Women's Rights Books

The Truth or Talking Politics

2009-12-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

The Truth (with Jokes)

Author: Al Franken

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

Talking Politics

Author: William A Gamson

Those who analyze public opinion have long contended that the average citizen is incapable of recounting consistently even the most rudimentary facts about current politics; that the little the average person does know is taken at face value from the media reports, and that the consequence is a polity that is ill-prepared for democratic governance. Yet social movements, comprised by and large of average citizens who have become exercised about particular issues, have been a prominent feature of the American political scene throughout American history and they are experiencing a resurgence in recent years.William Gamson asks the question, how is it that so many people become active in movements if people are so generally uninterested and badly informed about issues? The conclusion he reaches in this book is a striking refutation of the common wisdom about the public's ability to reason about politics. Rather than relying on survey data, as so many studies of public opinion do, Gamson reports on his analysis of discussions among small groups of working-class people on four controversial issues: affirmative action, nuclear power, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the troubles in American industry. Excerpts from many of these discussions are transcribed in the book.Gamson analyzes how these same issues have been treated in a range of media material, from editorial opinion columns to political cartoons and network news programs, in order to determine how closely the group discussions mimic media discourse. He finds that the process of opinion formation is more complex than it has usually been depicted and that people condition media information with reflection on their ownexperience or that of people they know. The discussions transcribed in this book demonstrate that people are quite capable of conducting informed and well-reasoned discussions about issues and that although most people are not inclined to become actively involved in politics, the seeds of political action are present in the minds of many. With the appropriate stimulation, this latent political consciousness can be activated, which accounts for the continual creation of social movements.

Subjectivity Identity Difference or Notes from Toyota land

2009-12-05T07:23:00.000-08:00

Subjectivity, Identity, Difference: Retrieving Experience for Feminist Politics

Author: Sonia Kruks

In Retrieving Experience, Sonia Kruks engages critically with the postmodern turn in feminist and social theory. She contends that, although postmodern analyses yield important insights about the place of discourse in constituting subjectivity, they lack the ability to examine how experience often exceeds the limits of discourse. To address this lack and explain why it matters for feminist politics, Kruks retrieves and employs aspects of postwar French existential theory—a tradition that, she argues, postmodernism has obscured by militantly rejecting its own genealogy.

Kruks seeks to refocus our attention on the importance for feminism of embodied and "lived" experiences. Through her original readings of Simone de Beauvoir and other existential thinkers—including Sartre, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty—and her own analyses inspired by their work, Kruks sheds new light on central problems in feminist theory and politics. These include debates about subjectivity and individual agency; questions about recognition and identity politics; and discussion of whether embodied experiences may sometimes facilitate solidarity among groups of different women.

About the Author:
Sonia Kruks is Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics and has served as the Director of the Women's Studies Program at Oberlin College. She is the author of The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society and coeditor of Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism.

Interesting textbook: Whats Cooking with Mavis or Classic Main Courses

Notes from Toyota-land: An American Engineer in Japan

Author: Darius Mehri

In 1996, Darius Mehri traveled to Japan to work as a computer simulation engineer within the Toyota production system. Once there, he found a corporate experience far different from what he had expected. Notes from Toyota-land, based on a diary that Mehri kept during his three years at an upper-level Toyota group company, provides a unique insider's perspective on daily work life in Japan and charts his transformation from a wide-eyed engineer eager to be part of the "Japanese Miracle" to a social critic, troubled by Japanese corporate practices.

Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings. As both an engaging memoir of cross-cultural misunderstanding and a primer on Japanese business and industrial practices, Notes from Toyota-land will be a revelation to everyone who believes that Japanese business practices are an ideal against which to measure success.

Author Bio:Darius Mehri lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. Robert Perrucci is Professor of Sociology at Purdue University.

Children of Global Migration or Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery

2009-12-04T02:11:00.000-08:00

Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes

Author: Rhacel Salazar Parreenas

In the Philippines, a dramatic increase in labor migration has created a large population of transnational migrant families. Thousands of children now grow up apart from one or both parents, as the parents are forced to work outside the country in order to send their children to school, give them access to quality health care, or, in some cases, just provide them with enough food. While the issue of transnational families has already generated much interest, this book is the first to offer a close look at the lives of the children in these families.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with the family members left behind, the author examines two dimensions of the transnational family. First, she looks at the impact of distance on the intergenerational relationships, specifically from the children’s perspective. She then analyzes gender norms in these families, both their reifications and transgressions in transnational households. Acknowledging that geographical separation unavoidably strains family intimacy, Parreñas argues that the maintenance of traditional gender ideologies exacerbates and sometimes even creates the tensions that plague many Filipino migrant families.

Book about: Frommers Alaska Cruises Ports of Call 2009 or Jeff Shaaras Civil War Battlefields

Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery

Author: Earl M Maltz

The slave Dred Scott claimed that his residence in a free state transformed him into a free man. His lawsuit took many twists and turns before making its way to the Supreme Court in 1856. But when the Court ruled against him, the ruling sent shock waves through the nation and helped lead to civil war. Writing for the 7-to-2 majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that blacks were not and never could be citizens. Taney also ruled that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, upsetting the balance of slave and free states. Earl Maltz now offers a new look at this landmark case, presenting Dred Scott as a turning point in an already contentious national debate. Maltz's accessible account depicts Dred Scott as both a contributing factor to war and the result of a political climate that had grown so threatening to the South that overturning the Missouri Compromise was considered essential. As the nation continued its rapid expansion, Southerners became progressively more fearful of the free states' growing political clout. In that light, the ruling from a Court filled with justices sympathetic to the Southern cause, though far from surprising helped light the long fuse that eventually exploded into Civil War. Maltz offers an uncommonly balanced look at the case, taking Southern concerns seriously to cast new light on why proponents of slavery saw things as they did. He presents the arguments of all the parties impartially, tracks the sequence of increasingly strained compromises between pro- and anti-slavery forces, and demonstrates how political and sectional influences infiltrated the legal issues. He then traces the impact of the case on Northern and Southernpublic opinion, showing how a decision meant to resolve the question of slavery in the territories only aggravated sectional animosity.

Editors' Preface     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
The Politics of Slavery, 1785-1842     4
The Supreme Court and Slavery, 1825-1842     19
Slavery in the Territories, 1842-1856     34
The Road to the Supreme Court     60
The Supreme Court in 1856     76
Arguments and Deliberations     101
The Opinions of the Justices     118
The Impact of Dred Scott     140
Dred Scott and the Limits of Judicial Power     155
Chronology     157
Bibliographic Essay     161
Index     169

Landscapes of the Jihad or Nasser

2009-12-02T20:59:00.000-08:00

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity

Author: Faisal Devji

What are the motives behind Osama bin Laden's and Al-Qaeda's jihad against America and the West? Innumerable attempts have been made in recent years to explain that mysterious worldview. In Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji focuses on the ethical content of this jihad as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda differs radically from such groups as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.

Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam's past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict.

Al-Qaeda and its jihad, Devji suggests, are only the most visible manifestations of wider changes in the Muslim world. Such changes include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority. In the author's view, Al-Qaeda represents a new way of organizing Muslim belief and practice within a global landscape and does not require ideological or institutional unity.

Offering a compelling explanation for the central purpose of Al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, the meaning of its strategies and tactics, and its moral and aesthetic dimensions, Landscapes of the Jihad is at once a sophisticated work of historical and cultural analysis and an invaluable guide to the world's most prominent terrorist movement.

Author Bio:Faisal Devji is Assistant Professor of History at New School University.

Look this: Natural Health for Kids or The Brain Disorders Sourcebook

Nasser: The Last Arab

Author: Said K Aburish

Since the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 there has been no ideology to capture the imagination of the Arab world except Islamic fundamentalism. Any sense of completely secular Arab states ended with him and what we see today happening in the Middle East is a direct result of Western opposition to Nasser's strategies and ideals.

Nasser is a fascinating figure fraught with dilemmas. With the CIA continually trying to undermine him, Nasser threw his lot in with the Soviet Union, even though he was fervently anti-Communist. Nasser wanted to build up a military on par with Israel's, but didn't want either the '56 or '67 wars. This was a man who was a dictator, but also a popular leader with an ideology which appealed to most of the Arab people and bound them together. While he was alive, there was a brief chance of actual Arab unity producing common, honest, and incorruptible governments throughout the region.

More than ever, the Arab world is anti-Western and teetering on disaster, and this examination of Nasser's life is tantamount to understanding whether the interests of the West and the Arab world are reconcilable.

Nasser is a definitive and engaging portrait of a man who stood at the center of this continuing clash in the Middle East.

Publishers Weekly

According to London-based journalist Aburish, his is the 28th biography of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970). The statistic says much about the appeal of the Egyptian colonel who forced out King Farouk yet failed to modernize an unwilling nation that adored him. Nasser evicted Britain from Suez and funded the Aswan Dam, but, Aburish concedes, could not lead Egypt out of backwardness, corruption and Islamic extremism. This biography has more politics than life in it, and much repetitive and often contradictory history. Once Nasser joins with dissident fellow officers whom he quickly co-opts, the reader learns little more than that he was always a good husband and father, spurned corruption and suffered early on from the heart trouble and diabetes that killed him at 52. Aburish mourns the lost potential of the man he sees as the greatest figure in the region since Saladin, but acknowledges that the inability to delegate authority to anyone not an incompetent and thus likely to unseat him left Nasser unable to achieve real change. The book attempts to explain Nasser's contradictions regarding relations with America (and the CIA), Russia, Israel and his Arab neighbors, but Aburish is unable to persuade even himself. At one point, for example, Nasser's "heir apparent" Zakkaria Mohieddine quarreled with him "and never saw Nasser again," but 15 pages later he is named prime minister "and seldom met his leader alone." Also marred by a propensity for triteness, this biography is unlikely to appeal to readers beyond those who are fixated on Middle Eastern political turmoil. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Gile Gordon, Curtis Brown Edinburgh. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Thoughtful-though sometimes puzzling-biography of the Arab world's "most charismatic leader since the Prophet Mohammed," and the last to command international influence. Gamal Abdel Nasser's death, more than 30 years ago, marked an end to Arab internationalism, an effort to build a pan-Arab polity. In the place of that populist movement, writes London-based Arabist Aburish (A Brutal Friendship, 1998, etc.), stand, on one hand, corrupt dictatorships ("The House of Saud fails to qualify as an institution, unless perpetuating despotism is elevated to an acceptable form of continuity") and, on the other, Islamic fundamentalism. Many readers may question Aburish's view that the West is the cause of this fundamentalism, but there it is: Nasser's "dreams have been hijacked by the Islamic movements the West created to defeat him." One need not accept that odd thesis, though, to profit from Aburish's account of Nasser's rise to power and his concerted efforts, once he got there, to extend the possibilities of an Egyptian-led Arab enlightenment into the dark corners of the Arab world-which included Saudi Arabia and Iraq, whose governments opposed Nasser at every turn. Aburish also traces the origins of Nasser's growing militancy to a conference of nonaligned nations of 1955, in which China's Chou En-Lai, Yugoslavia's Tito, and India's Nehru separately urged him to lessen his reliance on the West and become an independent, neutral force in the region. Nasser did so, Aburish shows, which set him in opposition to France and England (whence the Suez Crisis of the following year), cost him American support, and drew him into the Soviet camp, even though Nasser remained a middle-of-the-roader through andthrough ("Becoming a revolutionary meant throwing caution to the wind, something Nasser the conservative, ardent nationalist never did"). "For an Arab to excel in administration is rare," Aburish remarks in another curious statement. If so, Nasser was all the more exceptional. Agency: Curtis Brown UK

	Introduction: The Painful Truth	1
1.	The Dreamer from Nowhere	7
2.	The Encounter with Power	29
3.	The Road to Suez	57
4.	Give Them Dignity	87
5.	The Dark at the End of the Tunnel	123
6.	And I Shall Divide Your Araby into Two	155
7.	Search for an Honorable Exit	187
8.	Leader of the Arabs	221
9.	The Politics of Decline	249
10.	We Are Defeated	283
	Epilogue: "You Live, Abu-Khalid, You Live"	313
	Notes	321
	Interviews	337
	Select Bibliography	339
	Index	343

Befriend and Betray or Baghdad Diaries

2009-12-01T15:36:00.000-08:00

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

Author: Alex Cain

The Hells Angels. The Bandidos. Asian triads. Russian mobsters and corrupt cops. Even the KKK. Just part of a day’s work for Alex Caine, an undercover agent who has seen it all.

Alex Caine started life as a working-class boy from Quebec who always thought he’d end up in a blue-collar job. But after a tour in Vietnam and a stretch in prison on marijuana-possession charges, he fell into the cloak-and-dagger world of a contracted agent or “kite”: infiltrating criminal groups that cops across North America and around the globe were unable to penetrate themselves.

Thanks to his quick-wittedness and his tough but unthreatening demeanour, Caine could fit into whatever unsavoury situation he found himself. Over twenty-five years, his assignments ran the gamut from bad-ass bikers to triad toughs. When a job was over, he’d slip away to a new part of the continent or world, where he would assume a new identity and then go back to work on another group of bad guys.

Told with page-turning immediacy, Befriend and Betray gives a candid look behind the scenes at some familiar police operations and blows the lid off others that law enforcement would much prefer to keep hidden. And it offers an unvarnished account of the toll such a life takes, one that often left Caine to wonder who he really was, behind those decades of assumed identities. Or whether justice was ever truly served.

Publishers Weekly

Chilling and gritty, this new account by Caine, an undercover police agent for 25 years, showcases his skills as a shrewd chameleon who could infiltrate any group while tallying their vices and offenses. Following stints in Vietnam and behind bars, he teamed with the cops to penetrate the criminal netherworld populated by cruel Asian triads and street gangs battling for territories and riches. Caine, a tough cookie, was recruited by all of the federal enforcement agencies to get the goods on the big four outlaw bike gangs-the Hells Angels, the Bandidos, the Outlaws and the Pagans-and some of his exploits are the stuff of high-tension torture and lawlessness. His resourcefulness is uncanny, as is his sheer will to survive as he matches wits with a group of Russian mobsters and lawmen on the take. It's to Caine's credit that he lived to tell this riveting tale of bloodshed and corruption. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews

Infiltrator-for-hire Caine writes with disarming candor about going undercover everywhere from Newfoundland to Hong Kong. The child of a broken family in a small Quebec town, he was a directionless 20-year-old ne'er-do-well when he signed up in 1969 to fight with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam. A horrific tour of duty, which saw him coordinating extrajudicial assassinations and accidentally killing at least one civilian, left him prone to detachment, something he put to use after returning to Canada. Accidentally getting too friendly with a Vancouver criminal, he informed the police; but instead of giving him a reward, the Mounties signed him up as an informant. The investigation widened into an international operation that sent Caine flying to Hong Kong (along with plenty of cops looking for a taypayer-funded vacation) to move higher up the Triad's chain of command. After that, he became an undercover mercenary specializing in biker gangs. Caine's unassuming demeanor made him fit in better than the undercover officers who overdid it. Indeed, he displays considerable contempt for cops who relish playing the bad boy, portraying one police ambush he witnessed as little more than a gangland hit. Most of the narrative details his work inside the Bandidos, a Pacific Northwest gang, and a long assignment with the Hell's Angels in California. Along the way he also describes operations involving Toronto gangs and the KKK. His personal life suffered from all the role-playing: "My mind is really a graveyard for all the people I've been," he writes. Two marriages broke up, and an investigation involving a family member estranged his sisters. Unlike ATF special agent Jay Dobyns (No Angel, 2009),Caine remains resolutely unromantic about his targets and has no problem doing exactly what the book's title directs. A refreshingly open and clearheaded account of the dirty side of law enforcement.

Interesting textbook: Anna and Michael Olson Cook at Home or Feel Good Cookbook

Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle Of War And Exile

Author: Nuha Al Radi

The only available book about daily life in modern Iraq, BAGHDAD DIARIES offers American readers a first-person account of the human toll of war and the price paid by ordinary Iraqi citizens.

The author, Nuha al-Radi, is a cosmopolitan, Western-educated Iraqi woman who writes with surprising humor and stoicism about the reality of daily life in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and the subsequent bleak years under sanctions. She describes the difficulties of day-to-day survival but also the funny and macabre goings-on about town. Following her into exile in Jordan and later Beirut, the diary continues to November 2002. It ends with several dramatic new entries written as Baghdad is bombed again and U.S. troops advance towards the city.

The New York Times

Ms. Radi is a painter and sculptor not a writer, but she has an artist's eye for the telling detail: the birds flying upside down after an air raid, people gathering mementos from a rocket that has fallen into the garden of the Rashid Hotel, bicycles becoming the transport mode of choice as gasoline supplies dry up. — Michiku Kakutani

The Washington Post

Al-Radi looks at Iraq like a woman who insists on viewing a canvas only through a magnifying glass, intimately describing its texture while failing to see the wider scene. But however narrow its focus, Baghdad Diaries offers an unfiltered perspective on a widely misunderstood world. — Frank Smyth

Publishers Weekly

A London-educated Iraqi woman, al-Radi, recounts 10 years in her life, covering the Persian Gulf War in 1991, then the Western embargo on Iraq and finally the years she entitles "exile," which she spent primarily in Lebanon, occasionally visiting the United States. Al-Radi, an artist by training, writes powerful but not ostentatious prose, with abrupt, fragmented and simple sentences as she interweaves the violent, chaotic effects of war with everyday incidents. One may feel the urge to skim the detailing of run-of-the-mill events regarding, say, al-Radi's dog and his adventures. And the artistry and authenticity of al-Radi's voice will be marred for some by her ardent anti-Israel and anti-American sentiments. The author rightly addresses the devastation of war, the inevitable violence wrought on innocent civilians. But she does not address the context in which the Gulf War and the embargo took place. Mention of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and ruthlessness toward his own people is reduced to a bare minimum. Al-Radi singles out Israel for criticism of its policies regarding Lebanon and the Palestinians, at one point comparing Israeli policies to Nazi tactics. There is no question that war is brutal, and al-Radi touchingly portrays the Iraqi plight, but in her eagerness to cast blame, she loses sight of the bigger picture. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Penelope Power - KLIATT

Nuha Al-Radi, a potter, painter and eco-sculptor from a prominent and sophisticated Iraqi family, began her diary in 1991 at the beginning of the Gulf War, writing from her house in Baghdad. She was not privy to government plans (who was?) and her diary reflects the concerns of an ordinary citizen whose country is under attack. She describes the loss of electricity and the subsequent neighborhood feasts, as the people of Baghdad cleaned out their freezers and refrigerators and cooked the soon-to-be spoiled food. Friends and family leave for the safety of the country, hauling their freezers on trucks and barbequing on the way. Water and phone service are unavailable. The lush orchard surrounding her house becomes the site of the "loo" as water is too scarce to use for flushing. On the eighth day of bombardment she writes, "Depression has hit me with the realization that the whole world hates us." With the end of war comes the chaos of defeat. Wild dogs roam the streets and private yards. Shattered windows must be replaced but there are no available materials. The dirt and dust from the bombardment fills the streets and houses and the rain is black. The police force is decimated; thievery and car jacking become rampant. There is no army and the author comments, "We are told to rebel by the West, with what and how?" The subsequent embargo makes life difficult, and in some cases impossible. Medical care is non-existent; a visit to the hospital is useless, as there are neither supplies nor equipment. Despite the grim drain on the amenities of everyday life Nuha Al-Radi's sense of humor cannot be subdued. She gives up painting and begins to sculpt from cast-off automotive parts and stones. Her"Embargo Art" becomes well known. A U.S. representative promises to get her a U.S. tank to put in front of a famous Baghdad hotel; her intention is to paint it and invite people to write comments on it. She will call it "An Anti-Tank Missal," but the representative lets her down. In 1995 the artist left Iraq to show her art in Lebanon and has been an exile since. She says that Beirut is a gathering place for exiles as the Lebanese are famous for their grumbling and complaining and free speech is still allowed. On September 15, 2001 her entry reads "They know the names of the hijackers now and they are all Arabs; God help us." A March 2003 postscript for the Vintage edition records this painful entry: "In the name of peace and humanity, thousands have to be killed. In the name of liberation, in the name of democracy, there will be a military occupation. Would someone please tell me where the democracy lies in 'Either you are with us or against us'?" KLIATT Codes: SA;Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1998, Random House, Vintage, 217p.,

Healthy Voices Unhealthy Silence or When Washington Shut Down Wall Street

2009-11-30T10:24:00.000-08:00

Healthy Voices, Unhealthy Silence: Advocacy and Health Policy for the Poor

Author: Colleen Grogan

Public silence in policymaking can be deafening. When advocates for a disadvantaged group decline to speak up, not only are their concerns not recorded or acted upon, but also the collective strength of the unspoken argument is lessened-a situation that undermines the workings of deliberative democracy by reflecting only the concerns of more powerful interests.

In Healthy Voices, Unhealthy Silence, Colleen M. Grogan and Michael K. Gusmano address issues of public silence through the lens of state-level health care advocacy for the poor. They examine how representatives for the poor participate in an advisory board process by tying together existing studies; extensive interviews with key players; and an in-depth, firsthand look at the Connecticut Medicaid advisory board's deliberations during the managed care debate. Drawing on the concepts of deliberative democracy, agenda setting, and nonprofit advocacy, Grogan and Gusmano reveal the reasons behind advocates' often unexpected silence on major issues, assess how capable nonprofits are at affecting policy debates, and provide prescriptive advice for creating a participatory process that adequately addresses the health care concerns of the poor and dispossessed.

About the Author:
Colleen M. Grogan is associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago

About the Author:
Michael K. Gusmano is assistant professor of health policy and management and Lauterstein Scholar in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University

New interesting book: Lost Secrets of AyurVedic Acupuncture or Fearless

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy

Author: William Silber

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street unfolds like a mystery story. It traces Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo's triumph over a monetary crisis at the outbreak of World War I that threatened the United States with financial disaster. The biggest gold outflow in a generation imperiled America's ability to repay its debts abroad. Fear that the United States would abandon the gold standard sent the dollar plummeting on world markets. Without a central bank in the summer of 1914, the United States resembled a headless financial giant.

William McAdoo stepped in with courageous action, we read in Silber's gripping account. He shut the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months to prevent Europeans from selling their American securities and demanding gold in return. He smothered the country with emergency currency to prevent a replay of the bank runs that swept America in 1907. And he launched the United States as a world monetary power by honoring America's commitment to the gold standard. His actions provide a blueprint for crisis control that merits attention today. McAdoo's recipe emphasizes an exit strategy that allows policymakers to throttle a crisis while minimizing collateral damage.

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street recreates the drama of America's battle for financial credibility. McAdoo's accomplishments place him alongside Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan as great American financial leaders. McAdoo, in fact, nursed the Federal Reserve into existence as the 1914 crisis waned and served as the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction: The Legacy of 1914     1
The Opening Salvo     8
The European Gold Rush     26
The Nightmare of 1907     42
Unlocking Emergency Currency     66
Sterling Steals the Spotlight     86
New Street Defies McAdoo     104
Rescue     116
End Game     131
Birth of a Financial Superpower     151
Epilogue: Blueprint for Crisis Control     173
Notes     177
References     201
Index     207

Inheriting the City or Robert F Kennedy

2009-11-29T05:12:00.000-08:00

Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age

Author: Philip Kasinitz

Behind the contentious politics of immigration lies the question of how well new immigrants are becoming part of American society. To address this question, Inheriting the City draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York to provide a comprehensive look at their social, economic, cultural, and political lives.

Inheriting the City examines five immigrant groups to disentangle the complicated question of how they are faring relative to native-born groups, and how achievement differs between and within these groups. While some experts worry that these young adults would not do as well as previous waves of immigrants due to lack of high-paying manufacturing jobs, poor public schools, and an entrenched racial divide, Inheriting the City finds that the second generation is rapidly moving into the mainstream—speaking English, working in jobs that resemble those held by native New Yorkers their age, and creatively combining their ethnic cultures and norms with American ones. Far from descending into an urban underclass, the children of immigrants are using immigrant advantages to avoid some of the obstacles that native minority groups cannot.

What People Are Saying

Gish Jen
What a timely and surprising book! The second generation lens brings into focus so many aspects of American life, from the shifting color line to the effects of social policy, the plight of the native born, and the contribution of immigration. Original, relevant, and nuanced, this is a must-read for anyone interested in America today and tomorrowвЂ¦ A wonderful and worthwhile book. --(Gish Jen, author of The Love Wife)

Nathan Glazer
This major study of the children of the great wave of immigration to New York City that has been sustained since the 1960's tells us as much about the fate of the second generation--in education, in occupation and income, in acculturation--as we can presently know. --(Nathan Glazer, co-author of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City)

Henry Cisneros
How America absorbs immigrants is among the most important yet least understood dimensions of our national experience. The authors offer a nuanced analysis of the sometimes counter-intuitive processes by which this happens. The result provides resonant insights that will shape policies, improve services, and most importantly teach us how and why immigration works. --(Henry Cisneros, Chairman, CityView, and former Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)

Richard Alba
Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age is an eagerly-anticipated volume that will set the standard, and become the point of comparison, for future studies of the children of immigrants and second-generation incorporation. --(Richard Alba, State University of New York at Albany)

Robert D. Putnam
As recent headlines have made clear, the challenge of massive immigration is a defining issue for the twenty-first century. Debate on this volatile and controversial issue will be more enlightened if we get the facts straight. This powerfully documented book is a major contribution toward that end. The authors lay out the complicated, sometimes unexpected, but fundamentally encouraging facts about how the children of today's immigrants are assimilating into American life. If America's leaders can read only one book on this topic, this should be it. --(Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community)

Rubйn G. Rumbaut
Inheriting the City is chock-full of compelling stories of the generation now coming of age in New York. Explaining the divergent fates of young adults of Chinese, Dominican, Russian Jewish, West Indian, and South American origins--compared with their native white, black, and Puerto Rican counterparts--this brilliant study is essential for anyone hoping to grasp the manifold legacies of today's new immigration. --(Rubйn G. Rumbaut, co-author of Immigrant America: A Portrait and Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation)

Aristide R. Zolberg
The authors bring us no simplistic message. The 'melting pot' (if it ever existed) is gone forever. Diversity will persist. But, contrary to the rants of high- and low-brow prophets of doom, it is manageable. Indeed, the diversity resulting from immigration will continue to revitalize New York City and thereby the country as a whole. --(Aristide R. Zolberg, author of A Nation By Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America)

Books about: Eurabia or The Agenda

Robert F. Kennedy: And the Death of American Idealism

Author: Joseph A Palermo

At the forefront of the social movements and political crises that gripped America in the 1950s and 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy saw, advised and led the United States through some of the most epochal events in the 20^th century. This biography chronicles Kennedy’s life from his time as a boy growing up amidst the turmoil of the Great Depression and World War II to his rise as a central figure in the national debate on communism, poverty, civil rights, and the war in Vietnam.

Editor's Preface     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     1
Coming of Age     5
Launching a Public Life     16
Finding His Way in the 1950s     30
His Brother's Keeper     43
Attorney General     63
Tragedy and Rebirth     83
Senator Kennedy, the Cautious Critic     103
Coming Out Against the Vietnam War     115
Presidential Candidate     124
From Victory to Tragedy     137
Conclusion     154
Study and Discussion Questions     159
A Note on the Sources     166
Index     173

Understanding Power or Mandela

2009-11-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Author: Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sold-out lectures. Now, in Understanding Power, Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's talks on the past, present, and future of the politics of power.

In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions -- published here for the first time -- Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America's imperialistic foreign policy and social inequalities at home, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media's role in popular struggle, as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Understanding Power is definitive Chomsky. Characterized by Chomsky's accessible and informative style, Understanding Power is the ideal book for those new to his work as well as for those who have been listening for years.

Publishers Weekly

For the past several decades, Noam Chomsky has become more famous for his trenchant critiques of U.S. foreign policy than for his groundbreaking linguistic theories. In this collection of material from his lectures and teach-ins, public defenders Mitchell and Schoeffel put his challenging, controversial opinions on display. The discussions a format that allows Chomsky to present his views in a conversational, accessible style confirm his wide-ranging engagement with world affairs. Whether the topic is Cambodia (he all but holds the United States responsible for the mass deaths under the Khmer Rouge) or the Middle East (where he sees the peace process as analogous to South Africa's creation of apartheid), he consistently blasts the United States for what he sees as its guiding principle of maintaining its own power while claiming to fight for freedom and democracy. Chomsky, who has published more than 30 books but is best known for his contribution to Manufacturing Consent, a critique of the way public opinion is formed, often excoriates the press for what he sees as a willingness to reflect the views of the "elites" rather than challenge them. But while he maintains a gloomy view of U.S. policies, he preserves a surprising optimism about Americans, arguing that the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements have made citizens more critical of the mass media. Some readers will appreciate the views articulated here and others will be infuriated; but for anyone with an opinion of Chomsky would be wise not to ignore this collection, which provides a useful and wide-ranging introduction to his analysis of power and media in the West. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

MIT-based Chomsky revolutionized linguistics in the late Fifties, but for nearly as long he has been better known as an energetic and constructive debunker of American establishment politics and behavior. However, the current Chomsky contributes nothing to the legacy he established decades ago. These two most recent productions do not reveal systematic efforts to sustain or develop any aspect of his prolifically expressed critique; indeed, they are not so much authored as collaged, with Chomsky's sanction, from talks, after-talk Q&As, and interviews with generally converted interlocutors. Understanding Power draws mainly on vintage utterances from the Nineties, and its most penetrating passage takes on, of all pressing matters, literary theory. Chomsky, who is relentless in condemning the media as incapable of any function other than converting the masses to elite desires, just as relentlessly samples mainstream reporting sources for instances of corporate and government ill doings. In trying to illustrate that he is not a crude conspiracy theorist, he conveys the opposite impression. The shorter 9-11 could not have been planned, of course, though it mostly consists of interviews conducted while the calendar still read September, suggesting both the urgency Chomsky felt to get his perspective on the record and his utter disinclination to reexamine any of his cemented opinions about world affairs. Chomsky condemns the attacks specifically and then suggests that the deaths are entirely the responsibility of capitalist globalization, which nonetheless he asserts is irrelevant to the September 11 actors. However, consistency is even less a priority for Chomsky than humility. Apparently, Chomsky believes that he has discovered the concept of blowback, not to mention imbalance in coverage of the perpetual Israeli-Palestinian murder-and-misery fetish. For him, a direct line runs from Reagan's mining of Nicaragua's harbors to the flying of commercial airliners into buildings. 9-11 is a worthwhile purchase for public libraries intent on demonstrating (or risking) balance; Understanding Power is not half as useful as Chomsky's earlier, authentic innovations in political literature, especially Manufacturing Consent (coauthored with Edward Herman). Libraries truly wishing to ensure representation of the most lucid nonconventional opinion should first check that their subscriptions to the Nation a proud carrier of Chomsky for 40 years are current. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Mandela: The Authorized Biography

Author: Anthony Sampson

Nelson Mandela, who emerged from twenty-six years of political imprisonment to lead South Africa out of apartheid and into democracy, is perhaps the world's most admired leader, a man whose life has been led with exemplary courage and inspired conviction.

Now Anthony Sampson, who has known Mandela since 1951 and has been a close observer of South Africa's political life for the last fifty years, has produced the first authorized biography, the most informed and comprehensive portrait to date of a man whose dazzling image has been difficult to penetrate. With unprecedented access to Mandela's private papers (including his prison memoir, long thought to have been lost), meticulous research, and hundreds of interviews--from Mandela himself to prison warders on Robben Island, from Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo to Winnie Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, and many others intimately connected to Mandela's story--Sampson has composed an enlightening and necessary story of the man behind the myth.

KLIATT

The subtitle is key to why one would recommend this book. Sampson, a journalist, had been a friend of Mandela's for many years and Mandela was pleased to cooperate. He provided many unpublished letters, memoirs written while in jail, and the like, while assuring Sampson that he would leave the judgments to him, the author. This is a long, detailed account and few young people will plod through it. However, Mandela is a true hero to many and even a cursory reading of this work could well show others why he is so adored and respected. His 27 years in prison are described at length. During this time he grew, became more thoughtful, and had a quiet authority over the other prisoners. "My current circumstances give me advantages my compatriots outside jail rarely have.... One is able to stand back and look at the entire movement from a distance, and the bitter lessons of prison life force one to go all out to win the cooperation of all fellow-prisoners...." (p.268). The beginnings of the Soweto riots are discussed, his struggle with the younger, more radical blacks and his leadership of the ANC, his relationship with other factions such as the Zulus and their chief, Buthelezi, the roles of the Americans and the British, and so much more are covered. This is a densely packed work that can be read through by the truly dedicated reader, but with its excellent index it could be read also as reference or for information on one aspect or another of South Africa, its recent history and Mandela's struggle. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1999, Random House/Vintage, 672p, illus, notes, bibliog, index, 21cm, 99-18498, $17.00. Ages16 to adult. Reviewer: Doris Hiatt; January 2001 (Vol. 35 No. 1)

American Empire or Preserving Memory

2009-11-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

American Empire: A Debate

Author: Bradley A Thayer

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the lone, unrivaled superpower on the world stage. America's military, diplomatic and economic--not to mention its cultural and ideological--presence is felt throughout the world. With few, if any, rivals to its supremacy, the current administration has made an explicit commitment--in its 2002 National Security Strategy--to maintaining and advancing primacy for the U.S. in the world. But, what exactly are the benefits of American hegemony for the U.S. and the world and what are the costs and drawbacks for this fledgling empire. In this short, accessible book Chris Layne and Brad Thayer argue the merits and demerits of American empire. After making their best cases for and against an American empire, subsequent chapters will allow the authors respond to the major arguments presented by their opponent and present their own counter arguments.

American Empire: A Debate will be the first stop for readers interested in deciding for themselves where they stand on this very controversial topic.

Book review: Umbertos Kitchen or Pearls of Kitchen Wisdom

Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum

Author: Edward T Linenthal

Since its first year in 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has attracted visitors more than 15 million visitors, sometimes at the rate of 10,000 a day, each of whom has walked away with an indelible impression of awe in the face of the unimaginable. This lively, honest, behind-the-scenes account details the emotionally complex fifteen-year struggle surrounding the museum's birth.

Deborah Lipstadt

A masterpiece. It mesmerizes the reader.

Raul Hilberg

A brilliant book, incisive and clear . . . reveals the tensions, plunges, and surges that led to this bold museum.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Well-written and exciting . . . A riveting story that does not sensationalize or take sides in the many controversies.

Stephen T. Katz

Linenthal has written an intriguing, highly informative, ‘insider’ account of one of America's most important new cultural institutions. . . . Bravo.

Bandits Prophets and Messiahs or Israels Occupation

2009-11-25T13:37:00.000-08:00

Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus

Author: Richard A Horsley

The award-winning investigation that rediscovers the "common people" in the time of Jesus--the masses led by bandit forces, apocalyptic prophets, and messianic leaders.

Look this: Man and Nature or FDRs Fireside Chats

Israel's Occupation

Author: Neve Gordon

This first complete history of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip allows us to see beyond the smoke screen of politics in order to make sense of the dramatic changes that have developed on the ground over the past forty years. Looking at a wide range of topics, from control of water and electricity to health care and education as well as surveillance and torture, Neve Gordon's panoramic account reveals a fundamental shift from a politics of life--when, for instance, Israel helped Palestinians plant more than six-hundred thousand trees in Gaza and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds--to a macabre politics characterized by an increasing number of deaths. Drawing attention to the interactions, excesses, and contradictions created by the forms of control used in the Occupied Territories, Gordon argues that the occupation's very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government or the actions of various Palestinian political factions, has led to this radical shift.

Publishers Weekly

Applying the work of Michel Foucault to the contemporary Middle East, this highly theoretical book examines the "means of control used to manage" the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Gordon, a professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University, begins by exploring the diffuse mechanisms of power-in the political, civilian, geographical and economic arenas-used to normalize the occupation in its first years, making the ostensibly temporary occupation permanent. Later chapters take a more specific historical approach, examining a series of events that radically transformed these power structures: the first intifada, the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, which, the author argues, required a reorganization of Israeli power in the Occupied Territories, leading to the disregard of the Palestinians inhabiting those territories. Gordon focuses on the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and writes for a decidedly scholarly audience; as a result, the book's usefulness beyond academics will likely be limited. (Nov.)

Global Environmental Politics or Henry Adams

2009-02-21T22:01:00.000-08:00

Global Environmental Politics

Author: David L Downi

When Global Environmental Politics was first published, the environment was just emerging as a pivotal issue in traditional international relations. Today, the environment is considered to be a central topic to discussions of international politics, political economy, international organization, and the relationship between foreign and domestic policy. With new and updated case studies throughout, a revised chapter on improving compliance with international environmental regimes, and a new section on environment within the larger context of sustainable development, this classic text is more complete and up-to-date than any survey of international environmental politics on the market. In addition to providing a concise yet comprehensive overview of global environmental issues, the authors have worked to contextualize key topics such as the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the Kyoto Protocol, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, international forest policy, and the trade, development and environment nexus. Environmental concerns from global warming to biodiversity loss to whaling are seen as challenges to transnational relations, with governments, NGOs, IGOs, and MNCs all involved in the multilateral interaction that is necessary to address the ever-complicated subject of global environmental politics.

New interesting textbook: AutoCAD 2008 in 3D or Streaming Media Bible

Henry Adams: History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (Library of America), Vol. 1

Author: Henry Adams

This monumental work, complete in two volumes, culminated Henry Adams' lifelong fascination with the American past. First published in nine volumes from 1889-91, it has been judged one of the greatest historical works in English -- and yet has been out of print for several decades. Adams' History traces the formative period of American nationality from the rise of Thomas Jefferson's Republican party through the War of 1812. Hoping to keep the United States out of Europe's Napoleonic wars, Jefferson's pacificism instead antagonizes both France and England, the two greatest military powers in the world. While the states threaten to duplicate the map of Europe by dissolving into separate, squabbling sections, Madison leads the country into a war with British regulars and Indian tribes that he is illequipped to fight. Yet time is on the side of the American people -- who, despite statesmen and generals, emerge from the conflict a single nation ready to flex its burgeoning muscles. In Adams' ironic narrative, personalities like Bonaparte and Aaron Burr, William "Tippecanoe" Harrison and Andrew Jackson, Shawnee leader Tecumseh and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture act their glittering parts against a background of inexorable historical forces that transform the United States from a pre-industrial backwater into an emergent world power.

In this first volume, Jefferson's optimistic laissez-faire principles -- designed to prevent American government from becoming a militaristic European "tyranny" -- clash with the realities of European war and American security. The party of small government presides over the Louisiana Purchase, the most extensive use of executive power the country had yet seen. Jefferson's embargo -- a high-minded effort at peaceable coercion -- breeds corruption and smuggling, and the former defender of states' rights is forced to use federal power to suppress them. The passion for peace and liberty pushes the country toward war. In the center of these ironic reversals, played out in a Washington full of diplomatic intrigue, is the complex figure of Jefferson himself, part tragic visionary, part comic mock-hero. Like his contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte, he is swept into power by the rising tide of democratic nationalism; unlike Bonaparte, he tries to avert the consequences of the wolfish struggle for power among nation-states.

The grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, Adams gained access to hitherto secret archives in Europe. The diplomatic documents that lace the history lend a novelistic intimacy to scenes such as Jefferson's conscientious introduction of democratic table manners into stuffily aristocratic state dinner parties. Written in a strong, lively style pointed with Adams' wit, the History chronicles the consolidation of American character, and poses questions about the future course of democracy.

Volume 1
I.	Physical and Economical Conditions	5
II.	Popular Characteristics	31
III.	Intellect of New England	54
IV.	Intellect of the Middle States	76
V.	Intellect of the Southern States	91
VI.	American Ideals	107
VII.	The Inauguration	126
VIII.	Organization	148
IX.	The Annual Message	169
X.	Legislation	180
XI.	The Judiciary Debate	193
XII.	Personalities	209
XIII.	The Spanish Court	227
XIV.	The Retrocession	238
XV.	Toussaint Louverture	255
XVI.	Closure of the Mississippi	269
XVII.	Monroe's Mission	285
Volume 2
I.	Rupture of the Peace of Amiens	301
II.	The Louisiana Treaty	319
III.	Claim to West Florida	336
IV.	Constitutional Difficulties	352
V.	The Louisiana Debate	366
VI.	Louisiana Legislation	380
VII.	Impeachments	393
VIII.	Conspiracy	409
IX.	The Yazoo Claims	431
X.	Trial of Justice Chase	449
XI.	Quarrel with Yrujo	467
XII.	Pinckney's Diplomacy	480
XIII.	Monroe and Talleyrand	496
XIV.	Relations with England	516
XV.	Cordiality with England	533
XVI.	Anthony Merry	546
XVII.	Jefferson's Enemies	567
XVIII.	England and Tripoli	581
	Maps
	The States of North Africa	166
	The Coast of West Florida and Louisiana	302

The Lazlo Letters or The Shape of the River

2009-02-20T16:49:00.000-08:00

The Lazlo Letters

Author: Don Novello

In letters to stars, dignitaries, and chairmen of the country's most powerful organizations, Don Novello's alter ego Lazlo Toth pestered his victims for photographs, offered outlandish advice, fired off strange inquiries, and more. The strangest part? Practically everyone answered, leaving Toth with a hilarious collection of outlandish correspondence unmatched in the history of American letters.

The Lazlo Letters contains nearly 100 notes to public figures, including then-President Nixon, Vice President Ford ("I've been Vice President of a lot of organizations myself, so I know how you feel."), Bebe Rebozo, Lester Maddox, Earl Butz, and America's top business leaders. The replies, says the author, "classic examples of American politeness."

In an on-going correspondence with the White House, Toth suggests everything from ridiculously corny jokes for the President to use, to a campaign song sung to the tune of "Tea for Two." He asks the president of a bubble bath company just how to use the product, as the packaging instructions specifically state to "keep dry."

"No matter how absurd my letter was, no matter how much I ranted and raved, they always answered," reports the author. "Many of these replies are beautiful examples of pure public relations nonsense." One is not: columnist James Kilpatrick has a lone sentiment for Toth-"Nuts to You!" 247,000 copies in print.

The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions

Author: William G Bowen

This is the book that has forever changed the debate on affirmative action in America. The Shape of the River is the most far-reaching and comprehensive study of its kind. It brings a wealth of empirical evidence to bear on how race-sensitive admissions policies actually work and clearly defines the effects they have had on over 45,000 students of different races. Its conclusions mark a turning point in national discussions of affirmative action--anything less than factual evidence will no longer suffice in any serious debate of this vital question.

Glenn Loury's new foreword revisits the basic logic behind race-sensitive policies, asserting that since individuals use race to conceptualize themselves, we must be conscious of race as we try to create rules for a just society. Loury underscores the need for confronting opinion with fact so we can better see the distinction between the "morality of color-blindness" and the "morality of racial justice."

Across the country, in courts, classrooms, and the media, Americans are deeply divided over the use of race in admitting students to universities. Yet until now the debate over race and admissions has consisted mainly of clashing opinions, uninformed by hard evidence. This work, written by two of the country's most respected academic leaders, intends to change that. It brings a wealth of empirical evidence to bear on how race-sensitive admissions policies actually work and what effects they have on students of different races.

The authors are the economist William G. Bowen, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former President of Princeton University, and Derek Bok, former President of Harvard University andformer Dean of the Harvard Law School. Bowen and Bok argue that we can pass an informed judgment on the wisdom of race-sensitive admissions only if we understand in detail the college careers and the subsequent lives of students-or, to use a metaphor they take from Mark Twain, if we learn the shape of the entire river. The heart of the book is thus an unprecedented study of the academic, employment, and personal histories of more than 45,000 students of all races who attended academically selective universities between the 1970s and the early 1990s.

The study reveals how much race-sensitive admissions increase the likelihood that blacks will be admitted to selective universities and demonstrates what effect the termination of these policies would have on the number of minority students at different kinds of selective institutions. The authors go on to determine how well black students have performed academically in comparison to their white classmates, what success they have had in their subsequent careers, and how actively they have participated in civic and community affairs. The authors also explore the views expressed by graduates of selective colleges about the value of their education and the contributions that a diverse student body has made to their capacity to live and work with people of other races.

In the final chapters, Bowen and Bok relate their findings to the current debate about the wisdom of race-sensitive admissions. They consider whether critics are correct in claiming that such policies harm their intended beneficiaries by forcing minority students to compete with academically superior classmates. They examine alternative policies that have been proposed to increase diversity without relying explicitly on race in the admissions process. They end by reflecting on the thorny question of whether the concept of "merit" is compatible with a deliberate effort to achieve a racially diverse student body.

Authoritative, powerfully argued, and elegantly written, this book is a landmark work in one of the most important debates in recent American history. In the words of Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, "The Shape of the River should be essential reading for anyone seeking a dependable guide through the morass of competing claims that obscure from public attention the questions that need to be posed and the answers that need to be assessed."

Richard D. Kahlenberg

The Shape of the River makes a business case for diversity, a case that is chilling in its emphasis on efficiency over fairness. Maybe this book will help show that today's affirmative action is not the liberal program that liberals believe it to be. -- Washington Monthly

New York Times

No study of this magnitude has been attempted before. Its findings provide a strong rationale for opposing curent efforts to demolish race-sensitive policies in colleges across the country. . . .The evidence collected flatly refutes many of the misimpressions of affirmative-action opponents.

Los Angeles Times

A compelling new book. . .demonstrates why affirmative action programs can be good for the country. . .The authors prove with facts, not anecdotes, that affirmative action works.

Newsweek

The most ambitious and authoritative study to date of the effects of affirmative action in higher education.

Ronald Dworkin

Offers much more comprehensive statistics and much more sophisticated analysis than has been available before. . . .Impressionistic and anecdotal evidence will no longer suffice. -- The New York Review of Books

The New York Times

Newsweek

The most ambitious and authoritative study to date of the effects of affirmative action in higher education.

Los Angeles Times

A compelling new book. . .demonstrates why affirmative action programs can be good for the country. . .The authors prove with facts, not anecdotes, that affirmative action works.

David Karen

. . .Bowen and Bok have performed a major service for advocates of affirmative action. . . .[and] have also written a book that underliens the degree to which colleges are useful investments in human capital. -- The Nation

David Gergen

The most comprehensive study ever done of affirmative action in higher education.. .it demands the attention of anyone who cares about American universities. -- U.S. News & World Report

What People Are Saying

Garry Wills
An extensive and intensive study. . .finds that. . .what is good for business. . .is good for society, too -- good for all of us. This report may, at last, make that fact evident even to the most obtuse (Garry Wills is a syndicated columnist).

Robert M. Solow
This important book is a calm, expert, analytical study of race-sensitive college admissions, and what happens afterwards. . . .It tells us many things we didn't know, because untill now there was no way to know them (Robert M. Solow is M.I.T. Noel Laureate in Economics).

Bill Bradley
An invaluable resource for those interested in American higher education and, more generally, race in America.

Randall Kennedy
Written by two of the most respected figures in higher education, The Shape of the River offers the public what has long been needed: a large dose of crucial, unvarnished fact about affirmative action. -- Harvard Law School

	List of Figures
	List of Tables
	Preface
Ch. 1	Historical Context	1
Ch. 2	The Admissions Process and "Race-Neutrality"	15
Ch. 3	Academic Outcomes	53
Ch. 4	Advanced Study: Graduate and Professional Degrees	91
Ch. 5	Employment, Earnings, and Job Satisfaction	118
Ch. 6	Civic Participation and Satisfaction with Life	155
Ch. 7	Looking Back: Views of College	193
Ch. 8	Diversity: Perceptions and Realities	218
Ch. 9	Informing the Debate	256
Ch. 10	Summing Up	275
App. A	The College and Beyond Database	291
	App. B. Notes on Methodology	336
App. C	Earnings in Relation to Advanced Degrees, Sector of Employment, and Occupation	362
	App. D. Additional Tables	375
	References	451
	Index	461

Savage Peace or Crime Scene

2009-02-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America 1919

Author: Ann Hagedorn

Written with the sweep of an epic novel and grounded in extensive research into contemporary documents, Savage Peace is a striking portrait of American democracy under stress. It is the surprising story of America in the year 1919.
In the aftermath of an unprecedented worldwide war and a flu pandemic, Americans began the year full of hope, expecting to reap the benefits of peace. But instead, the fear of terrorism filled their days. Bolshevism was the new menace, and the federal government, utilizing a vast network of domestic spies, began to watch anyone deemed suspicious. A young lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover headed a brand-new intelligence division of the Bureau of Investigation (later to become the FBI). Bombs exploded on the doorstep of the attorney general's home in Washington, D.C., and thirty-six parcels containing bombs were discovered at post offices across the country. Poet and journalist Carl Sandburg, recently returned from abroad with a trunk full of Bolshevik literature, was detained in New York, his trunk seized. A twenty-one-year-old Russian girl living in New York was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for protesting U.S. intervention in Arctic Russia, where thousands of American soldiers remained after the Armistice, ostensibly to guard supplies but in reality to join a British force meant to be a warning to the new Bolshevik government.
In 1919, wartime legislation intended to curb criticism of the government was extended and even strengthened. Labor strife was a daily occurrence. And decorated African-American soldiers, returning home to claim the democracy for which they had risked their lives, were badly disappointed. Lynchings continued, raceriots would erupt in twenty-six cities before the year ended, and secret agents from the government's "Negro Subversion" unit routinely shadowed outspoken African-Americans.
Adding a vivid human drama to the greater historical narrative, Savage Peace brings 1919 alive through the people who played a major role in making the year so remarkable. Among them are William Monroe Trotter, who tried to put democracy for African-Americans on the agenda at the Paris peace talks; Supreme Court associate justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who struggled to find a balance between free speech and legitimate government restrictions for reasons of national security, producing a memorable decision for the future of free speech in America; and journalist Ray Stannard Baker, confidant of President Woodrow Wilson, who watched carefully as Wilson's idealism crumbled and wrote the best accounts we have of the president's frustration and disappointment.
Weaving together the stories of a panoramic cast of characters, from Albert Einstein to Helen Keller, Ann Hagedorn brilliantly illuminates America at a pivotal moment.

Publishers Weekly

Former Wall Street Journalstaffer Hagedorn (Beyond the River) makes a stylish entry into the history-of-a-year genre with this account of America in upheaval in the wake of WWI. In 1919, both the world and the U.S. were in need of reconstruction: soldiers returning from war needed jobs, and the influenza epidemic wasn't quite under control. Two threads Hagedorn follows are middle-class Americans' fear of Bolshevism, and the struggles of black Americans. U.S. Attorney-General Palmer instigated raids to try to root out leftist activists, and in what may have been "the State Department's first official interference in African-American politics," the agency denied black Americans' request for passports to travel to France and speak to the Paris Peace Conference about racial equality. In a year rife with lynchings in the Deep South, W.E.B. Du Bois, who had urged black Americans to shelve their grievances and fight the Germans, now argued that blacks, having served the nation, deserved to be accorded civil rights. Still, some exciting cultural developments presaged the roaring '20s: F. Scott Fitzgerald's star rose, and the nation's first dial telephones were installed in Norfolk, Va. This vivid account of a nation in tumult and transition is absorbing, and the nexus of global and national upheaval is chillingly relevant. (Apr.)

Prologue: Armistice Day 1918     1
Winter: Jubilation and Hope
Gods of War and Peace     19
Spies Are Everywhere     24
Christmas at Villa Lewaro     37
Women and Molasses     46
The List     53
A Mere Slip of a Girl     61
Polar Bears in Peril     80
Sergeant Henry Johnson     91
Trotter and the Passports     104
The Magisterial Wand     114
Blinders     124
Shuffleboard     134
In Like a Lion     143
Out Like a Lion     155
Spring: Fear
Inner Light     163
Make-Believe Riots and Real Bombs     175
It's in the Mail     188
Monsieur Trotter     203
302 Seconds in May     210
What Happened on R Street     218
War of a Different Sort     226
Thrilling Feats     234
Summer: Passion
Missichusetts     249
Paris     262
Independence Day 1919     269
The Narrow Path     279
Miss Puffer Insane?     285
That Certain Point     297
Weapons in Their Hats     308
Kingof the Index     323
"I'll Stay With You, Mary"     334
Autumn: Struggle
"The Right to Happiness"     345
Tugs-of-War and of the Heart     356
Autumn Leaflets     364
Not Exactly Paradise     376
Albert in Wonderland     386
Greatness     391
Armistice Day 1919     398
Falling Ladders     404
All Aboard     408
Boughs of Glory     417
Epilogue: Endings and Beginnings     425
Notes on Sources     447
Notes     455
Selected Bibliography     499
Acknowledgments     511
Index     517

Books about: Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible or The Elder Scrolls IV

Crime Scene: How Forensic Science Solves

Author: W Mark Dal

The Crime Scene: How Forensic Science Works is an affordable trade paperback for those who want to learn more about forensic science and how it is used to solve criminal cases.

This book will appeal to the college student who is studying forensic science, or the person who is interested in learning more about it for a career or course of study in criminal justice. Unlike the popular trade books out there on crime scene investigation, this book doesn’t just focus on the gory details of a crime and how it is solved; rather, it introduces the student to the science of the investigation and what it takes to break a case.

In addition, it will be aligned to criminal justice curriculum and the education of investigators-to-be.

Rebel in Chief or Fiscal Disobedience an Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa

2009-02-18T02:58:00.000-08:00

Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush

Author: Fred Barnes

“You can’t worry about being vindicated, because the truth of the matter is, when you do big things, it’s going to take a while for history to really understand.” —President Bush, in an exclusive interview with Fred Barnes for Rebel-in-Chief

With Rebel-in-Chief, veteran political reporter Fred Barnes provides the defining book on George W. Bush’s presidency, giving an insider’s view of how Bush’s unique presidential style and bold reforms are dramatically remaking the country—and, indeed, the world. In the process, Barnes shows, the president is shaking up Washington and reshaping the conservative movement.

Barnes has gained extraordinary access to the Bush administration for Rebel-in-Chief, conducting rare one-on-one interviews with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and many other close presidential advisers. That access, along with Barnes’s extensive independent reporting and interviewing, produces an eye-opening look at this highly consequential—and controversial—presidency.

Rebel-in-Chief reveals:

• How Bush acts as an “insurgent force” in the nation’s capital—“a different kind of president” who is turning the Washington establishment on its ear

• How Bush is redefining conservatism for a new era—and creating a new Republican majority

• The inside story of how Bush has revolutionized American foreign policy—and how the president's crusade for democracy would have been anathema to Bush himselfonly five years ago

• When and why Bush decided to go into Iraq, even knowing that he was putting his political future at risk

• How a White House aide you've probably never heard of is shaping the Bush vision

• The surprising and important ways Bush's faith affects critical presidential decisions

• How Bush has outmaneuvered his political opponents and surprised members of the press who have dismissed him as an intellectual bantamweight

• How Bush routinely defies conventional wisdom because of his contempt for elite opinion and halfway reforms (“small-ball,” he calls them)—and why he usually wins

George W. Bush billed himself as a “different kind of Republican.” He has proved to be a different kind of president, too. And Fred Barnes’s riveting behind-the-scenes account helps us understand how much this “Rebel-in-Chief ” is reshaping the world around us.

The Washington Post - Jackson Diehl

.The Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit convincingly describes a president who thinks and behaves "as an insurgent" in Washington, who scorns small ideas and conventional thinking and who consequently "has found it easy to overturn major policies with scarcely a second thought." Barnes portrays Bush's contempt for Washington elites and the press as a virtue that has allowed him to revolutionize both foreign and domestic policy and fashion a new form of conservatism. The case he makes for Bush's boldness is indisputable, especially in foreign affairs. But the thinness of Bush's counsel in his anti-Washington bubble also stands out.

Library Journal

Barnes (executive editor, the Weekly Standard) argues for the greatness of George W. Bush. Less biography than hagiography, this work is an unabashed love letter to the current president, with its author revealing that he shares Bush's inability to identify any mistakes that the president has made. Barnes notes an interview with Bush, but otherwise no sourcing is given for the book, which could pass for the regurgitated Republican National Committee talking points that one might hear on Barnes's own show on the Fox News Channel. A third of the text defends Bush's Middle East policy; the rest praises his faith and his impact on domestic politics, but the "new majority" Barnes hails is shaky at best, with new fissures opening weekly, while the "new conservatism" is a complete repudiation of traditional conservatism. As for Bush's "rebel" status, it apparently consists of refusing to wear tuxedos or to socialize with the Washington press corps. This book will be demanded by that new conservative choir that enjoys being preached to, but Ronald Kessler's similar, albeit gossipy A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush is more comprehensive and contains actual reporting. Purchase only where there is demand.-Michael O. Eshleman, Kings Mills, OH Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Case for Vegetarianism or Whats Cooking in the Courtroom

Fiscal Disobedience - An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa

Author: Janet L L Roitman

Fiscal Disobedience represents a novel approach to the question of citizenship amid the changing global economy and the fiscal crisis of the nation-state. Focusing on economic practices in the Chad Basin of Africa, Janet Roitman combines thorough ethnographic fieldwork with sophisticated analysis of key ideas of political economy to examine the contentious nature of fiscal relationships between the state and its citizens. She argues that citizenship is being redefined through a renegotiation of the rights and obligations inherent in such economic relationships.

The book centers on a civil disobedience movement that arose in Cameroon beginning in 1990 ostensibly to counter state fiscal authority--a movement dubbed Opération Villes Mortes by the opposition and incivisme fiscal by the government (which for its part was eager to suggest that participants were less than legitimate citizens, failing in their civic duties). Contrary to standard approaches, Roitman examines this conflict as a "productive moment" that, rather than involving the outright rejection of regulatory authority, questioned the intelligibility of its exercise. Although both militarized commercial networks (associated with such activities trading in contraband goods including drugs, ivory, and guns) and highly organized gang-based banditry do challenge state authority, they do not necessarily undermine state power.

Contrary to depictions of the African state as "weak" or "failed," this book demonstrates how the state in Africa manages to reconstitute its authority through networks that have emerged in the interstices of the state system. It also shows how those networks partake of thesame epistemological grounding as does the state. Indeed, both state and nonstate practices of governing refer to a common "ethic of illegality," which explains how illegal activities are understood as licit or reasonable conduct.

Ch. 1	Introduction : an anthropology of regulation and fiscal relations	1
Ch. 2	Incivisme fiscal	23
Ch. 3	Tax-price as a technique of government	48
Ch. 4	Unsanctioned wealth, or the productivity of debt	73
Ch. 5	Fixing the moving targets of regulation	100
Ch. 6	The unstable terms of regulatory practice	129
Ch. 7	The pluralization of regulatory authority	151

Vietnam or Nazi Germany

2009-02-16T21:46:00.000-08:00

Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War

Author: Gary R Hess

In Vietnam, Gary R. Hess describes and evaluates the main arguments of scholars, participants, and journalists – both revisionist and orthodox in their approach – as they consider why the United States was unable to achieve its objectives. While providing a clear and well-balanced account of the existing historical debate, Hess also offers his own interpretation of the events and opens a dialogue about the usefulness of historical argument in reaching a deeper understanding of the conflict. This concise book is essential reading for students and teachers of the Vietnam War as it provides a clear and well-balanced account of existing historical debate and a thought-provoking look at the future of historical scholarship.

Look this: Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles or Nine Questions

Nazi Germany

Author: Jane Caplan

The history of National Socialism as a movement and a regime remains one of the most compelling and intensively studied aspects of twentieth-century history, one whose significance extends far beyond Germany or even Europe. Featuring ten chapters by leading international experts, this volume presents an up-to-date and authoritative introduction to the history of Nazi Germany.
Opening with an introduction delineating the challenges this period of history has posed to historians since 1945, Nazi Germany continues on with chapters that explain how Nazism emerged as an ideology and a political movement; how Hitler and his party took power and remade the German state; and how the Nazi "national community" was organized around a radical and eventually lethal distinction between the "included" and the "excluded." Later chapters discuss the complex relationship between Nazism and Germany's religious faiths; the perverse economic rationality of the regime; the path to war laid down by Hitler's foreign policy; and the intricate and intimate intertwining of war and genocide. The volume concludes with a final chapter on the aftermath of National Socialism in postwar German history and memory.

Iraq or Christianity and Law

2009-02-15T16:34:00.000-08:00

Iraq: Searching for Hope

Author: Andrew Whit

As an envoy for peace, Andrew White is dedicated to religious and political reconciliation in Iraq and has frequently risked his life. In this new edition of his book, which tells a remarkable inside story, Andrew reflects on what he has seen in Iraq during his visits since 2005, including the escalating violence, working with the military and the involvement of the Americans. He also assesses what he considers to be mistakes in the peace process. Among the more dramatic moments are the trial of Saddam, at which Andrew was present; the abduction of the leaders of St George's church and their presumed death; and hostage crises including the death of colleagues. Andrew's personal struggle has been very real, but even at the worst moments, he never loses hope. His picture of life on the ground in Iraq is as compelling as his insights into what goes on behind the political censors. Interspersed in this compelling account are reflections on such profound issues as the nature of evil, the occasional necessity of war and - perhaps the most urgent question - whether religion is part of the problem or the solution.

About the Author:
Canon Andrew White is the former International Director of the Iraqi Institute of Peace and President of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East

Acknowledgements     iv
Historical note     vi
Preface to second edition     vii
Preface toufirst edition     viii
Making friends with the enemy     1
The struggle begins     16
Why me?     22
Hope, edged with fear     25
Was the war justified?     38
The tale of suffering     45
Is it appropriate to speak of 'evil'?     53
Chaos and horror     55
Who are the insurgents?     54
The pursuit of peace     69
Doesn't religion do more harm than good?     82
Signing up     85
Can there be peace between religions?     95
Striving to set the captives free     98
Where is God in all this?     107
The corridors of power     110
Whose side are the media on?     118
Changing regimes     122
What is so special about Iraq?     133
Signs of new growths     137
A land of hope     144
The darkness and the glory     152
The Baghdad Religious Accord     171
The Dokan Religious Accord     173
Who's who     175

Look this: NOPINESE TRADITIONAL HENOPAL MEDICINE or Faith Healers

Christianity and Law: An Introduction

Author: John Witte Jr

What impact has Christianity had on the law from its beginnings to the present day? This introduction explores the main legal teachings of Western Christianity, set out in the texts and traditions of scripture and theology, philosophy and jurisprudence. It takes up the weightier matters of the law that Christianity has profoundly shaped - justice and mercy, rule and equity, discipline and love - as well as more technical topics of canon law, natural law, and state law. Some of these legal creations were wholly original to Christianity. Others were converted from Jewish and classical traditions. Still others were reformed by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophers. But whether original or reformed, these Christian teachings on law, politics and society have made and can continue to make fundamental contributions to modern law in the West and beyond.

Moving A Nation to Care or The Faiths of Our Fathers

2009-02-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

Moving A Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops

Author: Ilona Meagher

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in our returning combat troops is one of the most catastrophic issues confronting our nation. Yet, despite the fact that nearly 20 percent of the over half million troops that have left the military since 2003 have been diagnosed with PTSD, and that many who suffer symptoms are unlikely to seek help because of the stigma of this terrible disease, our government and media have remained silent.

Moving A Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops is a grassroots call to action designed to break the shameful silence and put the issue of PTSD in our returning troops front and center before the American public. In addition to presenting interviews with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering with PTSD, such as Blake Miller, the famous "Marlboro Man," this book will be the most comprehensive resource to date for concerned citizens who want to understand the complex political, social, and health-related issues of PTSD, with an eye toward "moving our nation to care" to do what is necessary to help our fighting men and women who suffer from PTSD.

Ilona Meagher is editor of the online journal PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within and author of the PTSD Timeline, a comprehensive database of PTSD incidents. She has appeared on Fox News and numerous other media outlets.

Robert Roerich, MD, is one of the world experts in trauma therapy and PTSD and a board member of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

Book about: Introductory Mathematical Economics or Sales Management

The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America's Founders Really Believed

Author: Alf J Mapp

In this eloquent little book, leading colonial historian Alf J. Mapp, Jr., provides a highly readable overview of the religious beliefs of eleven of the most esteemed men of the generation that declared our independence and wrote the U. S. Constitution. Perhaps for the first time, we confront the breadth and diversity of the Founding Fathers’ thinking on religious matters. In fact, their sustained ruminations on issues of religion, conscience, and ethics contributed to making their era one of the greatest in human history.

As Mapp contends, there was “no monolithic national faith acknowledged by all Founding Fathers. Their religious attitudes were as varied as their political opinions.” This is hardly surprising, as these eleven men—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams, George Washington, John Marshall, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, Charles Carroll of Carroltton, and Haym Solomon—came from all parts of the colonies and from differing social backgrounds.

Faiths of Our Fathers explores the profound connections between the Revolutionary period and our own. In doing so, it offers a much-needed corrective to the many misconceptions about the role of faith in the lives of our Founding Fathers.

	Acknowledgments
1	In the Beginning Was Variety	1
2	Thomas Jefferson	3
3	Benjamin Franklin	22
4	James Madison	41
5	John Adams	54
6	George Washington	66
7	John Marshall	80
8	Patrick Henry	86
9	Alexander Hamilton	97
10	George Mason	110
11	Charles Carroll of Carrollton	124
12	Haym Salomon	146
13	What Most People Thought	153
App	Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom	158
	Bibliography	161
	Index	178
	About the Author	184

Transportation Systems Security or Blindside

2009-02-13T06:07:00.000-08:00

Transportation Systems Security

Author: Allan McDougall

Transportation systems security is an integral part of counterterrorism and homeland security. Highlighting all aspects, this comprehensive text presents strategic, practical, and operational applications for the physical, procedural, and psychological safeguards that are needed to keep all modes of transportation up and running. Topics include systems layout, core performance issues, and risk assessment; predicting internal and external loss; drills, exercises, and training; as well as layered systems, compliance, and shared information. Each chapter features questions and case scenarios to facilitate understanding. A fictitious company is used to depict various scenarios in order to illustrate the theoretical concepts discussed by the authors.

Preface     xv
Acknowledgments     xix
Authors     xxi
Introduction to Transportation Systems     1
Introduction     1
Requirements for Securing the Sector     2
The Transportation Sector as Linked Systems     4
Impact Resulting from System Failure or Interruption     4
Trends within the Transportation Sector     6
Fragility and Reliability     7
Understanding Transportation System Security     8
Transportation System Topography     11
Introduction     11
General Overview     12
Nodes and Conduits     12
Directly and Indirectly Derived Demands     14
Factors Affecting Directly Derived Demands     14
Factors Affecting Indirect Demands     16
Routing of Conduits     19
Spoke-and-Hub Systems     19
Control Points versus Nodes     20
Control Points in Fixed Conduits     20
Control Points along Flexible Conduits     21
Terminal or Transfer?     21
System as a Sum of Interlinked Systems     22
Recap of the System     24
Constraints within the System     25
Coordination Networks     25
Coordination Network-Operations     25
How the Coordination Network Interacts with the System     26
Conduit-Based Networks: Operations and Deployment     27
Use of Systems for Automation     27
Persons and Associations and Networks of Persons     28
Aviation (Air)     28
Marine     28
Rail     28
Trucking     28
Sector-Wide     29
Factors to Consider     29
Business Goals and Mission Analysis     33
Introduction     33
Scales of Operability     33
General Interaction     35
How Is the System Mission Achieved?     36
Considerations of the Transportation System     37
System-Level Mission Statement     38
Transportation System Security Mission Statement     38
Determining the Mission Statement for Organizations     39
Strategic Level Mission Statements as Organizational Constraints     40
Operational Level within the Structure     42
Interaction between the Strategic and Operational Levels     42
Role of the Operational Level     43
Tactical Level within the Structure      43
Interaction between the Operational and Tactical Levels     44
Overview of the Structure     45
Limitations on Controls     45
Limitations on the Strategic Level     45
Limitations on the Operational Level     47
Limitations on the Tactical Level     47
Generation of the Mission Statements     48
ABC Transport's Security Mission Statements     49
How Does the Mission Statement Fit into Critical Infrastructure Protection?     49
Questions     50
General Definitions and Approaches     53
Introduction     53
Persons, Assets, Facilities, Information, and Activities     54
Follow-the-Pipe Approach     54
Mission-Driven Value     55
Vulnerability-Driven Considerations     55
Integrating the C-I-A Triad     57
Confidentiality     57
Integrity     58
Availability     59
Integrating the D-M-L Triad     60
Disclosure     61
Modification     61
Loss     62
CIP Management Approach     62
Criticality     63
Means, Opportunity, and Intent      63
Convergence within the Transportation System     64
The Concept of Risk, Residual Risk, and Risk Appetite     65
Who Decides the Threshold for Risk Appetite?     68
Avoiding, Addressing, Transferring, Accepting, and Ignoring Risk     68
Avoiding Risk     69
Addressing Risk     69
Transferring Risk     70
Accepting Risk     71
Ignoring Risk     71
Responses to Risk and Regulation     72
Risk Awareness     73
The Concept of Safeguards     74
Tactical-Level Safeguards     75
Operational-Level Safeguards     75
Strategic-Level Safeguards     76
Regulator-Driven Safeguards     76
Prevention, Detection, Response, and Recovery     77
Prevention     77
Detection and Response     78
Recovery     80
Looking at Vulnerabilities     80
Interim versus Proposed Measures     81
Layered Defenses     82
The Macro Level     83
ABC Transport     83
Local versus Systems Approaches     89
Introduction     89
Structures of Networks     90
The Flux of the Transportation System     91
Imperatives Driving Network Component Behavior     92
Aligning Imperatives with the Mission Statement     93
Relationship between Imperatives and Levels     95
Tactical-Level Imperatives     95
Operational-Level Imperatives     96
Strategic-Level Imperatives     97
Aligning the Levels of the Organization     97
Communications among the Levels     98
Pace of Evolution     99
Internal Influences versus External Influences     100
Transorganizational Constraints     100
Alignment with Mission Statements     100
Influences on Follow the Pipe     101
Alignment of Transorganizational Groups with the Matrix     101
Constraints by Regulators     102
Questions     103
Answers     104
Criticality, Impact, Consequence, and Internal and External Distributed Risk     107
Introduction     107
Assignment of Value     108
Criticality     109
Single Points of Failure     109
Consideration for Nationally Declared Critical Infrastructure     110
Impact     110
Tactical-Level Impact     111
Operational-Level Impact     111
Strategic-Level Impact     112
Consideration for Control Systems     113
Consequence     113
Risk     114
Internal Risk     114
External Risk     115
Risk Calculations     115
ABC Transport Example     116
Questions     119
Mitigation and Cost Benefit     121
Introduction     121
First Step to Mitigating Risk-Strategy     121
Key Considerations     122
Management Tolerances toward Risk     122
Costs     122
Resistance to Change     123
Selecting a Mitigation Strategy     123
Ignoring Risk     124
ABC Transport Example     124
Tactical-Level Considerations     125
ABC Transport Example     126
Operational-Level Considerations     126
ABC Transport Example     127
Strategic-Level Considerations     127
System-Level Considerations     129
Cost Considerations     130
Benefit Considerations     130
Aligning Procedures with Performance      131
Setting Strong Procedures     131
Prevention     132
Detection     133
Response     134
Recovery     135
Linking Business Activities     136
Robustness, Resiliency, and Redundancy     137
Robustness     137
Resiliency     137
Redundancy     137
Cascading Impacts     138
Setting Goals and Benchmarks     138
Generating the Manual     139
Questions     139
Certification, Accreditation, Registration, and Licensing     141
Introduction     141
Linking to Mitigation     142
Certification     142
Accreditation     143
Registration     144
Licensing     145
The Trusted Transportation System     145
ABC Transport Example     146
Continuity of Operations Planning     147
Questions     149
Continuity of Operations     151
Introduction     151
What Is COOP?     152
Aligning COOP, BCP, and Contingency Planning     153
Background of COOP     154
Objectives     155
Elements     156
Operations     157
Issues Implementing COOP     158
Aligning with Preventive Safeguards     159
ABC Transport Example: Business Continuity Planning     159
Detection     161
ABC Transport Example: Corporate Policy     163
Response and Mitigation     163
ABC Transport Example: ABC Employees     163
ABC Transport Example: The Regional Office     164
ABC Transport Example: Senior Management     164
Recovery     165
Supply Chain Management Security     166
Questions     167
Networks and Communities of Trust     171
Introduction     171
Value of Community Involvement     172
Prevention     172
Detection     173
Response     174
Recovery     174
Community Building as a Continuum     175
Setting of Arrangements     176
Communities and Council Building     177
Tactical, Operational, and Strategic Considerations     177
Communities, Trusted Networks, and Operations     178
ABC Transport Example     179
Questions     180
Establishing and Monitoring Learning Systems     183
Introduction     183
Intent of the Learning System     184
How the Intent Is Met     184
Assessing or Evaluating against Criteria     185
Prioritizing Based on Divergence     186
Determining Causes     186
Communicating Results     187
Challenges with ISACs     188
How Would Information Be Shared?     189
Legal Issues with ISACs     190
Consequences of Accidental Disclosure of Information     191
Intellectual Property and ISACs     192
Trend Analysis     192
Reporting Trends     192
Information Sharing and Definition and Categorization Challenges     193
ABC Transport     194
Questions     195
Fragility and Fragility Analysis Management     197
Introduction     197
Requirement for Information     198
Repositories of Information     198
Lines of Communication     201
Data Categorization     202
Adaptability of the Categorization Process     203
Adaptability of Data Sets or Mutability     204
Assessment      205
Integration into Mitigation Strategies     206
Addressing Capacity in Decision-Making Gaps     209
Translating of Strategies into Action     209
The Rough Fragility Score for Evolution     210
Additional Factors with Respect to Fragility     213
Rating Geographic, Sphere of Control, and Interdependency Fragility     214
Fragility Factor     217
Relating to Resiliency and Redundancy     217
Fragility and the Path of Least Resistance     218
Mean Time between Business Failure (MTBBF)     218
Mean Time between Market Failure (MTBMF)     219
Persistent Fragility Leading to System Revolution     220
Management of Fragility     220
Relating to Prevention, Detection, Response, and Recovery     221
Transportation System Security, Risk, and Fragility     221
Questions     221
Sample Memorandum of Understanding between The Radio Amateurs of Canada Inc. and The Canadian Red Cross Society     223
Memorandum of Understanding between The Radio Amateurs of Canada Inc. and The Canadian Red Cross Society     223
Appendix A     224
Guidelines for Cooperation     224
Appendix B     225
Organization of The Canadian Red Cross Society     225
Organization of The Radio Amateurs of Canada Inc     225
Manager's Working Tool     227
Product or Service Delivery     227
Geography and Community Building     231
Data Categorization and Information Management     236
Establish a Learning System     238
Maintenance and Sustainability     242
Index     245

Look this: Attuazione dei quattro livelli: Una guida pratica per l'efficace valutazione dei programmi di formazione

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics

Author: Francis Fukuyama

A host of catastrophes, natural and otherwise, as well as some pleasant surprises--such as the sudden end of the cold war--have caught governments and societies unprepared in recent decades. September 11 is only the most obvious example among many unforeseen events that have changed, even redefined, our lives. We have every reason to expect more surprises in future.

Certain kinds of unanticipated scenarios--particularly those of low probability and high impact--have the potential to escalate into systemic crises. Even positive surprises can pose major policy challenges. Contemporary policymakers, however, lack the understanding and the tools they need to manage low-probability, high-impact events. Refining our understanding and developing such tools are the twin foci of this insightful and perceptive volume, edited by renowned author Francis Fukuyama and sponsored by The American Interest magazine.

Organized into five sections, Blindside addresses the psychological and institutional obstacles that prevent leaders from planning for negative low-probability events and allocating the necessary resources to deal with them. Case studies pinpoint the failures--institutional as well as personal--that allowed key historical events to take leaders by surprise, and other chapters examine the philosophies and methodologies of forecasting. The book's final section offers a debate and two discussions with internationally prominent authorities who assess how individuals, communities, and local and national governments have handled low-probability, high-impact contingencies. They suggest what these entities can do to move forward in a period of heightened concern aboutboth man-made and natural disasters.

How can we avoid being blindsided by unforeseen events? There is no easy or obvious answer. But we first must understand the obstacles that prevent us from seeing the future clearly and then from acting appropriately. This readable and fascinating book is an important step in that direction.

Richard M Nixon or When I Was a Kid This Was a Free Country

2009-02-12T00:55:00.000-08:00

Richard M. Nixon: An American Enigma

Author: Herbert S Parmet

Noted biographer and historian Herbert Parmet introduces readers to this enigmatic leader, whose forward-thinking policies and strategies still affect the international stage.

Both motivated and crippled by his appetite for power, President Richard M. Nixon will always be remembered for tarnishing the American Presidency. However, this new biography shows how Nixon’s groundbreaking initiatives on the environment, technology, foreign relations and social policy rank Nixon among the most accomplished leaders ever to sit in the White House.

Editor's Preface     ix
Author's Preface     xi
A Quaker from Whittier     1
From Whittier to Washington     13
You're My Boy     31
Vice President     45
Defeat     61
Resurrection     75
A Governing Center     91
Nixon and the World     115
Alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room     139
A "Third-Rate" Burglary     163
Death of a Presidency     185
Study and Discussion Questions     206
A Note on the Sources     210
Index     217

New interesting textbook: Understanding Economics Today or Effective Public Relations

When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country

Author: G Gordon Liddy

G. Gordon Liddy reminds us what we loved about America, back when you could shoot off a firecracker, light up a cigar, or drive fast, and there wasn't a government bureaucrat telling you how to live your life. Liddy sounds an alarm for all freedom-loving Americans, warning that our liberties are being chipped away in the name of good causes, civic convenience and left-wing demagoguery "that there ought to be a law." Liddy also divulges new information in a shocking, tell-all chapter on Watergate-including court documents and crime-scene evidence that shreds Woodward and Bernstein's popular theory to bits.

Publishers Weekly

In this colorful right-wing screed, the Watergate felon and conservative radio talk show host bemoans the politically correct gulag that is the United States. Liddy pillories the usual suspects-environmentalists, "killer air bags," gun-control advocates, women who think they can do anything a man can-and gnaws on old enmities in a tedious appendix full of Watergate ephemera (something about "the notorious rat John Dean," plus clippings of a call-girl ring, etc.). Liddy's hyper-masculine prose celebrates weapons, the massive, gas-guzzling "torque" of his automobiles, and Julius Caesar, a "great leader" who wisely "slaughtered all the males remaining alive" among his foes and "sold all the women and children into slavery." In his Nietzschean worldview, life is a ceaseless struggle for power among men and nations, channeled and structured by the sado-masochistic bonding rituals of warriors. But as his title implies, Liddy's most poignant writing dwells on the vanished liberties of youth: going hunting with a pal, making his own fireworks, burning leaves on an autumn afternoon (now, sadly, banned by "global warming"-a term he always uses with quotes-alarmists). His is essentially a boy's view of freedom as the absence of responsibility and constraint. His many fans, of course, will love it. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Ordeal of Change or Governor Henry Horner Chicago Politics and the Great Depression

2009-02-10T19:43:00.000-08:00

Ordeal of Change

Author: Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer--one of America's most important thinkers and the author of The True Believer--lived for years as a Depression Era migratory worker. Self-taught, his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--formed the basis of his insight to human nature. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hoffer's seminal work, The Ordeal of Change, essays on the duality and essentiality of change in man throughout history.

Interesting book: Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics or Spidering Hacks

Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression

Author: Charles J Masters

Many have never heard of Governor Henry Horner of Illinois, yet his story is remarkable. Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression focuses on Horner’s career in law and politics from 1915 to 1940, while examining the economic and political dynamics of Illinois during the darkest period in American history. This principled governor managed to maintain his political integrity in a climate where honesty was a liability, says author Charles J. Masters, but the few historians who include Horner in their narratives offer contradictory and dismissive characterizations of him. Masters corrects the public record and reintroduces Horner to political lore as a man who brazenly fought both the Chicago Democratic machine that worked to plot his downfall and Roosevelt’s White House to steadfastly do right by the people of Illinois.
In this first book-length treatment of Horner in over thirty-five years, Masters traces the politician’s career, the history and politics of Chicago, and the effects of the Great Depression in Illinois. The volume details Horner’s life as a lawyer, probate judge, and two-term Democratic governor of Illinois. Horner’s relationships with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and such political players as Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, and Chicago mayors Carter Harrison, Anton Cermak, and Ed Kelly are set against a backdrop of assassination, political sniping, court-packing schemes, Prohibition, and the New Deal.
Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression examines the governor’s management of the political andeconomic challenges of the state when millions of Americans were jobless, homeless, and hungry. The severely divergent economic and political positions of the state’s northern industrial and southern agrarian interests made the period even darker. Masters shows how Horner stemmed foreclosures, dealt with bank closings, placated unpaid teachers, soothed massive labor unrest, fed the hungry, and confronted the ever-present threat of revolution. While Hitler’s Germany was spreading Nazism throughout Europe, some Americans were questioning the fundamental order of their own political system, suggesting that socialism, communism, or Nazism could offer a better way. Masters addresses how Horner, Illinois’ first Jewish governor, dealt with these challenges to the U.S. political system.
A story long absent from the historical record, Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression offers a portrait of the man, his style of governance, his successes, and his failures. The volume, with eight illustrations, effectively reevaluates Horner’s historical reputation and role in Illinois politics in the midst of the worst economic depression in our nation’s history.

Resource Wars or Turning Stones

2009-02-09T14:30:00.000-08:00

Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict

Author: Michael T Klar

This sobering look at the future of warfare predicts that conflicts will now be fought over diminishing supplies of our most precious natural resources.From the barren oilfields of Central Asia to the lush Nile delta, from the busy shipping lanes of the South China Sea to the uranium mines and diamond fields of sub-Saharan Africa, Resource Wars looks at the growing impact of resource scarcity on the military policies of nations. International security expert Michael T. Klare argues that in the early decades of the new millennium wars will be fought not over ideology but over resources, as states battle to control dwindling supplies of precious natural commodities. The political divisions of the Cold War, Klare asserts, are giving way to an immense global scramble for essential materials, such as oil, timber, minerals, and water. And as armies throughout the world define resource security as their primary mission, widespread instability is bound to follow, especially in those places where resource competition overlaps with long-standing disputes over territorial rights.A much-needed assessment of a changed world, Resource Wars is a compelling look at the future of warfare in an era of heightened environmental stress and accelerated economic competition.

Publishers Weekly

His analyses of likely conflicts, for example among Syria, Jordan and Israel for the limited water delivered by the Jordan River, are informed by detailed research into projected usage rates, population growth and other relevant trends. As Klare shows, the same pattern is repeated in dozens of other locations throughout the world. Finite resources, escalating demand and the location of resources in regions torn by ethnic and political unrest all combine as preconditions of war. Klare, an expert on warfare and international security (Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, etc.), presents a persuasive case for paying serious attention to these impending hostilities and furnishes the basic information needed to understand their danger and the importance of international cooperation in staving off conflict.

Publishers Weekly

Klare analyzes the most likely cause of war in the century just begun: demand by rapidly growing populations for scarce resources. An introductory chapter sets the scene, laying out the complexities of rapidly increasing demand as the world industrializes, the concentration of resources in unstable states and the competing claims to ownership of resources by neighboring states. Succeeding chapters look more closely at the potential for conflict over oil in the Persian Gulf and in the Caspian and South China Seas, over water in the Nile Basin and other multinational river systems and over timber, gems and minerals from Borneo to Sierra Leone. The strength of Klare's presentation is its concreteness. His analyses of likely conflicts, for example among Syria, Jordan and Israel for the limited water delivered by the Jordan River, are informed by detailed research into projected usage rates, population growth and other relevant trends. As Klare shows, the same pattern is repeated in dozens of other locations throughout the world. Finite resources, escalating demand and the location of resources in regions torn by ethnic and political unrest all combine as preconditions of war. Klare, an expert on warfare and international security (Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, etc.), presents a persuasive case for paying serious attention to these impending hostilities and furnishes the basic information needed to understand their danger and the importance of international cooperation in staving off conflict. (May) Forecast: Klare's message is important, but it probably won't be heard by many beyond readers of the handful of major newspapers that will review it. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

1. Wealth, Resources, and Power: The Changing Parameters of
Global Security	1
2. Oil, Geography, and War: The Competitive Pursuit of
Petroleum Plenty	27
3. Oil Conflict in the Persian Gulf	51
4. Energy Conflict in the Caspian Sea Basin	81
5. Oil Wars in the South China Sea	109
6. Water Conflict in the Nile Basin	138
7. Water Conflict in the Jordan, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus
River Basins	161
8. Fighting for the Riches of the Earth: Internal Wars over
Minerals and Timber	190
9. The New Geography of Conflict	213
Appendix: Territorial Disputes in Areas Containing Oil and/or
Natural Gas	227
Notes	233
Acknowledgments	275
Index	277

Turning Stones: My Days And Nights With Children At Riska Caseworker's Story

Author: Marc Parent

An 8-year old boy holding a knife to his younger brother's throat. Three small children who watch their older sister jump out of a twenty-third story window, following their mother's orders. Two boys whose mother believes they are all victims of a hex laid on them by her ex-husband. An eleven-year-old boy at a fashionable Manhattan address whose mother is so drunk she can't keep her robe closed when child welfare workers come to visit. These are the heroes of Marc Parent's Turning Stones, small and unsuspecting victims of a society, and of a bureaucracy, that do not know what to do with them. For three years, Marc Parent was a respected caseworker in New York City's Emergency Children's Services, a city agency created to investigate cases of abused children during the evening and nighttime hours. Parent applied himself to his work with devotion, and in his tiny charges he saw day-to-day bravery as well as some of the strangest twists the human soul can suffer. Eventually, however, Parent discovered what a thin line separates any of us from tragedy, especially when children are involved. Faced with the horror of a child's death he ultimately, inspiringly, rediscovers the feeling of making a difference in our world - if only by turning one stone at a time. There are no prescriptions or policies here, only the lives of human beings in a fearsome world, told with vividness, humor, honesty, and deep sympathy.

Newsweek

"A revelatory and affirmative work, a grace note played against the darkest passages of family life."

Kirkus Reviews

At once heart-wrenching and heart-lifting is this record of four years that the author spent riding to the rescue of abused and neglected children.

Parent was an Emergency Children's Service worker in New York City's child welfare system, one of the men and women who on nights and weekends investigate calls about children in danger. Parent (yes, he took a lot of flack about his name) came to public prominence when a baby died after he and another worker had visited a family in a mice- and drug-infested building and missed identifying the child as at "imminent risk," that is, in immediate danger of death or serious injury. Official blame was placed elsewhere, but Parent agonized over the judgment for weeks. This compelling book is the result of his self-scrutiny. It includes what the author considers the most tragic and dramatic of the hundreds of cases he encountered. Here is the story of a mother who, anticipating Armageddon, urged her five children to jump out a 23rd-storey window; two leaped before help arrived. Another woman, convinced that she was hexed and seeing blood on the walls and broken glass in the food, had barricaded herself and her hungry children inside their apartment. In another horror story, a nine-year-old had beaten his five-year- old cousin to death. Amid the sad tales are often humorous sketches of Parent's colleagues and telling vignettes of the primitive working conditions—among other things, no place for children removed from their homes late at night to sleep except a straight chair. In the long anecdote that provides the title for the book, Parent comes to believe that even in cases where child welfare workers can do little, the work provides "an opportunity to touch a life at a critical moment and make it better."

Riveting stories, tuned to the headlines, that also defend the much maligned caseworkers who must make snap judgments under often bizarre circumstances in the field.

When I Was a German 1934 1945 or A Creative Tension

2009-02-08T09:18:00.000-08:00

When I Was a German, 1934-1945: An Englishwoman in Nazi Germany

Author: Christabel Bielenberg

This fascinating glimpse of Nazi Germany is provided by an Englishwoman who was fluent in German and at home in German society, yet not entirely of it. Christabel Bielenberg moved from passive to active resistance as Hitler seized power and the Nazi dictatorship clamped down.

	Foreword	7
	Dramatis Personae	9
	Prologue	13
	The Years Before	16
Pt. I	Berlin
	The Blockwart	51
	Cold Interlude	61
	A Dinner Party	77
	Our Neighbours	82
	A Dangerous Tea Party	89
	A Hospital in Bad Aussee	94
	Star of David	110
Pt. II	Rohrbach in the Black Forest
	Our Arrival in Rohrbach	117
	The Terwiel Story	127
	Invasionitis	132
	Adam	138
	The American Airman	147
	The Plot of July 20th	156
	Russian Interlude	180
	A Journey to Berlin	184
	Berlin	195
	Lexi	202
	A Visit to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp	213
	Interrogation in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse	225
	Return to Rohrbach	240
	Peter's Return	252
	Peter's Story	256
	The End	266

A Creative Tension: The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress

Author: Lee H Hamilton

A Creative Tension is a fresh look at the foreign policy roles of Congress and the president by one of the most astute congressional practitioners of foreign policy of recent decades, former U.S. representative and chairman of the House International Relations Committee Lee H. Hamilton. With an insider's perspective based on thirty-four years in Congress, Hamilton elucidates current domestic and international pressures influencing U.S. foreign policy, strengths and weaknesses in the foreign policy process, and ways to improve the performance of the president and Congress. A Creative Tension argues persuasively and elegantly that better consultation between the executive and legislative branches is the most effective way to strengthen American foreign policy.

A Creative Tension is the most extensive analysis of the congressional and presidential roles in foreign policy by a former member of Congress. Hamilton explores the topic in an original, stimulating, and accessible manner by deftly mixing incisive commentary with illuminating personal reflections. The book includes timely and important recommendations for improving the ability of Congress and the president to develop a foreign policy that meets the challenges and opportunities of a post-September 11 world. It should be of interest to foreign policy makers, scholars and students of American politics, and the general public.Wilson Forum

The Control Room or The Occupation

2009-02-07T04:05:00.000-08:00

The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections

Author: Martin Plissner

Who will determine what Americans are thinking when they cast their votes in the year 2000?

Martin Plissner, former political director of CBS News, has played a central role in the network coverage of every presidential campaign since 1964. In The Control Room, he shows how all the elements of our nation's greatest contest -- the primaries, the conventions, the counting of the ballots --are shaped by the networks' struggle for supremacy in today's media-intensive age. From the earliest announcements to the final swearing-in, those inside the control rooms determine what Americans care about when they enter the polling booths and whom the country ultimately sends to the Oval Office.

Publishers Weekly

Plissner, the former executive political director of CBS News, offers a spirited, if not entirely persuasive defense of how network news organizations cover presidential elections. Beginning in 1952, the first year that TV reporters roamed the floor at the Republican and Democratic conventions, Plissner traces the growing influence of the men in the network control rooms. Though he quickly dismisses the notion that TV producers and reporters form "a small and unelected elite," he acknowledges some of the dismaying byproducts of TV news coverage: feeding frenzies in New Hampshire and Iowa, nominating conventions with second-by-second scripts, obsessive polling to track the presidential "horse race." But these trends don't really seem to bother him, and he offers a weak defense of the tenor of campaign coverage: networks cover the horse race because it is "the only thing a good many viewers want to know in the first place." Plissner does better when he sticks to anecdotal evidence, as when he recounts the backstage maneuvering that led to Dan Rather's explosive 1988 interview with George Bush, in which Bush finally snapped: "How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?" At such points, the book is gripping. Ultimately, however, Plissner never goes beyond engaging eyewitness accounts to offer meaningful analysis of how the networks cover campaigns. He should have taken off the gloves and cast a more critical eye on his own profession. (May)

Library Journal

Plissner, the recently retired political director of CBS News, examines the role of television networks in transforming presidential elections. He argues that, given the pursuit of ratings (and the financial rewards that follow), campaigns have become almost exclusively creations of and responses to the demands of the networks. Lacing his narrative with inside stories and personal anecdotes, Plissner disputes theories of political bias in the news, arguing instead that while the "men and women who call the shots at the network news divisions do have an agenda," it is not to propagandize in favor of one party but to attract "the largest possible viewership at the lowest possible cost." On the proper relationship of the press to politics, Plissner says, "Prove all things, hold fast to that which is good." Admirable words but difficult to achieve--especially given the high stakes of the television ratings game. An elegant, persuasive book.--Michael A. Genovese, Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles

Kirkus Reviews

A CBS veteran's look at television coverage of presidential elections is more entertaining than reflective. As executive political director of CBS News, Plissner (now retired) was in a very good position to observe the impact of television on politics. While he concedes that impact has been major—no surprise there—he argues that those on the political left and right "who worry about this worry too much." Employing his insider's perspective to unveil the factors that determined what went on the air, Plissner offers a pastiche of media history, first-person accounts, and second-hand reporting very much in the television tradition of "just the highlights, please." Nevertheless, these snippets are revealing as well as amusing, effectively portraying television's coverage over the years of party conventions, the election-night race to call the winner, election-year polling, presidential debates, and the nightly news. The competition among networks is always at the forefront, with only the financial bean-counters reining in efforts to score journalistic coups and come out on top in the ratings. We also see a progression in the relationship between the media and politicians. Party conventions, for example, initially involved gavel-to-gavel coverage, which produced conventions increasingly managed for television consumption, which resulted in boring conventions that receive decreased coverage because there is no news. This example suggests a problem with Plissner's belief that we need not worry about the medium's impact on politics. Even granting his contention that television's election-coverage agenda is commercial rather than political, the reader may still wonder why the authorbelieves media bias is therefore benign. Indeed, the idea that television's power is wielded without regard to its considerable political impact is most discomfiting; more introspection on this thorny subject would have been comforting. Not a book to pick up for insightful analysis, but the stories will amuse most readers.

New interesting book: Debugging ASPNET or Introduction to AutoCAD 2005

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq

Author: Patrick Cockburn

A National Book Critics' Circle Award Finalist: A compelling, masterly portrait of a country ravaged by foreign occupation.

In March 2003, Patrick Cockburn traveled secretly to Iraq just before the invasion, and has covered the war from inside the country ever since. In this devastating, courageous and highly acclaimed book, he describes the fighting on the ground as Saddam's armies collapsed, the looting of Baghdad, the many failures of the US occupation, the springs of the resistance and how it turned into a full-scale uprising, and the country's collapse into civil war. In this new edition, brought completely up to date in a new chapter, Cockburn explores the impact of the "surge" of US forces into the country. Book of the Year for 2006 in the Guardian, Observer, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday and Glasgow Herald.

The New York Times - Barry Gewen

Patrick Cockburn, now a correspondent for The Independent of London…knows the Middle East well. He has reported from Tehran and Lebanon, lived in Israel, and been visiting Iraq since 1978. His eye for the telling detail lifts The Occupation above the usual journalist's account of the Iraq war.

Library Journal

This is a lively and highly informative book on the American war in Iraq and the follies of occupation. Veteran journalist Cockburn (Middle East correspondent, the Independent) has been visiting Iraq for almost three decades and has written probing reports on the country. Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, which he coauthored with his brother, Andrew Cockburn, remains one of the best journalistic accounts of Saddam Hussein's rejuvenation as a political leader in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. Cockburn's latest book takes the reader through the often bewildering array of forces and personalities that are shaping developments in post-Saddam Iraq and makes them comprehensible to Western readers. The author was in Iraq when U.S. forces invaded that country and toppled its regime. Cockburn's account of the evolving conflict, the emergence of the resistance movement, the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict, and the jockeying for power among the Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish communities is informed by his keen personal observations and understanding of the complexities and horrors of daily life in Iraq. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Nader Entessar, Univ. of South Alabama, Mobile Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Capital or McCain

2009-02-05T22:52:00.000-08:00

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3

Author: Karl Marx

Das Kapital, Karl Marx's masterwork, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that in our time dominated half the earth and for half a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, one billion Chinese remain in the power of the Marxist system. Yet this important and powerful work has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx's difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader. Now Serge Levitsky presents a new revised version of this masterpiece, carefully retranslated for the modern reader and abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx's work, while trimming away much that is now unimportant. Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas have influenced the lives of nearly every person alive today.

McCain: The Myth of a Maverick

Author: Matt Welch

John McCain is one of the most familiar, sympathetic, and overexposed figures in American politics, yet his concrete governing philosophy and actual track record have been left curiously unexamined, mostly because of the massive distractions in his official biography, but also because of his ingenious strategy of talking ad infinitum to each and every access-craving media person who happens by. The more he has spouted, the less journalists have bothered trying to see through the fog.

McCain gives the voting public what it wants but can’t find -- a flesh-and-bones political portrait of a man onto whom people are forever projecting their own ideological fantasies. It is a psychological key for decoding his allegedly ‘maverick’ actions, and the first realistic assessment of what a John McCain presidency may look like. McCain will quickly lay out in overlapping detail the root cause of the senator’s worldview: his personal transformation from underachieving punk to war hawk uber-patriot, in which he used the "higher power" of American nationalism to save his life and soul.

As McCain wrenches himself inside-out in pursuit of the prize that eluded him in 2000, McCain will look behind the war hero, behind the maverick reformer. Journalist and pundit Matt Welch brings to this project an investigative eye and a coolly analytical mindset to provide Republicans, Democrats and Independents a picture of the man in full before they enter the voting booth in 2008.

Acknowledgments     vii
Preface: The Vnexammed Candidate     xi
Cowboys and Indians     1
The Defiant One     21
The Elitist     39
Maverick vs. "Maverick"     57
The 12-Step Guide to Becoming President     71
Forgive Them, Father, For I Have Sinned     85
Anger Management     105
Healing Vietnam     119
Theodore Redux     135
Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran     153
The Crooked Talk Express     173
Epilogue: The Thirteenth Step     189
Notes     205
Index     221

Model Minority Imperialism or Exceptional State

2009-02-04T17:39:00.000-08:00

Model-Minority Imperialism

Author: Victor Bascara

At the beginning of the twentieth century, soon after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the United States was an imperialistic nation, maintaining (often with the assistance of military force) a far-flung and growing empire. After a long period of collective national amnesia regarding American colonialism, in the Philippines and elsewhere, scholars have resurrected the power of "empire" as a way of revealing American history and culture. Focusing on the terms of Asian American assimilation and the rise of the model-minority myth, Victor Bascara examines the resurgence of empire as a tool for acknowledging—and understanding—the legacy of American imperialism. Model-Minority Imperialism links geopolitical dramas of twentieth-century empire building with domestic controversies of U.S. racial order by examining the cultural politics of Asian Americans as they are revealed in fiction, film, and theatrical productions. Tracing U.S. economic and political hegemony back to the beginning of the twentieth century through works by Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, and Sui Sin Far; discourses of race, economics, and empire found in the speeches of William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan; as well as L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and other texts, Bascara's innovative readings uncover the repressed story of U.S. imperialism and unearth the demand that the present empire reckon with its past. Bascara deploys the analytical approaches of both postcolonial studies and Asian American studies, two fields that developed in parallel but have only begun to converge, to reveal how the vocabulary of empire reasserted itself through some of the very people who inspiredthe U.S imperialist mission.

Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism

Author: Ashley Dawson

Exceptional State analyzes the nexus of culture and contemporary manifestations of U.S. imperialism. The contributors, established and emerging cultural studies scholars, define culture broadly to include a range of media, literature, and political discourse. They do not posit September 11, 2001 as the beginning of U.S. belligerence and authoritarianism at home and abroad, but they do provide context for understanding U.S. responses to and uses of that event. Taken together, the essays stress both the continuities and discontinuities embodied in a present-day U.S. imperialism constituted through expressions of millennialism, exceptionalism, technological might, and visions of world dominance.

The contributors address a range of topics, paying particular attention to the dynamics of gender and race. Their essays include a surprising reading of the ostensibly liberal movies Wag the Dog and Three Kings, an exploration of the rhetoric surrounding the plan to remake the military into a high-tech force less dependent on human bodies, a look at the significance of the popular Left Behind series of novels, and an interpretation of the Abu Ghraib prison photos. They scrutinize the national narrative created to justify the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the ways that women in those countries have responded to the invasions, the contradictions underlying calls for U.S. humanitarian interventions, and the role of Africa in the U.S. imperial imagination. The volume concludes on a hopeful note, with a look at an emerging anti-imperialist public sphere.

The Marketplace of Revolution or Government By the People National Version

2009-02-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence

Author: T H Breen

The Marketplace of Revolution offers a boldly innovative interpretation of the mobilization of ordinary Americans on the eve of independence. Breen explores how colonists who came from very different ethnic and religious backgrounds managed to overcome difference and create a common cause capable of galvanizing resistance. In a richly interdisciplinary narrative that weaves insights into a changing material culture with analysis of popular political protests, Breen shows how virtual strangers managed to communicate a sense of trust that effectively united men and women long before they had established a nation of their own.
The Marketplace of Revolution argues that the colonists' shared experience as consumers in a new imperial economy afforded them the cultural resources that they needed to develop a radical strategy of political protest--the consumer boycott. Never before had a mass political movement organized itself around disruption of the marketplace. As Breen demonstrates, often through anecdotes about obscure Americans, communal rituals of shared sacrifice provided an effective means to educate and energize a dispersed populace. The boycott movement--the signature of American resistance--invited colonists traditionally excluded from formal political processes to voice their opinions about liberty and rights within a revolutionary marketplace, an open, raucous public forum that defined itself around subscription lists passed door-to-door, voluntary associations, street protests, destruction of imported British goods, and incendiary newspaper exchanges. Within these exchanges was born a new form of politics in which ordinary man and women--precisely the people mostoften overlooked in traditional accounts of revolution--experienced an exhilarating surge of empowerment.
Breen recreates an "empire of goods" that transformed everyday life during the mid-eighteenth century. Imported manufactured items flooded into the homes of colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia. The Marketplace of Revolution explains how at a moment of political crisis Americans gave political meaning to the pursuit of happiness and learned how to make goods speak to power.

Government By the People, National Version

Author: David B Magleby

The most authoritative text for American Government, Government By the People is always one step ahead. Building on a long tradition of clear and accessible writing, sound scholarship, and currency, it has become the most reliable, responsive, and respected text for today’s American government course. Its distinguished author team addresses your needs and the needs of your students in every edition—with the most innovative response to teaching trends, as well as trends in the discipline. With this text’s essential foundation, students will be set to respond—as involved American citizens—to the political issues facing their country, and their world, in the twenty-first century.

On Leadership or My Year in Iraq

2009-02-02T07:13:00.000-08:00

On Leadership

Author: John Gardner

Leaders today are familiar with the demand that they come forward with a new vision. But it is not a matter of fabricating a new vision out of whole cloth. A vision relevant for us today will build on values deeply embedded in human history and in our own tradition. It is not as though we come to the task unready. Men and women from the beginning of history have groped and struggled for various pieces of the answer. The materials out of which we build the vision will be the moral strivings of the species, today and in the distant past.

Most of the ingredients of a vision for this country have been with us for a long time. As the poet wrote, "The light we sought is shining still." That we have failed and fumbled in some of our attempts to achieve our ideals is obvious. But the great ideas still beckon—freedom, equality, justice, the release of human possibilities. The vision is to live up to the best in our past and to reach the goals we have yet to achieve—with respect to our domestic problems and our responsibilities worldwide.

—From the Preface to On Leadership

	Preface to the Paperback Edition
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	The Nature of Leadership	1
2	The Tasks of Leadership	11
3	The Heart of the Matter: Leader-Constituent Interaction	23
4	Contexts	38
5	Attributes	48
6	Power	55
7	The Moral Dimension	67
8	Large-Scale Organized Systems	81
9	Fragmentation and the Common Good	93
10	The Knitting Together	101
11	Community	112
12	Renewing	121
13	Sharing Leadership Tasks	138
14	Leadership Development: The Early Years	157
15	Leadership Development: Lifelong Growth	171
16	Motivating	183
17	The Release of Human Possibilities	193
	Notes	201
	Index	211

Book review: Color Harmony for Better Living or Living with Lupus

My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope

Author: L Paul Bremer

As the American diplomat chosen by President Bush to direct the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq, L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad in May of 2003. For fourteen danger-filled months, he worked tirelessly to realize the vision he and President Bush share of a free and democratic New Iraq.

MY YEAR IN IRAQ: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope is a candid and vital account of this world-shaping task and the daunting challenges lying in wait. With his unique insider perspective, Bremer takes us from the ancient lanes in the holy city of Najaf to the fires of a looted and lawless Baghdad; from the White House Situation Room to the Pentagon E-Ring; from making the case for more U.S. troops to helping Iraq's new leaders write a liberal constitution to unify a traumatized and divided Iraqi people.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

As this book makes clear, the hidden and not-so-hidden agendas of Washington officials and exiles like Mr. Chalabi, along with the clashing interests of various Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish representatives, turned many of Mr. Bremer's 18-hour days into marathons of frustrating conflict resolution. Combined with the daily exigencies of overseeing a country threatening to slip into chaos and the maddening bureaucratic problems of getting even the simplest plans off the ground, they give a whole new meaning to the phrase "crisis management," and they leave the reader with a sobering sense of the staggering difficulties of the situation in Iraq.

Foreign Affairs

Bremer arrived in Iraq only days after President George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished" in early May 2003. A more intractable mission was just beginning. Bremer replaced retired General Jay Garner, who had had little time on the job, and quickly reversed Garner's plan for an early handover of power to the Iraqis. He stayed until June 28, 2004, when he formally turned over sovereignty to an Iraqi government that he had worked to cobble together and then slipped away ahead of schedule to avoid a possible security mishap. Bremer tells us that he favored the early use of force against looters and insurgents such as Muqtada al-Sadr. He writes that he had argued early and late that more U.S. troops were needed. He justifies his decisions to ban Baathists from public office and dissolve the Iraqi army (it had already melted away, although he records that over 60 percent of those later recruited into the new army were former soldiers). He devotes pages to his efforts to work with the various Iraqi political figures, especially the powerful but elusive Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, but does not present a very clear picture of why they acted as they did. This book offers an almost day-by-day narrative that sticks to what Bremer was doing and with whom he was interacting, without providing much analysis or introspection. That is both the strength and the weakness of this memoir covering developments during the crucial first year of the United States' venture into Middle Eastern state building.

Library Journal

This just in from Simon & Schuster, and it's embargoed, but we can tell you that when retired diplomat Bremer was sent to Baghdad as ambassador, he immediately demanded more funds for reconstruction. With an eight-city tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

American Heroes or Think Tanks Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise

2009-02-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

American Heroes: In the Fight Against Radical Islam

Author: Oliver North

In American Heroes, New York Times bestselling author Oliver North offers an inspiring, first-hand account of the extraordinary young American volunteers defending us against radical Islamic terror. Since 9-11-01, North and his award-winning War Stories documentary team have made a dozen extended trips to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Philippines covering U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines for FOX News Channel. With extensive experience as a decorated military officer, a counter-terrorism expert and as a documentary filmmaker embedded with American combat units, he has a unique perspective on the enemy we face and the qualities of those who protect us.

American Heroes offers a close-up of this generation's "citizen-soldiers" who have chosen the path of the patriot and gone into harm's way for their countrymen. North's unprecedented access, his grasp of history and his lucid reports from the crucible of combat make this a stirring chronicle of courage, commitment, compassion and faith.

Thank God for American heroes.

"Real heroes are selfless. Those who serve America in harm's way in the war against radical Islam have that quality in abundance. And so do their families and loved ones at home. Yet, they rarely get the attention or coverage they deserve.

"Despite the way they are too often presented, the men and women in uniform today are overwhelmingly good. I never cease to be amazed at the self-discipline of these brave young Americans. They can endure the adrenaline-pumping violence of an enemy engagement - and then, just minutes later, help children get safely to school. No nation - ours included - has ever had a military force better thanthe one we have today." - Oliver North

Publishers Weekly

North is a retired Marine infantry veteran of Vietnam and was a key player in the Iran-Contra affair. This book is a mostly workmanlike presentation of his experiences as a war correspondent for FOX (which shares copyright on this book) as the U.S. invaded Iraq. Any political uproar it may cause is likely to stem largely from Pavlovian responses to the name of the author, a response that ignores that he has written both fiction and nonfiction as well as having been a Marine officer. So it is hardly surprising that he does excellent work covering a Marine aviation unit, one appointed to transport assault troops and evacuate wounded in aging helicopters-never without risk and sometimes with bloody incidents. These are vividly and knowledgeably described, as is the Marines' courage and professionalism. Nor is it surprising to witness the empathy between a retired Marine about to become a grandfather and younger Marines about to see combat. The briefer coverage of the armored units of the 4th Infantry Division is a little frustrating, and the polemics against antiwar journalists and politicians, while unlikely to offend readers who share the author's views, feel redundant. So does the capsule history of Iraq in the appendix, although well-written enough to give the author credibility as a popular historian. Even the larger issue of the linkage between a correspondent, a network and a publisher who are all politically simpatico can hardly be made into anything especially sinister without the same kind of political partisanship that the book exhibits in its less inspiring moments. DVD of Fox News North special not seen by PW. (Dec.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

	Preface
	Introduction: Reality Television	1
1	The Road to Hell	7
2	Sitzkrieg!	19
3	Good to Go	33
4	Helicopter Down!	51
5	Running the Gauntlet on Bloody Sunday	69
6	MOASS	87
7	What Quagmire?	103
8	Of Rivers and Rescues	125
9	Closing In	145
10	Fallen Idols	167
11	You Can Run but You Can't Hide	191
12	You're in the Army Now	213
13	Aftermath	235
14	Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory	243
	The Land Between the Rivers	261
	Glossary	299
	Acknowledgments	309
	Index	313

Go to: Aboutcom Guide to Shortcut Cooking or Handbook of Industrial Seasonings

Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise

Author: Andrew Rich

Think tanks are nonprofit policy research organizations that provide analysis and expertise to influence policymakers. From the 1970s their number exploded in the U.S. and their proliferation represented a hope that lawmaking might become better informed and more effective as a result of these expert contributions. Instead, as this book documents, the known ideologies of many, especially the newer, think tanks currently contribute to an environment in which they differ little from advocacy organizations, promoting points of view and preordained policy prescriptions. As a result, they fail to achieve desired influence and undermine their credibility.

Promises Not Kept or Mao

2009-01-30T20:47:00.000-08:00

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.

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

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

2009-01-29T15:35:00.000-08:00

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

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

2009-01-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

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

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

2009-01-27T05:08:00.000-08:00

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.<

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

2009-01-25T23:48:00.000-08:00

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.

	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

2009-01-24T18:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2009-01-22T08:10:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2009-01-21T02:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-20T00:06:00.000-08:00

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.

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.)

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

2009-01-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

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

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

2009-01-19T02:40:00.000-08:00

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.)

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.

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

2009-01-18T13:27:00.000-08:00

Saddam: King of Terror

Author: Con Coughlin

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

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.

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

2009-01-18T02:15:00.000-08:00

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)

The New Imperial Presidency or Unbowed

2009-01-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate

Author: Andrew Rudalevig

Has the imperial presidency returned?

"Well written and, while indispensable for college courses, should appeal beyond academic audiences to anyone interested in how well we govern ourselves. . . . I cannot help regarding it as a grand sequel for my own The Imperial Presidency."
---Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Has the imperial presidency returned? This question has been on the minds of many contemporary political observers, as recent American administrations have aimed to consolidate power.

In The New Imperial Presidency, Andrew Rudalevige suggests that the congressional framework meant to advise and constrain presidential conduct since Watergate has slowly eroded. Rudalevige describes the evolution of executive power in our separated system of governance. He discusses the abuse of power that prompted what he calls the "resurgence regime" against the imperial presidency and inquires as to how and why---over the three decades that followed Watergate---presidents have regained their standing.

Chief executives have always sought to interpret constitutional powers broadly. The ambitious president can choose from an array of strategies for pushing against congressional authority; finding scant resistance, he will attempt to expand executive control. Rudalevige's important and timely work reminds us that the freedoms secured by our system of checks and balances do not proceed automatically but depend on the exertions of public servants and the citizens they serve. His story confirms the importance of the "living Constitution," a tradition of historical experiences overlaying the text of the Constitution itself.

Interesting textbook: WorkPlace Health Protection or The Managed Care Answer Book

Unbowed

Author: Wangari Maathai

Hugely charismatic, humble, and possessed of preternatural luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her extraordinary life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya.

Born in a rural village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her studying with Catholic missionaries, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States, and becoming the first woman both to earn a PhD in East and Central Africa and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government. She makes clear the political and personal reasons that compelled her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages. We see how Maathai’s extraordinary courage and determination helped transform Kenya’s government into the democracy in which she now serves as assistant minister for the environment and as a member of Parliament. And we are with her as she accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her “contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace.”

In Unbowed, Wangari Maathai offers an inspiriting message of hope and prosperity through self-sufficiency.

Foreign Affairs

The charismatic leader of Kenya's environmental movement and 2004winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has written an affecting memoir. The inspirational, if somewhat artless, narrative starts with her hardscrabble youth in the Kikuyu highlands, goes on to the Catholic missionary education that brought her to a small college in Kansas in 1960, and then describes her triumphal return to Kenya as the country's first female university lecturer. The second half of the book covers her emergence as a passionate anti-deforestation activist as the head of the Green Belt Movement. Forced out of her position at the university for her increasingly militant environmental activism, Maathai essentially reinvented herself within the nascent Kenyan civil society. She recounts her bitter struggles with the government, the simple yet effective organizational structure she built, and her increasingly important ties to the Western networks of women's groups, environmental activists, and donor organizations that provided her with resources, publicity, and a discourse of high-minded international progressivism. She essentially invented a new kind of public role for herself within the Kenyan polity.

James Thorsen - Library Journal

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Kenyan environmental and political activist Maathai, currently an assistant minister in the Ministry for the Environment, Natural Resources, and Wildlife, Kenya, here offers an autobiography written with honesty, humility, and depth. She relates her early interest in the natural world, her formal studies at a Catholic school far from home, the terror as the Mau Mau rebellion began, and her U.S. college studies in biology. Although she encountered incidents of racial discrimination, her U.S. education proved to be a liberating experience. Having earned a master's in biology in 1965, she was asked to return to the newly independent Kenya to work as a lab assistant at the University of Nairobi and complete her Ph.D. She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, providing rural women with work planting trees to reforest Kenya, and moved into political activism as well. Her achievements, accomplished as they were in the face of incarceration by those in power, will astonish the reader. Maathai's fairness, activism, and determination to make her country and the continent she loves healthy again are palpable. For all academic libraries as well as public libraries with African collections. [For an interview with Maathai, see "Fall Editors' Picks," LJ9/1/06.—Ed.]

Manhattan Medics or Angels and Ages

2009-01-17T03:49:00.000-08:00

Manhattan Medics: The Gripping Story of the Men and Women of Emergency Medical Services Who Make the Streets of the City Their Career

Author: Francis J Rella NREMT P

This firsthand account of September 11, written by a paramedic on the scene, chronicles the days before and after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Frank Rella describes the paramedic crew stationed at St. Vincent's Hospital in lower Manhattan, the eerie foreshadowing of the coming disaster, and his encounter with a Middle Eastern man who offered a tarot card reading. Rella details how he and his partner arrived at Ground Zero just as the second tower collapsed and rescued a firefighter who was having a heart attack. The vivid descriptions of turf battles between paramedics and fire department personnel at Ground Zero and elsewhere will arouse controversy and interest.

School Library Journal

A vivid portrayal of the way . . . Manhattan paramedics responded to the September 11th tragedy . . . a fast-paced read.

EMS Magazine

One of those special books that is worth giving to yourself as a present

Library Journal

This account grew out of Rella's experiences as an emergency medical technician at the World Trade Center site on 9/11. He focuses on the chaotic events of the day, offering glimpses of the critical, often life-threatening, 24/7 first-response calls taken by the paramedics of New York City's emergency medical services (EMS). Even with a map (unseen) of lower Manhattan, readers unfamiliar with the area will have trouble comprehending the landscape and therefore the territorial conflicts among voluntary and municipal EMS crews. The glossary does assist with such dialog as "Remain 98 Five William....No ALS needed at this time." Still, insights into workplace grievances and rivalries, facile patriotism, and unintended and opportunistic revelations on the 9/11 response do not add up to a coherent picture. Not recommended.-James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-An emotional, vivid portrayal of the way Rella and his fellow Manhattan paramedics responded to the September 11 tragedy. When he got home from a crazy double shift and heard the news, he raced back to Manhattan. On his own initiative and often without regard for superiors' orders, the author worked at the center of activity at the World Trade Center. He took the first injured person, a firefighter, into the hospital. He literally saw his life pass before his eyes when he was pelted with debris as building number seven collapsed. Rella describes it all-the heroics of the men as they rushed to aid victims, the agonizingly long wait for instructions at the Chelsea Piers staging area, and the backstabbing and bureaucratic wrangling that went on between groups in the midst of this disaster. In terms with which teens will identify, the author describes his fellow paramedics, warts and all; the myriad responses people have in an emergency; and the aftershocks of the tragedy. A fast-paced read, the story occasionally gets bogged down in explanations of the various paramedic agencies and positions. Still, it's a readable, welcome tribute to these heroes.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Woodbridge, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Contratos

Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Author: Adam Gopnik

On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when almost everyone still accepted the biblical account of creation as the literal truth and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable social order. But by the time both men died, the world had changed: ordinary people understood that life on earth was a story of continuous evolution, and the Civil War had proved that a democracy could fight for principles and endure. And with these signal insights much else had changed besides. Together, Darwin and Lincoln had become midwives to the spirit of a new world, a new kind of hope and faith.

Searching for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution, Adam Gopnik shows us, in this captivating double life, Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and social climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living husband, father, son, and student behind each myth. How do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death? Why did the relentlessly rational Darwin delay publishing his “Great Idea” for almost twenty years? How did inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find—for himself or for a society now possessed of a sadder, if wiser, understanding of our existence? Such human questions and their answers are the stuff of this book.

Above all, we see Lincoln and Darwinas thinkers and writers—as makers and witnesses of the great change in thought that marks truly modern times: a hundred years after the Enlightenment, the old rule of faith and fear finally yielding to one of reason, argument, and observation not merely as intellectual ideals but as a way of life; the judgment of divinity at last submitting to the verdicts of history and time. Lincoln considering human history, Darwin reflecting on deep time—both reshaped our understanding of what life is and how it attains meaning. And they invented a new language to express that understanding. Angels and Ages is an original and personal account of the creation of the liberal voice—of the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public. Showing that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization, Adam Gopnik reveals why our heroes should be possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves, and endowed with the gift to speak for us all.

Publishers Weekly

In the year of Darwin's and Lincoln's bicentennial, New Yorker contributor Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate) can't resist the temptation to find parallels of cultural impact between the men, born on the same day in 1809, seeing them as twin exemplars of modernity. Gopnik notes that "it is not what they have in common with each other that matters; it is what they have in common with us." And that commonality lies in the modern way of speaking (plainly) and thinking (scientific and liberal in the broad sense). But the comparison of the two men feels like a stretch, and Gopnik's notion that the very idea of democracy was precarious until Lincoln freed the slaves isn't wholly convincing. In potted biographies of the two, Gopnik emphasizes the influence of Lincoln the lawyer on Lincoln the politician, and Darwin's unusual abilities as a writer of science. Most successfully, Gopnik underscores the importance of eloquence in spreading new ideas, and his notion that Lincoln and Darwin exemplify the modern predicament-that humans must live in the "space between what we know and what we feel"-is resonant and worth thinking about. (Jan. 30)

Kirkus Reviews

The coincidence of a birthday shared by two titans of modern history yields an absorbing joint appreciation of the politics of emancipation, evolutionary science and their respective contributions to the world we know now. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same winter day in 1809. New Yorker contributor Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York, 2006, etc.) seizes that day to muse on the meaning of their lives and ours. Reworked from a pair of previously published essays, his pensive exegesis describes how humankind's worldview was permanently altered by an iconic American's upward mobility and a well-born Briton's discerning and skeptical eye. By 1838, Darwin had come to his understanding of natural selection, and Lincoln had delivered his crucial Lyceum lecture. The sensitive observer and the astute lawyer each suffered the loss of a beloved child, a blow no less devastating for being a common one in the 19th century. Both were masters of rhetoric-spoken persuasion in Lincoln's case, written inducement in Darwin's-and their words changed our beliefs. They made us beholden to the future, declares Gopnik, as we once were only to the past. The rigors of democracy and science became part of civilization's habit. Logic and fact, including the fact of death, did matter after all. The author aspires to philosophical flights as he considers the question of what precisely Edwin Stanton said at the Emancipator's deathbed. Did he aver that Lincoln "belongs to the ages," or "to the angels"? Perhaps both apply, writes Gopnik, since this world embraces both the mundane and the evanescent. Despite indulging in such bombastic statements as, "all their angels areages, and the ages held out a distant halo of angels," this talented, skillful critic achieves considerable new, heartfelt depth. First printing of 40,000

Godless Constitution or Our Man in Mexico

2009-01-16T14:37:00.000-08:00

Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State, Revised

Author: Isaac Kramnick

"A timely, well-written and scholarly polemic for the separation of church and state."—Bernard Crick, The New Statesman

The Godless Constitution is a ringing rebuke to the religious right's attempts, fueled by misguided and inaccurate interpretations of American history, to dismantle the wall between church and state erected by the country's founders. The authors, both distinguished scholars, revisit the historical roots of American religious freedom, paying particular attention to such figures as John Locke, Roger Williams, and especially Thomas Jefferson, and examine the controversies, up to the present day, over the proper place of religion in our political life. With a new chapter that explores the role of religion in the public life of George W. Bush's America, The Godless Constitution offers a bracing return to the first principles of American governance.

Look this: Better Safe than Sued or Rose Recipes from Olden Times

Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA

Author: Jefferson Morley

Mexico City was the Casablanca of the Cold War—a hotbed of spies, revolutionaries, and assassins. The CIA's station there was the front line of the United States' fight against international communism, as important for Latin America as Berlin was for Europe. And its undisputed spymaster was Winston Mackinley Scott.

Chief of the Mexico City station from 1956 to 1969, Win Scott occupied a key position in the founding generation of the Central Intelligence Agency, but until now he has remained a shadowy figure. Investigative reporter Jefferson Morley traces Scott's remarkable career from his humble origins in rural Alabama to wartime G-man to OSS London operative (and close friend of the notorious Kim Philby), to right-hand man of CIA Director Allen Dulles, to his remarkable reign for more than a decade as virtual proconsul in Mexico. Morley also follows the quest of Win Scott's son Michael to confront the reality of his father's life as a spy. He reveals how Scott ran hundreds of covert espionage operations from his headquarters in the U.S. Embassy while keeping three Mexican presidents on the agency's payroll, participating in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and, most intriguingly, overseeing the surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald during his visit to the Mexican capital just weeks before the assassination of President Kennedy.

Morley reveals the previously unknown scope of the agency's interest in Oswald in late 1963, identifying for the first time the code names of Scott's surveillance programs that monitored Oswald's movements. He shows that CIA headquarters cut Scott out of the loop of the agency's latest reporting on Oswald before Kennedy was killed. He documents why Scott cameto reject a key finding of the Warren Report on the assassination and how his disillusionment with the agency came to worry his longtime friend James Jesus Angleton, legendary chief of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton not only covered up the agency's interest in Oswald but also, after Scott died, absconded with the only copies of his unpublished memoir.

Interweaving Win Scott's personal and professional lives, Morley has crafted a real-life thriller of Cold War intrigue—a compelling saga of espionage that uncovers another chapter in the CIA's history.

What People Are Saying

Anthony Summers
Here is a rare thing, a biography of a C.I.A. chief that neither dodges shameful truths nor throws gratuitous mud. Packed, to boot, with genuine revelations about the crime of the century--the assassination of President Kennedy. A tour-de-force! (Anthony Summers, author of Not in Your Lifetime)

Thomas Powers
Every decade or so, a talented writer provides a genuinely new glimpse into the CIA's shadowy history. Morley's account of legendary spymaster Winston Scott chronicles a life led in secret, stretching from the agency's founding through Scott's tenure as station chief in Mexico City. Morley tells this story with literary energy and an eye for the dark moments when intelligence stops making sense. (Thomas Powers, author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA)

Anthony Summers

Here is a rare thing, a biography of a C.I.A. chief that neither dodges shameful truths nor throws gratuitous mud. Packed, to boot, with genuine revelations about the crime of the century—the assassination of President Kennedy. A tour-de-force! (Anthony Summers, author of Not in Your Lifetime)

Thomas Powers

Every decade or so, a talented writer provides a genuinely new glimpse into the CIA's shadowy history. Morley's account of legendary spymaster Winston Scott chronicles a life led in secret, stretching from the agency's founding through Scott's tenure as station chief in Mexico City. Morley tells this story with literary energy and an eye for the dark moments when intelligence stops making sense. (Thomas Powers, author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA)

Milton Friedman on Economics or The Concept of the Political

2009-01-16T04:24:00.000-08:00

Milton Friedman on Economics: Selected Papers

Author: Milton Friedman

On his death in the autumn of 2006, Milton Friedman was lauded as “the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era” by the New York Times and “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century” by the Economist. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, Friedman was both a highly respected economist and a prominent public intellectual, the leader of a revolution in economic and political thought that argued robustly in favor of virtues of free markets and laissez-faire policies.

Milton Friedman on Economics: Selected Papers collects a variety of Friedman's papers on topics in economics that were originally published in the Journal of Political Economy. Opening with Friedman's 1977 Nobel Lecture, the volume spans nearly the whole of his career, incorporating papers from as early as 1948 and as late as 1990. An excellent introduction to Friedman's economic thought, Milton Friedman will be essential for anyone tracing the course of twentieth-century economics and politics.

Nobel Lecture: Inflation and Unemployment   Milton Friedman     1
The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk   Milton Friedman   L. J. Savage     23
The Expected-Utility Hypothesis and the Measurability of Utility   Milton Friedman   L. J. Savag     57
A Statistical Illusion in Judging Keynesian Models   Milton Friedman   Gary S. Becker     72
The Demand for Money: Some Theoretical and Empirical Results   Milton Friedman     89
Interest Rates and the Demand for Money   Milton Friedman     120
Government Revenue from Inflation   Milton Friedman     135
The Crime of 1873   Milton Friedman     146
Afterword: Milton Friedman as a Microeconomist   Gary S. Becker     181
Index     187

Book about: Beer for Petes Sake or Zingermans Guide to Good Eating

The Concept of the Political

Author: Carl Schmitt

In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism’s basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state—a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared. George Schwab’s introduction to his translation of the 1932 German edition highlights Schmitt’s intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. In addition to analysis by Leo Strauss and a foreword by Tracy B. Strong placing Schmitt’s work into contemporary context, this expanded edition also includes a translation of Schmitt’s 1929 lecture “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” which the author himself added to the 1932 edition of the book. An essential update on a modern classic, The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in political theory or philosophy.

Booknews

A sociological study of American drinking patterns reviewing current scholarly literature and providing commentary and observation on alcohol use and its public control. Gusfield presents research on alcohol studies, discussing the related social problems and cultural authority embedded in public drinking, and studying drinking as a leisure and social activity which points to the moral and political conflicts surrounding alcohol use particularly in relation to drinking and driving. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Energy Keepers Energy Killers or State of the Union

2009-01-14T07:09:00.000-08:00

Energy Keepers Energy Killers: The New Civil Rights Battle

Author: Roy Innis

Energy Keepers Energy Killers: The New Civil Right Battle exposes the wrongs done to the poor and minorities by environmental and political elites trying to eradicate fossil fuel production—coal, oil, and gas—supposedly to 'save the world from global warming.' Author Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, shows how their wrongheaded policies price energy out of reach and violate the civil rights of all Americans, but hurt the poor and minorities worst. Innis demands an end to this 'energy racism' and calls for the opening of all federal lands—which belong to the disadvantaged as much as to well-funded environmental leaders—to more energy production in a sustained campaign to increase supply and lower prices. Innis reveals the flaws in global warming hysteria and makes the stunning fact clear in his 'Energy Reality' chart that so-called 'alternative energy' from wind and solar power actually provided less than one-half of one percent of America's energy needs in 2006.

State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

Author: Nelson Lichtenstein

In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century.

The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce.

Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's mostimportant function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Stanley Aronowitz

In State of the Union, a richly documented and well-written book, Nelson Lichtenstein, who teaches history at UC Santa Barbara, traces the rise and decline of American labor, primarily since the Great Depression. He begins the story with the New Deal's struggle to overcome the economic crises of the time.

Commonweal - Kevin Mattson

Lichtenstein wants to see labor resuscitate itself. He argues for expanding on the rights revolution: "Rights consciousness and rights rhetoric...remain powerful weapons available to partisans of working people." As a college professor at the University of Virginia, he helped out with labor campaigns organized around the slogan of "Workers Rights Are Civil Rights."

Nola Theiss - KLIATT

Nelson Lichtenstein is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of many books on the labor movement in America. In his latest book, he has written a history of the labor union movement in America, from its inception in the 1930s to its current state. Along with history, he analyzes the cultural, economic, and political influences that have determined the attitudes Americans have had toward unions and labor. Decade by decade, the demands of the union movement and the response by government and management have changed and evolved as the country moved from an industrial society to a service and consumer-oriented one. This is a sophisticated and complex book of ideas that is an important resource for any student of labor unions. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Princeton Paperbacks, 336p. illus. notes. index., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

Lichtenstein (history, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit) presents a history of American unionism in the 20th century and argues convincingly that a thriving labor movement is an essential safeguard of American democracy. He chronicles the struggle for economic citizenship and security that led to the burst of organizing during the Depression and World War II. After the war, even as unions reached new highs in membership and political activity, their strength was sapped by corporate resistance, their own bureaucratization, legal restrictions, and ideological attacks from the Right by anti-Communist conservatives and from the Left by disenchanted intellectuals. Throughout, Lichtenstein examines both the positive and the negative sides of American labor unions have been champions of civil rights and equal pay and racially exclusive and economically self-interested clubs. But, Lichtenstein argues, as the only organized counterweight to the power of rapacious corporations, unions play an essential role in preserving American ideals. Today, the labor movement faces political, economic, and organizational problems, but it has overcome equally large challenges in the past and remains a vital force for social progress in the United States. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. Duncan Stewart, State Historical Soc. of Iowa Lib., Iowa City Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Nietzsches Political Skepticism or Letters to a Young Feminist

2009-01-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

Nietzsche's Political Skepticism

Author: Tamsin Shaw

Political theorists have long been frustrated by Nietzsche's work. Although he develops profound critiques of morality, culture, and religion, it is very difficult to spell out the precise political implications of his insights. He himself never did so in any systematic way. In this book, Tamsin Shaw claims that there is a reason for this: Nietzsche's insights entail a distinctive form of political skepticism.

Shaw argues that the modern political predicament, for Nietzsche, is shaped by two important historical phenomena. The first is secularization, or the erosion of religious belief, and the fragmentation of moral life that it entails. The second is the unparalleled ideological power of the modern state. The promotion of Nietzsche's own values, Shaw insists, requires resistance to state ideology. But Nietzsche cannot envisage how these values might themselves provide a stable basis for political authority; this is because secular societies, lacking recognized normative expertise, also lack a reliable mechanism for making moral insight politically effective.

In grappling with this predicament, Shaw claims, Nietzsche raises profound questions about political legitimacy and political authority in the modern world.

Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Predatory State 12
Chapter 2: The Self-Destruction of Secular Religions 36
Chapter 3: Laws of Agreement 59
Chapter 4: Nietzsche as a Moral Antirealist 78
Chapter 5: Nietzsche as a Moral Realist 109
Chapter 6: Nietzsche as a Skeptic about Liberalism 137
Acknowledgments 153
Index 155

New interesting book: Principi di base di controllo di politica

Letters to a Young Feminist

Author: Phyllis Chesler

Phyllis Chesler's Letters to a Young Feminist is a visionary message from a leading feminist revolutionary to the generation of feminists -- women and men -- emerging today. Chesler weaves her personal experiences with the history of the movement to assess the accomplishments and failures of her generation, as she encourages the next to take on what remains to be done. With frankness and candor, Chesler discusses the basic aspects of feminism, explains feminism's relevance in a world that is the danger of taking it for granted, and steers the next generation toward reclaiming feminism for itself. She examines sisterhood, sex, families and motherhood, resistance to the status quo, work, feminist heroism, and the economics of power.

Publishers Weekly

A call to arms in epistolary form, this is an evenhanded if occasionally polemical assessment of the feminist movement's accomplishments and what remains to be done before a feminist vision of society can be realized. Chesler (Women and Madness) doesn't mince words when detailing the ways in which women's lives are still circumscribed by cultural conventions, but her empathetic tone mitigates against angry self-righteousness or condemnation of antifeminists. On the contrary, while she insists that a proactive feminist movement is essential to the well-being of all women, Chesler also argues that feminists themselves must renew their efforts to be sympathetic to a wide range of viewpoints and agendas. Above all, she stresses feminism should stand for tolerance, self-empowerment and resistance to all forms of oppression. She covers a lot of groundmarriage, reproductive rights, sexual abuse, political oppression, career opportunitieswhich necessarily makes for cursory treatment of many topics. Yet Chesler's analysis is cogent throughout, and these essays are laced with compelling nuggets from one who has been on the front lines of the feminist movement for several decades.

Booknews

This book represents an older feminist's efforts to pass on what she has learned to the next generation. Chesler (psychology and women's studies, College of Staten Island) discusses the basic aspects of feminism, explains its relevance in a world that is in danger of taking it for granted, and examines sisterhood, sex, families, motherhood, resistance to the status quo, work, and the economics of power. She is careful to include males in the new generation of feminists, with the last letter written to her son. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Kim France

Part memoir, part manifesto, Letters to a Young Feminist is Chesler's attempt to pass on the kind of wisdom that she and so many women of her generation were left to figure out as they went along.

--Kim France, The New York Times Book Review

Portuguese Making of America or Cheney

2009-01-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

Portuguese Making of America: Melungeons and Early Settlers of America

Author: Manuel Mira

Early American history before the 17th century is rather vague. The 15th and 16th centuries are often called the lost or forgotten centuries in American history.

The author has painstakingly done a lengthy research on the attempts of one particular group to settle in North America since the early 15th century. The Portuguese people are one the oldest European group of settlers, probably the first to arrive in this continent and permanently settle among the natives in a peaceful manner. This book follows their quest for a better life in the New World and of other groups who consider themselves Portuguese, such as the Melungeons of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

What People Are Saying

Adalino Cabral
Adalino Cabral, Ph.D. Portuguese, Hispanic and American Cultures and Languages Educator Boston area
Portuguese presence in the United States of America has a long history much of which has yet to be unfolded. Unless courageous researchers take the bull by the horns our past will fade into obscurity thereby forever shadowing the untold truth. Fortunately, because of Manuel Mira's remarkable thirst for knowledge coupled with a tremendous appetite for historical revelation, we are now blessed with his English version of The Portuguese Making of America a very important contribution to Appalachia's Melungeon population. The powerful book is not only a tribute to the many whose Portuguese roots have been lost in the annals of time, but equally a historical instrument which serves to trigger further study by researchers at the local, national, and international levels.

Manuel Mira is to be congratulated for finally bringing to fruition The Portuguese Making of America. It is indeed, a most significant entry into the everlasting annals of Portuguese-American and Canadian history.

Jean Patterson
Manuel has good informal style of his own. The inclusion of many facts about the development of the Portuguese background, with the careful research he has done, and carefully footnoted, adds a good deal to the book, and makes a welcome addition, particularly to those researchers with some background of Melungeon reading, or study, or an interest in European history.
—:(Jean Patterson Bible Historian, researcher, author Dandridge, Tennessee)

Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen
Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This book brings together a great diversity of historical resources and oral accounts of Iberian exploration and settlement since the 1500's of what would become the United States.[and]…provides detailed timelines and numerous citations that will be helpful for future researchers and genealogists. (The Forgotten Portuguese book review, Portuguese Studies Review, ICGP, University of New Hampshire)

Manuel Luciano da Silva
Manuel Luciano da Silva,M.D. - Physician & Historian
No library on Americana will be complete without this valuable book. It brings together all the Portuguese discoveries and explorations.

Book about: A Complete Guide to Chi Gung or Healing Herbs

Cheney: A Revealing Portrait of America's Most Powerful Vice President

Author: Stephen F Hayes

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

Blood on the Table or What Jackie Taught Us

2009-01-12T20:10:00.000-08:00

Blood on the Table: The Greatest Cases of New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

Author: Colin Evans

A behind-the-scenes look at death in New York City.

For almost a century, New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has presided over the dead. Over the years, the OCME has endured everything- political upheavals, ghastly murders, bloody gang wars, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and non-stop battles for power and influence-and remains the final authority in cases of sudden, unexplained, or violent death.

Founded in 1918, the OCME has evolved over decades of technological triumphs and all-too human failure to its modern-day incarnation as the foremost forensics lab in the world, investigating an average caseload of over 15,000 suspicious deaths a year. This is the behind-the-scenes chronicle of public service and private vendettas, of blood in the streets and back-room bloodbaths, and of the criminal cases that made history and headlines.

Interesting textbook: À Procura de Respeito:Venda de Fenda em Bairro el

What Jackie Taught Us: Lessons from the Remarkable Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Author: Tina Santi Flaherty

She was a woman of confidence, focus, and passion, and it made her one of the world's greatest sources of inspiration and influence. She drew on a remarkable wealth of self-knowledge and a sense of purpose to cope with extraordinary public demands and overwhelming private needs. How can anyone emulate Jackie?

What Jackie Taught Us offers Jackie's own personal lessons about how best to live one's life with poise, grace, and zest, including wisdom about image and style, courage and vision, men, marriage, motherhood, and motivation, and how best to apply those lessons to everyday life. With the shining example of this American icon, we can illuminate who we are, what we want--and what we truly need from ourselves and each other.

Publishers Weekly

The very interesting life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994), married to the 35th president of the U.S., continues to fascinate, which should insure readership for this laudatory life lesson. The author, a corporate executive, once lived in the same New York City apartment building as her subject and, though she never actually met her, describes herself as an admirer. Flaherty contends that Onassis was never given credit for her leadership abilities and focuses on episodes of her life that illuminate the positive influence she had on others. Drawing on secondary sources and secondary interviews that one imagines would have appalled the famously reclusive Mrs. Onassis, Flaherty takes us over the familiar territory of her subject's childhood with a distant, critical mother and adoring but womanizing alcoholic father. She faithfully details Onassis's splendid education, which honed a passion for knowledge that sustained her through John Kennedy's extramarital affairs and his tragic assassination. Although the writing is competent, it too frequently tends to be repetitive and cloying. The areas that Flaherty believes Onassis taught by example include dealing with men (play hard to get), motherhood (loving but strict) and courage (the ability to withstand pain without crumbling). Photos. (Apr. 6) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Shallowness reigns in these two titles, one by a marginally famous woman, the other about a bona fide icon. Former supermodel Ferrare (Okay, So I Don't Have a Headache: What I Learned (and What All Women Need To Know) About PMS, Hormones, Stress, Diet, Menopause-and Sex) fails to demonstrate any personal growth in documenting her silver-spoon failures. She bemoans not landing the cohosting job that went to Kelly Rippa and overeating; she also crows about her proudest achievement-creating jewelry sold on cable TV. Libraries should instead consider Jackie Kallen's Hit Me with Your Best Shot: A Fight Plan for Dealing with All of Life's Hard Knocks (now in paperback) instead of this insipid read. Libraries should be aware, however, that Ferrare launched a new furniture line in April on the Home Shopping Network, so there could be demand. Meanwhile, former Colgate-Palmolive VP Flaherty (Talk Your Way to the Top) fairly idolizes Camelot's First Lady. In chapters padded with cursory biographical snippets, she purports to explore what Jackie "taught" the world. Take, for instance, the chapter "Men and Marriage," wherein readers learn that Jackie made herself attractive and "followed her heart." Much is made of the "beautiful, cultured, and intelligent" icon of our collective (and idealized) cultural memory. Instead of wasting money on this hardcover trifle, commemorate the tenth anniversary of Jackie's death by dusting off some respectable biographies, e.g., Sarah Bradford's America's Queen: A Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or even Pamela Clarke Keogh's photographic Jackie Style. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Living Lens or Armageddon Oil and Terror

2009-01-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward

Author: Alana Newhous

The finest photographic account of Jewish life in America.

This extraordinary volume features classic photographs of the history one has learned to associate with the Forward—Lower East Side pushcarts, Yiddish theater, labor rallies—along with gems no one would expect. The premiere national Jewish newspaper has opened up its never-before-seen archives, revealing a photographic landscape of Jews in the twentieth century and beyond. From shtetl beauty contests and matchmakers caught mid-deal to the streets of the New World; from diaspora communities and mandate Palestine to the Holocaust, the Soviet Jewry movement, and the emergence of Jewish suburbia; from Paul Muni and Barbra Streisand to Woody Allen and Madonna—this book is a kaleidoscopic array of modern Jewish life. Original essays are included by leading intellectuals and historians, including Leon Wieseltier, J. Hoberman, Roger Kahn, and Deborah E. Lipstadt, plus an introduction by Pete Hamill. A great gift book in the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World and Frederic Brenner's Diaspora: Homelands in Exile. 531 duotone photographs.

Publishers Weekly

Founded in 1897, the Jewish-American newspaper the Forward was in its heyday of the 1920s a powerhouse daily Yiddish newspaper with a larger circulation than the New York Times. Drawn from a treasure trove of 40,000 photos, the pre-1925 pictures are the most gripping here, depicting New York's pushcart-teeming Lower East Side, soldiers in the czar's army celebrating a seder, Polish pogrom victims, and men who deserted their families in America—printed to aid in tracking them down. Pictures from 1926 through 1945 show Yiddish theater's "royal" couple, Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky; a Jewish portrait artist sketching Mussolini; and an emaciated Jewish orphan being rescued from an Auschwitz crematorium by former Jewish inmates after the Nazis' retreat. Later decades show Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, and Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, but also a disturbing 1986 visual of a neo-Nazi computer game. Notable recent photos depict a New Orleans synagogue that was flooded after Katrina, and a Kraków souvenir stand offering yarmulkes and wooden klezmer figures, emblematic of the 1990s preoccupation with all things Jewish in European areas where Jews were largely exterminated in WWII. Gathered by Forward arts & culture editor Newhouse, this is a worthy, provocative group portrait of modern Jewish life in all its misery and glory. (Apr.)

Interesting textbook: Breaking Free from Depression or The Nutrition Solution

Armageddon, Oil, and Terror

Author: John F Walvoord

Updating the work of renowned biblical scholar John F. Walvoord, who famously predicted current world events, Armageddon, Oil, and Terror offers shocking predictions on the future of terrorism, oil-based economics, and nuclear war in the Middle East. In all, Armageddon, Oil, and Terror sheds light on 12 biblical prophecies that seem eerily close to coming true. Includes materials from lectures and discussions after 9/11 and incorporates vital, updated material from other Walvoord classics. It is as current as today's news ... and every prediction rings true.

The Fighting 69th or What Does China Think

2009-01-11T16:03:00.000-08:00

The Fighting 69th: One Remarkable National Guard Unit's Journey from Ground Zero to Baghdad

Author: Sean Michael Flynn

How a ragtag National Guard unit found itself thrust into the War on Terror and triumphed against impossible odds

On the eve of September 11, 2001, New York City's famous National Guard regiment, the Fighting 69th Infantry, was not fit for duty. Most of its soldiers were immigrant kids with no prior military experience and no intention of serving their country any longer than it took to get a paycheck or college credit. Once a respected all-Irish outfit, the 69th was now a Technicolor mix of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, African Americans, Russians, Poles, Koreans, Chinese, and a few token Irish Americans. Their uniforms were incomplete and their equipment was downright derelict. The thought of deploying such a unit was laughable. But that is exactly what happened.

With a charismatic mix of irreverent humor and eye-opening honesty, Sean Flynn, himself a member of the 69th, memorably chronicles the transformation of this motley band of amateur soldiers into a battle- hardened troop at work in one of the most lethal quarters of Baghdad: the notorious Airport Road, a blood- soaked strand that grabbed headlines and became a bellwether for progress in postinvasion Iraq. At home on the concrete and asphalt like no other unit in the U.S. Army, Gotham's Fighting 69th finally brings its own rough justice to this lawless precinct by ignoring army discipline and turning to the street-fighting tactics they grew up with and know best.

The Fighting 69th is more than a story about the impact of terrorism, the war on Iraq, or the current administration's failures. It is the story of how regular citizens come to grips with challenges far starker thanwhat they have been prepared for. Flynn's dark humor, empathy, and candor make for a fresh look at who our soldiers are and what they do when faced with their toughest challenges.

Publishers Weekly

Flynn (Land of Radioactive Midnight) draws on his experience as a company commander with the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard-the "Fighting 69th" of Civil War, WWI and WWII fame-for this riveting account of the unit's service following 9/11. Considered "the worst unit in the National Guard," at the turn of the 21st century, according to Flynn, the 69th was "under-trained, under-resourced, and under-led." Activated on 9/11, its soldiers were the first to arrive at ground zero, and then guarded New York City's bridges and tunnels and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In 2004, after retraining, the unit was flagged "Task Force Wolfhound" and certified for overseas deployment, but was "barely functional in the field." In Iraq, the 69th provided route security along a six-mile stretch known as "'The Most Dangerous Road in the World,'" the main highway between the airport and downtown Baghdad. Learning on the job, the 69th "effectively neutralized" the roadside bomb threat that has caused a high percentage of the war's casualties, but paid a heavy price in its own killed and injured. Drawing on combat journals, operations orders and interviews with survivors, Flynn fashions a tale equal to the making of the new, contemporary heroes of the Fighting 69th who, against all odds, restored a previously distinguished unit to its former glory. (Jan.)

Book review: Recipes from Mulates or North DakotaWhere Food Is Love

What Does China Think?

Author: Mark Leonard

We know everything and nothing about China. We know that China is changing so fast that the maps in Shanghai need to be redrawn every two weeks. We know that China has brought 300 million people from agricultural backwardness into modernity in just thirty years, and that its impact on the global economy is growing at unprecedented speed. We have an image of China as a dictatorship; a nationalist empire that threatens its neighbors and global peace.

But how many people know about the debates raging within China? What do we really know about the kind of society China wants to become? What ideas are motivating its citizens? We can name America's neo-cons and the religious right, but cannot name Chinese writers, thinkers, or journalists—what is the future they dream of for their country, or for the world? Because China's rise— like the fall of Rome or the British Raj—will echo down generations to come, these are the questions we increasingly need to ask. Mark Leonard asks us to forget everything we thought we knew about China and start again. He introduces us to the thinkers who are shaping China's wide open future and opens up a hidden world of intellectual debate that is driving a new Chinese revolution and changing the face of the world.

The Washington Post - John Pomfret

[Leonard] spent two years traveling around the country, interviewing many of its leading thinkers on politics and economics. His main conclusion: China is not morphing into a democracy with a capitalist economy; it is creating its own unique system, with an authoritarian government and a mixed economy. The result, Leonard predicts, will be a fundamental challenge to the West. Leonard believes that bright thinkers—political scientists, economists and grand strategists, many of them schooled at U.S. universities—are providing China's engineers with the framework for a novel political system that blends dog-eat-dog capitalism, a big state-controlled sector and one-party rule. They're succeeding, Leonard argues, where the Soviet Union, also led by engineers in its twilight years, failed.

Publishers Weekly

Commonly characterized as a juggernaut monomaniacally focused on breakneck economic growth, China is actually riven by a lively, far-reaching debate over its future, argues this inquisitive study. Leonard (Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century) divides Chinese intellectuals into a New Right that wants to extend laissez-faire market reforms and an increasingly influential New Left that decries rising inequality, corruption and environmental destruction and wants a strong government to rein in capitalist elites and protect workers. Meanwhile, political reformers push cautiously for local and Communist Party elections against a consensus that associates democracy with chaotic mob rule or national dismemberment. China's foreign policy is split between liberal internationalists and truculent "neo-comms" who contend that China must be ready to use force against its enemies. The author notes that these ideological divisions resemble those in Western countries, but emphasizes the distinctiveness of Chinese ideas, like the concept of the "deliberative dictatorship" of a one-party state that stays responsive to popular pressures, or a "Walled World" where globalization enhances rather than erodes the autonomy of national governments. Leonard's is a lucid, eye-opening account of China's intellectual scene and its growing importance to the world. (May)

Charles W. Hayford - Library Journal

Leonard (executive director, Open Society Inst. for Europe) argued in his Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century that the American Century based on "hard power" will give way to a European Century based on "soft power." Figuring in that process that China could be either a key partner or deadly adversary, Leonard became an "accidental Sinologist." He writes of smoking Cuban cigars in Beijing and debating with policy intellectuals whose arguments fell into several groups that he labels in the text. The "New Left" accepts the market system but advocates democracy and government welfare programs, while "Yellow River Capitalists" want to let a new capitalist class set priorities. What Leonard elsewhere wittily calls "Neo-Comms" mirror the American "neo-cons." Unlike the first two groups, whose focus is domestic, the "Neo-Comms" push a great power strategy of military expansion, aggressive cultural diplomacy, and hard-nosed international law. Leonard vaunts China's present model of economic growth and political control, downplaying its authoritarianism, but argues that we need to appreciate Chinese debates, which will shape future policies. Libraries with substantial world affairs collections should add this astute and lucid book.

Kirkus Reviews

A brief view of China's emergence as a world player, politically as well as economically. In the dawning days of what is now called globalism, it was assumed that China would become like the West as it grew in wealth and power. That assumption was wrong, writes Leonard (Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, 2005), executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and those who hold to it today persist in error. Instead, China is charting its own course, even if some of its debates and even factions-the homegrown equivalents of the Neocons and the Greens, for instance-sound familiar to Westerners. One is the battle over what democracy means and whether it is right for China, with a sharp line drawn between the Old Right ("who like to talk about the withering of the state . . . [but who] have, in fact, been the biggest beneficiaries of one-party rule") and New Left ("a loose grouping of intellectuals that is increasingly capturing the public mood, and setting the tone for political debate"). Democracy is, Leonard writes, not unknown in China; experiments thrive in the countryside, and even Chongqing, one of China's foremost cities, has become a "living laboratory" for democratic and populist modes of governance. As Leonard also notes, China harbors think tanks whose range and populace vastly dwarf anything in the West-a single Beijing institute, he writes, has more than 4,000 full-time researchers. Yet, for all this thinking and experimenting, the state shows no sign of withering away, and Chinese influence is felt in geopolitics far from the motherland-in Darfur, for instance-and closer to home, such as the repressive regime of Myanmar, backed by Beijing. The overarchinglesson: that China will present to the world its own idea-"the Chinese model"-of what the new global order looks like, and the rest of the world will have to listen. Useful reading for students of contemporary politics and international affairs.

My Colombian War or Seeing Like a State

2009-01-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind

Author: Silvana Paternostro

“Intimate, emotion-saturated portrait . . . the flavors and the colors are vivid . . . [A] compelling picture of contemporary Colombia and the roots of its problems . . . a gift for the rest of us.”—William Grimes, The New York Times

Growing up in the coastal city of Barranquilla, Colombia, Silvana Paternostro enjoyed a privileged childhood, a comfortable existence marred only briefly by fleeting encounters with the social inequalities and burgeoning drug trade that threatened the country’s security. Soon, however, these shadowy threats intensified, boiling over into the most violent, most protracted, and most misunderstood civil war of our time.

In My Colombian War, Paternostro, now an acclaimed reporter, journeys back to the place where her family and closest friends still live, weaving authentic experience into a history of this ongoing conflict. Drawing on interviews with family members, rebel and paramilitary leaders, and a singular young American marine named Charlie, Paternostro portrays all sides of the conflict. Blending superb reportage with poignant personal stories, she offers a stunning, comprehensive narrative of Colombia’s complicated past and present.

The New York Times - William Grimes

Toward the end of My Colombian War Silvana Paternostro hits on the perfect Spanish word to express her sense of dislocation. She is desubicada, which she translates as "difficult and kind of ridiculous, and always out of place." It shows, even to her family. "The stork dropped her in the wrong country," her father says. For a journalist it sometimes helps to be a little ridiculous and out of place. Alienation imparts a sense of urgency to Ms. Paternostro's intimate, emotion-saturated portrait of the homeland with which she cannot come to terms, a sentimental journey undertaken after decades living in the United States and working as a journalist in New York. Her confusion, and her often astounding ignorance of her own country, ends up being an asset, as she reconnects with her family and tries to sort out how Colombia developed into an international Wal-Mart for cocaine and marijuana, and a world leader in several major crime categories, including murder and kidnapping.

The Washington Post

The picture of Colombia presented here is so deracinated that one keeps turning the pages with incredulity. Her reportage is lax, but Paternostro does have a gift for drama and for bringing quirky characters to life. The story of Charlie, the American marine who goes to Colombia to kill drug traffickers with his own hands, is frightening and heartrending. Paternostro might want to try her hand at writing fiction next. When she empathizes with the characters she meets on the road, she captures both the foolishness and the beauty of even the most flawed individuals.

Publishers Weekly

In this disjointed memoir, Paternostro describes her return to war-torn Colombia, which she left in the 1970s as a teenager. A member of a wealthy, landholding family, Paternostro attended American schools and universities and made a career in the U.S. as a journalist, while giving little thought to the country she left behind. Yet the crises of cocaine and civil war draw her professional attention and an assignment from the New York Timesallows her to return to her coastal hometown of Barranquilla. Once there, she discovers how much her conservative family's life of privilege is at odds with her own romantic left leanings, and how the danger of being kidnapped is only matched by her countrymen's refusal to acknowledge the civil war around them. All the elements are in place for a fascinating story and yet the memoir lacks essential clarity. Although Paternostro addresses various aspects of Colombian history, she doesn't illuminate them to any great depth, and the lack of a narrative through-line leaves the book adrift. Revealingly, Paternostro writes: "I go around without contact lenses; that way I cannot see too much. I think otherwise I would not be able to smile, to talk, to sleep, to stay here." Ultimately, the author's decision not to see clearly leaves the reader as confused as she is. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

A Colombian-born journalist returns to her homeland in an attempt to reconcile her own past and her country's chaotic present. Paternostro (In The Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture, 1998), a reporter and senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, turns her pointed journalistic skills inward to examine her own identity in the larger context of her roots in Colombia, a place revealed here as "a beautiful country with an awful history and a terrible present." Although the author left the country in the turbulent 1980s, her identity now as much American as Latin, Colombia haunts her as she stares every morning at a map and imagines it as a corporal entity, assigning a divided body part to each of the country's disparate regions. Paternostro takes assignments that suit her "personal inquisition," traveling to each region to pursue stories of kidnapping, drug-running and the politics of rebellion. These, however, are mostly missions of convenience, as the author adopts the subjects of her stories for comparison against her own experiences of the country. The voices that emerge-ranging from an American soldier in the drug war who goes native, to the everyday citizens who have learned to accept gunfire and kidnapping as a part of life-are vivid and compelling characters in the author's introspective history. There is something of a dichotomy between the Paternostro's remembrances of her fortunate childhood as the daughter of an acclaimed economist and her reportage of the country's violent civil war. Because of that split, her overarching themes occasionally become muddled by the accounts of current events. Yet her poetic descriptions of the country's cultural conventions andfractured consciousness do much to enliven her account of a Colombian war that is, in the end, "brutal, sad, incoherent, and rarely resolved." While some of these labels certainly apply to segments of the book, its graceful melancholy and conscientious reporting elevate it beyond the customary journalist's memoir. A conflicted memoir of bodegas, bullets and a country tearing itself apart from within.

The Maps     1
Book 1
Miami International Airport, May 2002     21
Shelter Island, June 1999     29
Barranquilla, August 2001     41
Seeing You Again     45
My Birthmark     54
The Rebel Years     64
Making Plans as a Journalist     72
Researching My Story     80
Tricky, Tricky     88
Asking the Tough Questions     96
Kidnapping, Inc.     103
Running in Riomar     107
The Best in All the Land     112
High Times in Barranquilla     120
Need Help from Allegra     133
Book 2
Who Is She?     147
My Grandmother Explains Kidnappings     157
Memory Threads of El Carmen     165
Ma Cris and Her Cousin Describe a World of Peace     172
Guillermo's Terrace     183
Juana's Smell     196
Agustin Explains the Rules     200
Seeing You Again, September 10, 2001     206
Body Language     224
Book 3
How Did I End Up Here?, March 2002     241
Meeting the Rebels     254
Wrong Music     262
Can't Stay Away, Miami, May 2003     270
Needing to Report Again     277
Our Colombian War     290
Epilogue     299
Bibliography     306
Acknowledgments     309
Index     311

Go to: Desperation Entertaining or Pig Perfect

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Author: James C Scott

In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot be -- fully understood. Further the success of designs for social organization depends on the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. And in discussing these planning disasters, he identifies four conditions common to them all: the state's attempt to impose administrative order on nature and society; a high-modernist ideology that believes scientific intervention can improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale innovations; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

Washington Monthly - Gideon G. Rose

James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State is an important and powerful work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in large-scale public planning. . . . Among the book's virtues are its lucid style, deep learning, and wide range of fascinating cases.

London Review of Books - Paul Seabright

...Scott is definitely in storytelling mode...[M]any ironies...suggest that Scott's portrait of the failures of systematic knowledge is too simplified...

The New York Times Book Review - John Gray

The 20th century has seen many grand schemes for improving the human condition....In what must be one of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades -- Seeing Like a State -- James C. Scott contends that these apparently disparate experiments exemplify a single body of ideas.

United States v George Bush et al or Political Brain

2009-01-10T10:16:00.000-08:00

United States v. George Bush, et al.

Author: Elizabeth de la Vega

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

New interesting textbook: Tobacco or The Hardgainers Body Building Handbook

Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

Author: Drew Westen

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

Criminal Investigation or Managers and the Legal Environment

2009-01-10T00:04:00.000-08:00

Criminal Investigation

Author: Swanson

Criminal Investigation is recognized as being one of the most comprehesnive books available in the market. It is widely used in undergraduate courses in Criminal Investigation,and also by Police Departments who purchase it for their offices to study when preparing for promotional examinations.

	Preface
1	The Evolution of Criminal Investigation and Criminalistics	1
2	Crime and Its Investigation	27
3	The Crime Scene and Its Associated Procedures	39
4	Physical Evidence	78
5	Interviews	148
6	Field Notes and Reporting	169
7	Follow-Up Investigation	185
8	Interrogation	223
9	The Crime Laboratory and the Criminal Investigation Process	253
10	Behavioral Analysis in Criminal Investigation	280
11	Injury and Death Investigation	306
12	Sex-Related Offenses	368
13	Crimes against Children	400
14	Robbery	437
15	Burglary Investigation	467
16	Larceny Offenses	503
17	Vehicle Thefts and Related Offenses	551
18	Computer Crime	604
19	Agricultural, Wildlife, and Environmental Crimes	621
20	Arson Investigation	660
21	Recognition, Control, and Investigation of Drug Abuse	692
22	The Decision to Initiate the Criminal Process	752
23	The Rules of Evidence	762
24	The Investigator as Witness	776
	Index	787

Book review: Führungskommunikation

Managers and the Legal Environment: Strategies for the 21st Century

Author: Constance E Bagley

Recognized and respected for both its inclusion of cutting edge material and for its strong strategic managerial approach, this is one of the most comprehensive and challenging, yet approachable and understandable legal environments texts on the market. It is equally suitable for students with substantial work experience as well as for those who are studying business for the first time. The text fully looks at the subject matter from the perspective of current and future business managers and leaders by providing an in-depth understanding of how law impacts daily management decisions and business strategies. Its integrated treatment of law and management presents a very strategic perspective, showing how the law provides ways for managers to minimize risk and create value, how to use the law to craft solutions to attain core business objectives, and how to spot legal issues before they become legal problems and effectively handle the inevitable legal disputes that arise in the course of doing business.

Booknews

New edition of a text that provides a broad and detailed understanding of how law impacts daily management decisions and business strategies. With an emphasis upon ethical considerations, Bagley (business administration, Harvard Business School) covers essential legal topics such as agency, contracts, torts, criminal law, antitrust, as well as employment law, intellectual property, lending transactions, securities regulation, and environmental law. He also addresses current concerns in business regulation such as consumer privacy and the Internet, the World Trade Organization, copyright law in cyberspace, mandatory arbitration of employment disputes, employer liability for sexual harassment, selective disclosure of inside information to securities analysts, and the creation, sale, and patentability of genetically modified organisms. Each of the 23 chapters contains three to nine examples of law in action, boxed discussion of how the laws apply to cyberspace, and economic, historical, and political perspectives. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

War and Genocide or The Upside of Down

2009-01-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust

Author: Doris L Bergen

Unlike most treatments of the Holocaust, this book discusses not only the persecution of the Jews, but also other segments of society victimized by the Nazis: gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet POWs, the handicapped, and others.

	Foreword
	Preface: War and Genocide: Race and Space
1	Preconditions: Antisemitism, Racism, and Common Prejudices in Early-Twentieth-Century Europe	1
2	Leadership and Will: Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and Nazi Ideology	29
3	From Revolution to Routine: Nazi Germany, 1933-1938	53
4	Open Aggression: In Search of War, 1938-1939	81
5	Experiments in Brutality, 1939-1940: War against Poland and the So-Called Euthanasia Program	101
6	Expansion and Systematization: Exporting War and Terror, 1940-1941	131
7	The Peak Years of Killing: 1942 and 1943	161
8	Death Throes and Killing Frenzies, 1944-1945	205
	Conclusion: The Legacies of Atrocity	221
	Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading	229
	Photo Credits	243
	Index	247
	About the Author	263

Interesting textbook: Old Fashioned Dutch Oven Cookbook or Banana Split Book

The Upside of Down: The End of the World as We Know It, and Why That May Not Be Such a Bad Thing

Author: Thomas Homer Dixon

Environmental disasters. Terrorist wars. Energy scarcity. Economic failure. Is this the world's inevitable fate, a downward spiral that ultimately spells the collapse of societies? Perhaps, says acclaimed author Thomas Homer-Dixon - or perhaps these crises can actually lead to renewal for ourselves and planet earth.

The Upside of Down takes the reader on a mind-stretching tour of societies' management, or mismanagement, of disasters over time. From the demise of ancient Rome to contemporary climate change, this spellbinding book analyzes what happens when multiple crises compound to cause what the author calls "synchronous failure." But, crisis doesn't have to mean total global calamity. Through catagenesis, or creative, bold reform in the wake of breakdown, it is possible to reinvent our future.

Drawing on the worlds of archeology, poetry, politics, science, and economics, The Upside of Down is certain to provoke controversy and stir imaginations across the globe. The author's wide-ranging expertise makes his insights and proposals particularly acute, as people of all nations try to grapple with how we can survive tomorrow's inevitable shocks to our global system. There is no guarantee of success, but there are ways to begin thinking about a better world, and The Upside of Down is the ideal place to start thinking.

Foreign Affairs

In this important study of the looming dangers of social and economiccatastrophe, Homer-Dixon, a Canadian expert on the environment, security, and complex systems, argues that Western society faces a new and expanding array of challenges — oil shortages, global warming, economic instability, megaterrorism — that threaten to converge and reinforce one another, setting the stage for "synchronous failure" and the massive breakdown of our modern way of life. He uses the metaphor of an earthquake: a series of "tectonic stresses" are accumulating underneath the surface, made worse by global connectivity and the growing ability of small groups to project violence. The moment of upheaval is hard to predict, but if the stresses come together they will produce an impact greater than the sum of their parts. Homer-Dixon offers a striking vision of how to confront this world of risk and uncertainty, calling for "resilience-enhancing" strategies that protect food- and energy-supply networks and that can better cope with surprise. He effectively conveys the mentality necessary to operate in this new era but is less clear about the needed political innovations.

To Sleep with the Angels or House That Love Built

2009-01-09T00:39:00.000-08:00

To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire

Author: David Cowan

The story of one of the deadliest fires in American history that took the lives of ninety-two children and three nuns at a Catholic elementary school in Chicago. An absorbing account...a tale of terror. --New York Times Book Review

Journal of American History -

A journalistic account of tragedy...haunting and honest.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

A harrowing depiction of carnage, hysteria, fear, faith, heroism, and heartbreak.

Publishers Weekly

On December 1, 1958, a fire at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago killed 92 pupils, most between the ages of nine and 12, and three nuns. This deeply affecting account of that tragedy by two Illinois journalists recreates the horror that destroyed a school and parish. The causes of the tragedy were manifold: outdated fire laws that permitted an edifice built before 1908 to escape a code passed in 1949 to insure safer schools; severe overcrowding; delay in reporting the fire; nuns ordering their pupils to pray rather than try to escape. Nor did municipal and archdiocesan officials help matters, their philosophy being that the fire was best forgotten; when a former student admitted to setting the blaze, they tried to conceal his confession. One positive result of the fire were the safety improvements made in 16,500 U.S. school buildings within a year. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Cowan, an independent journalist in the Chicago area, and Kuenster, a former reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily News, fashion a gripping story from the events surrounding the tragic 1958 fire that swept through Chicago's Our Lady of the Angels elementary school. The fire, which left 92 elementary school children and three nuns dead, had profound effects on surviving students, parents, the surrounding neighborhood, and the city of Chicago. The tragedy spawned a nationwide school fire-safety program that is now often taken for granted. Cowan and Kuenster piece together a moving narrative based on the eyewitness accounts of surviving children, parents, firemen, doctors, nurses, and arson investigators. Although appropriate for any collection that serves general readers, this book is particularly recommended for Chicago-area libraries.-Robert J. Favini, Bentley Coll. Lib., Waltham, Mass.

BookList

In Chicago on a cold December afternoon in 1958, Our Lady of the Angels School burned ferociously; within minutes, 92 students and 3 nuns perished. Chicago journalists Cowan and Kuenster, who began to research this story independently, combined forces to write their riveting chronicle of the fire and its aftermath as survivors dealt with physical and emotional scars. Graphic descriptions of how the fire spread and was finally quelled are coupled with heroic rescues and tragic deaths. Even seasoned firefighters were horrified by the number of children they found burned or asphyxiated in their second-floor classrooms. The inquest never determined the fire's cause, although two young boys were suspected of arson. Since both were underage at the time (in Illinois, no one under 13 can be prosecuted for setting a fire) and details of their confessions were inconclusive, neither was charged. As a result of this disaster, fire codes across the country were revised to require sprinkler systems in schools. This is a devastating tale that will not soon be forgotten.

New interesting book: Fat Counter or Im Still with You

House That Love Built: The Untold Story of Linda & Millard Fuller, Founders of Habitat for Humanity and the Fuller Center for Housing

Author: Bettie B Youngs

After pursuing their lifelong belief that every person deserves a "simple, decent place to live," Linda and Millard Fuller found themselves locked out of the Habitat for Humanity organization that they founded. Pending legal action forced them to remain silent. Now in The House That Love Built, the true story is told of how a dedicated, charismatic leader, who attracted people like President Jimmy Carter to his cause and raised millions of dollars, was wrongly accused of sexual misconduct and pushed aside by a Board with a new agenda for Habitat. Millard and Linda Fuller's story inspires entrepreneurial spirit?starting a business from a simple idea?and Christian spirit-sacrificing material success for making the world a better place. America's largest non-profit foundation Habitat for Humanity includes 1700 affiliates and two million people: during 30 years, hundreds of thousands of volunteers, donors and activists together built 200,000 homes. Youngs unravels the nationally publicized controversy in eloquent, compelling detail, including the sexual misconduct accusation and ensuing corporate "takeover." She demonstrates the power of unproven allegations and how they can be used to serve the purposes of whoever wields the power. The book inspires you to believe that you can make a difference in the world by donating a little time to a home-building project. Nothing appeals to readers more than the intrigue of controversy and the compassion of helping people. The House That Love Built has both.

Erica L. Foley - Library Journal

Christian self-help author Youngs's (Living the Ten Commandments in New Times: A Book for Teens) insightful biography, more of Millard than of Millard and Linda, includes a detailed history of Habitat for Humanity International. Millard became an entrepreneur in his youth, excelling in various sales endeavors; he and Linda were millionaires before they were 30. Youngs relates the spiritual and marital crises that followed and how the Fullers gave away their wealth and shifted their goals to loving God by serving humanity. Eventually, this calling resulted in the formation of the world's largest nonprofit home-building organization with the goal to end the blight of low-income housing and homelessness worldwide. Youngs devotes nearly one-third of the book to the conflicts between the Fullers and Habitat's board and to the firing of Millard in 2005. Spending so much time on these issues may seem biased, but this book is not a mere polemic; it is an informed look at two philanthropists and their revolutionary work. The parts about Millard's faith will resonate with Christian readers. Recommended for spiritual living or philanthropy sections in most public libraries. [The author is a friend of the Fullers.-Ed.]

The Sacred Balance or Bloody Williamson

2009-01-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

Author: David T Suzuki

The economy and global competitiveness are the bottom line for society and governments, or so says conventional wisdom. But what are the real needs that must be satisfied to live rich, fulfilling lives? This is the question David Suzuki explores in this wide-ranging study. Suzuki begins by presenting the concept of people as creatures of the Earth who depend on its gifts of air, water, soil, and sun energy. He shows how people are genetically programmed for the company of other species, and suffer enormously when we fail to live in harmony with them. And he analyzes those deep spiritual needs, rooted in nature, that are also a crucial component of a loving world. Drawing on his own experiences and those of others who have put their beliefs into action, The Sacred Balance is a powerful, passionate book with concrete suggestions for creating an ecologically sustainable, satisfying, and fair future by rediscovering and addressing humanity's basic needs.

Go to: Perfect Preserves or Nueva Cocina Saludable

Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness

Author: Paul M Angl

Williamson County in southern Illinois is well-known by historians and crime enthusiasts as "Bloody Williamson"... a dark (and most likely not appreciated) nickname that came about in the 1920's after being the scene of a bloody massacre, brutal battles with the Klan, and a fantastic Prohibition war between battling bootleggers. Regardless of how you look at it, the moniker of "Bloody" is something that Williamson County has earned!

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

	Preface and Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
Ch. 1	Reconstructing the 1930s	20
Ch. 2	Citizenship at Work	54
Ch. 3	A Labor-Management Accord?	98
Ch. 4	Erosion of the Union Idea	141
Ch. 5	Rights Consciousness in the Workplace	178
Ch. 6	A Time of Troubles	212
Ch. 7	What Is to Be Done?	246
	Notes	277
	Index	323

Women's Rights Books

The Truth or Talking Politics

The Truth (with Jokes)

Talking Politics

Subjectivity Identity Difference or Notes from Toyota land

Subjectivity, Identity, Difference: Retrieving Experience for Feminist Politics

Notes from Toyota-land: An American Engineer in Japan

Children of Global Migration or Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery

Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes

Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery

Table of Contents:

Landscapes of the Jihad or Nasser

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity

Nasser: The Last Arab

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Table of Contents:

Befriend and Betray or Baghdad Diaries

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle Of War And Exile

The New York Times

The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Penelope Power - KLIATT

Healthy Voices Unhealthy Silence or When Washington Shut Down Wall Street

Healthy Voices, Unhealthy Silence: Advocacy and Health Policy for the Poor

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy

Table of Contents:

Inheriting the City or Robert F Kennedy

Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age

What People Are Saying

Robert F. Kennedy: And the Death of American Idealism

Table of Contents:

Understanding Power or Mandela

Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Mandela: The Authorized Biography

KLIATT

American Empire or Preserving Memory

American Empire: A Debate

Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum

Deborah Lipstadt

Raul Hilberg

Philadelphia Inquirer

Stephen T. Katz

Bandits Prophets and Messiahs or Israels Occupation

Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus

Israel's Occupation

Publishers Weekly

Global Environmental Politics or Henry Adams

Global Environmental Politics

Henry Adams: History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (Library of America), Vol. 1

Table of Contents:

The Lazlo Letters or The Shape of the River

The Lazlo Letters

The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions

Richard D. Kahlenberg

New York Times

Los Angeles Times

Newsweek

Ronald Dworkin

The New York Times

Newsweek

Los Angeles Times

David Karen

David Gergen

What People Are Saying

Table of Contents:

Savage Peace or Crime Scene

Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America 1919

Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents:

Crime Scene: How Forensic Science Solves

Rebel in Chief or Fiscal Disobedience an Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa

Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush

The Washington Post - Jackson Diehl

Library Journal