Promises Not Kept or Mao

Promises Not Kept: Poverty and The Betrayal of Third World Development

Author: John Isbister

* Updates include discussion of major initiatives such as the Millennial Development Goals, (MDG) to eliminate global poverty
* Examines changes in international politics and approaches to global terrorism following the US-led military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq
* Extensively revised facts and figures

The seventh edition of this perennial stalwart of the Kumarian Press list continues the discussion of the "new American hegemony" and the "war on terror" that began with the previous edition. In particular, Isbister addresses changes in international politics and the impact on the global order of the US-led military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The author also focuses on major initiatives, such as the UN's Millennium Development Goals, to confront the issue of world poverty. As with all editions of this vibrant text, Isbister writes with clarity and passion, not only about failed promises, but about hope, human potential, and the belief that a just and equitable world system is attainable.

Read also Eating Habits for Cancer Patients or Beginning with Chiles

Mao: The Unknown Story

Author: Jung Chang

Based on a decade of research and on interviews with many of Mao's close circle in China who have never talked before--and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him--this is the most authoritative life of Mao ever written. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relationship with Stalin went back to the 1920s, ultimately bringing him to power; he welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China; and he schemed, poisoned and blackmailed to get his way. After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing this dream he caused the deaths of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history. In all, well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao's rule--in peacetime.

Combining meticulous research with the story-telling style of Wild Swans, this biography offers a harrowing portrait of Mao's ruthless accumulation of power through the exercise of terror: his first victims were the peasants, then the intellectuals and, finally, the inner circle of his own advisors. The reader enters the shadowy chambers of Mao's court and eavesdrops on the drama in its hidden recesses. Mao's character and the enormity of his behavior toward his wives, mistresses and children are unveiled for the first time.

This is an entirely fresh look at Mao in both content and approach. It will astonish historians and the general reader alike.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Nicholas D. Kristof

… this is a magisterial work. True, much of Mao's brutality has already emerged over the years, but this biography supplies substantial new information and presents it all in a stylish way that will put it on bedside tables around the world. No wonder the Chinese government has banned not only this book but issues of magazines with reviews of it, for Mao emerges from these pages as another Hitler or Stalin.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Not only does their book demolish many of the myths Mao perpetrated about himself - myths that were believed by a host of Westerners, ranging from Simone de Beauvoir to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon - but it also serves up a far more scathing portrait of the Chinese leader than those laid out by recent biographers like Philip Short and Jonathan Spence.

The Washington Post - John Pomfret

In short, if you're hoping for staid, balanced scholarship, don't read this book. It's not history; it's a screed, albeit a screed on the side of the angels…Even screeds have their place, however, and this is an extremely entertaining one. Indeed, sometimes an emotionally charged account—one written with obvious biases—can reveal the truth better than ostentatious, morally numbed objectivity that cloaks a lot of Western scholarship on China. Chang and Halliday's point is very simple: Like a small group of scholars in China, they believe that Mao wasn't a revolutionary but a monster. He wasn't a communist but a bandit king. The result is a page-turner with a point.

Publishers Weekly

Jung Chang, author of the award-winning Wild Swans, grew up during the Cultural Revolution; Halliday is a research fellow at King's College, University of London. They join forces in this sweeping but flawed biography, which aims to uncover Mao's further cruelties (beyond those commonly known) by debunking claims made by the Communist Party in his service. For example, the authors argue that, far from Mao's humble peasant background shaping his sympathies for the downtrodden, he actually ruthlessly exploited the peasants' resources when he was based in regions such as Yenan, and cared about peasants only when it suited his political agenda. And far from having founded the Chinese Communist Party, the authors argue, Mao was merely at the right place at the right time. Importantly, the book argues that in most instances Mao was able to hold on to power thanks to his adroitness in appealing to and manipulating powerful allies and foes, such as Stalin and later Nixon; furthermore, almost every aspect of his career was motivated by a preternatural thirst for personal power, rather than political vision. Some of the book's claims rely on interviews and on primary material (such as the anguished letters Mao's second wife wrote after he abandoned her), though the book's use of sources is sometimes incompletely documented and at times heavy-handed (for example, using a school essay the young Mao wrote to show his lifelong ruthlessness). Illus., maps. (Oct. 21) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

KLIATT

Jung Chang, acclaimed author of Wild Swans, and her husband, historian Jon Halliday, spent a decade conducting interviews and archival research to deconstruct the myth of Chairman Mao, a myth that is on the whole still perpetuated by China's current Communist regime. Chang and Halliday's method: to consult every available archive, to listen to every cable they could find between Peking and the Kremlin before and during the 27 years Mao ruled, and to interview every living soul somehow connected to Mao in and out of mainland China, including the exiled Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger, Mao's daughter Li Na, George H.W. Bush, and such esoteric sources as Shi Da-zheng, son of the film director who was the first famous cultural figure to commit suicide after the Communist takeover. Their list goes on and on, and makes this biography the magisterial work that it is. The authors' most pressing contention, painstakingly substantiated, is that Mao, during his nefarious reign, starved and overworked 70 million of his people to death. Over half perished during the Great Famine of 1958—1961, a period Mao deemed the Great Leap Forward. These people died during peacetime because Peking mandated exporting vast amounts of food to countries capable of providing Mao's military with nuclear weapons. It was this Superpower Program more than anything else that fueled his ambitions, that made him instill terror and hate campaigns that created a nation of hundreds of millions of petrified, brainwashed, starving people. Meanwhile, the Chairman himself lived a life of extreme comfort and extravagance in grandiose villas built specifically for him all across China. The authors tread harshly on themythology of Mao, revealing a man with little if any ideological passion. Instead, he had a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. Mao's China was "run by terror and guarded like a prison." Chang and Halliday's book is both the fascinating revelation of Mao's improbable rise to power and the fierce, long-awaited condemnation of his deadly practices once he got there. At times they seem a little too quick to denounce every single one of his actions and sometimes present him as so much of a solipsistic psychopath that we wonder how he was possibly able to conquer the biggest country in the world. Nevertheless, their research indelibly destroys any claim to Mao's legitimacy. The narrative gives minute-by-minute details of famous events and is truly chilling in what it uncovers.

Library Journal

In Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Chang detailed the experiences of her parents, early revolutionaries and high officials in Communist China, and her own adventures as a rabid Red Guard in Mao's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s (when Halliday was likewise a Mao enthusiast). Their disillusionment with Mao paralleled the party's conversion in the 1980s to Deng Xiaoping's "market socialism." Chang and Halliday make devastating use of insider gossip, published scholarship, and archives to build a detailed story of a mad, lusting Mao with neither ideals nor scruples. Scholars may see this as a prosecutor's indictment that does not explain Mao's successes, however perverse, and blames him as an individual for all woes. Some charges seem exaggerated or tendentious-for instance, the dramatic opening statement that Mao was "responsible for well over 70 million deaths," more than any other 20th-century leader. Yet the thrust of the argument is necessary and rings true. The book, while officially banned in the People's Republic, will undoubtedly be widely read there. A controversial, highly significant, and compellingly readable biography that should be in every library.-Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In the spirit of The Black Book of Communism (1999), this grand narrative aims to show that Mao Tse-tung was among the greatest mass murderers in history-if not the greatest of them all. "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader," write China-born memoirist Chang (Wild Swans, 1991) and British historian Halliday in their provocative opening. Mao's rise was improbable, argue the authors, because he was a rotter and an opportunist, and everyone knew it. As a young man, Mao read diligently, and the conclusions he took away from world history were that he was above the law and that "giant wars" were the normal order of things. Just so, late in life, having whipped up the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Mao warned a palace guard, "Don't cultivate connections. . . . Don't have photographs taken with people." He lived by such rules. Self-serving and secretive, Mao was ostracized by the Soviet-led leadership in the early days of the Communist Party; far from leading the Long March, by this account, Mao was borne into the mountains on a litter, half because of illness, half because it suited his imperial character, though he almost didn't get to go at all. Still, amazingly, he managed to play off rivals and scheme his way to absolute rule, and woe to anyone who crossed him. Chang and Halliday document at length just how willing Mao was to kill innocents for presumed crimes or mere expediency, how quick he was to concoct schemes against even such essential comrades as Lin Baio and Chou En-Lai-and how willing the leaders of theworld, among them Richard Nixon, were to bow to Mao's wishes. A startling document, one that will surely occasion revision of the historical record. First printing of 75,000

What People Are Saying

"Ever since the spectacular success of Chang's Wild Swans we have waited impatiently for her to complete with her husband this monumental study of China's most notorious modern leader. The expectation has been that she would rewrite modern Chinese history. The wait has been worthwhile and the expectation justified. This is a bombshell of a book."
--Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, in The Times (London)

"Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao's tumultuous life...a stupendous work and one hopes that it will be brought before the Chinese people, who still claim to venerate the man and who have yet to come to terms with their own history..."
-Michael Yahuda, The Guardian

"Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have not, in the whole of their narrative, a good word to say about Mao. In a normal biography, such an unequivocal denunciation would be both suspect and tedious. But the clear scholarship, and careful notes, of The Unknown Story provoke another reaction. Mao Tse-Tung's evil, undoubted and well-documented, is unequalled throughout modern history."
-Roy Hattersley, The Observer

"A triumph. It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research."
-Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Sunday Times

"Jung Chang and Jon Halliday enter a savage indictment drawing on a host of sources, including important Soviet ones, to blow away the miasma of deceit and ignorance which still shrouds Mao's life from many Western eyes...Jung Chang delivers a cry of anguish on behalf of all of those in her native land who, to this day, are still not free to speak of these things."
-Max Hastings, The Sunday Telegraph

"Demonstrating the same pitilessness that they judge to be Mao's most formidable weapon, they unstitch the myths that sustained him in power for forty years and that continue to underpin China's regime--I suspect that when China comes to terms with its past this book will have played a role."
-Nicolas Shakespeare, Telegraph

"The detail and documentation are awesome. The story that they tell, mesmerising in its horror, is the most powerful, compelling, and revealing political biography of modern times. Few books are destined to change history, but this one will."
-George Walden, Daily Mail

"decisive biography--they have investigated every aspect of his personal life and career, peeling back the layers of lies, myths, and what we used to think of as facts--what Chang and Halliday have done is immense and surpasses, as a biography, everything that has gone before."
-Jonathan Mirsky, The Independent, Saturday

"written with the same deft hand that enlivened Ms. Chang's 1991 memoir, 'Wild Swans'"
--The Economist

Table of Contents:

List of Maps
Abbreviations and a Note About Spelling in the Text

PART ONE — Lukewarm Believer
1. On the Cusp from Ancient to Modern (1893–1911; age 1–17)
2. Becoming a Communist (1911–20; age 17–26)
3. Lukewarm Believer (1920–25; age 26–31)
4. Rise and Demise in the Nationalist Party (1925–27; age 31–33)

PART TWO — Long March to Supremacy in the Party
5. Hijacking a Red Force and Taking Over Bandit Land (1927–28; age 33–34)
6. Subjugating the Red Army Supremo (1928–30; age 34–36)
7. Takeover Leads to Death of Second Wife (1927–30; age 33–36)
8. Bloody Purge Paves the Way for “Chairman Mao” (1929–31; age 35–37)
9. Mao and the First Red State (1931–34; age 37–40)
10. Troublemaker to Figurehead (1931–34; age 37–40)
11. How Mao Got onto the Long March (1933–34; age 39–40)
12. Long March I: Chiang Lets the Reds Go (1934; age 40)
13. Long March II: The Power Behind the Throne (1934–35; age 40–41)
14. Long March III: Monopolising the Moscow Connection (1935; age 41)

PART THREE — Building His Power Base
15. The Timely Death of Mao’s Host (1935–36; age 41–42)
16. Chiang Kai-shek Kidnapped (1935–36; age 41–42)
17. A National Player (1936; age 42–43)
18. New Image, New Life and New Wife (1937–38; age43–44)
19. Red Mole Triggers China–Japan War (1937–38; age 43–44)
20. Fight Rivals and Chiang—Not Japan (1937–40; age 43–46)
21. Most Desired Scenario: Stalin Carves Up China with Japan (1939–40; age 45–46)
22. Death Trap for His Own Men (1940–41; age 46–47)
23. Building a Power Base Through Terror (1941–45; age 47–51)
24. Uncowed Opponent Poisoned (1941–45; age 47–51)
25. Supreme Party Leader at Last (1942–45; age 48–51)

PART FOUR — To Conquer China
26. “Revolutionary Opium War” (1937–45; age 43–51)
27. The Russians Are Coming! (1945–46; age 51–52)
28. Saved by Washington (1944–47; age 50–53)
29. Moles, Betrayals and Poor Leadership Doom Chiang (1945–49; age 51–55)
30. China Conquered (1946–49; age 52–55)
31. Totalitarian State, Extravagant Lifestyle (1949–53; age 55–59)

PART FIVE — Chasing a Superpower Dream
32. Rivalry with Stalin (1947–49; age 53–55)
33. Two Tyrants Wrestle (1949–50; age 55–56)
34. Why Mao and Stalin Started the Korean War (1949–50; age 55–56)
35. Mao Milks the Korean War (1950–53; age 56–59)
36. Launching the Secret Superpower Programme (1953–54; age 59–60)
37. War on Peasants (1953–56; age 59–62)
38. Undermining Khrushchev (1956–59; age 62–65)
39. Killing the “Hundred Flowers” (1957–58; age 63–64)
40. The Great Leap: “Half of China May Well Have to Die” (1958–61; age 64–67)
41. Defence Minister Peng’s Lonely Battle (1958–59; age 64–65)
42. The Tibetans Rebel (1950–61; age 56–67)
43. Maoism Goes Global (1959–64; age 65–70)
44. Ambushed by the President (1961–62; age 67–68)
45. The Bomb (1962–64; age 68–70)
46. A Time of Uncertainty and Setbacks (1962–65; age 68–71)

PART SIX — Unsweet Revenge
47. A Horse-Trade Secures the Cultural Revolution (1965–66; age 71–72)
48. The Great Purge (1966–67; age 72–73)
49. Unsweet Revenge (1966–74; age 72–80)
50. The Chairman’s New Outfit (1967–70; age 73–76)
51. A War Scare (1969–71; age 75–77)
52. Falling Out with Lin Biao (1970–71; age 76–77)
53. Maoism Falls Flat on the World Stage (1966–70; age 72–76)
54. Nixon: the Red-Baiter Baited (1970–73; age 76–79)
55. The Boss Denies Chou Cancer Treatment (1972–74; age 78–80)
56. Mme Mao in the Cultural Revolution (1966–75; age 72–81)
57. Enfeebled Mao Hedges His Bets (1973–76; age 79–82)
58. Last Days (1974–76; age 80–82)

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
List of Interviewees
Archives Consulted
Notes
Bibliography of Chinese-Language Sources
Bibliography of Non-Chinese-Language Sources
Index

American Dream or Messages to the World

American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare

Author: Jason DeParl

In this definitive work, two-time Pulitzer finalist Jason DeParle cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce a masterpiece of literary journalism. At the heart of the story are three cousins whose different lives follow similar trajectories. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces their family history back six generations to slavery and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic.

With a vivid sense of humanity, DeParle demonstrates that although we live in a country where anyone can make it, generation after generation some families don't. To read American Dream is to understand why.

The New York Times - Anthony Walton

Resolving to clean his ''mental slate,'' DeParle set out to explore the effects of the landmark law. The courageous and deeply disturbing result, American Dream, confounds the clichйs of the left as well as the right about race, poverty, class and opportunity in the early 21st century … Through his scrupulous attention, DeParle challenges the nation to contemplate the dreams, or lack thereof, within the American dream.

The New Yorker

In the years after 1996, when President Clinton signed welfare-reform legislation, nine million women and children left the country’s welfare rolls. Though the exodus was applauded in Washington, the story of exactly how these families were faring remained, in DeParle’s words, a “national mystery.” DeParle spent these years in Milwaukee, welfare reform’s unofficial capital, studying the lives of three former welfare mothers: Jewell, Opal, and Angie. The narrative pans across generations of poverty—the women’s grandparents sharecropped cotton—while, in the present, results vary. Opal tumbles into crack addiction, but the others struggle ahead, ultimately earning nine and ten dollars an hour as nursing assistants; Angie even joins a 401(k) plan. They are welfare-reform “successes,” but their lives remain precarious. When there isn’t enough money, lights are turned off and children go hungry. “Just treading water,” Angie says, surveying her progress. “Just making it, that’s all.”

Publishers Weekly

While campaigning for president in 1992, Bill Clinton vowed to "end welfare as we know it"; four years later, the much publicized slogan evolved into a law that sent nine million women and children off the rolls. New York Times reporter DeParle takes an eye-opening look at the controversial law through the lives of three black women affected by it, all part of the same extended family, and at the shapers of the policy. He moves back and forth between the women's tough Milwaukee neighborhoods and the strategy sessions and speeches of Clinton, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson and others. But the best parts of the book are its slices of life: DeParle accompanies the women on trips to the dentist, on visits to loved ones in jail, to job-training workshops and on travels to Mississippi. He offers few solutions for breaking the cycle of poverty and dependency in America, but DeParle's large-scale conclusion is that moving poor women into the workforce contributed to declines in crime, teen pregnancy and crack use. (Sept. 9) Forecast: This long-focus book will appeal to readers of David Shipler's bestselling The Working Poor and the highly praised Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and may receive a small boost from renewed Clinton mania. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

New York Times journalist DeParle tracks three women on-and then off-welfare. "An important book," insists the publicist. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

Contents
part i. welfare
1 | The Pledge: Washington and Milwaukee, 1991 3
2 | The Plantation: Mississippi, 1840-1960 20
3 | The Crossroads: Chicago, 1966-1991 38
4 | The Survivors: Milwaukee, 1991-1995 58
part ii. ending welfare
5 | The Accidental Program: Washington, 1935-1991 85
6 | The Establishment Fails: Washington, 1992-1994 101
7 | Redefining Compassion: Washington, 1994-1995 123
8 | The Elusive President: Washington, 1995-1996 138
9 | The Radical Cuts the Rolls: Milwaukee, 1995-1996 155
part iii. after welfare
10 | Angie and Jewell Go to Work: Milwaukee, 1996-1998 175
11 | Opal's Hidden Addiction: Milwaukee, 1996-1998 196
12 | Half a Safety Net: The United States, 1997-2003 208
13 | W-2 Buys the Crack: Milwaukee, 1998 222
14 | Golf Balls and Corporate Dreams: Milwaukee, 1997-1999 230
15 | Caseworker XMI28W Milwaukee, 1998-2000 251
16 | Boyfriends: Milwaukee, Spring 1999 264
17 | Money: Milwaukee, Summer 1999 282
18 | A Shot at the American Dream: Milwaukee, Fall 1999 303
Epilogue | Washington and Milwaukee, 1999-2004 323
Timeline 339
Notes 343
Acknowledgments 000
Index 000

Go to: Politics and Society in the Developing World or Fundamentals of Labor Economics

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden

Author: Osama bin Laden

Despite the saturation of global media coverage, Osama bin Laden's own writings have been curiously absent from analysis of the "war on terror." Over the last ten years, bin Laden has issued a series of carefully tailored public statements, from interviews with Western and Arabic journalists to faxes and video recordings. These texts supply evidence crucial to an understanding of the bizarre mix of Quranic scholarship, CIA training, punctual interventions in Gulf politics and messianic anti-imperialism that has formed the programmatic core of Al Qaeda.

In bringing together the various statements issued under bin Laden's name since 1994, this volume forms part of a growing discourse that seeks to demythologize the terrorist network. Newly translated from the Arabic, annotated with a critical introduction by Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, this collection places the statements in their religious, historical and political context. It shows how bin Laden's views draw on and differ from other strands of radical Islamic thought; it also demonstrates how his arguments vary in degrees of consistency, and how his evasions concerning the true nature and extent of his own group, and over his own role in terrorist attacks, have contributed to the perpetuation of his personal mythology.

THe New York Times - Noah Feldman

Putting bin Laden's words on paper helps show him for what he is — a Muslim out of the mainstream, distorting the faith to justify murder. In the end, the most constructive thing one can do with a book like this one is to use it against itself, as a tool in the fight against terrorism.

Foreign Affairs

Following Lawrence's succinct introduction, this short book presents translations of 24 different statements by Osama bin Laden (mainly speeches, but also one long interview), arranged chronologically from December 1994 to December 2004. Some are hardly more than a page, others longer. The provenance and context of each statement are given in a short introductory statement, and copious footnotes identify Koranic and hadith citations, persons past or present mentioned, and other subjects that might need identification. The translations provide an idiomatically smooth English text even while preserving the distinctive tenor of the Arabic (for four of the statements the Arabic original could not be recovered). This is a fine and faithful rendition of the mind of bin Laden as set out in his own words.

A Century of Spies or Passionaries

A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century

Author: Jeffery T Richelson

Here is the ultimate inside history of twentieth-century intelligence gathering and covert activity. Unrivalled in its scope and as readable as any spy novel, A Century of Spies travels from tsarist Russia and the earliest days of the British Secret Service to the crises and uncertainties of today's post-Cold War world, offering an unsurpassed overview of the role of modern intelligence in every part of the globe. From spies and secret agents to the latest high-tech wizardry in signals and imagery surveillance, it provides fascinating, in-depth coverage of important operations of United States, British, Russian, Israeli, Chinese, German, and French intelligence services, and much more.
All the key elements of modern intelligence activity are here. An expert whose books have received high marks from the intelligence and military communities, Jeffrey Richelson covers the crucial role of spy technology from the days of Marconi and the Wright Brothers to today's dazzling array of Space Age satellites, aircraft, and ground stations. He provides vivid portraits of spymasters, spies, and defectors--including Sidney Reilly, Herbert Yardley, Kim Philby, James Angleton, Markus Wolf, Reinhard Gehlen, Vitaly Yurchenko, Jonathan Pollard, and many others. Richelson paints a colorful portrait of World War I's spies and sabateurs, and illuminates the secret maneuvering that helped determine the outcome of the war on land, at sea, and on the diplomatic front; he investigates the enormous importance of intelligence operations in both the European and Pacific theaters in World War II, from the work of Allied and Nazi agents to the "black magic" of U.S. and British code breakers; and he gives us acomplete overview of intelligence during the length of the Cold War, from superpower espionage and spy scandals to covert action and secret wars. A final chapter probes the still-evolving role of intelligence work in the new world of disorder and ethnic conflict, from the high-tech wonders of the Gulf War to the surprising involvement of the French government in industrial espionage.
Comprehensive, authoritative, and addictively readable, A Century of Spies is filled with new information on a variety of subjects--from the activities of the American Black Chamber in the 1920s to intelligence collection during the Cuban missile crisis to Soviet intelligence and covert action operations. It is an essential volume for anyone interested in military history, espionage and adventure, and world affairs.

Publishers Weekly

Intelligence, according to Richelson, played a crucial role in defeating Hitler, preventing the Cold War from turning into a nuclear war and keeping the superpower arms race from getting completely out of hand. His comprehensive survey explores the impact of spies and their special technology on world events in this century, showing how intelligence gathering and espionage have become a multibillion-dollar enterprise. The book covers events and developments from WWI to the age of spy satellites. With the end of the Cold War, as he shows, intelligence organizations have begun to focus more on international economic rivalries-an emphasis that includes economic espionage. Richelson predicts that intelligence technologies in the next century will become even more sophisticated but humans will still be needed for obtaining documents, technical samples and on-site reporting. This decade-by-decade review of key events and breakthroughs in intelligence and espionage is masterly. Richelson is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive. (Aug.)

Library Journal

In this ambitious book, Richelson (America's Secret Eyes in Space, HarperBusiness, 1990) surveys the growth, development, and transformation of intelligence (a.k.a., "spying") in the 20th century. The work combines elements of popular spy books-great stories, colorful characters, and sad incidents-with more straightforward analysis. For the ardent spy buff, the volume is an interesting array of tales with a broader developmental focus; indeed, the cross-national perspective is a strength here. The book falls short, however, in providing the in-depth analysis one would hope for. For example, a final chapter on "a new world of disorder" falls short of providing a good vision of the current situation, despite a proper emphasis on economic intelligence, proliferation, and technical intelligence means. Ultimately, too many questions are left unanswered here. While Richelson believes that spying has had its beneficial aspects (e.g., breaking Hitler), its impact on domestic life, no matter what country, slips by him. An optional purchase.-H. Steck, SUNY at Cortland

Table of Contents:

Contents
Part I * 1900-1939
1. A Shady Profession	3
2. The Great War: Spies and Saboteurs	18
3. Spies in the Great War: Eyes and Ears	31
4. Lenin's Spies	47
5. Spies Between the Wars: 1919-1929	64
6. Spies Between the Wars: 1930-1939	79
Part II * The Second World War
7. Intelligence and the Onset of War	103
8. Spies and Counterspies	124
9. The Wrecking Crews	145
10. Aerial Spies	157
11. Black Magic	173
12. Knowing the Enemy	197
Part III * The Cold War Era and Beyond
13. New Adversaries	215
14. New Players	232
15. Secret Wars	244
16. Superpower Espionage	256
17. Spies and Moles	272
18. TechnologicalEspionage	293
19. Crisis Intelligence	310
20. The Technical Revolution Continues	328
21. Penetrations, Sunken Subs, and Sudden Death	342
22. Elusive Truths	360
23. A New Decade	373
24. The Year of the Spy	388
25. End of an Era	404
26. A New World of Disorder	416
Abbreviations Used in the Notes	433
Notes	435
Index	511

Go to: L'Entreprise Résistante :le Surpassement de la Vulnérabilité pour l'Avantage Compétitif

Passionaries: Turning Compassion into Action

Author: Barbara Metzler

PASSIONARIES: individuals who transform their compassionate visions into positive actions that significantly change the lives of others.

Have you ever asked yourself, "How can one person really make a difference?" Passionaries answers that question with vivid, true stories of extraordinary social entrepreneurs turning their passions into action-and surprisingly shows how one person can change our world. This book captures an unsung movement unique to American culture-to create a legacy, make a mark, leave the world better. These modern-day heroes show each of us how we can do it too.
True stories of more than 35 individuals, ages 6 to 89, serve as inspiration and guides. Each profile describes the leader of an organization that has significantly impacted millions of lives. Every nonprofit in financially efficient, has made a material impact on society, and is volunteer friendly. Readers will learn about what sparked the original idea for each organization, discover the creative ways obstacles were overcome, and see the power of change rippling out to second and third "generations" of lives. Facts, figures, and contact information included may encourage readers to join the ranks of the more than 20 million like-minded volunteers who helped build the organizations.

Gandhi the Man or Foxbats over Dimona

Gandhi the Man: The Story of His Transformation

Author: Eknath Easwaran

A vivid account of Mahatma Gandhi's spiritual transformation from timid young man to world leader that can serve as an inspiration for our own transformation. In 1893, Mohandas Gandhi left India for South Africa at the age of 23 – a man whose past was full of failure. Ten years later, called a saint even by those who opposed him, he grew to become the acknowledged leader of 400 million Indians in their struggle for independence. As a young man, Eknath Easwaran visited Gandhi – not to observe his political style, but, "because I wanted to know the secret of his power." Easwaran shares what he discovered in this book. The chapter by Timothy Flinders, "How Satyagraha Works" shows how to use Gandhi's nonviolent techniques to solve contemporary problems.

Argus-Courier

Gandhi the Man is a compelling and relevant account of the man many consider to be the most important figure of our age. It is perhaps the most accessible work on Gandhi that has yet been published

About the Author
Eknath Easwaran grew up in Gandhi's India in an ancient Hindu matrilineal family in Kerala state. He had not been long out of college when he made his first visit to Gandhi to discover the secret of his self-mastery – the secret not of Gandhi the political leader, but of Gandhi the man. Years later, in the midst of a busy career as a writer and professor, Easwaran began to practice meditation earnestly in order to bring about a similar spiritual transformation in his own life. He was chairman of the Department of English at a large Indian university when he came to the United States on the Fulbright exchange program. In 1961, he established the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in Berkeley, California.

Bill McKibben

It comes closer to giving some sense of how Gandhi saw his life than any other account I have read. . . . Gandhi mastered his own life – took charge of his mind and his body. As a result he knew no fear, only great and undifferentiated love for the rest of creation. And so he was able to powerfully affect that creation.New York Post

Noetic Sciences Review

Provides an inspiring example of the reaches of human possibility when infused with spiritual insight

Noetic Sciences News

Provides an inspiring example of the reaches of human possibility when infused with spiritual insight

Brain/Mind Bulletin

The illustrations are stunning, the biography vivid. Easwaran places Gandhi within a spiritual as well as historic context.

Go to: Fibromyalgia Advocate or The Portion Plan

Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War

Author: Isabella Ginor

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s groundbreaking history of the Six-Day War in 1967 radically changes our understanding of that conflict, casting it as a crucial arena of Cold War intrigue that has shaped the Middle East to this day. The authors, award-winning Israeli journalists and historians, have investigated newly available documents and testimonies from the former Soviet Union, cross-checked them against Israeli and Western sources, and arrived at fresh and startling conclusions.

Contrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez’s book shows that the Six-Day War was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel’s nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets then began preparing for war--well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis.

Ginor and Remez’s startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel’s shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scareIsrael into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel’s response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.

 

Foreign Affairs

The revisionist label is too often used to describe a reinterpretation of past events from an unorthodox political perspective. Here is a book that is truly revisionist, challenging what we thought we knew about the origins and conduct of the Six-Day War, Israel's crushing victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria 40 years ago. The exact role played by the Soviet Union has always been murky. The authors work their way through the murk, meticulously using every snippet of relevant information from an extraordinary range of sources, most effectively Soviet military personnel who can recall what they were up to in 1967. Where there are gaps, they make a careful case for conjecture and inference. They demonstrate how anxiety about Israel's imminent nuclear capability and an unwarranted confidence in Arab military strength led Moscow to develop a plot to provoke the Israelis into striking first before being overwhelmed by a devastating riposte, in which Soviet forces would participate. The plan never recovered from the quality of Israel's first strike, although bits of it were implemented as Israel appeared to be marching on Damascus. By its nature, this is an impossible case to prove, but Ginor and Remez have succeeded to the point where the onus is now on others to show why they are wrong.<

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     ix
Maps     xii
Historiography as Investigative Journalism     1
Threat or Bluster     10
Antecedents and Motivations     15
The Nuclear Context     28
The Spymaster and the Communist: A Disclosure in December 1965     36
A Nuclear Umbrella for Egypt     49
Converging Timelines: Syrian Coup and Party Congress     58
The "Conqueror" and "Victor" Plans: Soviet Signatures     68
The Naval and Aerial Buildup     78
Mid-May: Disinformation or Directive?     88
Escalation and Denial: 14-26 May     104
The Badran Talks: Restraining an Ally     113
Foxbats over Dimona     121
Poised for a Desant: 5 June     138
Un-Finnished Business: Preemptive Diplomacy     153
Debates, Delays, and Ditherings: 6-8 June     164
The Liberty Incident: Soviet Fingerprints     180
Offense Becomes Deterrence: 10 June     191
Aftermath     207
Notes     219
Works Cited     265
Index     275

Human Resource Management in Public Service or Texas Oil American Dreams

Human Resource Management in Public Service: Paradoxes, Processes, and Problems

Author: Evan M Berman

Effective human resource management is a critical function in today's public workplace. The authors have written a Second Edition to this best seller to help readers develop key skills for success while also reminding them of the complex puzzles and paradoxes of management in the public sector. Human Resource Management in Public Service emphasizes active learning capturing student's interest through end-of-chapter questions and group exercises. The authors provide a selection of HRM material that primarily addresses the needs of generalist public managers while still being appropriate for those seeking an HR career. While highlighting the public service heritage, the chapters reflect the stages of the employment process from start to finish. Readers learn to effectively manage people in the essential aspects of recruitment, selection, training, legal rights and responsibilities, compensation and appraisal. Practical applications, inclusion of essential theories, tools and processes, and the lively, brief presentation of the text can be appreciated by both students and professors alike.

The Second Edition:  

• Meets students needs: Added material relevant to the needs of students seeking to promote their careers and on-the-job effectiveness
• Provides end-of-chapter cases:Brief cases added to the end-of-chapter exercises
• Highlights new developments: Insertion of informative textboxes to highlight applications, recent developments, controversial issues, and the like
• Reflects changes in practice: Material in each chapter has been updated andmodified to reflect changes in practice, policy, law, and scholarship in local, state, and federal sectors
• Identifies useful websites: Links with specific, useful information provided in each chapter
• Discusses nonprofit organizations: Provides applications and discussions relevant to nonprofit organizations.  

The Second Edition of this award winning text is written for students and professionals in human resource management, public administration, public service, and political science.

Interesting book: Entrepreneurship Small and Medium Sized Enterprises and the Macroeconomy or Whos Running America The Clinton Years

Texas Oil, American Dreams: A Study of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association

Author: Lawrence R Goodwyn

In this intricate narrative, Lawrence Goodwyn has undertaken to penetrate the legend of the wildcatter and bring into focus the people who endeavored to act out the American Dream in the remote corners of oil country. It is surprising to discover early on - even before the outlines of the wildcatter become clear - other vague but seemingly omnipotent actors occupying center stage: major oil companies. Independents and the majors are found to be abrasively yoked in awkward embrace: what immediately becomes clear for the first time in this intimate study is that the presence of one helps in central ways to define the other. Indeed, the whole relationship of individual enterprise to corporate enterprise becomes uniquely visible in the sources amassed over half a century by the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. Texas Oil, American Dreams has a compelling quality whose ultimate meaning extends far beyond the borders of Texas because the enterprise of oil-finding and the wildcatters who have lived it constitute one of the most intense expressions of individual American striving. Above all, they kept careful records of their own efforts - when they prevailed and why, and when they met defeat and why.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: First a Tradition, Then a Method of Survival	1
1	Democracy Comes to the World of Oil	9
2	"Anarchy" vs "Order": Independents and the Majors	41
3	Closing Ranks	57
4	The Warning Years	81
5	Transformation	117
6	An Expanding Realm of Surprises	159
7	The Way of Life	197
	Epilogue	231
Appendix	TIPRO Presidents, 1946-1996	239
	Notes	247
	Bibliography	265
	Index	269

The Man in the Arena or American Evita

The Man in the Arena

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

By the time he was twenty-five the future president of the United States was already a published author. From The Naval War of 1812 through his four-volume Winning of the West, Teddy Roosevelt proved himself a master historian...but one must not make the mistake of labeling him a stodgy academic.
The future president was also a great outdoorsman, with such works as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail and African Game Trails capturing his rough and ready lifestyle.
Theodore Roosevelt was part Francis Parkman, part Lowell Thomas, and one hundred percent spirit of America and master of the printed page.
The Man in the Arena collects self-contained excerpts from some of his greatest works, including such revealing memoirs as The Rough Riders, the Autobiography, and Through the Brazilian Wilderness, in an effort to capture the many aspects of a great American who was indeed larger than life and his own best "Boswell."

Interesting book: Six Sigma Quality Improvement with MINITAB or Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5

American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power

Author: Christopher Andersen

"I don't quit. I keep going."
Hillary Rodham Clinton

The Divided West or The Responsible Administrator

The Divided West

Author: Jurgen Habermas

Make no mistake, the normative authority of the United States of America lies in ruins. Such is the judgment of the most influential thinker in Europe today reflecting on the political repercussions of the war in Iraq. The decision to go to war in Iraq, without the explicit backing of a Security Council Resolution, opened up a deep fissure in the West which continues to divide erstwhile allies and to hinder the attempt to develop a coordinated response to the new threats posed by international terrorism.


In this timely and important volume, Jurgen Habermas responds to the dramatic political events of the period since September 11, 2001, and maps out a way to move the political agenda forward, beyond the acrimonious debates that have pitched opponents of the war against the Bush Administration and its coalition of the willing. What is fundamentally at stake, argues Habermas, is the Kantian project of overcoming the state of nature between states through the constitutionalization of international law.


Habermas develops a detailed multidimensional model of transnational and supranational governance inspired by Kantian cosmopolitanism, situates it in the context of the evolution of international law toward a cosmopolitan constitutional order during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and defends it against the new challenge posed by the hegemonic liberal vision underlying the aggressive unilateralism of the current US administration.


The Divided West is a major intervention by one of the most highly regarded political thinkers of our time. It will be essential reading for students of sociology, politics, international relations, andinternational law, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the current and future course of European and international politics.

Table of Contents:

• Editor’s Preface
  
• Author’s Foreword
  
• Part I: After September 11
  
• Chapter 1: Fundamentalism and Terror
  
• Chapter 2: Interpreting the Fall of a Monument
  
• Part II: The Voice of Europe in the Clamour of its Nations
  
• Chapter 3: February 15, or: What Binds Europeans
  
• Chapter 4: Core Europe as Counterpower? Follow-up Questions
  
• Chapter 5: The State of German-Polish Relations
  
• Chapter 6: Is the Development of a European Identity Necessary, and Is It Possible?
  
• Part III: Views on a Chaotic World
  
• Chapter 7: An Interview on War and Peace
  
• Part IV: The Kantian Project and the Divided West
  
• Chapter 8: Does the Constitutionalisation of International Law Still Have a Chance?
  
• Index

Book about: PCs or Security Training Guide

The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Adminstrative Role

Author: Terry L Cooper

Those who serve the public trust must take special care to ensure they make ethical and responsible decisions. Yet the realities of bureaucracies, deadlines, budgets, and demands for quick results make the payoffs for dealing formally with ethics seem unclear. Since its original publication, The Responsible Administrator has guided professionals and students alike as they grapple with the challenges of making ethical, responsible decisions in real world situations.

This new edition includes information on coping with new demands for accountability, as well as new cases and examples, an examination of current issues relevant to administrative ethics, and supplementary materials for professors.

Cooper’s theoretical framework and practical applications and techniques will help you consider all of the factors involved in a decision, ensuring that you balance professional, personal, and organizational values. Case studies and examples illustrate what works and what does not. The Responsible Administrator helps both experienced and novice public administrators and students become effective decision makers, provides them with a solid understanding of the role of ethics in public service and the framework to incorporate ethical and values-based decision making in day-to-day management.

Hobbes or Scouting for Boys

Hobbes: Leviathan: Revised student edition

Author: Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes' Leviathan is arguably the greatest piece of political philosophy written in the English language. Since its first publication, Richard Tuck's edition of Leviathan has been recognized as the single most accurate and authoritative text, and for this revised edition Professor Tuck has provided a much-amplified and expanded introduction. Other vital study aids include an extensive guide to further reading, a note on textual matters, a chronology of important events and brief biographies of important persons mentioned in Hobbes' text.

Book review: The Java Programming Language or Enterprise SOA

Scouting for Boys: The Original 1908 Edition

Author: Robert Baden Powell

A startling amalgam of Zulu war-cry and Sherlock Holmes, of practical tips on health and hygiene and object lessons in woodcraft, Scouting for Boys (1908) is the original blueprint and inspiration for the Boy Scout Movement. An all-time bestseller in the English-speaking world, second in its heyday only to the Bible, it is one of the most influential manuals for youth ever published, known and loved around the world.
Including all of Baden-Powell's original illustrations, this new critical edition of Scouting for Boys serves up a wonderful hodge-podge of true crime stories, stern moralizing, stock adventure tales, natural history, first-aid tips, advice on observation and tracking, and much more. Readers will find a roughly composed pastiche of jingoist lore and tracker legend, padded with lengthy quotations from adventure fiction--from Rudyard Kipling and James Fenimore Cooper, to Alexander Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle--and seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration ("the fall of the Roman empire was due to bad citizenship") and a constant worry over imminent war. Alongside practical instructions on how to light fires, build a boat, or stalk animals (or men), it includes sections on chivalry, self-discipline, self-improvement, and citizenship. Indeed, the book brims with Baden-Powell's philosophy of life, one that replaces self with service, puts country before the individual, and duty above all. The introduction by Elleke Boehmer illuminates the book's maverick complexity and her notes clarify obscure references.
Though almost a century old, Scouting for Boys continues to fascinate, surprise, and motivate readers today. It willdelight anyone interested in popular culture, Victorian history, and literature for children.

Table of Contents:

Part I
Scoutcraft and Scout Law
Part II
Observations-and Tracking
Woodcraft and Knowledge of Animals
Part III
Campaigning and Camp Life
Pioneering and Resourcefulness
Part IV
Endurance and Health
Chivalry and Brave Deeds
Discipline
Part V
Saving Life and First-Aid
Patriotism and Loyalty
Part VI
Scouting Games, Competitions, and Plays
Words to Instructors

London Underworld in the Victorian Period or The Achille Lauro Hijacking

London Underworld in the Victorian Period: Authentic First-Person Accounts by Beggars, Thieves and Prostitutes

Author: Henry Mayhew

The first and possibly the greatest sociological study of poverty in 19th-century London. Mayhew and his collaborators explored hundreds of miles of London streets in the 1840s and 1850s, gathering thousands of pages of testimony from the city's humblest residents. A classic reference source for sociologists, historians, and criminologists.

New interesting textbook: Governmental and NonProfit Accounting or Visitor Management

The Achille Lauro Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism

Author: Michael K Bohn

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

Ground Truth or Nanny State

Ground Truth: The Future of U. S. Land Power

Author: Thomas Donnelly

"In Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power, Thomas Donnelly and Frederick W. Kagan pose five urgent questions for policymakers: What is the strategic role of American ground forces? What missions will these forces undertake in the future? What is the nature of land warfare in the twenty-first century? What qualities are necessary to succeed on the battlefields of the Long War? What is the ideal size and configuration of the force - and how much will it cost?" Answers to such questions are long overdue. The stresses of prolonged operations in the Middle East have strained the U.S. Army and Marine Corps; if the United States is to maintain its status as the sole superpower, American land power must be restructured to confront unprecedented challenges.

Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal

We are used to hearing about "ground forces" in Iraq. Here former House Armed Services Committee staffer Donnelly and former professor of military history at West Point Kagan (respectively, resident fellow and resident scholar in defense & security policy studies, AEI) look at America's military and note that it is functioning according to policy, funding, and organization from the 1980s even as today's counterterrorism and counterinsurgency require a new kind of land warfare. They succinctly lay out the needs for a larger, differently trained and equipped ground force. Of interest to military history buffs as well as the specialists.

Table of Contents:

Introduction 1

1 The Mission 5

How We Got Here 6

The Military's Missions 11

Priorities 14

Enemies 16

Threats 23

Iran 23

China 27

Challenges 28

Requirements 30

2 What Kind of War? 33

The Nature of Conflict and Attempts to Predict the

Nature of Future War 34

The Posture of the U.S. Military Today 37

The Need for a Full-Spectrum Force 40

The Internationalist Chimera 42

The Nature of the War on Terror 45

The Restoration of Military Capability 48

3 Case Studies: New Battlefields 50

The Invasion of Iraq: Speed Kills 52

Tal Afar: Conventional Forces in Irregular War 59

Israel in Lebanon: Serial Surprise 65

Lost and Won: The Fight for Anbar 73

Building Partners: The Abu Sayyaf Campaign 80

4 What Kind of Force? 87

Force Presence and the Institutional Base 89

Information Gathering and Processing 92

Firepower 98

Leader Training 100

Partnership 102

Expansibility 108

5 Costs: Time, People, Money 110

A Ten-Year Commitment 110

Sizing the Force 113

Structuring the Force 122

Equipping the Force 128

Paying for the Force 139

Notes 145

Index 159

Book about: Le Secteur À but non lucratif :un Manuel de Recherche

Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children

Author: David Harsanyi

In certain Massachusetts towns, school-yard tag is now banned. San Francisco has passed laws regulating the amount of water you should use in dog bowls. In New York City it is illegal to sit on an upended milk crate. In some parts of California, smoking is prohibited—outside.

In the name of health, safety, decency, and good intentions, ever-vigilant politicians, bureaucrats, and social activists are dictating what we eat, where we smoke, what we watch and read. Why do bureaucrats know what’s better for us than we do? Have they overstepped their bounds in dictating our behavior through legislation? Are their restrictive measures essential to our health and safety—or exercises in political expediency? Girl Scout cookies, swing sets, cigarettes, alcohol, and gay authors are all in their sights. Nanny State raises a host of questions about the motives and influence of the playground police, food-fascists, anti-porn crusaders, and other “nannies” popping up all over America.

Nanny State provides a rubric for viewing the debate about the size and scope of the state. Drawing on dozens of examples, Harsanyi offers a convincing argument that government intervention in its citizens’ private lives not only denies us freedom of choice, but also erodes our national character by promoting a culture of victimhood and dependence.

Publishers Weekly

Denver Postcolumnist Harsanyi's libertarian opus makes the case that government meddling in private lives demands our full attention. Whether bureaucrats are banning trans fats, trying to reduce drinking or legislating where citizens can smoke, Harsanyi objects. Such regulation, he believes, insults a freeborn citizenry. As he puts it: "the five most frightening words in the English language: something needs to be done." Aiming at predictable targets like New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he finds no meddler too insignificant to escape his contempt, including a Dublin, Calif., councilwoman who tried to further tighten the city's antismoking law. Harsanyi also trashes the religious right for trying to legislate morality. But the book would have benefited from more anecdotes and original reporting, instead of incessantly naming overzealous do-gooders. Moreover, Harsanyi barely considers business's role, as these dangerous do-gooders fight fast food and tobacco companies armed with hundreds of millions of marketing dollars. There's not much new, but fellow libertarians may enjoy getting carried away by the flood of Harsanyi's outrage. (Sept.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Denver Post columnist Harsanyi delivers a podium-thumping screed against micromanaging, moralizing busybodies from both sides of the political divide. According to the author, Americans are in danger of infantilization by legislation. Health-conscious scaremongers have passed laws eroding the freedom to eat a trans-fat-larded monster burger, smoke a post-prandial cigarette indoors or knock back a few beers. Safety-conscious meddlers have passed regulations on sharp toys, oversized gumballs, competitive dodgeball and buckling up when driving. They're also responsible for the inane warning labels affixed to just about everything. Morality-conscious prudes are monitoring provocative cheerleading routines and diverting FBI resources to anti-obscenity squads. Harsanyi bolsters his position with a relentless barrage of reports and statistics on legislation great and small, from the national "Click It or Ticket" seatbelt campaign and pet-care mandates in San Francisco to the federal law lowering the legal blood-alcohol level and licensing exams for florists in Louisiana. Harsanyi's sprightly prose keeps much of this minutia afloat, but he can be awfully glib. On alcohol: "The truth is that alcohol can be as dangerous as other drugs. But primarily, we've learned our limitations." He also reserves a baffling amount of vitriol for seatbelt laws, equated here to being ticketed at home for eating unhealthy foods because "there is no difference in principle when you legislate personal behavior." His specious arguments allege that "nannies" obfuscate and cherry-pick, while he blithely does the same in rebuttal, trotting out examples of people who lost weight eating at McDonald's, reports dismissing thedangers of second-hand smoke and statistics on how seatbelts haven't really saved lives. Sentences here and there hint that picayune pieces of legislation serve as distractions from more egregious matters, but Harsanyi doesn't bother to be any more specific than that. "Let's be adults" is a refreshing message, but the text fails to rise above a retread of libertarian talking points. Agent: Sloan Harris/ICM

Scraps of the Untainted Sky or Bubble Man

Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia

Author: Tom Moylan

Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors' and readers' doors.In Scraps of the Untainted Sky , Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grow out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960 and 1970s (the context that produced the project of cultural studies itself). He then presents a thorough account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the new science-fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the economic, political, and cultural convulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, and he examines in detail three of these new "critical dystopias:" Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower , and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It .With its detailed, documented, andyet accessible presentation, Scraps of the Untainted Sky will be of interest to established scholars as well as students and general readers who are seeking an in-depth introduction to this important area of cultural production.

Booknews

Moylan (media and cultural studies, Liverpool John Moores U., England) examines the history, aesthetics, and politics of dystopia, focusing on the methodological paradigm that developed within the fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grew out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960s and 1970s. He then describes the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text and discusses those that emerged in the context of the conservatism and corporate restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

See also: Cuba Cocina or Flavors of India

Bubble Man: Alan Greenspan and the Missing 7 Trillion Dollars

Author: Peter Hartcher

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

Table of Contents:

Ch. 1	Great American madness	1
Ch. 2	Nemesis	16
Ch. 3	The blind men and the elephant	33
Ch. 4	The wise man	76
Ch. 5	The moment of truth	117
Ch. 6	Punch-drunk	139
Ch. 7	The Enron award	180
	Epilogue : old bull, young bull	195

The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money or The Lion and the Unicorn

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Author: John Maynard Keynes

In 1936 Keynes published the most provocative book written by any economist of his generation. Arguments about the book continued until his death in 1946 and still continue today. This new edition, published 70 years after the original, features a new introduction by Paul Krugman which discusses the significance and continued relevance of The General Theory.

Go to: La nueva revoluci n diet tica or Yoga Abs

The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli

Author: Richard Aldous

The vicious political struggle that electrified Victorian society, brilliantly re-created for a new generation.

William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli were the fiercest political rivals of the nineteenth century. Their intense mutual hatred was both ideologically driven and deeply personal. Their vitriolic duels, carried out over decades, lend profound insight into the social and political currents that dominated Victorian England. To Disraeli—a legendary dandy descended from Sephardic Jews—his antagonist was an "unprincipled maniac" characterized by an "extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and superstition." For the conservative aristocrat Gladstone, his rival was "the Grand Corrupter," whose destruction he plotted "day and night, week by week, month by month." In the tradition of Roy Jenkins and A. N. Wilson, Richard Aldous has written an outstanding political biography, giving us the first dual portrait of this intense and momentous rivalry. Aldous's vivid narrative style—by turns powerful, witty, and stirring—brings new life to the Gladstone and Disraeli story and confirms a perennial truth: in politics, everything is personal. 16 pages of illustrations.

The New York Times - William Grimes

It may well have been the greatest political rivalry of all time. For half a century, in a series of battles that transformed Victorian Britain, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli faced off like two heavyweight fighters, giving and receiving no quarter. Sometimes they fought for great principles, sometimes for enormous political stakes, but in truth no quarrel was too petty for these two giants. Mutual loathing made their bruising encounters a riveting spectacle, richly enjoyed by the British public and recaptured, with great zest, by Richard Aldous in The Lion and the Unicorn…What Mr. Aldous presents, quite entertainingly, is a dual character study and a blow-by-blow account of two warriors engaged in hand-to-hand combat for the better part of their lifetimes.

Publishers Weekly

Two titans, Disraeli and Gladstone, dominated English politics in the Victorian age. Each did multiple stints as prime minister and as leader of the Conservative (Disraeli) or Liberal (Gladstone) party. Political opposition shifted over the years to mutual personal disapproval and finally to rage-driven attack. Aldous (of University College, Dublin) traces the development of this seemingly pathological antagonism amid the policy disputes of the era. Both combatants displayed rhetorical skills unimaginable in a politician today. Both were writers, Gladstone of dull works on religion and on Homer, Disraeli of novels lampooning notable figures of his day, especially Gladstone. Aldous portrays both as possessing repellent character traits, such as Disraeli's vindictive mockery and Gladstone's moral hypocrisy. All these tangy ingredients make this joint biography highly appetizing, even if some readers may find issues like the Corn Laws, that so energized Gladstone and Disraeli, a bit faded. However, vexing issues of international trade, religion in public life and voting rights divide our nation as they did Victorian England. Aldous's smooth pacing and adroit writing bring a forgotten world back to life and demonstrate how two forceful if warring personalities can create a history that neither could have achieved acting alone. (Sept.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Aldous (School of History & Archives/University College Dublin) chronicles the engrossing political chess match between two vastly different British prime ministers in lively prose that delivers the pacing and plot twists of a novel. Aristocratic William Gladstone (1809-98) was a stern moralist, Jewish outsider Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) an affable orator whose ascendancy to power was hailed as a breath of fresh air by many among his colleagues and the public. Disraeli's foppish charm won him the steadfast loyalty of Queen Victoria, whose admiration was such that she even elevated him to the peerage, an act that only intensified Gladstone's intense dislike for his enemy, who heartily reciprocated his sentiments. Whispers about Gladstone's penchant for prostitutes hurt his reputation less than it might have in today's political arena: Even after he insisted that he sought to "save" these women from their lot in life, opponents and supporters alike merely laughed about his "benevolent nocturnal rambles." The author offers an entertaining look at Disraeli's quirky habits, explaining that the confirmed dandy "was also a parvenu who unnerved his aristocratic colleagues with his unusual ideas (not least in dress) about how a country gentleman lived and behaved." After all the vitriol that passed between the two great leaders, it's oddly touching to know that upon hearing the news of Disraeli's death Gladstone noted in his diary, "There is no more extraordinary man surviving him in England, perhaps none in Europe." Underneath the motherlode of distaste for each other, Aldous suggests, ran a hidden vein of respect. No stunning new information here, but a rousing portrait of 19th-centuryEngland's most venomous political rivalry, featuring a highly readable exploration into the dueling natures of two powerful men.

Table of Contents:

Illustrations     ix
Preface     xiii
Prologue: The Funeral     1
The Dinner Party     9
Young Englishmen     23
Strangers     40
The Game     50
Thunder and Lightning     63
The Chancellor's Old Clothes     73
The Handshake     84
The Letters     95
Voyage of Discovery     108
In the Arboretum     128
The People's William     142
Cavemen     152
Up the Greasy Pole     165
Premier League     190
Die or Break Down     204
Volcanoes     218
An Artful Dodge     227
The Jewel Thief     240
The Other Guest     252
A Clash of Civilisations     266
Peace with Honour     279
Midlothian     290
Falconet     306
Epilogue: In Memoriam     320
Notes     327
Index     359

Saddam or LBJ

Saddam: King of Terror

Author: Con Coughlin

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Read also Wests Business Law with Online Research Guide or Reforming Infrastructure

LBJ: Architect of American Ambition

Author: Randall B Woods

For almost forty years, the verdict on Lyndon Johnson's presidency has been reduced to a handful of harsh words: tragedy, betrayal, lost opportunity. Initially, historians focused on the Vietnam War and how that conflict derailed liberalism, tarnished the nation's reputation, wasted lives, and eventually even led to Watergate. More recently, Johnson has been excoriated in more personal terms: as a player of political hardball, as the product of machine-style corruption, as an opportunist, as a cruel husband and boss.

In LBJ, Randall B. Woods, a distinguished historian of twentieth-century America and a son of Texas, offers a wholesale reappraisal and sweeping, authoritative account of the LBJ who has been lost under this baleful gaze. Woods understands the political landscape of the American South and the differences between personal failings and political principles. Thanks to the release of thousands of hours of LBJ's White House tapes, along with the declassification of tens of thousands of documents and interviews with key aides, Woods's LBJ brings crucial new evidence to bear on many key aspects of the man and the politician. As private conversations reveal, Johnson intentionally exaggerated his stereotype in many interviews, for reasons of both tactics and contempt. It is time to set the record straight.

Woods's Johnson is a flawed but deeply sympathetic character. He was born into a family with a liberal Texas tradition of public service and a strong belief in the public good. He worked tirelessly, but not just for the sake of ambition. His approach to reform at home, and to fighting fascism and communism abroad, was motivated by the sameideals and based on a liberal Christian tradition that is often forgotten today. Vietnam turned into a tragedy, but it was part and parcel of Johnson's commitment to civil rights and antipoverty reforms. LBJ offers a fascinating new history of the political upheavals of the 1960s and a new way to understand the last great burst of liberalism in America.

Johnson was a magnetic character, and his life was filled with fascinating stories and scenes. Through insights gained from interviews with his longtime secretary, his Secret Service detail, and his closest aides and confidants, Woods brings Johnson before us in vivid and unforgettable color.

The New York Times - Alan Brinkley

… in writing LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, Woods has produced an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the best of the Johnson studies yet to appear. He is more sympathetic and nuanced than Caro, more fluid and (despite the significant length of his book) more concise than Dallek — and equally scrupulous in his use of archives and existing scholarship. Even readers familiar with the many other fine books on Johnson will learn a great deal from Woods.

The Washington Post - Nick Kotz

… in his masterful new biography, Randall B. Woods convincingly makes the case for Johnson's greatness -- as the last American president whose leadership achieved truly revolutionary breakthroughs in progressive domestic legislation, bringing changes that have improved the lives of most Americans. In this compelling, massive narrative, Woods portrays Johnson fairly and fully in all his complexity, with adequate attention to flaws in his character and his tragic miscalculations in Vietnam. Considering today's vitriolic polarization, it is instructive to learn how Johnson skillfully won broad public and bipartisan support to break the gridlock associated with the controversial, historic 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts and more than a score of other major initiatives.

Publishers Weekly

Why, after major works by Robert A. Caro and Robert Dallek, do we need another biography of Lyndon B. Johnson? The answer is that Johnson was so complex that every new biographer willing to do the tough spadework of original research discovers fresh layers of Johnsonian reality to explain, new psychological and political corridors to explore. Such is the case with this excellent new work by University of Arkansas historian Woods (Fulbright, a Biography). Woods finds Johnson's key motivation to be largely altruistic, emerging from righteous outrage over the poverty and racism he'd witnessed while growing up in Texas. Woods serves up a Johnson who is less cynical, less self-serving and more heroic and tragic than the man portrayed elsewhere. Woods's Johnson is a man who saw his greatest personal ambitions realized with the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, and the Great Society programs. Not inappropriately, Woods concludes his eloquent and riveting account by quoting Ralph Ellison, who noted that Johnson, spurned at the end of his life by both liberals and conservatives, would "have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American President for the poor and for the Negroes, but that, as I see it, is a very great honor indeed." 16 pages of b&w photos. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Gilbert Taylor - Booklist

Wood's single volume evenhandedly condenses the complexities and controversies associated with the thirty-sixth president of the U.S....Raised in the populist tradition, LBJ cut his political teeth as an all-out New Dealer. But he shrewdly knew that the ambitions he harbored for himself and American society would never be realized without placating conservatives of various kinds--economic, segregationist, or anticommunist. In this fact of Johnson's political life, which induced some to perceive him as a malodorous wheeler-dealer, Woods detects a remarkable consistency, an inwardly liberal LBJ whose outwardly moderate politics were an expression of his mastery of political calculus...Thorough, astute, and readable.

Steven Carroll - The Age

This is an absorbing portrait of a man who was as stand-and-deliver as his plain-speaking persona suggested but also a highly complex, driven individual who not only sought power but sought to do something with it.

Library Journal

Woods (history, Univ. of Arkansas; Fulbright: A Biography) offers a sympathetic portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as a progressive legislator and president. The LBJ presented here contrasts strikingly with the self-serving, power-hungry politician depicted in the first two volumes of Robert Caro's biography, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent. He is more like the calculating and complex leader revealed in Robert Dallek's Flawed Giant. Richly but sometimes overly detailed, this substantial biography traces Johnson from his Texas childhood to his many years in the House and Senate, his accidental presidency following Kennedy's assassination, and his 1964 landslide election and Great Society triumphs, ultimately brought down by the Vietnam War. The author's strength is his excellent account of LBJ's presidency, especially how his domestic programs benefited African Americans and other minorities. His weakness is that unlike Dallek he does not provide a summation of Johnson's political legacy. In this thoroughly researched and fluidly written narrative, Woods adds some luster to Johnson's reputation. Primarily for Johnson scholars and serious general readers; strongly recommended for all academic and larger public libraries.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Lyndon Johnson was the architect of his own downfall, as this sprawling biography shows. Who knew that at the instant LBJ heard the crack of Oswald's rifle on that November morning in Dallas, he "was both exhilarated and apprehensive"? Defying commonsensical convention, Woods (History/Univ. of Arkansas) presumes to inhabit the president's mind at key moments, and he over-dramatizes where plenty of drama is already in play. Despite these blemishes, Woods's life of the blustering Texan who found John Kennedy too conservative has many virtues. He ably depicts how childhood circumstances-poverty, an alcoholic father, a domineering mother-forged Johnson's character, and often not to the good; by the time he entered college, LBJ had a knack for making enemies and a tendency to bully and manipulate others into doing his dirty work. He was secretive and aggressive, earning the nickname "Bull" for his rough ways and nonstop talking. For all his flaws, though, Johnson evolved into a definitive politician brilliantly skilled at forging strange-bedfellows alliances and making compromises. One of his first acts on entering the Senate was to forge a close relationship with Georgian Richard Russell, a segregationist and right-winger who was also a master of persuasion and vote-getting. Johnson quickly learned, and he outpaced the master, who exclaimed, "The son of a bitch, you can't say no to him!" LBJ kept the South Democratic; he gathered power carefully, amassing blackmail-worthy dossiers on his colleagues, and used that power to win pitched battles-all fine, so long as he was striving for social justice and racial equality. Alas, Vietnam derailed him, and Woods's book closes lingeringly on apresident so broken by that distant war that he welcomed the prospect of either Bobby Kennedy's or Richard Nixon's taking over the White House to "heal the wounds now separating the country."A sympathetic, well-rounded complement to Robert Caro's monumental biography-in-progress.

Table of Contents:

Prologue     1
Roots     5
Growing Up     20
College     44
The Secretary     70
Lady Bird and the NYA     92
Congress     116
Pappy     138
War     158
Truman and the Coming of the Cold War     179
Coke     196
A Populist Gentlemen's Club     219
Leader     248
Passing the Lord's Prayer     274
Back from the Edge     291
Containing the Red-Hots: From Dulles to the Dixie Association     313
Lost in Space     332
1960     352
Camelot Meets Mr. Cornpone     375
Hanging On     400
Interregnum: Death and Resurrection     415
"Kennedy Was Too Conservative for Me"     440
Free at Last     467
Containment at Home and Abroad     483
"The Countryside of the World"     501
Bobby     519
Barry     539
A New Bill of Rights     557
The Crux of the Matter     574
Daunted Courage     593
Castro's and Kennedy's Shadows     621
A City on the Hill     649
Balancing Act     672
Divisions     693
Civil War     715
Battling Dr. Strangelove     739
The Holy Land     759
Backlash     783
Of Hawks and Doves, Vultures and Chickens     798
Tet     818
A Midsummer Nightmare     838
Touching the Void     865
Notes     885
Acknowledgments     957
Index     959

I Lost My Love in Baghdad or This Common Secret

I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story

Author: Michael Hastings

At age twenty-five, Michael Hastings arrived in Baghdad to cover the war in Iraq for Newsweek. He had at his disposal a little Hemingway romanticism and all the apparatus of a twenty-first-century reporter -- cell phones, high-speed Internet access, digital video cameras, fixers, drivers, guards, translators. In startling detail, he describes the chaos, the violence, the never-ending threats of bomb and mortar attacks, the front lines that can be a half mile from the Green Zone, that can be anywhere. This is a new kind of war: private security companies follow their own rules or lack thereof; soldiers in combat get instant messages from their girlfriends and families; members of the Louisiana National Guard watch Katrina's decimation of their city on a TV in the barracks.
Back in New York, Hastings had fallen in love with Andi Parhamovich, a young idealist who worked for Air America. A year into their courtship, Andi followed Michael to Iraq, taking a job with the National Democratic Institute. Their war-zone romance is another window into life in Baghdad. They call each other pet names; they make plans for the future; they fight, usually because each is fearful for the other's safety; and they try to figure out how to get together, when it means putting bodyguards and drivers in jeopardy.Then Andi goes on a dangerous mission for her new employer -- a meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters that ends in catastrophe.
Searing, unflinching, and revelatory, I Lost My Love in Baghdad is both a raw, brave, brilliantly observed account of the war and a heartbreaking story of one life lost to it.

The Washington Post - Kimberly Johnson

Hastings's descriptions of events on the ground in Iraq are flat and impartial, delivered in just-the-facts style. But that only heightens his complete candor about his soul-shattering loss from Andi's death in a Baghdad gun battle.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In his powerful debut, a young Newsweek reporter details two tumultuous years covering the war while falling in love with his long-distance girlfriend Andi, who would join him in Iraq only to be killed in a botched kidnapping. Largely concerned with describing on-the-ground conditions, Hastings reports with insight and grim humor from the front lines, embedded with soldiers in "a world with its own language and geography." Hastings handles the grisly particulars directly, the way he talks with the troops; the account is pocked with their tales, short bursts of heart-stopping sadness ("One American and at least fifteen Iraqi children killed") with no lesson or redemption indicated, and often without follow-up. The chaos is given shape by Hastings' romance with Andi, who remains in New York for a year before joining him in the Green Zone; dates, emails and instant messages provide a welcome reprieve, and drive the narrative toward its devestating conclusion like a tightly-plotted thriller. Like Mariane Pearl's A Mighty Heart, this is a tragic love story with broad appeal married to an unflinching account of wartime violence and brutality; as such, it should do even more than that bestseller to fill in a general audience on the dire state of Iraq. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Look this: Extreme Parenting or Focusing the Whole Brain

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

Author: Susan Wicklund

Susan Wicklund was twenty-two-years old and juggling three jobs in Portland, Oregon, when she endured a difficult abortion. Partly in response to that experience, she later embarked on an improbable life journey devoted to women’s reproductive health, going to medical school while raising a daughter. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women share the ordeal of unwanted pregnancies—and how hidden this common experience remains.
This Common Secret is an emotional and dramatic story covering twenty years on the front lines of the abortion war. As we enter the most fevered political fight over abortion that America has ever seen, this raw and revealing memoir shows us what is at stake.

Christian Science Monitor

Gripping, deeply moving . . . a compelling memoir.

The Washington Post - Emily Bazelon

Susan Wicklund tells riveting stories about patients she has treated during nearly 20 years as an abortion provider…And Wicklund's sensitivity to the fraught nature of abortion, as some women experience it, makes her stories of the damage wrought by the "antis," as she calls them, more credible and vivid.

The New York Times - Eyal Press

The price of concealment is the central theme of Wicklund's memoir, This Common Secret, which offers a rare glimpse into the life of an abortion provider who, like her dwindling band of peers, learned to don an array of disguises over the course of her tumultuous and peripatetic career…in setting down her story, Wicklund has done something brave, not only by refusing to cower in the shadows but also by recounting experiences that don't always fit the conventional pro-choice script…Wicklund may never convince the protesters who demonized her that women should be free to make such decisions on their own. But in sharing her secrets, she has shown why there is much honor in having spent a lifetime attempting to ensure they do.

Kirkus Reviews

A longtime abortion provider relates her personal history, describes the opposition's ferocity, chronicles the corrosive effects of her profession on her family life and portrays herself as a White Knight in a Dark World. In 1980, Wicklund was a 26-year-old single mother on welfare. When a mentor advised her to become a doctor, she debated and then tried it, discovered she was a top student and zipped through college and medical school. Settling on a career in women's health, she devoted herself to traveling around the Upper Midwest performing legal abortions at various clinics. Her peripatetic professional activities shot down two marriages and introduced into her life a level of stress that is difficult to fathom: screaming protestors, threats of violence, frightening phone calls. At times she resorted to disguises to get by picketers; she packed guns while she performed operations. Her professional life became just about her entire life. Her most satisfying experience was the Mountain Country Women's Clinic she established in Bozeman, Mont., but she was forced to close it after five years in 1998 to help her sick and aging parents while working part-time at a corporate-owned facility in St. Paul, Minn. She returned to full-time work in Montana after her mother's death. All this is either admirable or reprehensible, depending on your position on abortion, but Wicklund and co-author Kesselheim have no doubts: She is eligible for sainthood right now. All the dialogue-and there is quite a bit-portrays her speaking in reasonable, well-structured paragraphs while her enemies bray in ignorant ugliness. She understands every case before her; knows when to touch, when to cry; converts a fewnaysayers; confronts the angry with calm courage; never makes a mistake in surgery. Two postscripts-one by her daughter, another by Kesselheim-provide further, embarrassing testimonials. In a genre known for self-celebration, this is Self-Celebration. Agent: Kristine Dahl/ICM

What People Are Saying

Maryanne Vollers
"This Common Secret is a riveting and heartbreaking memoir from the front lines of the abortion wars. Susan Wicklund is a true American hero. You will be amazed, enraged and inspired by her story."--(Maryanne Vollers, author of Ghosts of Mississippi, Lone Wolf, and co-author of Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole)