Practical Politics Book

Governing Health or The Fragmented World of the Social

2009-12-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy

Author: Carol S Weissert

Governing Health examines health care policy making from a long-term, political perspective, describing how Congress, the president, special interest groups, bureaucracy, and state governments help define health policy problems and find politically feasible solutions. The third edition of this pathbreaking book is updated to cover recent legislative efforts, including the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Praise for previous editions of Governing Health

Nancy Milio

This is a political science book that presents a comprehensive synthesis and analysis of the institutions and process of healthcare policymaking. It is based on a review and assessment of the literature and on some original research on the changes in healthcare policymaking over the last 50 years, through the mid-1990s. It includes a comparison of Federal and state policymaking and concludes with a prognosis for healthcare reform. The purpose is to provide a text written by political scientists for use in health politics courses. The authors are well-qualified, having done extensive and recognized research in healthcare policymaking. The book is appropriate for many audiences interested in understanding and acting in healthcare policy arenas. The book has a moderate number of charts, tables, and boxes that synthesize the text. It also has an extensive, 23-page bibliography and a list of acronyms. The font is rather small. This text provides interested audiences with as much useable detail and insight as they would need for applied purposes in the fields of health policy analysis, action, and education. It should prove a lasting reference for several years for theoretical and practical purposes in healthcare policy arenas as they now move between Federal and state governments, between public and private sectors, between elected officials and private interest groups, both commercial and voluntary, professional and public interest. The changing impact of the AMA over 50 years is among the policy influences that are highlighted.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer: Nancy Milio, PhD, FAAN, FAPHA (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Public Health)
Description: This is a political science book that presents a comprehensive synthesis and analysis of the institutions and process of healthcare policymaking. It is based on a review and assessment of the literature and on some original research on the changes in healthcare policymaking over the last 50 years, through the mid-1990s. It includes a comparison of Federal and state policymaking and concludes with a prognosis for healthcare reform.
Purpose: The purpose is to provide a text written by political scientists for use in health politics courses. The authors are well-qualified, having done extensive and recognized research in healthcare policymaking.
Audience: The book is appropriate for many audiences interested in understanding and acting in healthcare policy arenas.
Features: The book has a moderate number of charts, tables, and boxes that synthesize the text. It also has an extensive, 23-page bibliography and a list of acronyms. The font is rather small.
Assessment: This text provides interested audiences with as much useable detail and insight as they would need for applied purposes in the fields of health policy analysis, action, and education. It should prove a lasting reference for several years for theoretical and practical purposes in healthcare policy arenas as they now move between Federal and state governments, between public and private sectors, between elected officials and private interest groups, both commercial and voluntary, professional and public interest. The changing impact of the AMA over 50 years is among the policy influences that are highlighted.

Booknews

Health policy, like all exercises in politics, is about the wielding of power, note Carol Weissert (political science, Michigan State U.) and William Weissert (health management and policy, U. of Michigan). They present the history of U.S. health care policy as the product of the American system of government, combining ideological polarization and party politics, the dynamics of congressional needs for reelection and vote-trading, the discretionary power of the bureaucracy in its dealings with government and the public, the well- financed influence of health interests, and the budget and reconciliation process. Their work is divided into two sections that first describe the institutions of government and the interactions of structures and motivations and then explore the actual policy process itself. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Presenting health care policy as the product of the American system of government, this volume provides a synthesis of political science research on the institutions of government and the policy process, and an extensive review of the policies that have governed health care for a generation or more. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Rating

4 Stars! from Doody

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
I	Health Policy and Institutions
1	Congress	15
2	The Presidency	72
3	Interest Groups	110
4	Bureaucracy	154
5	States and Health Care Reform	192
II	Health and the Policy Process
6	The Policy Process	245
7	Applying Theory to Reality: The Case of the Balanced Budget Act	281
	Conclusion	318
	List of Abbreviations	329
	References	331
	Index	361

Book about: Medical Billing and Coding Demystified or All I Need To Know About Manufacturing I Learned In Joes Garage

The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy

Author: Axel Honneth

The essays in this book weave together insights and arguments from such diverse traditions as German critical theory, French philosophy and social theory, and recent Anglo-American moral and political theory, offering a unique approach to the political and theoretical consequences of the modernism/postmodernism discussion. Through an analysis of central themes in classical Marxism and early critical theory, the author shows how recent work in a variety of traditions converges on the need to question familiar distinctions between material production and culture, the public and the private, and the political and the social, and to reconsider the conceptions of agency and power that have informed them.

Views from the South or Right Answers

2009-12-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the Wto on Third World Countries

Author: Sarah Anderson

Ever since the `Battle in Seattle,` the World Trade Organization has been featured prominently in the news. For all their talk of being dedicated to the welfare of the Third World, the WTO has damaged the economies of several countries and encouraged the growth of labor markets that more closely resemble sweat shops. Third World activists/scholars Martin Knor, Walden Bello, Vandana Shiva, Dot Keet, Sara Larrain, and Oronto Douglas examine the effects of the WTO and provide alternative agendas geared towards people, not profits.

Booknews

This book is comprised primarily of four long essays: Martin Khor's "How the South is Getting a Raw Deal at the WTO"; Walden Bello's "Building an Iron Cage: Bretton Woods Institutions, the WTO, and the South"; Vandana Shiva's "War Against Nature and the People of the South"; and Dot Keet's "Implications for Developing Countries and Least Developed Countries." Opening the volume is Jerry Mander's foreword and closing the volume are two close-ups of Nigeria and Chile, and an afterword by Anuradha Mittal. All the contributors are part of different environmental and human rights organizations in Nigeria, Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, Nigeria, India, the US, and Chile, and all weighing in<-->at least when lives and living are at stake<-->against those Northern policies of "free" trade and globalization. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

	Foreword: The Resistance to Southern Perspectives	1
	How the South is Getting a Raw Deal at the WTO	7
	The WTO as an Instrument to Govern the South
	Difficulties for Developing Countries Generated by the WTO
	Agreements and Their Problems of Implementation
	The Need to Review and Repair the WTO Agreements
	Pressure for New Issues
	The Dangers of Four New Issues
	Other Issues at the Door: Environment and Labor
	Building an Iron Cage: Bretton Woods Institutions, the WTO, and the South	54
	The 1950s through the 1970s: Emergence of the Southern Agenda
	The 1980s and Early 1990s: Resubordination of the South
	The World Trade Organization: Sealing the Defeat of the South
	Strategy for Change
	War Against Nature and the People of the South	91
	Globalization of India's Agriculture
	The Driving Forces behind Globalization of Agriculture
	Implications for Developing Countries and Least Developed Countries	126
	Dashed Expectations in Developing Countries
	Abuses of the Multilateral Rules-based System by Developed Countries
	Marginalization for Least Developed Countries
	Future Implications for Developing Countries
	New Pressures from Developed Countries
	Millennial Challenges
	Further and More Fundamental Aims
	Two Cases of Corporate Rule	155
	The Case of Chile: Dictatorship and Neoliberalism
	The Case of Nigeria: Corporate Oil and Tribal Blood
	Afterword	164

Right Answers: Short Takes on Big Issues: Separating Fact from Fantasy

Author: Alan Caruba

Collection of best columns that Alan Caruba has written about environmentalism, animal rights, energy issues, the education system, immigration policies, United Nations, Islamic Holy War and others. These columns have appeared in major newspapers, magazines and the internet.

Poisonous Affair or Almanac of Political Corruption Scandals and Dirty Politics

2009-12-04T01:41:00.000-08:00

Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja

Author: Joost R Hiltermann

In March 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, thousands were killed in a chemical attack on a town in Iraqi Kurdistan. Both sides accused the other. Gradually it emerged that Saddam Hussein, with the tacit support of his western allies, was responsible. This book tells the story of the gassing of Halabja, and how Iraq amassed chemical weapons to target Iranian soldiers and Kurdish villagers as America looked the other way. Today, as the Middle East sinks further into turmoil, these policies are coming back to haunt the West.

The Washington Post - Fawaz A. Gerges

Hiltermann's A Poisonous Affair is a chilling account of the gassing of Halabja, a village in Iraq's Kurdish region, in March 1988 and the subsequent counterinsurgency campaign known as Anfal ("The Spoils"), in which some 80,000 Kurdish civilians were driven from their homes by poison gas, hauled to transit centers, sorted by age and sex, and carted off to execution sites in Iraq's western desert…A Poisonous Affair shows clearly that U.S. policymakers knew Iraq had gassed Halabja but instructed American diplomats to cast partial blame on Iran. By Hiltermann's persuasive account, the United States sacrificed universal norms at the altar of Cold War calculations and short-term gain, a choice that set the stage for America's current deadly embrace with Iraq as well as for Iran's quest to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Books about: International Human Rights or Modern Weapons Caching

Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals and Dirty Politics

Author: Kim Long

Watergate. Billygate. Iran-Contra. Teapot Dome. Monica Lewinsky.American history is marked by era-defining misdeeds, indiscretions, and the kind of tabloid-ready scandals that politicians seem to do better than anyone else. Now, for the first time, one volume brings together 300 years of political wrongdoing in an illustrated history of politicians gone wild—proving that today’s scoundrels aren’t the first, worst, and surely won’t be the last….

From high crimes to misdemeanors to moments of licentiousness and larceny, this unique compendium captures in complete, colorful detail the foibles, failings, peccadilloes, dirty tricks, and astounding blunders committed by politicians behaving badly. Amid stories of brawlers, plagiarists, sexual predators, tax evaders, and the temporarily insane, this almanac tells all about:

•The only (so far!) president to be arrested while in office: Ulysses S. Grant, who was allegedly issued a ticket for racing his horse and buggy through the streets of Washington, D.C.

•The former New Jersey state senator David J. Friedland, who disappeared during a scuba diving accident in 1985. It turns out he staged the accident and served nine years in prison after being captured in the Maldives.

•Tape-recorded instructions from highbrow president Franklin Delano Roosevelt on how his staff should carry out some low-down political tricks

•The bizarre story of U.S. congressman Robert Potter, who castrated two men he suspected of having affairs with his wife. Potter won election to the state house while in jail—but was kicked out for cheating at cards.

•Texascongressman Henry Barbosa Gonzalez: he was charged with assault in 1986 after he shoved and hit a man who called him a communist. Gonzalez was seventy years old at the time.

At once shocking and hilariously funny, here’s a book that exposes the history of American politics, warts and all—and makes for hours of jaw-dropping, fascinating, illuminating reading.

Differences That Matter or Kennedys

2009-12-02T20:29:00.000-08:00

Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada

Author: Dan Zuberi

This book shines a spotlight on the causes and consequences of working poverty, revealing how the lives of low-wage workers are affected by differences in health care, labor, and social welfare policy in the United States and Canada. Dan Zuberi's conclusions are based on survey data, eighteen months of participant observation fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with seventy-seven hotel employees working in parallel jobs on both sides of the border. Two hotel chains, each with one union and one non-union hotel in Seattle and Vancouver, provide a vivid crossnational comparison because they are similar in so many regards, the one major exception being government policy.

Zuberi demonstrates how labor, health, social welfare, and public investment policy affect these hotel workers and their families. His book challenges the myth that globalization necessarily means hospitality jobs must be insecure and pay poverty wages and makes clear the critical role played by government policy in the reduction of poverty and creation of economic equality. Zuberi shows exactly where and how the social policies that distinguish the Canadian welfare state from the U.S. version make a difference in protecting Canadian workers from the hardships that burden low-wage workers in the United States. Differences that Matter, which is filled with first-person accounts, ends with policy recommendations and a call for grassroots community organizing.

About the Author:
Dan Zuberi is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of British Columbia.

New interesting textbook: A Walk in the Woods or Eyewitness Travel Rome

Kennedys: An American Drama

Author: Peter Collier

The Kennedys are the most photographed, written about, admired, hated and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing family members and people close to the Kennedys. An immediate classic, The Kennedys: An American Drama brings the story of four generations of "America's family" fully into view.

Collier and Horowitz capture the fiery ambition, the mythic identity, the dynastic ebb and flow, and the corrosive underside of Camelot that led one young Kennedy to say, "We broke the rules and in turn we were broken by them." The Kennedys is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first and only time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall. The authors have updated the story with new material showing the effect of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the other family tragedies of the last few years on the Kennedys and their mythic role in American life.

Death of a Dissident or The Complete Book Of Police And Military Motorcycles

2009-12-01T15:06:00.000-08:00

Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB

Author: Alex Goldfarb

The assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko in November 2006 -- poisoned by the rare radioactive element polonium -- caused an international sensation. Within a few short weeks, the fit forty-three-year-old lay gaunt, bald, and dying in a hospital, the victim of a "tiny nuclear bomb." Suspicions swirled around Russia's FSB, the successor to the KGB, and the Putin regime. Traces of polonium radiation were found in Germany and on certain airplanes, suggesting a travel route from Russia for the carriers of the fatal poison. But what really happened? What did Litvinenko know? And why was he killed?

The full story of Sasha Litvinenko's life and death is one that the Kremlin does not want told. His closest friend, Alex Goldfarb, and his widow, Marina, are the only two people who can tell it all, from firsthand knowledge, with dramatic scenes from Moscow to London to Washington. Death of a Dissident reads like a political thriller, yet its story is more fantastic and frightening than any novel.

Ever since 1998, when Litvinenko denounced the FSB for ordering him to assassinate tycoon Boris Berezovsky, he had devoted his life to exposing the FSB's darkest secrets. After a dramatic escape to London with Goldfarb's assistance, he spent six years, often working with Goldfarb, investigating a widening series of scandals. Oligarchs and journalists have been assassinated. Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko was poisoned on the campaign trail. The war in Chechnya became unspeakably harsh on both sides. Sasha Litvinenko investigated all of it, and he denounced his former employers in no uncertain terms for their dirty deeds.

Death of a Dissident opens a window into the dark heart of the Putin Kremlin. With its strong-arm tactics, tight control over the media, and penetration of all levels of government, the old KGB is back with a vengeance. Sasha Litvinenko dedicated his life to exposing this truth. It took his diabolical murder for the world to listen.

Book review: Pajama Day or Skippyjon Jones Lost in Spice

The Complete Book Of Police And Military Motorcycles

Author: Joseph Berk

From Pittsburgh's adoption of motorcycles for police use in 1909 to Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing's 1916 pursuit of Pancho Villa into Mexican territory on Harley-Davidsons, Indians and Excelsiors to the deployment of motorcycles in both world wars, this book tells the fascinating tale of these magnificent machines from their 20th century beginnings to their current use by police departments and militaries throughout the world. Joseph Berk, author of The Gatling Gun, explores every aspect of police and military motorcycles, including the history of their manufacture by Harley-Davidson, Indian, Kawasaki, BMW, Honda and others; details of their procurement by selected U.S. police departments; critiques of the "Big Three" police models employed in the United States from officers who have put them to the test; a detailed outline of the intensive 10-day training program required of U.S. motor officers; an inside look at how specific police departments from Atlanta to L.A. utilize motorcycles on a day-to-day basis; and a look at the specific makes and models used by Special Forces and other military units from World War I through the turn of the century and beyond.

Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Police Motorcycle Concept
Chapter 2 - The Big Three Police Motorcycle Manufacturers in the U.S. Market
Chapter 3 - Other Police Motorcycles Throughout the World
Chapter 4 - Motor Officer Training
Chapter 5 - Atlanta's Special Operations Section
Chapter 6 - The Dallas Police Department
Chapter 7 - The Los Angeles Police Department's Special Enforcement Unit
Chapter 8 - The Ontario, California, Police Department
Chapter 9 - American Motorcycles in World War II
Chapter 10 - German Motorcycles in World War II
Chapter 11 - Military Motorcycles Today
Chapter 12 - Military and Police Motorcycles Websites

Silent Takeover or Testimony

2009-11-30T09:54:00.000-08:00

Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy

Author: Noreena Hertz

Of the world's 100 largest economies, 51 are now corporations, only 49 are nation-states. The sales of General Motors and Ford are greater than the gross domestic product of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, and Wal-Mart now has a turnover higher than the revenues of most of the states of Eastern Europe. Yet few of us understand fully the growing dominance of big business.

Widely acclaimed economist Noreena Hertz brilliantly reveals how corporations across the world manipulate and pressure governments by means both legal and illegal; how protest is becoming a more effective political weapon than the ballot-box; and how corporations are taking over from the state responsibility for everything from providing technology for schools to healthcare for the community.

The Silent Takeover asks us to recognize the growing contradictions of a world divided between haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable wealth. In the face of these unacceptable extremes, Noreena Hertz outlines a new agenda to revitalize politics and renew democracy.

Publishers Weekly

Cambridge University economist Hertz asserts that Reagan's and Thatcher's brand of free market capitalism has had dire social and political repercussions, although it has triumphed as the dominant world ideology and brought prosperity to many. She sensibly argues that with government in retreat from its traditional rule-setter role, multinational corporations have grown so powerful 51 of the hundred biggest economies in the world are corporations that they determine political policies rather than operate subject to them. Market success may rule, but Hertz laments that the state, in appearing to serve business, may be nullifying democracy's social contract to represent and protect the rights of all citizens equally. WTO protests and activism reinforce her sense of growing political discontent not only about income distribution effects (97% of the increase in income over the past 20 years in the U.S. has gone to the top 20% of the families) but also about human rights issues. Campaign finance realities, declining voter participation, increasing alienation and terrorism amid glowing corporate results represent an urgent cry for reform to Hertz. Since corporations are not designed and cannot be expected to serve a general population's social and political needs, she argues that democracies need to move toward a realignment between the state's political power and the corporations' economic power so that all people have a positive stake in world economic progress. Hertz maps out a proposed agenda, and her eloquent call to action deserves the attention of every concerned citizen of our troubled world. (June 17) Forecast: Concern about the unchecked influence of multinational corporations in the political sphere both nationally and internationally is a hot topic, and Hertz's credentials as a respected academic with a Wharton MBA and a pro-free market mindset reinforce her arguments. This book and Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents (Forecasts, May 13) will catch the eye of those seeking to understand how business will and should be done responsibly in the future. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Rosabeth Moss Kanter
The Silent Takeover is a powerful wake-up call to a sleeping citizenry. Noreena Hertz's wide-ranging, provocative, and important book will shape the debate about the role of business versus government for years to come.
— Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, bestselling author of World Class and Evolve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow

George Soros
Noreena Hertz is one of the most forceful, passionate, and incisive writers to address the debate on globalization. Written with great clarity and intelligence, The Silent Takeover persuasively identifies the challenges facing business and government, and suggests a number of important changes to consider. This outstanding young woman is a voice to reckon with.

Interesting textbook: Fat Proof Your Family or Herbs and Nutrients for the Mind

Testimony: France, Europe, and the World in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Nicolas Sarkozy

In this important book from the newly elected president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy sets forth his personal vision of France's role in world affairs and his plans for modernizing the country and equipping it for the twenty-first century.

With unusual candor, President Sarkozy describes the difficulties France has faced in recent years—high unemployment, social tensions, inadequate education, a government that has not been responsive or responsible when confronting economic and social problems. In international relations, he calls for a new approach to the way France positions itself in the world. He is a great admirer of the United States, an unorthodox position for a French leader, and his vision for Europe is ambitious and far-reaching. His iconoclastic views on Israel and the Arab world, Africa, globalization, immigration, and the environment promise a sharp break with the past.

The ideas of France's new president are probably more daring, coherent, and compelling than those of any French leader in decades. Furthermore, he remains optimistic about France, insisting that the country is eager to embrace profound change. Bold, pragmatic, a risk-taker, President Sarkozy sets forth an exciting new direction for France as it enters the world of the twenty-first century.

Hmong in Minnesota or As It Was in the Beginning

2009-11-29T04:42:00.000-08:00

Hmong in Minnesota

Author: Chia Youyee Vang

Minnesota has always been a land of immigrants. Successive waves have each made their own way, found their place, and made it their home. The Hmong are one of the most recent immigrant groups, and their remarkable and moving story is told in Hmong in Minnesota. Chia Youyee Vang reveals the colorful, intricate history of Hmong Minnesotans, many of whom were forced to flee their homeland of Laos when the communists seized power during the Vietnam War. Having assisted U.S. troops in the “Secret War,” Hmong soldiers and civilians were eligible to settle in the United States. Vang offers a unique window into the lives of the Minnesota Hmong through the stories of individuals who represent the experiences of many. One voice is that of Mao Heu Thao, one of the first refugees to come to Minnesota, sponsored by Catholic Charities in 1976. She tells of the unexpectedly cold weather, the strange food, and the kindness of her hosts. By introducing readers to the immigrants themselves, Hmong in Minnesota conveys a population’s struggle to adjust to new environments, build communities, maintain cultural practices, and make its mark on government policies and programs. Chia Youyee Vang was born in Laos and as a child escaped with her family to the United States. An assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, she specializes in the study of Hmong community-building efforts.

Foreword   Bill Holm     v
Hmong in Minnesota     1
A Brief History of the Hmong in Laos     1
Refugee Resettlement in the United States     9
Adjusting to Modern Life     21
Building Community     30
Cultural Practices     39
Achievements     54
Challenges     69
Conclusion     75
Personal Account: Reflections   Mao Heu Thao     77
For Further Reading     81
Notes     83
Index     87
Acknowledgments     92

New interesting book: Assault on Reason or Prince of the City

As It Was in the Beginning: The Coming Democratization of the Catholic Church

Author: McClory

Many assume the Catholic Church has always functioned with a top-down leadership model. But in this well-researched book, Robert McClory reveals that there have been long periods where lay people were consulted and had strong, leading voices. McClory also explains that a decentralized Chruch is around the corner and is inevitable. The books helps readers read the signs of the times to identify what is to come for the world's longest running corporation.

Bread Rising

As a church historian I enthusiastically recommend this book to inform and stimulate your late-night discussions about where the church has been and where and how it can possibly go. Here is your opportunity to pick a real winner!

Anna M. Donnelly - Library Journal

McClory (journalism, emeritus, Northwestern Univ.), who resigned from the priesthood in 1970, has published numerous articles (in the National Catholic Reporter, the Chicago Tribune, U.S. Catholic, and elsewhere) and several books on contemporary social issues debated within the Roman Catholic Church. Here, he handily documents lay movements developed since the 1960s and Vatican II to transition within the church from the traditional top-down leadership model toward a system of collaborative decision making. He recalls historical church councils and cites authorities such as Cyprian, third-century bishop of Carthage, who urged decisions to be made with the consent of the people, and 19th-century philosopher John Henry Cardinal Newman, who stressed the need for incorporating the sense and agreement of the faithful in matters of doctrine. He further documents the consequences of papal emphasis on ecumenism and the principle of subsidiarity, the growth of lay influence, and priest abuse scandals. Overall, McClory feels the time is now for a more democratized church. Recommended for public, academic, and religious collections.

The Republican War on Science or Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte

2009-11-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

The Republican War on Science

Author: Chris Mooney

Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since Richard Nixon fired his science advisors. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker’s agenda; or, when they’re too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, evolution, sex education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration’s positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies-once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents-are increasingly staffed by political appointees who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science. This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government’s increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.

The New York Times - John Horgan

As the title indicates, Mooney's book is a diatribe, from start to finish. The prose is often clunky and clichйd, and it suffers from smug, preaching-to-the-choir self-righteousness. But Mooney deserves a hearing in spite of these flaws, because he addresses a vitally important topic and gets it basically right.

Kirkus Reviews

A litany of indictments of misuse and abuse by the current administration, painstakingly documented by a journalist who has made science and politics his beat. Mooney (a writer for Mother Jones, Slate, the Boston Globe) traces the "war on science" back to the Reagan days (remember Star Wars? acid rain? the ban on fetal tissue research?). He goes on to chronicle the anti-science movement that gained momentum in the Gingrich-led Congress of the '90s, which dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment and stacked hearings with fringe scientists ready to deny the ozone hole, global warming and dioxin risks. Mooney catalogues the players, the right-wing think tanks and the administration spokespeople who continue to deny a human role in global warming or species destruction, who argue that condoms are unsafe, that abortion is linked to breast cancer and that "Plan B" will encourage teen sex. Add to these abuses the litmus tests for candidates for government science advisory councils and political censoring of what gets posted as health information on the Web. Perhaps the most chilling quote is from a Ron Suskind interview with a "senior advisor," who defined Suskind and others as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality," adding, "That's not the way the world really works anyone. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." One can fault Mooney for damning all Republicans in the title-he admits there are the John McCains, for example, as well as problematic Democrats. Sharper editing to eliminate some repetitiveness would also help. Mooney has put the right-wing handwriting on the wall, and the prospect is scary.

New interesting textbook: Low Carbohydrate Cooking for Health or Domestic Cookery Useful Receipts and Hints to Young Housekeepers

Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte: Volume II

Author: Louis Antonine De Bourrienn

This incredible set begins with Napoleon's birth in Corsica in 1769 and ends with his entombment in the Invalides in Paris in 1840, further set off by an additional section back of Volume IV, Napoleon's Will. (And, no, he didn't leave it all to Josephine. They divorced in 1809. Four months later, he married Archduchess Marie Louise. She didn't get anything either.) That aside, these four illustrated volumes include chronologies, text, letters, and many insights, both personal and professional, into the life and mind of a titan in world history.

People Before Profit or Brave New Neighborhoods

2009-11-26T18:18:00.000-08:00

People Before Profit: The New Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money, and Economic Crisis

Author: Charles Derber

Has globalization failed us? The promises of economic stability, increased prosperity, and cultural cooperation seem more like a pipe dream than ever before. But rather than stop globalization, Charles Derber challenges us to rewrite its rules in order to fulfill its potential as an agent of democracy and global harmony. In this provocative and optimistic work, one of the first examinations of globalization after September 11, 2001, Derber argues that only a democratic cure--begun at the grassroots level--will end global terror and economic insecurity. People Before Profit provides an essential understanding of our world economy as well as a practical guide for building a stable and more equitable global community.

Tom Hayden

Derber makes sense of such numbing issues as globalization, terrorism and world poverty...

Noam Chomsky

A provocative and stimulating work, directed to issues of the highest significance.

Ralph Nader

Derber describes the realities that affect everyday life...and elaborately presents sensible solutions for strong democracies [and] just economies...

...this book is about the urgent need to re-invent globalization to create a safe, democratic, and economically secure world.

Charles Kernaghan

This is a remarkable book, which deconstructs the myths of the global economy...

Naomi Klein

With any luck, it will help kick start a much needed debate on he principles that should unite our world.

Edward M. Kennedy

His ideas will be of interest to everyone who wants to know more about these basic issues of our time.

John J. Sweeney

...a thoughtful and penetrating assessment of the global economy, the inequities it has generated, and the global justice movement...

Publishers Weekly

Sociologist Derber (Corporation Nation) has a breezy writing style, slightly more academic than that of Thomas Friedman, whom he invokes often in this critique of the increasing trend toward globalization. Where Friedman sees globalization as an inevitable process, Derber believes we can still change globalization's direction, eliminating its market-driven excesses to provide truly universal economic development. The goals he proposes-ending global poverty, promoting local democracy and culture, making businesses socially accountable and creating a framework for genuinely collective peace and stability-aren't new, nor is his observance that people all over the world are coming together to achieve those goals, but what his analysis lacks in originality, it makes up in accessibility. Despite Derber's optimism that American citizens will sympathize with the emphasis of "third-wave" activists on combating corporate corruption and influence over government, he does admit his insistence that "we cannot have global democracy in a world so thoroughly dominated by the United States" is likely to meet with mainstream resistance. Reaction to that frank assessment is likely to overshadow other discussion, such as Derber's cogent explanation of the threats that the WTO and IMF pose to local sovereignty, especially with regard to labor and environmental legislation, and his 25 suggestions for "what to do right now," simple actions that almost anyone can take to become politically aware and active. It's clear Derber wants to do more than preach to the choir and less clear that the public is ready to listen. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An optimistic critique of globalization from Derber (Sociology/Boston Coll.; Corporation Nation, not reviewed). Despite the bluster of its proponents, the course of globalization is neither safe, democratic, nor economically secure, says Derber. This isn't because the system is inherently flawed or, as Thomas Friedman has it, outside of human intervention. Derber contends that globalization has within it the groundwork for a worldwide constitutional system that would allow active participants to think globally and act locally, pursue the basic set of human rights outlined in the UN Declaration of 1948, and seize the constitutional moment—aided by the technological innovation of instant global communication—at a time when "making history is a realistic prospect for ordinary people, as they find themselves caught up in seismic struggles over the basic rules of the world they inhabit." Today's globalization need be no more profit-driven, US-managed, or consumerist than, say, colonialism or the Gilded Age were socially flawed—those being examples of the fact that world systems have been with us since the beginning—if, as in Derber's scheme, a limited mega-government oversees global rights, with citizen-controlled national governments protecting participatory democracy on the local level and enforcing socially accountable global business standards. Obvious areas of reform include the antidemocratic, shadow governments of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization—though be it said that Derber is no conspiracy theorist, more a time-honored Social Democrat—as well as the tempering of the power grab by the US Fundamental in movingglobalization toward democracy is an informed, traveled, abolitionist, green, active citizenry, keen-eyed to all antidemocratic institutions and to interventionism and unilateralism. The effort "will involve engaging citizens not only in free and fair elections, but in active participation in local, national, and global politics through civic, grassroots, labor, feminist, and public-interest associations." Derber wants long-term stability, where accountability starts at and proceeds from the individual guided by the basic tenets of human decency.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: 911 globe	1
1	Globalization's Ghosts	23
2	Three Myths	35
3	One World Under Business	59
4	The American Umpire	80
5	The WTO and the Constitution	105
6	The UN, the Barbershop, and Global Democracy	127
7	A Global New Deal	143
8	People Power	170
9	Sleepless in Seattle	199
10	Global Democracy as Antiterrorism	234
	Epilogue: What To Do Right Now	271
	Notes	285
	Index	308

Book about: Ismail Merchants Paris or Matsutake Mushroom

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space

Author: Margaret Kohn

Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get on your soapbox doesn't mean anyone will be there to listen. Town squares have emptied out as shoppers decamp for megamalls; gated communities keep pesky signature gathering activists away; even most internet chatrooms are run by the major media companies. Brave New Neighborhood s considers what can be done to protect and revitalize our public spaces.
In recent years, courts have upheld prohibitions preventing homeless people from begging in the subway, tenants from distributing newsletters to their neighbors, and activists from leafleting in front of the post office. Brave New Neighborhood s lays out the blueprints of the future towns these changes have created, and in this new geography, the First Amendment comes from the wrong side of the tracks.

Community Resources for Older Adults or The Basics of American Politics

2009-11-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

Community Resources for Older Adults: Programs and Services in an Era of Change

Author: Robbyn R Wacker

Features and Benefits:

- Provides an overview of legislation that provides the foundation for aging related benefits and services

- Discusses theories that help predict service use, thus offering readers a framework to understand why older adults often do not use services

- Provides case studies that encourage critical thinking about the delivery and use of community resources

- Descrbes both public and private programs and services available to older adults, in-depth reviews of the current body of empirical literature in each program area, and discussions of the challenges programs and services will face in the future

- Includes best practice examples of community programs from around the country that illustrate unique ways to meet the needs of older adults

- Lists national organizations and Internet resources for each topic area

- Includes learning activities that challenge students to explore the community resources that exist in the reader's locale

Booknews

Community resources available to elderly Americans, including both public and private programs, are overviewed, theories on service use are discussed, and case studies that encourage critical thinking about the delivery and use of community services are presented in this book for professionals and students. Empirical literature in different program areas is reviewed, and legislation that provides the foundation for programs is explained. This second edition includes updated information on various programs and services such as the Older Americans Act, plus updated best practices and Web resources. Wacker is associate dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences and professor of gerontology at the University of Northern Colorado. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

	About the Authors
	Acknowledgments
Pt. I	The Social Context of Community Resource Delivery
1	On the Threshold of a New Era	3
2	Legislative Foundations for Programs, Services, and Benefits Supporting Older Adults	13
3	Patterns of Service Use and Theories of Help-Seeking Behavior	36
Pt. II	Continuum of Services
4	Information and Referral	53
5	Volunteer and Intergenerational Programs	73
6	Education Programs	92
7	Senior Centers and Recreation	115
8	Employment Programs	135
9	Income Programs	152
10	Nutrition and Meal Programs	167
11	Health Care and Wellness	189
12	Mental Health Services	218
13	Legal Services	237
14	Transportation	261
15	Housing	285
16	Case Management	315
17	Home Care Services	335
18	Respite Services	355
19	Long-Term Care Services	373
Pt. III	Preparing for the Future
20	Programs and Services in on Era of Change	403
App	State Units on Aging	409
	References	417
	Index	455

Interesting book: Cook and Deal or Low Fat Korean Cooking

The Basics of American Politics

Author: Gary Wasserman

This brief, nuts-and-bolts introduction to American government has been a student favorite and a bestseller for over 30 years because of its lively, straight-forward approach to the basics, its brevity, and its always inexpensive price.

This text uses a dynamic game metaphor to engage students in the basics of the American political system and the contact sport of politics. Beginning with a clear definition of politics, it introduces four governmental and four nongovernmental “players” who must abide by the “rules of the game” established by the Constitution and civil liberties. It ends by examining rival theories of who wins and who loses in American politics. Written to engage students and lay a flexible foundation for instructors, The Basics of American Politics covers all the terms and topics behind the current news, situating politics in the classroom and beyond.

Human Rights Inc or Dragons at Your Door

2009-02-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law

Author: Joseph Slaughter

In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of "world literature" and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call "the free and full development of the human personality."Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread ofmultinational consumer capitalism.Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature-imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.

Acknowledgments     vii
Preamble: The Legibility of Human Rights     1
Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law     45
Becoming Plots: Human Rights, the Bildungsroman, and the Novelization of Citizenship     86
Normalizing Narrative Forms of Human Rights: The (Dys)Function of the Public Sphere     140
Compulsory Development: Narrative Self-Sponsorship and the Right to Self-Determination     205
Clefs a Roman: Reading, Writing, and International Humanitarianism     270
Codicil: Intimations of a Human Rights International: "The Rights of Man; or What Are We [Reading] For?"     317
Notes     329
Bibliography     389
Index     419

New interesting book: Comptabilité internationale

Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition

Author: Ming Zeng

The new competitive challenge from Chinese businesses is like nothing seen by Western companies since the Japanese arrived twenty years ago with their cars and consumer electronics. To fend off these fierce competitors, managers must forget yesterday's image of Chinese companies as producers of cheap, low-quality imitations flooding world markets. In fact, by strategically implementing what the authors call cost innovation, Chinese firms are advancing into high-end products and industries and competing for such high-value activities as engineering, design, and even R&D.

The first book to examine this new competitive force, Dragons at Your Door exposes the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of these fast-rising Chinese competitors, surfaces the underlying logic that enables Chinese firms to attack high-end industries, and provides critical new insight into these very different competitors.

The New York Times

These companies are hiring people from anywhere in the world...[they]have different strategies, reflecting their strengths . . .

Financial Executive

Among the books assessing the impact of the Chinese surge into global markets [book] deserves a high ranking.

Strategy & Business

. . . a timely book . . .

Publishers Weekly

According to business professors Zeng (of Cheung Kong Graduate School in China) and Williamson (of INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), the slogan of the China International Marine Containers Group, "Learn, Improve, Disrupt," could just as easily apply, with global consequences, to any Chinese corporation busy using those principles to reinvent manufacturing. The authors reveal that low labor costs are only one advantage enjoyed by Chinese companies, and that the "three faces" of cost innovation (offering high technology at low cost, a near-impossible range of choice and "specialty products" at volume prices) have allowed them to make impressive inroads into markets long assumed impenetrable. This is sobering reading for Western audiences; while the authors avoid the alarms that sound throughout many current business books on China, their dry, factual approach may prove even more unnerving. Though it may paint a disturbing portrait of a competitor formidable even in its infancy, this volume brings to light anecdotes and analysis that are bound to inspire anyone serious about global business or politics today. (June 12)

Understanding and Dismantling Racism or Death in a Promised Land

2009-02-20T16:19:00.000-08:00

Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America

Author: Joseph Barndt

No issue has so daunted American life and history as that of race. Joseph Barndt's powerful, personal, yet practical work reframes race and racism in a new way for a new century and offers tested ways to address it. The clearest and most practical primer on race and race relations around, this book takes specific account of our society's ongoing failure to dismantle racism, the failure of the multicultural diversity model, and the need for a deeper understanding of racism's pernicious but embedded roots.

Barndt's unique book offers an historical account of racism, especially in white America, and its various personal, institutional, and cultural forms. Without demonizing anyone or any race, he also offers new, specific, positive ways m which people in all walks, including congregations, can work to bring systemic racism to an end. Also included are helpful analytical charts, definitions, bibliography, and exercises for readers, particularly to trace their own history of racism and change.

About the Author:
Joseph Barndt has been a parish pastor and an antiracism trainer and organizer for thirty years, much of the latter work being done with Crossroads Ministry, Chicago

Preface     xi
Introduction     1
The Happiness Machine-A Fable     1
The Dross of Racism     3
The Happiness Machine and Current Reality     4
A Book for White People     6
And Also a Book for People of Color     7
The Work of Crossroads Ministry and People's Institute     8
Language and Terminology     8
Other "Isms"-The Happiness Machine's Multiple Consequences     10
Writing an Ending to the Fable of the Happiness Machine     11
The Continuing Evil of Racism     13
The Complex and Bewildering Tangle of Racism     13
Our Colonial and Racist Beginnings     15
From Colony to Nationhood: The Deepening of Racism     17
Resistance to Racism: The Better Side of a Bitter History     25
The Civil Rights Movement: The Resistance Rewrites History     29
The Continuing Evil of Racism in the Twenty-First Century     33
Detecting and Measuring Twenty-First Century Racism     42
The Twenty-First Century: A New Beginning     48
Defining Racism     55
The Need for a Common Definition of Racism     55
Introducing a Definition of Racism     58
Exploring Prejudice     60
Exploring Race     62
The Misuse of Power by Systems and Institutions     73
Summary     82
White Power and Privilege     85
From "Black Like Me" to "White Like Me"     87
White Power: Not the Same as White Privilege     90
A Closer Look at White Power     91
A Closer Look at White Privilege     95
Responses to White Power and Privilege     107
Conclusion: You Can't Take It Off     110
Individual Racism: The Making of a Racist     111
Power[superscript 3]: Racism at Its Worst     111
"Go Home and Free Your Own People"     112
What and Who Is a Racist?     115
"Racialization": The Mass Production of Racists and Victims     120
Racial Identity Formation: The Shaping of Superior and Inferior Races     123
The Making of a White Racist     126
The Four Walls of Racism's Prison     129
Summary and Conclusion: None of Us Are Free     141
Institutionalized Racism     143
The Misuse of Power by Systems and Institutions     143
Taking an X-Ray of the Happiness Machine     144
The Nature and Purpose of Institutions     145
Defining Institutionalized Racism     151
How It Got That Way: A History of Institutionalized Racism     154
How It Stayed That Way: New Forms of Institutionalized Racism     157
How to "See," Identify, and Analyze Institutionalized Racism     165
Conclusion: The Possibility of Authentic Institutional Transformation     182
Cultural Racism     185
What Is Culture?     187
The Creating of Race-Based Cultures     190
Defining Cultural Racism     195
The Race-Based Cultures of Communities of Color     204
White Cultural Identity in the Twenty-First Century     207
Dismantling Racism     219
A Time to Tear Down...and a Time to Build     219
Building Antiracist Communities of Resistance     221
Planning a Jailbreak: Organizing to Dismantle Racism     231
Introducing a Tool to Measure Institutional Change     233
The First Half of the Continuum: Where Are We Now?     236
Principles of Organizing to Move Forward     243
The Second Half of the Continuum: The Three Stages of Institutional Transformation     255
Conclusion: Toward a Racism-Free Twenty-First Century     262
Notes     269
Additional Resources      277
Index     285

New interesting book: Os Elementos Essenciais de Fala Pública

Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Author: Scott Ellsworth

Exhaustively researched, Death in a Promised Land is a compelling story of racial ideologies, southwestern politics, and yellow journalism, and of an embattled black community's struggle to hold onto its land and freedom.

Booknews

**** BCL3 recommended the original (1982). This unaugmented reprint is printed on alkaline paper. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What We Say Goes or Imperial Hubris

2009-02-19T07:40:00.000-08:00

What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World

Author: Noam Chomsky

An indispensable set of interviews on foreign and domestic issues with the bestselling author of Hegemony or Survival, “America’s most useful citizen.” (The Boston Globe)

In this new collection of conversations, conducted in 2006 and 2007, Noam Chomsky explores the most immediate and urgent concerns: Iran’s challenge to the United States, the deterioration of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China, and the growing power of the left in Latin America, as well as the Democratic victory in the 2006 U.S. midterm elections and the upcoming presidential race. As always, Chomsky presents his ideas vividly and accessibly, with uncompromising principle and clarifying insight.

The latest volume from a long-established, trusted partnership, What We Say Goes shows once again that no interlocutor engages with Chomsky more effectively than David Barsamian. These interviews will inspire a new generation of readers, as well as longtime Chomsky fans eager for his latest thinking on the many crises we now confront, both at home and abroad. They confirm that Chomsky is an unparalleled resource for anyone seeking to understand our world today.

Marcia L. Sprules - Library Journal

Linguist, philosopher, and political activist Chomsky has long been critical of U.S. foreign policy and has authored many books expressing his views, beginning with American Power and the New Mandarins(1969). This latest book gathers 2006-07 interviews with radio journalist Barsamian (host, "Alternative Radio"; The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting), a frequent partner in dialog with Chomsky-they have produced at least six books together prior to this one. Presented in chronological order, these conversations cover many topics frequently in the news, including the Middle East and Iraq, Latin America, trade and globalization, and Israel. Despite the format, statements are extensively footnoted, with references to both mainstream media and the web sites of relevant organizations. The basic points are not new: that the United States regularly, through many administrations, violates international law, assuming that as sole superpower it can do whatever it chooses whenever it decides to. Chomsky criticizes those journalists and public intellectuals who, in reporting and commenting on events, do not question the assumptions under which the country acts and have framed the debate so that only the details are fodder for discussion. Chomsky's points are challenging and will make readers uncomfortable, yet most libraries will want to acquire this.

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

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror

Author: Michael Scheuer

When Imperial Hubris first came out in 2004, the greatest danger for Americans confronting the Islamist threat was to believe-at the urging of U.S. leaders-that Muslims attack us for what we are and what we think rather than for what we do. The now-classic showed that a growing segment of the Islamic world strenuously disapproves of specific U.S. policies and their attendant military, political, and economic implications and demonstrated that they will go to any length, not to destroy our secular, democratic way of life, but to deter what they view as specific attacks on their lands, their communities, and their religion. Imperial Hubris remains a must read for an in-depth look at Al Qaeda and the War on Terror.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Imperial Hubris, the scalding new book by a current Central Intelligence Agency officer — who was able to publish the book on the condition that his real name not be revealed — is an assessment of America's war on terror that is bound to provoke large heapings of controversy, on both the right and the left, among hardliners on Iraq and critics of the administration alike. Readers will doubtless contest some or many of the things Anonymous has to say, but he pulls few punches in this book and gives us a fascinating window on America's war with Al Qaeda — at least as framed by one senior analyst, who seems to have put all bureaucratic niceties aside.

The Washington Post - Richard A. Clarke

For those Americans who had begun to doubt whether the Central Intelligence Agency could produce good analysis, Imperial Hubris clearly demonstrates otherwise. It is a powerful, persuasive analysis of the terrorist threat and the Bush administration's failed efforts to fight it. The CIA carefully vetted the book to ensure that no "sources and methods" were exposed, but the anonymous author -- a current CIA official -- draws effectively on the years he's spent carefully studying detailed intelligence reports from several U.S. and many foreign spy agencies. His criticism is damning.

Publishers Weekly

It's unclear how, in an age when even office workers must sign confidentiality agreements, an alleged CIA Middle Eastern specialist has gotten permission to publish a sprawling, erudite book on the origins and present state of the "war on terror." His main point is that Arab antagonism to the West (and even non-fundamentalist Arab regimes' winking at terrorism) has its root in real grievances that have gone unaddressed by U.S. measures. The actions of the Saudis, and their U.S. supporters, come in for some hard criticism, as does the elevation of Northern Alliance warlords to de facto governors of Afghanistan. The author makes some challenging remarks regarding Israel ("Surely there can be no other historical example of a faraway, theocracy-in-all-but-name of only six million people that ultimately controls the extent and even the occurrence of an important portion of political discourse and national security debate in a country of 270-plus million people that prides itself on religious toleration, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech") while playing down the extent to which the Taliban itself was a corrupt theocratic regime. But his annotated compendia of battles and skirmishes won and lost by the U.S. and al-Qaeda are gripping, and his engagement with his subject has made him a pundit-in-demand. (Aug.) Forecast: This is more a book to shake up policy wonks with facts on the ground than for the general public, but it has already created a stir inside the Beltway and beyond. The book is the author's second; Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America was mostly ignored, but this time around, the Primary Colors approach (necessary to protect the author's identity) has led to much TV and print exposure (with voice and features disguised); expect media-based sales. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

	Introduction : "hubris followed by defeat"
1	Some thoughts on the power of focused, principled hatred	1
2	An unprepared and ignorant lunge to defeat - the United States in Afghanistan	21
3	Not down, not out : Al Qaeda's resiliency, expansion, and momentum	59
4	The world's view of bin Laden : a Muslim leader and hero coming into focus?	103
5	Bin Laden views the world : some old, some new, and a twist	127
6	Blinding hubris abounding : inflicting defeat on ourselves - non-war, leaks, and missionary democracy	163
7	When the enemy sets the stage : how America's stubborn obtuseness aids its foes	209
8	The way ahead : a few suggestions for debate	237
	Epilogue : no basis for optimism	261

Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome or Economists with Guns

2009-02-18T02:28:00.000-08:00

Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome

Author: Lesley Adkins

This handy reference provides full access to the 1,200 years of Roman rule from the 8th century B.C. to the 5th century A.D., including information that is hard to find and even harder to decipher. Clear, authoritative, and highly organized, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome provides a unique look at a civilization whose art, literature, law, and engineering influenced the whole of Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
The myriad topics covered include rulers; the legal and governmental system; architectural feats such as the famous Roman roads and aqueducts; the many Roman religions and festivals; the Roman system of personal names; contemporary poets and historians; even typical Roman leisure pursuits. Each chapter includes an extensive bibliography, as well as more than 125 site-specific photographs and line drawings. Maps chart the expansion and contraction of the territory from the foundation city of Rome itself to the Byzantine Empire and the ultimate decline of the West.
Combining both archaeological and historical evidence, the Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome is perfect for anyone interested in Roman history, the classics, or an overview of the amazing period in which the Romans ruled.

School Library Journal

YA-Broadly thematic in its arrangement, this reference book covers a wide range of topics and myriad details of Roman life from 800 B.C.-A.D. 500. A detailed index provides easy and complete access to the contents, maps, illustrations, charts, and tables. The bibliography cites mostly British journals and publications. An ideal and readable resource for students of Roman history and the classics.

Booknews

A reference to facts and figures about ancient Rome from the eight century B.C. to the fifth A.D. The thematic sections cover the republic and the empire, military affairs, geography, town and country, travel and trade, literature, religion, economy and industry, and everyday aspects such as family, entertainment, and medicine. Each section concludes with a list of further reading. Well illustrated in black and white. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Interesting book: Expert C Business Objects or Cisco Routers for the Desperate

Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U. S. -Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968

Author: Bradley R Simpson

Offering the first comprehensive history of U.S relations with Indonesia during the 1960s, Economists with Guns explores one of the central dynamics of international politics during the Cold War: the emergence and U.S. embrace of authoritarian regimes pledged to programs of military-led development.

Drawing on newly declassified archival material, this book examines how Americans and Indonesians imagined the country's development in the 1950s and why they abandoned their democratic hopes in the 1960s in favor of the military regime of General Suharto. Far from viewing development as a path to democracy, this book highlights the evolving commitment of both Americans and Indonesians to authoritarianism in the 1960s and succeeding decades. At a crucial juncture in modern Indonesian history, the United States found common cause with the Indonesian armed forces and their technocratic allies as the purported guardians of political and economic stability, shaping the country's trajectory in ways that—as Indonesia's current fragile transition to democracy illustrates—continue to unfold.

Acknowledgments     vii
Introduction     1
Imagining Indonesian Development     13
The Kennedy Administration Confronts Indonesia     37
Developing a Counterinsurgency State     62
The Road from Stabilization to Konfrontasi     87
From High Hopes to Low Profile     113
Indonesia's Year of Living Dangerously     145
The September 30th Movement and the Destruction of the PKI     171
Economists with Guns: Washington Embraces the New Order     207
Conclusion     249
Abbreviations     263
Notes     265
Works Cited     339
Index     361

Che Guevara Reader or Modern Utopia

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

Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Guerrilla Strategy, Politics and Revolution

Author: Ernesto Che Guevara

A new, revised and expanded edition of an Ocean Press classic.

This reader is the bestselling, most comprehensive selection of Che Guevara's writings, letters and speeches available in English. This volume covers Che's writings on the Cuban revolutionary war, the first years of the revolution in Cuba and his vision for Latin America and the Third World. It includes such classic essays as "Socialism and Man in Cuba" and his call to create "Two, Three, Many Vietnams."

Among the features of this expanded edition are several unpublished articles, essays and letters, including a letter from Che to his children shortly before his death in Bolivia in 1967 and an essay, "Strategy and tactics for the Latin American revolution."

This new edition of a popular Ocean title is published in collaboration with the Che Guevara Archive in Havana. It includes:
a new 24-page selection of photos (many previously unpublished)
an expanded and revised chronology
complete bibliography of the works of Che Guevara
new, extensive annotation and index

"Deep inside the T-shirt where we have tried to trap him the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with im-patience."-Ariel Dorfman

Two new movies to be released in Fall 2003 confirm Che's enduring status as an "icon of the century."
Ocean Press is preparing a range of merchandise, including T-shirts, bookmarks and posters to promote our books on Che Guevara.

This new, expanded edition of an Ocean Press classic complements several bestselling biographies of Che Guevara.

Look this: Quest for Viable Peace or Private Sector Public Wars

Modern Utopia

Author: H G Wells

In A Modern Utopia, two travelers fall into a space-warp and suddenly find themselves upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government.

Library Journal

This trio are from Wells's utopian writings, which generally chronicle a future society of potential greatness that has failed its mission and gone to seed. Not as posh as the "Deluxe Classics Editions," these nonetheless feature many nice extras, including scholarly introductions. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Health Communication or The Jewish Enemy

2009-02-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

Health Communication: From Theory to Practice

Author: Renata Schiavo

Health Communication: From Theory to Practice is a much needed resource for the fast-growing field of health communication. It combines a comprehensive introduction to current issues, theories, and special topics in health communication with a hands-on guide to program development and implementation. While the book is designed for students, professionals and organizations with no significant field experience, it also includes advanced topics for health communication practitioners, public health experts, researchers, and health care providers with an interest in this field.

Book about: Práticas Prudentes no Laboratório:Tratar e Disposição de Produtos químicos

The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust

Author: Jeffrey Herf

The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds.

According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany.

Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlyingthe ideology of the Third Reich.

What People Are Saying

Anson Rabinbach
In this impressive book, Jeffrey Herf shows that the omnipresent image of the 'international Jew' as the source of Germany's victimhood was central to the propaganda and political imagination of the Nazi leadership, which made no secret of its intention to destroy European Jewry. --(Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University)

Susannah Heschel
Jeffrey Herf has written a brilliant book that reorients our understanding of the Holocaust. Arguing that racial antisemitism, however vicious, was an insufficient basis for genocide, Herf demonstrates that a major shift occurred in Nazi propaganda during the war: Jews were now presented as a political threat to the German nation, and as the instigators, through their puppets, America, England, and the Soviet Union, of a deadly world war against Germany. --(Susannah Heschel, author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus)

Gerhard L. Weinberg
Here, practically for the first time, we can see how Germans before and during World War II were at all times in their daily lives confronted with a carefully designed view of the world in which a mythical Jewish enemy was portrayed as threatening Germans and hence had to be killed. No prior study has shown as clearly as this one how central this theme was to German wartime propaganda in all its forms. --(Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina)

Jay W. Baird
A commendable and compelling elucidation of the Nazi propaganda which accompanied the Holocaust, indispensable for both students of the Third Reich and general readers. --(Jay W. Baird, author of The Mythical World of Nazi Propaganda, 1939-1945)

Preface     vii
The Jews, the War, and the Holocaust     1
Building the Anti-Semitic Consensus     17
"International Jewry" and the Origins of World War II     50
At War against the Alliance of Bolshevism and Plutocracy     92
Propaganda in the Shadow of the Death Camps     138
"The Jews Are Guilty of Everything"     183
"Victory or Extermination"     231
Conclusion     264
The Anti-Semitic Campaigns of the Nazi Regime, as Reflected in Lead Front-Page Stories in Der Volkische Beobachter     281
List of Abbreviations     289
Notes     291
Acknowledgments     355
Bibliography     359
Bibliographical Essay     365
Index     375

The Power of Nonviolence or Mother Teresas Prescription

2009-02-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace

Author: Howard Zinn

A stirring anthology of writings about peace and nonviolence from Buddha to Arundhati Roy As you read this, America is at war. President Bush declared a "war on terrorism" and 90 percent of the American people believed he was doing the right thing. But is there another way? From Buddha in the pre-Christian era to the most recent declaration of peace principles by Nobel laureates, nonviolence has always been an alternative.

With an introduction by Howard Zinn about September 11 and the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks, The Power of Nonviolence presents the most salient and persuasive arguments for peace in the last 2,500 years of human history. Included are some of the most original thinkers and writings about peace and nonviolence—Buddha, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," Jane Addams, William Penn on "the end of war," Dorothy Day's position on "Pacifism," Erich Fromm, and Rajendra Prasad. Supplementing the classic voices are more recent advocates' arguments for peace: Albert Camus' "Neither Victims Nor Executioners," A. J. Muste's impressive "Getting Rid of War," Martin Luther King's influential "Declaration of Independence from the War in Viet Nam," and Arundhati Roy's "War Is Peace," plus many others.

Arranged chronologically, covering the major conflagrations of the world in the last hundred years, including the war in Afghanistan, The Power of Nonviolence is a compelling step forward in the study of pacifism, a timely anthology that fills a void for people looking for responses to crisis that are not based on guns or bombs.

Mother Teresa's Prescription: Finding Happiness and Peace in Service

Author: Paul A Wright

Among the hundreds of fine biographies, pictorial essays and meditation-based books about Mother Teresa of Calcutta, this book is refreshingly unique. Paul Wright, a highly successful doctor, tells the story of his life-changing, five-year friendship with this saint-in-the making. The reader encounters Mother Teresa and her prophetic message for a busy modern world through the eyes and memories of an American cardiologist who seemed to have it made. With wonderful anecdotes and personal reflections, Wright tells us how unhappy and unfulfilled he was in the midst of professional prominence and financial success. Recalling his encounters with Mother Teresa and her work in Tijuana and Calcutta, the author leads us to conclude that Mother Teresa had a prescription for happiness and peace, a universal message for all of us. She pointed Wright to the mandate issued by Jesus in Matthew 25 -- Just as you did it for one of the least of my brethren, you did it for me.

Forensic Entomology or Health Economics and Policy

2009-02-13T05:37:00.000-08:00

Forensic Entomology: An Introduction

Author: Dorothy Gennard

This invaluable text provides a concise introduction to entomology in a forensic context and is also a practical guide to collecting entomological samples at the crime scene.

Forensic Entomology: An Introduction:

• Assumes no prior knowledge of either entomology or biology

• Provides background information about the procedures carried out by the professional forensic entomologist in order to determine key information about post-mortem interval presented by insect evidence

• Includes practical tasks and further reading to enhance understanding of the subject and to enable the reader to gain key laboratory skills and a clear understanding of insect life cycles, the identification features of insects, and aspects of their ecology

• Glossary, photographs, the style of presentation and numerous illustrations have been designed to assist in the identification of insects associated with the corpse; keys are included to help students make this identification

This book is an essential resource for undergraduate Forensic Science and Criminology students and those on conversion postgraduate M.Sc. courses in Forensic Science. It is also useful for Scenes of Crime Officers undertaking diploma studies and Scene Investigating Officers.

List of figures.

List of tables.

Preface.

Acknowledgements.

1 The breadth of forensic entomology.

1.1 History of forensic entomology.

1.2 Indicators of time of death.

1.3 Stages of decomposition of a body.

1.4 Indicators of physical abuse.

1.5 Insect larvae: a resource for investigating drug consumption.

1.6 Insect contamination of food.

1.7 Further reading.

2 Identifying flies that are important in forensic entomology.

2.1 What is a fly and how do I spot one?

2.2 Forensically important families of flies.

2.3 DNA identification of forensically important fly species.

2.4 Further reading.

3 Identifying beetles that are important in forensic entomology.

3.1 What do beetles look like?

3.2 Features used in identifying forensically important beetle families.

3.3 Identification of beetle families using DNA.

3.4 Further reading.

4 The life cycles of flies and beetles.

4.1 The life stages of the fly.

4.2 The life stages of the beetle.

4.3 The influence of the environment on specific insect species.

4.4 Succession of insect species on the corpse and its role in post mortem estimation.

4.5 Review technique: preparing slides of larval spiracles or mouthparts – preparation of whole slide mounts.

4.6 Further reading.

5 Sampling at the crime scene.

5.1 Entomological equipment needed tosample from a corpse.

5.2 The sampling strategy for eggs.

5.3 Catching adult flying insects at the crime scene.

5.4 Catching adult crawling insects at the crime scene.

5.5 Obtaining meteorological data at the crime scene.

5.6 Review technique: investigating the influence of larval location.

5.7 Further reading.

6 Breeding entomological specimens from the crime scene.

6.1 Returning to the laboratory with the entomological evidence.

6.2 Fly-rearing conditions in the laboratory.

6.3 Conditions for successful rearing to the adult (imago) fly stage.

6.4 Beetle rearing in the laboratory.

6.5 Dietary requirements of insects reared in the laboratory.

6.6 Review technique: preserving and mounting insect specimens.

6.7 Further reading.

7 Calculating the post mortem interval.

7.1 Working out the base temperature.

7.2 Accumulated degree data.

7.3 Calculation of accumulated degree hours (or days) from crime scene data.

7.4 Sources of error.

7.5 Use of larval growth in length to determine post mortem interval (isomegalen and isomorphen diagrams).

7.6 Calculating post mortem interval using succession.

7.7 Review technique: interpretation of data from a crime scene case study.

7.8 Further reading.

8 Ecology of forensically important flies.

8.1 Ecological features of bluebottles (Calliphoridae).

8.2 Greenbottles – Lucilia spp..

8.3 Ecological associations with living organisms.

8.4 Further reading.

9 Ecology of selected forensically important beetles.

9.1 Categories of feeding relationship on a corpse.

9.2 Ecology of carrion beetles (Silphidae).

9.3 Ecology of skin, hide and larder beetles (Dermestidae).

9.4 Ecology of clown beetles (Histeridae).

9.5 Ecology of checkered or bone beetles (Cleridae).

9.6 Ecology of rove beetles (Staphylinidae).

9.7 Ecology of dung beetles (Scarabaeidae).

9.8 Ecology of trogid beetles (Trogidae).

9.9 Ecology of ground beetles (Carabidae).

9.10 Review technique: determination of succession and PMI.

9.11 Further reading.

10 The forensic entomologist in court.

10.1 The Statement of Witness.

10.2 Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners.

10.3 Communicating entomological facts in court.

10.4 Physical evidence: its continuity and integrity.

10.5 Review technique: writing a Statement of Witness using the post mortem calculations determined from details given in Chapter 7.

10.6 Further reading.

11 The role of professional associations for forensic entomologists.

11.1 Professional organizations.

11.2 Forensic entomology protocols.

11.3 Areas for future research.

11.4 Further reading.

Appendices.

Appendix 1: Form for forensic entomology questions to be asked at the crime scene.

Appendix 2: Answers to the calculation of the post mortem interval for the body at the Pleasure Gardens, Wingsea.

Appendix 3: UK list of Calliphoridae (2006).

Appendix 4: UK checklists for Coleoptera.

Appendix 5: List of relevant UK legal acts and orders.

Appendix 6: Selected sources of entomological equipment.

Appendix 7: Legal information relevant to giving testimony as a forensic entomologist in the USA.

Glossary.

References.

Index.

Health Economics and Policy

Author: James W Henderson

For individuals with an interest in health-related policy issues who want to learn how to analyze health, health care, and health policy topics from an economic perspective.

Booknews

This introductory health economics textbook examines the relevance of economics to health and medical care; discusses the mechanisms of health care delivery in the U.S. within broad social, political, and economic contexts; explores the changing nature of health care and its implications; and analyzes public policy from an economic perspective. Includes end-of-chapter questions. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Cradle of Violence or Crime at Mayerling

2009-02-12T00:25:00.000-08:00

Cradle of Violence: How Boston's Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution

Author: Russell Bourn

They did the dirty work of the American Revolution

Their spontaneous uprisings and violent actions steered America toward resistance to the Acts of Parliament and finally toward revolution. They tarred and feathered the backsides of British customs officials, gutted the mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, armed themselves with marline spikes and cudgels to fight on the waterfront against soldiers of the British occupation, and hurled the contents of 350 chests of British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor under the very guns of the anchored British fleet.

Cradle of Violence introduces the maritime workers who ignited the American Revolution: the fishermen desperate to escape impressment by Royal Navy press gangs, the frequently unemployed dockworkers, the wartime veterans and starving widows—all of whose mounting "tumults" led the way to rebellion. These were the hard-pressed but fiercely independent residents of Boston's North and South Ends who rallied around the Liberty Tree on Boston Common, who responded to Samuel Adams's cries against "Tyranny," and whose headstrong actions helped embolden John Hancock to sign the Declaration of Independence. Without the maritime mobs' violent demonstrations against authority, the politicians would not have spurred on to utter their impassioned words; Great Britain would not have been provoked to send forth troops to quell the mob-induced rebellion; the War of Independence would not have happened.

One of the mobs' most telling demonstrations brought about the Boston Massacre. After it, John Adams attempted to calm the town by dismissing the waterfront characters who had been killed as "arabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tars." Cradle of Violence demonstrates that they were, more truly, America's first heroes.

	Preface: Boston's "Jack Tars" and the Birth of Rebellion	ix
Part 1	The Ancient Ideal of Seamen's Equality	1
1	The Maritime Origins of a Mutinous Town	3
2	The Seaport's First Revolt	25
3	The Rising of the Mobs	45
4	The South End Gang and the Stamp Act	73
5	The Sailors' Liberty Tree	95
Part 2	Waterfront Uprisings before the Revolution	119
6	Tar, Feathers, and Terror	121
7	A Dockside Riot and the Massacre	145
8	The Maritime Workers' Tea Party	171
9	The Fighting Spirit of a Besieged Boston	199
	Epilogue: "Public Liberty": An Enduring Dream	231
	Acknowledgments, Sources, and Interpretations	239
	Bibliography	251
	Index	259

Books about: Einführung ins Gesetz von Immobilien: Ein Historischer Hintergrund des Gewohnheitsrechts von Immobilien und Seiner Modernen Anwendung

Crime at Mayerling (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture and Thought Series): The Life and Death of Mary Vetsera : With New Expert Opinions Following the Desecration of Her Grave

Author: Georg Markus

Crime at Mayerling deals with two of the most sensational crimes committed during the past century. Although separated in time by a hundred years, they are inextricably connected. In January 1889 the corpses of Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, and of Baroness Mary Vetsera were discovered in the prince's hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna. In December 1992 Mary's remains were stolen from a cemetery in the same area. For decades, scientists and historians had been trying to solve the mystery of what had happened at Mayerling. An Austrian "Mayerling buff" felt compelled to reach an explanation in his own way: he secretly opened the grave of Baroness Vetsera at night, stole the coffin with her remains, and had them examined by forensic physicians and other specialists. Georg Markus, a Viennese author and journalist, discovered the desecration of the grave, reported it to the police, and obtained for his newspaper the exclusive rights to the story. His reporting led to an early solution of the case. There has been considerable speculation about the crime at Mayerling for over a century. Now, for the first time, the way Mary Vetsera died can be precisely reconstructed, providing information that contributes to a final resolution of the mystery.

One That Got Away or Down with Big Brother

2009-02-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

One That Got Away: My SAS Mission Behind Iraqi Lines

Author: Chris Ryan

The British Army's SAS-the Special Air Service-is recognized as one of the world's premier special operations units. During the Gulf War, deep behind Iraqi lines, an SAS team was compromised. A fierce firefight ensued, and the eight men were forced to run for their lives. Only one, Chris Ryan, escaped capture-by walking nearly 180 miles through the desert for a week. The One That Got Away is his breathtaking story of extraordinary courage under fire, of narrow escapes, of highly trained soldiers struggling against the most adverse of conditions, and, above all, of one man's courageous refusal to lie down and die.

Book review: Spirituality for Our Global Community or Race Against Time

Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire

Author: Michael Dobbs

In The Final Decade of the Soviet Empire, Michael Dobbs was an eyewitness to the extraordinary episodes that led to the unraveling of the Bolshevik Revolution. Covering the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the Washington Post, Dobbs saw it all: Tito's funeral, the jubilation at the Gdansk shipyard where Solidarity was born, the euphoria and despair of Tiananmen Square, Boris Yeltsin facing down a coup. Down with Big Brother is filled with dramatic scenes and remarkable characters - heroes and villains, idealists and cynics, the tragic and the comic. On Michael Dobbs's watch, playwrights and electricians were magically transformed into presidents, while Communist Party leaders became jailbirds or newly minted tycoons. Basing his book not only on his presence at seminal events but also on hundreds of interviews, Dobbs identifies the seeds of the destruction and shows how Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular, was the unwitting inspiration for the upheaval of the empire, while he thought he could save the Communist Party by reforming it. Michael Dobbs concludes by saying that though Big Brother may be dead, his dark legacy is still alive, as we can see in the turbulence in Russia, Romania, Bosnia, and the other countries that once made up the most brutal empire of the twentieth century.

Phil Leggiere

According to Michael Dobbs, the longtime Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, the Soviet Union died not with a bang, but a whimper, expiring from what he describes as a "massive sclerotic hardening of the bureaucratic arteries." Happily, Dobbs' eyewitness chronicle of the fall of the Soviet Empire щ from Leonid Brezhnev's heyday in the 1970s to Boris Yeltsin's rise in the early 1990s щ doesn't suffer from hardened arteries itself. Down with Big Brother has an alert, episodic quality that keeps you turning the pages.

Dobbs provides detailed and colorful accounts of all the major public uprisings in the Soviet loc during the '80s: Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. There's also an absorbing history of the war in Afghanistan, and a deft play-by-play of the Machiavellian machinations between old-line Communist Party bureaucrats, the KGB, the Soviet military and the Gorbachevian "reformers." For all of this intrinsic drama, however, Dobbs' emphasis is on the larger, less visible, bureaucratic "Soviet disease," which he believes helped spawn these events. He dissects this in longer, analytic sections on the inefficiency of the Soviet "command economy," the corruption of the Soviet military-industrial complex and, above all, the obduracy of the labyrinthine Soviet bureaucracy. He provides telling, comic examples along the way, such as the Kremlin's decades-long funding of nonexistent factories and railway lines.

There is nothing startlingly new in Dobbs' interpretation of the Cold War, or his focus on the roles of major players like Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and Ronald Reagan. Down With Big Brother does, however, add a great deal to our understanding of the Soviet Bloc liberation movements. Dobbs provides fascinating portraits of little-known "secondary" historical characters such as Jacek Kuron щ an eccentric Polish Trotskyite journalist and intellectual mentor to many in Solidarity щ and Vytautas Landsbergis, "a pedantic music professor with a little goatee" who inadvertently became a leader of the Lithuanian independence movement.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 inspired a classic of Western reportage, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World. Where Reed's account of the birth of the Soviet Union was imbued with epic literary romanticism, Dobbs' sober tale oddly and ironically evokes its predecessor. Dobbs himself notes the parallels, recalling Reed's description of Revolutionary Russia where "every street corner was a public tribune, filled with lectures, debates, orations." Dobbs observes that "I was to witness such scenes myself many times as the Poles, Balts, Czechs, Ukrainians, Germans and finally Russians unmade the revolution Reed had chronicled." -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Washington Post correspondent Dobbs's firsthand account of the unraveling of the Soviet monolith is a remarkable tour de force, a pulsating human drama that resembles a Russian novel, full of biting ironies, driven personalities, momentous confrontations. The author, Moscow bureau chief from 1988 to 1993, was the first Western journalist admitted to the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk during the 1980 strike led by Lech Walesa; eyewitness to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square massacre, he covered a beat stretching from the brutal hothouse of Kremlin politics to freezing Romanian orphanages to labor camps in the Urals. Drawing on primary Soviet sources, including interviews and declassified archival documents, he unearths phenomena often overlooked by Western journalists, for example, the leaderless drift of the U.S.S.R. between 1974 and 1982 as Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev suffered a series of nervous breakdowns caused by arteriosclerosis of the brain, or how Gorbachev, "a master obfuscator and manipulator," used the state-run television network to establish a power base among the masses. Unfolding as a series of vignettes extending from the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan through Chernobyl to the wild scramble for property and riches following the collapse of Soviet communism, his epic chronicle charts the breakdown of a system that sidetracked the nation into decades of self-imposed isolation, waste and ideological conditioning. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Written by an experienced journalist observer of the Soviet collapse, this study naturally invites comparison with two recent works on the same theme: David Pryce-Jones's The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire (LJ 7/95) and Fred Coleman's The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (LJ 5/1/96). Dobbs has been able to draw upon materials perhaps not available to the two others, and he has certainly read and interviewed more extensively. His account is thorough and overwhelming in its sheer mass, as he slowly assembles the giant jigsaw puzzle. Events and personalities great and small follow in relentless profusion: Afghanistan, the Armenian earthquake, Chernobyl, Nancy Reagan's astrologer, Mathias Rust, Sakharov, Walesa, and many, many more. Some details might well have been omitted-Yugoslav events, for example-but the reader must be impressed by Dobbs sheer industry and breadth of research. His final verdict seems ambivalent as to whether "communism defeated itself" or was destroyed by its would-be savior, Gorbachev. As with the two previous accounts, one is struck by how ramshackle the mighty USSR in fact was. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Canada

Kirkus Reviews

Theodore White's you-are-there journalism makes its Soviet debut in this gripping account of the last years of the Soviet Union.

Dobbs, Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow from 1988 to 1993, turns his own experiences as well as interviews with some of the major participants and the increasingly frank memoirs flooding out of Moscow to good account in reconstructing almost novelistic scenes from the decline. These include his own experience as the first US newsman allowed into the Gdansk shipyard and his presence on the scene when Yeltsin made his famous speech from a tank. He has a novelist's eye for telling detail: the table designed for negotiations in Warsaw "providing a safety margin of three feet over and above the world's longest-recorded spitting distance"; the carpet to the Central Committee headquarters in Moscow as a guide to power, gliding past the offices of ordinary apparatchiks but making right-angle detours into the suites of top leaders; the supermarket in Houston that amazed and depressed Yeltsin—the Soviet group had scarcely recovered from the shock of the cheese section when they were "literally shaken" by the quality of produce in the vegetable section. "They had to fool the people," Yeltsin told an aide, "It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad." Dobbs's epilogue is an excellent summation of Gorbachev's importance as "the Communist who dismantled Communism, the reformer who is overtaken by his won reforms, the emperor who allows the world's last great multinational empire to break apart." The paradox is, he concludes, that by seeking to reinvigorate the Communist system, Gorbachev succeeded in destroying it.

Dobbs succumbs to the temptation of using material derived from his time in Yugoslavia, which does not really fit into his overall theme, and his book is not as profound as David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, but is well written and highly illuminating.

Ronald Reagan or Limbo

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

Ronald Reagan: The Great Communicator

Author: Ed Frederick Ryan

This unique collection of photographs and quotations is a celebration of the warmth, wisdom, and wit of Ronald Reagan, one of America's most beloved presidents. Through more than half a century of public life, he spoke with consistency and contagious optimism to the hearts and minds of American people, and his ability to inspire and persuade led to his reputation as "the Great Communicator." This volume is the consummate treasury of his insights and unwavering beliefs, carefully selected from thousands of speeches and public appearances. It is a spirited tribute to one of the twentieth century's greatest political leaders, whose captivating humor and enduring optimism helped shape a nation.

Book about: Außer dem Budgetieren: Wie sich Betriebsleiter von der Jährlichen Leistungsfalle Freimachen Können

Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams

Author: Alfred Lubrano

In Limbo, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano identifies and describes an overlooked cultural phenomenon: the internal conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives. These people often find that the values of the working class are not sufficient guidance to navigate the white-collar world, where unspoken rules reflect primarily upper-class values. Torn between the world they were raised in and the life they aspire too, they hover between worlds, not quite accepted in either. Himself the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Lubrano informs his account with personal experience and interviews with other professionals living in limbo. For millions of Americans, these stories will serve as familiar reminders of the struggles of achieving the American Dream.

Publishers Weekly

Lubrano's view of the challenges that upwardly mobile children of blue-collar families (he calls them Straddlers) face in establishing themselves in white-collar enclaves could spark lively debates among Straddlers themselves, not to mention those Lubrano views as having a head start based on birth into a white-collar family. In this combination of memoir and survey, the Philadelphia Inquirer staff reporter recalls his freshman year at Columbia; he'd expected classmates to regard him as sophisticated because he was a New Yorker. However, this son of a Brooklyn bricklayer found himself on the outside of elite cliques populated by men he characterizes as "pasty, slight fellas-all of them seemed 5-foot-7 and sandy-haired." This was only the beginning for Lubrano, who came to see entry into a select educational institution as a harsh cultural dividing line between his blue-collar upbringing and his white-collar future. Becoming a journalist cost him emotionally when he felt torn between abandoning cherished values from his youth and accommodating his new profession's demands. Lubrano's interviews with other Straddlers have convinced him that ambition puts many of them in positions fraught with similar ambivalence and unexpected culture shock. With quotes from Richard Rodriguez and bell hooks, Lubrano illustrates his thesis: "Limbo folk remain aware of their `otherness' throughout their lives [and remain] perpetual outsiders." Yet he's quick to recognize individual Straddlers who've persevered in the face of those outsider feelings (though, regrettably, he doesn't share self-reflection). Straddlers' ultimate challenge, Lubrano opines, is to be as steadfast and self-possessed in reconciling their white-collar present with their blue-collar heritage as they have been in achieving their professional goals. Agent, David Vigliano. (Nov.) Forecast: A national advertising and publicity campaign and co-promotions with the Philadelphia Inquirer and NPR should attract readers who've experienced the duality Lubrano describes. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Poor Alfred Lubrano! An award-winning reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer and commentator for National Public Radio, he owns 11 backyard-bred horses on a farm in South Jersey: "I hold our chestnut yearling Beau Soleil as a friend French braids his blond mane in preparation for his Devon debut," he reports. Life is good-but that's the problem: Lubrano cannot reconcile his father's being a construction worker with his becoming an affluent professional. The result is Limbo, a stringing together of Lubrano's and others' thoughts on the pain of straddling two different worlds. Lubrano's journalism background apparently precludes any sociological methodology: the narrative is full of broad generalizations with little substantiation. One may wonder what country Lubrano was born in: aren't most Americans of a "hybrid class"? Don't most parents aspire to have their children exceed their own station in life? And what about the current glut of unemployed graduates? Now there's a problem. My advice: Lubrano should stop kvetching, and librarians should save their money for Sherry B. Ortner's New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, which explores the forces that influenced the author's classmates' lives after graduation. Many of them went from blue-collar families to the middle class, but Ortner analyzes the phenomenon with scholarly expertise rather than bemoaning it.-Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

The Rehnquist Choice or Economics of the Environment

2009-02-08T08:47:00.000-08:00

The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court

Author: John Wesley Dean

In 1971, William Rehnquist seemed the perfect choice to fill a seat on the United States Supreme Court. He was a young, well-polished lawyer who shared many of President Richard Nixon's philosophies and faced no major objections from the Senate. But in truth, the nomination was anything but straightforward. Now, for the first time, former White House counsel John Dean tells the improbable story of Rehnquist's appointment.

Dean weaves a gripping account packed with stunning new revelations: of a remarkable power play by Nixon to stack the court in his favor by forcing resignations; of Rehnquist himself, who played a role in the questionable ousting of Justice Abe Fortas; and of Nixon's failed impeachment attempt against William 0. Douglas. In his initial confirmation hearings, Rehnquist provided outrageous and unbelievable responses to questions about his controversial activities in the '50s and '60s -- yet he was confirmed with little opposition. It was only later, during his confirmation as Chief Justice, that his testimony would come under fire -- raising serious questions as to whether he had perjured himself Using newly released tapes, his own papers, and documents unearthed from the National Archives, John Dean offers readers a place in the White House inner circle, providing an unprecedented look at a government process, and a stunning expose of the man who has influenced the United States Supreme Court for the last thirty years.

Library Journal

One of the central figures of President Nixon's Watergate scandal sets out to describe how William Hubbs Rehnquist, at the time an obscure Justice Department attorney, came to be appointed to the Supreme Court, later to become Chief Justice. White House counsel Dean takes regretful credit for having suggested Rehnquist because the latter was a strict constructionist (and very conservative), exceedingly talented, a writer of great lucidity, and blessed with a distinguished background that included being first in his class at Stanford Law School and clerking for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Dean was there, of course, and also has access to verbatim transcripts of the time. And so we hear Nixon and company's banal and repetitive discussions interweaving political considerations-regional balance, gender, and race concerns, for example-with rants about political philosophy and enemies. This is the sort of audiobook that does not benefit from histrionics, and reader Michael Rafkin does a good job, though this reviewer regretted his attempts at Nixon impersonation. Still, the book has been widely praised, and this audio version belongs in collections of modern political history.-Don Wismer, Cary Memorial Lib., Wayne, ME

Book about: Assistência Prática/Vocacional Contemporânea

Economics of the Environment

Author: Robert N Stavins

Over its previous four editions, Economics of the Environment has established itself as the standard student reader for environmental economics courses. A rich complement to other texts, this accessible reader provides a balanced selection of classic and contemporary readings to firmly ground students' understanding in the field's primary literature. The Fifth Edition has been carefully reorganized; over a third of the selections are new.

Author Biography: Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Director of the Environmental Economics Program at Harvard University.

1	How economists see the environment	1
2	The tragedy of the commons	9
3	The problem of social cost	23
4	Environmental regulation and the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing : what does the evidence tell us?	51
5	Toward a new conception of the environment-competitiveness relationship	92
6	Tightening environmental standards : the benefit-cost or the no-cost paradigm?	115
7	The contingent valuation debate : why economists should care	129
8	Valuing the environment through contingent valuation	146
9	Contingent valuation : is some number better than no number?	173
10	Contingent valuation and lost passive use : damages from the Exxon Valdez oil spill	194
11	The value of life in legal contexts : survey and critique	223
12	Is there a role for benefit-cost analysis in environmental, health, and safety regulation?
13	An eye on the future	255
14	Cost-benefit analysis : an ethical critique	260
	Replies to Steven Kelman	270
15	Economic instruments for environmental regulation	277
16	Environmental policy making in a second-best setting	302
17	What can we learn from the grand policy experiment? : lessons from SO[subscript 2] allowance trading	334
18	It's immoral to buy the right to pollute	355
	Replies to Michael Sandel	357
19	The environment and globalization	359
20	Confronting the environmental Kuznets curve	399
21	Creating incentives for international cooperation : strategic choices	421
22	Reflections on the economics of climate change	445
23	The cost of combating global warming : facing the tradeoffs	462
24	Kyoto's unfinished business	469
25	The role of economics in climate change policy	479
26	Sustainability : an economist's perspective	503
27	Economics of the Endangered Species Act	514
28	Conflicts and choices in biodiversity preservation	533
29	The choice of regulatory instruments in environmental policy	547
30	Environmental policy since Earth Day I : what have we gained?	593
31	Environmental regulation in the 1990s : a retrospective analysis	616
32	The impact of economics on environmental policy	649

Political Writings or Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail

2009-02-07T03:35:00.000-08:00

Political Writings

Author: Saint Augustine of Hippo

Presents an organized, comprehensive view of the saint's controversial ideas on sin, grace, and predestination.

Booknews

If Augustine can be said to have had any concern for politics, it is because of the moral problems that politics poses for Christians, whose religion takes it for granted they will live as full-fledged citizens of the political society they belong to. This translation, which makes Augustine's moral and political views more accessible to English-speaking readers, includes selections from The City of God as well as lesser-known writings. With a brief chronology and an introduction by Boston College theology professor Ernest L. Fortin. Paper edition (unseen), $9.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Go to: Dirección de Proceso Comercial:Pautas Prácticas a Realizaciones Acertadas

Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

No American president has been closer to the working life of the West than Theodore Roosevelt. From 1884 to 1886 he built up his ranch on the Little Missouri in Dakota Territory, accepting the inevitable toil and hardships. He met the unique characters of the Bad Lands—mountain men, degenerate buffalo hunters, Indians, and cowboys—and observed their changes as the West became more populated.

Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail describes Roosevelt's routine labor and extraordinary adventures, including a stint as a deputy sheriff pursuing three horse thieves through the cold of winter. Whether recounting stories of cowboy fights or describing his hunting of elk, antelope, and bear, the book expresses his lifelong delight in physical hardihood and tests of nerve.

The End of the Innocence or US Immigration and Citizenship

2009-02-05T22:22:00.000-08:00

The End of the Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair

Author: Lawrence R Samuel

A complete history and provocative reevaluation of the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair.

From April 1964 to October 1965, some 52 million people from around the world flocked to the New York World's Fair, an experience that lives on in the memory of many individuals and in America's collective consciousness. Taking a perceptive look back at "the last of the great world's fairs," Lawrence R. Samuel offers a thought-provoking portrait of this seminal event and of the cultural climate that surrounded it. Samuel counters critics' assessments of the fair as the "ugly duckling" of global expositions. Opening five months after President Kennedy's assassination, the fair allowed millions to celebrate international brotherhood while the conflict in Vietnam came to a boil. This event was perhaps the last time so many from so far could gather to praise harmony while ignoring cruel realities on such a gargantuan scale. This World's Fair glorified the postwar American dream of limitless optimism even as a counterculture of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll came into being. It could rightly be called the last gasp of that dream: The End of the Innocence.

Samuel's work charts the birth of the fair from inception in 1959 to demolition in 1966 and provides a broad overview of the social and cultural dynamics that led to the birth of the event. It also traces events and thematic aspects of the fair, with its focus on science, technology, and the world of the future. Accessible, entertaining, and informative, the book is richly illustrated with contemporary photographs.

CHOICE

A legacy of the events, which unfold in this accessible book . . . Recommended

The New York Times

An overdue and well-deserved encomium to a largely denigrated chapter in [New York] city's history.

Marcy L. Brown - Library Journal

Readers worried about the accessibility of this offering from an academic press need only read the first few paragraphs to see that Samuel (Brought to You By: Television Advertising and the American Dream) has a warm and conversational tone as he journeys back to the 1964-65 World's Fair. The fair was a financial failure and deemed a disaster by architectural and cultural critics, but it presented its visitors with a bright and shiny view of the future. Samuel tells the fair's history first chronologically and then thematically, focusing on dichotomies. The architectural freedom allowed exhibitors undermined the theme of world unity. The conservative nature of the entertainment stood in stark contrast to the era's sexual and political revolutions, while the lack of a black American presence at the fair appeared very much out of step with civil rights advances. The relatively brief text here is utterly approachable. Samuel's reliance on contemporary media accounts proves more compelling than had he used only scholarly sources. His book will appeal both to readers who were at the fair and those who would like to learn about it. The photographs add visual appeal to the story. Recommended for larger public libraries and for academic libraries.

Illustrations     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     xiii
Peace Through Understanding
The Greatest Event in History     3
Heigh Ho, Ho Hum     32
Second Time Around     61
Tomorrow Begins Today
The House of Good Taste     91
Global Holiday     124
Sermons from Science     164
Conclusion     198
Notes     203
Bibliography     233
Index     235

New interesting textbook: Éditions Éthiques dans les Affaires :une Approche Philosophique

U.S. Immigration and Citizenship: Your Complete Guide, 4th Edition

Author: Allan Wernick

"Obtaining your green card, visa, or citizenship can be a time-consuming, challenging, and stressful process. Let attorney Allan Wernick assist you with your goal of becoming a U.S. citizen, just as he has successfully helped thousands of clients and readers of his syndicated column. In U.S. Immigration & Citizenship, Wernick shares all the up-to-date information you need to safely and legally visit or move to the United States." The book also includes new information on post-September 11 laws and policies. With a comprehensive listing of immigration assistance agencies, plus sample forms and step-by-step directions for filling them out. U.S. Immigration & Citizenship is like hiring your own immigration lawyer.

American National Security or The Green State

2009-02-04T17:09:00.000-08:00

American National Security

Author: Amos A Jordan

This fifth edition of American National Security is a timely update of a classic classroom text, providing contemporary perspectives on limited war, economic challenges to national security, and research and development. It reviews the changing security environment in key regions of the world: Russia, East Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Europe. And it identifies the issues that the United States must face in the next century: peace operations, conflict and arms control, and the widening array of missions undertaken by U.S. armed forces.

"We have chosen to emphasize 'power,' broadly defined, as the central dimension of international and national security. This is not to deny that various trends and forces are increasingly pressing states toward more cooperative, less confrontational behavior; rather it is to focus on the fact that on important issues many states -- including all the great powers -- apply a power calculus in dealing with other international actors." -- from the fifth edition of American National Security

Praise for previous editions:

"A classic text, widely used in universities... It does an exemplary job of explaining the process of defining and implementing national security objectives. Hardly any significant subject is omitted from this very rich and readable volume." -- Foreign Affairs

Contents

Foreword by Senator Sam Nunn

Part I -- National Security Policy: What Is It, and How Have Americans Approached It?

1. National Security: The International Setting

2. Military Power and the Role of Force in the Post-Cold War Era

3. Traditional American Approaches toNational Security

4. The Evolution of American National Security Policy

Part II -- National Security Policy

5. Presidential Leadership and the Executive Branch in National Security

6. The Impact of Congress on National Security Policy

7. Intelligence and National Security

8. The Role of Military in the National Security Policy Process

9. Defense Planning, Budgeting, and Management

10. The National Security Decision-making Process: Putting the Pieces Together

Part III -- Issues of National Strategy

11. Low-level Conflict

12. Limited War

13. Nuclear Strategy

Economic Challenges to National Security

15. Research and Development

Part IV -- International and Regional Security Issues

16. Russia

17. East Asia

18. The Middle East

19. Sun-Sarahan Africa

20. Latin America

21. Europe

Part V: Approaches to National Security for the Early Twenty-first Century

22. Peace Operations

23. Conflict and Arms Control

24. National Security Perspectives for the Early Twenty-first Century

Booknews

Provides contemporary perspectives on limited war, economic challenges to national security, and research and development. Reviews the changing security environment in key regions of the world, and identifies issues that the US must face in the next century, such as peace operations, conflict and arms control, and the widening array of missions undertaken by US armed forces. Includes discussion questions, plus b&w maps and political cartoons. This fifth edition is updated since 1993. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

	Foreword
	Preface
	Abbreviations
I	National Security Policy: What Is It, and How Have Americans Approached It?
1	National Security: The International Setting	3
2	Military Power and the Role of Force in the Post-Cold War Era	26
3	Traditional American Approaches to National Security	48
4	The Evolution of American National Security Policy	64
II	National Security Policy: Actors and Processes
5	Presidential Leadership and the Executive Branch in National Security	93
6	The Impact of Congress on National Security Policy	123
7	Intelligence and National Security	143
8	The Role of the Military in the National Security Policy Process	171
9	Defense Planning, Budgeting, and Management	196
10	The National Security Decision-making Process: Putting the Pieces Together	217
III	Issues of National Strategy
11	Low-level Conflict	237
12	Limited War	256
13	Nuclear Strategy	274
14	Economic Challenges to National Security	290
15	Research and Development	316
IV	International and Regional Security Issues
16	Russia	337
17	East Asia	360
18	The Middle East	392
19	Sub-Saharan Africa	430
20	Latin America	453
21	Europe	483
V	Approaches to National Security for the Early Twenty-first Century
22	Peace Operations	507
23	Conflict and Arms Control	525
24	National Security Perspectives for the Early Twenty-first Century	544
	Notes	561
	Index	599

Books about: Kayak Cookery 2nd or Handy pocket Guide to Asian Herbs Spices

The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty

Author: Robyn Eckersley

What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state -- seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent years, most environmental scholars and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain of much current thinking, this book argues that the state is still the preeminent political institution for addressing environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of the global order, and greening the state is a necessary step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international policy and law.

The Green State seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology" expands the boundaries of the moral community to include the natural environment in which the human community is embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a "good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional and multilateral arrangements that could help transform the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic state. Rethinking the state in light of the principlesof ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role: that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory.

Just One Child or Quest for Environmental Justice

2009-02-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China

Author: Susan Greenhalgh

China's one-child rule is unassailably one of the most controversial social policies of all time. In the first book of its kind, Susan Greenhalgh draws on twenty years of research into China's population politics to explain how the leaders of a nation of one billion decided to limit all couples to one child. Focusing on the historic period 1978-80, when China was just reentering the global capitalist system after decades of self-imposed isolation, Greenhalgh documents the extraordinary manner in which a handful of leading aerospace engineers hijacked the population policymaking process and formulated a strategy that treated people like missiles. Just One Child situates these science- and policymaking practices in their broader contexts--the scientization and statisticalization of sociopolitical life--and provides the most detailed and incisive account yet of the origins of the one-child policy.

Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution

Author: Robert D Bullard

In 1994, Sierra Club Books was proud to publish Dr. Robert D. Bullard's Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color, a collection of essays contributed by some of the leading participants in the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, which focused attention on "environmental racism"--racial discrimination in environmental policymaking and the enforcement of environmental protection laws and regulations. Now, picking up where that groundbreaking anthology left off, Dr. Bullard has assembled a new collection of essays that capture the voices of frontline warriors who are battling environmental injustice and human rights abuses at the grassroots level around the world and challenging government and industry policies and globalization trends that place people of color and the poor at special risk.
Part I presents an overview of the early environmental justice movement and highlights key leadership roles assumed by women activists. Part II examines the lives of people living in "sacrifice zones"--toxic corridors (such as Louisiana's infamous "Cancer Alley") where high concentrations of polluting industries are found. Part III explores land use, land rights, resource extraction, and sustainable development conflicts, including Chicano struggles in America's Southwest. Part IV examines human rights and global justice issues, including an analysis of South Africa's legacy of environmental racism and the corruption and continuing violence plaguing the oil-rich Niger delta.
Together, the diverse contributors to this much-anticipated follow-up anthology present an inspiring and illuminating picture of the environmental justice movementin the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Publishers Weekly

Bullard offers a disturbing account of the environmental and human cost of the excesses of capitalism in this follow-up to Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. This volume takes a fresh look at the often unequal distribution of environmental hazards to poor and minority communities, examining locations from Louisiana's "Cancer Alley" to Nigeria. In part one, women activists detail their gutsy battles against the combined power of business and government when their minority neighborhoods were threatened by industrial pollution. Part two tells the stories of people (again, mostly minorities and the poor) living in "sacrifice zones," such as Cancer Alley the stretch down the Mississippi River in Louisiana where "approximately 80 percent of the total African American community in the nine parishes lives within three miles of a polluting facility." Parts three and four examine Chicano struggles in the Southwest and global justice issues, including "corrupt... petro-capitalism" in Nigeria, where deep poverty persists despite the country's oil wealth. Readers can learn much about those who pay the costs in safety and health for many of modern life's conveniences. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

	Foreword	ix
	Preface	xv
	Acknowledgments	xix
	Introduction	1
Part 1	A Legacy of Injustice	17
1	Environmental Justice in the Twenty-first Century	19
2	Neighborhoods "Zoned" for Garbage	43
3	Women Warriors of Color on the Front Line	62
Part 2	The Assault on Fence-Line Communities	85
4	Living and Dying in Louisian's "Cancer Alley"	87
5	Environmental Inequity in Metropolitan Los Angeles	108
6	Toxic Racism on a New Jersey Waterfront	125
Part 3	Land Rights and Sustainable Development	143
7	Anatomy of the Urban Parks Movement: Equal Justice, Democracy, and Livability in Los Angeles	145
8	Resource Wars against Native Peoples	168
9	Tierra y Vida: Chicano Environmental Justice Struggles in the Southwest	188
Part 4	Human Rights and Global Justice	207
10	Environmental Reparations	209
11	Vieques: The Land, the People, the Struggle, the Future	222
12	Alienation and Militancy in the Niger Delta: Petroleum, Politics, and Democracy in Nigeria	239
13	Environmental Racism and Neoliberal Disorder in South Africa	255
14	Addressing Global Poverty, Pollution, and Human Rights	279
Appendix A	Principles of Environmental Justice	299
Appendix B	Nongovernmental Organization Language on Environmental Racism	303
	Notes	307
	Selected Bibliography	359
	About the Contributors	365
	Index	373

Somebodys Gotta Say It or RealWorld Evaluation

2009-02-02T06:42:00.000-08:00

Somebody's Gotta Say It

Author: Neal Boortz

"I've come to the conclusion that roughly 50 percent of the adults in this country are simply too ignorant and functionally incompetent to be living in a free society. You might think I'm off base, but every day around half the people in this country go out of their way to prove me right."
-from Somebody's Gotta Say It

Think you've got it all figured out? Think again.
Neal Boortz - the Talkmaster, the High Priest of the Church of the Painful Truth - has been edifying, infuriating, and entertaining talk radio audiences for more than three decades with his blend of straight talk and twisted humor. Now, the author of the smash number one bestseller The FairTax Book returns to gore every sacred cow in the pasture, from the subversive agendas behind children's books to the scam artists behind "High Art."

In Somebody's Gotta Say It, Boortz warms up for the coming political season with a preemptive strike in "the War on the Individual": "The Democrats' theme for 2008 will be 'The Common Good.' I can't speak for you, but I am an individual. Government exists to protect my rights, not to order my life. And I damn sure don't exist to serve government." He takes on liberal catchphrases like giving back ("Nobody - especially not the evil, wretched rich - actually earns anything anymore. Why do liberals think this way? Because they find it impossible to acknowledge that people work for money"), our rampant civic idiocy ("We are not a democracy. Never were. Weren't supposed to be. And we shouldn't be"), and Big Brother ("We have smoke-free workplaces. We have drug-free school zones. I say let's start establishing government-free oases, where we can be free to leave our seat belts unbuckled, and peel the labels off anything we choose"). And somehow, along the way, he finds room for pop quizzes, cat-chasing contests, and an answer, once and for all, to the eternal question, "Neal, why don't you run for president?" - in a chapter called "No Way in Hell."

Full of irresistible wisecracks and irrefutable libertarian wisdom, Somebody's Gotta Say It is one man's response to America at a time when the government overreaches, the people underperform - and the truth hurts.

Go to: Memory Fitness or Get Your Body Back

RealWorld Evaluation: Working Under Budget, Time, Data, and Political Constraints

Author: Michael Bamberger

"I was quite impressed with how this book balanced the technical aspects with practical advice for managing budget, time and political constraints. The use of case study examples and checklists/worksheets helped to make the book much more "grounded in practice" compared to other texts. I like to think of myself as an experienced, well-read evaluator, but I must confess that I learned quite a lot from this book!"
--Scott Bayley, Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Australia

"[The authors] have really broken new ground by providing the guidance on how to apply the theory to reality. I plan to recommend this book highly, and [the authors have] have given me some great ideas on how to improve our evaluation capacity building efforts (and that's after reading just a few chapters!). Thanks for developing the RealWorld Evaluation approach to its full potential as a new way of thinking about and practicing evaluation."
--Paula Bilinsky, AED Senior Evaluation Analyst

"The breadth and depth of the authors' experiences in international and national settings is apparent on every page."
--Donna M. Mertens, Gallaudet University

"Each page of this book contains nugget after nugget of useful, pragmatic, and practical advice."
--Kent Glenzer, Director, Impact Measurement and Learning Team, CARE USA

RealWorld Evaluation: Working Under Budget, Time, Data, and Political Constraints is the only textbook that provides specific guidance on how to conduct evaluations when working under resource and/or data constraints. AuthorsMichael Bamberger, Jim Rugh, and Linda Mabry illustrate options for addressing each constraint through practical examples from both developed and developing countries to show how adapting to different types of exigencies can lead to successful evaluations.

Key Features:

Provides practical guidance: Specific and well documented case studies are provided for addressing budget, time, and data constraints, and for dealing with political pressures. Guidelines are offered for protecting the validity of conclusions when measures must be taken to save costs and time.
Uses a mixed-methods approach: Adapting a range of methods to real-world situations, this text draws on quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches. Design, methods, cultural sensitivity, validity, credibility, and reporting are among the many topics addressed. In addition, triangulation is encouraged for increasing the validity of findings.
Incorporates a unique seven-step model: A systematic step-by-step approach that is logical and easy to follow is presented. Frameworks and checklists are provided for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of an evaluation and providing strategies to overcome the weaknesses and improve the design and validity.

Intended Audience:
Perfect supplementary text for any advanced undergraduate or graduate introductory program evaluation course across disciplines including Education, Public Administration, Management, Social Work, Public Health, and Nursing; in addition it will also appeal to researchers in government agencies, NGOs, evaluation consultants, and other evaluation practitioners.

Visit the authors' Web site at realworldevaluation.org/

1	RealWorld evaluation and the contexts in which it is used	18
2	First clarify the purpose : scoping the evaluation	36
3	Not enough money : addressing budget constraints	51
4	Not enough time : addressing scheduling and other time constraints	69
5	Critical information is missing or difficult to collect : addressing data constraints	88
6	Reconciling different priorities and perspectives : addressing political influences	113
7	Strengthening the evaluation design and the validity of the conclusions	132
8	Making it useful : helping clients and other stakeholders utilize the evaluation	156
9	Applications of program theory in RealWorld evaluation	170
10	The most widely used RealWorld quantitative evaluation designs	194
11	Quantitative evaluation methods	230
12	Qualitative evaluation methods	266
13	Mixed-method evaluation	303
14	Sampling for RealWorld evaluation	323
15	Learning together : building capacity for RealWorld evaluation	356
16	Bringing it all together : applying RealWorld evaluation approaches to each stage of the evaluation process	373

Speech Out of Doors or Balaguer and the Dominican Military

2009-02-01T01:30:00.000-08:00

Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places

Author: Timothy Zick

Even in an age characterized by increasing virtual presence and communication, speakers still need physical places in which to exercise First Amendment liberties. This book examines the critical intersection of public speech and spatiality. Through a tour of various places on what the author calls the "expressive topography," the book considers a variety of public speech activities including sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics, residential picketing, protesting near funerals, assembling and speaking on college campuses, and participating in public rallies and demonstrations at political conventions and other critical democratic events. This examination of public liberties, or speech out of doors, shows that place can be as important to one's expressive experience as voice, sight, and auditory function. Speakers derive a host of benefits, such as proximity, immediacy, symbolic function, and solidarity, from message placement. Unfortunately, for several decades the ground beneath speakers' feet has been steadily eroding. The causes of this erosion are varied and complex; they include privatization and other loss of public space, legal restrictions on public assembly and expression, methods of policing public speech activity, and general public apathy. To counter these forces and reverse at least some of their effects will require a focused and sustained effort - by public officials, courts, and of course, the people themselves.

Book review: Mastering Depression through Interpersonal Psychotherapy or Country Folk Medicine

Balaguer and the Dominican Military: Presidential Control of the Factional Officer Corps in the 1960s and 1970s

Author: Brian J Bosch

Following the 1961 assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic descended into a period of national turmoil and political instability, culminating in 1965 when a catastrophic civil war engulfed the capital city of Santo Domingo. The intervention of foreign troops, particularly U.S. troops, played a critical role in the multinational effort to allow presidential elections to take place in June 1966. The result was the installation of Joaquin Balaguer in the presidency. Subsequently, this skillful civilian leader defeated both a right wing coup and a Cuban-based guerrilla expedition, and successfully gained control of the chaotic Dominican officer corps by the mid-1970s.
In this comprehensive study of the Dominican Republic's Balaguer era, the author draws upon declassified U.S. State Department and military documents and his own experiences as an army attaché in the U.S. Embassy, Santo Domingo, during the early 1970s. The result is a unique, inside look at Balaguer's presidency, his skillful manipulation of rival officers and cliques, and American involvement in the political history of the Dominican Republic.

Preface     1
The Foundations of the Officer Corps     5
The Officer Corps and Factionalism     8
The Officer Corps and Balaguer     30
A Military View of the Armed Forces     44
Officer Corps Attitudes During Balaguer's Second Term     64
Nivar Versus Perez y Perez: A Politico-Military Rivalry     77
The Rivalry Continues     102
The Wessin y Wessin Question     112
La Banda and Showdown     133
Nivar in the National Police     149
Perez y Perez Dominates the Ground Forces     174
The Caamano Dossier     183
The Critical First 12 Days of the Caamano Expedition     198
The Death of Caamano and the Aftermath     221
The End of the Campaign     245
The Last Years of the Rivalry Between Nivar and Perez y Perez     267
A Final View     281
Chapter Notes     291
Bibliography     311
Index     319

Social Determinants of Health or Painless Police Report Writing

2009-01-30T20:17:00.000-08:00

Social Determinants of Health

Author: Michael Marmot

Social Determinants of Health, 2E gives an authoritative overview of the social and economic factors which are known to be the most powerful determinants of population health in modern societies. Written by acknowledged experts in each field, it provides accessible summaries of the scientific justification for isolating different aspects of social and economic life as the primary determinants of a population's health.
The new edition takes account of the most recent research and also includes additional chapters on ethnicity and health, sexual behaviors, the elderly, housing and neighborhoods.
Recognition of the power of socioeconomic factors as determinants of health came initially from research on health inequalities. This has led to a view of health as not simply about individual behavior or exposure to risk, but how the socially and economically structured way of life of a population shapes its health. Thus exercise and accidents as as much about a society's transport system as about individual decisions; and the nation's diet involves agriculture, food manufacture, retailing, and personal incomes as much as individual choice. But a major new element in the picture we have developed is the importance of the social, or psycho-social, environment to health. For example, health in the workplace for most employees - certainly for office workers - is less a matter of exposure to physical health hazards as of the social envrionment, of how supportive it is, whether people have control over their work, whether their jobs are secure. A similar picture emerges in other areas ranging from the health importance of the emotional envrionment in early childhood to the need for moresocially cohesive communities.
Social Determinants of Health, 2E should be read by those interested in the wellbeing of modern societies. It is a must for public health professionals, for health promotion specialists, and for people working in the many fields of public policy which we now know make such an important contribution to health.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer:Sanija Bajramovic, MD(Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine)
Description:Health is a multidimensional entity. Likewise, there are multiple factors responsible to maintain or disrupt its balance. The editors of this book attempt to deliver research-based information that demonstrates clear relationships between various social conditions and health of community with special reference to European countries. The editors have assembled 12 chapters written by 22 contributors from four countries.
Purpose:The purpose is to offer useful tools for policy makers by summarizing some of the important research findings regarding social factors that are critical for disease prevention and health promotion.
Audience:This book is written for graduate level students and practitioners in public health and public health policy. The contributors are involved in the appropriate field of study. Because of their experience and expertise they can make appropriate recommendations for policy for each kind of social condition they write on to improve community health.
Features:The first chapter begins with an overall introduction to the subject matter. In subsequent chapters contributors address various social conditions including stress, biological condition of the mother, economy, psychological environment, transportation, social support, social cohesion, food, poverty, minorities, and health behaviors (i.e., smoking) and their relationships with the health status of the community. The editors and contributors point out very important issues in public health that have not been discussed in this magnitude before(i.e., smoking rates and the impact of health education). Contributors point out how health education is critical and yet is not effective on its own to reduce the rates of smoking among lower socio-economic groups. Such education needs to be accompanied by policy and environmental changes. Specific policy recommendations are included in most chapter discussions. Some very interesting diagrammatic illustrations have also been included. Overall, a better diagrammatic, graphical, or pictorial presentation could improve the quality of the book. The book ends with an epilogue that points out the WHO's ""Health for All"" initiative and how policy on social conditions may be a key factor in meeting the goals and objectives of this initiative.
Assessment:Although many other community and public health textbooks and articles have mentioned or touched on this subject matter, personally I have not read any book that has focused just on social determinants of health and their power to improve global health. The editors give legitimate reasons and appropriate tools for policy makers so that they can justify their proposals. The subject matter can also stimulate some thought provoking discussions in the classroom as well as debate among policy makers. This is a significant contribution to the field of public health.

1	Introduction	1
2	Social organization, stress, and health	6
3	Early life	31
4	The life course, the social gradient, and health	54
5	Health and labour market disadvantage : unemployment, non-employment, and job insecurity	78
6	Health and the psychosocial environment at work	97
7	Transport and health	131
8	Social support and social cohesion	148
9	Food is a political issue	172
10	Poverty, social exclusion, and minorities	196
11	Social patterning of individual health behaviours : the case of cigarette smoking	224
12	The social determination of ethnic/racial inequalities in health	238
13	Social determinants of health in older age	267
14	Neighbourhoods, housing, and health	297
15	Social determinants, sexual behaviour, and sexual health	318
16	Ourselves and others - for better or worse : social vulnerability and inequality	341

New interesting book: Measuring Computer Performance or The Engineering Design of Systems

Painless Police Report Writing: An English Guide for Criminal Justice Professionals

Author: Barbara Fraze

With an emphasis on relevance, this book tailors English instruction to the needs of police training and law enforcement. Taking a building block approach, the first five chapters present English grammar and the last two chapters are devoted to the police report writing process. Each chapter includes practice and review exercises that are taken from the field and assignment material that is geared to law enforcement interests. This edition features sample reports, sample forms and “war stories” that help students see how grammar and writing skills are used in their profession.

Cause of Death or Coroners Journal

2009-01-29T15:05:00.000-08:00

Cause of Death: Forensic Files of a Medical Examiner

Author: Stephen D Cohl

The body of a woman floats to the surface of a lake with sixty pounds of cinder block and chain attached to her legs. Her killer faces the death penalty if the prosecution can answer one question: Did she drown? A worker for the only U.S. plant licensed to produce anthrax dies, the victim of a heart attack. But what caused his heart to stop beating?

Follow veteran medical examiner Dr. Stephen D. Cohle into the world of forensic pathology, as he solves these and many other cases. Written from an insider's view, Cause of Death puts the reader behind Dr. Cohle's shoulder while he examines each victim. The cases range from exotic murder mysteries ripe for a CSI episode to everyday casualties of heart attacks and car accidents. Every victim, though, has a story to tell. Enter a real-life morgue with its strange sights, sounds, and smells, and watch a forensic mastermind as he unravels each victim's cause of death.

Introduction: Scenes     7
Decompression     21
Thorns!     27
Contrasts     49
Safe Sex?     56
What Killed Harry Freiburg?     73
The Perfect Murder     77
Bugs!     87
Red Sky in the Morning     101
The Oxford Lake Death Penalty Case     105
The Rough Sex Case     122
Skeletons in the Closet     131
Accidents     153
The Shortest Chapter     154
15 Seconds     169
The Museum of Tattoos     173
Blue Highway     189
Cyanotic     198
Broken Hearts     207
Broken Hearts     216
Of Zebras and Horses     227
David versus Goliath     230
Endings     243
The Hand of God     250
Horseplay     261
Bad Medicine     264
The Last Chapter: Life     283
Message in a Bottle     288
Conclusion: Morgue Poetry and Wintergreen Mints     397
Acknowledgments     313
Notes and Sources     315
Index     327

Books about: Mastering Simulink or PC Modding for Dummies

Coroner's Journal: Forensics and the Art of Stalking Death

Author: Louis Cataldi

During Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Louis Cataldie remained in New Orleans in dangerous and often unbearable conditions to attend to the sick, the injured-and the dead. As chief coroner of Baton Rouge, tending to the dead is Cataldie's job. A little town with big-city problems, Baton Rouge means "Red Stick"-and lives up to its bloody name. Cataldie has faced unusual and disturbing cases, from tracking three serial killers on the loose simultaneously while working the scene of a Malvo/ Muhammad Beltway Sniper shooting, to helping apprehend Baton Rouge serial killer Derrick Todd Lee in a controversial case that was featured in an ABC Primetime Live special with Diane Sawyer and Patricia Cornwell.

Cataldie's maverick ways have made him a favorite target of the media, but he offers no apologies, and speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. Graphic and frank, this is his unique, up-close look at his life spent stalking death in the Deep South.

Publishers Weekly

Cornwell's foreword may attract readers to this unremarkable account by the chief coroner in Baton Rouge, La. Flat writing and the occasional platitude ("How sad. This is someone's daughter") detract from what could have been an interesting professional memoir by a dedicated public servant whose duties include ordering psychological evaluations and commitments, as well as the more familiar forensic work. Instead, the scenarios, whether an autoerotic hanging or the evaluation of a psychiatric patient, are brief and lacking dramatic tension. Some readers may also be put off by the short prologue added after Hurricane Katrina, which is the "incomplete accounting" the author labels it; the value and heroism of the doctor's work are not adequately captured by his words. His perspective on a number of serial killer cases-and the mistakes made by law enforcement in investigating them-will be new to many and are indicative of the frankness and professionalism that have apparently marked his career. (Mar. 16) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

The Ghosts of Berlin or Health and Mental Health Care Policy

2009-01-28T09:52:00.000-08:00

The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

Author: Brian Ladd

In this compelling work, Brian Ladd examines the ongoing conflicts radiating from the remarkable fusion of architecture, history, and national identity in Berlin. Ladd surveys the urban landscape, excavating its ruins, contemplating its buildings and memorials, and carefully deconstructing the public debates and political controversies emerging from its past.

"Written in a clear and elegant style, The Ghosts of Berlin is not just another colorless architectural history of the German capital. . . . Mr. Ladd's book is a superb guide to this process of urban self-definition, both past and present."—Katharina Thote, Wall Street Journal

"If a book can have the power to change a public debate, then The Ghosts of Berlin is such a book. Among the many new books about Berlin that I have read, Brian Ladd's is certainly the most impressive. . . . Ladd's approach also owes its success to the fact that he is a good storyteller. His history of Berlin's architectural successes and failures reads entertainingly like a detective novel."—Peter Schneider, New Republic

"[Ladd's] well-written and well-illustrated book amounts to a brief history of the city as well as a guide to its landscape."—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

Look this: Direction d'Hôtel et Opérations

Health and Mental Health Care Policy: A Social Work Perspective

Author: Cynthia Moniz

Overview:

This text fills a void in social work literature by offering a comprehensive, in-depth overview of health and mental health care policy.

The second edition of Health and Mental Health Care Policy provides a comprehensive overview of health and mental health care policy in the U.S. and presents a biopsychosocial perspective for examining health care, mental health and health care policy. It examines the impact of poverty, inequality, and inadequate access to health care on disadvantaged and at-risk populations and considers implications for policy and practice. In the past four years, the problem of access to health insurance has actually worsened, policymakers have done little to address gaps in coverage and escalating health care costs, and low-income individuals and families, people of color, children, women, and older adults continue to experience significant disparities in health.

New to this edition:

Includes new information about health care reform efforts during the Bush years and concerns about bioterrorism in the wake of 9/11 and the spread of infectious disease.
Examines U.S. health care costs in international perspective and the quality of health care in the U.S.
Provides new information on research and public health efforts to understandand reduce disparities in health outcomes in infant mortality, cardiovascular disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes, and infectious disease. Each of the sections on African Americans, Latina/os, First Nations, Asian Americans, women, children, and older adults has been thoroughly updated.

What reviewers are saying:

“The primary strengths of this book include: it's quite well-written and very readable; it provides a concise overview of health care in this country, as well as comparative international models; it provides important content on health disparities, as well as the implications for social work practice; it provides an overview of the biopsychosocial approach to health care.”

--Mark Holter, University of Michigan

“I think the major strength of this book is that it gives an outstanding, comprehensive perspective on the historical antecedents of health care and health care policy in the United States as it relates to the profession of social work. An additional strength is the inclusion of chapters devoted to disparities in health and access to health care. Finally, the text has an exceptional conclusion that allows students to to think critically about issues of health care for the future.”

--Makeba Thomas, Bowie State University

Allyn & Bacon’s Themes of the Times for Health Care and Mental Health makes a great companion to this text (at no extra charge when valuepacked with this book). It includes 43 recent articles from the New York Times and allowsfor lively discussion of issues and controversies in the field of Health Care and Mental Health.

[ MyHelpingLab Advertisement ]

1	Models of health and health policy	3
2	The failure to enact national health insurance : 1865-1946	17
3	The emergence of employment-based insurance and managed care : 1943 to the present	35
4	Access to care	73
5	The growth and development of managed care	105
6	Medicare and Medicaid	133
7	Disparities in health : people of color	161
8	Disparities in health : gender and age-based differences	193
9	Looking beyond health care	227

Is Democracy Possible Here or Low Voltage Wiring

2009-01-27T04:38:00.000-08:00

Is Democracy Possible Here?: Principles for a New Political Debate

Author: Ronald Dworkin

Politics in America are polarized and trivialized, perhaps as never before. In Congress, the media, and academic debate, opponents from right and left, the Red and the Blue, struggle against one another as if politics were contact sports played to the shouts of cheerleaders. The result, Ronald Dworkin writes, is a deeply depressing political culture, as ill equipped for the perennial challenge of achieving social justice as for the emerging threats of terrorism. Can the hope for change be realized? Dworkin, one the world's leading legal and political philosophers, identifies and defends core principles of personal and political morality that all citizens can share. He shows that recognizing such shared principles can make substantial political argument possible and help replace contempt with mutual respect. Only then can the full promise of democracy be realized in America and elsewhere.

Dworkin lays out two core principles that citizens should share: first, that each human life is intrinsically and equally valuable and, second, that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for identifying and realizing value in his or her own life. He then shows what fidelity to these principles would mean for human rights, the place of religion in public life, economic justice, and the character and value of democracy. Dworkin argues that liberal conclusions flow most naturally from these principles. Properly understood, they collide with the ambitions of religious conservatives, contemporary American tax and social policy, and much of the War on Terror. But his more basic aim is to convince Americans of all political stripes--as well as citizens of other nations with similarcultures--that they can and must defend their own convictions through their own interpretations of these shared values.

Publishers Weekly

Rarely has partisan rhetoric been more divisive or political bickering more infantile than over the last few election cycles. In this short book, Dworkin, a professor of law and philosophy at New York University and Oxford University, argues that liberals and conservatives must realize that each camp is working for the same goal of a better nation. Dworkin (Law's Empire) builds this work on the assertion that most Americans accept certain fundamental principles, the most important of which are the beliefs that "each human life has a special kind of objective value" and "each person has a special responsibility for realizing the success of his own life." From these conventionally conservative maxims, Dworkin constructs an unmistakably liberal legal framework, coming down in favor of due process for terror suspects, same-sex marriage, abortion rights and progressive taxation and social welfare policies. Written in simple and sometimes repetitive language, some of the book's sections are more compelling than others. The too-brief passage on abortion, for instance, is unlikely to make any converts, and the final chapter, on tax-and-spend policies, may strike some as na ve. Though his claim that democracy is imperiled by a dearth of rational public debate is certainly overblown, Dworkin's book deserves careful consideration and response. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Eminent philosopher Dworkin (law, New York Univ. & jurisprudence, University Coll. London; Sovereign Virtue) here sets himself the ambitious goal of infusing political discourse in the United States with reasoning such as he himself has employed while engaged in scholarly debate for the past 30 years over the nature of law, of rights, and of liberty and equality. He attempts to address our "degraded politics," which he believes threaten the legitimacy of America's political order, by proposing two principles that can be shared even among those on opposite edges of today's political divides: that each human life has objective value and that each person has responsibility for realizing the potential of his or her own life. From these principles, Dworkin constructs arguments on the treatment of suspected terrorists, the place of religion in public life, and our system of taxation, while contesting a purely majoritarian form of democracy. Dworkin invites those who disagree with his own liberal conclusions to respond with respectful argument and not sloganeering. Based on Princeton's 2005 Scribner Lectures and among the most accessible of Dworkin's many books, this is recommended for public-and essential for academic-libraries.-Robert F. Nardini, Chichester, NH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Low Voltage Wiring: Security/Fire Alarm Systems

Author: Terry Kennedy

Best-of-the-best guidelines for handling low voltage wiring

The A-Z reference on designing, installing, maintaining, and troubleshooting modern security and fire alarm systems is now fully up-to-date in a new edition. Prepared by Terry Kennedy and John E. Traister, authors with over three decades of hands-on experience apiece in the construction industry, Low Voltage Wiring: Security/Fire Alarm Systems, Third Edition provides all the appropriate wiring data you need to work on security and fire alarm systems in residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. A CD-ROM packaged with the book conveniently puts at your fingertips sample forms, checklists, a fully-searchable glossary, and hot-linked industry reference URLs. In addition, you get:

*Important safety tips
* Lists of regulations
* Explanations of emerging technologies
*Useful treatments of estimating and bidding
* Much more

JOHN E. TRAISTER (deceased) was involved in the electrical industry for more than 35 years and wrote several best-selling McGraw-Hill books, including the HANDBOOK OF ELECTRICAL DESIGN DETAILS and the NEC HANDBOOK. He was the original author of SECURITY/FIRE ALARM SYSTEMS.

TERRY KENNEDY is an analyst for Liberty Mutual and scrutinizes the causes of defects in major construction lawsuits. He has had a hands-on involvement with the construction industry for over 30 years--carpenter, electrician, general contractor, construction manager, estimator--a thorough knowledge of the industry. Mr. Kennedy is a freelance writer, has been a featured speaker and lecturer, has recently completed the 2nd Edition of the ROOFING HANDBOOK, and is working on the ROOFER'S INSTANT ANSWER BOOKfor McGraw-Hill.

	Preface
Pt. 1	The Security Systems Business
Ch. 1	A Business Built on Contracts	3
Ch. 2	Estimating the Installation of Security Systems	27
Ch. 3	Managing a Security Systems Business	49
Ch. 4	Profit Centers: Service, Maintenance, and Ancillary Cash Flow	71
Pt. 2	The Field
Ch. 5	Basic Security System Considerations	93
Ch. 6	Basic Installation Techniques	121
Ch. 7	Residential Security Systems	159
Ch. 8	Commercial and Industrial Security Systems	183
Ch. 9	Troubleshooting and Maintenance of Security Systems	199
Pt. 3	A Deeper Understanding
Ch. 10	Electrical Circuits	233
Ch. 11	The Code	281
Ch. 12	Print Reading	313
	Using the CD	349
	Glossary	351
	Resource Directory	379
	Index	395

Global Capitalism or Depression in New Mothers

2009-01-25T23:18:00.000-08:00

Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century

Author: Jeffry A Frieden

"Magisterial history...one of the most comprehensive histories of modern capitalism yet written."—New York Times Book Review

In 1900 international trade reached unprecedented levels and the world's economies were more open to one another than ever before. Then as now, many people considered globalization to be inevitable and irreversible. Yet the entire edifice collapsed in a few months in 1914.

Globalization is a choice, not a fact. It is a result of policy decisions and the politics that shape them. Jeffry A. Frieden's insightful history explores the golden age of globalization during the early years of the century, its swift collapse in the crises of 1914-45, the divisions of the Cold War world, and the turn again toward global integration at the end of the century. His history is full of character and event, as entertaining as it is enlightening.

The New York Times - Michael Hirsh

Frieden's 500-plus-page book can be ponderous to read, but it is one of the most comprehensive histories of modern capitalism yet written. He provides a clear, detailed account of the rise and fall of the gold-standard era, especially its peak years from 1896 to 1914, and of the post-World War II Bretton Woods agreements, which gave national economies some control over short-term capital flows…Frieden also argues that for all the strains created by today's global capitalism, it is still the least worst system out there.

Library Journal

In this economic history of the 20th century, Frieden (government, Harvard Univ.) concentrates on the role played by international trade in economic development. He describes the pre-1914 period as one in which free trade reigned supreme, without regard for social disruption, under the umbrella of the gold standard. He shows that various 20th-century attempts at sealing off national economies, from Nazi Germany to Communist China, generally ended disastrously. While Frieden concedes that problems exist with the current trend toward globalization, he argues that it is the best hope for worldwide economic improvement. Considering the century's various experiments with capitalism, socialism, fascism, and their variants, Frieden concludes persuasively that national economies work best when they are open to the world and that open economies work best when national governments address social and other sources of dissatisfaction with globalization. This historical work on international trade is most welcome in the debate over globalization. The length and depth of this book recommends it to academic and larger public libraries.-Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Expert Guide to Oncology or Yoga for Men

Depression in New Mothers: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment Alternatives

Author: Kathleen Kendall Tackett

Are you prepared to provide the best possible treatment for new mothers with depression—including those determined to breastfeed?

This book, which completely updates Kathleen Kendall-Tackett's 1993 classic text Postpartum Depression, provides you with a comprehensive approach to treating postpartum depression in an easy-to-use format, including treatment options that are safe for use with breastfeeding mothers. Addressing fatigue, pain, negative birth experiences, infant characteristics, and psychosocial factors, Depression in New Mothers: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment Alternatives presents a vital, cross-cultural view of depression in new mothers that will prove invaluable in treating the mothers who come to you for help.

Depression in New Mothers: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment Alternatives dispels the myths that hinder effective treatment and presents up-to-date information on:

the impact of maternal depression on the health of the mother, as well as the health and well-being of the infant
conditions that may co-occur with postpartum depression, including anxiety disorders (obsessive compulsive disorder), posttraumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, and substance abuse
alternative treatments, including diet, exercise, and omega-3s
the role of psychotherapy and community-based programs
the use of herbs and psychotropic medications to combat postpartum depression
the impact of various treatments on breastfeeding—with treatment options that are safe for women who continue breastfeeding through treatment

From the Foreword, by Jane Honikman, Founding Director of Postpartum Support International, Santa Barbara, California: Dr. Kathleen Kendall-Tackett has been a pioneer educator in the field of maternal mental health since her first book, Postpartum Depression, was published in 1993. In this new volume she expands upon her knowledge of the complexities and interrelationships that exist in the field of maternal depression. Her goal is to equip her readers with the information needed to make a real difference in the lives of mothers and babies. She has achieved this goal through a systematic framework that will help you understand the topic and how to communicate effectively with postpartum mothers.

Depression in New Mothers is truly comprehensive, addressing under-investigated issues, such as negative birth experience, previously untreated trauma, and the impact of infant characteristics such as crying, sleep habits, prematurity, chronic illness, and disability. Each chapter contains summaries of thought-provoking international research studies. The information in this reader-friendly resource can add a vital perspective to advance the way health professionals today—and the health professionals of tomorrow—view and treat postpartum depression.

What People Are Saying

Linda J. Smith
Linda J. Smith, BSE, FACCE, IBCLC, Director, Bright Future Lactation Resource Centre Ltd., Dayton, Ohio
This stunning compendium of research evidence, clinical descriptions, and real-life stories is A MUST-HAVE RESOURCE for all professionals working in the field of maternal and child health.

Karin Cadwell PhD
Karin Cadwell, PhD, RN, FAAN, IBCLC, Faculty, Healthy Children Project, East Sandwich, Massachusetts; Adjunct Faculty, The Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, Ohio
Without a doubt, this book is A MUST-READ FOR ANYONE WORKING WITH CHILDBEARING WOMEN. The mothers we serve deserve nothing less than knowledgeable, prepared practitioners. The author carefully describes the complex landscape of postpartum depression. Her evidence-based, cogent examination of the life-threads, biologic possibilities, and realities of new motherhood encourage the reader to abandon simplistic or one-dimensional explanations for this common and potentially devastating life event.

For the Presidents Eyes Only or Lincolns America

2009-01-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush

Author: Christopher Andrew

From the co-author of KGB: The Inside Story and an acknowledged authority on the subject comes "the most important book ever written about American intelligence."--David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers and Hitler's Spies

Book about: Communication in Complex Organizations or Imperial Power and Popular Politics

Lincoln's America: 1809-1865

Author: Joseph R Fornieri

To fully understand and appreciate Abraham Lincoln's legacy, it is important to examine the society that influenced the life, character, and leadership of the man who would become the Great Emancipator. Editors Joseph R. Fornieri and Sara Vaughn Gabbard have done just that in Lincoln's America: 1809-1865, a collection of new and original essays by ten eminent historians that place Lincoln within his nineteenth-century cultural context.

Among the topics explored in Lincoln's America are religion, education, middle-class family life, the antislavery movement, politics, and law. Of particular interest are the transition of American intellectual and philosophical thought from the Enlightenment to Romanticism and the influence of this evolution on Lincoln's own ideas.

By examining aspects of Lincoln's life—his personal piety in comparison with the beliefs of his contemporaries, his success in self-schooling when frontier youths had limited opportunities for a formal education, his marriage and home life in Springfield, and his legal career—in light of broader cultural contexts such as the development of democracy, the growth of visual arts, the question of slaves as property, and French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on America, the contributors delve into the mythical Lincoln of folklore and discover a developing political mind and a changing nation.

As Lincoln's America shows, the sociopolitical culture of nineteenth-century America was instrumental in shaping Lincoln's character and leadership. The essays in this volume paint a vivid picture of a young nation and its sixteenth president, arguably its greatestleader.

The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating or The Shifts in Hizbullahs Ideology

2009-01-23T12:53:00.000-08:00

The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader

Author: James L Watson

Food is an important and endlessly fascinating lens for social and cultural analysis –not only for anthropologists, but also for scholars of history, literature, cultural studies, political economy, and public policy. The subject is a central idiom for understanding cultural practices and for teaching about culture on many levels. The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating is a collection of readings that uses the study of food as a vehicle for addressing broad themes that are emerging in social anthropology: globalization, capitalism, market economies, and consumption practices.

The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating offers an ethnographically informed perspective on the ways in which people use food to make sense of life in an increasingly interconnected world. It includes studies from eleven countries across five continents on such hot topics as sushi, fast food, gourmet foods, and food scares and contamination.

	Introduction	1
1	How sushi went global	13
2	French beans for the masses : a modern historical geography of food in Burkina Faso	21
3	Fresh demand : the consumption of Chilean produce in the United States	42
4	Coca-Cola : a black sweet drink from Trinidad	54
5	China's Big Mac attack	70
6	Of hamburger and social space : consuming McDonald's in Beijing	80
7	Children's food and Islamic dietary restrictions in Xi'an	106
8	The rise of yuppie coffees and the reimagination of class in the United States	122
9	Crafting Grand Cru chocolates in contemporary France	144
10	Globalized childhood? : Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing	163
11	Domesticating the french fry : McDonald's and consumerism in Moscow	180
12	"India shopping" : Indian grocery stores and transnational configurations of belonging	197
13	Food and the counterculture : a story of bread and politics	217
14	Industrial tortillas and folkloric Pepsi : the nutritional consequences of hybrid cuisines in Mexico	235
15	Food, hunger, and the state	251
16	The bakers of Bernburg and the logics of communism and capitalism	259
17	The global food fight	276
18	Half-lives and healthy bodies : discourses on "contaminated" food and healing in post-Chernobyl Ukraine	286
19	Mad cow mysteries	299

Books about: Changing Lanes in China or Making Career Decisions That Count

The Shifts in Hizbullah's Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program

Author: Joseph Elie Alagha

As the recent war in Lebanon demonstrated, an understanding of the Lebanese Shi‘ite militant group Hizbullah remains an important component of any attempt to solve the problems of the Middle East. The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology provides an in-depth analysis of the group’s motivations, tracking the changes it has undergone since Hizbullah’s founding by Lebanese Shi‘ite clergy in 1978. Joseph Alagha demonstrates that Hizbullah, driven at its founding chiefly by religious concerns, in the latter half of the 1980s became a full-fledged social movement, with a structure and ideology aimed at social change. Further changes in the 1990s led to Hizbullah’s becoming a mainstream political party—but without surrendering its militarism or willingness to use violence to advance its ends.
In tracking these changes, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology covers such disparate topics as Hizbullah’s views of jihad, suicide and martyrdom, integration, pan-Islamism, anti-Zionism, and the relationship with Israel and the United States. It will be necessary reading for both scholars and policymakers.

Blackwater or George Washington

2009-01-22T07:40:00.000-08:00

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

Author: Jeremy Scahill

Meet Blackwater USA, the powerful private army that the U.S. government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. With its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and twenty-thousand troops at the ready, Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the "global war on terror"— yet most people have never heard of it. It was the moment the war turned: On March 31, 2004, four Americans were ambushed and burned near their jeeps by an angry mob in the Sunni stronghold of Falluja. Their charred corpses were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The ensuing slaughter by U.S. troops would fuel the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. But these men were neither American military nor civilians. They were highly trained private soldiers sent to Iraq by a secretive mercenary company based in the wilderness of North Carolina. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army is the unauthorized story of the epic rise of one of the most powerful and secretive forces to emerge from the U.S. military-industrial complex, hailed by the Bush administration as a revolution in military affairs, but considered by others as a dire threat to American democracy.

Publishers Weekly

Scahill's liberal horror story is about the company that has deployed many of the "private contractors" who have assisted the U.S. military in Iraq and been responsible for more than its share of death and disorder. Scahill, a regular contributor to the Nation, amps up the scare language in his study of both Blackwater and the wealthy, ultra-conservative Prince family that founded the company, but luckily, Weiner does not. With his booming baritone reined tightly in check, Weiner coolly and calmly delivers the bad news. The parade of scaremongering may grow wearying, but Weiner maintains his composure throughout, offsetting Scahill (to a degree) by virtue of his unyielding temperateness. Simultaneous release with the Nation hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 26). (Nov.)

New interesting textbook: Detroits Historic Hotels Restaurants or Balls

George Washington: Writings (Library of America)

Author: George Washington

This one-volume collection - the most extensive and authoritative ever published - covers five decades of Washington's astonishingly active life and brings together over 440 letters, orders, addresses, and other writings. Among the early writings included are the journal Washington kept at age 16 while surveying the Shenandoah Valley frontier and his dramatic account of the winter journey he made through the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1753 while on a diplomatic mission. Some two dozen letters written during the French and Indian War, including first-hand accounts of the controversial forest skirmish that began hostilities and of Braddock's bloody defeat, record Washington's early encounters with the harsh challenges of military command. An extensive selection of letters, orders, and addresses from the Revolutionary War record Washington's determined leadership of the Continental Army through years of defeat and deprivation. Letters from the Confederation period (1783-1789) show Washington's pleasure at returning to Mount Vernon, his continued interest in Western land speculation and river navigation, his growing concern with the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, and his role in the framing and ratification of the Constitution. The writings from his two terms as president show how Washington strove to establish enduring republican institutions, to build public trust in the new government, to avoid the divisions of party and faction, and to maintain American neutrality during the war between Britain and Revolutionary France. Also included in the volume are letters revealing his close and careful management of Mount Vernon and his evolving attitudes toward slavery.

Publishers Weekly

Distilled from his multi-volume writings, this superbly edited selection of Washington's letters, speeches, diary entries, maxims and military orders reveals a writer of surprising versatility and a statesman consciously involved with the forging of our national character. Washington's tumultuous life mirrors the birth traumas of the early Republic, and this collection of his scribblings (nearly all unpublished during his lifetime) add up to an extraordinary autobiographical portrait. Containing missives to Noah Webster, Patrick Henry, Benedict Arnold, Lafayette, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Hamilton, this volume offers an unvarnished view of Washington as hemp and tobacco farmer, frontier explorer, land grabber, debtor, runaway slave-catcher, indefatigable commander-in-chief, proactive patriot, adept politician and reluctant president dismayed at the growing rift between Federalists and Republicans. Rhodehamel is curator of American historical manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif.

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

The Library of America was red hot this year. In addition to this collection of Washington's most important papers, the publisher also produced volumes of Nathaniel West, Wallace Stevens, John Muir, and a gangbusters, two-volume collection of American crime fiction. (Classic Returns, LJ 4/1/97)

The New Public Personnel Administration or In Defense of Anarchism

2009-01-21T02:27:00.000-08:00

The New Public Personnel Administration

Author: Lloyd G Nigro

Prepare for your career in public personnel management with THE NEW PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION! With coverage of public policies, law rulings, and court rulings, this text gives you a solid foundation for advanced studies in specialized areas of public personnel management. Major policy trends and debates are discussed including affirmative action, compensation and benefits, sexual harassment, workplace violence, substance and alcohol abuse, performance appraisal, and collective bargaining. Discussion questions, suggested readings, chapter appendices, informative illustrations, and examples are just a few of the tools that will help you succeed in this course.

Booknews

An advanced undergraduate or graduate-level introduction to the field of public personnel administration in US governments. This fifth edition is updated with regard to policies dealing with political activity of public employees, sexual harassment, and affirmative action. Special attention has been paid to ongoing reforms of public personnel systems on all levels of government. There is a new chapter on workplace violence. Felix Nigro is affiliated with the University of Georgia. Lloyd Nigro is affiliated with Georgia State University. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Go to: The Future of Business or Competing Devotions

In Defense of Anarchism

Author: Robert Paul Wolff

Once more available in paperback, and with a new Preface, here is Robert Paul Wolff's classic 1970 analysis of the foundations of the authority of the state and the problems of political authority and moral autonomy in a democracy.

	Preface to the 1998 Edition
	Preface
1	The Conflict Between Authority and Autonomy
1	The Concept of Authority	3
2	The Concept of Autonomy	12
3	The Conflict Between Authority and Autonomy	18
2	The Solution of Classical Democracy
1	Democracy Is the Only Feasible Solution	21
2	Unanimous Direct Democracy	22
3	Representative Democracy	27
4	Majoritarian Democracy	38
3	Beyond the Legitimate State
1	The Quest for the Legitimate State	69
2	Utopian Glimpses of a World Without States	78

Gorgias or Red Highways

2009-01-19T23:36:00.000-08:00

Gorgias

Author: Plato

The Gorgias is a vivid introduction to central problems of moral and political philosophy. In answer to an eloquent attack on morality as conspiration of the weak against the strong, Plato develops his own doctrine, insisting that the benefits of being moral always outweigh any benefits to be won from immorality. He applies his views to such questions as the errors of democracy, the role of the political expert in society, and the justification of punishment.
In the notes to this translation, Professor Irwin discusses the historical and social context of the dialogue, expounds and criticizes the arguments, and tries above all to suggest the questions a modern reader ought to raise about Plato's doctrines.

Books about: Strutture di affari

Red Highways: A Liberals Journey into the Heartland

Author: Rose Aguilar

A San Francisco radio host grown tired of media stereotypes, Rose Aguilar packed up her van, picked up her boyfriend, and set out on a six-month road trip through the red-state West to find out what voters there really care about. Equal parts travelogue, political reportage, and personal discovery, RED HIGHWAYS challenges conventional wisdom and calls for a more thoughtful and productive dialogue between Red and Blue America.

Introduction 1 I Welcome to Texas: My First Taste of Fear, Hope, and Hospitality 11 A Day at the Mall Not So Red Self-Described Poor Republicans Camping in Kerrville Blessed Are the Peacemakers Progressive Religion Sex Sells in Dallas Anti-abortion Radio Everyone's Welcome at the Cathedral of Hope Green Republicans Who Supports the Troops?
Houses of Right-Wing Worship The Dallas Divide The Blueberry Festival Diversity in East Texas Pro-War Vegan II Mississippi: A Lesson in Listening 75 Domestic Violence Changed My Politics The Last Abortion Clinic in Mississippi Returning Home to Start a Movement Conflicted Christians Segregated Sundays Exploring the Mississippi Delta Questioning My Pastor Advocating for the Poor Overworked and Underpaid III Oklahoma: The Unplanned Adventure 129 Off the Front Lines and Forgotten Keeping Tabs on the Right Oklahoma City Gun Show Bull Riding, the U.S. Army, and Hooters A Truth-Seeker From Evangelism to Inclusion Adventures along the Oklahoma Panhandle Welcome to Liberal, Kansas!
Burning man Break IV Montana: Independence, Change, and American Indians 179 From Poverty to Politics The Only Republican in the Room Out in Montana Out in the Wilderness Going to the Sun Native America Going Home Afterword 213 Acknowledgments 217 Index 221 About the Author 229

Edmund Burke or Freedom Riders

2009-01-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered

Author: Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk was a leading figure in the post-World War II revival of American interest in Edmund Burke. Today, no one who takes seriously the problems of society dares remain indifferent to "the first conservative of our time of troubles." In Russell Kirk's words: "Burke's ideas interest anyone nowadays, including men bitterly dissenting from his conclusions. If conservatives would know what they defend, Burke is their touchstone; and if radicals wish to test the temper of their opposition, they should turn to Burke." Kirk unfolds Burke's philosophy, showing how it revealed itself in concrete historical situations during the eighteenth century and how Burke, through his philosophy, "speaks to our age. "This volume makes vivid the four great struggles in the life of Burke: his efforts to reconcile England with the American colonies; his involvement in cutting down the domestic power of George III; his prosecution of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of India; and his resistance to Jacobinism, the French Revolution's "armed doctrine."

Children's Literature

With a forward by Roger Scruton, this detailed biography presents the life and time of Edmund Burke in eleven lengthy chapters, including an epilogue about why he is studied. Born in Dublin in 1729, Burke spent most of his career in England as a conservative statesman and philosopher. An index, notes, biographical notes and a timeline are included. 1977, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, $24.95. Ages 16 up. Reviewer: Gisela Jernigan

	Foreword
	Prefatory Note
	Selected Events in the Life of Edmund Burke
	How Dead Is Burke?	1
	From Letters to Politics	18
	Conciliation and Prudence	41
	Reforming Party and Government	66
	India and Justice	97
	The Verge of the Abyss	123
	A Revolution of Theoretic Dogma	145
	The Defense of Civilization	169
	Never Succumb to the Enemy	192
	Epilogue: Why Edmund Burke Is Studied	213
	Appendices	230
	Bibliographical Note	248
	Notes	254
	Index	267

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Author: Raymond Arsenault

They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America.
The Freedom Riders were greeted with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as racist thugs battered them. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church. Arsenault recreates these moments with heart-stopping immediacy. His tightly braided narrative reaches from the White House--where the Kennedys were just awakening to the moral power of the civil rights struggle--to the cells of Mississippi's infamous Parchman Prison, where Riders tormented their jailers with rousing freedom anthems. Along the way, he offers vivid portraits of dynamic figures such as James Farmer, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth, recapturing the drama of an improbable, almost unbelievable saga of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph.
The Riders were widely criticized as reckless provocateurs, or "outside agitators." But indelible images of their courage, broadcast to the world by a newly awakened press, galvanized the movement for racial justice across the nation. Freedom Riders is a stunning achievement, a masterpiece of storytelling that will stand alongside thefinest works on the history of civil rights.

The Washington Post - Roger Wilkins

… I entirely agree with a statement made by my former Justice Department colleague the late sociologist James Laue, and quoted by Arsenault: "The national mobilization of conscience which had begun in Montgomery and grown in 1960 reached full bloom with the Freedom Rides." To find out how that happened, one must read Arsenault's superb rendering of that great saga. For those interested in understanding 20th-century America, this is an essential book.

The New York Times - William Grimes

This is a story that only benefits from Mr. Arsenault's deliberately slowed-down narration. Moment by moment, he recreates the sense of crisis, and the terrifying threat of violence that haunted the first Freedom Riders, and their waves of successors, every mile of the way through the Deep South. He skillfully puts into order a bewildering series of events and leads the reader, painstakingly, through the political complexities of the time. Perhaps his greatest achievement is to show, through a wealth of detail, just how contested every inch of terrain was, and how uncertain the outcome, as the Freedom Riders pressed forward, hundreds of them filling Southern jails.

Library Journal

Arsenault (history, Univ. of South Florida; Jacksonville: The Consolidation Story, from Civil Rights to the Jaguars) deftly weaves an intricate narrative of the 1961 Freedom Rides, the civil rights effort by black and white volunteers to enforce the integration of interstate buses and travel facilities throughout the Deep South. Narrating the origins, the violent and turbulent rides themselves, the litigation, and the legacy, this work is similar, in its skillful crafting, to James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom on the Civil War. Arsenault recounts the dynamics of the civil rights organizations that eventually banded together to sustain the Freedom Rides, as well as the individual riders who suffered mob beatings and prison sentences. The interplay of the riders with municipal and state leaders, as well as with the Kennedys and the FBI at the federal level, is skillfully portrayed. The 500 pages are justified when one considers the near inexhaustible courage of the freedom riders and the significance of the national crisis they forced. For a more concise, thesis-driven history of the Freedom Rides, consider David Niven's The Politics of Injustice: The Kennedys, the Freedom Rides, and the Electoral Consequences of a Moral Compromise. Freedom Riders will find avid readership among patrons of academic collections.-Jim Hahn, Harper Coll. Lib., Palatine, IL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Major Problems in American Foreign Relations or Creating Public Value

2009-01-19T02:10:00.000-08:00

Major Problems in American Foreign Relations (Major Problems in American History Series): Volume I: To 1920

Author: Dennis Merrill

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the Major Problems in American History Series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. History.

Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government

Author: Mark H Moor

A seminal figure in the field of public management, Mark Moore presents his summation of fifteen years of research, observation, and teaching about what public sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Useful for both practicing public executives and those who teach them, this book explicates some of the richest of several hundred cases used at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and illuminates their broader lessons for government managers. Moore addresses four questions that have long bedeviled public administration: What should citizens and their representatives expect and demand from public executives? What sources can public managers consult to learn what is valuable for them to produce? How should public managers cope with inconsistent and fickle political mandates? How can public managers find room to innovate?

Moore's answers respond to the well-understood difficulties of managing public enterprises in modern society by recommending specific, concrete changes in the practices of individual public managers: how they envision what is valuable to produce, how they engage their political overseers, and how they deliver services and fulfill obligations to clients. Following Moore's cases, we witness dilemmas faced by a cross section of public managers—William Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency, Jerome Miller and the Department of Youth Services, Miles Mahoney and the Park Plaza Redevelopment Project, David Sencer and the swine flu scare, Lee Brown and the Houston Police Department, Harry Spence and the Boston Housing Authority. Their work, together with Moore's analysis, reveals how public managers canachieve their true goal of producing public value.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	Managerial Imagination	13
Pt. I	Envisioning Public Value
2	Defining Public Value	27
3	Organizational Strategy in the Public Sector	57
Pt. II	Building Support and Legitimacy
4	Mobilizing Support, Legitimacy, and Coproduction: The Functions of Political Management	105
5	Advocacy, Negotiation, and Leadership: The Techniques of Political Management	135
Pt. III	Delivering Public Value
6	Reengineering Public Sector Production: The Function of Operational Management	193
7	Implementing Strategy: The Techniques of Operational Management	239
	Conclusion: Acting for a Divided, Uncertain Society	293
	Notes	311
	Index	396

William Wilberforce or American Constitutional Law

2009-01-18T12:57:00.000-08:00

William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity

Author: Kevin Belmont

Dramatized in the major motion picture Amazing Grace, the story of William Wilberforce is the remarkable account of how one mans vision, courage, and relentless pursuit of justice brought freedom to thousands and changed the course of history.

That the greatest and most successful reformer in all history is almost unknown today is a crying shame. Kevin Belmonte puts this right with his inspiring study of an inspiring life.

Dr. Os Guinness, author of Unspeakable: Facing Up to the Challenge of Evil

An excellently researched and insightfully written biography I applaud its sound scholarship and commend its perceptive insights into a great life.

Brian Sibley, author of C. S. Lewis: Through the Shadowlands

William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity is the definitive biography of the English statesman who overcame incredible odds to bring about the end of slavery and slave trade. Called "the wittiest man in England" by philosopher and novelist Madame de Stael, praised by Abraham Lincoln, and renowned for his oratorical genius, Wilberforce worked tirelessly to accomplish his goal.

Whether you are an avid student of history, a pupil of prominent leaders of the past, or simply someone who reads for pleasure, you will love award-winning biographer Kevin Belmontes vivid account of the life of William Wilberforce.

Go to: Le gouvernement et la non Comptabilité :les Concepts et les Pratiques avec CDROM

American Constitutional Law: Introductory Essays and Selected Cases

Author: Adephus T Mason

This classic collection of carefully selected and edited Supreme Court case excerpts and comprehensive background essays explores constitutional law and the role of the Supreme Court in its development and interpretation. Well-grounded in both theory and politics, it displays the role of the U.S. Supreme Court as a legal and political institution and as a major player in American government.

The volume examines and presents supporting cases regarding jurisdiction and organization of the federal courts, the constitution, the supreme court, and judicial review, congress and the president, federalism, the electoral process, the commerce clause, national taxing and spending power, property rights and the development of due process, nationalization of the bill of rights, criminal justice, freedom of expression, protest and symbolic speech, freedom of association, freedom of press, religious liberty, privacy, equal protection of the laws, and security and freedom in wartime.

For those interested in American constitutional law.

Booknews

Explains the history and politics behind key cases in constitutional law. After a chapter on jurisdiction and organization of the federal courts, 12 chapters offer extended excerpts from cases and chapter introductions tracing the thread of constitutional doctrine through major decisions. Includes key terms, discussion questions, lists of presidents and Supreme Court justices, and the complete Constitution. Also includes two noteworthy cases from 1997-98. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Urgent Message from Mother or Perfect Hostage

2009-01-18T01:44:00.000-08:00

Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World

Author: Jean Shinoda Bolen

Mother is calling! This polemic, infused with Jungian examination and new age theories, explores the psychological, spiritual and scientific aspects of women as collaborators for change. Now available in paperback edition.

What People Are Saying

Isabel Allende
"This is the most inspiring and optimistic book I've read in years. It tells how women working together can bring us peace and save the planet. Jean Shinoda Bolen invites us all to join the next, most powerful wave of the women's movement. Count me in!"

Desmond Tutu
"Jean Shinoda Bolen's Urgent Message from Mother is a book whose time has come. Our earth home and all forms of life in it are at grave risk. We men have had our turn and made a proper mess of things. We need women to save us. I pray that many will read Bolen's work and be inspired then to act appropriately. Time is running out"

Look this: The Employment Interview Handbook or Materials and Process Selection for Engineering Design Second Edition

Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Prisoner of Conscience

Author: Justin Wintl

"The trouble is that I know too much."—Aung San Suu Kyi

Burma is a country where, as one senior UN official puts it, "just to turn your head can mean imprisonment or death." Aung San Suu Kyi is considered to be Burma's best hope for freedom, and, because of her unwavering commitment to nonviolent resistance to the country's brutal military junta, she has been under house arrest since 1989.

Elected Prime Minister, she was prevented from taking office, but despite failing health, vilification at the hands of the Burmese media, and actual imprisonment in one of the world's most appalling jails, Suu Kyi has persevered in a campaign of nonviolent protest as unflagging as those of Gandhi, King, and Mandela, which earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

In Perfect Hostage, the most thorough biography of Suu Kyi to date, Justin Wintle tells both the story of the Burmese people and the story of an ordinary person who became a hero. 43 b/w photographs.

The New York Times - Seth Mydans

This thoroughly researched biography sets out to explicate the personality of a leader who found herself by chance (though also by birth) at the head of her country's struggling pro-democracy movement. By delving into her childhood and her years as a student at Oxford University, Wintle, a journalist and the author of books on Vietnam, finds the seeds of her commanding personality, her straight-backed moral certainty and a "fierce purity" that gave her, as one friend said, "the knack of putting one on one's best behavior"…the book presents readers with the complexity of Myanmar's history and its present tensions, and of Aung San Suu Kyi herself, who is described as both flexible and inflexible, ready to cooperate with her oppressors but unbending in calling for international sanctions against them.

Publishers Weekly

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi seems both the least likely and the most natural person to become "the world's best-known prisoner of conscience," and Wintle's thoroughly engrossing book magnificently illustrates both sides of this elusive yet very public figure. Her education at Oxford and self-effacing demeanor did not prime her for the life of a dissident. Behind her reserve and English veneer, however, was a resolutely stubborn streak and a family life steeped in politics. Wintle's research has been prodigious; he brings encyclopedic knowledge of just about anything that can be linked to Suu Kyi. In rendering his subject, he weaves in Burmese history and folklore, Buddhism, Indian politics and portraits of Suu Kyi's intimates and enemies; that he delivers all this in an absorbing fashion is a marvel. Entertaining and instructive, charming and persuasive, Wintle mingles sober history and gossipy chat. Obscure political in-fighting is made comprehensible; unfamiliar colonial history is made accessible. Still, Wintle (Romancing Vietnam; Furious Interiors) can skewer in a sentence ("About Sanjay [Gandhi] there was something palpably uncouth, while the vainglorious Rajiv [Gandhi] was lacking in intelligence"). Suu Kyi's developing political activism, her house arrests, her honors are delineated in draftsman's detail that Wintle manages to keep vibrant. He is a biographer smitten with his subject, who cares enough to note the smallest detail, such as that Suu Kyi prefers Simenon's Maigret to Christie's Poirot. In making the reader care about the smallest things, Wintle makes the reader really care about the big thing-that "the world's best-known prisoner of conscience" is notfree. (Apr.)

Harold M. Otness - Library Journal

There have been several publications by and about Myanmar's 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Suu Kyi, whose work for democracy in her country (formerly Burma) has placed her under house arrest in Rangoon for much of the last 20 years. Wintle (New Makers of Modern Culture), a British author who has written extensively on Asia, here compiles an impressively thorough account of Suu Kyi's life, brought up to date with a postscript to cover the Monks' Revolt of November 2007. He sets that uprising and its suppression against the recent tragic history of Myanmar. Unable to meet with his subject, he has drawn upon a wide variety of sources to present a convincingly sympathetic portrait of a woman considered the most courageous of human rights advocates. Wintle explores the network of international relationships and the global economic aspirations of China and India to show why Suu Kyi's struggles are more than just a problem of her backward country and why the West has not been able to resolve the matter. One can hope that Suu Kyi will eventually be able to write and publish her own book. In the meantime, Wintle's book will be sought out in both public and academic libraries.

Illustrations     xi
Principal Burmese Personae     xiii
Glossary (including acronyms)     xv
Map     xx
Prologue     xxiii
Land and Father
At the Shwedagon     3
The Shwe Pyidaw     9
After the Mongols     18
The Salami Wars     27
British Burma     41
Saturday's Child     50
From Campus Oddball to National Hero (aged 20)     63
'1300': The Year That Never Was     74
Desperate Times, Desperate Remedies     81
Bo Teza: Reluctant Collaborator     92
Snakes, Ladders and a Wife     104
Old Enemies, New Friends     115
Getting There     124
The Daughter
19th July     141
The Golden Rain is Brown     151
An Indian Idyll: The 'Ugly One' Takes Wing     162
The Daughter of Some or Other Burmese General     172
Things Fall Apart     181
Between Three Continents     196
Thimphu, Kyoto, Simla     209
Sixteen Months
Number One and Number Nine     225
White Bridge, Red Bridge     239
8.8.88     249
Shadow of the HundredFlowers     265
Digging In     277
Squaring Up     287
Suu Kyi's Tightrope     298
Danubyu     308
The Door Slams Shut     317
The Political Madonna
Egg on the Generals' Faces     329
Soldiers at the Gate     341
Famously Alone     354
Freedom on a Leash     370
The Saddest Thing     385
The Widowed Road to Depayin     397
Back to Mandalay     413
Postscript: The Monks' Revolt     430
Acknowledgements     439
Sources/Further Reading/Websites     441
Index     449

Triple Cross or I Write What I like

2009-01-17T13:32:00.000-08:00

Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI--and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him

Author: Peter Lanc

In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than Ali Mohamed. A former Egyptian army captain, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA in Europe, the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, and the FBI in California - even as he helped to orchestrate the al Qaeda campaign of terror that culminated in 9/11. As investigative reporter Peter Lance demonstrates in this gripping narrative, senior U.S. law enforcement officials - including the now-celebrated U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who personally interviewed Mohamed long before he was brought to ground - were powerless to stop him. In the annals of espionage, few men have moved between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed. For almost two decades, the former Egyptian army commando succeeded in living a double life.

Brazenly slipping past watch lists, he moved in and out of the U.S. with impunity, marrying an American woman, becoming a naturalized citizen, and posing as an FBI informant - all while acting as chief of security for Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Known to his fellow terrorists as Ali Amiriki, or "Ali the American," Mohamed gained access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. counterterrorism arsenal while brokering terror summits, planning bombing missions, and training jihadis in bomb building, assassination, the creation of sleeper cells, and other acts of espionage.

Building on the investigation he first chronicled in his previous books, 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up, Lance uses Mohamed to trace the untold story of al Qaeda's rise in the 1980s and 1990s. Incredibly, Mohamed, who remains in custodial witness protection today, has never been sentenced for his crimes. He exists under a veil of secrecy - a living witness to how the U.S. intelligence community was outflanked for years by the terror network.

From his first appearance on the FBI's radar in 1989 - training Islamic extremists on Long Island - to his presence in the database of Operation Able Danger eighteen months before 9/11, this devious triple agent was the one terrorist they had to sweep under the rug. Filled with news-making revelations, Triple Cross exposes the incompetence and duplicity of the FBI and Justice Department before 9/11...and raises serious questions about how many more secrets the Feds may still be hiding.

New interesting textbook: Legge, commercio e societ�

I Write What I Like: Selected Writings

Author: Steve Biko

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." Like all of Steve Biko's writings, those words testify to the passion, courage, and keen insight that made him one of the most powerful figures in South Africa's struggle against apartheid. They also reflect his conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness movement that he helped found.
I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko's writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Students' Organization, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. The collection also includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; an introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, who were both involved with Biko in the Black Consciousness movement; a memoir of Biko by Father Aelred Stubbs, his longtime pastor and friend; and a new foreword by Professor Lewis Gordon.
Biko's writings will inspire and educate anyone concerned with issues of racism, postcolonialism, and black nationalism.

American Foreign Policy or Values in a Time of Upheaval

2009-01-17T03:19:00.000-08:00

American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century

Author: Bruce W Jentleson

Thoroughly updated to reflect the most recent developments, the Third Edition of American Foreign Policy addresses with unmatched authority the most pressing foreign policy issues of this new global era: how should the United States wield its power, pursue peace, be true to its principles, and work with the international community? American Foreign Policy helps students approach these issues by applying a consistent critical framework throughout the text, emphasizing both the strategic and political aspects of foreign policy decision-making. With new readings and pedagogy in the text and a new website for study and review, the Third Edition is an unparalleled introduction to U.S. foreign policy amidst the challenges of terrorism, postwar Iraq, the Darfur crisis, globalization, democratization, and other timely issues.

Booknews

A primary text for courses on American foreign policy, encompassing both foreign policy strategy and foreign policy politics. Part I provides theory and history for establishing a framework for the dynamics of choice, and Part II applies this framework to the post- Cold War foreign policy agenda and major choices the US now faces. Pedagogical features include boxes on major policy and theoretical debates, and excerpts from speeches and documents. Jentleson is director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Values in a Time of Upheaval

Author: Pope Benedict XVI

In the worldwide best seller Values in a Time of Upheaval, Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) passionately defends the role traditional Judeo-Christian values should play in a pluralistic society and a multicultural world. He examines such crucial contemporary issues as the moral foundations of a free society, the role of spiritual values in promoting human rights, current challenges to Western culture, and the place of faith and love of God in finding true peace. Joseph Ratzinger proposes a balance of faith and reason that avoids the extremes of fundamentalist theocracies and secular, relativist states.

1	To change or to preserve? : political visions and political praxis	11
2	What keeps the world together : the prepolitical moral foundations of a free state	31
3	Freedom, law, and the good : moral principles in democratic societies	45
4	What is truth? : the significance of religious and ethical values in a pluralistic society	53
5	If you want peace... : conscience and truth	75
6	Searching for peace : tensions and dangers	101
7	What must we do? : Christians' responsibility for peace	117
8	Acting in the strength that comes from remembrance : the grace of reconciliation	123
9	Europe's identity : its intellectual foundations yesterday, today, and tomorrow	129
10	Common identity and common will : chances and dangers for Europe	151
	Epilogue : belief in the Triune God and peace in the world	161

Symptoms of Withdrawal or Aftermath

2009-01-16T14:06:00.000-08:00

Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption

Author: Christopher Kennedy Lawford

The firstborn child of famed Rat Pack actor Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy, sister to John F. Kennedy, Christopher Kennedy Lawford grew up with presidents, senators, and movie stars as close relatives and personal friends. When he was a toddler, Marilyn Monroe taught him how to dance the twist. He recalls being awakened late at night to hear his uncle Jack announce his candidacy for president. His early life was marked by the traumatic assassinations of two beloved uncles—and during his teen years, he succumbed to the tragic allure of the 1970s drug scene.

Symptoms of Withdrawal is Lawford's unflinchingly honest portrayal of his life as a Kennedy—a journey overflowing with hilarious insider anecdotes, heartbreaking accounts of his addictions to narcotics as well as to celebrity, and, ultimately, the redemption he found by asserting his own independence.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Mr. Lawford packs so much material into one book that a Kennedy-parasite biographer could find a career's worth of stories here. But Symptoms of Withdrawal, for all its tales told out of school, has poignant legitimacy. Mr. Lawford may have had to exploit his relatives to get his story published, but he has found a way to step out of their long shadow. His book is sunlit in this way too.

Publishers Weekly

Pity the poor shelver who has to decide where to put this book. Does it go with the wall full of Kennedyana, the tell-alls and critiques of the family America loves to hate and hates to love? Or does it go into the ever increasing "recovery" section of the memoir department, packed as it is with tales of debauchery, and finally, painful and hard-won sobriety? Because this offering, by the 50-year-old nephew of President Kennedy, son of the late actor Peter Lawford, and cousin of the late American prince, JFK Jr. (how's that for a legacy to live with?), is both of those things, it is hard to categorize, and harder to resist. There's plenty of dish here, even if it is dish of the gentle, almost old-fashioned variety. (Lawford tells of being taught to do the twist by Marilyn Monroe; of spying, as a 10-year-old, on a former First Lady taking a bath, of partying with Kennedys and Lennons and Jaggers.) But it is also a palpably painful and moving rendition of bad behavior with women and money and drugs, and 20 years of staying sober. If you've read any recovery lit, you already know the drill: the stories of lying and charming and messing up school, jobs and relationships. There's plenty of that, but in Lawford's case, the backdrop against which he misbehaved is in itself dramatic. He writes achingly of his relationship with his cousin David, RFK's son, with whom he regularly did drugs and who died in a Palm Beach hotel room in 1984. (Lawford broke with Kennedy family tradition and named his son for David.) When he arrives high at a family party, the photographic proof turns up in the newspaper-because it was a fundraiser for his uncle Teddy. If this were somebody with a less famous-for-carousing name, you might think he was just another self-dramatizing alcoholic; as it is, Lawford is clearly just recounting his life. Even so, he could come off as obnoxious-were it not for his frankness, humor and self-awareness. Lawford goes out of his way to own, as they say in recovery, his behavior, and while he acknowledges a family tendency, he blames no one but himself. He can also write knowingly and self-deprecatingly about his competitive relationships with his many cousins, his vanity as an actor (he has appeared in films including The Russia House and Mr. North, as well as many television programs but is, by his own admission, no Tom Cruise), and his tendency to refer to his many female conquests as "the most beautiful girl in the world." So where does this book belong? Does it matter? You don't have to care about Kennedys to find this a moving tale of self-discovery and redemption. Whatever else he may have been-son, nephew, cousin, etc.-Christopher Lawford shows himself here to be a writer of talent and grace. 32 pages of photos. (Oct.) Sara Nelson is the Editor-in-Chief of PW. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Born into wealth and favor as the son of Rat Pack actor Peter Lawford and JFK's sister Patricia, 50-year-old Lawford writes an engaging memoir of privilege, struggle, and recovery. The privilege meant growing up among such Hollywood elite as Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and on the Washington scene among the Kennedys. All the while, he was trying to find his own identity. But in his dysfunctional family, bonding with dad included receiving a vial of cocaine for his birthday. Lawford writes about his struggle with and recovery from the oblivion of alcohol and drug addiction, an "800-pound gorilla" made heavier by his family legacy. For Lawford and cousin David (RFK's son), being anonymous panhandlers and heroin junkies was sometimes easier than being Kennedys. After David was found dead of an overdose in 1984, Lawford's aunt, Joan Kennedy, brought him to a church basement, where he was disabused of his professed "terminal uniqueness" as he listened to others share strikingly similar tales of addiction. (He has maintained his sobriety for 20 years.) Thoughtful, honest, and at times humorous, Lawford's memoir is recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/05.]-Patti C. McCall, Albany Molecular Research, Inc., NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A rare and worthy first-person glimpse into the pitfalls of being a Kennedy, complete with instructions on how to step into the deepest hole available, from the son of Patricia Kennedy and actor Peter Lawford. "I was given wealth, power, and fame when I drew my first breath. Now what?" asks Lawford, admitting that he "failed to take advantage of any of them." The "what" was booze and drugs in quantities that would make even the most hardened liver quail. But you could hardly blame him. Here was a guy whose first stop before being brought home from the hospital was a bar so his parents could grab a drink (they'd already had a few while still in the hospital, of course). Lawford's memoir zeroes in on his shabby, feckless behavior until he was in his 30s, but it can't help revealing all sorts of minutiae of the kind craved by Kennedy-watchers. The story covers his mother's proprietary relationship with her family; the divorce that threw him in among his maternal relatives; life with Uncle Bobby; the daily protocols of Hyannis Port; what it meant to suffer the wrath of Big E (Ethel); how it felt to have family members murdered while the rest of the world described the deaths as assassinations. In a natural, jazzy voice, Lawford describes his years of "better living through chemistry," which beveled the edges of neglect and failed expectations until it became the 800-pound gorilla riding his back, queering his prospects and turning his life to trash amidst the grandeur. It wasn't easy for Lawford to get straight; consequences included alienation, divorce and crying children-the same things his parents had inflicted on him. Classier than the usual tell-all: an honest account of a personalpilgrimage through privileged self-destruction.

Go to: Gold or Killer Mousse

Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive

Author: Joel Meyerowitz

After the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11th 2001, the world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz felt compelled to visit the site. In his own words, he was 'overcome by a deep impulse to help, to save, to soothe, but, being far away, there was nothing I could do.' On his return Meyerowitz soon made his way to the scene where, upon raising his camera, he was reminded by a police officer that this was a crime scene and that no photographs were allowed. Meyerowitz duly left the scene but within a few blocks the officer's reminder had turned into consciousness. To Meyerowitz, 'no photographs meant no history' and he decided at that moment to find a way in and make an archive for the City of New York.

Within days he had established strong links with many of the firefighters, policemen and construction workers contributing to the clean up. With their assistance he became the only photographer to be granted unimpeded access to Ground Zero. Once there he systematically began to document the wreckage followed by the necessary demolition, excavation and removal of tens of thousands of tonnes of debris that would transform the site from one of total devastation to level ground. Soon after the Museum of the City of New York officially engaged Meyerowitz to create an archive of the destruction and recovery at Ground Zero. The 9/11 Photographic Archive numbers in excess of 5,000 images and will become part of the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York.

Meyerowitz takes a meditative stance toward the work and workers at Ground Zero, methodically recording the painful work of rescue, recovery, demolition and excavation. His pictures succinctly convey the magnitude of the destruction and loss and the heroic nature of the response. The images included here are a combination of prints from a large format camera, which allows for the greater detail, and standard 35mm, a format which provided Meyerowitz with the freedom to move easily around the site and capture each moment as it happened.

The remarkable pictures in the archive visually relate the catastrophic destruction of the 9/11 attacks and the physical and human dimensions of the recovery effort. The aim of this book is to provide record of the extraordinary extent of the World Trade Center attacks and to documents the recovery efforts. The book will serve as both a poignant elegy to those who lost their lives and as a celebration of the tireless determination of those left behind to reclaim and rebuild the area known as 'Ground Zero'.

Twenty eight of the images in from the archive were displayed in New York and then in over fifty cities around the world in a travelling exhibition entitled After September 11: Images from Ground Zero.

The New York Times - Jonathan Mahler

Looking through Aftermath, one sees these men and women -- sometimes working alone, sometimes in clusters -- bearing the nation's collective grief as they gradually restore order to chaos. Their grim task notwithstanding, the effect is uplifting. They are not just knocking down the vestigial shells of half-destroyed buildings and clearing away mountains of metal, they are reclaiming this hallowed ground, making it possible once again to imagine a future there.

Library Journal

This large book, measuring 15.8" 11.2" 1.5" inches and weighing 8.45 pounds, chronicles the massive efforts to clean up the debris and human remains surrounding the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. At the time, noted photographer Meyerowitz was out of New York City but immediately attempted to return to his home. However, no one was being granted reentry for five days; to boot, the site had been labeled a "crime scene." Yet with the pulling of some strings, he was permitted access to what became known as Ground Zero and took numerous large-format color photographs of the ravaged landscape over the next nine months. The book begins with a series of breathtaking cityscapes, with the Twin Towers prominent in the skyline. Readers then encounter photographs grouped in four sections: "History in the Making," "Fall," "Winter," and "Spring." A feeling of stunned reverence pervades these images, which collectively constitute an exhaustive archive of the aftermath of the attacks. Among the broad panoramas, Meyerowitz portrays dedicated workers, who offer a feeling of hope, at least in the sense that the worst crimes, even atrocities, often bring out the best in many people. Following the cycle of seasons, the book concludes with a plan for the site and indexes. Meyerowitz contributes a long, poignant essay that opens the book and then threads its way through the layout of the photographs. Beautifully designed and printed, this epic collection serves as a monumental tribute to those who died on 9/11 and those who have thereafter worked to honor their memory. Highly recommended for all libraries.--Raymond Bial, First Light Photography, Urbana, IL Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Crusade or La noche de Tlatelolco

2009-01-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War

Author: Rick Atkinson

This definitive account of the Gulf War relates the previously untold story of the U.S. war with Iraq in the early 1990s. The author follows the 42-day war from the first night to the final day, providing vivid accounts of bombing runs, White House strategy sessions, firefights, and bitter internal conflicts.

Publishers Weekly

Atkinson ( The Long Gray Line ) here writes an engrossing account of the actions and utterances of those who directed and fought in the Persian Gulf War. He also provides a thorough analysis of diplomatic and political aspects of the conflict. Rich in pertinent details, the powerful narrative leaps nimbly from Washington to Riyadh, from Baghdad to Kuwait City, and to various battle sites across the sands. Expectedly, the book's dominant personality is General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, whose operatic rages are here shown to be an integral element of his command style. Atkinson defends the much-maligned VII Corps commander, Gen. Fred Franks, against Schwarzkopf's ``unfair and unwarranted'' criticism. The basic tactical decisions are all here, but the author also addresses the broader issues such as the true effectiveness of the air war, what role the Vietnam War played in Desert Shield/Desert Storm (``For Norman Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants, this war lasted not six weeks but twenty years''), and passes judgment on the reality-testing of the U.S. Army AirLand Battle doctrine. Photos. 75,000 first printing; first serial to the Washington Post; History Book Club main selection; author tour. (Oct.)

Library Journal

This interesting account of the 1991 Persian Gulf War by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter features a number of original observations about the conduct of the war. For example, Atkinson discloses that the Bush administration allowed navy warships to fire cruise missiles covertly over Iran against Iraqi targets. Among his other disclosures are the use of napalm and fuel air explosives on Iraqi infantry positions and the suggestion by Air Force Brig. Gen. Buster Glosson to use small nuclear weapons against Iraqi targets. Atkinson is extremely critical of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's behavior. Although Schwarzkopf is credited with being an accomplished military strategist, he is portrayed as someone who abused and publicly denigrated his subordinates and who appeared to be in a near-constant state of rage. Recommended for general readers. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/93.-- Nader Entessar, Spring Hill Coll . , Mobile, Ala.

Kirkus Reviews

Exhaustive, albeit consistently absorbing, record of the 42- day Gulf War that offers fresh, often startling, perspectives on the planning and conduct of what the author characterizes as "a brilliant slaughter." Focusing almost entirely on military operations, Pulitzer- winning Washington Post correspondent Atkinson (The Long Gray Line, 1989) provides a chronological account of how the US-led coalition liberated Kuwait. In the course of doing so, he discloses that Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf could be an imperious martinet given to volcanic rages that not only cowed subordinates but also disturbed superiors (including Defense Secretary Richard Cheyney), who considered relieving him. The author also includes new details on, among other matters, how Washington persuaded Israel to eschew retaliation for Scud strikes; the aerial assault on Baghdad's Al Firdes bunker (which killed over 200 civilians and led to restrictions on strategic bombing); the hit-or-miss efforts of allied navies to clear mines from important waterways; disputes between intelligence agencies as to damage assessments; secret routes flown by US missiles on their way to enemy targets; the command decision to halt a rout short of annihilation; and the post-ceasefire action that decimated a fleeing Republican Guard division. Atkinson's episodic narrative also affords a coherent log of the successful air/sea/land campaign to oust Saddam from Kuwait. He recounts the contributions of the hang-loose French and British contingents, and unobtrusively puts crucial Gulf engagements in clearer context with allusions to feats of arms from the distant and recent past. Nor does Atkinson fail to point out that the professionalismdisplayed in achieving a deliberately limited triumph at a modest cost in casualties all but erased the stigma left by US involvement in Vietnam. Military history of a very high order. (Photos and maps—not seen) (First printing of 75,000; first serial to The Washington Post; Main Selection of the History Book Club)

Interesting book: Der Persönliche Berufschef: Das Geschäft, Geschäfte als ein Persönlicher Chef Zu machen

La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral (Massacre in Mexico)

Author: Elena Poniatowska

During the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, 10,000 students gathered in a residential area called Tlatelolco to peacefully protest their nation's one-party government and lack of political freedom. In response, the police and the military cold-bloodedly shot and bayoneted to death an estimated 325 unarmed Mexican youths. Now available in paper is Elena Poniatowska's gripping account of the Tlatelolco tragedy, which Publishers Weekly claimed "makes the campus killings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 pale by comparison." "This is a story that has not been effectively told before," said Kirkus Reviews. "Call it the grito of Tlatelolco, a cry of protest and the subjective manifesto of Mexico's suppressed, potentially explosive, middle-class dissenters." In this heartbreaking chronicle, Elena Poniatowska has assembled a montage of testimony drawn over a three-year period from eyewitness accounts by surviving students, parents, journalists, professors, priests, police, soldiers, and bystanders to re-create the chaotic optimism of the demonstrations, as well as the terror and shock of the massacre. Massacre in Mexico remains a critical source for examining the collective consciousness of Mexico. As Library Journal so aptly stated, "While the 'Tlatelolco Massacre' is the central theme of this study, the larger tragedy is reflected, and we see a nation whose government resorts to demagoguery rather than constructive action while it maintains and protects the privileged position of the new 'revolutionary' elite." Octavio Paz's incisive introduction underscores the inability of the Mexican government to deal with the socio-economic realities of the Mexican nation. Students and scholars of Mexican culture, historians, sociologists, and others who seek to interpret aspects of that country's national reality will find this book to be invaluable.

Publishers Weekly

Poniatowska reports on the massacre of 325 unarmed Mexican students who were peacefully protesting police repression one week prior to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. PW called this ``heartbreaking. . . . A massive chronicle that builds to the night of the Tlatelolco massacre in an accumulation of skillfully crosscut eyewitness accounts.'' Photos. (Dec.)

Criticas

Essential reading for those interested in the Tlatelolco massacre or state repression in Latin America, this 1971 journalistic account by the award-winning novelist reports on the massacre of 325 unarmed Mexican students, workers, and teachers who were peacefully protesting police repression one week before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Poniatowska (1932- ) skillfully constructs the buildup to the night of the massacre through compelling firsthand accounts of those who witnessed one of the worst cases of Mexican state repression. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Booknews

A reprint of the Viking edition of 1975 (which was a translation of La Noche de Tlateloco, Mexico. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Mellon or Killed Cartoons

2009-01-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

Mellon: An American Life

Author: David Cannadin

A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each.
Following a boyhood in nineteenth-century Pittsburgh, Andrew Mellon overcame painful shyness to become one of America’s greatest financiers. Across an unusually diverse range of enterprises, he would build a legendary personal fortune, tracking America’s course to global economic supremacy. Personal happiness, however, eluded him. He had been bred to do one thing, and that he did with brilliant and innovative entrepreneurship.
Mellon’s wealth and name allowed him to dominate Pennsylvania politics, and under presidents Harding, Coolidge, and finally Hoover, he made the federal government run like a business. But this man of straightforward conservative politics was no politician. He would be hailed as the architect of the Roaring Twenties, but, staying too long, would be blamed for the Great Depression, eventually to find himself a broken idol.
The issues Andrew W. Mellon confronted–concerning government, business, influence, the individual and the public good–remain at the center of our national discourse to this day. Indeed, the positions he steadfastly held reemerged relatively intact with the Reagan revolution, having lain dormant since the New Deal. David Cannadine’s magisterial biography brings to life a towering, controversial figure, casting new light on our history and the evolution of our public values.

Library Journal

Cannadine (British history, Inst. of Historical Research, Univ. of London; The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy) presents the first comprehensive biography of Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937), a long-awaited, extensively researched project that serves its subject well. Cannadine introduces us to the shy, reticent Mellon, born into a Pittsburgh family of achievers, before moving on to his early work in lumber and banking, his ill-fated marriage to Nora McMullen, and his constant indulgence of his children, Paul and Ailsa. In 1914, he was the richest man in the United States. In public life, he served as the longest and most controversial secretary of the Treasury, retaining that office during the politically conservative years of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He reduced the public debt from $26 billion in 1921 to $16 billion by 1930. Late in life, he gave $10,000,000 and 21 masterpieces purchased from the Hermitage in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), to establish the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. As Cannadine shows us, when Mellon's life ended during the New Deal, he stood for fiscal policies that were no longer supported. This is a valuable portrait of a banker, statesman, philanthropist, and art collector whose initiatives still resonate today. Highly recommended for all libraries, especially public libraries with a well-established history or business collection. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.] Mary C. Allen, Everett Lib., WA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Lavish, multifaceted portrait of the early-20th-century American business titan, emphasizing the man rather than the money. British historian Cannadine (In Churchill's Shadow, 2003, etc.) shows power, politics, art and money all working together in the life of Andrew Mellon (1855-1937). Born and bred into the world of finance and industry, Mellon was shy and obsessed with self-sufficiency. A lengthy opening section here on Mellon's father, Thomas, explains his impact on his son's character. At 19, Mellon began work at the family bank under his father's watchful eye. Their formula for success-invest to increase value; leave get-rich-quick schemes to fools-was hardly revolutionary, but Cannadine's exposition of the early years lays the groundwork for a fuller picture of Mellon. Somewhat repetitive stories of mergers and acquisitions (both financial and artistic) frame the story of Mellon's personal struggles. Less than adept in relationships outside the office, at 43 he fell for and married an English girl of 19. The marriage ended in divorce 14 years later, the first of two major scandals the otherwise private Mellon endured. (The second involved accusations of tax fraud in the mid-1930s by a hostile New Deal government.) Though the financier preferred to exercise his power out of the spotlight, circumstances often moved him to the center of attention. When asked to become Secretary of the Treasury in 1921, Mellon would have liked to turn down the offer in order to concentrate on building closer ties with his estranged daughter, but he felt obligated to help rebuild a country recovering from war. Once in Washington, he saw an opportunity to leave a lasting legacy in the form of theNational Gallery of Art. Although he didn't live to see its completion, his dream was ultimately fulfilled. Cannadine's insightful account reveals Mellon as a man who took personal risks that seemingly defied his upbringing. Grand successes and epic failures, engrossingly recounted.

Books about: Impero: L'aumento ed il crollo dell'ordine mondiale britannico

Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression

Author: David Wallis

One hundred political cartoons you wanted to see, but weren't allowed to: all were banned for being too hot to handle.

Think you live in a society with a free press? These celebrated cartoonists and illustrators found out otherwise. Whether blasting Bush for his "Bring 'em on!" speech, spanking pedophile priests, questioning capital punishment, debating the disputed 2000 election, or just mocking baseball mascots, they learned that newspapers and magazines increasingly play it safe by suppressing satire.

With censored cartoons, many unpublished, by the likes of Garry Trudeau, Doug Marlette, Paul Conrad, Mike Luckovich, Matt Davies, and Ted Rall (all Pulitzer Prize winners or finalists), as well as unearthed editorial illustrations by Norman Rockwell, Edward Sorel, Anita Kunz, Marshall Arisman, and Steve Brodner, you will find yourself surprised and often shocked by the images themselves—and outraged by the fact that a fearful editor kept you from seeing them. Needed now more than ever because of a neutered press that's more lapdog than watchdog, Killed Cartoons will make you laugh, make you angry, and make you think. 100 illustrations.

Rachel Bridgewater - Library Journal

In his latest collection, Wallis, who also edited Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print, takes on censored editorial cartoons. He displays 95 cartoons rejected by editors fearful of offending their readership, advertisers, corporate owners, or political leaders. A brief essay describing the circumstances surrounding the rejection prefaces each cartoon. Though each part may be read alone, a sequential reading reveals Wallis's thoughtful editorial choices as each entry builds subtly on the last. The collection is enriched by the comments of the cartoonists themselves, which Wallis includes whenever possible. Unleavened by these comments, Wallis's approach might seem heavy-handed. The inclusion of these diverse voices increases the value and readability of the work. This collection is particularly powerful in light of the 2006 riots surrounding the Danish Muhammad cartoons, a topic dealt with here at some length and with considerable nuance. This will be a popular and relevant title in collections with a current affairs focus, especially larger public libraries.

Introduction     9
Editor's Note     23
Indecent Exposure: From Sex to Death     25
Not a Prayer: Irreligious Imagery     77
Profiles in No Courage: Editors Playing Politics     115
Fall from Race: Nothing Is Black and White     205
Protection Racket: Corporate Power at Work     233
About the Editor     261
About the Contributors     263
Acknowledgments     277
Credits     279

What Would Jackie Do or Storm Center

2009-01-13T19:06:00.000-08:00

What Would Jackie Do?: An Inspired Guide to Distinctive Living

Author: Shelly Branch

We can't help but want to be like her: Exuding unmatched poise and style, Jackie O continues to fascinate women and men of all ages. But how would Jackie have handled the twenty-first century? What would she have thought of a society defined by casual rules of conduct? Gathering intriguing research, commentary from today's experts, and fond reminiscences about the first lady of perfection's day-to-day decisions, journalists Shelly Branch and Sue Callaway offer a sparkling answer to the question: What Would Jackie Do?

Applying Jackie's philosophies to every aspect of contemporary life, including relationships, office politics, family matters, household bills, and entertaining, What Would Jackie Do? is a trove of advice, featuring:

• Noblesse oblige for beginners
• How not to be an interchangeable woman
• Mastering the effortless rich look
• The art of attachment: lessons on sex, marriage, and men of consequence
• Career whirls: pearls for getting ahead

What Would Jackie Do? portrays the practical wisdom behind an icon. The next best thing to having Jackie O as a personal adviser, What Would Jackie Do? gives readers a piece of the Jackie mystique.

Publishers Weekly

Never mind what Jackie would do. The bigger question is, what would she think about having her name attached to this chatty, gossipy manual that covers everything from how to gracefully decline a date ("Oh, you're so thoughtful but I'm terribly busy these days") to how to avoid a "customs confrontation" regarding your overseas spending ("book your flight through an airport where the agents are apt to be less savvy" about recognizing Prada). Journalists Branch and Callaway have mined every detail of Jackie's life to generate such advice as "Do suck up to people with private craft" and interviewed a variety of incongruous experts like designer Oleg Cassini and Thom Filicia of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, who observes, "So many clients want to create a facade.... Jackie would never do that." Branch and Callaway deem Jackie "the model for how to do practically everything right," but leave wiggle room to point out her shortcomings, among them smoking, skipping meals and using appetite-suppressing medications. As a guide to the social niceties (and sometimes not-so-niceties) this should be taken with a pile of salt; gossip hounds may take a look just to feed their appetite for all things Jackie. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Hungering for America or US History Cookbook

Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics

Author: David M OBrien

David O'Brien shows students how the Supreme Court is a "storm center" of political controversy where personality, politics, law, and justice come together to help determine the course of public policy. This thoroughly updated Seventh Edition of Storm Center continues to chart historic steps taken by the Court, drawing on the recently opened private papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun and including expanded coverage of the Rehnquist court and its impact on American life.

Carol Nackenoff

A very useful introduction to the Court,well-liked by students for its lively style,anecdotes,and political acumen.

Library Journal

With the abortion and school desegregation decisions, O'Brien contends, the Supreme Court has ceased to be Hamilton's ``least dangerous branch.'' Increasingly activist, it has in fact become a ``storm center'' of national politics. Ever mindful of our judicial past, O'Brien likewise finds the Court is markedly more bureaucratic. His lucid text descibes the inner rules and proceduresthe cost of filings, screening procedures, certiorari petitions, the justices' give-and-take negotiations, their tentative votes and maneuverings, the oral arguments, the growing number of dissents and plurality opinions. O'Brien finds the Court rife with heated personal clashes. Rather than above the battle, it is highly sensitive to external pressures, from the President, Congress, public opinion. This is an illuminating, first-rate primer for those seeking to understand the workings of the Court. Milton Cantor, History Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America or Traitors among Us

2009-01-13T08:52:00.000-08:00

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America: Including Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom

Author: Georgetown University Press

In one compact volume, the full texts of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America with all ratified twenty-seven Amendments to the Constitution are side by side - along with another of America's seminal documents, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, an additional word-changing statement which codified for the first time that one cannot required by law to support or prefer any belief or be punished for those one does profess - and the basis for what we have come to know as the "wall of separation" between church and state.

Who we are and what we are free to be as citizens of the United States of America is contained between these covers. Cass R. Sunstein prefaces the volume with a succinct history and interpretation of the place and meaning of both the Declaration and the Constitution in American life. Enhanced by an index and suggestions for further reading, this volume, small in size but overwhelming in the impact of its contents, belongs in the home of every citizen of the United States.

Interesting book: Earthway or Getting Back in Shape

Traitors among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World

Author: Stuart A Herrington

As director of the elite Foreign Counterintelligence Activity, author Stuart Herrington was the U.S. Army's top counterintelligence officer. In this thrilling and informative account he details one of the most damaging and delicate cases of espionage ever committed against the United States. Between 1972 and 1988, thousands of highly classified documents were sold to the Soviet Union and her Warsaw pact surrogates. They were secrets so sensitive that had war broken out in Central Europe, our ability to defend our NATO allies would have been seriously compromised. It was up to Herrington and his team to root out the elusive spy ring responsible for this treachery. An intriguing page-turner with more twists and turns than a spy novel, Traitors Among Us guides us through the intricate spy catcher's world of Cold War Berlin, showing us how the "game" was played when the stakes were as high as national survival.

The Majesty of the Law or Ronald Reagan

2009-01-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice

Author: Sandra Day OConnor

In The Majesty of the Law, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor explores the law, her life as a Justice, and how the Court has evolved and continues to function, grow, and change as an American institution. Tracing some of the origins of American law through history, people, and ideas, O'Connor sheds new light on the basics, and through personal observation she explores the development of institutions and ideas we have come to regard as fundamental.

O'Connor discusses notable cases that have shaped American democracy and the Court as we know it today, and she traces the turbulent battle women have fought for a place in our nation's legal system since America's inception. Straight-talking, clear-eyed, inspiring, The Majesty of the Law is more than a reflection on O'Connor's own experiences as the first female Justice of the Supreme Court; it also contains a discussion of how the suffrage movement changed the lives of women-in voting booths, jury boxes, and homes across the country.

In The Majesty of the Law, Sandra Day O'Connor reveals some of what she has learned and believes about American law and life, insights gleaned over her years as one of the most powerful and inspiring women in American history.

About the Author

Sandra Day O'Connor was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised on the Lazy B, a ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border. She attended college and law school at Stanford University, and began her public service in Phoenix, Arizona. She has been married to John O'Connor since 1952, and they have three sons. She is the author, with her brother, H. Alan Day, of Lazy B, a memoir about growing up in the American Southwest. Nominated by President Reagan as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, she took the oath of office on September 25, 1981, the first woman to do so.

Craig Joyce, editor, is Law Foundation Professor at the University of Houston Law Center, where he currently serves as codirector of the Institute for Intellectual Property and Information Law.

Alva O. Way University Professor and professor of history at Brown University, author of The American Revolution: A History - Gordon S. Wood

A marvelous collection of wide-ranging and plainspoken ruminations on the Constitution, constitutionalism, and the Supreme Court by the Court's first female Justice. Justice O'Connor's keen-wittedness, honesty, and common sense are revealed throughout. Although she eloquently reveals the majesty of the law, she also brings that majesty down to earth and makes it intelligible to all of us. It is her special genius.

Martin Professor of Law at New York Law School and author of What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States - James F. Simon

In The Majesty of the Law, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has blended personal reflections with key professional insights to give us a richly textured account of the fascinating history, current status, and hopeful future of the rule of law. The fact that the author is destined to take her place among the most influential Justices to serve on the modern U.S. Supreme Court makes this important book all the more significant.

author of The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 - Michael Beschloss

With this important book, one of the most intriguing figures in American history reveals her private musings about history, the law, and her own life-both public and personal. The Majesty of the Law shows us why Sandra Day O'Connor is so compelling as a human being and so vital as a public thinker.

president, Duke University - Nan Keohane

Justice O'Connor's newest book will intrigue and enlighten many different readers. She discusses multiple issues, including what it's like to be on the Supreme Court, how and by whom the Court has been shaped, and the meaning of the rule of law. Her reflections on women in the law, and women in power, are especially thought-provoking. No one is better qualified than she to write about these issues, and she does so with her customary wit and clarity.

The New York Times - Dennis J. Hutchinson

Not surprisingly, O'Connor is at her most frank and most interesting when she addresses her status as the first woman to serve on the court. What difference has it made to the institution? Her answer is somewhat equivocal. ''My intuition and my experience persuade me that having women on the bench, and in other positions of prominence, is extremely important.'' She adds that until the percentage of women in important office, including the court, comes ''closer to 50 percent, we cannot say we have succeeded'': success would matter not because women bring a different view to judging, or legislating (she served in the Arizona legislature before becoming a state court judge). Only stereotypes, she argues, prevent women from achieving parity, a view borne of her own experience 50 years ago, when the only job a law firm offered her, after she made a distinguished record at Stanford Law School, was as a legal secretary.

The Washington Post - Dahlia Lithwick

O'Connor is most compelling in the essays that shed light on the sorts of influences that affect her as a judge: how her experiences as a state legislator in Arizona have informed her feelings about states' rights or how her inability to get anything other than a legal secretary's job despite excellent grades at Stanford Law School colors her view of discrimination cases. While she acknowledges that her role is limited to interpreting the law, her essay on Thurgood Marshall is one of the most telling chapters of the book. Here she admits to being moved by his storytelling and profoundly influenced by his struggles with racism and his compassion for the downtrodden. This quality in O'Connor -- a willingness to look beyond black-letter law and express sympathy for the weak -- is something one sometimes witnesses at oral argument.

Publishers Weekly

O'Connor, veteran associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, distills in this book the scores of talks she has given across the country and around the world in the 20 years since her accession to the high court. O'Connor, the author of the bestselling memoir Lazy B, is an enthusiast of the American legal system, reaching back to its origins in the Magna Carta and, later, in the English Privy Council, with its power to invalidate legislation. Declaring federal and state laws unconstitutional, of course, is the core of the Supreme Court's authority over this country's legal system, and O'Connor traces the exercise of that authority from the era of Chief Justice John Marshall to Brown v. Board of Education. In other chapters, O'Connor profiles Supreme Court titans such as Holmes and Taft, and reviews the long struggle to gain for women the right to vote. Elsewhere, the author suggests reforms for the jury system, extols the benefits of an independent judiciary and offers a graceful tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall. Canons of ethics prohibit judges from public comment on controversial matters likely to arise in their future cases, and a Supreme Court justice cannot reveal the dynamics of the Court's deliberations. These rules of discretion pervade O'Connor's book. Divisive (and provocative) issues such as abortion, the death penalty or affirmative action are addressed only in the broadest possible generalities. Purged of controversy, O'Connor's book is an engagingly written civics lesson, delivering a warm appreciation of legal history and principles but little light on the issues the Supreme Court confronts today. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Justice O'Connor gives a history of the U.S. judicial system with an emphasis on how the Supreme Court evolved into its present form. For students only dimly aware of the court through a basic civics class and the occasional sensational case highlighted by the media, this title will prove to be enlightening. The book takes on a conversational tone, and it's easy to imagine oneself in a university lecture hall with O'Connor as the (usually) fascinating professor who has her feet firmly planted in the real world. To get the most out of the book, it should be read cover to cover. However, it is also useful for readers who wish commentary on particular aspects of the Supreme Court, historical cases, or personalities. The tone is even, and O'Connor has a kind and often complimentary attitude toward fellow justices past and present. High points are her experiences working with Justice Thurgood Marshall, and her thoughts on women and the law. As a bonus, she includes a glimpse into her views on judicial systems of countries that are undergoing their own painful evolutions, such as the former Soviet bloc. All in all, this is a good book for readers who would like a personable introduction to one of our nation's most powerful institutions.-Sheila Shoup, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An informative, behind-the-scenes view of daily life at the tallest bench in the land. One of the most ingenious points of American democracy, writes Justice O'Connor (Lazy B, 2001), is its according "dual sovereignty" to the national and state governments; it is also one of its thorniest aspects, a source of constant conflict. Hence, the Supreme Court, which, since the days of John Marshall, has reserved for itself the power to determine whether a given law falls within the bounds of the Constitution. Justice O'Connor looks at a few of the signal cases the Court has heard in the last half-century, such as Brown v. Board of Education; profiles predecessors and colleagues like Thurgood Marshall and Warren Burger; holds forth on practical problems, e.g., jury duty ("It is incumbent upon those who oversee their jury systems to make sure that jury service, for whatever length of time, is bearable"); and exalts the better angels of American democracy, however fragile, witness the principle "that certain fundamental rights, to which every citizen is entitled, mist be placed outside the reach of political exigency." Throughout, Justice O'Connor writes with lively humor; considering the mounds of paper that cross her desk: for instance, "The Court is a more reliable backstop for the health of the paper industry than any protectionist legislation Congress might pass." Humor aside, and despite her conservative leanings, she also writes with a sharp sense of appreciation for dissenting views, and she is keenly appreciative of the growing role of women in political decision-making, arguing that "society as a whole can benefit immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of gender,have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement, and remuneration based on ability." An able primer on the role of the Supreme Court in American life, and on the merits--and shortcomings--of American democracy.

Look this: Einnahme des Sprungs: Das Bauen einer Karriere als ein Sehkünstler

Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History

Author: John Patrick Diggins

An important reassessment of the fortieth president, placing him in the pantheon with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

In this bold, revisionist biography, distinguished historian John Patrick Diggins shows that Ronald Reagan, in his distrust of big government, his pursuit of libertarian ideals, and his negotiations with Gorbachev, was a far more active and sophisticated president than we previously knew. Affirming the fortieth president to be an exemplar of the truest conservative values, Diggins "identifies Reagan as the 'Emersonian President,' who believed that power is best when it resides in people, not government" (Library Journal). 13 photographs.

Publishers Weekly

A professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Diggins (The Rise and Fall of the American Left) provides an original reappraisal of Ronald Reagan from the conservative perspective. Throughout, Diggins discovers nuances that have heretofore escaped notice by most other Reagan scholars. For example: in appraising Reagan's reaction as California governor to '60s radicals, Diggins is the first writer to acknowledge the extent to which the onetime movie star shared common ground with rebels on campuses nationwide. Reagan, with his reverence for Thomas Paine and passion for limiting the reach of government, was-on at least one level-more than sympathetic when Berkeley protesters chanted, "Two, Four, Six, Eight, Organize to Smash the State!" Although a fan of Reagan's, Diggins doesn't hesitate to be critical-as when he discusses Reagan's attitude as president toward environmental issues, which Diggins characterizes as "puzzling" and "disastrous." (Diggins notes that Reagan's record as governor of California, where he allied himself with old guard Republican conservationists, was far more environmentally-friendly.) Overall, Diggins does a superb job of tracing Reagan's intellectual development from old school New Dealer to thoughtful, Emersonian libertarian, and also firmly establishes Reagan's credentials as a major architect of communism's final collapse. 13 photos. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Now that nearly two decades have passed since the Ronald Reagan presidency ended, insightful commentaries that benefit from recently released documents and new historical perspectives have supplanted the many kick-and-tell memoirs written by officials and advisors immediately following the Gipper's departure from office. These two works illuminate the political roots that anchored Reagan's memorable speeches and policies. Diggins (history, CUNY Graduate Ctr.; The Proud Decades) claims that the many liberal academic historians and a biased media have denied Reagan his legacy as one of our greatest presidents. He identifies Reagan as the "Emersonian President," who believed that power is best when it resides in people, not government. This belief, he says, inspired Reagan's advocacy of small government, low taxes, and anticommunism. While such events as the Iran-contra fiasco, the savings and loan scandals, ballooning deficits, and strained race relations-all described here-must be factored into Reagan's legacy, Diggins makes a good case that Reagan's relationships with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resulted in nuclear disarmament and a Cold War thaw that were Lincolnesque in their importance and revealing of a "greatness of soul." Evans, an attorney who served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, offers an account of Reagan's years with General Electric (GE) from 1954 to 1962. During this time, he shows, Reagan honed his emerging conservative message while serving as the traveling ambassador to GE's 250,000 workers at 139 plants throughout the United States. For Reagan, this experience was his advanced education in practical politics taught by his mentor, GE director of community relations Lemuel Boulware, to whom the author devotes much attention. Boulware taught his apt pupil how to avoid labor bosses and speak directly to the blue-collar employees who enthused over his call for lower taxes and reduced government control. The education and the enhanced communications skills that Reagan took from his GE years propelled him toward the political career that culminated with his two-term presidency and wide public support. Both of these books about Reagan's rise are recommended for public and academic libraries, and Diggins's book, strongly so, for larger public collections. [Diggins's book was previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/06.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A middle-of-the-road liberal (John Adams, 2003, etc.) looks into Ronald Reagan's soul and concludes that it was great-and that the president was "politically wise, humane, and magnanimous" to boot. Reagan was more radical than conservative, by Diggins's account. He found inspiration in the life and work of Tom Paine, that little acknowledged founding father; he quoted Paine to the Soviets and hailed the Afghan mujahedeen and Nicaraguan contras as Paine's rightful heirs. He considered the state to be the source of most evil, though his actions, Diggins writes, made big government inevitable; his dream of an almost stateless society and his sensibility generally "partook of the tragic vision of liberalism." And, Diggins suggests, Reagan's religion was less inclined to Christian fundamentalism than to a Jeffersonian deism: "He seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice." All in all, Diggins writes, Reagan "was a liberal romantic who opened up the American mind to the full blaze of Emersonian optimism." For this and many other reasons, not least because Reagan knew his Transcendentalists, Diggins holds that Reagan needs serious attention from intellectual historians, who have largely dismissed him as a nonintellectual. Not so, Diggins counters: Reagan was aware of the nature of his arguments, was well schooled in them. If Diggins has a beef, it is with the unworthy neoconservatives who claim Reagan as their own; Diggins faults Reagan's view of the Cold War as inaccurate and lacking in complexity, for instance, but clearly favors it to the reckless warmaking of the current administration. "To rescueReagan from many of today's so-called Reaganites may help rescue America from the pride of its present follies," he adds. A significant book, if surely arguable in granting Reagan more depth and ability than most nonbelievers have hitherto suspected.

Preface     xiii
Acknowledgments     xxiii
Introduction     1
The Political Romantic     19
From Huck Finn to Film Star     55
To Repent or Not to Repent: The Communist Controversy in Hollywood     81
Governor Reagan: The Golden State     117
A Reagan Revolution, or the End of Ideology?     155
Neoconservative Intellectuals and the Cold War     189
Into the Heart of Darkness: The Reagan Doctrine and the Third World     219
History as Tragedy, History as Farce     263
Politics, Economy, Society     303
From Deterrence to Dialogue: How the Cold War Ended     343
The Homeric Conclusion     399
A Coda: Slavery and Communism: Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan     415
Abbreviations for References     431
Notes     433
Bibliographical Note     459
Photograph Credits     465
Index     467

The Firm or American Chica

2009-01-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

Author: Penny Junor

The House of Windsor is a big business, though one with more ups and downs than the stock market. Prince Philip calls it “The Firm,” and all the royal executives and their powerful associates are supposed to make every effort to avoid even a hint of scandal that could diminish the reputation of the family business.

Unfortunately for the royals, for the past twenty years scandal and controversy have deluged the Queen’s family, putting everything at risk. Focusing primarily on the years after the death of Diana and leading up to the heir to the throne’s marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles this past April 9th, royal insider Penny Junor offers a sympathetic yet utterly candid look at a family that has made itself the world’s soap opera in THE FIRM: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor.

Can “The Firm” survive much longer? Will Charles or even William decide that the throne is not worth the trouble? Can this, the ultimate family business, weather this storm of spiritual (though not fiscal) bankruptcy, or will momentum and a cadre of brilliant advisors keep the enterprise in business for years to come?

THE FIRM investigates the Family’s relationship with government, the press and the people. It looks at whether the institution can reach out to those, particularly the young, who see the House of Windsor as insignificant. It asks, in short, whether the British monarchy has a future.

Penny Junor knows the answers in this sure-to-be controversial book—the first to be published on the newly restructured royal family.

Library Journal

Readers of this interesting and occasionally jaw-dropping look at the world's most famous dysfunctional family will find plenty to engage them. Journalist and royal biographer Junor (Charles: Victim or Villain; Diana, Princess of Wales) tells the reader that "the Queen believes that with few exceptions everything that has gone wrong for the monarchy in the last twenty years has been attributable to Mrs. Parker Bowles." And the reason Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party? "Today's young are blissfully unaware of history (some of them aren't even taught it in our schools)." The reader comes away from the book feeling that had this family ever actually sat down and talked to one another a lot of their very public misfortunes might have been avoided. However, Junor doesn't just dish the dirt. She goes to a great deal of trouble to explain how "The Firm" works (and the queen, Princes Philip and Charles, and Princess Anne work very hard indeed) and at what actual cost to the nation. Given the Royal Family's frequent appearance in the headlines, this work is sure to be in demand. Highly recommended for all public libraries.-Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., MA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Geschäftsethik, ein Unterrichten und das Lernen der Klassenzimmer-Ausgabe: Konzepte und Fälle

American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

Author: Marie Arana

In her father’s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who “was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica.”

Here are two vastly different landscapes: Peru—earthquake-prone, charged with ghosts of history and mythology—and the sprawling prairie lands of Wyoming. In these rich terrains resides a colorful cast of family members who bring Arana’s historia to life...her proud grandfather who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling grandmother, “clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage.” But most important are Arana’s parents: he a brilliant engineer, she a gifted musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.

New York Times Book Review - Wendy Gimbel

[In] Arana's passionate account of her childhood, cross-fertilization is a source of strength . . . One of the many reasons the reader can't put this memoir down is the author's impressive command of her craft.

Washington Post

American Chica is a fascinating blend of autobiography and soap opera, memoir and meditation. ... full of larger-than-life characters and stranger-than-fiction situations. ... delightful.

USA Today

Lush, mystical ... a memoir that blends family historia and the puzzling deadly politics of Peru.

New York Times Book Review

Part history, part family memoir ... American Chica reads like a collaboration between John Cheever and Isabel Allende.... One of the many reasons the reader can't put this memoir down is the author's impressive command of her craft.... Arana has left her own imprint on her material, while at the same time displaying virtuosity in the storyteller's traditional gifts: spareness, clarity, and a passion for allegory.

Publishers Weekly

Though this memoir of growing up in America and Peru centers on Arana's parents' turbulent marriage, her real focus is the way cultures define, limit and enrich us. At one point, Arana, whose mother is American and father is Peruvian, recalls her first lesson in the color politics of Latin America. She was living in a gated house, in a factory town high in the Andes, and wanted to invite the daughter of the family cook to her birthday party. Of course she can come, said Arana's mother, but if she does, none of the mothers of the other little girls will allow them to attend; an Indian girl is not accepted at a party of aristocratic schoolchildren. "I am reminded of my political innocence," Arana writes, "when I go to Latino conferences in [the U.S.]. When I see the children of Spanish-blooded oligarchs line up alongside migrant workers for a piece of affirmative action." It is this willingness to slice through convenient classifications, to see the rifts in every group, that distinguishes Arana's account of how she learned to navigate between a culture that encouraged family loyalty and another that fostered independence. She writes beautifully, whether describing hunting for ghosts in Peru's highlands, chewing tobacco in Wyoming, attending an American school in Lima or finding friends in New Jersey. Arana, the editor of the Washington Post Book World, blends a journalist's dedication to research with a style that sings with humor. Her memoir is an outstanding contribution to the growing shelf of Latina literature. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Those who have lived life trying to bridge two different worlds will find that Arana's intimate and intelligent memoir captures exactly the pulse of a changing America. In the mid-1940s, Arana's Peruvian father, an upper-class, MIT-educated engineer, married a free-spirited Wyoming musician and brought her back to his homeland to raise their three children. Told from the perspective of a precocious young Arana, who is learning that she has to navigate constantly between her inner two selves the "wild American" and the "lady-like Latina" the first chapters recount an idyllic childhood in Peru. But eventually, circumstance leads her to trace her lineage back to the infamous Julio Cesar Arana, who turned a profitable rubber business at the edge of the Amazon into a virtual human slaughterhouse, and Arana reveals the legacy of shame surrounding her surname. Arana expertly juggles the good vs. evil elements essential to any coming-of-age story and forays effortlessly into mystical moments. Toward the end, her themes begin to feel repetitive, but her story still manages to grip you. Finally able to connect the pieces of her family's history, she likens Peru's earthquakes to her parents' love, in which "two force fields meet and you have confrontation." With her first book, Arana, who is editor of the Washington Post Book World, clearly demonstrates her ability to write crystalline prose and make erudite cultural observations. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Adriana Lopez, "Cr ticas" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World, recently described this memoir as a love story. It is fraught with the tension of two worlds colliding: her North American mother's independent, free-spirited individualism crashes into her South American father's traditional, family-based orientation. Their children formed the bicultural bridge between them. In rich, lyrical prose, the author details her privileged, Peruvian childhood, watched by amas, and schooled at home. She writes of her grandfather who lived like a hermit in his own house, and further back the ancestors who played a horrifying role on Peru's rubber plantations. She describes the scent of sugar, "raw, rough, Cartavio brown" from her father's factory; the sounds of "El Gringo," the crazy blind man on his daily rounds; and the surreal world of los pishtacos, the ghosts, so mystifying, but terrifyingly real to Arana. She also writes of her mother and her former marriages, and finally of her life in America. Here Arana is an American Chica, where she leads not a double life, sometimes in her "American skin" at other times she is a Latina, but a triple life in which she makes up a "whole new person." While this book, filled with humor and insight, will be of special interest to Hispanic teens, it is a sparkling addition to the story of America's "salad bowl" and will appeal to young people of all heritages.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Expressive memoirs of a Peruvian-American girlhood, by the editor of the Washington Post Book World. Arana, daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother, sees herself as a hybrid, a fusion of Latina and Anglo, embodying both cultures but an outsider in each. Growing up in Cartavio, a W.R. Grace company town on the coast of Peru (where her father was an engineer) in the 1950s, the author was surrounded by native servants who filled the observant and impressionable child with magical legends and tales of fearsome spirits. At the same time, she was being schooled at home by her no-nonsense mother with textbooks ordered from the US. In 1956, when her American grandmother was dying, the family spent three months in Wyoming. There Arana, not yet seven, met her all-American relatives, learned to shoot, chew tobacco, and spit, and encountered racial segregation for the first time. Back in Peru (this time in Lima) and once again a member of the upper class, she fooled the administrator of the American school there into assigning her to the Spanish-speaking classes (where she made fun of the Anglos), but out of school she played American street games with her older brother. In 1959, the family moved to New Jersey, and the author describes herself slipping in and out of her cultural identities there, choosing when to be Peruvian and when to be American. Within this winning portrait of a bicultural childhood are a host of notable characters-the mysterious Peruvian grandfather who stayed in his upstairs room for 20 years, the tradition-bound Peruvian grandmother who ruled the family, the young gardener who taught Arana about her soul, and (most of all) her parents, whose difficult but enduring marriage is at the very center of her story. A rich and compelling personal narrative.

Raid on the Sun or Racial Paranoia

2009-01-11T15:32:00.000-08:00

Raid on the Sun: Inside Israel's Secret Campaign That Denied Saddam the Bomb

Author: Rodger W Clair

The first authorized inside account of one of the most daring—and successful—military operations in recent history.

From the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So when France sold Iraq a top-of-the-line nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concerned—especially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weapons-grade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb. The reactor formed the heart of a huge nuclear plant situated twelve miles from Baghdad, 1,100 kilometers from Tel Aviv. By 1981, the reactor was on the verge of becoming "hot," and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew he would have to confront its deadly potential. He turned to Israeli Air Force commander General David Ivry to secretly plan a daring surgical strike on the reactor—a never-before-contemplated mission that would prove to be one of the most remarkable military operations of all time.

Written with the full and exclusive cooperation of the Israeli Air Force high command, General Ivry (ret.), and all of the eight mission pilots (including Ilan Ramon, who become Israel's first astronaut and perished tragically in the shuttle Columbia disaster), Raid on the Sun tells the extraordinary story of how Israel plotted the unthinkable: defying its U.S. and European allies to eliminate Iraq's nuclear threat. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, journalist Rodger Claire re-creates a gripping tale of personal sacrifice and survival, of young pilots who trained in the United States on the then-new, radically sophisticated F-16fighter bombers, then faced a nearly insurmountable challenge: how to fly the 1,000-plus-kilometer mission to Baghdad and back on one tank of fuel. He recounts Israeli intelligence's incredible "black ops" to sabotage construction on the French reactor and eliminate Iraqi nuclear scientists, and he gives the reader a pilot's-eye view of the action on June 7, 1981, when the planes roared off a runway on the Sinai Peninsula for the first successful destruction of a nuclear reactor in history.

Publishers Weekly

This gripping account of Operation Babylon, the Israelis' 1981 raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, is the first to draw on planners' and pilots' own memories. The raid was planned to follow a long campaign of espionage, sabotage and outright assassination by the Mossad, which had failed to prevent the French-built reactor from being about ready to produce weapons-grade plutonium in the summer of 1981. Then the Israeli air force, taking its new F-16s on their first combat mission and one far beyond their designed performance, struck, obliterating the reactor with no losses, few misses and only one civilian casualty. Tactics, technology and weapons are all presented in a clear manner that does not slow the pace. L.A.-based journalist Claire's group portrait of the eight superlatively skilled and trained pilots includes Zeev Raz, the squadron leader and now a general; the ace, Iftach Spector, who missed his target because he suffered a blackout induced by the flu; and Ilan Ramon, who became Israel's first astronaut and was lost on the Columbia. The final result reads like a techno-thriller that is difficult to put down once the mission gets airborne. (On sale Apr. 13) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Lack of good intelligence-gathering sources has plagued the United States for decades-long before the evident disappearance of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction despite the use of all our technology. This was not the case in 1981, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq's first nuclear reactor. Iraq had purchased its nuclear reactor from France in 1975 and had scientists at work on extracting plutonium to develop an atomic weapons program. Claire, the first journalist granted access to classified documents and interviews with strike participants, details how the Israeli government obtained high-resolution satellite photographs of the site from the United States, adapted newly acquired F-16 fighters so that they could make the flight without refueling, and secretly trained pilots for the mission. Claire breathes life into this largely forgotten event, and his sensitivity to the human element of the story-especially the ability of the Israelis to obtain human intelligence in planning their response-is striking. Extremely well written, this is highly recommended for all libraries.-Charles M. Minyard, U.S. Army, Blountstown, FL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Weapons of mass destruction? Look for them in the rubble of Iraq's al-Tuwaitha nuclear facility, destroyed by Israeli flyers 23 years ago. After attaining power, writes Los Angeles-based journalist and screenwriter Claire, Saddam Hussein set about making Iraq a nuclear power. But early on, "for all Hussein's obsession with control, it was clear that Iraq had been taken for a ride by the superpowers." The Soviets, for instance, sold Hussein a leaky reactor in the early 1960s, for which the Soviets charged by the ton and layered on all kinds of useless and ancient hardware. Hussein had his revenge: he ordered his scientists to figure out how to develop weapons-grade materials from the reactor, then expelled the Soviets in 1972 and stopped payment. Claire marvels at the ingenuity of those scientists, among them Khidir Hamza, who worried about "his part in enabling Saddam's ambitious plans to become a nuclear state" but still figured that the achievement of building the Arab world's first nuclear weapon would look good on his resume. Enter France, which sold Hussein a better reactor and helped speed the process along. Enter Israel, which had no intention of sharing nuclear-power status with a hostile neighbor; it launched a daring air raid on Iraq that involved crossing over hundreds of miles of desert only a hundred or so feet above the ground. The pilots, among them Israeli's first astronaut, passed directly above Jordanian King Hussein's yacht; fortunately, he didn't pick up the phone to call Baghdad, and the raid went on as planned, destroying the Iraqi nuclear plant with letter-perfect precision and making the French technicians there very glum indeed-as well as displeasing US Secretaryof State Alexander Haig, who called the raid "reckless" and briefly suspended arms sales to Israel. Drawing on interviews with the Israeli pilots involved, Claire's well-paced account is of interest to aerial-warfare buffs, and a useful if minor footnote to the war against Hussein. Agent: David Halpern/Robbins Agency

See also: Funding Evil or On the Fireline

Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness

Author: John L Jackson

A provocative new paradigm of race relations in the twenty-first century, in which the overt racism of the past has been replaced by subconscious suspicions and whispered conspiracy theories.

The Civil War put an end to slavery, and the civil rights movement put an end to legalized segregation. Crimes motivated by racism are punished with particular severity, and Americans are more sensitive than ever about the words they choose when talking about race. And yet America remains divided along the color line.

Acclaimed scholar John L. Jackson, Jr., identifies a new paradigm of race relations that has emerged in the wake of the legal victories of the civil rights era: racial paranoia. We live in an age of racial equality punctuated by galling examples of ongoing discrimination-from the federal government's inadequate efforts to protect the predominantly black population of New Orleans to Michael Richards's outrageous outburst. Not surprisingly, African-Americans distrust the rhetoric of political correctness, and see instead the threat of racism lurking below every white surface.

Conspiracy theories abound and racial reconciliation seems near to impossible. In Racial Paranoia, Jackson explains how this paranoia is cultivated, transferred, and exaggerated; how it shapes our nation and undermines the goal of racial equality; and what can be done to fight it.

Publishers Weekly

Calls for a conversation about race crop up persistently-as in the wake of the Imus scandal or O.J. Simpson's acquittal. Jackson's (Harlemworld; Real Black) examination of how race remains singular in American consciousness proves a lively opening gambit to a thought-provoking analysis. After a loose historical survey of race matters before the 1960s, when "brash and brazen American racism" was mainstream, Jackson focuses on the current state of affairs in racial fears and distrust that have gone underground and express themselves as racial paranoia and "de cardio" racism ("what the law can't touch, what won't be easily proved or disproved, what can't be simply criminalized or deemed unconstitutional"). Racial paranoia, not "just 'a black thing,' " owes much to the way mass media confirms or subverts stereotypes; de cardio racism is cloaked, "papered over with public niceties and politically correct jargon." Jackson explores particularly fresh areas in his illuminating consideration of The Man Who Cried I Amand 1996, racial paranoia's canonical texts and in his attention to the McCarran Act's effect upon black thinkers. Passionate and committed Jackson is, but his content is balanced. Casually scholarly and often witty, Jackson offers the reader "new ways of talking about race's subtler dynamic and new ways of spying racial conflict in the twenty-first century." (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

Forty years after the heydey of the Civil Rights movement, blacks find themselves in a quandary, unable to deduce who is racist. So asserts Jackson (Communications and Anthropology/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity, 2005, etc.) in a rambling, repetitive text burdened by academic jargon. With lynching (almost) a historical memory and public use of the word "nigger" taboo, racial prejudice is now exhibited in more subtle ways that have given rise to a debilitating paranoia among blacks, he argues. Jackson cites as evidence media reports, publications by other academics and Internet chatter. In a wildly disjointed discussion, he revisits the saga of Dave Chappelle, who in 2005 famously walked away from a purported $50 million contract for his hit television show on Comedy Central. Jackson notes that Chappelle was driven to take a hiatus from his career after a white staffer laughed at a sketch he performed in blackface. The comic could not discern whether the staffer was laughing with or at him-a common conundrum for blacks at a time when political correctness reigns. The author also probes a 2006 conflict involving former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who was detained by a white Capitol Hill cop after bypassing a metal detector at her office. Successful blacks like McKinney, who alleged she was a victim of racial profiling, routinely evoke suspicion in halls of power, writes Jackson. He suggests that whites can help blacks conquer racial paranoia-he uses the phrase ten times on a single page-by making friends across racial lines, buying homes in diverse neighborhoods and avoiding predominately white day-care centers. Readers are likely to be stunned byJackson's revelation that some blacks feel they receive less cream cheese on their bagels than whites. A professor's lecture notes run amok. Agent: Andrew Stuart/The Stuart Agency

What People Are Saying

Mark Anthony Neal
"Having an honest conversations about race is as daunting as it was a century ago when W.E.B. DuBois acknowledged the color-line as the defining reality of American culture. Never one to be discouraged by such challenges, John L. Jackson, Jr., once again puts conventional wisdom on its head with a smart, imaginative and humorous conversation about race in contemporary America. With the publication Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, I suspect Jackson will become everybody's favorite public intellectual."--(Mark Anthony Neal, author of New Black Man)

Randall Robinson
"For those who are repeatedly wounded by racism, the prophylactic defense of 'paranoia' may be every bit as involuntary as it is practical. In his insightful new book, John L. Jackson Jr. renders a rigorous and fresh examination of the new axis of race relations in America."--(Randall Robinson, author of An Unbroken Agony: Haiti From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President)

Noah Feldman
"Brutally honest and brilliantly original, Racial Paranoia diagnoses an urgent problem: the suspicion and the reality of racism on the down-low. John Jackson takes us on a stunning whirlwind tour through a landscape peopled by everyone from Frederick Douglass to Dave Chappelle. The picture that emerges is of a new reality where race is everywhere and nowhere, seen and unseen, felt and ignored. Jackson's insight into what he calls the de cardio racism inscribed on American hearts is destined to make this book a classic."--(Noah Feldman, Professor of Law, Harvard University, author of Fall and Rise of the Islamic State)

Henry Louis Gates Jr.
"By listening to conversations about race and studying its endless iterations in popular culture, John L. Jackson, Jr., arrives at a nuanced and utterly convincing reading of how, when we talk about race, we pretend to talk about everything but race, and of how all of us learn to understand what's being said. This important new book will help us decipher and make sense of our national conversation about race."--(Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University)

Tyrants or CliffsQuickReview American Government

2009-01-11T05:20:00.000-08:00

Tyrants: The World's 20 Worst Living Dictators

Author: David Wallechinsky

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

Look this: Freedom or The Puritan Dilemma

CliffsQuickReview American Government

Author: Abraham Hoffman

CliffsQuickReview course guides cover the essentials of your toughest classes. Get a firm grip on core concepts and key material, and test your newfound knowledge with review questions.

Whether you are a student under pressure, an interested citizen trying to brush up, or a recent arrival trying to understand this new land in which you find yourself, CliffsQuickReview American Government can help. This guide introduces each topic, defines key terms, and carefully walks you through each sample problem step-by-step. In no time, you'll be ready to tackle the key concepts in this book such as

The Declaration of Independence
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
Congress, the President, and the Judiciary
Political parties
Voting and elections
Civil Liberties
Economic and foreign policy

CliffsQuickReview American Government provides an overview of the history, institutions, practices, and policies of the American government with plain words and useful formats, so that you can use your time efficiently. Use this reference in any way that fits your personal style for study and review — you decide what works best with your needs. Here are just a few ways you can search for topics:

Use the free Pocket Guide full of essential information
Get a glimpse of what you'll gain from a chapter by reading through the Chapter Check-In at the beginning of each chapter
Use the Chapter Checkout at the end of each chapter to gauge your grasp of the important information you need to know
Test your knowledge more completely in the CQR Review and look for additional sources of information in the CQRResource Center
Use the glossary to find key terms fast.

With titles available for all the most popular high school and college courses, CliffsQuickReview guides are a comprehensive resource that can help you get the best possible grades.

The Nations Health or Writing a Research Paper in Political Science

2009-01-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

The Nation's Health

Author: Rosemarie Rizzo Pars

Edited by two of the nation's leading health and aging policy experts, Philip R. Lee and Carroll L. Estes, the seventh edition of The Nation's Health critically examines the nation's health; the determinants of health; the roles of both public health care (population-based intervention) and personal health care; and the role of the community in protecting and assuring the health of the population. Rather than merely focusing on the care of the sick or the financing of care and public health, this text looks at the complex web of issues, policies, controversies, and proposed solutions that surround health policy, public health, community health, and health care in the United States.

Bernard J. Turnock

The latest edition of this book is an outstanding collection of articles and essays on the American health system. More than two dozen separate topics are addressed by an impressive panel of contributors. The book's purpose is to provide an understanding of the health problems facing the U.S. in the 1990s, and especially those problems that have brought the system to the brink of significant reform in the organization, financing, and provision of health services. These worthy objectives are achieved as this book provides an excellent foundation for understanding both the problems facing the provision of health services as well as the underlying determinants of health and illness in American society. Many audiences will find this book useful and interesting. These include students of health policy and health administration, as well as many professionals and leaders in the field of health services. The authors are very credible -- the senior author is the current Assistant Secretary for Health in the Clinton Administration -- and the contributors are a diverse selection of national policy experts. The technical features of this book, including illustrations, table of contents and index, are adequate. The references and recommended related readings are an excellent feature of this fourth edition. The need for a new edition is apparent in view of the current interest and recent debate over the form and content of health reform in America. Overall, this is an excellent and important contribution to the field. It is a must purchase for health libraries and must reading for those seriously engaged in thinking and planning for an enhanced health system for the U.S.

Nancy J. Stiles

This is a collection of concise articles covering the major health care issues and challenges of the 1990's. This is the fifth edition; the fourth edition was published in 1994. The purpose is to address the latest developments in the nation's health care system. The authors clearly meet this important goal. The book is relevant to a multidisciplinary audience interested in our nation's health. The editors and contributors meet the objectives of the text and all are readily acknowledged experts in their field. References are recent and from relevant well-respected sources. The overall appearance of the book is pleasing and its compact size facilitates portability. The table of contents is well organized into four parts. The brevity of the articles makes it easy for the reader to be updated on current issues quickly. The articles cover major healthcare issues and evolving challenges of the 1990s. Particular attention is given to healthcare reform, managed care, and women's health. Unfortunately some articles are covered too superficially.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer: Nancy J. Stiles, MD (University of Kentucky College of Medicine)
Description: This is a collection of concise articles covering the major health care issues and challenges of the 1990's. This is the fifth edition; the fourth edition was published in 1994.
Purpose: The purpose is to address the latest developments in the nation's health care system. The authors clearly meet this important goal.
Audience: The book is relevant to a multidisciplinary audience interested in our nation's health. The editors and contributors meet the objectives of the text and all are readily acknowledged experts in their field.
Features: References are recent and from relevant well-respected sources. The overall appearance of the book is pleasing and its compact size facilitates portability. The table of contents is well organized into four parts.
Assessment: The brevity of the articles makes it easy for the reader to be updated on current issues quickly. The articles cover major healthcare issues and evolving challenges of the 1990s. Particular attention is given to healthcare reform, managed care, and women's health. Unfortunately some articles are covered too superficially.

Booknews

A compendium of articles overviewing factors affecting the health of Americans. Topics discussed include tobacco, AIDS, the rationing of healthcare, preventive care, and the relationship between socioeconomic class and health. This new edition offers increased emphasis on public health and on women's health and aging. For students and professionals in health policy, public health, nursing, and medicine. Lee is affiliated with the Institute for Policy Studies. Estes is founding director of the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California-San Francisco. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Rating

4 Stars! from Doody

	Preface
	Introduction
	Acknowledgments
Pt. 1	Health of the Nation and Determinants of Health	1
Ch. 1	The Health of the Nation	3
Article 1	Trends in Mortality in the Twentieth Century	9
Article 2	Healthy People 2010 Objectives	30
Ch. 2	Determinants of Health	49
Article 1	Determinants of Health	57
Article 2	Socioeconomic Disparities in Health in the United States: An Agenda for Action	65
Article 3	Race or Class versus Race and Class: Mortality Differentials in the United States	79
Pt. 2	Health Policy and the Politics of Health	85
Ch. 3	Health Policy	87
Article 1	Health Care and Health Care Policy in a Changing World	93
Article 2	The Process of Public Policymaking: A Conceptual Model	109
Article 3	Chronic Condition: Why Health Reform Fails	116
Article 4	Decentralization, Devolution, and the Deficit: The Changing Role of the State and the Community	129
Ch. 4	Ethics, Values, and Ideology	143
Article 1	Ethics in the Political Marketplace	151
Article 2	A National Bill of Patients' Rights	157
Article 3	Health Care as a Social Good: Trauma Care and "The Kindness of Strangers"	166
Ch. 5	The Politics of Health	181
Article 1	The New Politics of U.S. Health Policy	186
Article 2	The Politics of Long-Term Care Reform Under the Clinton Health Plan: Lessons for the Future	206
Pt. 3	Public Health, Clinical Preventive Services, and the Emerging Collaboration of Medicine and Public Health	215
Ch. 6	Public Health, Clinical Preventive Services, and the Emerging Collaboration of Medicine and Public Health	217
Article 1	Ten Great Public Health Achievements - United States, 1900-1999	225
Article 2	Motor-Vehicle Safety: a 20th Century Public Health Achievement	228
Article 3	Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Control of Infectious Diseases	233
Article 4	Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Decline in Deaths from Heart Disease and Stroke - United States, 1900-1999	240
Article 5	Guide to Clinical Preventive Services	247
Article 6	Medicine and Public Health: The Power of Collaboration	262
Pt. 4	Health Insurance and Health Care Systems	303
Ch. 7	The Health Insurance System	305
Article 1	Health Insurance Coverage: Consumer Income	313
Article 2	The American Health Care System: Health Insurance Coverage	321
Article 3	The American Health Care System: Employer-Sponsored Health Coverage	331
Ch. 8	Medicare and Medicaid	341
Article 1	The American Health Care System: Medicare	349
Article 2	Rethinking Medicare Reform	363
Article 3	Medicare: Considerations for Adding a Prescription Drug Benefit	379
Article 4	The American Health Care System: Medicaid	389
Article 5	Medicare and Medicaid for the Elderly and Disabled Poor	403
Article 6	Medicaid's Role for Children	408
Ch. 9	Managed Care	413
Article 1	Consumer Protection in Managed Care: A Third-Generation Approach	417
Article 2	Medicaid and Managed Care	426
Article 3	The Uncertain Future of Managed Care	430
Ch. 10	Quality of Health Care	435
Article 1	The American Health Care System: The Movement for Improved Quality in Health Care	441
Article 2	Health System Reform and Quality	452
Pt. 5	Women's Health and Aging	467
Ch. 11	Women's Health and Aging	469
Article 1	Women in the Health Care System	475
Article 2	Gender and Race Bias in Medical Treatment	483
Article 3	Writing a New National Prescription for Women's Health in the 21st Century	490
Article 4	Health Concerns Across a Woman's Lifespan: The Commonwealth Fund 1998 Survey of Women's Health	503
Article 5	Medicare: A Women's Issue	514
Article 6	Aging and Gender: A New Voice on the Women's Health Agenda	523
	Recommended Reading	547
	Index	557

New interesting book: Cases and Materials on American Property Law or On the Front Lines

Writing a Research Paper in Political Science

Author: Lisa Baglion

Learn to write a great research paper with WRITING A RESEARCH PAPER IN POLITICAL SCIENCE! This concise political science text is more than just a typical research methods text, it helps you master writing, methodological, and research skills with ease. Topics covered include how to develop a research question, write a literature review, design a study, analyze information, write introductory and concluding sections, and edit and revise a paper. With a glossary, writing checklists, and examples of different parts of papers written by actual undergraduates, this political science text provides you with the tools you need to write a good research paper.

American Government or The Scotch Irish

2009-01-09T23:33:00.000-08:00

American Government

Author: Theodore J Lowi

American Government does more than any other text to get students to think analytically about American politics and government. The successful Five Principles of Politics framework integrated throughout the full and core versions helps students make sense of the material they encounter in the course, and the political information they encounter in their daily lives. In this Tenth Edition, new "Analyzing the Evidence" units in each chapter use bold graphics to show how data and basic methodology illuminate key political phenomena, and a new online reader offers students easy access to readings from over 100 recent articles and foundational works cited in the text. This Tenth Core Edition does not includes the policy chapters of the Tenth Full Edition.

Interesting textbook: Creative Kids or Faster Im Starving

The Scotch-Irish: A Social History

Author: James G Leyburn

Dispelling much of what he terms the "mythology" of the Scotch-Irish, James Leyburn provides an absorbing account of their heritage. He traces their life in Scotland, when the essentials of their character and culture were shaped; their removal to Northern Ireland; and their successive migrations to America, where many settled in the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, before joining the flow of pioneers westward in the wake of the Revolutionary War.

	Foreword	v
	Introduction	xi
Part I	The Scot in 1600
1.	Poverty and Insecurity	3
2.	Domestic Life of the Lowland Scot	14
3.	Scottish Social Institutions in 1600	36
4.	Religion in Scotland	47
A.	Before the Reformation	47
B.	The Reform and After	56
5.	The Mind and Character of the Lowlander	62
Part II	The Scots in Ireland
6.	The Plantation of Ulster, 1610 and After	83
7.	Causes of the Scottish Migration	99
A.	Economic	99
B.	Religious	101
8.	The Pioneer Scots in Ulster, 1606-1634	108
9.	The Hard Years, 1634-1690	120
10.	Intermarriage with the Irish	133
11.	The Character of the Ulster Scot	140
Part III	The Scotch-Irish in America
12.	The Migration	157
13.	Scotch-Irish Settlements	184
A.	Southeastern Pennsylvania	186
B.	The Valley of Virginia	200
C.	The Upper Carolinas	210
D.	Indian Menace to Settlement	223
E.	Smaller Settlements of Scotch-Irish	225
(1)	New England	236
(2)	The Middle Colonies	242
(3)	The Tidewater South	250
14.	Frontier Society	256
15.	The Presbyterian Church	273
16.	The Scotch-Irish in Politics	296
17.	Final Estimate	317
Appendix I	The Name "Scotch-Irish"	327
Appendix II	Important Events in Scottish History	335
	Notes	338
	Bibliography	354
	Index	373

The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East or Constitutional Law

2009-01-09T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East

Author: Olivier Roy

In this book, Olivier Roy, Europe's leading scholar of political Islam, argues that the consequences of the "war on terror" have artificially conflated conflicts in the Middle East in such a way that they appear to be the expression of a widespread "Muslim anger" against the West. But in reality, there are no us and them. Instead, the West faces an array of "reverse alliances" that operate according to their own logic and dynamics.

The West supports General Musharraf in Pakistan, yet his military intelligence services are in league with the Taliban; in Iraq, the United States shores up a government that is closely linked to its archenemy, Iran; Iraqi Kurds, allies of the Americans, give sanctuary to the PKK, an adversary of a fellow NATO member, Turkey; while the Saudis support the Iraqi Sunnis who are, in turn, fighting Coalition forces. As if these issues were not complicated enough, the ever-worsening Shia-Sunni divide now threatens to disrupt any future strategic planning the West might attempt in the Middle East.

Roy unravels the complexity of these conflicts in order to better understand the political discontent that sustains them. He also emphasizes that the war on terror should not be regarded merely as a geopolitical blunder committed by a fringe group of neoconservatives. It is instead a problematic outgrowth of our deeply rooted Western perceptions of the Middle East, including the belief that Islam, rather than politics, is the overarching factor in these conflicts, thus explaining the West's support for either would-be secular democrats or (more or less) benign dictators. Roy's conclusion argues that the West has no alternative but to engage in a dialogue with the political forces that truly matter-namely the Islamo-nationalists of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The New York Times - Dexter Filkins

At only 167 pages, Roy's book provides a concise and penetrating summation of the current scene; it's a fine primer for anyone trying to get a sense of just how chaotic the Middle East is. But if you are looking for a way out of the quagmire, or even ways to manage the various catastrophes, you will not find much here. Roy impressively delineates the challenges, but doesn't say much about solving them.

Contents:
Introduction: The War on Terror: between Fourth World War and Optical Illusion
I. Who is the Enemy? Where is the Enemy?
The obsession with Iraq
An illusion: the weight of lobbies in the decision to invade Iraq
The project to reform the greater Middle East
The failure of the top-down democratization policy
The return to a policy of containment or the eradication of Islamism

II. The Middle East: Atomization of Conflicts and New Fault Lines
The three traumas of the Arab Middle East
The political imaginaire in crisis: between nationalism, clannism, and supranationalism
From pan-Arabism to forms of pan-Islamism
A tectonic upheaval: Shiites against Sunnis

III. Iran, Between the Bomb and Bombardment
The Ahmadinejad phenomenon, parentheses or continuity?
An American bombardment?

IV. And meanwhile, Al Qaeda

Constitutional Law: Individual Rights E&E, 4E

Author: Aspen Law Business

Part of a two-volume set, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: Individual Rights continues to be a favorite with its tried-and-true E&E pedagogy. It is a problem-oriented guide designed and organized to complement major Constitutional Law casebooks. It takes students through the principal doctrines of constitutional law covered in a typical course, focusing on the constitutional provisions that protect citizens, specifically Takings and Contracts clauses, Due Process, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and Equal Protection.

This edition retains the great features that have always made it a dependable source for students. The text is:

straightforward in nature, though not overly simplistic

presented in a format that is unique and time-tested. Its E&E pedagogy combines textual material with well-written and comprehensive examples, explanations, and questions to test studentsї comprehension of the material and provide practice in applying legal principles to fact patterns. The questions, which develop a variety of issues in one fact situation, are similar to those on a law school or bar examination

a problem-oriented guide that takes students through the principal doctrines of constitutional law that are covered in a typical course

designed to make students think, with depth and perception, about the larger issues of constitutional law

part of a two-volume set that includes a corresponding treatment of National Power and Federalism. Together, these volumes present a foundation in the doctrines and methods of constitutional law and constitutional argument

organized in easily digestible sections. It explains legal concepts and principles, followed by examplesand analysis that illustrate how to apply these concepts and principles in hypothetical situations

strong in authorship, as the authors have more than 50 years of combined experience in the area of constitutional law

The Fourth Edition also includes an abundance of updated & timely information, including:

all relevant Supreme Court decisions that were announced since publication of the Third Edition. Representative new case coverage includes:—Tenn. v. Lane (congruence and proportionality under the Fourteenth Amendment)—Goodridge v. Dept.of Public Health (Massachusetts decision on gay marriage)—Kelo v. City of New London, Conn. (Fifth Amendment Takings Clause decision regarding public use)—League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (political gerrymandering)—McConnell v. Federal Election Comm'n (First amendment limits on soft money contributions)—City of San Diego v. Roe (free speech rights of public employees)—McCreary County v. ACLU (display of Ten Commandments in state courthouse)—Van Orden v. Perry (display of Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds)—Van Orden v. Perry (government benefits and Free Exercise)

refreshed and updated examples and explanations to put the material in context for your students

Justice or The Plot to Seize the White House

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

Justice: Rights and Wrongs

Author: Nicholas Wolterstorff

Wide-ranging and ambitious, Justice combines moral philosophy and Christian ethics to develop an important theory of rights and of justice as grounded in rights. Nicholas Wolterstorff discusses what it is to have a right, and he locates rights in the respect due the worth of the rights-holder. After contending that socially-conferred rights require the existence of natural rights, he argues that no secular account of natural human rights is successful; he offers instead a theistic account.

Wolterstorff prefaces his systematic account of justice as grounded in rights with an exploration of the common claim that rights-talk is inherently individualistic and possessive. He demonstrates that the idea of natural rights originated neither in the Enlightenment nor in the individualistic philosophy of the late Middle Ages, but was already employed by the canon lawyers of the twelfth century. He traces our intuitions about rights and justice back even further, to Hebrew and Christian scriptures. After extensively discussing justice in the Old Testament and the New, he goes on to show why ancient Greek and Roman philosophy could not serve as a framework for a theory of rights.

Connecting rights and wrongs to God's relationship with humankind, Justice not only offers a rich and compelling philosophical account of justice, but also makes an important contribution to overcoming the present-day divide between religious discourse and human rights.

Preface     vii
Introduction     1
The Archeology of Rights     19
Two Conceptions of Justice     21
A Contest of Narratives     44
Justice in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible     65
On De-justicizing the New Testament     96
Justice in the New Testament Gospels     109
Fusion of Narrative with Theory: The Goods to Which We Have Rights     133
Locating That to Which We Have Rights     135
Why Eudaimonism Cannot Serve as Framework for a Theory of Rights     149
Augustine's Break with Eudaimonism     180
The Incursion of the Moral Vision of Scripture into Late Antiquity     207
Characterizing Life- and History-Goods     227
Theory: Having a Right to a Good     239
Accounting for Rights     241
Rights Not Groundedin Duties     264
Rights Grounded in Respect for Worth     285
The Nature and Grounding of Natural Human Rights     311
Is a Secular Grounding of Human Rights Possible?     323
A Theistic Grounding of Human Rights     342
Applications and Implications     362
Epilogue: Concluding Reflections     385
General Index     395
Index of Scriptural References     399

Interesting textbook: Construção Sustentável:Desenho de Edifício Verde e Entrega

The Plot to Seize the White House

Author:

Most people will be shocked to learn that in 1933 a cabal of wealthy industrialists—in league with groups like the K.K.K. and the American Liberty League—planned to overthrow the U.S. government in a fascist coup. Their plan was to turn discontented veterans into American “brown shirts,” depose F.D.R., and stop the New Deal. They clandestinely asked Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to become the first American Caesar. He, though, was a true patriot and revealed the plot to journalists and to Congress. In a time when a sitting President has invoked national security to circumvent constitutional checks and balances, this episode puts the spotlight on attacks upon our democracy and the individual courage needed to repel them.

	Prologue	1
Part 1	Architect of Their Lives	5
Part 2	The Stand-In	117
Part 3	Brothers Within	231
Part 4	The Lost Boys	317
	Epilogue	405
	Afterword, 2001	414
	Bibliographic Note	424
	Reference Notes	429
	Index	514

Practical Politics Book

Governing Health or The Fragmented World of the Social

Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy

Nancy Milio

Doody Review Services

Booknews

Booknews

Rating

Table of Contents:

The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy

Views from the South or Right Answers

Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the Wto on Third World Countries

Booknews

Table of Contents:

Right Answers: Short Takes on Big Issues: Separating Fact from Fantasy

Poisonous Affair or Almanac of Political Corruption Scandals and Dirty Politics

Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja

The Washington Post - Fawaz A. Gerges

Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals and Dirty Politics

Differences That Matter or Kennedys

Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada

Kennedys: An American Drama

Table of Contents:

Death of a Dissident or The Complete Book Of Police And Military Motorcycles

Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB

The Complete Book Of Police And Military Motorcycles

Table of Contents:

Silent Takeover or Testimony

Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy

Publishers Weekly

What People Are Saying

Testimony: France, Europe, and the World in the Twenty-First Century

Hmong in Minnesota or As It Was in the Beginning

Hmong in Minnesota

Table of Contents:

As It Was in the Beginning: The Coming Democratization of the Catholic Church

Bread Rising

Anna M. Donnelly - Library Journal

The Republican War on Science or Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte

The Republican War on Science

The New York Times - John Horgan

Kirkus Reviews

Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte: Volume II

People Before Profit or Brave New Neighborhoods

People Before Profit: The New Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money, and Economic Crisis

Tom Hayden

Noam Chomsky

Ralph Nader

Charles Kernaghan

Naomi Klein

Edward M. Kennedy

John J. Sweeney

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Table of Contents:

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space

Community Resources for Older Adults or The Basics of American Politics

Community Resources for Older Adults: Programs and Services in an Era of Change

Booknews

Table of Contents:

The Basics of American Politics

Human Rights Inc or Dragons at Your Door

Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law

Table of Contents:

Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition

The New York Times

Financial Executive

Strategy & Business

Publishers Weekly

Understanding and Dismantling Racism or Death in a Promised Land

Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America

Table of Contents:

Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Booknews

What We Say Goes or Imperial Hubris

What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World

Marcia L. Sprules - Library Journal

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

The Washington Post - Richard A. Clarke