in Where Have All the Leaders Gone? he offers his no-nonsense, straight-up assessments of the American politicians most likely to run for president in 2008. He also shares his lessons learned, and issues a call to action to summon Americans back to their roots of hard work, common sense, integrity, generosity, and optimism.

Where have all the leaders gone? Lee Iacocca has the answer.

Sarah Statz Cords - Library Journal

Business icon Lee Iacocca has cultivated a reputation as a straight talker, and he lives up to it in this engaging treatise. Using a lifetime's worth of business examples from Ford (where he was president) and Chrysler (where he was CEO), as well as his charitable endeavors, he makes his case that better leadership is needed to regain America's social and economic greatness. In 21 chapters, arranged somewhat arbitrarily into four sections questioning America's lack of leadership, fragile global relationships, capitalism, and future, Iacocca tackles such broadly ranging subjects as the prospective 2008 presidential candidates, the war in Iraq, our (lack of an) energy policy, globalization's challenges, and his own retirement. His mix of straightforward lists (e.g., nine qualities of leadership) and conversational asides makes for fast reading, although many readers may be surprised by his level of vitriol toward George W. Bush ("the President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies"). His status as an icon of commerce and a best-selling author (Iacocca) demands this book's purchase by all public and corporate libraries, but its lack of sourcing or index may make it an optional purchase for undergraduate libraries.

Library Journal

Acknowledgments     xi
Where Have All the Leaders Gone?     1
Had enough?     3
People and priorities: It's that simple     15
Can you show me where it's working?     25
Aren't we supposed to be the good guys?     33
How much do we love democracy?     39
Where Have All Our Friends Gone?     57
Will the real leader of the free world please stand up?     59
Meet the coalition of the UNwilling     75
What will we do for oil?     89
Free trade must be fair trade     101
Don't fence me in ... or out     111
Is Capitalism Letting Us Down?     125
Where does all the money go?     127
Will we ever trust corporate America again?     137
Chrysler's lesson: Resist the urge to merge     151
Can anyone around here run a car company?     165
Who will save the middle class?     185
The blame game is killing us     195
Can America Be Great Again?     203
Are we too fat and satisfied for our own good?     205
Bring back brain power     215
Three men who taught me to lead     223
Get off the golf course and DO something     237
2008: A call to action     257
Index     265

Look this: Game Design or Programmable Logic Controllers 3e

Conflict After the Cold War: Arguments on Causes of War and Peace

Author: Richard K Betts

1920 or Machiavellis Shadow

2009-01-16T13:06:00.000-08:00

1920: The Year of the Six Presidents

Author: David Pietrusza

The presidential election of 1920 was one of the most dramatic ever. For the only time in the nation's history, six once-and-future presidents hoped to end up in the White House: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was an election that saw unprecedented levels of publicity — the Republicans outspent the Democrats by 4 to 1 — and it was the first to garner extensive newspaper and newsreel coverage. It was also the first election in which women could vote. Meanwhile, the 1920 census showed that America had become an urban nation — automobiles, mass production, chain stores, and easy credit were transforming the economy and America was limbering up for the most spectacular decade of its history, the roaring '20s. Award-winning historian David Pietrusza's riveting new work presents a dazzling panorama of presidential personalities, ambitions, plots, and counterplots — a picture of modern America at the crossroads.

Publishers Weekly

Pietrusza's (Rothstein) chronicle of the presidential election of 1920 is absorbing, despite the subtitle's rather tangential claim that the election involved six men who had served or would serve as president: Harding, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover and both Roosevelts (though Teddy had died in 1919). This book isn't really about them, nor is it merely the story of one electoral race. Rather, Pietrusza is telling a grander tale, of a country toppling into "modernity, or what passed for it." In 1920, the automobile had overtaken the horse, jazz and the fox-trot were replacing the camp meeting as popular entertainment, people were learning to buy on installment, and more and more of those fox-trotting shoppers lived in cities. Presidential candidates, for the first time, courted women voters. (Democrat Cox was divorced, which was expected to play badly with the fairer sex.) Both parties waffled on the so-called race question, seeking black votes while either tacitly or explicitly endorsing white supremacy. Given Harding's electoral victory and death during his term, Pietrusza could have devoted more space to the abiding importance of this election. All in all, Pietrusza has produced a broad, satisfying political and social history, in the style of Doris Kearns Goodwin. 16 pages of b&w illus. (Feb. 7) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Thomas J. Baldino - Library Journal

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, the United States did nothave six presidents in 1920. The author stretches the truth a bit to dramatize a historical anomaly: six men—a sitting president, former president, and four eventual presidents—competed in the 1920 presidential election. Actually, President Woodrow Wilson was physically incapacitated at the start of the year, and Theodore Roosevelt had died in 1919, but the legacies of both presidents shaped the 1920 election campaign. Pietrusza (Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series) sufficiently contends that this election marked the birth of modern American politics. Each of the main characters is introduced sequentially, with brief biographical information, beginning with Wilson and his failed attempt to have his League of Nations treaty adopted by the Senate, to TR and his split with Taft and the mainstream Republican Party, to Warren Harding, winner of the election, to Coolidge, Harding's vice president and successor upon death, to Hoover and finally FDR. Pietrusza wisely includes considerable information on Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate that year. The many issues and forces that swirled during that time, from the fear of Communists and Socialists and the terrorism they allegedly perpetrated to technological advances and Prohibition, make for a fascinating and compelling tale of an often-overlooked election in our history. Highly recommended.

Kirkus Reviews

A rousing chronicle of the political year that saw six American presidents, past, present and future, vying simultaneously for high office. Poised between the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the ensuing decade that would earn itself the qualifier "roaring," 1920 found Americans craving a pause, a return to the soothing "normalcy" of a bygone era. Who better fit the national mood than the thoroughly undistinguished Senator Warren G. Harding? After an intense primary season and many convention ballots, the Republican Party finally settled on the affable Ohioan and his law-and-order running-mate, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, choices made easier by the sudden death of the beloved TR, himself eyeing a comeback, and the one man capable of disturbing the party's predilection for calm. Incumbent President Wilson, bedridden after a debilitating stroke, shed no tears over the death of his bitter enemy and unaccountably believed the Democratic Party would extend his discredited presidency by nominating him for an unprecedented third term. Instead, the party chose Ohio Governor James Cox, like Harding a former small-town newspaper editor, and for vice-president, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a charming fellow from New York, who came with the added advantage of that hallowed name Roosevelt: Franklin D. Only Herbert Hoover's seeming desire to be anointed rather than nominated (he refused to disclose his party affiliation) kept this internationally acclaimed humanitarian from being a bigger factor in the race. Other figures who helped shape the political battle-Eugene Debs, Hiram Johnson, Leonard Wood, William McAdoo, A. Mitchell Palmer, Nicholas MurrayButler, Alfred E. Smith-are highlighted as well. Pietrusza (Rothstein: The Life Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series, 2003) adds color and dimension with smart discussions of Prohibition, women's suffrage, immigration, civil rights, the League of Nations and labor strife, and he offers animated portraits of William Jennings Bryan, Carrie Chapman Catt, Henry Ford, Marcus Garvey, Sacco and Vanzetti, William Randolph Hearst, H.L. Mencken and many others. A hugely fascinating episode in American history, told with insight and great humor, by an author in command of his subject. Agent: Robert Wilson/Wilson Media

The Players in Our Drama     1
"Discover a Common Hate"     9
"Something Queer Was Happening"     26
"I Seem to Have Gone to Pieces"     36
"He Is the Only Candidate"     55
"A Turtle on a Log"     72
"I Am Governor of Massachusetts"     90
"He Is Certainly a Wonder"     105
"A Twentieth-Century Apollo"     122
"Criminal Intrigues Everywhere"     140
"Superior Biologic Values"     155
"The Funeral Bake Meats"     167
"A 'Safe' Kind of Liberal"     187
"Red Feathers, Tin Bears, and Cardboard Oranges"     201
"Warren Harding Is the Best of the Second-Raters"     224
"The Greatest Living Champion of Water"     242
"Convict No. 9653"     262
"A Gathering of Asteroids"     282
"A Mother's Advice Is Always Safest"     290
"Back to Normal"     311
"A Pretty Good Constitution"     331
"Wake up, Ethiopia!"     353
"Warren Gamaliel Harding Is Not a White Man"     369
"Perverts by Official Orders"     386
"It Was an Earthquake"     397
"Power Must Fail"     418
"Fear Itself"     435
Epilogue: "Malevolent Detachment"     439
Notes     455
Bibliography     527
Acknowledgments     543
Index     545

Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove

Author: Paul Alexander

Karl Rove has come to personify scorched earth political tactics and merciless, win-at-any-cost trickery. His status as the so-called architect behind Bush’s election victories has elevated him to a mythic kingmaker in the national imagination. Not since Mark Hanna, special assistant to President William McKinley, has someone not elected to public office played such a vital role in the governance of our nation.

We know the myth, but who is the man? In Machiavelli's Shadow, the full, unvarnished truth about the mastermind of the Bush administration is revealed as swirling scandals and Karl Rove's diminished power have freed people to speak candidly as never before. Acclaimed author and veteran journalist Paul Alexander tracks Rove's journey from consummate outsider to presidential consigliere, conducting firsthand interviews with A-list sources who have never gone on the record about Rove before now. The result is a gripping, no-holds-barred account of the man whose insistence on politicizing any area on which he has advised the president—from the war in Iraq to domestic issues like Social Security, energy, the environment, and hotly controversial judicial matters—has brought about his own fall from grace and an escalating crisis within the government and the nation.

Drawing on the author's extensive connections in the political arena and delving into all areas of Rove's life—political, business, psychological, and personal—this book stands as the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures ever to emerge on the American political scene.

The Georgetown Ladies Social Club or The Illustrated Guide to Forensics

2009-01-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club: Power, Passion, and Politics in the Nation's Capital

Author: C David Heymann

In this definitive portrait of the political and social life of Georgetown, bestselling biographer C. David Heymann chronicles the dinner parties, correspondence, overlappings, and underpinnings of some of the most influential women in Washington's history.

"The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club" -- a term coined by Ronald Reagan -- comprises a list of formidable and fascinating women, among them Katharine Graham, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce, Pamela Harriman, and Sally Quinn. Their husbands, government officials and newsmakers among them, relied on the ladies for their sharp wit and sensitivity, refined bearings, and congeniality. In a city characteristically and traditionally controlled by men, the Georgetown wives were, in turn, afforded an abundance of behind-the-scenes political clout.

Filled with intriguing and often startling insights into Washington life, from the latter days of the Kennedy and Truman administrations to the Clinton era and the advent of President George W. Bush, The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club is a compelling testament to the sex, lies, and red tape of American politics.

Washington Post

Think Entertainment Tonight does Georgetown.

Toronto Sun

An informative and entertaining book—like the women it profiles.

Liz Smith - New York Post

One juicy story after another. Mr. Heymann doesn't hold back. I couldn't put this book down....Don't miss it!

Publishers Weekly

Heymann, bestselling biographer of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Barbara Hutton, offers a captivating chronicle of the female power behind American politics in the latter half of the 20th century. In a time when men wrote the rules of the political game, he writes, five formidable women greatly influenced who won and who lost: Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham; Lorraine Cooper, wife of Kentucky's Sen. John Sherman Cooper; Evangeline Bruce, wife of U.S. ambassador David Bruce; Democratic Party fund-raiser (and later ambassador) Pamela Harriman, married to the powerful and wealthy Averell Harriman; and Sally Quinn, Washington Post writer and wife of the Post's former executive editor Ben Bradlee. While they had husbands in high places, these women wielded a vital political influence in Georgetown by organizing the parties where momentous meetings took place and decisions were made. These women were so compelling not only for their professional and political accomplishments and legendary dinner parties but for their dynamic, and often clashing, personalities and ambitions. Heymann deftly explores these personalities through interviews with family, friends, enemies, admirers and detractors. The resulting anecdotal social history of Georgetown is a winning combination of sex, scandal and political escapade. It also provides a complex portrait of its subjects. "What the Georgetown Five ultimately share is their ability to maintain a public pose, to protect the image they sought to create, no matter what the cost, no matter what the burden," writes Heymann, whose earlier books have become award-winning TV miniseries. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Owen Laster. (Oct. 28) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Heymann, a writer of popular "candid" and "intimate" biographies (e.g., A Woman Named Jackie), asserts (repeatedly) that in the second half of the 20th century, Georgetown dinner parties, run by women, mattered to the nation. This several-hundred-page gossip column fails to demonstrate his claim: a consequential exchange occurs at most every hundred pages. The rest of the tome recounts the lifestyles of the rich and politically well connected, including their adulterous escapades and the names of their fashion designers, as well as other excruciating trivia. (From what store in Chevy Chase did Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi buy a wardrobe for Elizabeth Taylor in preparation for her meeting with the Shah?) Purportedly focusing on "Kay" Graham, "Vangie" Bruce, Lorraine Cooper, Pamela Harriman, and Sally Quinn, Heymann throws in chunks about Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, subjects of his previous works. This book will hold precious little interest for Washington insiders, and none for those outside the city who have never heard of Lorraine Cooper. Nevertheless, the publisher will be conducting a major publicity blitz, so public libraries should be prepared to tell at least a few disappointed patrons that they'll have to buy this book themselves.-Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Dogged diva biographer Heymann (Liz, 1995, etc.) purports to show that governments rose and fell by the promptings of those in DC's glittery ghetto. From his report, however, the signal events were simply what Susan May told Missy and what Oatsie said about Rip and Adlai. Five Georgetown duchesses-Katherine Graham, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce, Pamela Harriman, and Sally Quinn-headline, supported by a large cast of featured players, including Liz Taylor, Warren Buffett, Ben Bradlee, and JFK. There's Capote and his wretched Black and White caper for Kay Graham. Were these the best and brightest? Is this how Dolley Madison did it? Amid the clatter of teacups and tumblers of scotch, we hear the piercing clank of dropping names. It's a toast to the sort who "liked pleasure and . . . had great fun with it." Heymann informs us of loves, feuds, and peccadilloes. The tittle-tattle covers the fortunes, talents, connections, alliances, dalliances, table manners, looks, wardrobes, sleeping habits, and mental aberrations of yesteryear's Georgetowners. CIA spooks, a mysterious murder, Joe Alsop's sexual orientation, and Phil Graham's madness all come up for discussion. Some of it is patently questionable. Did a hostess really revive Alan Greenspan with an oxygen tank she "happened to have on hand"? Did "everyone come dressed as a ground hog" to a Groundhog's Day fкte? It's all cold dish, largely enclosed in quotation marks, an inflated and fetid hodgepodge suited to a tabloid's party report. Admittedly, contrary to all decency, this sort of thing can become addictive and may even find a solid audience-but what's the point? Shallow and nasty enough to make readers queasy. (16 pp. b&w photos, notseen) Agent: Owen Laster/William Morris

The Illustrated Guide to Forensics: True Crime Scene Investigations

Author: Zakaria Erzinclioglu

A gripping and fully illustrated study of the forensic techniques that are familiar to us from countless trials, media reports and television dramas
Includes famous case histories, such as that of O.J. Simpson, along with fascinating accounts of trials where the author was himself an expert witness
Reveals the limitations of forensic science, and shows how so-called evidence can sometimes lead to wrongful conviction

Evaluation Methodology Basics or Brothers

2009-01-14T05:19:00.000-08:00

Evaluation Methodology Basics: The Nuts and Bolts of Sound Evaluation

Author: Jane Davidson

Click 'Additional Materials' for downloadable samples

"What is evaluation-specific logic and methodology? This book answers that question in a way that is persuasive, accessible, and understandable. It presents a set of principles and procedures to guide the task of blending descriptive data with relevant values to draw explicitly evaluative conclusions. The book makes a significant contribution to positioning evaluation as a unique and special field of inquiry and judgment."
—Michael Quinn Patton, Union Institute and University

"Amidst the wash of methods books available to evaluators, Davidson's book provides powerful techniques for asking and answering the important foundational questions in any program evaluation."
—Doug Leigh, Pepperdine University

"This is a very well written book that offers a unique perspective on long-practiced evaluation techniques and presents several new, potentially very useful, techniques that return "valuation" to the evaluation process."
—Greg Roberts, University of Texas, Austin

Evaluation theorists for years have advised evaluators to "take into account" all relevant values as part of an evaluation. But especially for the relatively new evaluator (even one who is knowledgeable and experienced in research methodology), there is not a lot of guidance about how this is done. Evaluation Methodology Basics: The Nuts and Bolts of Sound Evaluation provides a step-by-step guide for doing a real evaluation. It focuses on the main kinds of "big picture" questions that evaluators usually need to answer, andhow the nature of such questions is linked to evaluation methodology choices. Jane Davidson explains how to combine a mix of qualitative and quantitative data with "relevant values" (such as needs) to draw explicitly evaluative conclusions.

Many students and evaluators find it difficult to visualize what evaluation logic and methodology "look like" in practice. To address this, Davidson presents readers with useful rubrics and flowcharts that may be used during each stage of the evaluation. Many of the concepts presented in the chapters are illustrated with specific examples from a range of disciplines. Exercises and "pop quiz" questions help reinforce the key points covered in each chapter, provide homework assignments for those teaching an evaluation course, and allow learners to develop slices of an evaluation plan as they work their way through the text.

Evaluation Methodology Basics is an ideal text for students of evaluation and students in programs that have evaluation course requirements, such as education, health, sociology, psychology, and many others throughout the social sciences. It will also be essential reading for practitioners who find themselves thrown into evaluation roles without the benefit of specialized evaluation training.

1	What is evaluation?	1
2	Defining the purpose of the evaluation	13
3	Identifying evaluative criteria	23
4	Organizing the criteria and identifying potential sources of evidence	53
5	Dealing with the causation issue	67
6	"Values" in evaluation	85
7	Determining importance	99
8	The merit determination step	131
9	Synthesis methodology	151
10	Putting it all together	189
11	Meta-evaluation	205

Look this: The New Project Management or Talk Is Cheap

Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

Author: David Talbot

For decades, books about John or Robert Kennedy have woven either a shimmering tale of Camelot gallantry or a tawdry story of runaway ambition and reckless personal behavior. But the real story of the Kennedys in the 1960s has long been submerged -- until now. In Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, David Talbot sheds a dramatic new light on the tumultuous inner life of the Kennedy presidency and its stunning aftermath. Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, has written a gripping political history that is sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.
Brothers begins on the shattering afternoon of November 22, 1963, as a grief-stricken Robert Kennedy urgently demands answers about the assassination of his brother. Bobby's suspicions immediately focus on the nest of CIA spies, gangsters, and Cuban exiles that had long been plotting a violent regime change in Cuba. The Kennedys had struggled to control this swamp of anti-Castro intrigue based in southern Florida, but with little success.
Brothers then shifts back in time, revealing the shadowy conflicts that tore apart the Kennedy administration, pitting the young president and his even younger brother against their own national security apparatus. The Kennedy brothers and a small circle of their most trusted advisors -- men like Theodore Sorensen, Robert McNamara, and Kenneth O'Donnell, who were so close the Kennedys regarded them as family -- repeatedly thwarted Washington's warrior caste. These hard-line generals and spymasters were hell-bent on a showdown with the Communist foe -- in Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, and especially Cuba. But the Kennedys continually frustrated theirmilitaristic ambitions, pushing instead for a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. The tensions within the Kennedy administration were heading for an explosive climax, when a burst of gunfire in a sunny Dallas plaza terminated John F. Kennedy's presidency.
Based on interviews with more than one hundred fifty people -- including many of the Kennedys' aging "band of brothers," whose testimony here might be their final word on this epic political story -- as well as newly released government documents, Brothers reveals the compelling, untold story of the Kennedy years, including JFK's heroic efforts to keep the country out of a cataclysmic war and Bobby Kennedy's secret quest to solve his beloved brother's murder. Bobby's subterranean search was a dangerous one and led, in part, to his own quest for power in 1968, in a passion-filled campaign that ended with his own murder. As Talbot reveals here, RFK might have been the victim of the same plotters he suspected of killing his brother. This is historical storytelling at its riveting best -- meticulously researched and movingly told.
Brothers is a sprawling narrative about the clash of powerful men and the darker side of the Cold War -- a tale of tragic grandeur that is certain to change our understanding of the relentlessly fascinating Kennedy saga.

The New York Times - Alan Brinkley

Talbot, the founder and former editor of Salon, the online magazine, is the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy — and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well. Brothers is a fearless, passionate, often angry book that both summarizes much of the vast conspiracy literature and attempts to add new evidence that Talbot himself amassed through dogged interviews with many people connected — directly or indirectly — with the Kennedy years.

The Washington Post - Matthew Dalleck

Talbot, the founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon, has written a fast-paced narrative of Kennedy's search for his brother's killers. Talbot is careful to sidestep the question of who was actually responsible for the assassination. He dismisses the lone gunman theory as a crock and wonders about the CIA, Cuba and Mafia involvement. He bases his conclusions on more than 150 interviews he did with aides to the Kennedys, relatives of ex-CIA agents and anti-Castro exiles. His sources believe for the most part that Oswald didn't work alone, and their suppositions form the heart of Talbot's Manichean chronicle of two brothers who battled forces of darkness for the soul of modern America.

Publishers Weekly

Those looking for new insight into John F. Kennedy's presidency will want to read this meticulously researched chronicle. Talbot, the journalist founder of online newsmagazine Salon, sticks to the facts, starting with a timeline of then-attorney general Bobby Kennedy's actions on Nov. 22, 1963, the day his brother was killed. Immediately suspicious of the CIA, the Mafia and the Cuban exiles they're involved with, Bobby made it his mission to expose this "shadowy nexus"; much of the book concerns the Kennedy brothers' relationships with members of those factions as they dig for the truth behind the assassination. Talbot profiles friends and enemies, taking readers into JFK's strained work with Pentagon officials who famously pressured him to take a chance on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Later chapters deal with the aftermath of JFK's and then RFK's assassinations, and the final chapter contains Talbot's incisive conclusions on those momentous years. Talbot's only weakness is in covering too much-with more than 150 original interviews, he is forced to move too quickly from event to event, making his numerous characters hard to keep straight. Still, it's an admirable feat of reporting, and one that will spark conversation among conspiracy theorists, historians and others who lived through the Kennedy era. (May)

Fire at Edens Gate or Showdown

2009-01-13T18:05:00.000-08:00

Fire at Eden's Gate: Tom McCall and the Oregon Story

Author: Brent Walth

More than any other American leader of his time, he personified the fight to protect the environment. When so many other politicians talked about being environmentalists, McCall showed how one state could succeed in protecting its beaches, cleaning its rivers and conserving its land. When he told the world in 1971 that Oregon welcomed everyone to visit, "But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live", he sighted a belief that livability stood tall in his state.

Thoroughly researched and gracefully written, this biography addresses the many myths and controversies that surrounded McCall. The product of two once-powerful families, McCall had a hunger for adulation that dwarfed even his tall frame. An impetuous, flamboyant, imposing and outrageous showman, he fascinated America as a refreshingly candid and forthright politician. Republican by birthright, McCall became the conscience of his party, standing up to the hypocrisies of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Fire at Eden's Gate unflinchingly reveals the saga of one of America's most courageous politicians.

Booknews

A biography of the former Oregon governor. Covers McCall's early career, focusing on his plans for protecting Oregon's natural resources, and discusses McCall's 1954 campaign for Congress, his on- going quarrels with Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, GOP backroom deals aimed at ruining McCall's hopes of becoming governor, and McCall's deals with Oregon power broker Glenn Jackson. Contains b&w photos. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Look this: Cyber Safe Kids Cyber Savvy Teens or Mehndi

Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests that Divide America

Author: Larry Elder

The Ten Things You Can't Say in America struck a chord with eager readers acroos the country, exposing thruths others have been too afraid to address. In his new book, Elder is out to slay entrenched and enmeshed special interest groups, government agencies with the capacity to meddle in Americans' lives and businesses, lawmakers who continue a pattern of outrageous overtaxation, and those who would hamstring this country with good intentions.

Showdown demonstrates how the nation would be better, stronger and safer with less gvernment intervention and how individuals would not only cope but thrive without the so-called safety net. Showdown is a call to arms for a truly free society. Elder discusses:

- What a Republican-led government means for progress
- Where a responsible government would put its citizens' tax dollars
- Why racial and sex discrimination are non-issues in the 21st century.

Larry Elders straight talk and common-sense solutions spare no one and will inspire his passionate and growing audience.

Publishers Weekly

Elder's new book is not for the timid and weak of mind. In his second book, the popular California radio host and author of the bestselling The Ten Things You Can't Say in America, accuses the U.S. government of "liberal fascism," denying its people the freedom to work hard, make their own choices and reap the benefits of their labor. He takes us back to a vision of America as he says the Founding Fathers intended it to be: less government, more personal responsibility; less red tape, more freedom; less dependency, greater wealth. With an arsenal of facts and real-life evidence, Elder assails many of what he terms societal myths. Racism in America? Almost nonexistent, he declares. Public education? Get rid of it. The mainstream media? Obstreperous in its liberal bias, shameful in its denial. No special group or interest escapes the author's indictment. The essential purpose of government, Elder asserts, is to protect its citizens. As evidenced by the September 11 tragedy, he argues, the government cannot adequately defend its citizens when its elected officials are pouring time and money into a vast array of pet projects. It is time, Elder declares, for a reshuffling of priorities. Although somewhat slapdash, this remains a provocative charge. Elder's voice is refreshing even when you disagree with him. (Sept.) Forecast: This book's success will no doubt be similar to that of Elder's previous book: expect to see it on bestseller lists alongside Ann Coulter's Slander. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The host of a popular drive-time radio show in Los Angeles, Elder is author of The Ten Things You Can't Say in America, which gives you a sense of how his new book reads. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

The Big Con or Badge of the Assassin

2009-01-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics

Author: Jonathan Chait

The Big Con is a brilliantly revealing look at how the radical ideas of a small group of economic hucksters have taken over the American political system and perverted our nationa (TM)s policies. Through vivid portraits of self-interested politicians and pseudoeconomists, with wry analysis of their bogus theories, Jonathan Chait gives us the tools to understand whata (TM)s really behind economic policy debates in Washington: a riveting drama of greed and deceit.

The New York Times - Roger Lowenstein

Any writer who accuses his adversaries of being paranoid extremist nuts (epithets like this appear frequently in the book) runs the risk of seeming like a paranoid extremist nut himself. But Chait sets out to disarm us on the first page. "I have this problem," he begins. "Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics…I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not." And he isn't. Chait attacks the tax-cutters' agenda from a sensible middle ground—the terrain he laments has been largely lost in American politics and completely abandoned by the Republican Party. By middle ground, I don't mean that Chait simply splits the difference between, say, Newt Gingrich and Robert Rubin…Instead, what Chait does is to examine the tax cuts on their economic merits. The debate is not new, but Chait's tale is enlivened by his account of how the G.O.P. evolved from a party of strait-laced budget balancers to extremists who resemble old-time Marxists in their rigid adherence to doctrine.

Publishers Weekly

The author, a senior editor at the New Republic, is best known for declaring "I hate President George W. Bush" in 2003. This book traces the roots of his dislike back 30 years, when supply-side economics took over the Republican Party and made cutting taxes the GOP answer to all political and economic questions. "American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists," Chait declares, "some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane." To which he adds, "the Republicans' success at defeating the democratic process explains why it has been able to enact its agenda despite a lack of popular support." The rhetoric is inflammatory, but the case is laid out with clarity. Chait claims that traditional Republicans, religious people and social, fiscal and foreign policy conservatives have been cheated as much as liberals, and that unparalleled corruption and ruthless cynicism in Washington and the timidity of nonpartisan media allow the minority to rule. His analysis should appeal to anyone interested in politics, though many may find the style too irritating to endure. (Sept. 12)

Kirkus Reviews

America has turned into a mean-spirited plutocracy, declares the New Republic's senior editor, and mendacious political hacks' universal panacea for the nation's considerable problems is always the same-cut taxes. In a generation, the conservative right has won its way, avers Chait, and to the victors, it seems, belong the spoils: The present political ideology is a conspiracy of self-perpetuating greed. The author demonstrates his thesis with apt, methodical and copious detail. Do not be misled by sporadic achievement on the left, he warns. There has been a seismic shift, a tectonic slide to the right that cannot be quickly reversed. Who has been stealing the government? Chait points to those whose know-nothing convictions yield to no expertise. They include the loony, laissez-faire-thee-well, Laffer Curve, trickle-down economists, but it's about more than crackpot economics. It's about the symbiosis of K Street and Capitol Hill, a merger of the lobbying industry with GOP politicians. It's about well-disciplined neocons and woefully disorganized liberals. It's about the collapse of independent media and the brainless partisan cult of personality. Even as the conservative party line may fluctuate, it always embraces personal attacks on the enemy. It's about Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist, Ann Coulter and Karl Rove. And it's about egregious pork-barrel earmarks and no regard for the underclass or for the Earth itself. A political party, Chait shows, may enjoy a preponderance of public opinion on the issues and still lose elections. Forget bipartisanship: This is a conflict between red-state NRA gun fans and blue-state NPR listeners. This text is, of course, a jeremiad from the left, anact of active, aggressive partisanship. But it is also methodical and fact-based. Agree or not with the author's liberal beliefs, consider this a stimulating analysis of how public policy is formulated today.

Badge of the Assassin

Author: Robert K Tanenbaum

They were just doing their jobs—saving and protecting—when the unimaginable happened: Officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini became moving targets, ambushed from behind at a Manhattan housing project. Jones lay dead in a pool of his own blood, and Piagentini lived long enough to beg for his life—befor ehe was riddled with twenty-two bullet holes by members of a deadly hit squad hell-bent on taking out the men and women of law enforcement.

Masterfully building suspense on every page, Robert K. Tanenbaum reconstructs the vicious murders of Jones and Piagentini and the manhunt for the suspects, and brings to life his courtroom prosecution of the killers—revealing the triumphs and failures of America's legal system.

A Lincoln or Common Sense

2009-01-12T18:40:00.000-08:00

A. Lincoln: A Biography

Author: Ronald C White Jr

Everyone wants to define the man who signed his name “A. Lincoln.” In his lifetime and ever since, friend and foe have taken it upon themselves to characterize Lincoln according to their own label or libel. In this magnificent book, Ronald C. White, Jr., offers a fresh and compelling definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity–what today’s commentators would call “authenticity”–whose moral compass holds the key to understanding his life.

Through meticulous research of the newly completed Lincoln Legal Papers, as well as of recently discovered letters and photographs, White provides a portrait of Lincoln’s personal, political, and moral evolution. White shows us Lincoln as a man who would leave a trail of thoughts in his wake, jotting ideas on scraps of paper and filing them in his top hat or the bottom drawer of his desk; a country lawyer who asked questions in order to figure out his own thinking on an issue, as much as to argue the case; a hands-on commander in chief who, as soldiers and sailors watched in amazement, commandeered a boat and ordered an attack on Confederate shore batteries at the tip of the Virginia peninsula; a man who struggled with the immorality of slavery and as president acted publicly and privately to outlaw it forever; and finally, a president involved in a religious odyssey who wrote, for his own eyes only, a profound meditation on “the will of God” in the Civil War that would become the basis of his finest address.

Most enlightening, the Abraham Lincoln who comes into focus in this stellar narrative is a person of intellectual curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity, unafraid to“think anew and act anew.”

A transcendent, sweeping, passionately written biography that greatly expands our knowledge and understanding of its subject, A. Lincoln will engage a whole new generation of Americans. It is poised to shed a profound light on our greatest president just as America commemorates the bicentennial of his birth.

Praise for A. LINCOLN
“Ronald C. White’s A. Lincoln is the best biography of Lincoln since David Donald’s Lincoln (1995). In many respects it is better than Donald’s biography, because it has incorporated the scholarship of the past fourteen years and is written in a fluent style that will appeal to a large range of general readers as well as Lincoln aficionados. The special strengths of A. Lincoln that lift it above other biographies include a brilliant analysis of Lincoln’s principal speeches and writings, which were an important weapon in his political leadership and statesmanship, and on which Ronald C. White is the foremost expert, having written two major books on Lincoln’s speeches and writings. Another strength is White’s analysis of Lincoln’s evolving religious convictions, which shaped the core of his effective leadership, his moral integrity. White’s discussion of Lincoln’s changing attitudes and policies with respect to slavery and race is also a key aspect of this biography. Amid all the books on Lincoln that will be published during the coming year, this one will stand out as one of the best.” --James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom

“Ron White’s A. Lincoln is a superb biography of America’s greatest leader. It is fully fleshed, thoughtful, provocative, and scholarly. Lincoln is never out of fashion. After a generation during which three comprehensive one-volume Lincoln biographies appeared—Benjamin P. Thomas’s Abraham Lincoln: A Biography in 1952; Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln in 1977; and David Donald’s Lincoln in 1995—A. Lincoln: A Biography, with its rich detail, will be the standard text for years to come. The author includes the religious connections to his subject like no other biographer. This is a remarkable Lincoln biography by an outstanding writer.” --Frank J. Williams, Founding Chair of The Lincoln Forum and Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court

“Each generation requires—and seems to inspire—its own masterful one-volume Lincoln biography, and scholar Ronald C. White has crowned the bicentennial year with an instant classic for the 21st century. Wise, scholarly, even-handed, and elegant, the book at once informs and inspires, with a rewarding new emphasis on the complex meaning and timeless importance of Lincoln’s great words. Brimming with new anecdotes and informed interpretations, White’s superb study brings vivid new life to an American immortal.”

Kirkus Reviews

Huntington Library fellow White (The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words, 2005, etc.) offers a lively, comprehensive life of the 16th president. Known variously throughout his career as "Honest Abe," "Old Abe," "the Rail-Splitter," "the original gorilla," "the dictator," "the Great Emancipator" and "Father Abraham," Lincoln referred to himself in famously self-deprecating terms and signed his name simply as "A. Lincoln." That's all that was simple, though, about this unusually "shut-mouthed" man, who from youth burned for public distinction. White's highly readable, picturesque presentation follows Lincoln's life from the pioneer birth and boyhood to the presidential assassination, with especially good passages on Lincoln's ancestry, his Springfield law practice and his emergence from the political wilderness in 1858. White doesn't shy away from Lincoln's shortcomings-his ferocious ambition, his opportunism, his woeful performance as a husband-but this mostly admiring treatment highlights his virtues, not least his ability to draw on the talents of diverse personalities, use the best of their advice and deftly manipulate them to advantage, whether as a militia captain, a state legislator, a party organizer a candidate or a president. White's triumph, though, is his focus on the forging of Lincoln's moral character-how the private man used contemplation, reading, experience, the press of events and the teachings of his political heroes to clarify his own political identity. Splendidly, and unsurprisingly given his past scholarship, White pays particular attention to language, referencing the innumerable scraps of paper Lincoln wrote to himself, public and privateletters and formal addresses. He graphically depicts Lincoln thinking, first tentatively, and then logically working through the thicket of a problem to a lawyerly understanding and, finally, with his singular combination of "homely and high language," to an exquisite expression of meaning and purpose. Likely to be frequently cited during the bicentennial celebration of Lincoln's birth.

Book review: Eigentumsmanagement

Common Sense

Author: Thomas Pain

Thomas Paine arrived in America from England in 1774. A friend of Ben Franklin, he was a writer of poetry and tracts condemning the slave trade. In 1775, as hostilities between Britain and the colonies intensified, Paine wrote "Common Sense" to encourage the colonies to break the British exploitative hold through independence. The little booklet of 50 pages was published January 10, 1776 and sold a half-million copies, approximately equal to 75 million copies today.

Library Journal

Penguin strikes again with a wonderful new series called "Great Ideas" featuring 12 books by great thinkers dating back to the first millennium B.C.E. through the mid-20th century, covering art, politics, literature, philosophy, science, history, and more. Each slim paperback is individually designed, and all are affordable at $8.95. A great idea indeed. Snap 'em up! Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

1	Analytic framework	1
2	Fundamental determinants of population health	35
3	Sustainable development	65
4	Human development	106
5	Economic development	183
6	Community development and public health	237
7	Toward a healthy (re)public	285

	Acknowledgments	XIII
Chapter I	September 2000	1
	Oliver Wendell Holmes has been agreeing with the CEO's opinions for nearly one hundred and fifty years
	The CEO's wife does so less frequently
	The CEO speaks on the subject of mobile phones in the manner of a 1959 curmudgeon inveighing against transistor radios
	Imagine if cheap devices to broadcast noise for idiots had allowed idiots to broadcast noise in return
	The UN is visited--a nice enough place until it was discovered by foreigners
Chapter II	October 2000	24
	The CEO considers stock market investments and decides that risk may be involved
	His wife suggests getting a job but wonders if anything is available in the field of monkey business
	The CEO considers employment and decides that work may be involved
	He conceives a brilliant idea for making his fortune by thinking like a toddler but cannot find a play group with a wet bar
Chapter III	November 2000	44
	The candidates for the 2000 presidential election are given a thorough examination although the mainstream media are allowed to do the part involving a check for prostate enlargement
	The mainstream media encounter themselves up there
	Hillary Clinton is praised for her abilities as a GOP fund-raiser
	The Political Nut, who often shows up in the CEO's household during the cocktail hour, thinks eBay could make political corruption more market-oriented
Chapter IV	December 2000	62
	The CEO argues that Las Vegas is superior to Venice as a vacation destination--having found himself in better shape after being pulled over in traffic by the Nevada Highway Patrol than he was after being pulled out of a canal by the Italian carabinieri
	Christmas gifts are chosen
	The CEO carefully inspects the catalog from Blunderwear--lingerie that would be a mistake for anyone other than the catalog models
	Hillary Clinton is embraced again--not, thank goodness, in her lingerie
	The CEO attempts to bring modern ideas of caring and compassion to great works of literature but discovers that banning the death penalty ruins many masterpieces
	At the end of A Tale of Two Cities, Sidney Carton has to explain to his parole officer that he's become a better person
Chapter V	January 2001	77
	Decadence is pondered and found to be a rotten old idea
	The CEO begins an essay on how to get properly inebriated but realizes he has important research to do
	He embarks, with his friend Chris Buckley, on a blind (drunk) wine tasting, the results of which have to be carried home flat on their backs in an SUV
	The Political Nut beats a dead horse but Bill Clinton keeps whinnying
	The impeachment is fondly remembered, and plans are made for a Bill Clinton/Ken Starr reunion tour
	The CEO meditates upon hypocrisy and decides that you can't fake it
Chapter VI	February 2001	108
	The CEO is perplexed by the quantitative nature of modern celebrity and wonders how many times Thomas De Quincey would have to be arrested for opium eating to become as famous as Robert Downey, Jr.
	The CEO is--thanks to the miracle of modern car alarms--able to teach his teenage godson how to parallel park by sonar
	The CEO lectures his young assistant on the virtues of the automobile: Consider having a hot date and needing to borrow your father's feet
Chapter VII	March 2001	136
	The CEO intends to write his memoirs but forgets
	He helps with his godson's homework instead, asking, "What's all this argle-bargle about the loss of certainty in modern mathematics? I was never able to get anything to add up the same way twice."
	The CEO explains the concept of "spring break" to his godson who hears the lyrics of "Where the Boys Are" with disbelief and disputes the idea that Connie Francis and George Hamilton were ever teenagers
Chapter VIII	April 2001	159
	The Democrats next door are vanquished by the CEO's logic and are forced to resort to low political tactics such as not letting the CEO borrow their string trimmer
	As an Oprah guest, Hitler is suggested: a larger-than-life personality who wrote a popular book about his struggle with personal issues
	The CEO argues against legalizing drugs, now that the statute of limitation has expired on his behavior in the 1960s
	Then the CEO argues in favor of legalizing drugs, if the federal government promises not to tell his wife
Chapter IX	May 2001	178
	A new baby-sitter arrives on the scene causing romantic disturbance--for those in love with Keynesian economic assumptions
	The CEO reveals his secret for avoiding stardom as a television commentator
	The CEO holds forth on the proponents of Earth Day and declares them "Dirt of the Earth."
	Counsel is consulted and a brief is filed on missile defense
	The CEO prefers a plea of guilty rather than nolo contendere
	The CEO's baby-sitter and young assistant are chastised for swiping tunes with MP3 technology--especially since none of the tunes swiped is "Volare" or "Moon River."
	San Francisco passes a law forbidding discrimination against the fat, and the CEO is outraged that the lazy aren't included
Chapter X	June 2001	203
	A blessed event occurs consisting of the arrival, in plain brown wrapper, of cigars from Cuba
	The CEO's wife has a baby, too
	The CEO's godson finds there are difficulties in dating a young lady who can do risk-analysis computations
	Breast feeding is an excellent method of getting a big baby to sleep, but the CEO is up in the middle of the night anyway
	The second anniversary of the air war in Kosovo is celebrated with suitable pomp
	The CEO declares the e-mail fad has run its course and buys stock in the Mimeograph corporation
	Wives are praised for not killing their husbands, particularly the husband the CEO's wife is married to
Chapter XI	July 2001	225
	India is traversed and the wild Indians are ... well, let's just say Dancing with Wolves got it all wrong
	The CEO proposes that an inexpensive second honeymoon could be had right in the living room if a second bottle of scotch can be procured
	The CEO's wife goes in search of the keys to the gun cabinet
Chapter XII	August 2001	247
	The CEO's godson's sister experiences rather more enlightenment than can stand the light of day
	The Political Nut counters with a more sensitive and less judgmental upgrade of the Ten Commandments
	Good feelings prevail
	The Political Nut decides to apologize for all the horrible things he's said about Democrats--especially the true things
	The baby-sitter tutors the CEO's godson in the higher mathematics of: [characters not reproducible]
	The CEO's young assistant gets a real job
	Hunter S. Thompson is shown, through rigorous textual analysis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to be a heck of a nice guy
	The CEO's wife gets the CEO to shut up
	A happy ending is had by all

	Introduction : the matrix	11
1	How to big elections	17
2	Patchwork democracy	42
3	Does race still matter?	65
4	No backsliding	87
5	La Sociedad Abierta	121
6	Fraud or suppression?	148
	Conclusion : the choice	168