Education Policies Books

Worlds Wine Markets or Cultural Resistance

2009-12-06T11:15:00.000-08:00

World's Wine Markets: Globalization at Work

Author: Kym Anderson

"The World's Wine Markets includes an in-depth look at the growth and impact of New World wine production on the Old World producers, revealing that between 1990 and 2001, the New World's combined share of world wine exports grew from 4 to 18 per cent, or from 10 to 35 per cent when intra-European Union trade is excluded. Original essays, by economists from each of the major wine producing and consuming regions in the world, analyse recent developments and future trends, and conclude that globalization of the industry is set to continue for the forseeable future. Furthermore they argue that with increasing globalization, there is a greater need than ever for systematic analysis of the world's wine markets." This work will appeal to students enrolled in wine marketing and business courses, those studying industrial organization, and economists and other social scientists interested in case studies of globalization at work. As well, wine industry participants interested in understanding the reasons behind the recent dramatic developments in the industry will find this book of great value.

Go to: Food in History or The Cooks Encyclopaedia

Cultural Resistance: A Reader

Author: Stephen Duncomb

From the Diggers seizing St. Georges Hill in 1649 to Hacktivists staging virtual sit-ins in the 21st century, from the retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has long been used as a political weapon. This expansive and carefully crafted reader brings together many of the classic texts that help to define culture as a tool of resistance. With illuminating introductions throughout, it presents a range of theoretical and historical writings that have influenced contemporary debate, providing tools for the reader's own interventions. In these pages can be found the work of Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Antonio Gramsci, C.L.R. James, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stuart Hall, Christopher Hill, Janice Radway, Eric Hobsbawm, Abbie Hoffman, Mahatma Gandhi, Dick Hebdige, Hakim Bey, Raymond Williams, Robin Kelley, Tom Frank and more than a dozen others—including a number of new activists/authors published here for the first time.

Cultural Resistance: A Reader will be an invaluable resource for instructors teaching courses in cultural studies, communications and politics. The book is also a tool for cultural activists and political organizers. But most importantly, Cultural Resistance will inspire everyday readers to resist.

Author Biography: Stephen Duncombe teaches the history and politics of media and culture at the Gallatin School of New York University. He is the author of Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, as well as a life-long political activist, most recently working with the Lower East Side Collective and Reclaim the Streets/New York City.

Christopher Hill, "Levellers and True Levellers," from The World Turned Upside Down
Raymond Williams, "Culture," from Keywords
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, from The German Ideology
Matthew Arnold, from Culture and Anarchy
Antonio Gramsci, from The Prison Notebooks
Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer"
Mikhail Bakhtin, from Rabelais and His World
James C. Scott, from Weapons of the Weak
Robin D.G. Kelley, from Race Rebels
Adolph Reed Jr., "Why Is There No Black Political Movement"
Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social Media"
Hakim Bey, from TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone
Simon Reynolds, from Generation Ecstasy
"Huge Mob Tortures Negro," account of a lynching in 1920
E.J. Hobsbawm, from Primitive Rebels
Robin D.G. Kelley, "OGs in Postindustiral Los Angeles," from Race Rebels
Stuart Cosgrove, 'The Zoot-suit and Style Warfare"
Dick Hebdige, "The Meaning of Mod"
John Clarke, "The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community"
Riot Grrrl, "The Riot Grrrl Is..."
Kathleen Hanna, interview in Punk Planet
Bertold Brecht, "Emphasis on Sport"
Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'"
Elaine Goodale Eastman "The Ghost Dance War," from Sister to the Sioux
Mahatma Gandhi, from Hind Swaraj
C.L.R. James, from Beyond a Boundary
Lawrence Levine, "Slave Songs and Slave Consciousness"
George Lipsitz, "Immigration and Assimilation: Rai, Reggae, and Bhangramuffin," from Dangerous Crossroads
Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own
Radicalesbians, "The Woman-Identified Woman"
Jean Railla, A Broom of One's Own, from Bust
Janice A. Radway, from Reading the Romance
John Fiske, "Shopping for Pleasure" from Reading the Popular
Theordor Adorno, "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening"
Richard Hoggart, from The Uses of Literacy
Malcolm Cowley, from Exile's Return
Thomas Frank, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent"
Abbie Hoffman, from Revolution for the Hell of It
Jerry Rubin, from Do It!
Barbara Epstein, "The Politics of Prefigurative Community"
John Jordan, "The Art of Necessity: The Subversive Imagination of Anti-road Protest and Reclaim the Streets"
Jason Grote, "The God that People Who Do Not Believe in God Believe In: Taking a Bust with Reverend Billy"
Andrew Boyd, "Truth Is A Virus; Meme Warfare and the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)"
Ricardo Dominguez, 'Electronic Disturbance: An Interview"

Ever Closer Union or Immigration Questions and Answers

2009-12-05T06:03:00.000-08:00

Ever Closer Union: An Introduction to Eruopean Integration

Author: Desmond Dinan

Ever Closer Union clearly explains the complexities of European integration from the 1950s to the present. This new edition retains the familiar three-part structure - history, institutions, and policies - but incorporates expanded coverage of both enlargement issues and constitutional change. New policy and institutional developments are thoroughly explored, and an entirely new chapter examines the decisionmaking dynamics among the Commission, Council, and Parliament. The completely revised chapter on the complicated EU-U.S. relationship includes discussions of the Bush administration's worldview, the broad repercussions of the terrorist attacks in the United States and Spain, and the ongoing fallout from the war in Iraq.

Interesting textbook: Moo Baa La La La or The Cat in the Hat

Immigration Questions and Answers

Author: Carl R Baldwin

Immigration Questions and Answers is a complete introduction to immigration law that will help immigrants become aware of their rights and know when and how to seek legal assistance. If you have a question or problem, this book offers detailed instructions on how to file petitions and applications successfully in order to get an immigration benefit - ranging from asylum, to a green card, to citizenship. Easy-to-understand answers are given to questions about working legally, job discrimination, temporary stays, the visa lottery, access to public benefits, and much more. Taking sharp issue with today's critics of both legal and illegal immigration, the book argues that we in the United States could not be competitive in the new global economy, or staff our hospitals, or care for our children, much less cut sugar cane and harvest apples, without the skill and hard work of men and women from all over the world.

Library Journal

Using a question-and-answer format, this helpful book provides detailed information on many issues facing immigrants, e.g., obtaining a green card, avoiding employment discrimination, and applying for citizenship and political asylum. Written in clear, straightforward language; for the general public.Jose M. Fornes

	Preface	5
1	Is Immigration Good for the U.S.?	9
2	Green Card Defined	15
3	Obtaining a Short Term Visa	21
4	Will the I.N.S. Keep You Out?	45
5	Political Asylum	57
6	Temporary Protected Status	71
7	The Visa Lottery	77
8	Helping Your Spouse Get a Green Card	83
9	Removing Conditional Residence	95
10	If You Are Battered	99
11	If You Are a Widow or Widower	103
12	Helping Your Child Get a Green Card	105
13	Visa Processing	113
14	How Employers Stay Legal	117
15	Can Your Employer Help You?	123
16	Labor Certification	133
17	Fighting Job Discrimination	139
18	Special Cases and Parole	143
19	If You Need Public Benefits	151
20	Ways To Become a Citizen	157
	Appendix	169
	Index	173

Structures of Memory or Martin Luther King JR and the Civil Rights Movement

2009-12-04T00:51:00.000-08:00

Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond

Author: Jennifer A Jordan

“This is an original and fascinating work that will be a welcome addition to the ever-growing conversation on the cultural functions of memorialization, official and vernacular memorial processes, and the relation between remembering and forgetting. Jordan reminds us, as well she should, that what does not gain a place in the landscape is as revealing as what does finally gain the prestige of a public site.”—Edward T. Linenthal, Indiana University

Look this: Trading for a Living or Harvest for Hope

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: Controversies and Debates

Author: John A Kirk

Combining the latest scholarship with John Kirk's informed commentary, this sourcebook throws a powerful light on the civil rights movement and its most influential leader. Debates that until now have been carried out across a range of books and journals are here brought together for the first time in a clear, helpful volume which introduces readers to key topics, debates and scholars in the field. Essential reading for all those with an interest in the man and the movement.

Speeders Guide to Avoiding Tickets or The Middle East and the United States

2009-12-02T19:39:00.000-08:00

Speeder's Guide to Avoiding Tickets

Author: James M Eagan

Regardless of your record as a driver, everyone speeds sometimes. You are on the open road, no one around for miles, and so you step on the gas pedal. Then you experience a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach -- and in your wallet -- when you see a flashing red light in the rearview mirror. Now you can ease on down the road without paying the high price of traffic tickets, inflated insurance premiums and expensive lawyer's fees. Former New York State Trooper James M. Eagan tells you how-with invaluable tips and trade secrets that the police don't want you to know.

What makes a cop "tick" -- and how to use it to your advantage
What dates and times are safest to step on the gas and when you are most likely to get caught
How to avoid talking yourself into tickets
What stories and excuses will often work
How to spot an unmarked car
Clipping the wings off "The Bear in the Air"
And much more!

Whether you drive for business or pleasure -- or simply suffer from occasional leadfoot -- you cannot afford to be without this book!

Books about: Unlimited Power or How to Master the Art of Selling

The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, Vol. 4

Author: David W Lesch

The fourth edition of the acclaimed The Middle East and the United States brings together scholars and diplomats from the Middle East, Europe, and North America to provide an objective, cross-cultural assessment of US policy toward the Middle East. The new edition has been thoroughly and thoughtfully reorganized, revised, and updated to include five new chapters on topics such as the 2003 war in Iraq and its aftermath, the US promotion of democracy in the region, and recent developments in the Arab-Israeli arena.

Booknews

An explication of Indian communalism directed primarily to a US audience and representing the current state of research on Hindu nationalism. The 12 essays, culled from a seminar collaboration, combine methods in anthropology, history, political science and religious studies to develop the ideas of communal mobilization, and the genealogies of colonialism and conflict among both the Hindu and Muslim populations. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Note on the Text
	Introduction	1
1	The Ironic Legacy of the King-Crane Commission	11
2	The "Ambassador for the Arabs": The Locke Mission and the Unmaking of U.S. Development Diplomacy in the Near East, 1952-1953	29
3	U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Iran During the Mussadiq Era	51
4	Iranian Perceptions of the United States and the Mussadiq Period	67
5	The Mussadiq Era in Iran, 1951-1953: A Contemporary Diplomat's View	79
6	National Security Concerns in U.S. Policy Toward Egypt, 1949-1956	91
7	The United States and King Hussein	103
8	The Jekyll-and-Hyde Origins of the U.S.-Jordanian Strategic Relationship	117
9	The 1957 American-Syrian Crisis: Globalist Policy in a Regional Reality	131
10	U.S. Policy and Military Intervention in the 1958 Lebanon Crisis	147
11	The United States and Nasserist Pan-Arabism	167
12	The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: U.S. Actions and Arab Perceptions	189
13	Flawed Strategies and Missed Signals: Crisis Bargaining Between the Superpowers, October 1973	209
14	The United States and Israel: The Nature of a Special Relationship	233
15	The U.S.-PLO Relationship: From Dialogue to the White House Lawn	249
16	The Specifics of the Meaning of Peace in the Middle East	265
17	Kuwait and the United States: The Reluctant Ally and U.S. Policy Toward the Gulf	279
18	From "Over the Horizon" to "Into the Backyard": The U.S.-Saudi Relationship and the Gulf War	299
19	The Invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War: Dilemmas Facing the Israeli-Iraqi-U.S. Relationship	313
20	U.S. Input into Iraqi Decisionmaking, 1988-1990	325
21	The U.S.-GCC Relationship: Is It a Glass Leaking or a Glass Filling?	355
22	The Soviet Union, the Gulf War, and Its Aftermath: A Case Study in Limited Superpower Cooperation	379
23	The Soviet Perception of the U.S. Threat	403
24	New U.S. Policies for a New Middle East?	413
25	Islamist Perceptions of U.S. Policy in the Middle East	419
	About the Book	439
	About the Editor and Contributors	441
	Index	445

Reconciliation or Fighting Terrorism

2009-12-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu

Author: Michael Jesse Battl

Reconciliation is Michael Battle's highly original analysis of Bishop Tutu's theology of ubuntu - an African concept recognizing that persons and groups form their identities in relation to one another. This model proved successful in opposing the apartheid racism in South Africa, but it also offers a Christian paradigm for resisting oppression wherever it appears. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including Tutu's unpublished speeches and sermons, as well as many secondary sources, Battle portrays the Nobel Peace Prize winner as a theologian who embraces Anglican orthodoxy and who has consistently applied that framework to issues of race in South Africa. Yet Tutu is much more than a conventional theologian. He is, as Battle shows, not only an articulate preacher and at times an unwilling politician, but a genuinely committed theologian whose deepest roots are in prayer and protest.

	Foreword
	Preface
1	Introduction: Holding Back a Tide of Violence	1
2	A Milk-and-Honey Land of Oppression	11
3	Delicate Networks of Interdependence	35
4	Filled with the Fullness of God	54
5	Inspired by Worship and Adoration of God	83
6	An African Spirituality of Passionate Concern	123
7	Conclusion: God and a Political Priest	154
	Notes	183
	Bibliography	217

New interesting textbook: Nasty Bits or The Machu Picchu Guidebook

Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network

Author: Benjamin Netanyahu

The growth of terrorism has been accompanied by a steady escalation in the means of violence, from small arms used to assassinate individuals, to automatic weapons used to mow down groups, to car bombs now capable of bringing down entire buildings, to lethal chemicals that (as in Japan) can threaten entire cities. The very real possibility that terrorist states and organizations may soon acquire horrific weapons of destruction and use them to escalate terrorism beyond our wildest nightmares has not been addressed properly by Western governments. It mus be recognized that barring firm and resolute action by the United States and the West, terrorism in the 1990s will expand dramatically both domestically and internationally. Today's tragedies can either be the harbingers of much greater calamities yet to come or the turning point in which free societies once again mobilize their resources, their ingenuity, and their will to wipe out this evil from our midst. Fighting terrorism is not a "policy option"; it is a necessity for the survival of our democratic society and our freedoms. Showing how this battle can be won is the purpose of this book.

New York Times - Richard Bernstein

Vigorous . . . Mr.Netanyahu's argument, which is soberly and clearly made, cannot be taken lightly.

Washington Post Book World - Peter W. Rodman

Netanyahu has produced a small volume updating the story of international terrorism and his advice on how to defeat it.

Washington Times - Bill Gertz

An excellent primer on the groups, motives and methods of the current terrorist threat.

Detroit News - Berl Faulbaum

. . . makes a strong case that the west has not prepared itself properly for increased domestic and international terrorism.

Broken Promises Broken Dreams or George Washingtons Expense Account

2009-11-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: The Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience

Author: Alice Rothchild

The tragedies of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are never far from the pages of the mainstream press. Yet it is rare to hear about the reality of life on the ground, and it is rarer still when these voices belong to women. This book records the intimate journey of a Jewish-American physician travelling and working within Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Alice Rothchild grew up in a family grounded by the traumas of the Holocaust and passionately devoted to Israel. This book recounts her experiences as she grapples with the reality of life in Israel, the complexity of Jewish Israeli attitudes, and the hardships of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

Through her work with a medical and human rights project, Rothchild is able to offer a unique personal insight into the conflict. Based on interviews with a number of different women, she examines their diverse perspectives and the complexities of Jewish Israeli identity. Rothchild's memorable account brings to life the voices of people mutually entwined in trauma, and explores individual examples of resilience and resistance.

Ultimately, the book raises troubling questions regarding U.S. policy and the insistence of the mainstream Jewish community on giving unquestioning support to all Israeli policy.

Alice Rothchild, M.D., serves on the steering committee of Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston. She has worked with medical delegations to Israel and the Occupied Territories with the JVP Health and Human Rights Project. A Boston-based physician, she has sought to build alliances between Israelis and Palestinians in opposition to Israeli policies of occupation and to promote a morehonest dialogue within the Jewish community in the United States.

Visit the author's website at brokenpromisesbrokendreams.com

George Washington's Expense Account: General George Washington and Marvin Kitman, PFC (Ret.)

Author: Marvin Kitman

In George Washington's Expense Account — the best-selling expense account in history — Kitman shows how Washington brilliantly turned his noble gesture of refusing payment for his services as commander in chief of the Continental Army into an opportunity to indulge his insatiable lust for fine food and drink, extravagant clothing, and lavish accommodations. In a close analysis of the document that financed our Revolution, Kitman uncovers more scandals than you can shake a Nixon Cabinet member at — and serves each up with verve and wit.

Please Dont Remain Calm or Free Lunch

2009-11-29T03:51:00.000-08:00

Please Don't Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries

Author: Michael Kinsley

A lucid deconstruction of the politics and public figures shaping the social, financial, and military disasters of our times.

This selection of Michael Kinsley's trenchant editorial writing in Slate (and elsewhere) since 1995 covers the end of the Clinton era (Monica, impeachment, etc.) and two terms of George W. Bush (9/11, the War on Terror, Iraq, etc.).

During this time Kinsley left Washington for Seattle and founded Slate, was opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, underwent brain surgery for Parkinson's disease, and had other adventures that are reflected here. Although mostly about politics, there are articles and essays about other things, such as the future of newspapers, the existence of God, and why power women love Law and Order.

This is the work of a writer at the top of his form. Kinsley's wit is a weapon that any talk-show host or elected blowhard should envy and fear, and the reader will cherish his sense of humor, which enlivens even the toughest subject matter.

The New York Times - Jonathan Freedland

Most columnists would be sufficiently self-aware to admit that collections like this shouldn't really work: an op-ed article is written for that week rather than posterity. Yet Kinsley pulls it off, thanks chiefly to a personality that you want to spend more, not less, time with. He is honest, admitting that he didn't read all the books when judging the National Book Award; generous, giving the credit for Slate's achievements to his successor; and self-deprecating, even when fessing up to his years in denial about his own Parkinson's disease, about which he is plain-spoken and never mawkish. So you find yourself like a couch potato with a bar of chocolate, polishing off a piece only to indulge yourself with just one more. You're left with a strong sense of what a turbulent, even gloomy decade this has been since Kinsley headed west—yet somehow you've enjoyed reliving it.

Publishers Weekly

Partisan political writing generally enjoys the life expectancy of a weather report, but this collection of Kinsley's trenchant commentary is worth preserving. Kingsley has assembled 127 essays on the American political scene from the Clinton administration to the present. He eschews deep analysis in favor of poking fun at the foibles, evasions, contradictions and hypocrisies of American public figures and the media that feed off them, with occasional detours into his personal life. Inevitably, some pieces show their age, but readers will relish his skewering of the 2000 and 2004 elections. Kinsley is irresistible when he steps back from reporting to pose his trademark provocative-often humorous-questions: Why is it admirable for scientists to love science and businessmen to love business, but political candidates must proclaim how much they hate politics? Is Pat Robertson anti-Semitic or simply nuts? Does President Bush really believe his claim that all Muslims and Jews are going to hell because they don't accept Jesus? While essays from recent years naturally feel more relevant, every essay in this collection sparkles with Kinsley's trademark brand of wit. (Apr.)

Introduction     xiii
1995-1999
Long Sentence     3
Confessions of a Buckraker     6
EDITORIAL: A Dangerous Medium     11
Slate: A Policy Statement     13
Bill Clinton's Browser     14
In Defense of Matt Drudge     15
Lies, Damned Lies, and Impeachment     17
The Trouble with Scoops     21
Easy Answers     23
Internet Envy     28
Go to Hell     32
2000
Six Degrees of America Online     36
McCain's High Horse     38
Republicans for Hillary     41
The Secret Shame of the Professional Politician     43
McCain for Veep: It's Not Too Late!     45
It's an Outrage (Never Mind What)     48
Frankly, My Dear     51
Voters to Decide Election     53
My Plan's Better than Your Plan     56
The Emperor's New Brain     58
Fun with Numbers     61
Democracy Is Approximate: Live with It     62
No Contest     65
W and Justice     67
Equal Protection of Whom? From What?     70
Reasonable People Can Differ?     72
2001
God Bless YouAnd...     75
Reagan's Record     77
Reagan's Record II     80
O'Reilly among the Snobs     82
The Mystery of the Departing Guests     84
Confessions of a McCain-Feingold Criminal     87
It's Not Just the Internet     89
Triumph of the Right-Wing Dorks     92
Trent Lott's Stages of Grief     94
Pandora's Cable Box     96
Shining C     99
Equality at the Airport, I     101
What Is Terrorism?     104
New York Becomes Seattle     106
An Agenda for Victory     109
Is Disappearing     111
Osama Done Told Me     113
The Genius of Ari Fleischer     116
Forgetting Afghanistan     118
In Defense of Denial     121
2002
Listening to Our Inner Ashcroft     125
The Goldberg Variations     127
Are Conservatives Brainier?     132
Davos for Beginners     134
What Is Terrorism, Continued     137
Social Hypochondria     139
Equality at the Airport, II     141
The Justice's Wife's Tale     144
An Ode to Managers      146
Lying in Style     149
Some Kind Words for Cardinal Law     151
This Throne of Kings     153
The Hindsight Saga     155
Blame the Accountant     158
King George     160
Disabilities and Inabilities     163
It's Good Enough     165
Who Wants This War?     167
Government by Osmosis     169
What Time Is It?     172
Ours Not to Reason Why     174
The Secret Vice of Power Women     178
Curse You, Robert Caro!     180
Computers Go Too Far     183
Why Innocent People Confess     185
How Reaganomics Became Rubinomics     188
Lott's Adventures in Gaffeland     190
2003
Pious Pair     193
Morally Unserious     195
Desert Shields     198
J'Accuse, Sort Of     200
Unauthorized Entry     203
Unsettled     205
Bush's War     208
Bill Bennett's Bad Bet     210
The Fabulist     213
Sympathy for the New York Times     215
Supreme Court Fudge     218
Abolish Marriage     220
Who Is Buried in Bush's Speech?     223
At Least Say You're Sorry     225
Just Supposin'     228
Filter Tips     230
Taking Bush Personally     232
The Religious Superiority Complex     235
Attack Geography     237
When Good News Is Bad News     240
2004
Novak Agonistes     243
Blind, Deaf, and Lame     246
"I'm Not a Quitter!"     248
Take This Column, Please     251
Paradise Lost     253
The Trouble with Optimism     259
A Good Editorial     262
The Case against George W. Bush     267
Social Security Privatization Won't Work     270
2005
The Century's Greatest Love Story     272
No Smoking Gun     274
Niger-Scooter-Plame-Gate     277
How Conservative Is "Too Conservative"?     280
Guess Who's Not Coming to Dinner?     282
Cheney Weighs In     285
The New Corruption     287
2006
Wendy     290
The Future of Newspapers     292
Give Me Liberty or Let Me Think about It     295
Why Lawyers Are Liars     297
The Ayatollah Joke Book     300
What's Your Theory?     303
M1 and Me     305
The Twilight of Objectivity     308
Win a Date with E. J. Dionne     311
Above the Law     314
Please Don't Remain Calm     317
How I Spent My Summer Vacation     320
Yrotciv in Iraq     323
War and Embryos     325
2007
In God, Distrust     328
We Try Harder (but What's the Point?)     332
How Many Divisions Has the Congress?     334
Index     337

Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)

Author: David Cay Johnston

The bestselling author of Perfectly Legal returns with a powerful new exposé.

Kirkus Reviews

An exhaustive litany of federal, state and even local giveaways to the very wealthy, described in agonizing and depressing detail. Beginning in the Reagan years, the U.S. government has placed a growing economic burden onto those least able to bear it, declares Johnston (Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich-and Cheat Everybody Else, 2003, etc.). It subsidizes the prosperous through tax breaks and other giveaways while stripping away protections for consumers, retirees, workers and investors. Starting with the sordid story of an exclusive Oregon golf course whose wealthy patrons enjoy recreation indirectly paid for by taxpayers, Johnston details dozens of giveaways, demonstrating beyond doubt that while government policies have made life much easier for those at the very top of the income pyramid, the great majority have it much worse than ever before. Examples range from the infamous-electricity deregulation, the collapse of Enron and the resulting astronomical spikes in the cost of power-to the obscure. In the latter category is Cabela's, a sporting-goods behemoth that convinced the citizens of tiny Hamburg, Pa., to grant it an exemption from property and sales taxes in exchange for locating a new megastore in their community. The total subsidy: some $8,000 for each man, woman and child in the community. Stories like these are no longer shocking, and Johnston fails to reach beyond sensationalism to solutions. In a final chapter, he suggests that citizens embrace democratic principles, but is disappointingly vague on how that might manifest itself in policies that would right the sinking ship he so vividly describes. Without solutions, thisremains little more than a list of grievances.

What People Are Saying

"If you're concerned about congressional earmarks, stock options (especially backdated options), hedge fund tax breaks, abuse of eminent domain, subsidies to sports teams, K Street lobbyists, the state of our health-care system, to say nothing of the cavernous gap between rich and poor, you'll read this fine book—as I did—with a growing sense of outrage. Free Lunch makes it clear that it's high time for 'We the People' to stand up and be counted."
—John C. Bogle, founder and former chairman, The Vanguard Group

"With clarity, conciseness, and cool, fact-saturated analysis, Mr. Johnston, the premier investigative reporter on how industry and commerce shift risks and costs to taxpayers, sends the ultimate message to all Americans—either we demand to have a say or we will continue to pay, pay, and pay."
—Ralph Nader

One Nation Underground or American Made

2009-11-27T22:40:00.000-08:00

One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture

Author: Kenneth Ros

"Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground explores U.S. nuclear history from the bottom up—literally. . . . Rose deserves credit for not trivializing this period of our history, as so many retrospectives of the Cold War era have tended to do."
—Journal of Cold War Studies

"Important . . . One Nation Underground is an elegant account of the issues involved in the nuclear age."
—Pacific Northwest Quarterly

"This is a fine compilation of a massive amount of research, well founded in the existing literature, and presented in a readable narrative."
—Journal of Illinois History

"A readable short history of the fallout shelters and the broader political debate over civil defense. . . . Mr. Rose is a good storyteller, and One Nation Underground is engagingly writen, with an array of evocative photgraphs."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Rose writes well, with a good eye for the telling phrase and revealing example."—Journal of Social History

For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being.

Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism,what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war?

Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

Wall Street Journal, Nov 13, 2001 - Melanie Kirkpatrick

Mr. Rose is a good storyteller, and "One Nation Underground" is engagingly written, with an array of evocative photographs.

Washington Monthly

"A broad-ranging narrative that covers the politics, culture, religion, and even engineering of the Cold War era."

Christian Science Monitor

An interesting and amply illustrate dcommentary on cold war concerns.

Library Journal

Although Rose (history, California State Univ., Chico; American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition) might have wished his popular history of the Cold War to work from below ground on up, his excavation of the great fear of the Fifties reveals a discourse overwhelmingly top-down. Government and civic elites propagandized for shelters built from theoretical funds that mostly were never appropriated; average citizens fretted that their neighbors were building bunkers to exclude them come Armageddon, yet apparently very few private spaces were ever erected. Rose demonstrates that the shelter was the leading if least visible icon of a civil defense debate that questioned whether nuclear wars were confinable, hence survivable, but also whether shelter was more practical or at least not incompatible with mass evacuation. Rose reconstructs Herman Kahn, the pro-limited nuclear war physicist/Dr. Strangelove model, as the most intriguing if possibly insane personage in his account but leaves much possibly fertile soil unturned. (What did history's most famous shelterists, the World War II British, think of their Yankee cousins' official mania only a few years later?) This book fails to live up to the originality promised by the subject but as a first-of-area undertaking should be acquired by academic libraries. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Treating the fallout shelter as an American icon, this history discusses its significance in the context of the Cold War. It considers the implications of the fallout shelter<-->and the fact that so few Americans actually built them<-->for the national self-image, the ideals of citizenship, and moral thinking. The book examines the role schools, film, government bureaucracies, civil defense efforts, and literature each played in forming the fallout shelter culture. Rose teaches history at California State University, Chico. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

New interesting book: Microsoft Office System Step by Step 2003 or Start Your Own Business On eBay

American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work

Author: Nick Taylor

Seventy-five years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, here for the first time is the remarkable story of one of its enduring cornerstones, the Works Progress Administration (WPA): its passionate believers, its furious critics, and its amazing accomplishments.

The WPA is American history that could not be more current, from providing economic stimulus to renewing a broken infrastructure. Introduced in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment and desperation ruled the land, this controversial nationwide jobs program would forever change the physical landscape and social policies of the United States. The WPA lasted eight years, spent $11 billion, employed 8½ million men and women, and gave the country not only a renewed spirit but a fresh face. Now this fascinating and informative book chronicles the WPA from its tumultuous beginnings to its lasting presence, and gives us cues for future action.

The Washington Post - H. W. Brands

Taylor's American-Made is bigger than its title suggests; he provides a succinct survey of the Great Depression and particularly its consequences for workers…he interweaves personal stories with explanations of policy. His manner is brisk; chapters of four and five pages fly by. He treats Roosevelt sympathetically, but his hero is Harry Hopkins, the WPA's founding director.

Publishers Weekly

Launched in 1935, at the bottom of the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) served as a linchpin of FDR's "New Deal." Through the WPA, Roosevelt put millions of unemployed Americans to work on public construction projects, from dams and courthouses to parks and roads. The WPA's Federal Writers Project employed a host of artists and writers (among them Jackson Pollock, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and Studs Terkel); theater and musical artists also received funding. Taylor (Ordinary Miracles: Life in a Small Church) vividly and painstakingly paints the full story of the WPA from its inception to its shutdown by Congress in 1943, at which point the war boom in manufacturing had made it unnecessary. In an eloquent and balanced appraisal, Taylor not only chronicles the WPA's numerous triumphs (including New York's LaGuardia Airport) but also its failures, most notably graft and other chicanery at the local level. Taylor details as well the dicey intramural politics in Congress over which states and districts would get the largest slice of the WPA pie. All told, Taylor's volume makes for a splendid appreciation of the WPA with which to celebrate the upcoming 75th anniversary of the New Deal's beginnings in 1933. (Mar. 4)

Frederick J. Augustyn Jr. - Library Journal

Taylor (coauthor, John Glenn: A Memoir) acknowledges 2008's 75th anniversary of the New Deal (dated to FDR's first inaugural), followed in 2010 by that of the Works Progress Administration (1935-42)-later called the Work Projects Administration (WPA). His is a balanced summary of one of FDR's most prolific agencies. Although introductive for general readers and younger scholars on the subject of what a government can accomplish in a time of need, it is also informative for professional historians. The WPA's famous first commissioner, Harry Hopkins, was reassigned from the Civil Works Administration, later to move to the Commerce Department and then to become a presidential adviser. Taylor shows that the WPA also evolved from diverse programs to those focused on construction. The post office murals; the Federal Writers, Theater, and Music programs; what is now known as Camp David; and numerous parks, zoos, recreational areas, and airports are iconic products of the WPA. It also did work in the library field and offered a pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Its follies and triumphs are praised and critiqued here in a readable, often investigative, and apparently first full retrospective. Lavishly illustrated, the book also has a list of New Deal organizations, a partial list of construction projects, a New Deal chronology, and endnotes. It will be a boon to all 20th-century history collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/1/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

Breezy but well-considered account of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal's signature jobs program. Taylor (Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War, 2000, etc.) writes popular history, which means that academics may find his fast-paced narrative lacking in complex ideas. He peppers descriptions of major policy clashes with profiles of destitute people whose lives were literally saved by going on the workforce program. The book is filled with plucky, fast-talking characters who by dint of charm and grit pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to participate in the nationwide effort to put the jobless to work. Taylor's principal hero is Harry Hopkins, the tireless, charismatic FDR aide who steamrolled bureaucratic opposition to get the WPA up and running, then saw it through to the end, at the expense of his health and personal political ambitions, until it was ultimately derailed by the onset of World War II. The author paints a colorful, compelling picture of how miserable life was for most Americans after the stock market crash of 1929; his portrait of government competence and visionary goals contrasts pointedly with the radically restricted ambitions of today's politicians. He gives airtime to critics who found the WPA anti-business and anti-American, who invented the term "boondoggle" to describe the government's sometimes wasteful methods for getting people back to work. He also shows those voices drowned out by the concerns of starving citizens and reminds us that the WPA built some of the nation's most beloved pieces of infrastructure, from San Francisco's Cow Palace to New York's LaGuardia Airport. Readable and vividly rendered-anear-definitive account of one of the most massive government interventions into domestic affairs in American history. Agent: Lynn Nesbit/Janklow & Nesbit Associates

Irans Military Forces and Warfighting Capabilities or Land Mosaics

2009-11-26T17:28:00.000-08:00

Iran's Military Forces and Warfighting Capabilities: The Threat in the Northern Gulf

Author: Anthony H Cordesman

Nations around the world are uncertain and anxious about Iran's intentions in the Middle East and the wider global arena. Its current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made no secret of his opposition to Western society, particularly Israel, and his desire to acquire nuclear weapons. However, as Anthony Cordesman and Martin Kleiber point out, Ahmadinejad does not necessarily speak for the Iranian clerical regime, who operate in a cloud of secrecy and also directly control Iran's military. Given the ambiguous nature of Iran's global objectives, this new study focuses on the tangible aspects of Iran's military forces and takes an objective look at the realistic threats that Iran poses the region and the world. The authors systematically assess each aspect of Iranian military forces from their conventional armies to their asymmetric threat via proxy wars in the region.

New interesting book: Cannibal Island or Inclusion

Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions

Author: Richard T T Forman

Animals, water, wind, and people flow at different rates according to spatial patterns common to almost all landscapes and regions. This up-to-date synthesis explores the ecology of heterogeneous land areas, where natural processes and human activities interact to produce an ever changing mosaic. The subject has great relevance to contemporary society and this book reflects the breadth of this importance: there are many ideas and applications for planning, conservation, design, management, sustainability and policy. Spatial solutions are provided for society's land-use objectives. Students and professionals alike will be drawn by the attractive and informative illustrations, the conceptual synthesis, the wide international perspective, and the range of topics and research covered.

Booknews

A state-of-the-art synthesis that explores the ecology of heterogeneous land areas, where natural processes and human activities spatially interact to produce a continually changing mosaic. The foundations of landscape and regional ecology are first introduced. Early chapters then explore the array of patch, corridor, and matrix types, plus movements and flows between adjacent elements, as the essential building blocks of land mosaics. Middle chapters fit these spatial elements together, and explore movements and flows through the resulting mosaics. Later chapters then explore the mosaics changing over time, including alternative pattern sequences in planning or managing landscapes or regions. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Confronting Iran or Personal Memoirs of U S Grant

2009-11-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East

Author: Ali M Ansari

Iran refuses to relent in developing nuclear technology, despite U.N. sanctions. Rumors persist that Israel is drawing up plans for military strikes. Neither the emboldened Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor the embattled President Bush has relented in his war of words. How did we get here? Iran expert Ali Ansari sets the current crisis in the context of a long history of mutual antagonism. From the overthrow of Mosaddeq in 1953 to the hostage crisis in 1979 and, more recently, the Gulf War and the War in Iraq, both Iranian and American politicians have forged conflicting narratives about an "evil empire" lying half a world away-resulting in a mutual mistrust that may ultimately lead to war. An authoritative account of failed foreign policy, this book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this explosive region.

Chronology     ix
Introduction     1
Imperial Hubris     7
1953     19
1979     55
The United States and the Islamic Republic     93
Khatami and the Reform Movement     147
Iran-US Relations in the Shadow of 9/11     165
Nuclear Politics     197
Conclusion     233
Afterword     243
Acknowledgments     257
Notes     259
Glossary     275
Sources and Guide to Further Reading     278
Index     281

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Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant

Author: Ulysses S Grant

After three deadly years of fighting, President Abraham Lincoln had seen a little progress in the West against the Confederacy, but in the main theater of operations, Virginia, the lines were almost exactly where they had been when the American Civil War started. The war was at a stalemate with northern public support rapidly fading. Then, Lincoln summoned General Ulysses S. Grant, victor of the Vicksburg campaign, to come East. In little over a year, America's most catastrophic armed conflict ended, the Union was preserved, and slavery was abolished. This book details how these triumphs were achieved and in the telling earned international acclaim as a superb example of an English-language personal chronicle.

About the Author
Ulysses S. Grant remains one of the giants in American history, revered and respected by his contemporaries, but viewed ever after as one of the country's most controversial figures. He graduated from West Point in 1843 and went on to have a successful military career before becoming the 18th President of the United States for two terms. These grand accomplishments stand in stark contrast with his failures. He became an alcoholic, a failed businessman, and the administration during his presidency is regarded as one of the most corrupt in U.S. history. While other prominent Americans look to publishing their recollections as a crowning event undertaken in the leisure of retirement, Grant had to write his 1885 memoir as a means to pay his debts and support his family.

Booknews

**** Reprint of the 1885-86 edition (cited in BCL3) with a selection of Matthew Brady photos. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Last Campaign or Blueprint for Action

2009-02-21T20:41:00.000-08:00

Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election

Author: Zachary Karabell

In The Last Campaign, Zachary Karabell rescues the 1948 presidential campaign from the annals of political folklore ("Dewey Defeats Truman," the Chicago Tribune memorably and erroneously heralded), to give us a fresh look at perhaps the last time the American people could truly distinguish what the candidates stood for.

In 1948, Harry Truman, the feisty working-class Democratic incumbent was one of the most unpopular presidents the country had ever known. His Republican rival, the aloof Thomas Dewey, was widely thought to be a shoe-in. These two major party candidates were flanked on the far left by the Progressive Henry Wallace, and on the far right by white supremacist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. The Last Campaign exposes the fascinating story behind Truman’s legendary victory and turns a probing eye toward a by-gone era of political earnestness, when, for “the last time in this century, an entire spectrum of ideologies was represented,” a time before television fundamentally altered the political landscape.

Library Journal

Dewey defeats Truman! claims Karabell (Architects of Intervention) in this engaging narrative of the 1948 presidential election. It was the final contest in which voters could choose from four candidates representing quite distinct political ideologies and the final campaign before television "worked its destructive magic." Incumbent President Harry Truman and Tom Dewey, his Republican opponent, offered voters moderate choices, while Progressive Henry Wallace and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond were extreme alternatives. The author is strongest discussing the impact of the press, polls, and radio and describing the importance of the convention, which was then "a mix of high politics, low politics and entertainment." Truman was the last candidate to verbally savage his opponents, especially Dewey, who instead ran a civil but dull campaign--the kind future voters would come to expect. Dewey's campaign and not Truman's "Give-'em-Hell-Harry" strategy became the model for following elections. In this respect, the author concludes, Dewey did indeed defeat Truman. Along with Gary Donaldson's more analytical Truman Defeats Dewey (LJ 10/15/98), Karabell provides an intriguing overview of this watershed election. Recommended for all libraries.--Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twsp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Michael Tomasky

…frank and suggestive…Tikkun

NY Times Book Review

Brings all four candidates to life skillfully recreating a tumultuous time... A vivid, entertaining book.

Boston Globe Magazine

The perfect antidote to this year's pale imitation of a political campaign.

What People Are Saying

Michael Beschloss
An absorbing, intelligent, sometimes startling account of the outsized personalities & drama and the larger forces behind a legendary campaign.

Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating

Author: Thomas P M Barnett

The strategically crucial sequel to the New York Times bestseller.

The Pentagon's New Map was one of the most talked-about books of the year-a fundamental reexamination of war and peace in the post-9/11 world that provided a compelling vision of the future. Now, senior advisor and military analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett explores our possible long-and short-term relations with such nations and regions as Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East, China and North Korea, Latin America and Africa, while outlining the strategies to pursue, the entities to create, and the pitfalls to overcome. Barnett's new book is something more-a powerful road map through a chaotic and uncertain world to "a future worth creating."

Ready for Revolution or Memos to the Governor

2009-02-20T15:29:00.000-08:00

Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

Author: Stokely Carmichael

By any measure, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) fundamentally altered the course of history. Published at the fifth anniversary of Carmichael's death, this long-awaited autobiography fills a yawning gap in the American historical record as it chronicles the legendary civil rights leader's work as chairman of SNCC, patriarch of Black Power, Pan-African activist, and social revolutionary. It is an unflinching, searing, often visionary testament to the man's legacy and joins the works of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela as a crucial and colorful contribution to contemporary history.

As in life, the Carmichael in these pages is the definition of charisma and determination. In sharp prose full of Carmichael's candor, wit, irrepressible sense of irony, and undying love for his people, Ready for Revolution relates with clear-eyed intelligence the epic struggle for human liberation in our time. Carmichael -- who in 1978 changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of his mentors, the revolutionary African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure -- recounts the course of his own experience and struggles, ranging from the prison farms and lynch mobs of Mississippi through the firefights and political intrigue of the African liberation wars to Black Power and Pan-Africanism. His transformation from immigrant child to impassioned activist is spellbinding. Populated with an international cast of luminaries, including James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Miriam Makeba, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, Ready for Revolution captures, as few books ever have, the pulse of the cultural upheavals that define the modern world.

More than the sum of its parts, this book is the personal testimony of a supremely courageous and committed African-American freedom fighter, radical thinker, and warm and engaging human being. Regardless of whether one subscribes to Carmichael's politics and ideas, there is no denying the overwhelming influence he had on American lives and history. And his view from the eye of the black-struggle storm is invaluable.

The New York Times

… Ready for Revolution captures Carmichael's electrifying moments in the national spotlight and his emblematic journey from nonviolent integrationist to advocate of black power and Pan-African revolution. His faith in ultimate justice further buoys his memoir, as does his abiding gratitude at ''being part of a uniquely favored historical generation'' that ''presented black youth with an unprecedented opportunity to engage society militantly.'' —Robert Weisbrot

The Washington Post

The segment on the early 1960s, in which Carmichael relates his first-hand experience of key events of the times, are the most absorbing. Though the story of the Freedom Rides and SNCC's organizing in Mississippi have been told often, Carmichael's recounting is still gripping. The violence directed at activists was horrific, the sadism of white supremacists chilling, the determination of black Southerners inspiring. These chapters are especially timely as an antidote to contemporary rhetoric. As today's White House paints terrorism as a creation of foreigners with dark skins, Ready for Revolution reminds us of a much longer history of terrorism's white American face. — John D'Emilio

Publishers Weekly

The firebrand civil rights leader who led the call for Black Power in the 1960s looks back on nearly five decades of protests and freedom fighting in this passionate, posthumous autobiography. In collaboration with his friend Thelwell (a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts), Carmichael, who died in Guinea in 1998, traces his path from immigrant child of Trinidad to charismatic U.S. student activist and unrepentant revolutionary. The story is told largely in Carmichael's own stylish, often thunderous, first-person words and is named for the telephone greeting that the author used for much of his life. It covers the full sweep of events that shaped Carmichael's life: his years at the elite Bronx High School of Science and Howard University; summers spent registering black voters in Mississippi and Alabama; personal encounters with such leaders as Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and Malcolm X; and his sudden decision in 1969 to relocate to Africa and change his name to Kwame Ture. Carmichael also addresses controversial issues that surrounded him as a young civil rights activist: his splits with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers, and reports of ideological struggles with the pacifist King all "[u]tter, utter nonsense," he insists. While Carmichael's love for the African community and its traditions are infectiously passionate, the book's singular perspective, despite being intercut with other interviewees and sources, won't sustain every reader. The book is at its strongest when Carmichael recounts powerful I-was-there anecdotes (most notably from his days as a SNCC organizer in Mississippi) that civil rights historians will devour. At its best, this is a compelling portrait of a radical thinker who radiated charisma and practiced revolution to the end. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Dictated as autobiography before he succumbed to cancer, this is the story of the enlarging life of Stokely Carmichael (1941- 98), with Thelwell (Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, Afro-American studies) arranging the transcription for publication. Perhaps best known as the voice of the radical call "Black Power" while he headed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1966-67, Carmichael cast himself then and ever as a freedom fighter. He promoted a vision of radical change throughout the black diaspora, with an aim not of moving from the margin to the mainstream but of moving the mainstream past its contradictions and complacency with the products of materiality into the moral process of justice. His theme harkens back to his 1971 Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. He further embraced his affinity in changing his name in 1978 to honor revolutionary West African leaders Kwame Nhrumah of Ghana and Sekou Toure of Guinea. Eschewing reductionism, this profound and expansive work demands reading by all with any interest in the Civil Rights Movement, African American or Pan-African history, biography, or modern U.S. history and politics. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/03.]-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Howard Zinn
I knew Stokely as a brilliant, charismatic, and courageous figure in the Southern movement against racism. He was a thinker of extraordinary vision and a fighter of unequalled courage. We should welcome his autobiography as told to his friend Mike Thelwell.

Mary King
Located midway between Gandhi and Lenin, Stokely engendered fierce love from his fellow SNCC workers — something inexplicable to onlookers who reviled him. No one seriously interested in the U.S. civil rights movement should be without this book. The provocative is made plain, the enigmatic clarified, and the elusive becomes sensible — with Stokely's unique voice, wit, and verve.

William Julius Wilson
Fascinating...one of the most engaging and interesting autobiographies I have ever read. The struggles of the civil rights movement and Carmichael's vision of social justice come alive in this important contribution to social history.

Manisha Sinha
One of the most historically significant autobiographies from the civil rights era. No historian of the civil rights movement will be able to write about this period without consulting this indispensable book. Written in the language and from the heart of African America, it is also an immense stylistic achievement.

Robert A. Hill
Stokely Carmichael has bequeathed to us what is sure to become one of the great American autobiographies — the story...of a time when Americans, black and white, men and women, believed they could remake their America. With amazing humor, tempered by real humility, Ready for Revolution represents...what is surely the defining story of the American century.

I. Oriki: Ancestors and Roots
II. The House at the Forty-Two Steps
III. A Tale of Two Cities
IV. "A Better Neighborhood"
V. Bronx Science: Young Manhood
VI. Howard University: Everything and Its Opposite
VII. NAG and the Birth of SNCC
VIII. Nonviolence -- Apprenticeship in Struggle
IX. The Great Leap Forward: The Freedom Rides
X. Nashville: A New Direction
XI. To School or Not to School
XII. The Hearts and Minds of the Student Body
XIII. Mississippi (1961-65): Going Home
XIV. A Band of Brothers, a Circle of Trust
XV. Of Marches, Coalitions, Dreams, and Ambulance Chasing
XVI. Summer '64: Ten Dollars a Day and All the Sex You Can Handle
XVII. They Still Didn't Get It
XVIII. The Unforeseen Pitfalls of "Success" American Style
XIX. Selma: Crisis, Chaos, Opportunity
XX. Lowndes County: The Roar of the Panther
XXI. "Magnified, Scrutinized, Criticized..."
XXII. "We Gotta Make This Our Mississippi"
XXIII. Black Power and Its Consequences
XXIV. Around the World in Eighty Days
XXV. Mother Africa and Her Suffering Children
XXVI. In That Ol' Brier Patch
XXVII. Conakry, 1968: Home to Africa
XXVIII. Cancer Brings Out the Best in People
XXIX. A Struggle on Two Fronts

Postscript
Afterword: In the Tradition
Acknowledgments
Index

Read an Excerpt

Ready for Revolution

The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

By Stokely Carmichael Michael Ekwueme Thelwell

Scribner

Copyright © 2003 Kwame Ture and Ekwueme Michael Thelwel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-684-85004-4

Chapter One

"A Better Neighborhood"

My father's announcement took us children by surprise. My mother was part of the announcing, standing next to my father, her face a study in pride and determination. Any apprehension in her expression was held firmly in check beneath the weight of the first two.

My father explained to us that even before we'd arrived from Trinidad, he had been searching everywhere for a better home for us. Now, with the help of the Lord and our good mother, he had found what he was looking for. We would be moving in about two weeks, for our parents had bought us a house.

"Praise the Lord," Mummy Olga sighed audibly. "Praise His holy name."

It would be a better neighborhood, my mom said. We would have more living space. The streets would be quieter, less crowded, and the children would have more freedom. It was close to a school. My mother really emphasized that we would be moving to a "good neighborhood." I do not recall if she mentioned that it would be a white neighborhood, but it was.

The house was farther up in the Bronx, on Amethyst Street, in the Morris Park/White Plains Road area, not far from the Bronx Zoo. We would discover that the neighborhood was heavily Italian with a strong admixture of Irish. It was respectable working class, "ethnic," and very, very Catholic. On one side it bordered Pelham Parkway, across which was a predominantly Jewish enclave.

Ours would be the first, and for much of my youth, the only African family in that immediate neighborhood.

Because we were children, it never occurred to us to wonder why or how my father had been allowed to buy into that block. Nor how, on a single income - my father's, for our parents were very clear that my mother would stay home and mother us full-time - they could have scraped together the down payment. Or from what reserves of inner will and determination these two young immigrants had summoned the optimism and courage to take this major first step in pursuit of the American Dream.

I do recall the excitement of packing for the move, my sisters' and my gleeful anticipation of the promised space and freedom. How big would our house be? How fancy? Would we have our own rooms? This excitement lasted until we actually saw our new home.

It was a dump. I mean, it was a serious, serious dump. In fact, it was the local eyesore, and the reason - I now understand clearly - my father had been able to get the house with no visible opposition was because it was, hands down, the worst house on the block. It was so run-down, beat-up, and ill kept that no one wanted it. If that house were a horse, it would have been described as "hard rode and put up wet." A creature in dire need of a little care and nurturing. My dad was the "sucker" the owners had "seen coming" on whom to unload their white elephant. Which is one reason, I'm sure, the race question was overlooked. Who else could have been expected to buy such a wreck?

When we first saw it, we children were shocked. We looked around the house and at each other. I mean, even the cramped quarters at Stebbins looked like a mansion compared to what we were moving into. I mean, small, little, squinched-up rooms, dark, sunless interiors, filthy baseboards, a total mess and not at all inviting.

But our initial disappointment did not, of course, take into account my father - his supreme confidence in his skills and resourcefulness. He had indeed spent a long time looking for just such a house. Seeing not what was, but what could be. The neighborhood was quieter, and the house just three houses down from a school, and by the grace of God, sufficiently derelict and decrepit as to be available and affordable. Perfect. The Lord do move in mysterious ways.

My father had cased the joint purposefully and assured himself that the foundations were solid enough to afford him a base on which to build. He'd figured out exactly what he was going to do with this house.

Immediately when we moved in - my mother used to tease him fondly that he unpacked his tools before he unpacked his bed - my father set to work, even though it was January and cold. The remake took a long time, continuing in some way as long as he lived there. On those happy days when he had a construction job, my father worked on our house at night. On those all too many days when the union hiring hall failed to refer him to a job, he worked on our home day and night. Before he was through he had added rooms upstairs and down, knocked out walls to create more space, put in windows and doors. In a word, he completely transformed that wreck.

We learned later that as the neighbors looked on, amusement turned to skepticism, skepticism to wonder, and wonder to respect. They were, after all, working men and respected industry and competence. And as they watched the transformation from eyesore to one of the more attractive and well-maintained homes on the block, the neighbors recognized that because of my father the value of their property had not, as expected, plummeted by reason of our black presence, but had instead been enhanced.

The school three houses away on Hamilton Avenue was P.S. 34, where I and my three hearing sisters were immediately enrolled. The eldest, Umilta, who was deaf, attended a special school downtown. Naturally, for us, there would be the necessary period of adjustment - the new-kids-on-the-block syndrome. That we were African undoubtedly contributed something to this tension at first, but I must say clearly that I can remember no instances of overt racism from the neighborhood kids.

Whatever their elders' attitudes might have been, once we were accepted in "da hood" by the other kids, that was it. Once we became familiar presences on the turf, so to say, citizens in good standing of the neighborhood, we were to be defended against any strangers from outside, whatever their color. But there would be a period of adjustment.

Our mother was always at home and overwatchful with one eye tuned in on the street. She at first tried to keep us at home as much as possible, and for a long time she was never really completely comfortable with our visiting other children's homes. For this reason, my father built a clubhouse in our backyard for my friends. Our backyard became a focus of youth activity, which made my mother happy, as most of my time was spent where she could watch my movements and make sure I was not being subjected to racist insults.

I believe my status among the boys was determined early by my mom and a stocky, muscular kid named Paulie Henry. Paulie was Italian/Irish, and most bellicose. He would, as they say, fight at the drop of a hat - and drop the hat himself. One day early on, Paulie slapped around a friend of mine called Billy. I mean, ol' Paulie, like Stack O' Lee in the blues, had laid a hurtin' on poor Billy.

According to my mom, she came out and found me crying along with Billy. I guess, sensitive kid that I was, I was comforting Billy by helping him cry. Billy explained what Paulie had done and added that Paulie had promised to come back and beat me up too. In fact, he had gone to round up his boys to help him administer said beating.

"And where's this Paulie now?" my mother asked.

"Over in the school yard," Billy sobbed.

Before the words were well out of his mouth, my mother stormed into the school yard, trailed a little hesitantly by me and Billy.

"Which one of you is Paulie?" she demanded. Whereupon she declared in a loud and carrying voice - obviously she was sending a message beyond just the school yard - that I was not Billy. And she was not Billy's mother. So everybody, I mean, everybody, better understand that if they laid a finger on her son, she would come back with her husband's ax and set to chopping.

Upon which a chastened, deeply impressed Paulie hastened to assure her that this did not involve her son at all. That they had absolutely no intention in the world of touching her son. This was purely between them and Billy.

It had been a dramatic performance on my mom's part, and quite convincing. It certainly convinced Paulie and his gang, and even I was not entirely sure whether my mother had been serious. Which, I suppose, is exactly what she intended.

For it sure worked. I was probably the only kid on that block Paulie never fought with. In fact, he became a friend, and later, something of an influence.

In all of P.S. 34, there was but one other African family, the Stovalls. But they lived farther down in the Bronx, on the edge of the district. The oldest Stovall was a good athlete and, by reputation, rough, a "real toughie." I suppose as only the second African boy to come through, I basked in some of his reflected valor. Strangely enough, I never became real close with the Stovalls, perhaps because they didn't live in our immediate neighborhood. A case of the dominance of geography, "turf" over race, I presume.

In my class, the fifth grade, the acknowledged baddest dude was an Italian kid named Nicky. I had not been in school two weeks when, for some reason, Nicky challenged me. Again, the teacher gets wind of it and lets me out early. This time, though, there was no uncertainty on my part. I had learned with Jay precisely how to work this one.

In the end, it was almost a total rerun of P.S. 39 and Jay, as Nicky also decided it best that we not fight. Unlike Jay, however, we never became friends. Our relationship remained cool, but correct, a kind of peaceful school-yard coexistence.

Here at P.S. 34 I would find my peers undisciplined, less so than at Stebbins, but undisciplined nonetheless. Also just as destructive, breaking pens and pencils to throw at each other, dashing their books to the ground to fight each other. Which again raised the same question for me: Why were American children so undisciplined and even self-destructive? I still have no answer for that, but as I got more and more into the neighborhood, I would get to see this self-destructiveness at close hand.

By constantly reminding us that we were going to a better neighborhood, my mother had created certain expectations. Yet I would discover that just as much stealing was occurring in the "better" neighborhood, and this would come to touch me quite poignantly.

Despite my mother's efforts to keep us at home or in the backyard, inevitably, my being a boy and older, I would eventually begin to roam the neighborhood. This was almost always in the company of my new and close friend John DiMilio. John and I were inseparable, so close that the neighbors called us the Bobbsey Twins - one being fair and the other dark. They said, "Wherever you see one, you look for the other, he won't be far." We were constantly in and out of each other's home, and before long I was deeply immersed in the ambient local Italian culture.

What little sponges children can be. I loved the food, both the taste and the sound of it, those final vowels and rolling consonants: spaghetti, macaroni, pizza, calamari, antipasto, mozzarella, and so forth. Because of Umilta's deafness, our family had learned to sign to communicate with her. This might explain my fascination with the expressive vocabulary of gestures that was so much a part of Italian conversation. I picked up these gestures naturally, and soon I could curse fluently in Italian to the accompaniment of eloquent gestures, much to the amusement of the adults. "Yo, kid, wad-daw-yah, a wise guy? Gi-dudah-heyah!"

I must in truth have been a sight, a pint-size paisano in blackface. A real wise guy. Everyone knew me even if they did not know my name. The street name they gave me, because I was dark, was Sichie, short for Sicilian. (Later I would learn from Malcolm X the role of Africans in the history of that island and the extent to which the Moors had left their indelible imprint on Sicilian architecture and on the complexion of the populace.)

Naturally, I also picked up the prevalent political attitudes of the Italian community. They did not particularly trust the government, in particular the FBI and the IRS. Of the two agencies, the IRS was truly to be feared while the FBI, in vernacular translation "Forever Bugging Italians," was bush league. My neighbors had scant respect for either that agency or its director, noting that it had consistently failed to make a single racketeering charge against Al Capone stick, while the IRS had busted him on tax evasion.

In the Harlem barbershop where my hair was cut, I would hear an African version of this conventional street wisdom. "Better you kill someone than cheat on them taxes, baby. Yo kin get away with murder easier than taxes. Mes wit his taxes an' Uncle Sam will git you. Yes he will, swear befo' God. Look what happened to Capone."

I know my mother regarded my integration into the local culture with considerable ambivalence. On the one hand, she was pleased with my easy acceptance and local popularity. On the other, a caveat. Her mantra became "Remember now, you can't be doing like these little white boys. Something happen out there in the street and you know who will get the blame." And that familiar nostrum of black parents: "Your little white friends got it made. For you to make it, you will have to be three times better than them. You best remember that, now." That, as it turned out, proved not all that accurate, failing as it did to take into account the serious consequences of class, culture, and gender.

However, my mother's misgivings were well founded, for the youth culture of that block was even then at considerable odds with the values and expectations of the parents.

When I began to hang out after sunset, she imposed a 9:00 P.M.. curfew, which, of course, I stretched as much as was prudent, which did not escape her notice. There would be frequent confrontation. Whenever I pulled in at 9:20 or 9:30, I'd hear about it in no uncertain terms.

One evening, fortunately for me, nothing very interesting was going down in the street. I went home early and retired quietly upstairs to my room. I read some and fell asleep.

At nine o'clock, my mother became incensed, "I know that boy's been running the streets. Well, when he comes in tonight, I am going to catch him. And he will hear me."

Whereupon she fetches up some of my Dad's two by fours and nails and proceeds to batten down the front door as though in preparation for a hurricane. I mean it was a sho'nuff barricade, Jack. By about ten, she's worried. Ten thirty she's besides herself. She rouses my father. "That son of yours is out running the streets again. You better go find him."

"Course I'll go. But, May, you done nailed up the door," my father pointed out.

I hear my name and call down. "Did someone call me?"

"You upstairs?" my mother cried. "Stokely, you upstairs?"

"Yes, ma'am. Is something wrong?"

"No, nothing. Nothing at all," she cries. "Stay in your bed." But by then I'm coming downstairs, trying (without great success) to keep a straight face at the sight of the door.

"Oh, what happened to the door?" I ask innocently. "Is a hurricane coming?"

"Yes, Mr. Man. You go ahead and laugh. But the night I catch you, we'll see how you laugh then."

Did my mother have reason to worry? Absolutely. More reason to worry, in fact, than she ever suspected, even though she tried everything possible to keep me out of trouble. Everything possible. Just like John DiMilio's mother; just like Cookie Delappio's mother; just like Paulie Henry's mother. And many, many other mothers like them. They do their best to keep their children out of trouble in this society ... and fail. They do all in their power to keep them out of jail, to keep them off drugs, away from the many dangers that are out there in America, and too often they fail.

That's why I laugh when I hear people say that it is the parents who are to blame. It's not the parents, it's the society, stupid. The society with its venal, backward, and predatory values. This is what must be changed.

So, what was it that my mother did not really know? Well ... start with the bellicose Paulie, he of the ax-lady incident. Among his age group on the block, Paulie was a leader, in fighting, in stealing, in breaking into neighborhood stores, and such like antisocial actions. All potentially self-destructive. A nice friend otherwise, but this was just his undisciplined streak. Something I found so rampant in America.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Ready for Revolution by Stokely Carmichael Michael Ekwueme Thelwell Copyright © 2003 by Kwame Ture and Ekwueme Michael Thelwel. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Interesting book: Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns or CINEMA 4D

Memos to the Governor: An Introduction to State Budgeting

Author: Dall W Forsyth

This revised and updated edition of Memos to the Governor goes behind governmental fiscal gobbledygook to clearly explain the technical, economic, and political dynamics of budget making. Dall Forsythe untangles the knotty processes of budget preparation and implementation, outlining the budgeting process through a series of memos from a budget director to a newly elected governor -- a format that guides the neophyte through the complicated financial processes involved in state governance. Forsythe covers all of the steps of budget preparation, from strategy to execution, explaining technical vocabulary, and discussing key topics including baseline budgeting, revenue forecasting, and gap-closing options. Memos to the Governor is a painless, practical introduction to budget preparation for students of and practitioners in public administration and public-sector financial management.

Vernacular Voices or Song of Faith and Hope

2009-02-19T06:50:00.000-08:00

Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres

Author: Gerard A Hauser

Democracy is grounded on the principle that public opinion should influence the course of society. Yet this opinion, its content, and its representation are difficult to define and interpret. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres discusses the role of citizen voices in steering a democracy through an examination of the rhetoric of publics - active segments of society that influence the "general climate" of public dialogue - and of the associated public spheres and public opinion.

	List of Tables
	Series Editor's Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: Forgotten Publics	1
Ch. 1	The Public Voice of Vernacular Rhetoric	13
Ch. 2	Discourse, Rhetorical Discourse, and the Public Sphere	37
Ch. 3	Civic Conversation and the Reticulate Public Sphere	57
Ch. 4	Reading Public Opinion from Vernacular Rhetoric	82
Ch. 5	Narrative, Cultural Memory, and the Appropriation of Historicity	111
Ch. 6	Reshaping Publics and Public Spheres: The Meese Commission's Report on Pornography	161
Ch. 7	Technologizing Public Opinion: Opinion Polls, the Iranian Hostages, and the Presidential Election	189
Ch. 8	Democracy's Narrative: Living in Roosevelt's America	232
Ch. 9	The Rhetoric of Publicness: Theory and Method	268
App. I	Chronology of Hostage Developments	283
App. II	Chronology of the 1980 Campaign	289
	Notes	293
	Bibliography	311
	Index	329

New interesting textbook: Corporations and Other Business Associations or Human Value Management

Song of Faith and Hope: The Life of Frankie Muse Freeman

Author: Frankie Muse Muse Freeman

Growing up in the Jim Crow-era South, Frankie Freeman learned lessons about discrimination. She walked places instead of taking the segregated streetcar; she felt hurts and vowed privately never to forget. But in her loving family, she also learned positive lessons about living: work hard, get an education, fight injustice, and make a difference. Freeman took all these lessons to Hampton Institute, to Howard University law school, then to her career as a St. Louis civil rights attorney, winning a landmark victory in the area of fair housing. In 1964, she became the first woman appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, leaving in 1979 to serve as inspector general of the Community Services Administration. During these years, she was also St. Louis Housing Authority general counsel—and lost her job amid bitter controversy stirred up by a commission hearing in St. Louis County. This memoir tells the story of Frankie Freeman's life and career. There were high points, such as meetings with President Lyndon Johnson, historic commission hearings, and her national presidency of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. There were also difficult events, such as the illness and death of her husband and son. Through it all, she continued to fight for what she believed in; she kept her faith—and carried on.

Eternally Vigilant or Black Marxism

2009-02-18T01:38:00.000-08:00

Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era

Author: Lee C Bollinger

While freedom of speech has been guaranteed us for centuries, the First Amendment as we know it today is largely a creation of the past eighty years. Eternally Vigilant brings together a group of distinguished legal scholars to reflect boldly on its past, its present shape, and what forms our understanding of it might take in the future. The result is a unique volume spanning the entire spectrum of First Amendment issues, from its philosophical underpinnings to specific issues like campaign regulation, obscenity, and the new media.
"With group efforts, such as this collection of essays, it is almost inevitable that there will be a couple—and often several—duds among the bunch, or at least a dismaying repetition of ideas. Such is not the case here. . . . Whether one agrees with a given author or not (and it is possible to do both with any of the essays), each has something to add. Overall, Eternally Vigilant is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, consistently intelligent and, at times, brilliant."—Richard J. Mollot, New York Law Journal
Contributors:
Lillian R. BeVier
Vincent Blasi
Lee C. Bollinger
Stanley Fish
Owen M. Fiss
R. Kent Greenawalt
Richard A. Posner
Robert C. Post
Frederick Schauer
Geoffrey R. Stone
David A. Strauss
Cass R. Sunstein

New interesting book: The Best of Coffee or Pasta Verde

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Author: Cedric J Robinson

In this influential work, first published in 1993, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses, he shows, tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analysis of African American history needs to acknowledge this.

Library Journal

Robinson rejects previous studies of black radicalism on the basis that they are founded on European history, which does not include blacks. Although he does trace European Marxism, for him the path of black resistance lies in other areas. A must-have volume for any black studies curriculum, this volume is also something public libraries will want. This edition of the 1983 original sports a new preface by Robinson. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Part I. The Emergence and Limitations of European Radicalism 1. Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of Capitalist Development
Europe's Formation
The First Bourgeoisie
The Modern World Bourgeoisie
The Lower Orders
The Effects of Western Civilization on Capitalism
2. The English Working Class as the Mirror of Production
Poverty and Industrial Capitalism
The Reaction of English Labor
The Colonization of Ireland
English Working-Class Consciousness and the Irish Worker
The Proletariat and the English Working Class
3. Socialist Theory and Nationalism
Socialist Thought: Negation of Feudalism or Capitalism?
From Babeuf to Marx: A Curious Historiography
Marx, Engels, and Nationalism
Marxism and Nationalism
Conclusion

Part II. The Roots of Black Radicalism 4. The Process and Consequences of Africa's Transmutation
The Diminution of the Diaspora
The Primary Colors of American Historical Thought
The Destruction of the African Past
Premodern Relations between Africa and Europe
The Mediterranean: Egypt, Greece, and Rome
The Dark Ages: Europe and Africa
Islam, Africa, and Europe
Europe and the Eastern Trade
Islam and the Making of Portugal
Islam and Eurocentrism
5. The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Labor
The Genoese Bourgeoisie and the Age of Discovery
Genoese Capital, the Atlantic, and a Legend
African Labor as Capital
The Ledgers of a World System
The Column Marked "British Capitalism"
6. The Historical Archaeology of the Black Radical Tradition
History and the Mere Slave
Reds, Whites, and Blacks
Black for Red
Black Resistance: The Sixteenth Century
Palmares and Seventeenth-Century Marronage
Black Resistance in North America
The Haitian Revolution
Black Brazil and Resistance
Resistance in the British West Indies
Africa: Revolt at the Source
7. The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition

Part III. Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory 8. The Formation of an Intelligentsia
Capitalism, Imperialism, and the Black Middle Classes
Western Civilization and the Renegade Black Intelligentsia
9. Historiography and the Black Radical Tradition
Du Bois and the Myths of National History
Du Bois and the Reconstruction of History and American Political Thought
Slavery and Capitalism
Labor, Capitalism, and Slavery
Slavery and Democracy
Reconstruction and the Black Elite
Du Bois, Marx, and Marxism
Bolshevism and American Communism
Black Nationalism
Blacks and Communism
Du Bois and Radical Theory
10. C. L. R. James and the Black Radical Tradition
Black Labor and the Black Middle Classes in Trinidad
The Black Victorian Becomes a Black Jacobin
British Socialism
Black Radicals in the Metropole
The Theory of the Black Jacobin
Coming to Terms with the Marxist Tradition
11. Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory
Marxist Theory and the Black Radical Intellectual
The Novel as Politics
Wright's Social Theory
Blacks as the Negation of Capitalism
The Outsider as a Critique of Christianity and Marxism
12. An Ending
Notes
Bibliography
Index
WEB REVIEWS: "Robinson demonstrates very clearly . . . the ability of the black tradition to transcend national boundaries and accommodate cultural, religious and 'racial' differences. Indeed, he shows that, in a sense, it has emerged out of the transformation of these differences."--Race and Class

"A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of black radical thought."--Cornel West, Monthly Review AUTHOR BIO: Cedric J. Robinson is professor of black studies and professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Terms of Order, Black Movements in America, and the forthcoming Anthropology of Marxism.

Crisis of Islam or Triangle Fire

2009-02-16T20:26:00.000-08:00

Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror

Author: Bernard Lewis

In his first book since What Went Wrong? Bernard Lewis examines the historical roots of the resentments that dominate the Islamic world today and that are increasingly being expressed in acts of terrorism. He looks at the theological origins of political Islam and takes us through the rise of militant Islam in Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, examining the impact of radical Wahhabi proselytizing, and Saudi oil money, on the rest of the Islamic world.

The Crisis of Islam ranges widely through thirteen centuries of history, but in particular it charts the key events of the twentieth century leading up to the violent confrontations of today: the creation of the state of Israel, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the September 11th attacks on the United States.

While hostility toward the West has a long and varied history in the lands of Islam, its current concentration on America is new. So too is the cult of the suicide bomber. Brilliantly disentangling the crosscurrents of Middle Eastern history from the rhetoric of its manipulators, Bernard Lewis helps us understand the reasons for the increasingly dogmatic rejection of modernity by many in the Muslim world in favor of a return to a sacred past. Based on his George Polk Award–winning article for The New Yorker, The Crisis of Islam is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Usama bin Ladin represents and why his murderous message resonates so widely in the Islamic world.

The New York Times

The Crisis of Islam is rich with the eloquence and erudition for which Lewis has become known and admired, even by his critics. Where this book is at its best is in showcasing his knowledge of the history, historiography, jurisprudence and customs of Islamic society in the Middle East. For this reason, his chapter ''The House of War,'' describing the theological basis for jihad and martyrdom, as well as their distortion by some fundamentalists to justify terrorism, is a gem. So too is ''Double Standards,'' which deals with America's own sordid relationship with Middle East tyrants. — Kenneth M. Pollack

The Washington Post

Lewis elegantly and concisely tracks the crisis that is besetting the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East, soberly explaining that if al Qaeda's leaders "can persuade the world of Islam to accept their views and their leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead." Bin Laden has acquired a mantle of respectability among certain sections of the Muslim world because other Middle Eastern leaders are seen as compromised. By contrast, his sizable fan base sees him as courageous and incorruptible. For that reason, al Qaeda is not only a terrorist organization but also is morphing into something that approximates a mass movement subscribing to bin Laden's Manichean view that the West really is the enemy of Islam. One can only hope that the conduct of U.S. policy in Iraq, both during the war and afterward, will help to invalidate that view. — Peter Bergen

Publishers Weekly

This lean, muscular volume, an expansion of Lewis's George Polk Award-winning New Yorker article, sheds much-needed light on the complicated and volatile Middle East. To locate the origins of anti-American sentiment, Islamic scholar Lewis maps the history of Muslim anxiety towards the West from the time of the Crusades through European imperialism, and explains how America's increased presence in the region since the Cold War has been construed as a renewed cry of imperialism. In Islam, politics and religion are inextricable, and followers possess an acute knowledge of their own history dating back to the Prophet Mohammed, a timeline Lewis revisits. By so doing, the bestselling author of What Went Wrong? is able to cogently investigate key issues, such as why the United States has been dubbed the "Great Satan" and Israel the "Little Satan," and how Muslim extremism has taken root and succeeded in bastardizing the fundamental Islamic tenets of peace. Lewis also covers the impact of the Iranian Revolution and American foreign policy towards it, Soviet influence in the region and the ramifications of modernization, making this clear, taut and timely primer a must-read for any concerned citizen. (171 pages; 4 maps) (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, myriad articles and books have been published to explain how certain interpretations of Islam have led to the rise of terrorist groups in the Muslim world. In this book, well-known historian Lewis (emeritus, Princeton) continues the debate about the nature of Islam and the implications of politicized Islam for the West. An updated and expanded version of an article he wrote for The New Yorker in November 2001 (for which he received the prestigious George Polk Award), this, in many ways, continues the discussion of topics covered at greater length in the author's recent What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Here, Lewis covers the historical roots of contemporary malaise in the Muslim world, the role of Saudi Arabia in Islamic radicalism, and how grievances of radical Muslims against the West and its local allies-real or contrived-are formed. Recommended for large public libraries, but those already holding the more scholarly and historical What Went Wrong? may not need this.-Nader Entessar, Spring Hill Coll., Mobile, AL Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-This is a clear, evenhanded overview of the geopolitical events and religious/cultural belief systems that underlie current tensions between the West and Muslim populations around the globe. An amplification of an article Lewis wrote for the New Yorker, the book spans more than 13 centuries but primary emphasis is on key happenings from the early 20th century to the present. Four pages of maps precede the text, illustrating the dramatic expansion of Islamic influence from the Age of the Caliphs (632-750 C.E.) to its zenith during the Ottoman Empire, followed by attrition and decline through the Age of Imperialism to current boundaries. Among the themes the author tackles are grievances over the modern-day presence of foreigners and "infidels" in holy lands, a discussion he places in historical context to explain the rise of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, albeit without excusing the excesses of that movement's adherents. Fundamental differences in the way Islamic societies and the West approach religion and government are elucidated, with commentary on the ramifications for power structures. The issues are complex, but the writing is accessible to older high school students. John L. Esposito's The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford, 2003) is a valuable companion resource for academically reliable, paragraph-length identification of concepts, geographic place names, and people in the Lewis volume.-Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The dean of Islamic studies in America ponders the current state of what is both a religion and a political system, and finds it wanting. Mainstream Islam, at least in its ideal form, is at a far remove from the headline-conquering visions of the Islamicists, whether they be the ayatollahs of Iran or the terrorists of al-Qaeda. But, suggests Lewis (Near Eastern Studies Emeritus/Princeton Univ.; The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, 1999, etc.), the fundamentalists may be well along in shifting the center toward the extreme: "The medieval assassins were an extremist sect, very far from mainstream Islam," he writes. "That is not true of their present-day imitators." Witness, Lewis writes, the ever-growing power of Wahhabism, the conservative strain of Islam that now dominates Saudi Arabia, which Lewis persuasively likens to the Ku Klux Klan. "The custodianship of holy places [in Saudi Arabia] and the revenues of oil have given worldwide impact to what would otherwise have been an extremist fringe in a marginal country," writes Lewis-an extremist fringe among whose notable products is Usama bin Ladin, as Lewis spells it, whose "declaration of war against the United States marks the resumption of the struggle for religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century." The Islamicists have been able to turn the disaffection of the young and impoverished against not merely America, writes Lewis, but against their home governments, which, after all, have done little to produce healthy societies. (For in every measurable respect of social and material well-being, Lewis writes, the Islamic world lags "ever farther behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind themore recent recruits to Western-style modernity, such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.") Small wonder that so many young Muslims are so eager to fulfill the Quranic obligation of jihad, or "holy war," by striking out against the West-though, Lewis is quick to add, "at no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder." Expanded from Lewis's prizewinning New Yorker commentary following 9/11: an illuminating brief overview of Islam today.

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Triangle Fire

Author: Leon Stein

On March 25, 1911, 146 employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City were killed in the span of a few minutes because no provision had been made for their safety in the event of fire. The Cornell edition of Leon Stein's 1962 account features 16 illustrations, some never before published. A new introduction by the journalist William Greider makes clear that accounts of dangerous workplaces and sweatshop conditions are still all-too-relevant today, ninety years after the fire. The story of the catastrophe and the doomed Triangle Shirtwaist workers, as told by one of the great labor journalists, will not soon be forgotten.

About the Authors:
The late Leon Stein was the editor of Justice, the official publication of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. He was also the author of Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy.

William Greider, national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine, is author of One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism.

What People Are Saying

Michael Kazin
Leon Stein's gripping narrative of the Triangle tragedy is one of the classics of American history. And William Greider has added an introduction that bluntly, eloquently describes how little conditions have changed for sweatshop workers the world over. As the grandson of a one-time Triangle seamstress, I salute the reissue of a book that anyone who cares about labor, past or present, should read.
&3151;(Michael Kazin, Georgetown University. Author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History and other books.)

Brave New War or The Texture of Memory

2009-02-15T15:13:00.000-08:00

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

Author: James Fallows

"For my money, John Robb, a former Air Force officer and tech guru, is the futurists' futurist."
—Slate

War in the twenty-first century will be very different from what we've come to expect. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare are rapidly evolving to allow nonstate networks to challenge the structure and order of nation-states. It is a change on par with the rise of the Internet and China, and will dramatically change how you and your kids will view security.

In Brave New War, the counterterrorism expert John Robb reveals how the same technology that has enabled globalization also allows terrorists and criminals to join forces against larger adversaries with relative ease and to carry out small, inexpensive actions—like sabotaging an oil pipeline—that will generate a huge return. He shows how taking steps to combat the shutdown of the world's oil, high-tech, and financial markets could cost us the thing we've come to value the most—worldwide economic and cultural integration—and the crucial steps we must take now to safeguard our systems and ourselves against this new method of warfare.

Foreword by James Fallows.

Preface.

Part I. THE FUTURE OF WAR IS NOW.

1 The Superempowered Competition.

2 Disorder on the Doorstep.

3 A New Strategic Weapon.

Part II. GLOBAL GUERRILLAS.

4 The Long Tail of Warfare Emerges.

5 Systems Disruption.

6 Open-Source Warfare.

Part III. HOW GLOBALIZATION WILL PUT AN END TO GLOBALIZATION.

7 Guerrilla Entrepreneurs.

8 Rethinking Security.

9 A Brittle Security Breakdown.

Notes.

Further Reading.

Index.

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The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America

Author: James E Young

For the Germans and Austrians, memorializing the Holocaust has required public recognition of their crimes; for the Jews, it has required public expression of their suffering. As James Young brilliantly demonstrates, each monument is charged with the often highly problematic struggle between collective memory and national self-image, self-interest, and the aspiration toward a future. Through the memorials and monuments, Young illuminates the process whereby the meaning of the Holocaust continues to be redefined in each new generation in Europe, Israel, and America. This richly illustrated book is a groundbreaking study of the fusion of Holocaust memory and public art in contemporary life.

Booknews

Young (English and Judaic studies, U. of Mass., Amherst) examines Holocaust monuments and museums in Europe, Israel, and America, exploring how every nation remembers the Holocaust according to its own traditions, ideals, and experiences, and how these memorials reflect their place in contemporary aesthetic and architectural discourse. Thoroughly and well illustrated. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

Saul Friedlander
A sensitive and intellectually compelling book. Young's comparative approach to the study of Holocaust memorials is groundbreaking.

Mark Pollock
The Texture of Memory is a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust....It makes clear that much of who we are is shpaed not only by what we remember but also by how we remember.

The Prince or The Berlin Wall

2009-02-14T09:59:00.000-08:00

The Prince (Enriched Classics Series)

Author: Niccolo Machiavelli

Need to seize a country? Have enemies you must destroy? In this handbook for despots and tyrants, the Renaissance statesman Machiavelli sets forth how to accomplish this and more, while avoiding the awkwardness of becoming generally hated and despised.

"Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge."

For nearly 500 years, Machiavelli's observations on Realpolitik have shocked and appalled the timid and romantic, and for many his name was equivalent to the devil's own. Yet, The Prince was the first attempt to write of the world of politics as it is, rather than sanctimoniously of how it should be, and thus The Prince remains as honest and relevant today as when Machiavelli first put quill to parchment, and warned the junior statesman to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.

	Chronology
	Map
	Introduction
	Translator's Note
	Selected Books
	Machiavelli's Principal Works
	Letter to the Magnificent Lorenzo de Medici	1
I	How many kinds of principality there are and the ways in which they are acquired	5
II	Hereditary principalities	5
III	Composite principalities	6
IV	Why the kingdom of Darius conquered by Alexander did not rebel against his successors after his death	13
V	How cities or principalities which lived under their own laws should be administered after being conquered	16
VI	New principalities acquired by one's own arms and prowess	17
VII	New principalities acquired with the help of fortune and foreign arms	20
VIII	Those who come to power by crime	27
IX	The constitutional principality	31
X	How the strength of every principality should be measured	34
XI	Ecclesiastical principalities	36
XII	Military organization and mercenary troops	39
XIII	Auxiliary, composite, and native troops	43
XIV	How a prince should organize his militia	47
XV	The things for which men, and especially princes, are praised or blamed	49
XVI	Generosity and parsimony	51
XVII	Cruelty and compassion; and whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse	53
XVIII	How princes should honour their word	56
XIX	The need to avoid contempt and hatred	58
XX	Whether fortresses and many of the other present-day expedients to which princes have recourse are useful or not	67
XXI	How a prince must act to win honour	71
XXII	A prince's personal staff	75
XXIII	How flatterers must be shunned	76
XXIV	Why the Italian princes have lost their states	78
XXV	How far human affairs are governed by fortune, and how fortune can be opposed	79
XXVI	Exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians	82
	Glossary of Proper Names	86
	Notes	99

New interesting textbook: Japanese Asian 50 Low Fat No Fat Recipes or Vineyard Tales

The Berlin Wall: And the Inner-German Border 1961-89

Author: Gordon L Rottman

The Berlin Wall and the Inner-German Border (IGB) were built to halt the flow of refugees from East Germany to the West. From August 13, 1961, over 96 miles of crude fences and more sophisticated walls were erected around West Berlin. Border defenses ran 858 miles from the Baltic to the Czechoslovakian border, cutting villages in two, running through buildings, and intersecting roads and railways. Gordon L Rottman, who became familiar with both sides of the border while posted to Germany, examines the international situations that led to the creation of the Berlin Wall, discussing how the barrier systems functioned and their significance in the Cold War. Covering the erection of the barriers, how they evolved, defensive devices and the role of the checkpoints, this book also describes how ordinary people attempted to overcome these physical and political obstacles in their quest for freedom.

Gordon Rottman writes,"In 1980 I found myself in a long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) company. After 2 years of training we were assigned as the V Corps LRRP company: our mission in the event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany was to insert our 21 five-man reconnaissance teams inside East Germany, establish "hides" overlooking autobahns and other highways, and report the movements of the second operational echelon, the follow-on forces behind the initial assault forces. This required us to know a great deal about what it was like inside East Germany. We began an intense study of the IGB, and in the process I was able to visit the border, learn its ways, and find out how to penetrate it."

Invisible Enemies or Energy Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere

2009-02-13T04:47:00.000-08:00

Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000

Author: Edwin A Martini

Beginning where most histories of the Vietnam War end, Invisible Enemies examines the relationship between the United States and Vietnam following the American pullout in 1975. Drawing on a broad range of sources, from White House documents and congressional hearings to comic books and feature films, Edwin Martini shows how the United States continued to wage war on Vietnam "by other means" for another twenty-five years. In addition to imposing an extensive program of economic sanctions, the United States opposed Vietnam's membership in the United Nations, supported the Cambodians, including the Khmer Rouge, in their decade-long war with the Vietnamese, and insisted that Vietnam provide a "full accounting" of American MIAs before diplomatic relations could be established. According to Martini, such policies not only worked against some of the stated goals of U.S. foreign policy, they were also in opposition to the corporate economic interests that ultimately played a key role in normalizing relations between the two nations in the late 1990s.

Martini reinforces his assessment of American diplomacy with an analysis of the "cultural front"-the movies, myths, memorials, and other phenomena that supported continuing hostility toward Vietnam while silencing opposing views of the war and its legacies. He thus demonstrates that the "American War on Vietnam" was as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war within the United States as it was a lengthy economic, political, and diplomatic campaign to punish a former adversary.

About the Author:
Edwin A. Martini is assistant professor of history at Western Michigan University

Chronicle of Higher Education

Examines American postwar hostility to Vietnam as reflected in economic sanctions, foreign policy, popular culture, and other realms.

What People Are Saying

James McAllister
"Invisible Enemies" is an original and welcome addition to the existing literature on the Vietnam War. In addition to providing a critique of American policy toward Vietnam after 1975, a period generally ignored by students of the war, Martini effectively combines the fields of diplomatic history and cultural studies. . . . ["Invisible Enemies"] is a work of scholarship that truly does transcend narrow disciplinary boundaries."--(James McAllister, Williams College)

Robert K. Brigham
"Martini should be commended for adding significantly to our understanding of the war after the war. . . . This is a first-rate book and a must reading for anyone interested in recent U.S. foreign policy."--(Robert K. Brigham, Vassar College)

Matthew Masur
"Teachers of courses on the Vietnam War will find "Invisible Enemies" a useful source for bringing their class to the end of the twentieth century. Scholars of American foreign relations will appreciate a fresh and engaging approach to a topic that is sorely in need of historical study."--(Matthew Masur, St. Anselm College)

Acknowledgments     xi
Abbreviations     xiii
Introduction     1
A Continuation of War by Other Means: The Origins of the American War on Vietnam, 1975-1977     12
Constructing Mutual Destruction: The Cultural Logic of Normalization, 1977-1979     40
Bleeding Vietnam: The United States and the Third Indochina War     78
"I Am Reality": Redrawing the Terms of Battle, 1985-1989     116
Peace Is at Hand: Roadmaps, Roadblocks, and One-Way Streets, 1990-1995     162
Invisible Enemies: Searching for Vietnam at the Wall(s)     205
Epilogue: The Uneasy Peace and the Flags That Still Fly     235
Notes     243
Index     274

Look this: Voltaire in Exile or Though the Heavens May Fall

Energy Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere: Benefits and Impediments

Author: Sidney Weintraub

Energy Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere examines the state of energy cooperation among 11 Western Hemisphere oil and natural gas producers and the opportunities for greater cooperation. The result of more than two years of extensive in-country research and interviews with key stakeholders including governments and major oil and gas interests, the study is distinguished by its comprehensive approach and detailed country-by-country analysis of current conditions and future projects. Sidney Weintraub and his coauthors examine the critical historical factors, technical challenges, dangerous conditions, and political tensions, divisions, and disagreements that have hampered hemispheric cooperation.

What People Are Saying

Guy Caruso
Energy Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere ...captures the essence of these energy issues and succinctly discusses the opportunities and challenges ahead for the political leadership in the countries involved. (Guy Caruso, Administrator, Energy Information Administration)

Thomas F. McLarty III
Richly detailed and persuasively argued...A must read for policymakers, business executives, and students of the hemisphere. (Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty III, President, Kissinger McLarty Associates)

Of Paradise and Power or Miles Gone By

2009-02-11T23:34:00.000-08:00

Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order

Author: Robert Kagan

From a leading scholar of our country’s foreign policy, the brilliant essay about America and the world that has caused a storm in international circles now expanded into book form.

European leaders, increasingly disturbed by U.S. policy and actions abroad, feel they are headed for what the New York Times (July 21, 2002) describes as a “moment of truth.” After years of mutual resentment and tension, there is a sudden recognition that the real interests of America and its allies are diverging sharply and that the trans-atlantic relationship itself has changed, possibly irreversibly. Europe sees the United States as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the United States sees Europe as spent, unserious, and weak. The anger and mistrust on both sides are hardening into incomprehension.

This past summer, in Policy Review, Robert Kagan reached incisively into this impasse to force both sides to see themselves through the eyes of the other. Tracing the widely differing histories of Europe and America since the end of World War II, he makes clear how for one the need to escape a bloody past has led to a new set of transnational beliefs about power and threat, while the other has perforce evolved into the guarantor of that “postmodern paradise” by dint of its might and global reach. This remarkable analysis is being discussed from Washington to Paris to Tokyo. It is esssential reading.

The New York Times

A veteran of four years in the State Department, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of several books and articles, Kagan demonstrates a confidence and authority that demand serious attention. To disagree with his theses is not to argue against the importance of his essay. On the contrary, generating an intelligent and focused debate is a major function of such works. The true measure of Kagan's small book is that it is hard to imagine any future serious discussion of trans-Atlantic relations or America's role in the world without reference to it. — Serge Schmemann

Foreign Affairs

A book version of the essay that sparked a great debate on both sides of the Atlantic in 2002. In this tour de force, Kagan argues that today's conflict between the United States and Europe is not simply a result of passing policy disputes or the Bush administration's foreign policy style. Rather, it reflects a more profound estrangement rooted in American power and European weakness. The old Atlantic partners live today on different planets. America's preeminent global position has thrust it into a Hobbesian world of lurking threats and made it more willing to use force, whereas Europe seeks peace through law and diplomacy. Kagan is best in describing Europe's postwar project of taming the dangers and instabilities of power politics in a democratic, Kantian zone of peace. Thanks partly to the U.S. security guarantee, Europeans have devised a political order in which power is subdued and the use of force banished. Yet Europe has also made itself weak, Kagan charges, as its nations remain unable to confront the anarchical dangers of the wider world. Kagan argues that America's realpolitik view is not only a feature of Republican administrations but a deeper expression of American power (after all, Bill Clinton was willing to bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan). The result is a growing divergence in strategic views and eroding solidarity.

Kagan's characterization of a postmodern Europe, however, is too German-centered; he ignores the fact that the United Kingdom and France retain great-power identities and a willingness to use military force. His reading of the United States is also debatable. The United States has been the preeminent global power since World War II, yet it has oftenpursued its national interest through multilateral institutions and security partnerships. Pace Kagan, Europe and the United States might disagree on the nature of threats outside the West — as they have in the past — but their own relationship remains embedded in an Atlantic security community.

Library Journal

This slim work by Kagan (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) ought to be required reading within the Bush administration as it attempts to patch together a multinational coalition to unseat Saddam Hussein. In a beefed-up version of his seminal 2002 article in Policy Review, Kagan argues that the United States and Europe no longer inhabit the same universe where power politics is concerned. Power, then, lies at the heart of the transatlantic culture war. Americans have it-making them a target and priming them to use it to address foreign threats. Europeans don't have it, and, judging by their trifling defense budgets, don't want it. Operating from a "psychology of weakness," says Kagan, Europeans place their faith in diplomacy, international law, and international institutions-both to come to grips with the Saddams of the world and to rein in what they see as the excesses of the world's remaining superpower. It behooves American officials to try to bridge this gap in perspectives. This brilliant and controversial work belongs in all library collections.-James R. Holmes, Univ. of Georgia Ctr. for International Trade & Security, Athens Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Former diplomat and current conservative think-tanker Kagan (A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1996) rehashes an argument he originally offered in 2001 in 'Policy Review'. That argument goes like this: During the Cold War, the developed world fell into two camps, one dominated by the US, the other by the Soviet Union. The former had need "to preserve and demonstrate the existence of a cohesive 'West,' " and so political divisions between, say, Germany and the US tended to be muted, at least on an official level. Though it begs for a united front of defense, today's common enemy--Islamic fundamentalism--does not demand the same coherence, which allows Europe to turn away from superpower big-stick formulas, to move "beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation." The US, conversely, is settling into its role as the world's sole superpower, able to accomplish at least some of its tasks in the "anarchic Hobbesian" world by virtue of its military might. Europe, of course, benefits from this situation, even while clucking its tongue and attempting to "control the behemoth by appealing to its conscience," which Kagan considers to be a pretty good strategy that usually works. The upshot? Interpretations may vary, but Kagan offers a genteel solution for both sides: Europe should let us do what we must to keep the peace, recognizing that "we have only just entered a long era of American hegemony." And America shouldn't try to bully Europe into accepting the unpalatable, and perhaps even listen to our putative allies from time to time. Though he's capable of concocting a memorable sound bite, Kagan develops his nuancedargument with an appreciation for why Europeans are not now lining up alongside us to give Saddam a good thrashing. Good reading for policy wonks who missed the original article, of a piece with recent arguments for the virtues of American imperialism.

Book about: Direction D'information Stratégique :les Défis et les Stratégies dans les Systèmes informatiques Gérants

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography

Author: William F Buckley Jr

In celebration of his 80th birthda, Regnery presents Bill Buckley's New York Times bestseller. Included are treasured essays from the beloved founder of National Review that captures Buckley's joyful boyhood and family life.

The New York Times - Jon Meacham

Reading Miles Gone By, his latest collection of autobiographical pieces, a book of charm and grace and wit, one finds it virtually impossible to envision Buckley as his liberal critics have for so long: as a dark Goldwaterite, even a pro-crypto Nazi (Gore Vidal's phrase), who hides his extremism beneath a sophisticated Manhattan veneer. He is a partisan combatant, a key figure in the right wing's journey from the fringes of American politics to the mainstream -- from, roughly, Joe McCarthy's sweaty brow to Ronald Reagan's sunny smile. But agree or disagree with the conservative creed he helped shape and promulgate, Buckley is the happiest of warriors, an exuberant man of the right, a Roman Catholic who has apparently taken the reassurances of Scripture to heart. ''In the world ye shall have tribulation,'' Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John, ''but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.''

Caspar Weinberger - Forbes

This has been an especially good reading summer for devotees of American Colonial and Revolutionary his-tory. First and, in my opinion, the best of the many new books covering this period is Washington's Crossing--by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press, $35). Professor Fischer is a noted historian, whose Albion's Seed, published in 1989, tells the story of those descendants of the British who settled here and helped create the United States. His Paul Revere's Ride has also been widely and justly praised.

Washington's Crossing tells the complete story of General George Washington's most daring, risky and successful venture early in the war. Following a succession of victories by the British and their mercenary forces, which had resultedin the loss of New York for the Americans, the British were within sight of Philadelphia, where the new American Congress was sitting.

Washington's army had been all but destroyed, and the British were surging across New Jersey. Washington's decision to cross the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776, when it was considered virtually impossible, was a move both bold and foolhardy. A flotilla of small boats crammed with soldiers, guns and horses somehow rowed across the river through one of the East's worst winter snow and ice storms. (The crossing as painted by Emanuel Leutze in 1851 captured this event spiritually and has become a great icon of the Revolution.) By crossing the Delaware, Washington placed the remnants of his army in a position to trap the British behind Trenton and, a few days later, to give that army and the cause for which it fought its first real victory. In many ways the shots fired atTrenton were the shots "heard round the world."

Professor Fischer conveys in a remarkably realistic way what combat and the fog of war are actually like. But, more important, he tells the story of what it was like for Washington to lead a discouraged, underequipped army that was constantly being micromanaged by a divided Congress that couldn't--at least at the beginning--decide whether it wanted independence or, simply, to get the Stamp Act repealed.

For those who still wonder how the Revolutionaries ever defeated the huge British forces arrayed against them, both on land and at sea, this book makes clear that it was the military genius and leadership of George Washing-ton that turned almost certain defeat into victory. Washington's Crossing is an essential and exciting key to a more complete understanding and appreciation of what our ancestors did to win the Revolution.

A new biography, Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press, $35), is another superb book I read this summer. Hamilton served as principal aide to General Washington from the early days of the Revolu-tion. This gave him a ringside seat at the formation of the United States and its implausible victory over the British, who had deployed one of the world's finest military machines but lost to a ragtag army of upstarts.

Chernow's splendid, thorough and brilliantly written biography gives us a new understanding of Hamilton's vi-tal role during the war and immediately after as Secretary of the Treasury of this new entity on the world's stage. I doubt that many people realize how much of our country's financial structure we owe to Alexander Hamilton. This book goes beyond the standard fare offered in most American history classes. Hamilton's towering intellect, as well as his many faults, and his long, fierce disagreements with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and many of the other Founding Fathers are presented here with almost shocking candor.

There have been other biographies of Hamilton, but Chernow's is far and away the most comprehensive and compelling of any I have read. It is a fitting tribute to the man who set the U.S. on the path that has made our nation the economic leader of the world.

Another treat for Revolutionary history enthusiasts is The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood (Penguin Press, $25.95). This delightful new study focuses on the actual aristocratic and elitist views and opinions of this so-called populist leader, who was one of our best-loved, most influential and renowned spokesmen to the world.

Moving away from Revolutionary times, I next read, and thoroughly enjoyed, Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography byWilliam F. Buckley Jr. (Regnery Publishing, $29.95). Buckley, a major founder of today's sen-sible conservatism, has led an extraordinary life, which fully matches his extraordinary talents. His subtitle is apt, as the book contains essays on sailing, skiing, music, old friends and colleagues and all manner of other diverse subjects, which are united in that they have all been of interest to one of the best minds and writers in America today.

Publishers Weekly

The conservative writer and Firing Line host has published so many millions of words in five decades of polemics and public musing that amassing a sort of autobiography required little more than sandwiching a selection of 50 essays between a brief preface and epilogue. The extracts range in subject from his silver-spoon boyhood and boarding-school days to the lives and deaths of the many prominent people he has known. Fame came early, with Buckley's 1951 God and Man at Yale, excerpted here, which lambasted liberal bias at elite American colleges. (Far superior, though, is the sparkling memoir of his war-veteran class of 1950 at Yale.) An instant darling of conservatives who needed a spirited new voice, Buckley founded the National Review, whose writers became the core of his widening circle of influential acquaintances. While sailing, touring and media punditry take up much of the collection, the most memorable pieces are about such offbeat friends as the tragic Whittaker Chambers. Nevertheless, some portraits are merely laudatory epitaphs. Approaching 80, Buckley notes that his sporting days are about over, but "[s]o to speak, I can still ski on a keyboard." Like skiing, his keyboard has its ups and downs. B&w photos. Agent, Lois Wallace. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

	At home
	Life at Great Elm	3
	Life at Great Elm II	11
	St. John's, Beaumont	17
	The "distinguished" Mr. Buckley	36
	Wine in the blood	39
	Wine : one man's happy experiences	42
	William Frank Buckley, 1881-1958	48
	Aloise Steiner Buckley, 1895-1985	51
	Yale
	God and man at Yale	57
	A toast to the class of 1950	95
	Reflections on life after Yale	104
	Wartime
	Army life	115
	Sailing (and skiing, and one fly-by)
	We must sail across the ocean!	123
	Christmastime in the Caribbean	145
	Gulf stream musings	164
	Meet me at K club	174
	A quickie, Bahamas to Charleston	179
	Pleasure on skis	191
	Alta, my alta	197
	Six freshmen and an Ercoupe	206
	The angel of Craig's point	217
	A sail across the Pacific	228
	Aweigh	240
	People
	Ten friends	255
	Five colleagues	282
	And a sixth	292
	Remembering
	Whittaker Chambers, 1901-1961	299
	Murray Kempton, 1917-1997	318
	Henry Regnery, 1912-1996	330
	National Review, b. 1955	338
	Blackford Oakes, b. 1975	343
	William Shawn, 1907-1992	354
	Firing line, 1966-1999	362
	Language
	The dictionary, ready at hand	391
	The conflict over the unusual word	395
	On writing speedily	400
	Getting about
	1001 days on the Orient Express	409
	Definitive vacations	421
	A pilgrimage to Lourdes	427
	The stupefaction of the New England coastline	443
	A performance with the symphony, coming up	446
	The life of the public speaker	455
	Going down to the Titanic	469
	Aboard the Sea Cloud	482
	Politics
	My own secret right-wing conspiracy	501
	Running for mayor of New York City	518
	Social life
	Querencia : on coping with social tedium	545
	The threatened privacy of private clubs	553
	Why don't we complain?	558
	Epilogue : thoughts on a final passage	569

Eichmann in Jerusalem or Howard Zinn on Democratic Education

2009-02-10T18:22:00.000-08:00

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Author: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt's authoritative report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann includes further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.

Michael A. Musmanno

There will be those who wonder how Miss Arendt, after attending the Eichman trial and studying the record and pertinent material, could announce, as she solemnly does in this book, that Eichman was not really a Nazi at heart, that he did really not know Hilter's program when he joined the party, that the Gestapo were helpful to the Jews in Palestinian immigration, that Himmler (Himmler!) had a sense of pity, that the Jewish gas-killing program grew out of Hitler's euthanasia program and that, all in all, Eichmann was really a modest man.-- Books of the Century; New York Times

Howard Zinn on Democratic Education (Series in Critical Narrative)

Author: Howard Zinn

Perhaps no other historian has had a more profound and revolutionary impact on American education than Howard Zinn. This is the first book devoted to his views on education and its role in a democratic society.

Howard Zinn on Democratic Education describes what is missing from school textbooks and in classrooms - and how we move beyond these deficiencies to improve student education. Critical skills of citizenship are insufficiently developed in schools, according to Zinn. Textbooks and curricula must be changed to transcend the recitation of received wisdom too common today in our schools. In these respects, recent Bush Administration and educational policies of most previous presidents have been on the wrong track in meeting educational needs.

This book seeks to redefine national goals at a time when public debates over education have never been more polarized — nor higher in public visibility and contentious debate.

1	Apparatus of lies USA : introduction	1
2	Schools and the manufacture of mass deception : a dialogue	27
3	A people's history of the United States	67
4	How free is higher education?	87
5	Columbus and western civilization	97
6	Grey matters interviews Howard Zinn	123
7	Being left : growing up class-conscious	137
8	What Bush's war on terror is all about	157
9	The diverted left	163
10	A campaign without class	167
11	Federal bureau of intimidation	175
12	Why students should study history : an interview	187

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov or The Anatomy of Fascism

2009-02-09T13:10:00.000-08:00

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century

Author: Peter Pringl

In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century.

In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity."

To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today.

But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage.

Stalin's collectivization of farmlandcaused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results.

In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag.

Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.

Publishers Weekly

Pringle (Food, Inc.), former Moscow bureau chief for the Independent, offers a well-researched and well-written study of the murder of an outstanding Soviet geneticist and the ideological perversion of science. Pringle details the life and career of Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943) through his rise in the early Soviet scientific establishment and awarding of the Lenin Prize. Vavilov was a scientist's scientist, traveling the world to collect seeds and plants unavailable in Russia in order to transform "Soviet and even world agriculture, and ensure the survival of humanity through an adequate food supply." He was one of the U.S.S.R.'s top scientists when Soviet authorities fell in love with the now-discredited notions of a rival scientist, Trofim Lysenko, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Using recently opened archives, Pringle is able to detail Vavilov's arrest on trumped-up charges of sabotage and spying, his torture and death in prison. Pringle has added another page to the lengthy tale of the deadly workings of the Soviet bureaucracy-and the toll of Stalin's terror on the world by turning science into propaganda. (May)

Edward Cone - Library Journal

It seems incredible that millions of desperate or idealistic souls who believed in the revolution left the United States, fleeing the Depression, and flocked to the new Soviet state in hopes of starting life over. The fate of those who once had such faith in the Soviet experiment is tragically chronicled in these two works. Pringle (Insight on the Middle East War) presents his work from the viewpoint of an insider, foremost Soviet biologist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, who ran afoul of the regime when Stalin championed Trofim Lysenko, whose views were eventually discredited. Vavilov amassed one of the largest seed collections in the world and hoped to prevent the famines that had plagued the USSR and other countries. As the terror of the 1930s mounted, Vavilov apparently continued to believe in the revolution until it was too late. Left to languish in the Gulag, this "eminent plant hunter who had a plan to feed the world died of starvation," concludes Pringle. Documentary filmmaker and television journalist Tzouliadis traces the lives of immigrants to the USSR and their fate in the land of the revolution. Most eventually perished once the Stalinist state declared them to be enemies. This is a collection of heartbreaking stories about people who were neglected or ignored by their own government. The author presents numerous instances in which official intervention might have saved thousands of lives, yet officials, from President Roosevelt on down, found it inconvenient or untimely to risk disrupting U.S.-Soviet relations by peering too closely into the cases of U.S. citizens stuck in the USSR. The Forsaken is actually a grim testament of Stalin's crimes against his ownpeople as well as the immigrants. With copious notes, it is highly recommended for public and academic libraries. Vavilov is written in a popular style sometimes lacking nuance on a subject that should still be of interest to academics as well as informed readers. (Photos not seen for Vavilov.)

Kirkus Reviews

A tragic story of the totalitarian suppression of knowledge-one that is all too familiar to history, even in our own time. Pringle (Day of the Dandelion, 2007, etc.), former Moscow bureau chief for The Independent, recounts that in that city he lived on a street named for Lenin's otherwise little-known brother. Down the way, on a grid named as a kind of "Who's Who of the old USSR and its socialist allies, even Ho Chi Minh," was Vavilov Street, named after the great physicist Sergei Vavilov, whose admitted brilliance was nothing compared to that of his brother Nikolai. A kind of Indiana Jones of the plant world, Nikolai was always tearing off in search of rare einkorn or interesting hybrids. Pringle records a meeting of Vavilov and American botanist Luther Burbank, with the former concluding that "it was difficult to learn anything from Burbank-'the artist's intuition overwhelmed his research.' " When the Bolsheviks came to power, Lenin, though despising the intelligentsia, recognized their at least temporary usefulness as technocrats in the new state, and Vavilov was allowed to continue his research in plant genetics and agronomy. Stalin was less kindly disposed toward the knowledge-working class, and he gave pride of place in the new Soviet science to the quack Trofim Lysenko, who dismissed Mendelian genetics in favor of a particularly ungainly kind of Lamarckism. Vavilov generously insisted that his scientific colleagues hear Lysenko out, even though "there was no proof of the inheritance of acquired characteristics," as Lysenko insisted. Lysenko won out with his theories of vernalization; the result was a killing famine, one of several the Soviet Union endured. For his part,increasingly marginalized in a politicized scientific community, Vavilov wound up in the Gulag. The war on science is an old story. Pringle lends it specific weight with this chilling story of a man who, had he survived, might have saved millions of lives. Agent: Michael Carlisle/InkWell Management

The Anatomy of Fascism

Author: Robert O Paxton

What is fascism? Many authors have proposed definitions, but most fail to move beyond the abstract. The esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question for the first time by focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did, rather than what they said. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up “enemies of the state,” through Mussolini’s rise to power, to Germany’s fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and explores whether fascism could exist outside the early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged.
The Anatomy of Fascism will have a lasting impact on our understanding of modern European history, just as Paxton’s classic Vichy France redefined our vision of World War II. Based on a lifetime of research, this compelling and important book transforms our knowledge of fascism–“the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.”

The Washington Post

… Paxton has made a helpful contribution, thoughtfully mapping out the descent of a civilized people -- first the Italians, then the Germans -- into a primal state (and state of being) ruled by mythology, symbol and emotion. While avoiding much discussion of the intellectual and cultural roots of fascism, he traces the political and structural development of a movement that evolved into a party and then a state and, finally, a war against humanity. — Peter Savodnik

The New York Times - Samantha Power

The Anatomy of Fascism is the work of a distinguished scholar who has sifted through the primary sources, the tomes and the trends in an effort to synthesize and even settle prior debates. His main emphasis is on Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, but in order to demonstrate why certain fascist movements were able to seize power while most remained marginal, he contrasts these ''successes'' with fascist sputterings in Britain, France, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere … the lasting contribution of this splendid book is to remind us that fascism, if it returns, will do so not simply because of a rousing leader, but because of his timid accomplices.

Publishers Weekly

Paxton, the author of seminal works on Vichy France, now sums up a lifelong reflection on fascism's myriad forms. Paxton writes in his introduction that fascism was "the most self-consciously visual of all political forms," yet many of those indelible images (Mussolini haranguing a crowd from a balcony; the perfect choreography of totalitarianism in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will) can "induce facile errors" about the omnipotent leader or the supposed unanimity of the crowd. Rather than begin with a definition of fascism, Paxton prefers to give concrete examples of it in action in various countries, from Italy and Germany to France, Holland and Eastern Europe; in particular, he examines its "mobilizing passions," such as a sense of overwhelming crisis and dread of a native group's decline. This study has several virtues (and few defects): the writing is free of some of the theoretical jargon that threatens our understanding of a defining political movement of the 20th century. This is a study of both the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome, Paris and other locales. In addition, Paxton examines such important topics as images of fascism and what we might call "the future of fascism" (in a quick aside on a current controversy, Paxton notes that Islamic fundamentalism is not fascist). Although Paxton doesn't address present or future forms of fascism, his list of its "mobilizing passions" will sound to some readers frighteningly similar to aspects of contemporary America. This is sure to take its place among classics in the field by Stanley Payne and Roger Griffith. (Mar. 26) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

The term "fascism" originated with Mussolini in 1919 and has since often been stretched to apply to almost any political group to the right of the person using it. Paxton, a historian, sets out to rescue the term from such sloppy usage, even as he acknowledges that a narrow definition is impossible. In his quest for understanding, Paxton surveys how a broad array of fascist movements has sought out followers, formed alliances, and seized and exercised power. The comparisons show great variety over time and place but also reveal characteristics that distinguish fascism from other kinds of authoritarian rule. Fascists, he concludes, were identifiable most of all by a style of political behavior that emphasized historical grievances, worshiped the cult of leadership, relied on a mass-based movement of national militants, repressed democratic liberties, and used violence as a political tool. Paxton's first book, "Vichy France," has become the standard work in the field despite its once-controversial thesis (that the Vichy regime was not merely imposed by Nazis but had domestic roots); "The Anatomy of Fascism," based on decades of research and teaching, is likely to prove just as authoritative. The in-depth bibliographical essay alone will guide scholars and graduate students for years to come.

Library Journal

Paxton (Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Social Sciences, Columbia Univ.; Vichy France) dissects a historical phenomenon that unleashed the deadliest epoch in world history. It is well known that fascism consumed the passions of Germany and Italy, but Paxton reminds readers that the fascist impulse found expression throughout the globe and still poses a threat to international stability. His goal is to find generic characteristics that shape the dynamics of fascism-not the product of a well-defined ideology, Paxton emphasizes, but rather a visceral response to national crises that defy conventional solutions. Paxton stresses that all fascist movements sanctify violence and view life as a Darwinian struggle; beleaguered constituencies turn toward a leader who revitalizes nationalistic sentiments by demonizing perceived internal and external enemies. The culmination of a lifetime's study, this work is based on a thorough analysis of just about every secondary work on fascism and includes a superb bibliographic essay that will guide students and historians for many years to come. While there are countless studies on fascism, readers will be hard pressed to find anything more in-depth from a scholar with Paxton's credentials. Recommended for all academic libraries and for public libraries with strong political science collections.-Jim Doyle, Marconi P.L., GA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An immensely learned consideration of "the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain."The folks at MoveOn.org notwithstanding, George Bush is no Hitler, John Ashcroft likely no fascist. The looseness of terms and equations disguises the complexity of the deadly far-right ideology, which Paxton (Emeritus, Social Sciences/Columbia Univ.; Europe in the Twentieth Century, not reviewed, etc.) defines, quite comprehensively, as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." A mouthful, but Paxton ably demonstrates why precision is wanted here, having spent the preceding chapters analyzing the many brands of fascism on the world stage. The best known, of course, is the first: Mussolini's pompous, theatrical regime, which came to power a full decade before Hitler's; as Paxton writes, Mussolini coined the term fascismo and set the tone for many a dictatorship to come. These allied but subtly different fascisms shared a radicalism that belied their socialist origins, which has caused some historians to regard fascism as anticapitalist at heart. Not so, Paxton argues: Fascism was at once a revolt against the left and against liberal individualism and a slap in the face of old-school, elitist conservatism, whose exponents "wanted obedience anddeference, not dangerous popular mobilization" of the sort that working-class fascism drew on. But, all the same, it was a very willing crony of big business, which was quite happy with the anti-leftist "new man" that once threatened to rule the world. A solid contribution to political literature, and of much interest to students of 20th-century history. Agency: Wylie Agency

Guerillas or The Counter Terrorism Puzzle

2009-02-08T07:57:00.000-08:00

Guerillas: War and Peace in Central America

Author: Dirk Krujit

Three parallel wars were fought in the latter half of the twentieth century in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. This fascinating study of the "guerrilla generation" is based on in-depth interviews with both guerrilla comandantes and political and military leaders of the time. Dirk Kruijt analyzes the dreams and achievements, the successes and failures, the utopias and dystopias of an entire Central American generation and its leaders. Guerrillas ranges widely, from the guerrilla movement's origins in poverty, oppression and exclusion; its tactics in warfare; the ill-fated experiment with Sandinista government in Nicaragua; and the subsequent "normalization" of guerrilla movements within democratic societies.

List of Abbreviations and Spanish Terms
* List of Tables
* Acknowledgements
* Foreword--Edelberto Torres-Rivas
* Introduction: Guerrillas and Comandantes
* Dictators and Civil Wars
* Genesis of a Guerrilla Generation
* Inside the Guerrilla
* Utopia and Dystopia, Nicaragua (1979 - 1990)
* Negotiations, Peace and Post - War Integration
* Legacies and Ambivalences
* Appendix I: Politico - Military Organizations
* Appendix II: Demographic Data
* Appendix III: List of Interviews
* Notes
* Bibliography
* Index

New interesting textbook: Blood and Marrow Transplantation or Understanding Dietary Supplements

The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: A Guide for Decision Makers

Author: Boaz Ganor

The escalation of global terrorism has left populations across the world and decision makers unprepared. This book is the first attempt to create a manual of counter-terrorism measures on all relevant operational levels. The author's main purpose is to give decision makers the tools to make rational and effective decisions in both preventing and countering terrorism.

The need to contend with terrorism can be found in almost every sphere of life: Security, prevention and suppression of terrorism, legal and ethical dilemmas regarding democratic issues, such as the individual's human rights, intelligence interrogations, the right of the public to know, as well as coping with social, psychological, and media-related issues. The book deals with all relevant aspects of counter-terrorism and analyzes decision makers' main dilemmas. It is based on accumulated experience in the field all over the world, particularly in the State of Israel. The method of presentation is to portray the main dilemmas in each sphere of counter-terrorism-defining the threat and appropriate countermeasures, evaluating intelligence, offensive and defensive action, legal and judicial issues, media coverage, international cooperation-and to analyze them in terms of Israel's accumulated experience, comparing them, in many cases, to the experience of other countries. The conceptual models used, and the indexed charts appearing at the end of the discussion of each respective dilemma, enable decision makers to think rationally without outside considerations, and are based solely on cost/benefit considerations, in order to resolve the dilemma most effectively.

This is an essential book in its field. Its professional importance is unrivaled in counter-terrorism, both theoretically and in the scope of its research. It will be of interest to security professionals, students of counter-terrorism methods and those dealing with the planning and application of foreign policy, and journalists.

Lords of the Land or Lobbying for Social Change

2009-02-07T02:45:00.000-08:00

Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007

Author: Idith Zertal

Lords of the Land tells the tragic story of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of the 1967 war and Israel's devastating victory over its Arab neighbors, catastrophe struck both the soul and psyche of the state of Israel. Based on years of research, and written by one of Israel's leading historians and journalists, this involving narrative focuses on the settlers themselves — often fueled by messianic zeal but also inspired by the original Zionist settlers — and shows the role the state of Israel has played in nurturing them through massive economic aid and legal sanctions. The occupation, the authors argue, has transformed the very foundations of Israel's society, economy, army, history, language, moral profile, and international standing. "The vast majority of the 6.5 million Israelis who live in their country do not know any other reality," the authors write. "The vast majority of the 3.5 million Palestinians who live in the regions of their occupied land do not know any other reality. The prolonged military occupation and the Jewish settlements that are perpetuating it have toppled Israeli governments and have brought Israel's democracy and its political culture to the brink of an abyss."

The New York Times - Adam LeBor

Lords of the Land is the first complete history of the settlement project. It provides a detailed narrative of injustice, and is profoundly depressing for anyone still hoping for a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even hoping that Jews and Arabs will be seen as equal in the eyes of Israeli law…This may be an angry, embittered book, but the two authors are well-informed experts. Zertal is a noted Israeli historian, who now teaches at the University of Basel, and Eldar is an influential columnist for the left-wing daily, Ha'aretz. They are especially good on Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, the religious Zionists driving the settlement project and the compromises with them made by a weak secular Israeli establishment.

The Economist

In this thorough and eye-opening book, Idith Zertal, a historian, and Akiva Eldar, a journalist, explain how a few tens of thousands of people bent the state to their purpose. Settlements were not on the official agenda after Israel's surprise capture of the Palestinian territories in 1967. But pressure from ardent young religious Zionists found a secular echo among military men, who came to see security benefits to having Israelis live in the West Bank.

Lobbying for Social Change

Author: Willard C Richan

Written by a leader in the field of American social policy, this new edition of Lobbying for Social Change provides step-by-step suggestions and case examples for individuals who wish to get involved with and have an impact on social policy. Using a nuts-and-bolts approach, Lobbying for Social Change is ideal for those with no previous experience in advocating for public policy. This new edition avoids professional and academic jargon and prepares readers to lobby effectively, face-to-face with public officials with its new chapters on the changing context of political action and how to use the new technology of the information age to aid lobbying efforts.

Booknews

Provides step-by-step suggestions and case examples for individuals who want to have an impact on social policy, especially those with no previous experience. Discusses setting an action agenda, gathering evidence, lobbying, working with a live audience, testifying in hearings, and using the mass media. This second edition contains a new section reflecting changes in the political scene since 1991, looking at middle- and working-class Americans and changes in technology. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

	Preface to the Second Edition
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
Ch. 1	The Politics of Frustration	23
Ch. 2	Lobbying in the Information Age	47
Ch. 3	Assessing Your Strengths and Limitations	69
Ch. 4	Setting the Action Agenda	87
Ch. 5	Understanding Policymakers	105
Ch. 6	Gathering Evidence	131
Ch. 7	Preparing the Case	155
Ch. 8	Lobbying One-on-One	185
Ch. 9	Working with a Live Audience	221
Ch. 10	Testifying in a Hearing	249
Ch. 11	Using the Mass Media	279
	Appendix: The Policymaking Machinery	321
	Bibliography	339
	Index	349

Dominion of Memories or You Can Lead a Politician to Water But You Cant Make Him Think

2009-02-05T21:31:00.000-08:00

Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia

Author: Susan Dunn

During the Revolutionary Period, and in the early days of the Union, Virginia was the nation's most promising state. It produced a galaxy of America's most important founders and statesmen: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Marshall, and many others. And yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Virginia had become little more than a byword for poverty, slavery, and economic stagnation. The decline was dramatic and startling. What happened?

In Dominion of Memories, Susan Dunn chronicles the precipitous decline of America's most promising state. A gloriously written tale of the Founding Fathers and their beloved state, Dominion of Memories offers in microcosm the story of how a nation founded with great hope in the Age of Revolution found itself marching inexorably towards civil war half a century later.

The New York Times - Mick Sussman

Slavery's role in the decline of the South is an old story, but Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, finds fresh insights by making a case study of Virginia. She emphasizes the significance of lesser-known figures like Thomas Roderick Dew, who in 1832 published an essay that laid the intellectual groundwork for an uncompromisingly pro-slavery ideology, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, who anticipated secession with an 1836 novel envisioning a Southern rebellion. Dunn's chief aim, though, is to show the complicity of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia's stagnation.

Publishers Weekly

Whatever happened to the great Commonwealth of Virginia? Dunn (Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800) investigates how Virginia fell from being the most advanced and vibrant of the 18th-century American states to being among the new country's most stultified and parochial. Dunn points out that four of the first five American presidents were Virginians, and it was often supposed in the early Republic that, in the words of one politician, the Old Dominion had hatched "a systematic design of perpetually governing the country." By the 1820s, however, the commonwealth's once thriving economy had shuddered to a halt, its aristocratic planters were defaulting on their considerable debts, many lived in poverty and visitors from the industrializing, bustling Northeast noticed that everything was dirty and dilapidated—even Monticello and Mount Vernon. Dunn attributes Virginia's downfall to a combination of its ruling elite adhering to a "gentlemanly" way of life, its obsession with states' rights and the retention of slavery. These factors, Dunn says, fostered an atmosphere of indolence and tedious provincialism that condemned the Old Dominion to the status of a has-been champion musing nostalgically on the pleasures of the past. By focusing intently on the stresses within a single state, Dunn's is an admirable guide to those perplexed by the eventual sundering of the entire Union. (June)

KLIATT

Williams College history professor Dunn presents the reader with an absorbing chronicle of Virginia from Colonial to pre-Civil War times. Seen mainly through the public and private writings of storied leaders Jefferson and Madison, Virginia struggles to maintain its position of prominence in a young nation that quickly outstrips it economically and socially. The value of this smoothly written and exhaustively researched volume is that it offers a view of Virginia and its fabled leaders that most history readers may well have missed. Jefferson and Madison think, rethink and even seem to contradict themselves as they meditate on the growth of their young nation while the nation moves beyond them and, finally, begins to set itself against Virginia, the South, and the slave culture. Highly recommended for all teachers and advanced students of American history and culture. Reviewer: Patricia Moore

Kirkus Reviews

Virginia went from cradle of presidents to political backwater in a couple of generations-mostly for reasons of its own making, argues Dunn (Humanities/Williams College; George Washington, 2004, etc.). Jefferson's death in 1826 coincided with the "sunset of the Virginia dynasty," writes Dunn. Hitherto, Virginia had provided four of the first five presidents and much of the early judiciary; afterward, Virginia would supply only one president, John Tyler, and two justices, Lewis Powell and Peter Daniel. The reversal of fortunes owes to many factors, by Dunn's account. One was the state's "population of slumbering citizens, demoralized and passive," bullied by property requirements and custom to leave politics to the landed aristocracy; another was illiteracy, four times higher than in states to the north, since "wealthy Virginians, historically averse to taxation, refused to support public schools." Jefferson's granddaughter, Ellen Coolidge, rightly remarked that for the state to prosper it required good soil and intelligent farmers, good citizens willing to support roads and schools and other amenities, a diversified economy, bustling cities and widely shared ideals of freedom and equality. Yet hidebound social traditions met political and economic reaction to produce resistance to change, such as breaking away from a tobacco economy, abandoning slavery and investing in industrial expansion. In the early republic, Virginia had no cities of note, no means to support the textile industry that it could have developed; had the state not cut off funding for geological surveys, Virginia explorers might have discovered its stores of "coal, gold, iron, copper, lead, and even salt" and yieldedwealth that way. (One of the state surveyors left in disgust and, as Dunn notes, founded MIT.) Irrelevant to the nation's progress, Virginians came to embrace a wounded sense of state's rights, still led by a gentry that subscribed to the view that "good government was simply government of, by, and for themselves and their interests." And so it would long remain. A lucid, provocative work of historical inquiry, though unlikely to win any praise among the First Families of Virginia.

Interesting textbook: Game Programming Gem 5 or Comet and Reverse Ajax

You Can Lead a Politician to Water, but You Can't Make Him Think: Ten Commandments for Texas Politics

Author: Kinky Friedman

And Kinky Said Unto the People: Why the Hell Not?

So the good people of Texas weren't able to get the Kinkster into the Governor's Mansion in 2006. It was a solid race, and he fought the good fight. Getting on the ballot as an independent -- a feat that had not been achieved in over a century -- was a victory in itself. And with ideas like "slots for tots" (legalized gambling to pay for education), the five Mexican generals plan (bribes to enforce border protection), and a firm stand against the "wussification" of the state, he would have done a helluva job.

If that 2006 election was any indication -- and it was -- the political landscape in both Texas and the country at large needs a significant overhaul. The hucksters, the wealthy, and the twofaced rule; there is no room for Truth, and the little guys are quickly forgotten in all the muck. But Kinky, (briefly) down yet certainly not out, is still looking out for his fellow Americans, and he has much wisdom to impart.

In this hilarious, thought-provoking manifesto, Kinky lays forth his ten commandments for improving the state of Texas and politics everywhere, and for restoring order, logic, decency, and above all a sense of humor back to this country. It's classic Kinky in a brand new way. And he might just have a point.

The New York Times - Bill Scheft

A chronicle of a race in which one doesn't even wind up with a podium finish cannot help being self-reverential …but the narcissistic journey is worth it. Kinky loves Texas more than himself. His heart is in the right place, and so is his outrage…In a state that offers festival seating on death row, there is only one capital offense for the Favorite Son Humor Writer: first-degree unfunniness. Fear not. Kinky never stops working the room. New, used and pre-owned jokes cohabit with Southwestern Zen and spur-jangling wordplay. He gives credit where he can, or when it makes him look good. Sure, you'd like to know who originally uttered the line "I'm 62 years old. That's too young for Medicare and too old for women to care," but this is hardly Joe Biden ripping off Neil Kinnock. If you want to beat him up for being a sloppy archivist of other people's witticisms, fine. At worst, Kinky is the one guy who e-mails you gags that are actually good.

Publishers Weekly

When satirist/novelist/musician Friedman declared his independent candidacy for Texas governor, nobody expected him to win-and he didn't. But he did get nearly 550,000 votes, or 12% of the total cast. He also collected rich material for his sendup of politics in Texas and other jurisdictions. Friedman's always irreverent, sometimes profane and occasionally sophomoric commentary won't appeal to everybody, but even those who refuse to laugh out loud can find verities worth repeating. His chapter about improving schooling for all children, for example, includes the observation that "No good teacher wants to teach to the test; no great teacher ever will." The emphasis on classroom assessment, Friedman says, risks creating "a whole generation of supposedly college-bound kids who aren't quite sure if the Civil War took place here or in Europe. It wasn't on the test." Given Texans' independent streak, Friedman correctly calculated his messages would get a hearing on the campaign trail. After all, he noted, professional wrestler Jesse Ventura won the governorship of Minnesota. Too bad he lasted only one term, Friedman quips: Ventura "never figured out that wrestling is real and politics is fixed." (Oct.)

The Geography of Urban Transportation or Londonistan

2009-02-04T16:19:00.000-08:00

The Geography of Urban Transportation

Author: Susan Hanson

Here is a timely revision of the 1986 collection that defines the intersection of urban and transportation geography. Its integrative approach links spatial, technical, demographic, and political aspects of urban transportationm-all themes of increasing importance as American society addresses 1990s issues of congestion management.

Booknews

Three substantial introductory chapters are followed by seven chapters outlining various analytical approaches to transportation problems, balancing historical material with descriptions and analyses of travel at the aggregate and disaggregate levels, methodological presentations, and policy descriptions. First published in 1986. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

1	The context of urban travel : concepts and recent trends	3
2	City interactions : the dynamics of passenger and freight flows	30
3	Transportation and urban form : stages in the spatial evolution of the American metropolis	59
4	Impact of information technologies	86
5	The urban transportation planning process	115
6	Reflections on the planning process	141
7	GIS in urban-regional transportation planning	163
8	Public transportation	199
9	Land use impacts of transportation investments : highway and transit	237
10	Transportation and energy	274
11	The geography of urban transportation finance	294
12	Social and environmental justice issues in urban transportation	332
13	Transportation and the environment	356
14	Managing the auto	382

Interesting textbook: After Victory or Migration Theory

Londonistan

Author: Melanie Phillips

The suicide bombings carried out in London in 2005 by British Muslims revealed an enormous fifth column of Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers. Under the noses of British intelligence, London has become the European hub for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism - so much so that it has been mockingly dubbed Londonistan. In this ground-breaking book Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of traditional English identity and accommodation of a particularly virulent form of multiculturalism. Londonistan has become a country within the country and not only threatens Britain but its special relationship with the U.S. as well.

The Federalist with Letters of Brutus or The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

2009-02-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

The Federalist, with Letters of Brutus

Author: Alexander Hamilton

The Federalist represents one side of one of the most momentous political debates ever conducted: whether to ratify, or to reject, the newly drafted American constitution. This authoritative new edition presents complete texts for all of the eighty-five Federalist papers, along with the sixteen letters of "Brutus", the unknown New York Antifederalist. Each paper is systematically cross-referenced to the other, and both to the appended Articles of Confederation and U.S. Constitution. Terence Ball's editing skills enhance the accessibility of a classic of political thought in action.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life As a Slave, His Escape from Bondage and His Complete History

Author: Frederick Douglass

Raised as a plantation slave, Douglass went on to become a writer, orator, and major participant in the struggle for African-American freedom and equality. In this engrossing narrative he recounts early years of abuse; his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom, abolitionist campaigns, and his crusade for full civil rights for former slaves.

The Importance of Being Honest or Great Partition

2009-02-02T05:52:00.000-08:00

The Importance of Being Honest: How Lying, Secrecy, and Hypocrisy Collide with Truth in Law

Author: Steven Lubet

"The Importance of Being Honest is both funny and dangerous. In pulling the lid off the hypocrisy and delusions at virtually every level of the legal profession, he is in danger of touching off a chain reaction that could result in the average American's understanding and thus his and her ability to reform the legal system."
—Allen Barra, Wall Street Journal

"Lubet probes some of the thorniest ethical and legal questions facing us, and respects both his reader and the law enough to avoid simplistic answers. Whether he's scrutinizing Bill Clinton's relationship to his lawyer, reassessing what we know about the Scopes Monkey trial, or evaluating the demotion of Pluto, Lubet's book offers a fresh lens through which to view legal questions."
—Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.com

"Lubet is so witty and entertaining that you may not even notice how much you're learning about the dangers of 'honesty-deficient lawyers and judges.' A real eye-opener!"
—Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction

Popular author Steven Lubet brings his signature blend of humor, advocacy, and legal ethics to The Importance of Being Honest, an incisive analysis of how honesty and law play out in current affairs and historical events. Drawing on original work as well as op-ed pieces and articles that have appeared in the American Lawyer, the Chicago Tribune, and many other national publications, Lubet explores the complex aspects of honesty in the legal world.

The Importance of Being Honest is full of tales of questionable practices and poor behavior,chosen because negative examples are much richer, and often more remarkable, in their ultimate lessons. Wyatt Earp's shootout with Billy Clanton, Bill Clinton's disastrous decision to lie under oath, Oscar Wilde's self-destructive perjury in a 1896 libel trial, and the dubious resolution of Justice Scalia's duck hunting trip with Dick Cheney are only a few of the cases Lubet use to illustrate that law is a vague and boggy realm where truth, and falsehood, is seldom absolute. With his lively, insightful, and sometimes hilarious prose, Lubet takes readers on a tour of the law in our everyday lives, and forces us to rethink how we really feel about honesty and truth.

Publishers Weekly

Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern (Lawyers' Poker: 52 Lessons That Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players) tackles a series of subtle and thorny ethical questions that lawyers and judges face each day. These questions can challenge their integrity, determine their effectiveness and affect how the public views the legal profession. Lubet chooses a few notorious examples to showcase his points, such as the ethical questions raised by Supreme Court Justice Scalia's duck-hunting trip with Vice President Cheney (should the justice have recused himself in Sierra Club v. Cheney?) and Bill Clinton's infamous Monica Lewinsky deposition (did he lie to his lawyer?). Many of Lubet's examples are about less public conundrums, such as what lawyers should do if they make a mistake and the problem of judicial bullies. Lubet's central concern, which he mines adeptly, is with actions that are arguably legal but may also be strategically or morally wrong. Lubet's writing is a great strength: straightforward, funny, intelligent and devoid of legalese. Like a good color analyst, he conveys an insider's knowledge in an entertaining and informative way. (May)

Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

Author: Yasmin Khan

The Partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political and religious freedom—through the liberation of India from British rule, and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Instead, the geographical divide brought displacement and death, and it benefited the few at the expense of the very many. Thousands of women were raped, at least one million people were killed, and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes as refugees. One of the first events of decolonization in the twentieth century, Partition was also one of the most bloody.

In this book Yasmin Khan examines the context, execution, and aftermath of Partition, weaving together local politics and ordinary lives with the larger political forces at play. She exposes the widespread obliviousness to what Partition would entail in practice and how it would affect the populace. Drawing together fresh information from an array of sources, Khan underscores the catastrophic human cost and shows why the repercussions of Partition resound even now, some sixty years later. The book is an intelligent and timely analysis of Partition, the haste and recklessness with which it was completed, and the damaging legacy left in its wake.

Uma Doraiswamy - Library Journal

Khan (postdoctoral fellow, Univ. of London) eloquently discusses the making of India and Pakistan after British rule on the subcontinent was dismantled in 1947. She emphasizes that the partitioning that created two separate countries was a fateful folly committed by the British and some nationalist forces, revealing how partition changed the lives of millions of people across all walks of life. With insistent irony, Khan argues that the British government executed the partition plan in a "shoddy" manner that destroyed the lives of thousands and the dreams of millions. Powerfully described here, the horrendous aftermath of the partition has created a wedge between Hindus and Muslims, and the book gives a clear warning about the dangerous consequences of heedless partition and extreme nationalism. Drawing from varied historical literature and archival sources, the author has obviously provided a new look at this still important subject. Strongly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.

Combating Corruption Encouraging Ethics or Administrative Law

2009-02-01T00:39:00.000-08:00

Combating Corruption, Encouraging Ethics: A Practical Guide to Management Ethics

Author: William L Richter

In their second edition of Combating Corruption, Encouraging Ethics, William L. Richter and Frances Burke update this essential staple to delve deeply into the unique ethical problems of twenty-first century public administration. Combating Corruption, Encouraging Ethics offers both the depth demanded by graduate courses in administrative ethics and the accessibility necessary for an undergraduate introduction to public administration.

Preface     ix
Ethics: Foundations and Challenges     1
Introductory Essay
Ethical Foundations: Virtue, Consequence, Principle     11
Virtue, Habit, and Ethics   Aristotle     11
On Virtue   Terry Cooper     12
The Prince   Niccolo Machiavelli     15
Utilitarianism   John Stuart Mill     17
Principle: The Categorical Imperative   Immanuel Kant     20
The Ethical Triangle   James Svara     22
Gyges's Ring     29
Chapter Discussion Questions     29
For Further Exploration     29
Responsibility and Accountability     31
The Study of Administration   Woodrow Wilson     31
Politics as a Vocation   Max Weber     33
The Friedrich-Finer Debate     35
Public Policy and the Nature of Administrative Responsibility   Carl Joachim Friedrich     35
Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government   Herman Finer     37
Ethics and the Public Service   Stephen K. Bailey     38
Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics   Ruth W. Grant   Robert O. Keohane     42
Following Orders     45
Chapter Discussion Questions     45
For Further Exploration     46
Twenty-First Century Challenges: Global Dimensions/Changing Boundaries     47
The New Public Administrator   Glenn L. Starks     47
Megaprojects and Risk   Bent B. Flyvbjerg   Nils Bruzelius   Werner Rothengatter     52
The World We Could Win   Michael Duggett   Fabienne Maron     58
The CAUX Round Table Principles for Business$dCAUX Round Table     60
Balance Between Electronic Access and Privacy Rights   Blake Harris     62
Integrity at the United Nations     65
Chapter Discussion Questions     66
For Further Exploration     66
Ethical Problems: Some Blatant, Some Not So Obvious     69
Introductory Essay
Understanding Fraud, Waste, and Corrupt Practices     75
An Organizational Perspective on Corruption   Yadong Luo     75
Corruption and Governance   Gerald E. Caiden     78
What Is Corruption?$dU.S. Agency for International Development     80
Fighting Corruption Globally$dTransparency International     81
Corruption in the Not-for-Profit Sector$dMiami-Dade County     83
The Adjunct Professor     85
Chapter Discussion Questions     86
For Further Exploration     87
Graft, Bribery, and Conflict of Interest     89
Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft   William L. Riordan     89
Struggling Against Bribery   John T. Noonan, Jr.     91
Conflict of Interest in Nonprofit Ethics   David Schultz     94
Extremism in the Search for Virtue   Kathryn G. Denhardt   Stuart C. Gilman     99
The Gift of a Carpet     102
Chapter Discussion Questions     103
For Further Exploration     104
Lying, Cheating, and Deception     105
Lies for the Public Good   Sissela Bok     105
Lying in the Public Interest   Lynn Pasquerella   Alfred G. Killilea     108
"Plausible Deniability"   John Poindexter   David Boren     114
Distorting Scientific Research$dUnion of Concerned Scientists     116
Greater Good Versus Falsification     120
Chapter Discussion Questions     121
For Further Exploration     121
Privacy, Secrecy, and Confidentiality     123
Secrecy in the Bush Administration   U.S. House Committee Minority Staff     123
Privacy in the United States and the European Union   U.S. Department of Commerce     129
HIPAA Compliance   Christina Torode     131
USA Patriot Act: Privacy v. Security   Maura King Scully     132
Not Just a Driver's License   Amitai Etzioni     135
"Outing" Agents and Protecting Sources     138
Chapter Discussion Questions     139
For Further Exploration     139
Abuse of Authority and 'Administrative Evil"     141
The Malek Manual   Frederick Malek     141
The Banality of Evil   Hannah Arendt     144
Torture as Public Policy/   James Pfiffner     147
What About Evil?   H. George Frederickson     150
History as Cause: Columbia and Challenger$dColumbia Accident Investigation Board     152
When the County Knows Best?     154
Chapter Discussion Questions     156
For Further Exploration     156
Strategies: What to Do When the Angels Are Missing     157
Introductory Essay
Establishing Expectations, Providing Guidelines, and Building Trust     165
Maintaining Government Integrity   Amy Comstock     165
The Investors' Advocate$dSecurities and Exchange Commission (SEC)     167
Trust in Government: Ethics Measures in OECD Countries$dOECD     169
Data Regulation: Measuring Governance and Corruption$dThe World Bank     171
Maximizing Trust, Minimizing Conflicts   Robert Meyers   Christina Prkic     172
Batho Pele Principles and Service Delivery   Kishore Raga   John Derek Taylor     174
The ASPA Code of Ethics$dAmerican Society for Public Administration     175
Are You an Ethical Public Official?$dICMA     178
Legal, Wrong, or Morally Required?     182
Chapter Discussion Questions     183
For Further Exploration     183
Transparency, Whistle-Blowing, and Dissent     185
Dealing with Dissent: Learning to Listen   Richard A. Loverd     185
The Ethical Importance of Resigning   J. Patrick Dobel     189
Protecting the Whistle-blower   Roberta Ann Johnson     193
Circumscribed Protection: The Ceballos Case$dU.S. Supreme Court     197
Ethics, Transparency International, and the Private Sector   Jermyn Brooks     199
What Is a Whistle-Blower to Do?      201
Chapter Discussion Questions     202
For Further Exploration     202
Compliance, Oversight, and Sanctions     205
Government Accountability$dGAO     205
SEC and Oversight   William H. Donaldson     208
Funding GASB after Sarbanes-Oxley   William Voorhees     210
Governmental Nonprofit Oversight$dPanel on the Nonprofit Sector     212
Hurricane Relief Oversight$dPCIE/ECIE     215
Ignorance or Insider Trading?     218
Chapter Discussion Questions     218
For Further Exploration     219
Leadership and Individual Responsibility: Encouraging Ethics     221
Ethics Advice to a New Public Servant   Kenneth Ashworth     221
The Moral Responsibility of Individuals in Public Sector Organizations   Debra Stewart     225
Eliot Spitzer as a Moral Exemplar   William B. Eimicke     230
As a City Upon a Hill   John F. Kennedy     234
Mayors as Exemplars?     235
Chapter Discussion Questions     236
For Further Exploration     236
Index     239
About the Editors     247

Go to: Freaks Geeks and Cool Kids or The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination

Administrative Law: Cases and Materials

Author: Ronald A Cass

Instructors who want a traditional administrative law casebook that supplies important contextual information have long favored this carefully crafted teaching tool. ADMINISTRATIVE LAW: Cases and Materials, Fifth Edition, continues to present administrative law as a vital force in policymaking, law enactment, and politics through the use of case analysis and excerpted materials that explore policy theories.

Refined through years of successful classroom use, the casebook offers:

outstanding authorship from a team of expert scholars, including Colin S. Diver, who served on the National Regulatory Commission's Advisory Committee

integration of doctrinal analysis and procedural rules with substantive policy areas to enable students to see the relevance of administrative law in policy and contemporary politics

clearly written introductions, transitional text, notes, and questions, all designed to stimulate student understanding

selected provisions from the Constitution of the United States and the Administrative Procedure Act, plus related provisions, in an appendix

a comprehensive Teacher's Manual that presents the authors' insights on teaching and outlines different approaches to the course

The scrupulously updated Fifth Edition presents new material on:

separation of powers, including Edmunds v. United States on the distinction between principal and inferior offices, the establishment and organization of the Department of Homeland Security, issues concerning the President's authority in the war on terrorism, and Telecom Ass'n v. FCC, regarding agencies sub-delegating their authority to state agencies

standards of judicial review, with notablecoverage of Chevron regarding air quality standards and extensive revision to accommodate the rules governing when Chevron applies, with a focus on Mead and related cases, such as Boeing v. United States

availability of judicial review, now including Norton v. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance on the definition of 'agency action' subject to judicial review, Public Citizen Health Research Group v. Chao on the reviewability of excessive agency delay, and Bennet v. Spear concerning the importance of the finality standard

adjudication, reflecting Justice Scalia's refusal to recuse himself from Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Court for the District of Columbia after traveling with Cheney on a duck-hunting trip and discussion of Sprietsma v. Mercury Maine regarding preemption of state law by federal agency under the Federal Boat Safety Act

licensing, now with the inclusion of National Cable & Telecommunications Ass'n v. Brand X Internet Services on the FCC's treatment of competing internet services

the war on terror's effects on government's ability to withhold information from the public

recent Supreme Court decisions, such as Sprietsma v. Mercury Marine dealing with preemption of the Federal Boat Safety Act over a state common-law tort action and Aetna Health Inc. v. Davila regarding ERISA preempting individuals from suing their HMOs for refusing to pay for recommended treatment

The File or Franklin Delano Roosevelt

2009-01-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

The File: A Personal History

Author: Timothy Garton Ash

"Eloquent, aware and scrupulous . . . a rich and instructive examination of the Cold War past." —The New York Times

In 1978 a romantic young Englishman took up residence in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen years later Timothy Garton Ash—who was by then famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central Europe—returned. This time he had come to look at a file that bore the code-name "Romeo." The file had been compiled by the Stasi, the East German secret police, with the assistance of dozens of informers. And it contained a meticulous record of Garton Ash's earlier life in Berlin.

In this memoir, Garton Ash describes what it was like to rediscover his younger self through the eyes of the Stasi, and then to go on to confront those who actually informed against him to the secret police. Moving from document to remembrance, from the offices of British intelligence to the living rooms of retired Stasi officers, The File is a personal narrative as gripping, as disquieting, and as morally provocative as any fiction by George Orwell or Graham Greene. And it is all true.

"In this painstaking, powerful unmasking of evil, the wretched face of tyranny is revealed." —Philadelphia Inquirer

Look this: Advanced VBScript for Microsoft Windows Administrators or Joel Whitburn Presents Songs and Artists

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (The American Presidents Series)

Author: Roy Jenkins

A masterly work by the New York Times bestselling author of Churchill and GladstoneA protean figure and a man of massive achievement, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only man to be elected to the presidency more than twice. In a ranking of chief executives, no more than three of his predecessors could truly be placed in contention with his standing, and of his successors, there are so far none. In acute, stylish prose, Roy Jenkins tackles all of the nuances and intricacies of FDR's character. He was a skilled politician with astounding flexibility; he oversaw an incomparable mobilization of American industrial and military effort; and, all the while, he aroused great loyalty and dazzled those around him with his personal charm. Despite several setbacks and one apparent catastrophe, his life was buoyed by the influence of Eleanor, who was not only a wife but an adviser and one of the twentieth century's greatest political reformers. Nearly complete before Jenkins's death in January 2003, this volume was finished by historian Richard Neustadt.

The New York Times

Breezy and brief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a small-scale biography of an outsize personality, and succeeds brilliantly. The joy that Jenkins takes in Roosevelt, and the reformers and rogues that surround him, is manifest, and difficult not to share. — Jeff Shesol

Publishers Weekly

Distinguished British historian Jenkins (author of the recent bestselling biography Churchill) died in January 2003. He left this brief biography of FDR for Arthur Schlesinger's American Presidents series largely complete. Now published with a conclusion written by another eminent historian, Richard Neustadt, the volume comprises a concise yet coherent and quite reliable summation of Roosevelt's fascinating life and presidency. Jenkins captures FDR in all his contradictions. As the author astutely notes, although a Knickerbocker squire from New York's Hudson Valley-arguably the most Europe-oriented part of the United States-FDR was "peculiarly successful at transcending geography and uniting the continent." Whomever he met, he charmed, be it some simple farmer or Winston Churchill. But the one he charmed before most others, his fifth cousin and spouse, Eleanor Roosevelt, came to view him cynically. She recognized that intermixed with his enormous capacity and willingness to do good, there was a certain self-serving casualness that permitted numerous petty lies perpetrated on friends, allies and family. Elegantly describing FDR's course through a score of personal and political ordeals, Jenkins astutely shows us the man in all his many incarnations: the confident son of privilege who morphed into a wry, young politico on the rise; the startled victim, for whom all things had previously come so easily, hitting the brick wall of polio and fighting back, strenuously leading his broken country out of its two great 20th-century crises: the Great Depression and World War II. (Nov. 4) Forecast: This is the short alternative for readers unwilling to take on Conrad Black's 1,300-page biography (Forecasts, Sept. 22) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

This brilliant short biography provides more insight and reward than many Roosevelt biographies ten times its length. Jenkins, who died in the final stages of completing the manuscript, was ideally suited to appreciate the longest-serving U.S. president. As a master biographer, political practitioner, and partisan of the same Anglo-American liberal tradition that shaped Roosevelt, Jenkins had the intellectual and political background to understand F.D.R.; as a foreigner, he was able to view Roosevelt's accomplishments and failures from a judicious distance. The light touch and deft style that Jenkins employed when treating even the weightiest matters illuminate rather than distract: to call Eleanor Roosevelt's childhood circumstances "a House of Mirth atmosphere" is to say more, and more economically, than most others who have written on the theme. The carefully selected facts and quotations in the book are memorable precisely because they are so spare. Jenkins' long biographies of statesmen such as Gladstone and Churchill showed that he was a master of the long form; his life of Roosevelt shows that his biographical talents, undiminished by age, did not require acres of paper to achieve their full effect.

Library Journal

More than half a century after Abraham Lincoln's presidency, the first best single volume biography of him was authored by Lord Charnwood (Godfrey Rathbone Benson), and now after only a slightly longer period, another certain classic on America's best president since Lincoln has been authored by another Englishman, Lord Black. The publication of this FDR biography is quite a feat since America's 32nd president served three times longer than its 16th president. A perspective that truly comprehends the global magnitude of America's two greatest chief executives may require the perspective from someone abroad. Author of two previous books and the chairman/CEO of Hollinger International, Inc. (publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator, and the Jerusalem Post), Black is a capable writer, able to sustain interest in a long narrative. However, his major achievement is putting FDR's leadership in both an American and an international perspective. He captures its prudential nature, always aiming for the middle ground between extremists at home (e.g., Huey Long and Douglas MacArthur) and modern ideological dictators abroad. The author clearly understands that FDR was the democratic alternative that made him the most important leader of the 20th century, surpassing the traditionalism of Winston Churchill. FDR's personal shortcomings are fully addressed, but Black shows that they did not undermine his political legacy. Both the general public and scholars will benefit from this highly readable account. An essential purchase for all libraries. Another British observer, Jenkins (Churchill), a Labor Party Member of Parliament and the author of 21 books, had nearly finished this short work on FDR when he died earlier this year. (Political scientist and Harvard professor Richard Neustadt completed it for him.) Jenkins's approach to FDR is generally positive. He notes that had FDR maintained the two-term tradition, he would have been regarded as only a nearly great president. Except for the British interest in social class and occasional comparisons to its leaders, this is a conventional introduction to FDR that political buffs and FDR fans will enjoy reading. Libraries with budget restraints are better served with the Black biography or with Patrick J. Maney's readable but more scholarly short biography, The Roosevelt Presence.-William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-To distill the life of Roosevelt into a book of less than 200 pages is a major challenge; to succeed in doing so without shortchanging readers is a true accomplishment. As president, FDR faced America's worst financial crisis and the world's most destructive war. He also influenced the larger trends of the 20th century, from the progressive movement of his younger days to the Cold War and the welfare state that followed him. Jenkins admirably describes his subject's background and development and outlines how Roosevelt dealt with the Great Depression and the Second World War. But Jenkins is not only an accomplished biographer, he was also one of the leading British politicians of the second half of the 20th century. His nationality gives him a perspective on FDR that would be difficult to obtain as an American. Likewise, his study of other great political leaders allows him to gain a broader view of Roosevelt as president. This is one of the best short biographies of Roosevelt imaginable.-Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

One of America's greatest presidents becomes a barely recognizable caricature. It's hard to imagine who the audience is supposed to be for this latest installment in the American Presidents series, presided over by Arthur Schlesinger. Of course, Jenkins (Churchill, 2001, etc.), who died earlier this year, had an unenviable task: to take the life of FDR—patrician, world leader, master politician—and condense it into fewer than 200 breezy pages. There's plenty to choose from. Roosevelt was the scion of one of the country's truest blue-blood families, and, strangely enough, the author seems most comfortable sketching this genteel Knickerbocker heritage. In describing the almost feudal atmosphere of the Hudson River Valley estates where FDR was raised, Jenkins points out how paradoxical it was that this man, "a product not of the heartland but of the extreme eastern edge and most Europe-centered part of America," would be so successful at "transcending geography and uniting the continent." Although permanently linked in the public mind, FDR and intellectual roustabout Teddy Roosevelt, whom FDR greatly admired and tried to emulate, were only distant cousins. Jenkins describes the halting and imperfect road that FDR took toward the White House, marked by such relatively low points as his undistinguished term as assistant secretary of the Navy and an unsuccessful vice-presidential candidacy in 1920. But even after FDR's election as New York governor and finally his ascendancy to the White House in 1932 (an office he would hold until his death in 1945) this life fails to take flight. Only in limning the chinks in the normally revered FDR's armor—especially in his less-than-romanticrelationship with wife Eleanor—does Jenkins manage to render any of it terribly interesting. Too skimpy to interest serious historians, too dull and stiff for general readers looking for a quick overview. (For the other descriptive extreme, see Conrad Black, above.)

	Editor's Note	xiii
	A Note on the Text	xvii
1.	Roosevelt Cousins	1
2.	Portrait of a Marriage That Became Crippled	22
3.	From Albany to the White House	47
4.	The Exciting Ambiguities of the First Term	66
5.	Setbacks: Political and Economic	94
6.	Backing into War	115
7.	The Hard-Fought Years: December 1941-July 1944	132
8.	Death on the Verge of Victory	149
	Milestones	171
	Selected Bibliography	175
	Index	179

Martha Washington or Government in America

2009-01-29T14:14:00.000-08:00

Martha Washington: America's First Lady (Childhood of Famous Americans Series)

Author: Jean Brown Wagoner

One of the most popular series ever published for young Americans, these classics of childhood have been praised alike by parents, teachers, and librarians. These lively, inspiring, believable biographies sweep today's young readers right into history.

Books about: Americanization of Benjamin Franklin or What Orwell Didnt Know

Government in America: People, Politics, and Policy

Author: George C Edwards

Framing its content within a resonant “politics matters” theme and emphasizing public policy throughout, this accessible text illustrates the impact that government has on the daily lives of each and every American.

Through engaging and interactive boxed features and a focus on the issues that matter to most, this practical text motivates readers to become active participants in our political system, and helps overcome public apathy toward government.

Booknews

Taking a public policy approach to government in the United States, this text book covers five main areas. These are: constitutional foundations, patterns of political behavior, political institutions, public policy outputs, and state and local government. Emphasis is given to the nature of democracy and the scope of government. Specific issues like taxation, regulations, campaign finance, and health care are also discussed. An appendix includes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and , tables on parties and key officials, and a glossary. An accompanying CD-ROM contains the full text of the book, as well as audio and video clips, web links, activities, practice tests, and primary sources. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Criminal Investigation or Becoming Somaliland

2009-01-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

Criminal Investigation: The Art and the Science

Author: Michael D Lyman

This book presents crime detection as a dynamic field relying heavily on the past experiences of investigators as well as recent practical and technological innovations. It explores the many external variables that can influence the investigator's success and the specific methods of crime detection and prosecution of law available in today.

Fundamentals of criminal investigation–Explores the fundamentals of criminal investigation as practiced by actual police officers on the job. Theory and practice—Blends scientific theories of crime detection with a practical approach to criminal investigation. Duties of both the uniformed officer and criminal investigator–Outlines the duties of each participant while considering the fundamental need for both groups to work in together. Role of criminal investigator—Emphasizes the role of criminal investigation as a law enforcement responsibility that must be conducted within the framework of the constitution and the practices of a democratic society.

Law Enforcement professionals.

Booknews

Intended for use in lower-division college courses, this book contains 23 chapters which explain various types of crime and investigation techniques related to them. Keeping the different roles of the uniformed officer and the investigator separate, the author explores: crime scene documentation, search and seizure, suspect identification, interview and interrogation, and informant management. Twelve separate categories of crime are given individual treatments including child abuse and neglect, organized crime, and white collar crime. A final chapter discusses the preparation of courses for prosecution. Relevant case studies and court decisions are included throughout the text to provide a perspective on proper and improper methods of investigation. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Becoming Somaliland

Author: Mark Bradbury

The emergence of a new African republic.

Izzy Birch - Pambazuka News

...[A] comprehensive and inspiring account...The world is starting to wake up to what has been happening in Somaliland and to what its people have achieved on their own terms. This book will make a major contribution to that process of enlightenment.

Mandela or Transgender Rights

2009-01-27T03:47:00.000-08:00

Mandela!: Struggle and Triumph

Author: David Turnley

Nelson Mandela, an icon of the international struggle for freedom and equality, whose importance rivals that of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, turns ninety in July 2008. Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for his opposition to the apartheid regime of his native South Africa. Released in 1990, he pursued a policy of reconciliation, steering his nation into the ranks of the world’s multi-racial democracies. He was elected president of South Africa in 1994.

Photographer David Turnley covered Mandela and South Africa for the world’s press, beginning in the 1980s. He witnessed the turbulence of the last violent years of apartheid, was there when Mandela was released from prison, campaigned with him during the presidential election, and sought out the significant people and places of his life. In Mandela: Struggle and Triumph, he tells in words and photographs the dramatic and emotional story of the most powerful movement for civil rights since the American civil rights movement, through the eyes of its legendary leader.

Transgender Rights

Author: Paisley Currah

"Transgender Rights packs a surprising amount of information into a small space. Offering spare, tightly executed essays, this slim volume nonetheless succeeds in creating a spectacular, well-researched compendium of the transgender movement." -Law Library Journal

Over the past three decades, the transgender movement has gained visibility and achieved significant victories. Discrimination has been prohibited in several states, dozens of municipalities, and more than two hundred private companies, while hate crime laws in eight states have been amended to include gender identity. Yet prejudice and violence against transgender people remain all too common.

With analysis from legal and policy experts, activists and advocates, Transgender Rights assesses the movement’s achievements, challenges, and opportunities for future action. Examining crucial topics like family law, employment policies, public health, economics, and grassroots organizing, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable resource in the fight for the freedom and equality of those who cross gender boundaries. Moving beyond media representations to grapple with the real lives and issues of transgender people, Transgender Rights will launch a new moment for human rights activism in America.

Contributors: Kylar W. Broadus, Judith Butler, Mauro Cabral, Dallas Denny, Taylor Flynn, Phyllis Randolph Frye, Julie A. Greenberg, Morgan Holmes, Bennett H. Klein, Jennifer L. Levi, Ruthann Robson, Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson, Dean Spade, Kendall Thomas, Paula Viturro, Willy Wilkinson.

Paisley Currah is associate professor of political science atBrooklyn College, executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

Richard M. Juang cochairs the advisory board of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in Washington, DC. He has taught at Oberlin College and Susquehanna University. He is the lead editor of NCTE's Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual and coeditor of Transgender Justice, which explores models of activism.

Shannon Price Minter is legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

Iraq and the Challenge of Counterinsurgency or Sandra Day OConnor

2009-01-25T22:27:00.000-08:00

Iraq and the Challenge of Counterinsurgency

Author: Thomas R Mockaitis

Mockaitis begins by providing a working definition of counterinsurgency that distinguishes it from conventional war while discussing the insurgents' uses of terror as a method to support their broader strategy of gaining control of a country. Insurgent movements, he notes, use terror far more selectively than do terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, which kills indiscriminately and is more than willing to produce mass casualties. Such methods stand in stark contrast to the American approach to armed conflict, which is more ideally suited to pragmatic culture leery of involvement in protracted foreign wars and demands immediate results. Within this context, Mocktaitis examines the conflict in Iraq, from post conflict troubles with Saddam in the early 1990s, to pre-invasion planning in 2003. He then moves into a discussion of the rise of insurgent movements and the challenges they posed in the aftermath of the fighting, tracing the ongoing efforts to shape a doctrine that allows US forces to successfully deal with the growing insurgency The U.S. military in Iraq faces the most complex counterinsurgency campaign in its history and perhaps the history of modern warfare. At the outset, it confronted as many as 22 different domestic insurgent and foreign terrorist groups in an environment made more difficult by thousands of criminals released by Saddam Hussein. Over the past three years, the conflict has evolved with growing ethnic violence complicating an already difficult security situation. Even the most optimistic assessments predict a continued deployment of significant U.S. forces for at least five years for the country to be stabilized. It remains to be seen whether public opinionwill support such a deployment. Mockaitis situates the Iraq War in its broad historical and cultural context. He argues that failure to prepare for counterinsurgency in the decades following the end of the Vietnam War left the U.S. military ill equipped to handle irregular warfare in the streets of Baghdad. Lack of preparation and inadequate troop strength led American forces to adopt a conventional approach to unconventional war. Over-reliance on firepower combined with cultural insensitivity to alienate many Iraqis. However, during the first frustrating year of occupation, U.S. forces revised their approach, relearning lessons from past counterinsurgency campaigns and adapting them to the new situation. By the end of 2004, they had developed an effective strategy and tactics but continued to be hampered by troop shortages, compounded by the unreliability of many Iraqi police and military units. The Army's new doctrine, embodied in FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, outlines the correct approach to winning Iraq. However, three years of desultory conflict amid ongoing revelations that the premises upon which the administration argued the need for invading Iraq may be false have eroded support for the war. The American armed forces may soon find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having found a formula for success at almost the same time the voters demand withdrawal.

Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice

Author: Joan Biskupic

Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first woman justice, was called the most powerful woman in America. She became the axis on which the Supreme Court turned, and it was often said that to gauge the direction of American law, one need look only to O'Connor's vote. Drawing on information gleaned from once-private papers, hundreds of interviews, and the insight gained from nearly two decades of covering the Supreme Court, author Joan Biskupic offers readers a fascinating portrait of a complex and multifaceted woman—lawyer, politician, legislator, and justice, as well as wife, mother, A-list society hostess, and competitive athlete. Biskupic provides an in-depth account of her transformation from tentative jurist to confident architect of American law.

The Washington Post - Kathleen M. Sullivan

Biskupic gives a fascinating account of O'Connor's political astuteness; she was appointed and reelected as an Arizona state senator, then rose to become majority leader of that body. Later, she became a judge on an Arizona trial court and an intermediate appeals court. Diligent, alert, energetic and adept at politicking, she was a master of the telephone call and the handwritten note, and she helped organize everything from Republican presidential campaigns in Arizona to her classmate Rehnquist's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The New York Times - Emily Bazelon

…if Biskupic lacks intimate confidences for Sandra Day O'Connor, she has something else: perfect timing. Her book appears as O'Connor leaves the bench and while her legacy is unsettled. Biskupic jumps into that opening with a well-researched and (no doubt to O'Connor's chagrin) revealing account.

Publishers Weekly

In the late 1980s, as the Supreme Court justices were discussing a case, Antonin Scalia ranted against affirmative action. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first and then still the only woman on the High Court, replied, "Why, Nino, how do you think I got my job?" This is one of the few revelatory moments in Biskupic's bio of the retiring O'Connor as sharp-tongued, humorous and utterly realistic. It's also, as Biskupic shows in a close study of O'Connor's jurisprudence, a bit misleading: for most of her career on the Court, the conservative O'Connor voted against affirmative action. With access to justices' once private papers, longtime court observer Biskupic, now with USA Today, sheds light on the internal workings on the Court, but not much on the internal workings of the very private O'Connor's mind and heart. Biskupic does show the justice gaining confidence and force on the Court, particularly after her fight against breast cancer in 1988. As O'Connor faces retirement, Biskupic clarifies her judicial legacy, sometimes seeing the glass as half full, sometimes as half empty: praising her lack of ideology but also noting a lack of vision in a justice who often "step[s] to the brink, and then back[s] away"-a mixed legacy that will be debated for years to come. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Veteran Supreme Court reporter Biskupic offers an insightful biography of perhaps the most influential associate justice in recent history. She cites O'Connor's frontierlike upbringing in Arizona and her ability to mingle with finesse in a male world as factors in her ascension to the de facto leadership of the Court's centrist plurality, which has swayed the majority opinion on a range of issues, including abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and the death penalty. Biskupic underscores the nontraditional nature of O'Connor's credentials: her lack of high-level judicial experience and her brief career in the Arizona State Senate. But there were also her connections with the Republican Party and her inclination to avoid public positions on controversial topics. O'Connor was a consensus-builder and team player, but Biskupic nevertheless traces the theme of women's rights in her career-as when she exhorted President Nixon to name a woman to the Supreme Court. Once on the Court, she was frequently called on to write opinions involving sex discrimination and women's rights. On abortion, she carefully backtracked, allowing states more latitude than the approach taken by the liberals but rebuffing conservative efforts to gut abortion rights altogether. The O'Connor Court, Biskupic notes, thus moved the law-and society-in new directions. Highly recommended.-Philip Y. Blue, New York State Supreme Court Criminal Branch Law Lib., New York Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

"She was not raised to sit still," remarked a weary clerk of Sandra Day O'Connor. Indeed not, as this lively life of the just-retired Associate Justice relates. Supreme Court chronicler Biskupic writes, mostly admiringly but not unreservedly, of O'Connor, a tough but polite woman who grew up on an Arizona ranch headed by a never-pleased patriarch who, by most accounts, put the fear into everyone he met. Sandy Day was brilliant, a surprise to her classmates at Stanford Law School (including William Rehnquist, whom she briefly dated) and to hapless chauvinists in the Phoenix suburbs, to which she and her husband repaired in 1957. O'Connor served as a state legislator-a fellow senator, meaning to be complimentary, said of her, "this pretty little thing carries a disconcerting load of expertise"-and appeals-court judge before being shortlisted by Attorney General William French Smith to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1981. Though President Reagan had pledged to name a woman to the court, Biskupic writes, "O'Connor's credentials did not make her an obvious candidate." On closer examination, administration vetters found that she was politically well-connected and suitably conservative, though big-C rightists had fits when they discovered that O'Connor was generally pro-choice. No matter: she easily passed the audition, only to take a mostly independent course on the bench that put her at odds with doctrinaire types on the left and right alike. Biskupic does a solid job of charting O'Connor's evolution as a judge who, given her druthers, preferred to seek consensus and split the difference in a given dispute over the slash-and-burn approach of certain other jurists,notably bete noire Antonin Scalia. O'Connor shaped the law, Biskupic concludes, "with her Western pragmatism, her feel for the American center-and a shrewd but quiet negotiating skill."Fitting farewell to an influential jurist who may soon be very much missed.

World of Our Fathers or No Bone Unturned

2009-01-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made

Author: Irving How

A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic.

"Irving Howe has written a great book . . . a marvelous narrative."
—The New York Times Book Review

World of Our Fathers is a book for Jew and non-Jew, for immigrants and native-born Americans. It is a book for all people."—Chicago Tribune Book World

Winner of the National Book Award, 1976

World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.

This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

New interesting book: Normal Childbirth or Healing from the inside out

No Bone Unturned: Inside the World of a Top Forensic Scientist and His Work on America's Most Notorious Crimes and Disasters

Author: Jeff Benedict

A curator for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Doug Owsley painstakingly rebuilds skeletons, helping to identify them and determine their cause of death. He has worked on several notorious cases -- from mass graves uncovered in Croatia to the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon -- and has examined historic skeletons tens of thousands of years old. But the discovery of Kennewick Man, a 9,600-year-old human skeleton found along the banks of Washington's Columbia River, was a find that would turn Owsley's life upside down.

Days before Owsley was scheduled to study the skeleton, the government seized it to bury Kennewick Man's bones on the land of the Native American tribes who claimed him. Along with other leading scientists, Owsley sued the U.S. government over custody. Concerned that knowledge about our past and our history would be lost forever if the bones were reburied, Owsley fought a legal and political battle for six years, putting everything at risk, jeopardizing his career and his reputation.

Dictator Next Door or Law Business and Society

2009-01-23T12:02:00.000-08:00

Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945

Author: Eric Paul Roorda

The question of how U.S. foreign policy should manage relations with autocratic governments, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America, has always been difficult and complex. In The Dictator Next Door Eric Paul Roorda focuses on the relations between the United States and the Dominican Republic following Rafael Trujillo's seizure of power in 1930. Examining the transition from the noninterventionist policies of the Hoover administration to Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, Roorda blends diplomatic history with analyses of domestic politics in both countries not only to explore the political limits of American hegemony but to provide an in-depth view of a crucial period in U.S. foreign relations.

Although Trujillo's dictatorship was enabled by prior U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic, the brutality of his regime and the reliance on violence and vanity to sustain his rule was an untenable offense to many in the U.S. diplomatic community, as well as to certain legislators, journalists, and bankers. Many U.S. military officers and congressmen, however -- impressed by the civil order and extensive infrastructure the dictator established -- comprised an increasingly powerful Dominican lobby. What emerges is a picture of Trujillo at the center of a crowded stage of international actors and a U.S. government that, despite events such as Trujillo's 1937 massacre of 12,000 Haitians, was determined to foster alliances with any government that would oppose its enemies as the world moved toward war.

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
1	Dominican History, the United States in the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Good Neighbor Policy	6
2	The Dominican Revolution of 1930 and the Policy of Nonintervention	31
3	The Bankrupt Neighbor Policy: Depression Diplomacy and the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council	63
4	What Will the Neighbors Think? Dictatorship and Diplomacy in the Public Eye	88
5	Genocide Next Door: The Haitian Massacre of 1937 and the Sosua Jewish Refugee Settlement	127
6	Gold Braid and Striped Pants: The Culture of Foreign Relations in the Dominican Republic	149
7	Fortress America, Fortaleza Trujillo: The Hull-Trujillo Treaty and the Second World War	192
8	The Good Neighbor Policy and Dictatorship	230
	Notes	245
	Bibliography	307
	Index	327

Law, Business, and Society

Author: Tony McAdams

The text takes an interdisciplinary approach utilizing elements of law,political economy,international business,ethics,social responsibility and management. The author's primary goal is to produce a compelling holistic picture of the concepts by giving extensive attention to readings,provocative quotes and factual details. Students learn not merely the law but the law in context.

Booknews

This text for courses at the advanced undergraduate and graduate level takes an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing elements of law, political economy, international business, and management. Readings, case examples, and anecdotes round out sections on business and society, trade regulation and antitrust, employment law, and environmental law. The material emphasizes analysis, ethics, and social responsibility. Appendices offers various documents regarding the legal business environment. Includes a glossary. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Get a Life or Islamic Imperialism

2009-01-22T06:49:00.000-08:00

Get a Life: You Don't Need a Million to Retire Well

Author: Ralph Warner

The financial-service industry wants you to believe that in order to avoid financial destitution, you need to put aside huge amounts of money that you — let's say it together — ""should have begun saving years ago.""
Not true, states Warner, the author of Get a Life. Although a sensible savings plan makes good horse sense, many other actions and decisions will determine whether you enjoy your retirement years.
Get a Life shows you how to beat the anxiety surrounding retirement, and to develop a plan to make your golden years the best of your life by:
* developing family relationships
* maintaining and creating friendships
* improving health
* keeping active
* developing a robust curiosity for the world
* realistically calculating how much money you need and how to secure it
Interviews with successful (and successfully) retired people illustrate how to put Warner's advice into action.

Chicago Tribune

Get a Life offers sound advice for achieving both financial success and developing areas of your life that will truly make a difference in retirement: good health and fitness habits, strong ties with family and friends, and a plate full of interesting things to do.

Reuters - Linda Stern

One of the best retirement books to come out in recent years, Get a Life: You Don't Need a Million to Retire Well puts money and the other essentials of retirement life in its place.

Chicago Tribune

Ft. Worth Star Telegram

Some books slice through the media noise with clarity. Get a Life is one of them. Its author advises a life-enriching retirement plan.

Ft. Worth Star Telegram

Some books slice through the media noise with clarity. Get a Life is one of them. Its author advises a life-enriching retirement plan.

Publishers Weekly

Warner, attorney and founder of Nolo, the do-it-yourself legal publisher, has written a unique retirement guide which, despite its title, focuses on non-financial issues as well as the traditional retirement concerns. The book also includes conversations with notable people who have led productive "retirement" lives, including environmental activist and writer Ernest Callenbach and mathematician Arthur Levenson. By focusing on important concerns such as broadening circles of friends, relying on one's extended family, turning to hobbies and nonwork activities, the book will help readers gain a healthier perspective on retirement. The sections on friendship and love are particularly compelling. The chapters on specific financial planning are not as complete as readers might want; for example, there's only one brief chapter that explains how investments work. Warner can also be something of a contrarian in his financial advice. He maintains that experts who say people need roughly 80% of their pre-retirement income are wrong. In addition, Warner says (arguably) that the Social Security system is not actually in precarious shape and will be around for many years to come. Still this is one of the freshest and most practical approaches to retirement planning in a long time. (Aug.)

Islamic Imperialism: A History

Author: Efraim Karsh

From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim Karsh in this highly provocative book. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region’s experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam’s millenarian imperial tradition.
The author explores the history of Islam’s imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day. September 11 can be seen as simply the latest expression of this dream, and such attacks have little to do with U.S. international behavior or policy in the Middle East, says Karsh. The House of Islam’s war for world mastery is traditional, indeed venerable, and it is a quest that is far from over.

Library Journal

Karsh (Mediterranean studies, King's Coll., London) summarizes the history of the Islamic world as the rise and occasional setbacks of an empire whose center has shifted over time. In this different approach, he sees Islam's continuity in its ideal of a nonnational community of shared faith. Recent terrorism, he says, comprises attacks on the West's challenging power, not a reaction to specific U.S. policies. Worthy of attention by general and advanced readers. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

The Labor Relations Process or Girl from Botany Bay

2009-01-21T01:37:00.000-08:00

The Labor Relations Process

Author: William H Holley

THE LABOR RELATIONS PROCESS, 9th Edition provides you with the latest information available on current research, issues and events in labor relations. To bring this dynamic field to life, the book integrates real-world examples and quotes from practitioners. This comprehensive text examines the labor movement from its inception to current and emerging trends, including topics such as unions, labor agreements, collective bargaining, arbitration, and labor relations in government, white-collar, and international contexts. The authors give an in-depth analysis of all facets of the relationship between management and labor, including a study of the rights and responsibilities of unions and management; the negotiation and administration of labor agreements; and labor-management cooperation. Other topics explored include the results of the labor relations process, and collective bargaining issues such as healthcare costs containment, pensions, labor productivity and alternative work arrangements.

Girl from Botany Bay

Author: Carolly Erickson

Acclaim for Carolly Erickson

"Carolly Erickson is one of the most accomplished and successful historical biographers writing in English."
–The Times Literary Supplement

The First Elizabeth

"Even more readable and absorbing than the justly praised works of Tuchman and Fraser. A vivid and eminently readable portrait of history’s favorite Tudor."
–The New York Times Book Review

"A masterpiece of narrative, a story so absorbing it is as hard to put down as a fine novel."
–Los Angeles Times Book Review

Alexandra

"Gifted . . . breathless . . . heartbreaking . . . Erickson excels."
–Chicago Tribune

Josephine

"An intimate, richly detailed, and candid portrait . . . [Erickson’s] scholarly insights combine superbly with a mastery of period manners more often found in the best historical fiction."
–Kirkus Reviews

Mistress Anne

"Carolly Erickson is a most admirable biographer, and this book is highly enjoyable as well as being reliable and acute; indeed, it is popular historical biography at its best."
—The Times (London)

Publishers Weekly

Veteran biographer Erickson (Great Harry, etc.) focuses on Mary Broad, who was arrested for robbery in 1786 and transported in sordid conditions to the new penal colony in Australia. But the book is, more generally, a stark and fascinating account of what prisoners endured: in England, where harsh laws protected property in an era of unsettling social change; on board ship; and in the penal colonies themselves, where the convicts and their guards carved a bleak existence out of the inhospitable environment. Life was particularly harsh for women, who, in addition to the usual deprivations, also endured the threat of rape and the responsibilities and sorrows of raising children in dire conditions. Mary Broad, along with several male convicts and her own young children, made a daring escape in a small, stolen boat. Perhaps fortified by stories of the survivors of the Bounty, they sailed along the Australian coast and across open sea to the Dutch settlement of Kupang in Indonesia, where they enjoyed a few months of ease before their recapture. Despite Erickson's speculations, little can be known concretely about Mary as an individual. Her story draws in the reader, nonetheless, and Mary's brief moment of celebrity, when the escape and the well-timed intervention of the writer James Boswell earn her a royal pardon, provides a satisfying end to the unrelenting hardship of her life. Agent, Russell Galen. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Prolific biographer Erickson (Alexandra, 2001, etc.) skillfully renders the extraordinary life of Mary Broad, who survived a voyage to and from a penal colony to become James Boswell's protegee. Born in 1769 and raised in Cornwall, Mary grew up amid filth, violence, and privation in a period of especially hard times: harvests had failed, the fish were not running, the Cornish were starving. Arrested for robbery and sentenced to be hung, the 20-year-old girl was instead sent to the recently established penal colony of New South Wales in Australia, because the British government needed people, women in particular, to settle there. In the fetid prison hulks that dotted Plymouth harbor, imprisoned with prostitutes and habitual criminals, Mary became pregnant before she finally set sail. The 15,000-mile voyage was grueling: space, food, and water were limited, diseases rampant, and sexual abuse common. But Mary survived, giving birth to a daughter en route. When they reached Australia, she married fellow convict William Bryant in order that they could acquire their own land. But crops failed, famine was rife, the natives were hostile, and mortality was high; realizing that their lives were even worse than they'd been in England, the Bryants decided to escape. Bringing along Mary's daughter and newborn son, they stole a boat and sailed with seven other adults up the east coast to Dutch-ruled Batavia, some 4,000 miles away. It was an epic feat, but Mary wasn't yet safe. Discovered and sent back to England, with both her children dead, she was once more imprisoned. Luckily, her amazing story garnered public sympathy and the support of Boswell, who determined to secure her freedom. Compelling talewith a gritty heroine: Broad's hardscrabble adventures forcefully remind readers that 18th-century life bore very little resemblance to an episode of Masterpiece Theater. Russell Galen/Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency

The Prince or Hackers

2009-01-19T22:45:00.000-08:00

The Prince (Hpc Classics Series)

Author: Niccolo Machiavelli

Book about: Simple Thai Cookery or Food Wine Magazines Wine Guide 2006

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

Author: Steven Levy

A mere fifteen years ago, computer nerds were seen as marginal weirdos, outsiders whose world would never resonate with the mainstream. That was before one pioneering work documented the underground computer revolution that was about to change our world forever. With groundbreaking profiles of Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, and more, Steven Levy's Hackers brilliantly captured a seminal moment when the risk-takers and explorers were poised to conquer twentieth-century America's last great frontier. And in the Internet age, the hacker ethic-first espoused here-is alive and well.

A remarkable collection of characters...courageously exploring mindspace, an inner world where nobody had ever been before. (The New York Times)

Fascinating...A huge job hugely well done. (The Washington Post)

Author Bio: Steven Levy is also the author of Crypto: When the Code Rebels Beat the Government-Saving Privacy in the Digital Age and the chief technology writer for Newsweek. He is a regular contributor to numerous publications including Macworld and Wired.

Global Outlaws or Fascism

2009-01-19T11:32:00.000-08:00

Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World

Author: Carolyn Nordstrom

Carolyn Nordstrom explores the pathways of global crime in this stunning work of anthropology that has the power to change the way we think about the world. To write this book, she spent three years traveling to hot spots in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States investigating the dynamics of illegal trade around the world--from blood diamonds and arms to pharmaceuticals, exotica, and staples like food and oil. Global Outlaws peels away the layers of a vast economy that extends from a war orphan in Angola selling Marlboros on the street to powerful transnational networks reaching across continents and oceans. Nordstrom's extraordinary fieldwork includes interviews with scores of informants, including the smugglers, victims, power elite, and profiteers who populate these economic war zones. Her compelling investigation, showing that the sum total of extra-legal activities represents a significant part of the world's economy, provides a new framework for understanding twenty-first-century economics and economic power. Global Outlaws powerfully reveals the illusions and realities of security in all areas of transport and trade and illuminates many of the difficult ethical problems these extra-legal activities pose.

Go to: Programming Ruby or PHP Cookbook

Fascism

Author: Kevin Passmor

What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? This book argues that it is both: fascism unleashes violence against the left and ethnic minorities, but also condemns the bourgeoisie for its "softness". Kevin Passmore opens his book with a series of "scenes from fascist life"--a secret meeting of the Romanian Iron Guard; Mussolini meeting the king of Italy; a rally of Hungarian doctors calling for restrictions on the number of Jews entering the profession. He then looks at the paradoxes of fascism through its origins in the political and social crisis of the late nineteenth century, the history of fascist movements and regimes in Italy and Germany, and the fortunes of "failed" fascist movements in Romania, Hungary and Spain. He shows how fascism employs propaganda and popular culture to propagate itself and how it exported its ideas outside Europe, through Nazi and Spanish post-war escape routes to Latin America. The book concludes with a discussion of the recent revival of the extreme right in Austria, Italy, France, and Russia.

	Acknowledgements
	List of illustrations
	List of maps
1	Scenes from the history of fascism	1
2	'A and not A': what is fascism?	10
3	Fascism before fascism?	33
4	Italy: 'making history with the fist'	50
5	Germany: the racial state	62
6	Fascisms and conservatisms in the early 20th century	72
7	Phoenix from the ashes?	88
8	Fascism, nation, and race	108
9	Fascism and gender	123
10	Fascism and class	134
11	Fascism and us	148
	References	157
	Index	159

A Theory of Justice or Franco and Hitler

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

A Theory of Justice

Author: John Rawls

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Thomas Nagel

The writings of John Rawls, whom it is now safe to describe as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century, are very different. They owe their influence to the fact that their depth and their insight repay the close attention that their uncompromising theoretical weight and erudition demand.

The New Republic

Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II

Author: Stanley G Payn

Was Franco sympathetic to Nazi Germany? Why didn't Spain enter World War II? In what ways did Spain collaborate with the Third Reich? How much did Spain assist Jewish refugees?

This is the first book in any language to answer these intriguing questions. Stanley Payne, a leading historian of modern Spain, explores the full range of Franco’s relationship with Hitler, from 1936 to the fall of the Reich in 1945. But as Payne brilliantly shows, relations between these two dictators were not only a matter of realpolitik. These two titanic egos engaged in an extraordinary tragicomic drama often verging on the dark absurdity of a Beckett or Ionesco play.

Whereas Payne investigates the evolving relationship of the two regimes up to the conclusion of World War II, his principal concern is the enigma of Spain’s unique position during the war, as a semi-fascist country struggling to maintain a tortured neutrality. Why Spain did not enter the war as a German ally, joining with Hitler to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British navy, is at the center of Payne’s narrative. Franco’s only personal meeting with Hitler, in 1940 to discuss precisely this, is recounted here in groundbreaking detail that also sheds significant new light on the Spanish government’s vacillating policy toward Jewish refugees, on the Holocaust, and on Spain’s German connection throughout the duration of the war.

Free Soil Free Labor Free Men or Babylons Ark

2009-01-18T12:07:00.000-08:00

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War with a New Introductory Essay

Author: Eric Foner

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought.
A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of AbrahamLincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny.
In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks.
Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

	The Idea of Free Labor in Nineteenth-Century America
	Abbreviations Used in Footnotes and Bibliography
	Introduction	1
1	Free Labor: The Republicans and Northern Society	11
2	The Republican Critique of the South	40
3	Salmon P. Chase: The Constitution and the Slave Power	73
4	The Radicals: Anti-Slavery Politics and the Moral Imperative	103
5	The Democratic Republicans	149
6	Conservatives and Moderates	186
7	The Republicans and Nativism	226
8	The Republicans and Race	261
9	Slavery and the Republican Ideology	301
	Bibliography	319
	Index	337

Book review: Joy of Grilling or Williams Sonoma Savoring Meat and Poultry

Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo

Author: Lawrence Anthony

When the Iraq war began, conservationist Lawrence Anthony could think of only one thing: the fate of the Baghdad Zoo, located in the city center and caught in the war's crossfire. Once Anthony entered Baghdad he discovered that full-scale combat and uncontrolled looting had killed nearly all the animals of the zoo.

But not all of them. U.S. soldiers had taken the time to help care for the remaining animals, and the zoo's staff had returned to work in spite of the constant firefights. Together the Americans and Iraqis had managed to keep alive the animals that had survived the invasion.

Babylon's Ark chronicles the zoo's transformation from bombed-out rubble to peaceful park. Along the way, Anthony recounts hair-raising efforts to save a pride of the dictator's lions, close a deplorable black-market zoo, and rescue Saddam's Arabian horses. His unique ground-level experience makes Babylon's Ark an uplifting story of both sides working together for the sake of innocent animals caught in the war's crossfire.

Publishers Weekly

Anthony, a South African conservationist and recipient of the U.N.'s Earth Day award, details how, through a series of complex maneuvers, he entered Iraq after the American invasion and led the fight to save what was left of the Baghdad Zoo. Most of the animals were killed by war and looting; the remainder were starved and in filthy cages, with no staff to care for them. Anthony describes how he, along with the zoo's former deputy director and several brave workers, risked daily danger to save the bears, lions, tigers, monkeys and birds. Anthony fended off looters with a gun obtained from a sympathetic U.S. soldier, spent his own funds for equipment and bartered the use of a satellite phone for food and other essentials. Anthony vividly recounts the rescue of other animals, including the inhabitants of the appalling Luna Park Zoo and Saddam's prize Arabian horses, saved from the hands of black marketeers. The author takes no position on the invasion. His goal is for his mission, so dramatically recounted with journalist Spence's help, to set an example of conservation and respect for animal life. 8 pages of color photos. (Mar. 12) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Terrific tale about how Iraqis, a South African conservationist and American soldiers saved the animals of the Baghdad Zoo. In April 2003, in the opening days of the Iraq War, the Baghdad Zoo was bombed, its animals released or taken. Watching the war unfold on television, South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony became determined to travel to Baghdad and save what animals he could. Upon arrival, Anthony discovered Dr. Husham Hussan, the zoo's vet, daily risking his life in an effort to feed and hydrate the few remaining creatures, including a Bengal tiger, a blind brown bear, several lions, a lynx and a few boars. Baboons, monkeys and various birds, all of whom had escaped their damaged cages, freely wandered the zoo grounds. With the zoo's water pumps broken, the two men ferried water to the parched animals bucketful by bucketful from a nearby canal, an all-day job in 115-degree heat. Although still engaged in combat, American soldiers offered to help, giving the animals their MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), and "liberating" crucial supplies, ranging from cleaning solvents to generators to food for the zoo staff. In addition to saving the zoo's animals, Anthony and his team rescued lions from one of Saddam's son's "love nests," closed down a black-market exotic-animal ring and rounded up some of Saddam's prized Arabian horses. Happily, the zoo's future was secured when coalition forces offered to rebuild the zoo and the surrounding Al Zawra Park as a symbol of goodwill toward the Iraqi people. A wartime story with a joyful ending.

The Underboss or The War of Ideas

2009-01-18T00:54:00.000-08:00

The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family

Author: Dick Lehr

On February 26, 1986, Mafia underboss Gennaro Angiulo was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. In The Underboss, bestselling authors Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill tell the story of the fall of the house of Angiulo. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, aided in part by the Irish Mob's Whitey Bulger, entered the Boston Mafia's headquarters in Boston's North End early one morning in 1981 and began to compile the evidence that would lead to the entire upper tier of one of the most profitable and ruthless criminal enterprises in America.

Originally published in hardback by St. Martin's in 1989, The Underboss became a national bestseller. Information uncovered during the course of Lehr and O'Neill's Black Mass investigations adds new dimensions to the story and the authors include this new material-including Whitey Bulger's cagey manipulation of the FBI-in The Underboss's revised text and in a new preface and afterword.

The Boston Globe - David Nyhan

Fans of George Higgins' novels will feel right at home here.... This is how the Mob operates.... The full, grimy story.

Chicago Tribune

An engrossing story of the good guys winning big, told with insight and chilling effect.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Nobody could follow these hair-raising maneuvers better, or write about them more authoritatively.... A riveting book.

Library Journal

This fast-paced, engrossing, and ultimately satisfying story shows how the FBI bridged the mythic moat surrounding Angiulo.... Gripping.

Worcester Telegram

An eminently readable capsule history of organized crime in Boston and ... an absorbing, true tale of cops and criminals.

Publishers Weekly

The undoing of a Mafia underboss related with underdone flair or tension, this picks up momentum halfway through with the re-creation of the FBI's bugging surveillance, Operation Bostar, conducted in 1981 in Boston's ethnic North End, where Gennaro J. Angiulo's bookmaking operation was headquartered. Case agent was Edward Quinn, romanticized by the authors, reporters at the Boston Globe , to heroism. Still, the tale is not without a measure of real valor, especially given the ennui endured by the agents monitoring 850 hours of often boring, frequently garbled tape recordingstedium that caused them all to gain weight from gobbling donuts. An interesting aspect of the case proves to be the successful prosecution of Angiulo under the challenged federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Actby which he was ultimately convicted. And when he has served his 45-year term, there is a mandatory life sentence awaiting him for his conviction for accessory to murder. Photos. ( Feb.)

Library Journal

Ruthlessly and brutally, Jerry Angiulo reigned as underboss of Boston's Mafia; he molded it into one of the most lucrative mob enterprises in the country. An ``evil genius,'' Anguilo's fatal error was to believe the popular wisdom that he was too crafty and too well insulated in his impregnable North Boston enclave to ever be apprehended. This fast-paced, engrossing, and ultimately satisfying story shows how the FBI bridged the mythic moat surrounding Angiulo. On the fourth attempt, marked by a quasi-military campaign, the FBI secretly broke into mob headquarters and planted bugs which led to Angiulo's life imprisonment; he was literally condenmed by his own words. A popular, gripping look at the FBI operation, which monitored Angiulo's criminal pursuits.-- Jerry Maioli, Western Lib. Network, Olympia, Wash.

Booknews

Longtime investigative reporters for the describe how in the 1980s a group of FBI agents brought down Gennaro J. "Jerry" Angiulo and his four brothers, who had run the Mafia in Boston for decades. Their coup was placing a bug at the main office. The 1989 edition was cloth bound. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

George V. Higgins
The straight stuff ... Real - and wonderfully readable.... This is what the Mob's about now, cruel and smart and vicious. (George V. Higgins author of At End of Day)

Dominick Dunne
A tough and tautly written account of the interlinking machinations of the good guys and the bad guys.

The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy

Author: Walid Phares

From Afghanistan and Iraq to Europe and the U.S., we are engaged in one of the most heated wars of all time. In this incisive book, terrorism expert Walid Phares shows that the most important battle of all is taking place in the hearts and minds of people across the world. This is the War of Ideas, where ideology is the most powerful weapon. Phares looks at the two opposing camps, one standing for democracy and human rights, the other rejecting the global community and calling for jihad against the West. He reveals the strategies of both sides, explaining how new technology and the jihadists' media savvy have raised the stakes in the conflict. And most urgently, he warns that we are in danger of losing the war, for while debate and theorizing rarely lead to action, ideas and deeds are inextricably linked for the forces of jihad.

Fallujah With Honor First Battalion Eighth Marines Role in Operation Phantom Fury 2e or The Day of Islam

2009-01-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

Fallujah, With Honor First Battalion Eighth Marine's Role in Operation Phantom Fury 2e

Author: Gary Livingston

For twenty months after Operation Iraqi Freedom, Fallujah festered with rebellion against American interests as well as the Iraqi Interim Government. Fallujah became a magnet for foreign fighters and a base of operation for the terrorists in Iraq. The rouge city was completely out of control and American forces would have to fight in an urban environment to regain control.

Fallujah, With Honor, a battle book, is the story of the First Battalion, Eighth Marines' attack into Fallujah as part of Operation Phantom Fury. Lieutenant Colonel Gary Brandl's marines attacked up the "belly of the beast" as part of the six battalion attack on the insurgency in Fallujah in November 2004.

This is their book, the Marines of 1/8. A compilation of accounts from 1/8 Marines shared through personal interviews with author Gary Livingston.

Interesting book: Little Book of Wine or Simple Pleasures of the Kitchen

The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World

Author: Paul L Williams

In two previous books, Osama's Revenge and The Al Qaeda Connection, seasoned investigative reporter Paul Williams revealed the alarming potential for nuclear terrorism on U.S. soil and the sinister connections among organized crime, illegal immigrants, and al Qaeda. Now, Williams broadens his focus beyond al Qaeda to provide readers with newly uncovered information on terrorist activities in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, other Muslim countries-and our neighbor Canada! What emerges is a harrowing picture of international terrorist activities, all aimed at the destruction of the United States and the collapse of the Western world. This cataclysm will usher in "the Day of Islam," the dream of radical Muslims to see all of humankind fall in submission before the throne of Allah.

Based on the "forgotten testimony" of the FBI's "Confidential Source One," as well as other sources, Williams first presents evidence of Osama Bin Laden's purchase of highly enriched uranium in Sudan and nuclear devices from the Chechens and the Russian Mafia. He then offers further information on the workings of Pakistani scientists and technicians from the A. Q. Khan Research Facility to maintain and upgrade al Qaeda's "bespoke nukes" (with explosive yields in excess of ten kilotons) for the "American Hiroshima." This information comes with empirical proof that should dispel any doubts that these weapons not only have been developed but have also been forward-deployed from the seaport at Karachi to strategic locations within the Western world. Keeping the focus on Pakistan, he predicts a nightmarish scenario if President Pervez Musharref should be overthrown and his arsenal of sixty-eight nuclear weapons falls into the hands of radical mullahs.

Williams also examines the role of the Iranians both in sponsoring terrorism and in planning the American Hiroshima. In addition, he uncovers many unreported and startling accounts of the terrorist activities of Hezbollah in America and presents evidence that the marriage between Hezbollah and al Qaeda has been consummated.

Finally, he presents intelligence showing that grave threats to America come, not from just our southern border, but from Canada and its amazingly open policies regarding radical Islam. The greatest threat of all, he concludes, comes from within -not only from the radical mosques within every major American city but also the Islamic paramilitary compounds in rural areas throughout the country, including Islamberg in New York State, where new recruits are trained for the great jihad against the United States under the very nose of FBI and Homeland Security officials.

Sure to be controversial, this shocking expose sends a wake-up to Americans lulled into a false sense of security in the post-9/11 era.

Acknowledgments     11
Prologue: The Nuclear Solution   Abu Shihab el-Kandahari     13
The Forgotten Testimony     15
The Dawn of Doomsday     33
From Russia, with Lithium     51
The Chechen Connection     63
Osama's Nuclear Babies     75
Eight Nightmares     93
The Mad Scientist     105
King Khan     117
Hezbollah and al Qaeda Marry in South America     131
The Cancer Spreads     145
The Search for Adnan el-Shukrijumah     159
O Canada! Haven of Islamic Terror!     171
Canadian Campfire: A Couple of Scary Tales     187
Welcome to Islamberg     199
Epilogue: The Day of Islam     207
The Nuclear Fatwa     213
Examples of Terrorism Convictions Since September 11, 2001     225
Notes     233
Index     267

Arsenals of Folly or Truman and MacArthur

2009-01-17T02:28:00.000-08:00

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Author: Richard Rhodes

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a riveting account of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War.

In the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the United States and the Soviet Union came within minutes of nuclear war, until Gorbachev boldly launched a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons, setting the stage for the 1986 Reykjavik summit and the incredible events that followed. In this thrilling, authoritative narrative, Richard Rhodes draws on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants and a wealth of new documentation to unravel the compelling, shocking story behind this monumental time in human history—its beginnings, its nearly chilling consequences, and its effects on global politics today.

The New York Times - Martin Walker

Rhodes focuses on three topics: Gorbachev and the dramatic psychological impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident; the hardline cold warriors who gathered around the Reagan White House; and the pivotal encounter at the Reykjavik summit of 1986, when Gorbachev and Reagan seriously discussed getting rid of all nuclear weapons…It is a familiar tale, but Rhodes tells it well, and his artful narrative contains some real gems.

Jenny Emanuel - Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize winner Rhodes (Ctr. for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford Univ.) completes his third volume of works related to the Cold War nuclear buildup (following The Making of the Atomic Bomband Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb). Combining a riveting narrative with historical data, his work reads like a novel but chronicles the truth of the U.S. and Soviet Union buildup and ultimate takedown of nuclear arms. Detailing the professional careers of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and many other Soviet and American officials, Rhodes takes us to the pivotal Reykjavík Summit in 1986 and the ensuing drama, leading ultimately to the end of the arms buildup and the end of the Cold War détente between the two superpowers. This historical record, drawing upon many firsthand accounts and interviews, details pivotal events in world history and should be necessary reading for anyone interested in 20th-century history. Recommended, particularly for academic libraries, but also for larger public libraries.

A Rigid System
To the Chernobyl Sarcophagus     3
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears     27
A Hierarchy of Vassals and Chiefs     46
Apes on a Treadmill
"The Bomber Will Always Get Through" (I)     69
"The Bomber Will Always Get Through" (II)     84
The Sorcerer's Apprentices (I)     102
The Sorcerer's Apprentices (II)     118
Decapitation     138
Rehearsing Armageddon     154
The Warheads Will Always Get Through     168
Common Security
Going Around in Circles     187
Naysayers Hard at Work     212
Looking Over the Horizon     236
The Sovereign Right to Choose     271
The Little Suitcase     290
Notes     311
Bibliography     343
Acknowledgments     359
Permissions Acknowledgments     361
Index     363

Interesting book: Cold War or The Challenge

Truman and MacArthur: Policy, Politics, and the Hunger for Honor and Renown

Author: Michael D Pearlman

A timely account of an explosive conflict over civil-military relations and the conduct of American foreign policy.

Armchair General

[This] meticulously documented, painstakingly researched book removes the shroud of folklore that has clouded the controversy for decades and shatters long held myths . . .

The Strange Death of Republican America or The Way of the Wiseguy

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

The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party

Author: Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Blumenthal—trenchant analyst, best-selling author, and senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton (and more recently, Hillary)—offers a penetrating journalistic and historical examination of the ongoing collapse of Republicanism. Closely charting the Party’s imploding reputation in America and the world, as well as the potential consequences of George W. Bush’s radical presidency for the 2008 election, The Strange Death of Republican America will be required reading for anyone interested in politics and concerned about the fate of the nation. In these essays and opinion columns written by Blumenthal over the past few years for The Guardian of London and salon.com, along with a new and stimulating introduction, Blumenthal provides a unifying and overarching perspective on the Bush years.
Blumenthal scrutinizes the past and present state of the Republican Party, which he believes portends the incipient demise of their vaunted political machine and the Republican era since the Nixon administration. The issues on the table range from the legacy of Nixon’s imperial presidency and its influence on Dick Cheney to Karl Rove’s failed strategy for political realignment, as well as conflicts within the military and intelligence communities over Bush’s policies, and the underlying political shifts that are demonstrably weakening the once-strong foundations of Republican philosophy and governance.
These essays have the cumulative effect of an irresistible factual and historical tide—a portrait of a party in self-destructive decline that will grab the attention of anyone fascinated by the world of politics.

Aselection of the Progressive Book Club.

Publishers Weekly

In this incisive and timely essay compilation, Blumenthal, a former adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, charts the fatal radicalization of the Republican Party, its imminent "great unraveling" and the consequences for the 2008 election. Blumenthal argues that the presidency of George W. Bush heralds the decline of the Republican Party after 30 years of political dominance, moderating his otherwise passionate indictment of the GOP by acknowledging that power ebbs and flows between the two parties over time. He likens the current shift to the implosion of the Johnson presidency and subsequent weakening of the Democratic Party, saying, "Vietnam ended a Democratic era as definitively as Iraq is closing a Republican one." The consummate Washington insider, Blumenthal has a host of high-ranking (albeit often anonymous) sources, and surprising portraits of power pepper the book: of Bush as "a classic insecure authoritarian" given to imposing "humiliating tests of obedience" on his staff (such as locking Colin Powell out of a cabinet meeting for being late), Laura Bush as deeply disdainful of Rove (allegedly dubbing him "Pigpen"), former Majority Leader Tom DeLay as the "Republican Stalin, the ruthless consolidator and centralizer." Authoritative, meticulously researched, these previously published pieces evade many of the clichés that ensnare partisan political writing and is instead a lively-if deeply sobering-panorama of political life during the Bush presidency. (Apr. 1)

Introduction: The Strange Death of Republican America     1
Implosion: From Stephen Colbert's Monologue to Mark Foley's Emails     15
The Fool     17
Coup at the CIA     19
The Nativist Revolt     25
Defeat Through Victory     27
The War Paradigm     32
The Bush Way of War     34
"Mission Accomplished" in a Business Suit     40
Surrealpolitik     42
The Avoiding of the President     50
Judgment Day     52
A Pantomime Presidency     58
The Emperor's New Veto     60
Splitting the Republican Cell     65
Birth Pangs     68
Ring of Fire     70
Axis of Failure     75
Father and Son     79
Remembrance of Things Past     81
The Enabler     86
Dreamland     88
A Radical Temperament     94
Where Torture Got Him     96
In Denial     98
The Bob Woodward Version     102
Instant Messages     108
Queer and Loathing on Capitol Hill     111
The Intervention     113
Rove's Last Campaign     116
Repudiation: From the 2006 Elections to the Baker-Hamilton Report     119
Downfall of the Culture War     121
Realignments     127
Deep Currents     129
All the Father's Men     137
"The business about a graceful exit"     139
The Prime of Ms. Jeane Kirkpatrick     145
The Escalation of Delusion     152
No Time to Heal     157
Washington's Political Cleansing     163
Delusion: From the Trial of I. Lewis Libby to the Testimony of General David Petraeus     169
Contortions of Power     171
Preparing for Failure     176
United States v. I. Lewis Libby: Washington Anthropology     180
United States v. I. Lewis Libby: Closing Arguments     185
United States v. I. Lewis Libby: The Verdict     192
The History Book Club     193
The Assassination of Dick Cheney     197
All Roads Lead to Rove     201
Law and Disorder     207
The Passion of the Judas     212
The Republican Grand Experiment     217
Dances With Wolfowitz     221
Torture Kitsch     225
Spooked     232
Royal Crush      236
Loyalty and Betrayal     238
Wolfowitz's Tomb     243
The Libby Lobby     249
Fugue State     254
Null and Void     258
The Imperial Vice Presidency     264
"The Administration of Justice"     268
Marketing, Muslims, and Methodists     271
Stab in the Back     274
The Code of Silence     281
Colin Powell's Ghost     287
Rove's Fall     291
The War of Memory     296
Fredo's End     301
Top Secret     304
The General Testifies     310
The Many Victories of George W. Bush     315
A Republic, If You Can Keep it     321
Acknowledgments     327
Index     329

The Way of the Wiseguy

Author: Joseph D Piston

Here's the first nonfiction work from author Joe Pistone since his New York Times #1 bestseller and hit movie, Donnie Brasco. Perhaps no man alive knows the inner workings and lifestyle of wiseguys better than Pistone does, having spent six years infiltrating the Mafia as an undercover FBI agent. Now, years later, Pistone reassesses what the underworld was really about. Occasionally poignant, always in shocking detail, The Way of the Wiseguy gives readers a first-hand look at the thinking, psychology, and customs that make wiseguys a unique breed. The book is divided into anecdotes that reveal key principles of wiseguy life, including "Don't Volunteer You Don't Know Something," "Be a Good Earner," "Look Like You Mean Business," "It's Your Best Friend Who Will Kill You," and much more. The stories-more than 80 of them-are spellbinding, and the insights into this lawless realm of badguys are often uncannily relevant to the workings of the legitimate world of big business and everyday social discourses. Includes CD with shocking undercover surveillance audio from the Donnie Brasco operation (with commentary by author Joe Pistone).

Publishers Weekly

The romanticized view of the mob gets a reality check in this fascinating guide to the real Cosa Nostra from Pistone, who successfully infiltrated one of New York City's five families as an FBI undercover agent in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During his six years posing as Donnie Brasco, Pistone managed to gain the trust of countless mobsters and was almost formally made a member of the Mafia. That access led to numerous investigations and prosecutions resulting in more than 100 convictions, including those of the bosses who formed the mob's ruling body, the Commission. Pistone's first book, the bestselling Donnie Brasco (later filmed with Johnny Depp in the lead role), presented a detailed chronological narrative of his infiltration. This time, he has organized his experiences into short chapters describing what the gangsters he worked with were really like, with titles such as "A Typical Day in the Life of a Wiseguy" and "How Wiseguys Take over a Business." He makes abundantly clear that the codes of honor depicted in popular culture and self-serving Mafiosi memoirs are myths, as is the notion that the old-timers steered clear of drug-dealing for moral reasons. The book also contains an amazing extra-a CD of an actual FBI surveillance tape in which thugs talk about the idea of doing in Donnie Brasco. Agent, Frank Weimann. (Apr. 1) Forecast: A 50,000 printing, a $50,000 national ad campaign and a seven-city author tour should help launch this onto many bestseller lists. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Former FBI agent Pistone authored the best-selling Donnie Brasco (Pistone's assumed name), which detailed his years of deep, perilous undercover work within the Mafia and later begat the Johnny Depp/Al Pacino movie of the same name. Here he returns with a kind of Cliffs Notes guide to wiseguys for those who either didn't catch Donnie Brasco or Pistone's Mafia novels or who have trouble drawing their own conclusions about people, offering short chapters such as "Wiseguys Are Not Nice Guys," "Why Wiseguys Will Kill You," and the like, all designed to show the reader that, well, wiseguys are not nice guys. (The Bonanno family put out a $500,000 contract on him when it became known that he was a cop.) In so doing, he assumes a tough-guy persona that establishes a certain tone and probably did wonders in keeping him alive during his years undercover but does wear a bit thin. Other than his observations that the younger generation of mobster is a different breed of cat, more careless and less respectful of the rules and traditions of the mob, Pistone offers few new revelations about Mafiosi. Still, the public's abiding interest in gangsters and the Donnie Brasco connection will create demand. Recommended for most public libraries. Jim Burns, Jacksonville P.L., FL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

The Story of American Freedom or True Green Work

2009-01-14T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Story of American Freedom

Author: Eric Foner

Over the course of our history, freedom has been a living truth for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. In Eric Foner's stirring history, freedom's story is not the simple unfolding of a timeless truth, but an openended history of accomplishment and failure. Its impetus lies in the aspirations and sacrifice of millions of Americans, celebrated and anonymous, who have sought freedom's blessings. Its meaning is shaped not only in Congressional debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms. Its cast of characters ranges from Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, from former slaves seeking to breathe real meaning into emancipation to the union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights advocates of our time.

National Review - Robert Ferrell

Foner's book...approaches brilliance in relating the efforts of many Americans to advance freedom for everyone, of others to advance it for themselves.

The Progressive - Erin Middlewood

...[H]e shows why making sense of the West is so difficult....[H]e doesn't try to smooth the rough terrain. Instead, he explores the contours and contradictins of the ...states....He's not shy of interpretation or or deflating legends. But he leaves his vision of the future wide open.

The Progressive - Harvey J. Kaye

This is not a philosophical book on freedom....[The book] reminds us that in every age Americans have risen...to contest the established limits to freedom and to redeem the nation's prophetic memory of liberty, equality, and democracy.

KLIATT

"Today, when asked to choose between freedom and equality, three quarters of Americans give priority to freedom." This little survey appears early in Foner's introduction and it is the foundation of his story about how elusive, misunderstood, misrepresented, and how perverted the concept and meaning of freedom is today for most Americans. In a country that was "born of liberty" in the breach of a bloody revolutionary war, most Americans were anything but free. The enslavement of Africans, the oppression of American Indians, the subjugation of women and the inhumane conditions under which Americans labored mocked the very idea of liberty for two-thirds of the adult American population. Until equality and freedom were inextricably linked in our political philosophy, freedom could not begin to fulfill the promise of democratic ideals in the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights. Foner charts the 200-year evolution of freedom in America when, in the beginning, only white males who owned property achieved "the social preconditions to freedom." Not until the age of Jackson (1837) were these rights extended to "ALL white males, [but] "for everyone else, it took a lot longer." Foner relates the development of freedom to America's great social movements; freedoms derived from the contract (labor), the Progressives, the sixties, the Cold War and in 1980, "conservative freedom" when Ronald Reagan "transformed the public discourse [by] rewriting history to erase non-conservative meanings of freedom, insisting that Americans from the beginning had been concerned only with freedom from,' specifically from the evils of repressive government and never with freedom to." With Supreme Court nominee RobertBork urging Americans to repudiate "our modern, virtually unqualified enthusiasm for liberty," and the astonishing proposal at the 1996 Republican National Convention to rescind the 14th Amendment principal of birthright citizenship, Foner has good reason to be concerned. He fears that Americans are eroding their cherished freedoms as they retreat into a crude insularity that defines freedom as "little more than to be left alone." This book is a celebration and a warning for all who wish to understand democracy and our unique brand of American liberty. All that one can hope for in the future is that "the better angels of our nature will reclaim their place in the forever unfinished story of American Freedom." KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students, and adults. 1998, Norton, 422p, 21cm, 98-3290, $15.95. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: William Kircher; Washington, DC, July 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 4)

Library Journal

Distinguished Columbia historian Foner frames American history as a continuing fight for freedom.

The New York Times - Richard Bernstein

. . .[O]ne is is grateful for Mr. Foner's clarity and knowledgeability, even while wishing that he had been more outspoken about his passions and less dutifully respectful of so many points of view.

The Progressive - Harvey J. Kaye

The New York Times Book Review - Pauline Maier

Succinct, information-packed, wonderfully readable. . .an excellent choice for serious readers.

Los Angeles Times

Eric Foner's brilliant, important book. . .shows how, having invoked liberty to justify their independence in 1776, Americans have fought ever since over what that freedom means and over who may enjoy its blessings.

The Progressive - Erin Middlewood

Kirkus Reviews

A leisurely stroll through American history in search of the elusive and constantly changing concept of freedom. Foner (History/Columbia; Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution), a Bancroft Prize-winning historian of the Gilded Age, here examines the growth of the American ideal of personal and political freedom. The two are not necessarily the same, he notes: in our history, there has been a longstanding tension between 'freedom as the power to participate in public affairs and freedom as a collection of individual rights requiring protection against governmental interference.' The generation of the American Revolution believed that freedom was largely the latter, Foner argues: this was exemplified by their estimation of 'the most sacred of rights,' freedom of religion and conscience. Other generations, such as the free-labor movement of the Civil War era and the freedom-as-utilitarian-good school of thought that held sway during the New Deal years, have seen things differently. Foner is particularly good on the abolitionist movement, which held that freedom as extended by statute to American citizens had to be broadened to include those who were not citizens—namely, slaves and (in later decades) guest laborers brought from places like Mexico to fill in during wartime labor shortages. He observes, with the abolitionist Thomas Higginson, that the history of freedom is not 'a narrative of linear progress' and that, particularly in the matter of civil liberties for African-Americans, one step forward is often immediately followed by two steps backward. Sometimes competing (often widely varying) notions of freedom mark our history, Foner notes: ThomasJefferson's ideal of liberty was not necessarily that of W.E.B. DuBois or Susan B. Anthony. But each interpretation has influenced our present ideas of democracy and responsibility, which, Foner observes, continue to spread across the world. .

	Introduction
1	The Birth of American Freedom	3
2	To Call It Freedom	29
3	An Empire of Liberty	47
4	The Boundaries of Freedom in the Young Republic	69
5	A New Birth of Freedom	95
6	Liberty of Contract and Its Discontents	115
7	Progressive Freedom	139
8	The Birth of Civil Liberties	163
9	The New Deal and the Redefinition of Freedom	195
10	Fighting for Freedom	219
11	Cold War Freedom	249
12	Sixties Freedom	275
13	Conservative Freedom	307
	Notes	333
	Acknowledgments	395
	Index	397

Book about: Managing People in Public Agencies or Inside Vietnams Last Great Myth

True Green @ Work: 100 Ways You Can Make the Environment Your Business

Author: Kim McKay

Now, from the authors of the quintessential how-to-go-green guide for individuals and households, this definitive do-it-yourself manual is for the working world—businesses, workers, and day-to-day life at the office. Positive and practical, True Green at Work tells everyone who holds a job, from top executives on down the ladder, how to help minimize their company’s carbon footprint. The book is accessible and actionable, with its signature, crisp design and lively text. Each page contains a single tip for reducing waste, making it easy for anyone in any job to take small steps toward a healthier planet. Suggestions run the gamut, from obvious recycling to innovative strategies that encourage sustainability.

Authors McKay and Bonnin draw on their extensive industry expertise to address corporate culture, branding, and marketing and to profile American businesses on the leading edge of green—inspiring stories that are sure to motivate any company and employee. Timely and smart, True Green at Work is one business book that will pay dividends.

Sam Houston or The Handbook of Municipal Bonds

2009-01-14T05:29:00.000-08:00

Sam Houston

Author: James L Haley

In the decades preceding the Civil War, few figures in the United States were as influential or as controversial as Sam Houston. In Sam Houston, James L. Haley explores Houston's momentous career and the complex man behind it. Haley's fifteen years of research and writing have produced possibly the most complete, most personal, and most readable Sam Houston biography ever written. Drawn from personal papers never before available as well as the papers of others in Houston's circle, this biography will delight anyone intrigued by Sam Houston, Texas history, Civil War history, or America's tradition of rugged individualism.

Library Journal

There is no shortage of good biographies of Houston, and the bicentennial of his birth (1993) created a cottage industry of lives, such as Marshall de Bruhl's Sword of San Jacinto (LJ 2/15/93) and John Hoyt Williams's Sam Houston: A Biography of the Father of Texas (LJ 12/92), both out of print. Haley (Texas: From Frontier to Spindletop) argues that most biographies fail to provide a completely accurate picture of the man and that, despite over 60 biographies, Houston remains a mystery in many ways. Using an amazing array of primary source materials, including many recently discovered Houston papers in scattered collections, Haley explores a more personal angle, looking at what "made Houston tick" by examining topics that were important to Houston himself (e.g., Native American dealings). From his rise and fall in Tennessee politics and through his many roles in Texas, Haley paints a lively picture of a sometimes deeply troubled man. While this is not a definitive biography, it is a refreshing, important look at a weighty yet often overlooked figure in American politics. Ample illustrations and Haley's easy style make the book accessible to lay readers, while his exhaustive research should appeal to academics. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Mike Miller, Dallas P.L. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Book review: Human Resource Management or Essentials of Health Care Marketing

The Handbook of Municipal Bonds

Author: Frank J Fabozzi

In The Handbook of Municipal Bonds, editors Sylvan Feldstein and Frank Fabozzi-along with a number of experienced contributors-provide you with the practical guidance needed to succeed within this challenging environment.

Whether you're on the buy-side or the sell-side, this reliable resource offers a well-rounded look at the municipal bond industry and its many products. As you progress through each chapter, a different contributor will detail a specific aspect of this field-providing in-depth insights on everything from modern municipal bond portfolio management to the analysis of high-yield, high-risk credit sectors.

Also included are an extensive array of case studies that cover a wide range of bond issues related to the 9/11 catastrophe, subprime loans, a major airline bankruptcy, and much more.

Written with the serious investor in mind, The Handbook of Municipal Bonds contains the information you need to make more informed decisions within this ever-evolving industry. Through the innovative insight of some of the most respected experts in this field, you'll quickly become familiar with the essential elements of the municipal bond market.

Foreword (Christopher "Kit" Taylor)

Preface.

About the Editors.

Contributing Authors.

Part One: The Sell Side: The Originators of Deals.

Chapter 1. The Central Place of States and Local Governments in American Federalism (Richard Briffault)

Chapter 2. An Overview of Investment Banking (Herman R. Charbonneau)

Chapter 3. Chapter 3. Role of the Financial Advisor (William H. Wood)

Chapter 4. Method of Sale in the Municipal Bond Market (Jun Peng, Kenneth A. Kriz, and Tracy Neish)

Chapter 5. The Role of Bond Counsel in Public Agency Financing (John L. Kraft)

Chapter 6. The Role of Counsel to the Underwriters (Mary G. Wilson)

Chapter 7. Summary of Federal Tax Requirements for Tax-Exempt Bonds ( Perry E. Israel)

Chapter 8. The Role of the Municipal Bond Trustee (James E. Spiotto)

Chapter 9. The Last Resort for Financially Distressed Municipalities (James E. Spiotto)

Chapter 10. Subnational Infrastructure Finance in the Emerging Markets: A Financial Guaranty Perspective (Thomas H. Cochran, Anthony Pellegrini, David Stevens, Richard Torkelson, and David White)

Chapter 11. The Role of the Rating Agencies (Edward A. Rabson)

Chapter 12. Municipal Bond Refundings (William H. Wood)

Chapter 13. Public-Private Partnerships (Robert H. Muller)

Part Two: The Sell Side: Distribution and Market-Making Roles.

Chapter 14. The Role of Underwriter (Christopher J. Mier)

Chapter 15. The Roles of Traders and Brokers (JonPaul Zaptin)

Chapter 16.Municipal Arbitrage and Tender Option Bonds (Bart Mosley)

Chapter 17. Interest Rate Swaps and Their Application to Tax-Exempt Financing (Eric H. Chu, Craig Underwood, Thomas B. Fox, Jon A. McMahon, Roger L. Davis, Stephen A. Spitz, Albert Simons III, and George G. Wolf)

Chapter 18. The Regional Firm: Its Customers, Traders, and Institutional Salespeople (Mychele Lindvall)

Chapter 19. Changing Roles of Buyers and Sellers of Municipal Bonds: One Participant's View (William J. Darusmont)

Chapter 20. The Depository Trust Company and Real-Time Price Transparency (Sylvan G. Feldstein and David Ratner)

Chapter 21. i-Deal/Ipreo: the Transaction Platform (Allen Williams)

Part Three: Compliance Issues.

Chapter 22. The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (Paul S. Maco and Jennifer Webster Taffe)

Chapter 23. The Role of the Securities and Exchange Commission (Paul S. Maco and Cristy C. Edwards)

Chapter 24. Sarbanes-Oxley and the Securities and Exchange Commission (Paul S. Maco)

Chapter 25. Using Auditing Techniques to Develop Investment Adviser Compliance Procedures (Kevin Reilly)

Chapter 26. Rule 2a-7: Legal and Research Issues for Tax-Exempt Money Market Funds 9Stephen A. Keen and Leslie K. Ross)

Part Four: Fixed Income Analysis of Municipal Products.

Chapter 27. Evaluation of Municipal Bonds (Gerard Brennan)

Chapter 28. Valuation of Municipal bonds with Embedded Options (Fr5ank J. Fabozzi, Andrew Kalotay, and Michael P. Dorigan)

Chapter 29. Analyzing and Evaluating Tax-Exempt Indexed Floaters: Investor and Issuer Perspectives (Yingchen Li)

Chapter 30. Municipal Inverse Floating Rate Securities (Cadmus Hicks)

Chapter 31. Analyzing Portfolios Daily (Paul R. Daniels)

Chapter 32. Discovering Relative Value Using Custom Indices (Daniel J. Garrett)

Chapter 33. Municipal Bond Swaps (Evan C. Rourke)

Chapter 34. The Tax Treatment of Municipal Bonds (Martin J. Mauro and Philip Fischer)

Part Five: The Buy Side: Institutional Investors.

Chapter 35. Managing a National Municipal Bond Fund (Alexander Grant)

Chapter 36. Managing a High-Yield Municipal Fund (Wayne Godlin, Jim Phillips, Bill Black, Barnet Sherman, Mark Paris, and Seth Horwitz)

Chapter 37. Managing Municipal bonds for Property and Casualty Insurance Companies for Total Return. (Karen Szerszen)

After Hegemony or Police Patrol

2009-01-13T18:15:00.000-08:00

After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton Classics Edition)

Author: Robert O Keohan

This book is a comprehensive study of cooperation among the advanced capitalist countries. Can cooperation persist without the dominance of a single power, such as the United States after World War II? To answer this pressing question, Robert Keohane analyzes the institutions, or "international regimes," through which cooperation has taken place in the world political economy and describes the evolution of these regimes as American hegemony has eroded. Refuting the idea that the decline of hegemony makes cooperation impossible, he views international regimes not as weak substitutes for world government but as devices for facilitating decentralized cooperation among egoistic actors. In the preface the author addresses the issue of cooperation after the end of the Soviet empire and with the renewed dominance of the United States, in security matters, as well as recent scholarship on cooperation.

1	Realism, institutionalism, and cooperation	5
2	Politics, economics, and the international system	18
3	Hegemony in the world political economy	31
4	Cooperation and international regimes	49
5	Rational-choice and functional explanations	65
6	A functional theory of international regimes	85
7	Bounded rationality and redefinitions of self-interest	110
8	Hegemonic cooperation in the postwar era	135
9	The incomplete decline of hegemonic regimes	182
10	The consumers' oil regime, 1974-81	217
11	The value of institutions and the costs of flexibility	243

Look this: Assessment of Addictive Behaviors or Directory of Essential Oils

Police Patrol: Operations and Management

Author: Charles D Hal

Hale's Police Patrol, Third Edition covers patrol operations, goals, and strategies. Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of police patrol operations. It combines management theory with case study examples taken from small police departments in addition to coverage of community and problem oriented policing. This new edition discusses important issues such as:

The most fundamental aspects of the patrol function—preparing for patrol and patrol techniques
The role of the uniformed police officer in the criminal investigation process
Community outreach programs including victim advocacy programs, citizen advisory councils, and school curricula
Cultural diversity in the workplace
The importance of integrity in police work
Bias crime, stalking, and racial profiling

Police Patrol will serve the needs of the law enforcement community and further strengthen and improve upon the police patrol effort. This third edition may prove to be especially useful to police personnel who are employed in accredited police agencies or in those that are considering or attempting accreditation.

God Prayer and Sarah Palin or Nazi Games

2009-01-13T08:02:00.000-08:00

God, Prayer, and Sarah Palin

Author: Kristina Benson

We know Sarah Palin as John McCain's vice-presidential choice for 2008, and also as a former Wasilla High School basketball star, ex-beauty queen, and one-time journalist. But her life has also been blessed with abundant faith. Her faith is based on a personal relationship with God, and prayer. This book examines the power of prayer in Sarah's life and includes inspiration for Republican and Democrat alike.

Book about: 100 Questions and Answers about Melanoma and Other Skin Cancers or The Patients Guide to Weight Loss Surgery

Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936

Author: David Clay Larg

Athletics and politics collide in a critical event for Nazi Germany and the contemporary world.

The torch relay—that staple of Olympic pageantry—first opened the summer games in 1936 in Berlin. Proposed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, the relay was to carry the symbolism of a new Germany across its route through southeastern and central Europe. Soon after the Wehrmacht would march in jackboots over the same terrain.

The Olympic festival was a crucial part of the Nazi regime's mobilization of power. Nazi Games offers a superb blend of history and sport. The narrative includes a stirring account of the international effort to boycott the games, derailed finally by the American Olympic Committee and the determination of its head, Avery Brundage, to participate. Nazi Games also recounts the dazzling athletic feats of these Olympics, including Jesse Owens's four gold-medal performances and the marathon victory of Korean runner Kitei Son, the Rising Sun of imperial Japan on his bib. 25 b/w photographs.

Property and Freedom or Ideas for Development

2009-01-12T18:50:00.000-08:00

Property and Freedom

Author: Richard Pipes

Property, asserts Richard Pipes, is an indispensable ingredient not only of economic progress but also of liberty and the rule of law. In his new book, the Harvard scholar demonstrates how, throughout history, private ownership has served as a barrier to the power of the state, enabling the Western world to evolve enduring democratic institutions. However, he warns that contemporary trends in the treatment of property - in a century that, he suggests, has been unfavorable to the institution - threaten to undermine the rights of citizens. And he makes clear why he believes that excessive interference by government, even when intended to promote the "common good," could lead to a diminution of freedom.

Publishers Weekly

Renowned Sovietologist Pipes (The Russian Revolution, etc.) offers a powerfully argued coda to the Cold War triumph of capitalism. Private property, his thesis runs, is a prerequisite for the development of liberal, democratic legal and political systems. The books central comparison of 17th-century England with patrimonial Russia provides a potent argument in support of this assertion. The emergence of private estates in England required a legal system, while the czars ruled by decree; dependent on estate holders for revenue, the English Crown convened parliaments, while the czars required obligatory state service from Russian landowners. British citizens ability to accumulate wealth, backed by common law, resulted in modern capitalist democracies. Not surprisingly, Pipes has little patience with socialist ideals and with what he sees as their penchant for artificially imposed equality. He explicitly states that what a man is, what he does, and what he owns are of a piece, so that an assault on his belongings is an assault also on his individuality and his right to life. As Pipes takes Rousseau and Marx to task for their attacks on property, some readers will be put off by his untempered vehemence. While Pipes begrudgingly concedes that the reformist demands of various social movements have placed valuable checks on the unfettered accumulation of property, his message is most clear when he states human beings must have in order to be. (May)

Booknews

Pipes (history, Harvard U.) demonstrates how, throughout history, private ownership has served as a barrier to the power of the state, enabling the Western world to evolve enduring democratic institutions. He shows how England, as the first country to treat land as a commodity and to develop a robust defense of property rights, also became the first country to institute a parliamentary government capable of restraining the powers of royalty, and describes attitudes toward property of 20th-century totalitarian states. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

National Review - Charles Murray

...[A] principled [defense] of property rights....a surprising and splendid book....[Pipes tackles] a topic that is both sprawling and politically charged....a topic that should be front and center in the American political debate.

The New York Times Book Review - Charles R. Morris

In Pipes' view, despite the vanquishing of Communism, "liberty's future...is still at peril, although from a different and novel source. The main threat to freedom today comes not from tyranny but from equality"....an exercise in dyspepsia that is not interested in...difficult questions.

Kirkus Reviews

Harvard historian Pipes, author of a number of seminal books on Russia (The Russian Revolution, 1990; Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1994; etc.), seeks here to find the reason for the virtual absence of democracy and civil liberties through seven centuries of Russian history. He finds it in the refusal of the Russian state to recognize anything akin to Western attitudes on property. The growth of legal protection for the individual in England, and later in its colonies, was closely associated with the recognition of property rights. By contrast, he contends that "the critical factor in the failure of Russia to develop rights and liberties was the liquidation of landed property in the Grand Duchy of Moscow," which deprived the Russians of the means to limit the power of their kings. But Pipes goes beyond this to contend that property rights have been critical throughout history to the development of liberty. He shows that the Marxist assumption of early communism, of property being shared in common, is historically unfounded. Surviving ancient legal codes, like the Code of Hammurabi (c.2000 b.c.e.), and Assyria (1500 b.c.e.), are very much focused on ownership. What concerns Pipes is that an awareness of this historic link has been eroded by evolutionary sociology, which emerged in the 19th century under the influence of Darwin; and by a thoughtless egalitarianism, epitomized by President Johnson's famous statement that we seek "not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result." Since human beings are by nature unequal, such equality in fact can be achieved only by compulsion. Pipes may be on some unfamiliar territory, and this book lacks theassurance of his earlier works, but it constitutes a valuable and cautionary lesson from his deep study of the failed Russian system.

Look this: Investments with InfoTrac or Marketing

Ideas For Development

Author: Robert Chambers

*From one of the 'gurus' of development and author of the best selling Participatory Workshops
*Chock-full of provocative and actionable ideas drawn from four decades of development work and written in Robert Chambers' infectious and highly readable style

Our world seems entangled in systems increasingly dominated by power, greed, ignorance, self-deception, and denial, with spiralling inequity and injustice. Against a backdrop of climate change, failing ecosystems, poverty, crushing debt ,and corporate exploitation, the future of our world looks dire and the solutions almost too monumental to consider.

Yet all is not lost. Robert Chambers, one of the 'glass is half full' optimists of international development, suggests that the problems can be solved and everyone has the power at a personal level to take action, develop solutions, and remake our world as it can and should be. Chambers peels apart and analyzes aspects of development that have been neglected or misunderstood. In each chapter, he presents an earlier writing which he then reviews and reflects upon in a contemporary light before harvesting a wealth of powerful conclusions and practical implications for the future. The book draws on experiences from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, covering topics and concepts as wide and varied as irreversibility, continuity, and commitment; administrative capacity as a scarce resource; procedures and principles; participation in the past, present, and future; scaling up; behavior and attitudes; responsible wellbeing; and concepts for development in the 21st century.

1	Words and ideas : commitment, continuity and irreversibility	1
2	Aid and administrative capacity	30
3	Procedures, principles and power	54
4	Participation : review, reflections and future	86
5	PRA, participation and going to scale	119
6	Behaviour, attitudes and beyond	156
7	For our future : responsible well-being : a personal agenda for development	184

Washington Posts Supreme Court Year in Review 2009 or Promises to Keep

2009-01-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

Washington Post's Supreme Court Year in Review 2009: The Major Cases and Decisions of 2008

Author: The Washington Post

Complete coverage of the important Supreme Court cases and findings of 2008 with commentary from the legal desk of The Washington Post. Organized by subject area, this review will cover the cases of the Supreme Court that have the biggest impact on our country. Whether your interest is in personal freedom, Constitutional law, or legal decisions that directly affect business or politics, this book provides the details of the cases that confirm or change the direction of law in the United States.

Select commentary from the staff of The Washington Post’s legal desk will clarify and pull together how the decisions affect each of us and affect the legal system of our country.

Ch. 1 Habeas Corpus 1 Medellin v. Texas, 06-984 2 Boumediene v. Bush, 06-1195 31 Ch. 2 The First Amendment 83 New York State Board of Elections v. Lopez Torres, 06-766 84 United States v. Williams, 06-694 95 Davis v. Federal Election Commission, 07-320 115 Ch. 3 The Second Amendment 139 District of Columbia v. Heller, 07-290 140 Ch. 4 The Eighth Amendment 197 Baze v. Rees, 07-5439 198 Kennedy v. Louisiana, 07-343 221 Ch. 5 The Fourteenth Amendment 243 Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 07-21 244 Ch. 6 Federal Sentencing Guidelines 273 Kimbrough v. United States, 06-6330 274 Ch. 7 Criminal Law 293 Snyder v. Louisiana, 06-10119 294 Ch. 8 Employee Benefits 307 LaRue v. DeWolff Boberg, Associates, Inc., 06-856 308 Ch. 9 Torts 321 Stoneridge Investment Partners, LLC v. Scientific-Atlanta, Inc., 06-43 322 Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., 06-179 345 Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, 07-219 363 Timeline 389 Index 393

Book review: Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3 or Final Cut Pro Portable Genius

Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics

Author: Joe Biden

“Nearly forty years after I first got involved, I remain captivated by the possibilities of politics and public service. In fact, I believe that my chosen profession is a noble calling. That’s why I wanted to be a part of it.”
–Joe Biden

As a United States senator from Delaware since 1973, Joe Biden has been an intimate witness to the major events of the past four decades and a relentless actor in trying to shape recent American history. He has seen up close the tragic mistake of the Vietnam War, the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a presidential impeachment, a presidential resignation, and a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court. He’s observed Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and two Bushes wrestling with the presidency; he’s traveled to war zones in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and seen firsthand the devastation of genocide. He played a vital role by standing up to Ronald Reagan’s effort to seat Judge Robert Bork on the Supreme Court, fighting for legislation that protects women against domestic violence, and galvanizing America’s response (and the world’s) to Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal march in the Balkans. In Promises to Keep, Biden reveals what these experiences taught him about himself, his colleagues, and the institutions of government.

With his customary candor, Biden movingly recounts growing up in a staunchly Catholic multigenerational household in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware; overcoming a demoralizingstutter; marriage, fatherhood, and the tragic death of his wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi; remarriage and re-forming a family with his second wife, Jill; success and failure in the Senate and on the campaign trail; two life-threatening aneurysms; his relations with fellow lawmakers on both sides of the aisle; and his leadership of powerful Senate committees.

Through these and other recollections, Biden shows us how the guiding principles he learned early in life–the obligation to work to make people’s lives better, to honor family and faith, to get up and do the right thing no matter how hard you’ve been knocked down, to be honest and straightforward, and, above all, to keep your promises–are the foundations on which he has based his life’s work as husband, father, and public servant.

Promises to Keep is the story of a man who faced down personal challenges and tragedy to become one of our most effective leaders. It is also an intimate series of reflections from a public servant who refuses to be cynical about political leadership, and a testament to the promise of the United States.

Mrs Kennedy or Pursuit

2009-01-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years

Author: Barbara Leaming

Drawing from recently declassified top-secret material, as well as revelatory eyewitness accounts, Secret Service records, and Jacqueline Kennedy's personal letters, bestselling biographer Barbara Leaming answers the question: what was it like to be Mrs. John F. Kennedy during the dramatic thousand days of the Kennedy presidency? Brilliantly researched, Leaming's poignant and powerful chronicle illuminates the tumultuous day-to-day life of a woman who entered the White House at age thirty-one, seven years into a complex and troubled marriage, and left at thirty-four after her husband's assassination. Revealing the full story of the interplay of sex and politics in Washington, Mrs. Kennedy will indelibly challenge our vision of this fascinating woman, and bring a new perspective to her crucial role in the Kennedy presidency.

Kirkus Reviews

"The famously private Mrs. kennedy has met her match and is herein revealed-along with her husband and his administration-respectfully, but thoroughly, by an author possessed.

With admirable obsession, biographer Leaming (Marilyn Monroe, 1998, etc.) has plumbed the vaults of the many official libraries (JFK's, LBJ's, Oxford's Bodleian) and consulted with Secret Service personnel, Kennedy friends, and White House log books to create a convincing day-by-day chronicle of the Kennedy marriage and presidency. Armed with a remarkable level of detail and turning an eye toward psychological anaylsis, the author briefly explores her subject's childhood, and then dives into the Kennedy's life together. In Leaming's view, the personal and political spheres of the Kennedys are inseparable. Thus, the Bay of Pigs fiasco is explained as a son attempting to compensate for his ambassador father's perceived weakness when, decades before, the elder Kennedy coundeled conciliation in the face of Hitler. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam is traced back to Jack's inability to focus on foreign affairs after the death of his newborn son. Meanwhile, Jackie's determination to be a good wife is what spurred her to enter the world's stage. Leaming paints a portrait of a political creature whose every action was premeditated, from her whispery voice designed to project a non-threatening femininity, to her decision to quit Washington every weekend in order to allow Jack to conduct his extramarital affairs out of her sight. Full of such interesting theories, Leaming is particularly convincing when arguing that Jackie was to Jack nothing so much as the perfect replacement for his beloved sister, Kick, who died very young. The standard tasty details of dress, design, and glittering social circle are not neglected; indeed, Jackie's sense of style writ large is seen as her particular genius, equally useful for charming world leaders and the crowd back home.

Admirably detailed, stunningly successful, and likely to become the definitive biography of the Kennedy marriage, with all the intimacy and international scope implied."

Book Magazine

While Pottker's Janet & Jackie is a sort of hoopskirt in a high wind—loose, inappropriate and uncontrollable—Leaming's Mrs. Kennedy, by comparison, is a marvel of clarity, intelligence, sympathy and sound research. We see how a young woman in her twenties, at first dreading the hoopla of high office and high visibility, gathered her courage and prepared meticulously to charm such leaders as Jawaharlal Nehru, Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev, greatly enhancing her husband's popularity and effectiveness. Regarding a state dinner with de Gaulle at which Jackie dismissed the official translator and served as a whispery, sexy intermediary between the two presidents, Leaming writes, "She appeared to enjoy the political game as never before, and the meaning she had once sought in her own life as an antidote to the emptiness and insularity of her mother's existence seemed attainable at last."

Jackie's effort to find a way of living that preserved her dignity and sense of worth despite her husband's chronic infidelity—and her struggle to figure out what was required of her, and brilliantly, to fulfill that expectation—makes her a fascinating subject. Jackie's story is greatly enhanced by Leaming's generosity of spirit and imagination. She observes, for example, that Jackie read and delighted in accounts of French court scandals but must have been dismayed by the inescapable parallels that could be drawn.

For Jackie, the White House, which she had redecorated to national acclaim, represented not simply public triumph but private shame. In the past, she had remained at home while her husband pursued casual sex elsewhere. "Now," Leamingobserves, "in order to guard against being confronted with things she preferred to avoid, she was going to have to take active steps to make it possible for him to cheat." At virtually the same moment that she left the White House for weekends in the country, trusted cronies were ferrying in young women with whom the president had sexual relations. Mary Meyer, a louche, ambitious woman in her forties who prided herself on her recklessness and planned to introduce the president to LSD, was a frequent partner.

Leaming, who thinks of the White House years as a period when JFK was engaged in "a personal struggle against unimaginable odds for a moral compass," also documents the president's habitual use of methamphetamines provided by Dr. Max Jacobson, whose patients called him Dr. Feel Good. Her aim is not simply to dredge up scandal but to show the factors that could impair judgment at crucial junctures.

Throughout this volume, Leaming's concern is to match private experience with public events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the disastrous diplomatic summit with Khrushchev in Vienna. These were moments when the president floundered, at the mercy of events and of advisers with their own agendas. But if our view of him is diminished by Leaming's account, respect for Jackie can only be increased. As when she disregarded the advice of the Secret Service, who feared another assassination attempt, and walked behind her fallen husband's cortege, Jackie did what the American public most loved her for. She found a brave and appropriate gesture to convey the best in her own nature. Leaming is far too wise to indulge in hero worship, but she is equally too wise to overlook or diminish what is heroic in her subject. For that, and a great deal else, readers must be grateful.
—Penelope Mesic

Publishers Weekly

Asserting that Jacqueline Kennedy's role in shaping her husband's presidency has been under-examined, Leaming (Katharine Hepburn) offers a corrective in this intimate look at a very private woman. Initially inclined to keep herself as much in the background as possible, says Leaming, Jacqueline Kennedy became an increasingly visible and vocal first lady as she realized how effective she could be as an image maker. It's in this capacity that Leaming convincingly depicts her as being instrumental in shaping the course of her husband's administration: charming, intuitive and socially savvy, she was clearly adept at recognizing precisely how to win over any given individual or audience, and to convince them to see her husband in a favorable light. While many world leaders, for example, were initially inclined to view John F. Kennedy as a playboy and an intellectual lightweight, Jackie skillfully massaged their perceptions until they began to take him more seriously and consequently to be much more responsive to his foreign policy agenda. But even as she worked hard on his behalf, Jack continually betrayed her with his legendary infidelities; the impact of this on Jackie's psyche is also a major theme here. Indeed, this is as much a psychological biography as a political one, and Leaming explores Jackie's complex and often painful inner life with subtlety and compassion. Unabashedly sympathetic toward her protagonist, Leaming provides a fascinating glimpse into the psychodynamics of one of the 20th century's most famous marriages, and her assertion that Jackie Kennedy deserves more credit than she's typically gotten for her husband's successes is persuasive. 32 pages b&w photos not seen by PW.(Nov.) Forecast: Leaming's bio of Katharine Hepburn was a bestseller, and one can predict generous sales for this title, which Leaming will promote in New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., including an appearance on the Today show. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Despite the welter of material on Jacqueline Kennedy, biographer Leaming has indeed produced an original and compelling portrait of Jackie as first lady. Leaming has plumbed primary sources heretofore unused (such as the letters of Harold Macmillan) and conducted interviews with sometime friends and associates, perhaps more willing to talk now that Jackie has died. Leaming makes a persuasive case for Jackie's substantive contribution as first lady in the role of diplomat. Jackie did the research and softened up visiting leaders, who then met the president already impressed with his administration. Leaming also explains Jackie's highly criticized absences from the White House: she was fleeing her husband's flagrant womanizing. Leaming's extensive documentation of his shameless conduct and his cruelty to his wife is breathtaking. (Her theories about why they married and why Jackie stood for such treatment are less dispositive.) The publisher plans a national publicity campaign. Public libraries should stock up, but they won't be able to meet the certain demand no matter how many copies they own. Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The famously private Mrs. Kennedy has met her match and is herein revealed-along with her husband and his administration-respectfully but thoroughly, by an author possessed. With admirable obsession, biographer Leaming (Marilyn Monroe, 1998, etc.) has plumbed the vaults of the many official libraries (JFK's, LBJ's, Oxford's Bodleian) and consulted with Secret Service personnel, Kennedy friends, and White House log books to create a convincing day-by-day chronicle of the Kennedy marriage and presidency. Armed with a remarkable level of detail and turning an eye toward psychological analysis, the author briefly explores her subject's childhood, and then dives into the Kennedys' life together. In Leaming's view, the personal and political spheres of the Kennedys are inseparable. Thus, the Bay of Pigs fiasco is explained as a son attempting to compensate for his ambassador father's perceived weakness when, decades before, the elder Kennedy counseled conciliation in the face of Hitler.The US involvement in Vietnam is traced back to Jack's inability to focus on foreign affairs after the death of his newborn son. Meanwhile, Jackie's determination to be a good wife is what spurred her to enter the world's stage. Leaming paints a portrait of a political creature whose every action was premeditated, from her whispery voice designed to project a non-threatening femininity, to her decision to quit Washington every weekend in order to allow Jack to conduct his extramarital affairs out of her sight. Full of such interesting theories, Leaming is particularly convincing when arguing that Jackie was to Jack nothing so much as the perfect replacement for his beloved sister, Kick, who died very young. Thestandard tasty details of dress, design, and glittering social circle are not neglected; indeed, Jackie's sense of style writ large is seen as her particular genius, equally useful for charming world leaders and the crowd back home. Admirably detailed, stunningly successful, and likely to become the definitive biography of the Kennedy marriage, with all the intimacy and international scope implied. Book-of-the-Month Club/Literary Guild/Doubleday Book Club/History Book Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection

	Author's Note	ix
Chapter 1	Modus Vivendi	1
Chapter 2	The Presidency Begins	33
Chapter 3	Tell Me About Macmillan	51
Chapter 4	A Family Drama	71
Chapter 5	The Magic Is Lost	89
Chapter 6	Hall of Mirrors	111
Chapter 7	In Her Own Right	130
Chapter 8	Goddess of Power	173
Chapter 9	Eyes in the Portraits	194
Chapter 10	A Critical Moment	217
Chapter 11	Valediction	237
Chapter 12	Indiscretion	256
Chapter 13	Private Grief	286
Chapter 14	A Study in Betrayal	303
Chapter 15	Alone	328
Chapter 16	My Dear Friend	351
	Epilogue	356
	Acknowledgments	361
	Notes on Sources	365
	Index	393

New interesting textbook: Economia direttiva: Applicazioni, strategie e tattiche

Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution, and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis

Author: Clint Johnson

While much has been written about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, much less has been written about the efforts to apprehend Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the days following the dissolution of the Confederacy, and the subsequent attempt to try him for treason. In the only book to tell the definitive story of Davis's chase, capture, imprisonment, and release, journalist and Civil War writer Clint Johnson brings this chapter in our nation's history to vivid life, and paints a fascinating portrait of one of American history's most complex and enduring figures.

In the vulnerable weeks following the end of the War and Abraham Lincoln's assassination, some in President Andrew Johnson's administration burned to exact revenge against Davis. Trumping up charges of conspiracy to murder Lincoln and treason against the Union, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered cavalry after Davis. After a chase through North and South Carolina and Georgia, Davis was captured on May 10, 1865. The former United States Senator and Mexican War hero was imprisoned for two years in Fortress Monroe, Virginia, where he was subjected to torture and humiliation-but never brought to trial. Remarkably, the Johnson administration knew Davis was innocent of all crimes before he was even arrested.

With a keen eye for the period's detail, as well as a Southerner's insight, Johnson sheds new light on Davis's time on the run, his treatment while imprisoned, his surprising release from custody, and his eventual exoneration-exposing the powerful political forces involved, and their lasting impact. Johnson draws on extensive official historical documents as well as countless archived private materials such asdiaries, letters, and private papers. With the 200th anniversary of Davis's birth in 2008, the time has never been better for a compelling account of such a defining episode of the Civil War.

Armchair Interviews

Meticulously researched and well written.

What People Are Saying

Rod Gragg
"A master storyteller exposes one of the most fascinating and overlooked dramas in Civil War history."--(Rod Gragg, author of Covered With Glory and Confederate Goliath)

Chris Hartley
"Using solid research, an engaging style and a novelist's eye for details, Clint Johnson has produced a vivid, fresh and entertaining look at Jefferson Davis's flight and capture. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on the final days of the Confederacy and the fate of its one and only chief executive."--(Chris Hartley, author of Stuart's Tarheels: James B. Gordon and His North Carolina Cavalry, as well as a forthcoming book on George Stoneman's 1865 raid)

Marc Leepson
"If there was one Civil War historian I would choose to tell the story of Jefferson Davis, it would be Clint Johnson. In these pages Johnson brings the mercurial Confederate President alive with a riveting and revealing narrative that sheds important new light on one of the pivotal figures in American history. Highly recommended."--(Marc Leepson, the author of Desperate Engagement, Flag: An American Biography, and Saving Monticello)

David J. Eicher
"Clint Johnson's Pursuit is a spellbinding tale of the last days of the Confederacy. The author's crisp prose and solid research give readers a riveting view of Jefferson Davis's last days in power."--(David J. Eicher, author of The Longest Night and Dixie Betrayed)

Ch. I	Justice as fairness	3
Ch. II	The principles of justice	54
Ch. III	The original position	118
Ch. IV	Equal liberty	195
Ch. V	Distributive shares	258
Ch. VI	Duty and obligation	333
Ch. VII	Goodness as rationality	395
Ch. VIII	The sense of justice	453
Ch. IX	The good of justice	513

Part 1
1.	Fire	11
2.	Trap	22
3.	Eighth	30
4.	Tenth	43
5.	Ninth	51
6.	Escape	67
7.	Night	73
8.	Day	89
9.	Morgue	95
Part 2
10.	Guilt	113
11.	Help	122
12.	Protest	134
13.	Dirge	147
14.	Shirtwaist	158
15.	Protection	169
16.	Justice	177
17.	Phoenix	204
18.	Fire	213
	Postscript	215
	Index	221

	Introduction	IX
1	Cold Pork Chops	1
2	The Mob in Boston	13
3	The Rise of Gennaro Angiulo	33
4	Catch Up	61
5	The Wave	89
6	Failure	113
7	Break-In	129
8	Inside 98 Prince Street	147
9	An Attempted Murder	169
10	The Noose Tightens	193
11	Mafia Murder	211
12	The Fall of Gennaro Anguilo	227
	Conclusion	245
	Acknowledgments	251
	Index	253

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