When a scholar as careful and learned as Mr. Kennedy is prompted by contemporary issues to reexamine the great processes of the past, the result can only be an enhancement of our historical understanding.... When the study is written as simply and attractively as this work is, its publication may have a great and beneficient impact. It is to be hoped that Mr. Kennedy's will have one, at a potentially decisive moment in America's history."Michael Howard, The New York Times Book Review"Important, learned, and lucid... Paul Kennedy's great achievement is that he makes us see our current international problems against a background of empires that have gone under because they were unaible to sustain the material cost of greatness; and he does so in a universal historical perspective of which Ranke would surely have approved."James Joll, The New York Review of Books"His strategic-economic approach provides him with the context for a shapely narrative....Professor Kennedy not only exploits his framework eloquently, he also makes use of it to dig deeper and explore the historical contexts in which some 'power centers' prospered....But the most commanding purpose of his project...is the lesson he draws from 15 centuries of statecraft to apply to the present scene....[The book's] final section is for everyone concerned with the contemporary political scene."Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times"Kennedy gives epic meaning to the nation's relative economic and industrial decline." Newsweek

    In the all-but-vanished tradition of ward healer, the retired Speaker of the House, writing in the first person, blends treacle (``I would work to make sure my own people could go to places like Harvard'') and shrewdness (``power accumulates when people think you have power''), idealism and pragmatism, humor and heft as he relates anecdotes about the national figures he has dealt with in Washington, D.C., and politicians in Massachusetts where he spent eight terms in the legislature before joining Congress in 1952. Like ``a good Irish pol who can carry on six conversations at once,'' O'Neill talks about baseball, poker and his boyhood gang, issues of governance and the functioning of Congress, in which he served for 34 years. ``All politics is local,'' he writes, and this memoir makes that a truism, bringing national imperatives back home to the national constituency. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

    

    In this seminal study, Robert Cox offers a new approach to the study of power by identifying the connections between production, the state, and world order.

    It seeks anonymity and political refuge. It dodges taxes and sidesteps currency controls. It rolls through offshore shell companies and secret bank accounts, phoney charities and fraudulent religious foundations. It is kept rolling by white-collar criminals, gun-runners, drug dealers, insurgent groups, scam artists, tax evaders, gold and gem smugglers, and, not least, secret service agents plotting coups and financing revolutions. R.T. Naylor explains the origins of this pool of hot and homeless money, its origins, its uses and abuses, how the world of high finance, corporate and governmental, became hostage to it, and the price the world is paying and will continue to pay until the hostages are released. This book was one of the first, and remains the most comprehensive, to dissect the world of offshore finance, capital flight, money laundering, and tax evasion. Once a subject of concern principally to tax authorities and finance ministries, since the September 11, 2001 hot and homeless money has now become a central preoccupation for police forces and intelligence services around the world.

    She says: Remember what happened to you. What we went through. I think, on account of one sentence: The true . . .' etc. I look at her, keep quiet, write and do not publish anything. I wait. Alone. In the shadows with my typewriter, a folding table, a stack of paper and a bottle, I write: To freedom, even if it lasts only fifteen minutes.'"- from Biting SilenceThe journalist narrator of Biting Silence named no names and claimed no untruths in his brief editorials about high-level government corruption. He was not a radical, not a communist, less interested in politics than in writing itself. Nevertheless, his words proved the beginning of a harrowing journey from his home to a life in which prison, torture, and eventual exile became more than just words on a page.This, the first novel from exiled Bolivian writer Arturo von Vacano, draws heavily on the author's own experience as a journalist hampered by dictatorship and forced to choose between silence and safety. It is a wrenching, provocative portrait of the collision between free expression and uneasy power. In a remarkable real-life twist, the same government that von Vacano criticizes ordered all copies of the book's Spanish-language edition burned, and, until recently, it was unavailable in its author's homeland.Biting Silence is a searingly emotional protest against censorship and a celebration of the freedom that writing provides-a welcome discovery not only for fans of von Vacano's Latin American contemporaries, but for anyone concerned with the basic freedom to write.Arturo von Vacano was born in 1938 in La Paz, Bolivia. He worked as a journalist in Bolivia and Peru before fleeing the country in 1980 to live in exile in the United States. He currently lives outside Washington, D.C. and works as a writer and editor for United Press International.

    Sartori synthesizes a theory of his own which he proffers as a new mainstream view to his readers. His trenchant and swift-moving argument moves deftly among competing schools of thought. The book's greatest strength lies in Sartori's demonstration that prescriptive and descriptive theories (the ideal and the real) must be blended, to be valid, in an integral whole--in theory of the democratically possible. The clarity and dramatic power of this erudite work render it very accessible to undergraduate students."- William T. Bluhm, The University of Rochester

    From the notorious dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, to less-known states and leaders this book scrutinizes the experiences of: *Russia *Germany *Italy *Spain and Portugal *Central and Eastern European states such as Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Austria and Albania *Norway With clear, detailed and highly accessible descriptions and analysis, this is an essential and invaluable introduction to the study and understanding of the tumultuous events of early twentieth century Europe.

    Gordon calls, the 'neglected history of Bengali Muslims before 1947'. It provides a detailed account of the Bengal Muslim League during the period from 1906 to 1947. It covers its various aspects, such as, problems of organisation, policies and mobilisation, nature of leadership, inner party conflict, bases of support and relations with the parent all-India body. A special attempt has been made to show how the formerly popular Krishak Praja Party disappeared from the political scene of Bengal, ironically, during the Chief Ministership of its architect, A. K. Fazlul Huq, and how the Muslim League emerged as the Muslim nationalist movement in eastern India within a decade.The book makes a distinctive contribution in revealing the fact that, throuhghout the Pakistan movement there was exiting a national variation among the Bengali Muslims and that the statehood ideal of the larger section of the Bengali Muslim leaders was completely different from that of Jinnah. The Bengali Muslim leaders developed the ideal of an independent Eastern Pakistan or some kind of Greater Bengal comprising the whole of Bengal and Assam and some portion o the Purnea district in Bihar under the 1940 Lahore Resolution. For the majority of the Bengali Muslim leaders the Lahore Resolution was meant to have recognized the national variations of the two Muslim-majority zones in North-West and North-East India and the establishment of two separate states in those two regions.The book provides an in-depth discussion of the move for United Independent Bengal in 1947 as initiated by the League Chief Minister H. S. Suhrawardy along with some Bengali Hindu leaders, and examines critically the attitude of Jinnah, the Congress High Command and the British towards the move.The study argues that the national variation of the Bengali Muslims could be subdued temporarily in the 1940s by the general Muslim fear of Hindu domination in united India and concludes that the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971 may be regarded as the partial fulfillment of the dream in the 1940s for an independent Greater Bengal.The Postscript added to the revised edition gives a bird's eye view of the subsequent developments in the post-1947 Pakistani period up to 1971 showing how the pre-1947 foreshadowing of Bangladesh did turn into a reality during this phase.

    

    Using the tools of philosophy and intellectual history, White extracts and examines the interlocking theory of knowledge, doctrine of normative ethics, psychology of motivation, and even metaphysics and theology, all of which were used in different degrees by the founding fathers in defense of the Constitution.

    In this new interpretation of her career, philosopher Richard Bernstein situates Arendt historically as an engaged Jewish intellectual and explores the range of her thinking from the perspective of her continuing confrontation with the Jewish question.Bernstein argues that many themes that emerged in the course of Arendt's attempts to understand specifically Jewish issues shaped her thinking about politics in general and the life of the mind. By exploring pivotal events of her life story - her arrest and subsequent emigration from Germany in 1933, her precarious existence in Paris as a stateless Jew working for Zionist organizations, her internment at Gurs and her subsequent escape, and finally her flight from Europe in 1941 - he shows how personal experiences and her responses to them oriented her thinking. Arendt's analysis of the Jews' lack of preparation for the vicious political antiSemitism that arose in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bernstein argues, led her on a quest for the ultimate meaning of politics and political responsibility. Moreover, he points out that Arendt's deepest insights about politics emerged from her reflections on statelessness and totalitarian domination. Bernstein also examines Arendt's attraction to and break with Zionism, and the reasons for her critical stance toward a Jewish sovereign state. He then turns to the issue that, in Arendt's opinion, needed most to be confronted in the aftermath of World War II: the fundamental nature of evil. He traces the nuances of her thinking from radical evil to the banality of evil and, finally, reexamines Eichmann in Jerusalem, her meditation on evil that caused a storm of protest and led some to question her loyalty to the Jewish people.