Best of
Politics

2005

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East


Robert Fisk - 2005
    A book of searing drama as well as lucid, incisive analysis, The Great War for Civilisation is a work of major importance for today's world.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals


Thomas Sowell - 2005
    As late as the 1940s and 1950s, he argues, poor Southern rednecks were regarded by Northern employers and law enforcement officials as lazy, lawless, and sexually immoral. This pattern was repeated by blacks with whom they shared a subculture in the South. Over the last half century poor whites and most blacks have moved up in class and affluence, but the ghetto remains filled with black rednecks. Their attempt to escape, Sowell shows, is hampered by their white liberal friends who turn dysfunctional black redneck culture into a sacrosanct symbol of racial identity. In addition to Black Rednecks and White Liberals, the book takes on subjects ranging from Are Jews Generic? to The Real History of Slavery.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln


Doris Kearns Goodwin - 2005
    Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.

Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire


Angela Y. Davis - 2005
    Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence


Martin Meredith - 2005
    As Europe's colonial powers withdrew, dozens of new states were launched amid much jubilation and to the world's applause. African leaders stepped forward with energy and enthusiasm to tackle the problems of development and nation-building, boldly proclaiming their hopes of establishing new societies that might offer inspiration to the world at large. The circumstances seemed auspicious. Independence came in the midst of an economic boom. On the world stage, African states excited the attention of the world's rival power blocs; in the Cold War era, the position that each newly independent state adopted in its relations with the West or the East was viewed as a matter of crucial importance. Africa was considered too valuable a prize to lose." "Today, Africa is spoken of only in pessimistic terms. The sum of its misfortunes - its wars, its despotisms, its corruption, its droughts - is truly daunting. No other area of the world arouses such a sense of foreboding. Few states have managed to escape the downward spiral: Botswana stands out as a unique example of an enduring multi-party democracy; South Africa, after narrowly avoiding revolution, has emerged in the post-apartheid era as a well-managed democratic state. But most African countries are effectively bankrupt, prone to civil strife, subject to dictatorial rule, weighted down by debt, and heavily dependent on Western assistance for survival." "So what went wrong? What happened to this vast continent, so rich in resources, culture and history, to bring it so close to destitution and despair in the space of two generations?" Focusing on the key personalities, events and themes of the independence era, Martin Meredith's narrative history seeks to explore and explain the myriad problems that Africa has faced in the past half-century, and faces still. The Fate of Africa is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how it came to this — and what, if anything, is to be done.

America's Constitution: A Biography


Akhil Reed Amar - 2005
    Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it. We all know this much: the Constitution is neither immutable nor perfect. Amar shows us how the story of this one relatively compact document reflects the story of America more generally. (For example, much of the Constitution, including the glorious-sounding “We the People,” was lifted from existing American legal texts, including early state constitutions.) In short, the Constitution was as much a product of its environment as it was a product of its individual creators’ inspired genius.Despite the Constitution’s flaws, its role in guiding our republic has been nothing short of amazing. Skillfully placing the document in the context of late-eighteenth-century American politics, America’s Constitution explains, for instance, whether there is anything in the Constitution that is unamendable; the reason America adopted an electoral college; why a president must be at least thirty-five years old; and why–for now, at least–only those citizens who were born under the American flag can become president. From his unique perspective, Amar also gives us unconventional wisdom about the Constitution and its significance throughout the nation’s history. For one thing, we see that the Constitution has been far more democratic than is conventionally understood. Even though the document was drafted by white landholders, a remarkably large number of citizens (by the standards of 1787) were allowed to vote up or down on it, and the document’s later amendments eventually extended the vote to virtually all Americans. We also learn that the Founders’ Constitution was far more slavocratic than many would acknowledge: the “three fifths” clause gave the South extra political clout for every slave it owned or acquired. As a result, slaveholding Virginians held the presidency all but four of the Republic’s first thirty-six years, and proslavery forces eventually came to dominate much of the federal government prior to Lincoln’s election.Ambitious, even-handed, eminently accessible, and often surprising, America’s Constitution is an indispensable work, bound to become a standard reference for any student of history and all citizens of the United States.

Liberalism: A Counter-History


Domenico Losurdo - 2005
    Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles


Dominic Sandbrook - 2005
    He explores the growth of a modern consumer society, the impact of immigration, the invention of modern pop music, and the British retreat from empire. He tells the story of the colourful characters of the period, like Harold Macmillan, Kingsley Amis, and Paul McCartney, and brings to life the experience of the first post-imperial generation, from the Notting Hill riots to the first Beatles hits, from the Profumo scandal to the cult of James Bond.

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism


Kevin M. Kruse - 2005
    Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate."In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms.Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar struggle over segregation. Likewise, white resistance gave birth to several new conservative causes, like the tax revolt, tuition vouchers, and privatization of public services. Tracing the journey of southern conservatives from white supremacy to white suburbia, Kruse locates the origins of modern American politics.

Men in Black: How Judges are Destroying America


Mark R. Levin - 2005
    Levin in his explosive book, Men in Black. “But today, our out-of-control Supreme Court imperiously strikes down laws and imposes new ones to suit its own liberal whims––robbing us of our basic freedoms and the values on which our country was founded.” In Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America , Levin exposes countless examples of outrageous Supreme Court abuses, from promoting racism in college admissions, expelling God and religion from the public square, forcing states to confer benefits on illegal aliens, and endorsing economic socialism to upholding partial-birth abortion, restraining political speech, and anointing terrorists with rights.  Levin writes: “Barely one hundred justices have served on the United States Supreme Court. They’re unelected, they’re virtually unaccountable, they’re largely unknown to most Americans, and they serve for life…in many ways the justices are more powerful than members of Congress and the president.… As few as five justices can and do dictate economic, cultural, criminal, and security policy for the entire nation.” In Men in Black, you will learn: How the Supreme Court protects virtual child pornography and flag burning as forms of free speech but denies teenagers the right to hear an invocation mentioning God at a high school graduation ceremony because it might be “coercive.” How a former Klansman and virulently anti-Catholic Supreme Court justice inserted the words “wall of separation” between church and state in a 1947 Supreme Court decision––a phrase repeated today by those who claim to stand for civil liberty. How Justice Harry Blackmun, a one-time conservative appointee and the author of Roe v. Wade, was influenced by fan mail much like an entertainer or politician, which helped him to evolve into an ardent activist for gay rights and against the death penalty. How the Supreme Court has dictated that illegal aliens have a constitutional right to attend public schools, and that other immigrants qualify for welfare benefits, tuition assistance, and even civil service jobs.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism


David Harvey - 2005
    Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

The Heritage Guide to the Constitution


Edwin Meese III - 2005
    Constitution as never before, including a clause-by-clause analysis of the document, each amendment and relevant court case, and the documents that serve as the foundation of the Constitution.

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America


Ira Katznelson - 2005
    Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."

Black Liberation and Socialism


Ahmed Shawki - 2005
    and much more—with essential lessons for today’s struggles.In the 40 years since the civil rights movement, many gains have been made—but there is still far to go to win genuine change. Here is a badly needed primer on the history and future of the struggle against racism.Ahmed Shawki is the editor of the International Socialist Review. A member of the National Writers Union, he is also a contributor to The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket). He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History


Norman G. Finkelstein - 2005
    Finkelstein moves from an iconoclastic interrogation of the new anti-Semitism to a meticulously researched exposé of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict.Bringing to bear the latest findings on the conflict and recasting the scholarly debate, Finkelstein points to a consensus among historians and human rights organizations on the factual record. Why, then, does so much controversy swirl around the conflict? Finkelstein’s answer, copiously documented, is that apologists for Israel contrive controversy. Whenever Israel comes under international pressure, another media campaign alleging a global outbreak of anti-Semitism is mounted.Finkelstein also scrutinizes the proliferation of distortion masquerading as history. Recalling Joan Peters’ book From Time Immemorial, published to great fanfare in 1984 but subsequently exposed as an academic hoax, he asks deeply troubling questions here about the periodic reappearance of spurious scholarship and the uncritical acclaim it receives. The most recent addition to this genre, Finkelstein argues, is Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s bestseller, The Case for Israel.The core analysis of Beyond Chutzpah sets Dershowitz’s assertions on Israel’s human rights record against the findings of the mainstream human rights community. Sifting through thousands of pages of reports from organizations such as Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and Human Rights Watch, Finkelstein argues that Dershowitz has misrepresented the facts.Thoroughly researched and tightly argued, Beyond Chutzpah lifts the veil of controversy shrouding the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The FairTax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS


Neal Boortz - 2005
    In the face of the outlandish American tax burden, talk-radio firebrand Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder are leading the charge to phase out our current, unfair system and enact the FairTax Plan, replacing the federal income tax and withholding system with a simple 23 percent retail sales tax on new goods and services. This dramatic revision of the current system, which would eliminate the reviled IRS, has already caught fire in the American heartland, with more than six hundred thousand taxpayers signing on in support of the plan.As Boortz and Linder reveal in this first book on the FairTax, this radical but eminently sensible plan would end the annual national nightmare of filing income tax returns, while at the same time enlarging the federal tax base by collecting sales tax from every retail consumer in the country. The FairTax, they argue, would transform the fearsome bureaucracy of the IRS into a more transparent, accountable, and equitable tax collection system. Among other benefits, it will:Make America's tax code truly voluntary, without reducing revenueReplace today's indecipherable tax code with one simple sales taxProtect lower-income Americans by covering the tax on basic necessitiesEliminate billions of dollars in embedded taxes we don't even know we're payingBring offshore corporate dollars back into the U.S. economyEndorsed by scores of leading economists and supported by a huge and growing grassroots movement, the FairTax Plan could revolutionize the way America pays for itself. In this straight-talking book, Neal Boortz and John Linder show you how it would work—and how you can help make it happen.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City


Jonathan Mahler - 2005
    Buried beneath these parallel conflicts--one for the soul of baseball, the other for the soul of the city--was the subtext of race. Deftly intertwined by journalist Jonathan Mahler, these braided Big Apple narratives reverberate to reveal a year that also saw the opening of Studio 54, the acquisition of the New York Post by Rupert Murdoch, a murderer dubbed the "Son of Sam," the infamous blackout, and the evolution of punk rock. As Koch defeated Cuomo, and as Reggie Jackson rescued a team racked with dissension, 1977 became a year of survival--and also of hope.

Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses


Theodore Dalrymple - 2005
    In these twenty-six pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx, from the break-down of Islam to the legalization of drugs. The book includes "When Islam Breaks Down," named by David Brooks of the New York Times as the best journal article of 2004.Informed by years of medical practice in a wide variety of settings, Dr. Dalrymple's acquaintance with the outer limits of human experience allows him to discover the universal in the local and the particular, and makes him impatient with the humbug and obscurantism that have too long marred our social and political discourse.His essays are incisive yet undogmatic, beautifully composed and devoid of disfiguring jargon. Our Culture, What's Left of It is a book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization.

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated


Dave Eggers - 2005
    They were wrongfully convicted because of problems that plague many criminal proceedings: inept defense lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful and coercive interrogation tactics, bad science, snitches, and eyewitness misidentification. The lives of these victims of the U.S. criminal justice system were effectively wrecked. Finally free, usually after more than a decade of incarceration, they re-enter society with nothing but the scars from a harrowing descent into prison only to struggle to survive on the outside.The thirteen men and women portrayed here, and the hundreds of others who have been exonerated, are the tip of the iceberg. There are countless others (thousands by all estimates) who are in prison today for crimes they did not commit. These are the stories of some of the wrongfully convicted, who have managed, often by sheer luck, to prove their innocence. Their stories are spellbinding, heartbreaking, unimaginable, and ultimately inspiring. After reading these deeply personal accounts, you will never look at the criminal justice system the same way. (from the publisher's website)

How Rich Countries Got Rich And Why Poor Countries Stay Poor


Erik S. Reinert - 2005
    Reinert suggests that this set of policies in various combinations has driven successful development from Renaissance Italy to the modern Far East. Yet despite its demonstrable sucess, orthodox developemt economists have largely ignored this approach and insisted instead on the importance of free trade. Reinart shows how the history of economics has long been torn between the continental Renaissance tradition on one hand and the free market theories of English and later American economies on the other. Our economies were founded on protectionism and state activism—look at China today—and could only later afford the luxury of free trade. When our leaders come to lecture poor countries on the right road to riches they do so in almost perfect ignorance of the real history of national affluence.

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires


Peter Turchin - 2005
    Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history.

The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom


David Kupelian - 2005
    Why?Why have thousands of years of Judeo-Christian moral standards suddenly been abandoned? What's behind today's divorce epidemic? Why is public prayer being criminalized? Why are 3,000 innocent unborn children aborted daily? In this widely acclaimed exposé, veteran journalist David Kupelian reveals the brilliant marketing strategies that have turned America upside down."Within the space of our lifetime, much of what Americans once almost universally abhorred has been packaged, perfumed, gift-wrapped, and sold to us as though it had great value. By skillfully playing on our deeply felt national values of fairness, generosity, and tolerance, these marketers have persuaded us to embrace as enlightened and noble that which every other generation has regarded as grossly self-destructive—in a word, evil.”

Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation


Alexei Yurchak - 2005
    To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of “late socialism” (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie — and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War


Anthony Shadid - 2005
    Born and raised in Oklahoma, of Lebanese descent, Shadid, a fluent Arabic speaker, has spent the last three years dividing his time between Washington, D.C., and Baghdad. The only journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for his extraordinary coverage of Iraq, Shadid is also the only writer to describe the human story of ordinary Iraqis weathering the unexpected impact of America's invasion and occupation. Through the moving stories of individual Iraqis, Shadid shows how Saddam's downfall paved the way not just for hopes of democracy but also for the importation of jihad and the rise of a bloody insurgency. "A superb reporter's book," wrote Seymour Hersh; Night Draws Near is, according to Mark Danner, "essential."

What's God Got to Do with it? Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk & the Separation of Church & State


Robert G. Ingersoll - 2005
    An outspoken and unapologetic agnostic, fervent champion of the separation of church and state, and tireless.

Race Against Time


Stephen Lewis - 2005
    Lewis's determination to bear witness to the desperate plight of so many in Africa and elsewhere is balanced by his unique, personal, and often searing insider's perspective on our ongoing failure to help.Lewis recounts how, in 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York introduced eight Millennium Development Goals, which focused on fundamental issues such as education, health, and cutting poverty in half by 2015. In audacious prose, alive with anecdotes ranging from maddening to hilarious to heartbreaking, Lewis shows why and how the international community is falling desperately short of these goals.This edition includes an afterword by Lewis, covering events after the lectures were delivered in fall 2005.

The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold


Geoffrey Robertson - 2005
    The man they briefed was the radical lawyer John Cooke. His Puritan conscience, political vision, and love of civil liberties gave him the courage to bring the King's trial to its dramatic conclusion: the creation of the English Republic. Cooke would pay dearly for role in the trial. Charles I was found guilty and beheaded, but eleven years later Cooke himself was arrested, tried, and brutally executed at the hands of Charles II.Geoffrey Robertson, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer, provides a vivid new reading of the tumultuous Civil War years, exposing long-hidden truths: that the King was guilty as charged, that his execution was necessary to establish the sovereignty of Parliament, that the regicide trials were rigged and their victims should be seen as national heroes.John Cooke sacrificed his own life to make tyranny a crime. His trial of Charles I, the first trial of a head of state for waging war on his own people, became a forerunner of the trials of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein. This is a superb work of history that casts a revelatory light on some of the most important issues of our time.

Sinister Forces-The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft


Peter Levenda - 2005
    Readers are taken from ancient American civilization and the mysterious mound builder culture to the Salem witch trials, the birth of Mormonism during a ritual of ceremonial magic by Joseph Smith, Jr., and Operations Paperclip and Bluebird. Not a work of speculative history, this exposé is founded on primary source material and historical documents. Fascinating details are revealed, including the bizarre world of "wandering bishops" who appear throughout the Kennedy assassinations; a CIA mind control program run amok in the United States and Canada; a famous American spiritual leader who had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks and months leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy; and the "Manson secret."

The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq


George Packer - 2005
    It brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration’s war policy and led America to the Assassins’ Gate—the main point of entry into the American zone in Baghdad. The Assassins’ Gate also describes the place of the war in American life: the ideological battles in Washington that led to chaos in Iraq, the ordeal of a fallen soldier’s family, and the political culture of a country too bitterly polarized to realize such a vast and morally complex undertaking. George Packer’s best-selling first-person narrative combines the scope of an epic history with the depth and intimacy of a novel, creating a masterful account of America’s most controversial foreign venture since Vietnam.

The Promise of Politics


Hannah Arendt - 2005
    In particular, she shows how the tradition of Western political thought, which extends from Plato and Aristotle to its culmination in Marx, failed to account for human action. The concluding section of the book, “Introduction into Politics,” examines an issue that is as timely today as it was when Arendt first wrote about it fifty years ago–the modern prejudice against politics. When politics is considered as a means to an end that lies outside of itself, argues Arendt, when force is used to create “freedom,” the very existence of political principles is imperiled.

The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate


Marjorie Williams - 2005
    Beloved for her sharp analysis, elegant prose and exceptional ability to intuit character, Williams wrote political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair that came to be considered the final word on the capital's most powerful figures. Her accounts of playing ping-pong with Richard Darman, of Barbara Bush's stepmother quaking with fear at the mere thought of angering the First Lady, and of Bill Clinton angrily telling Al Gore why he failed to win the presidency -- to name just three treasures collected here -- open a window on a seldom-glimpsed human reality behind Washington's determinedly blank façe. Williams also penned a weekly column for the Post's op-ed page and epistolary book reviews for the online magazine Slate. Her essays for these and other publications tackled subjects ranging from politics to parenthood. During the last years of her life, she wrote about her own mortality as she battled liver cancer, using this harrowing experience to illuminate larger points about the nature of power and the randomness of life. Marjorie Williams was a woman in a man's town, an outsider reporting on the political elite. She was, like the narrator in Randall Jarrell's classic poem, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," an observer of a strange and exotic culture. This splendid collection -- at once insightful, funny and sad -- digs into the psyche of the nation's capital, revealing not only the hidden selves of the people that run it, but the messy lives that the rest of us lead.

Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery


Anne Farrow - 2005
    But the North’s profit from–indeed, dependence on–slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. In this startling and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists de-mythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life.Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that lucratively linked the North to the West Indies and Africa; discloses the reality of Northern empires built on profits from rum, cotton, and ivory–and run, in some cases, by abolitionists; and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line–including Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, the only slave trader sentenced to die in the United States, who even as an inmate of New York’s infamous Tombs prison was supported by a shockingly large percentage of the city; Patty Cannon, whose brutal gang kidnapped free blacks from Northern states and sold them into slavery; and the Philadelphia doctor Samuel Morton, eminent in the nineteenth-century field of “race science,” which purported to prove the inferiority of African-born black people.Culled from long-ignored documents and reports–and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings–Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past. Expanded from the celebrated Hartford Courant special report that the Connecticut Department of Education sent to every middle school and high school in the state (the original work is required readings in many college classrooms,) this new book is sure to become a must-read reference everywhere.From the Hardcover edition.

Eichmann and the Holocaust


Hannah Arendt - 2005
    Inspired by the trial of a bureaucrat who helped cause the Holocaust, this radical work on the banality of evil stunned the world with its exploration of a regime's moral blindness and one man's insistence that he be absolved all guilt because he was 'only following orders'.

Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All


Craig Shirley - 2005
    What few people realize, however, is that Reagan's revolution did not begin when he took office in 1980, but in his failed presidential challenge to Gerald Ford in 1975-1976. This is the remarkable story of that historic campaign-one that, as Reagan put it, turned a party of "pale pastels" into a national party of "bold colors." Featuring interviews with a myriad of politicos, journalists, insiders, and observers, Craig Shirley relays intriguing, never-before-told anecdotes about Reagan, his staff, the campaign, the media, and the national parties and shows how Reagan, instead of following the lead of the ever-weakening Republican party, brought the party to him and almost single-handedly revived it.

Becoming Jefferson's People: Re-Inventing the American Republic in the Twenty-First Century


Clay S. Jenkinson - 2005
    Pragmatic utopian and practical visionary, Jefferson was one of the most creative men who ever lived. He penned the thirty-five most revolutionary words in the history of the English language: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson has written a bold call for a Jeffersonian renewal in America. "We need the Sage of Monticello's vision as we begin what is the most difficult periods of American history." The Jeffersonian consists of self-reliance, an uncompromising dedication to liberty (over security, profit, comfort, and tradition), an unambiguous wall of seperation between church and state, first-rate public education, thoughtfulness and diffidence about America's place in the world, and a commitment to civility. Jefferson brought genius (not to mention reason, good sense, and idealism) to whatever he undertook, and he believed that the purpose of America was not to seek glory and profit in the world's arena, but to build a nation of equality, justice, and cultural achievement. Becoming Jefferson's People is part manifesto, part call for a new political persuasion in the United States, part self-help book, and part critique of the consumerist world empire that the United States has become at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

How to Live a Holy Life


Gregory Postnikov - 2005
    In a eminently straightforward manner the author describes how to conduct oneself in the morning, in relation to God, in common situations of life, in daily work, during meals, during the afternoon rest, in the evening, before sleep, and during sleeplessness. He concludes with a consideration of prayer and guidance and on how to spend Sundays. A biography of the author, Metropolitan Gregory (Postnikov) of St. Petersburg (1784-1860), concludes the work.

The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara


James G. Blight - 2005
    McNamara is one of modern America's most controversial figures. His opinions, policies, and actions have led to a firestorm of debate, ignited most recently by Errol Morris's Academy Award-winning film, The Fog of War. In the companion book, editors James G. Blight and janet M. Lang use lessons from McNamara's life to examine issues of war and peace in the 20th century. McNamara's career spans some of America's defining events-from the end of World War I, through the course of World War II, and the unfolding of the Cold War in Cuba, Vietnam, and around the world. The Fog of War brings together film transcripts, documents, dialogues, and essays to explore what the horrors and triumphs of the 20th century can teach us about the future.

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq


Rory Stewart - 2005
    A Farsi-speaking British diplomat, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war. The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart's year. As a participant, he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, this book amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.

Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America


Rickie Solinger - 2005
    Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised breeding schemes, when the U.S. government took Indian children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressed Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the diverse plot lines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time.Solinger asks which women have how many children under what circumstances, and shows how reproductive experiences have been encouraged or coerced, rewarded or punished, honored or exploited over the last 250 years. Viewed in this way, the debate over reproductive rights raises questions about access to sex education and prenatal care, about housing laws, about access to citizenship, and about which women lose children to adoption and foster care.Pregnancy and Power shows that a complete understanding of reproductive politics must take into account the many players shaping public policy--lawmakers, educators, employers, clergy, physicians--as well as the consequences for women who obey and resist these policies. Tracing the diverse plotlines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the struggle to control sex and pregnancy in America.

The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire


Andrew Bernstein - 2005
    This book is written for the rational mind, whether the reader is a professional intellectual or an intelligent layman. It makes the case for individual rights and freedom in terms intelligible to all rational men.

Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America


Nick Kotz - 2005
    Martin Luther King Jr. forged . . . a fresh and vivid account.” — Washington Post Book World The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nick Kotz offers the first thorough account of the complex working relationship between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. Tracing both leaders’ paths, from Johnson’s ascension to the presidency in 1963 to King’s assassination in 1968, Kotz describes how they formed a wary alliance that would become instrumental in producing some of the most substantial civil rights legislation in American history: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources—Johnson’s taped telephone conversations, voluminous FBI wiretap logs, and secret communications between FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the president—Kotz examines the forces that drew the charismatic men together and those that eventually drove them apart. Kotz’s focused and incisive examination significantly enriches our understanding of both men.This book will appeal to people interested in: Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, Race Relations, Voting Rights, 20th Century History, Politics, Political Investigations, Segragation, and American History."A powerful reminder that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts transformed the lives not just of black citizens, but of every American.” — Christian Science Monitor“A hard-headed, no-nonsense look at these two towering figures of the 1960s … [Judgment Days] vividly re-creates the behind-the-scenes dynamics informing civil rights politics.” — Boston Globe“An important examination of a critical moment in American history—a battle for our nation’s soul.” — Jimmy Carter Nick Kotz is the author of five previous books on politics, social justice, and the civil rights movement. A renowned journalist, he has received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award. He lives in Broad Run, Virginia.

Politics the Wellstone Way: How to Elect Progressive Candidates and Win on Issues


Bill Lofy - 2005
    Tensions over the war in Iraq and the presidential election motivated hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the political fence to take to the streets. Politics the Wellstone Way offers a comprehensive set of strategies to help progressives channel that energy into winning issue-based and electoral campaigns. Wellstone Action is a nonprofit organization dedicated to continuing Paul and Sheila Wellstone’s fight for progressive change and economic justice by teaching effective political action skills to people across the country. Politics the Wellstone Way is a workshop in book form, providing the detailed framework needed to jump-start a new generation of activists plus plenty of helpful tools for old pros, including articulating a strong message, base building, field organizing, budgeting, fundraising, scheduling, getting out the vote, and grassroots advocacy and lobbying, illustrated by practical and inspirational examples. From the school board all the way to the White House, Politics the Wellstone Way instructs people on becoming better organizers, candidates, campaign workers, and citizen activists, empowering them to make their voices heard. Wellstone Action was established by the Wellstones’ two surviving sons, David and Mark. The main vehicle for this ongoing work is Camp Wellstone, a weekend training program that Wellstone Action leads regularly in locations across the country. Jeff Blodgett, Paul Wellstone’s longtime campaign manager, is the executive director of Wellstone Action. For more information visit www.wellstoneaction.org.

Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress


David Smail - 2005
    This view reflects the wishful thinking necessary for the success of consumer capitalism, but it does not reflect the way things are. Smail examines how our experience of ourselves and our conduct can be explained in terms of the social operation of power and interest.

Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media


David Edwards - 2005
    It is the most important book about journalism I can remember." - John Pilger"Regular critical analysis of the media, filling crucial gaps and correcting the distortions of ideological prisms, has never been more important. Media Lens has performed a major public service by carrying out this task with energy, insight, and care." - Noam Chomsky "Media Lens is doing an outstanding job of pressing the mainstream media to at least follow their own stated principles and meet their public service obligations. [This is] fun as well as enlightening." - Edward S. HermanCan a corporate media system be expected to tell the truth about a world dominated by corporations?Can newspapers, including the 'liberal' Guardian and the Independent, tell the truth about catastrophic climate change -- about its roots in mass consumerism and corporate obstructionism -- when they are themselves profit-oriented businesses dependent on advertisers for 75% of their revenues?Can the BBC tell the truth about UK government crimes in Iraq when its senior managers are appointed by the government? Has anything fundamentally changed since BBC founder Lord Reith wrote of the establishment: "They know they can trust us not to be really impartial"?Why did the British and American mass media fail to challenge even the most obvious government lies on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the invasion in March 2003? Why did the media ignore the claims of UN weapons inspectors that Iraq had been 90-95% "fundamentally disarmed" as early as 1998?This book answers these questions, and more.Since July 2001, Media Lens has encouraged thousands of readers to email senior editors and journalists, challenging them to account for their distorted reporting on Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Haiti, East Timor, climate change, Western crimes in Central America, and much more. The responses -- often surprising, sometimes outrageous -- reveal the arrogance, unaccountability and servility to power of even our most respected media.

My Vision


Muammar Gaddafi معمر القذافي - 2005
    Further, Gadaffi agreed to compensate the families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing and the attack on the TWA flight that occurred in the late 1980s. This remarkable gesture showed Gaddafi’s commitment to seeing Libya rejoin the international community. In the sprit of reconciliation, Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to Tripoli, declaring that Libya was now an ally in the fight against global terrorism. How is this reversal explained? Born from conversations between Gaddafi and political expert Edmond Jouve, this book retraces the Libyan leader's political and ideological journey.

Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row


David R. Dow - 2005
    He changed his position as the men on death row became real people to him, and as he came to witness the profound injustices they endured: from coerced confessions to disconcertingly incompetent lawyers; from racist juries and backward judges to a highly arbitrary death penalty system.It is these concrete accounts of the people Dow has known and represented that prove the death penalty is consistently unjust, and it's precisely this fundamental-and lethal-injustice, Dow argues, that should compel us to abandon the system altogether.

Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World


Paul M. Buhle - 2005
    Wobblies! presents the IWW whole, scripted and drawn by old-time and younger Wobbly and IWW-inspired artists.

John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics


Richard Parker - 2005
    From his acerbic analysis of America’s “private wealth and public squalor” to his denunciation of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Galbraith consistently challenged “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he coined). He did so as a witty commentator on America’s political follies and as a versatile author of bestselling books—such as The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State—that warn of the dangers of deregulated markets, corporate greed, and inattention to the costs of our military power. Here, in the first full-length biography of Galbraith and his times, Richard Parker provides not only a nuanced portrait of this extraordinary man, but also an important reinterpretation of twentieth-century public policy and economic practices.“Whatever you may think of his ideas, John Kenneth Galbraith has led an extraordinary life. . . . Doing justice to this life story requires an outsize biography, one that not only tells Mr. Galbraith’s tale but sets it on the broader canvas of America’s political and economic evolution. And Richard Parker’s book does just that.”—Economist“Parker’s book is more than a chronicle of Galbraith’s life; it’s a history of American politics and policy from FDR through George W. Bush. . . . It will make readers more economically and politically aware.”—USA Today “The most readable and instructive biography of the century.”—William F. Buckley, National Review      “The story of this man’s life and work is wonderfully rendered in this magnum opus, and offers an antidote to the public ennui, economic cruelty, and government malfeasance that poison life in America today.”—James Carroll, Boston Globe

Ten Lies and Ten Truths


Parker Hudson - 2005
    The subjects include marriage, abortion, character, relative truth and macroevolution. Immediately following each parable is a specific statement of the underlying Lie, its corresponding Truth and several nonfiction resources for further study of the issue. These resources include other books, scripture references and websites. The purpose of the book is to arm believers with a memorable story (and facts) about an important issue. And to disarm unbelievers by pulliing them into a realistic situation which then requires them to rethink what they have always thought was the Truth. An engaging, nonthreatening conversation starter with friends and family members who hold secular views on important cultural issues.

The Almanac of American Politics 2006 (Almanac of American Politics)


Michael Barone - 2005
    In 2000, those armies fought to a near-draw—out of more than 100 million ballots cast, the presidency of the United States hinged on a breathtakingly slim 537-vote margin in Florida. Four years later, despite the occurrence of a recession, two wars, and a devastating terrorist attack on American soil, the two adversaries remain fairly evenly divided.In the wake of an acrimonious election where both political parties together spent roughly $4 billion on the federal elections, politicians, analysts, citizens, and scholars continue to turn to the book that George Will called the "Bible of American politics" to understand the American political landscape. The 2006 Almanac of American Politics remains the gold standard of accessible political information, relied upon by everyone involved, invested, or interested in American politics. As in previous editions, the 2006 Almanac includes profiles of every member of Congress and every governor; in-depth and completely up-to-date narrative profiles of all 50 states and 435 House districts, covering everything from economics to history to, of course, politics; and analyses of the 2004 presidential election, the 2004 congressional elections, and redistricting battles. Specific to this latest edition of the nation's leading political reference work is coverage of all special elections in the 108th Congress and the California gubernatorial recall; maps and district profiles of the newly redrawn Texas congressional districts; a state-by-state analysis of the 2004 presidential election; a national overview of the 2004 presidential election; and a statistical breakdown of the 2004 presidential vote by state and congressional district.Full of maps, census data, and information on topics ranging from campaignexpenditures to voting records to interest group ratings, this latest edition of the Almanac of American Politics presents everything you need to know about current American politics in snappy prose framed by cogent analysis.

Other Lands Have Dreams: Letters From Pekin Prison


Kathy Kelly - 2005
    While in prison, Kelly’s organization, Voices in the Wilderness, was targeted by a US State Department lawsuit charging that Kelly violated US-imposed sanctions when she took humanitarian aid to Iraq during numerous visits over the last five years.In this fiercely eloquent book, Kelly recounts such trips to Iraq, tells the largely unknown story of the School of the Americas and describes daily life inside a federal prison, where America’s poor are warehoused. Like Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Kelly’s powerful narrative gives voice to the unheard millions suffering at home and abroad.

The Law and Policy of the World Trade Organization: Text, Cases and Materials


Peter Van den Bossche - 2005
    It explores the institutional aspects of the WTO together with the substantive law. New to this edition are examinations of the WTO rules on the protection of intellectual property and the rules on technical barriers to trade and sanitary and phytosanitary measures. Assignments are integrated throughout to allow students to assess their understanding, while chapter summaries reinforce learning. In addition further-reading sections have been added to each chapter and exercises have been included to draw on primary sources and real-life trade scenarios, enabling students to hone their practical and analytical skills. The title is an essential tool for any student of the WTO, either at undergraduate or postgraduate level.

Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics


Wendy Brown - 2005
    They range from explorations of politics post-9/11 to critical reflections on the academic norms governing feminist studies and political theory. Edgework is also concerned with the intellectual and political value of critique itself. It renders contemporary the ancient jurisprudential meaning of critique as krisis, in which a tear in the fabric of justice becomes the occasion of a public sifting or thoughtfulness, the development of criteria for judgment, and the inauguration of political renewal or restoration. Each essay probes a contemporary problem--the charge of being unpatriotic for dissenting from U.S. foreign policy, the erosion of liberal democracy by neoliberal political rationality, feminism's loss of a revolutionary horizon--and seeks to grasp the intellectual impasse the problem signals as well as the political incitement it may harbor.

Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy


Bruno Latour - 2005
    In a time of political turmoil and anticlimax, this book redefines politics as operating in the realm of "things." Politics is not just an arena, a profession, or a system, but a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. But how are things made public? What, we might ask, is a republic, a "res publica," a public thing, if we do not know how to make things public? There are many other kinds of assemblies, which are not political in the usual sense, that gather a public around things--scientific laboratories, supermarkets, churches, and disputes involving natural resources like rivers, landscapes, and air. The authors of "Making Things Public"--and the ZKM show that the book accompanies--ask what would happen if politics revolved around disputed things. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official sphere of professional politics, they examine the new atmospheric conditions--technologies, interfaces, platforms, networks, and mediations that allow things to be made public. They show us that the old definition of politics is too narrow; there are many techniques of representation--in politics, science, and art--of which Parliaments and Congresses are only a part.The authors include such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Richard Powers, Lorraine Daston, Richard Aczel, and Donna Haraway; their writings are accompanied by excerpts from John Dewey, Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. More than 500 color images document the new idea of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an "object-oriented democracy."

Research As Resistance: Critical, Indigenous And Anti Oppressive Approaches


Leslie Brown - 2005
    It is a work that will have a place in the classroom, as well as on the desks of researchers in agencies, governments, and private consulting practices. The first section of the book is devoted to the ontological and epistemological considerations involved in such research, including theorising the self of the researcher. The second section of the book offers exemplars across a range of methodologies, including institutional ethnography, narrative autobiography, storytelling and indigenous research, and participatory action research. 'Research as Resistance' is unique in that it describes both theoretical foundations and practical applications, and because all of the featured researchers occupy marginalised locations.

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees


Caroline Moorehead - 2005
    Moorehead's experience living and working with refugees puts a human face on the news, providing unforgettable portraits of the refugees she meets in Cairo, Guinea, Sicily, Lebanon, England, Australia, Finland, and at the U.S.-Mexico border. Human Cargo changes our understanding of what it means to have and lose a place in the world, and reveals how the refugee "problem" is on a par with global crises such as terrorism and world hunger.

War and Peace


Anton Balasingham - 2005
    War and Peace (போரும் சமாதானமும்) - Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers

Urban Transit: Operations, Planning, and Economics


Vukan R. Vuchic - 2005
    Dozens of worked problems and end-of-chapter exercises help familiarize the reader with the formulae and analytical techniques presented in the book's three convenient sections:Transit System Operations and Networks Transit Agency Operations, Economics, and Organization Transit System Planning Visually enhanced with nearly 250 illustrations, Urban Transit: Operations, Planning, and Economics is a reliable source of the latest information for transit planners and operators in transit agencies, metropolitan planning organizations, city governments, consulting firms as well as students of transportation engineering and city planning at universities and in professional courses.

Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System


Christophe Jaffrelot - 2005
    Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) rose from a community of "untouchables," to become a major figure in modern Indian history. Christophe Jaffrelot's biography reconsiders Dr. Ambedkar's life and thought and his unique combination of pragmatism and idealism. Establishing himself as a scholar, activist, journalist, and educator, Ambedkar ultimately found himself immersed in Indian politics and helped to draft the nation's constitution as law minister in Nehru's first cabinet. Ambedkar's ideas remain an inspiration to India's Dalit community.

The Art of War


Mao Zedong - 2005
    The parallels between Chairman Mao's thoughts on strategy and those of Sun Tzu belie a direct lineage of culture and genius projected across twenty five centuries. First, Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War, considers the rational and classical stratagems underlying the conduct of a successful war. Second, Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan, discusses the conduct of guerrilla actions relative to, and within, conventional warfare. Third, On Protracted War, deals with a wide range of topics including mobile warfare, guerrilla warfare, positional warfare, war of attrition and war of annihilation. Fourth, Problems of War and Strategy summarizes the lessons of the previous discourses and reiterates the famous dictum: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Other Special Editions in this series that deal with the subject of warfare and strategy include: The Art of War By Sun Tzu - Special Edition The Art of War By Baron De Jomini - Special Edition The Art of War & The Prince By Machiavelli - Special Edition

Letters from Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out


Dan Berger - 2005
    These diverse authors challenge the common misconception that today's young people are apathetic, shallow, and materialistic. Aged ten to thirty-one, these atheist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, transgender, heterosexual, bisexual, metrosexual Americans are from every type of background and ethnicity, but are united by their struggle toward a common goal. They are the inheritors of their parents' legacy from the sixties, but also have the imagination and courage to embark on new paths and different directions. In letters addressed to their parents, to past generations, to each other, to the youth of tomorrow and to their future selves, each author articulates his or her vision for the world as they work towards racial, economic, gender, environmental and global justice. As the editors write in their introduction: "From globalization to the war on terrorism and beyond, our generation is compelled to action in the midst of a rapidly changing, and unique political moment Our challenge, and yours, is to live our lives in a way that does not make a mockery of our values."

The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House


John F. Harris - 2005
    Bill Clinton is the most arresting leader of his generation. He transformed American politics, and his eight years as president spawned arguments that continue to resonate. For all that has been written about this singular personality–including Clinton’s own massive autobiography–there has been no comprehensive, nonpartisan overview of the Clinton presidency.Few writers are as qualified and equipped to tackle this vast subject as the award-winning veteran Washington Post correspondent John F. Harris, who covered Clinton for six of his eight years in office–as long as any reporter for a major newspaper. In The Survivor, Harris frames the historical debate about President William Jefferson Clinton, by revealing the inner workings of the Clinton White House and providing the first objective analysis of Clinton’s leadership and its consequences.Harris shows Clinton entering the Oval Office in 1993 primed to make history. But with the Cold War recently concluded and the country coming off a nearly uninterrupted generation of Republican presidents, the new president’s entry into this maelstrom of events was tumultuous. His troubles were exacerbated by the habits, personal contacts, and the management style, he had developed in his years as governor of Arkansas. Clinton’s enthusiasm and temper were legendary, and he and Hillary Rodham Clinton–whose ambitions and ordeals also fill these pages–arrived filled with mistrust about many of the characters who greeted them in the “permanent Washington” that often holds the reins in the nation’s capital.Showing surprising doggedness and a deep-set desire to govern from the middle, Clinton repeatedly rose to the challenges; eventually winning over (or running over) political adversaries on both sides of the aisle–sometimes facing as much skepticism from fellow Democrats as from his Republican foes. But as Harris shows in his accounts of political debacles such as the attempted overhaul of health care, Clinton’s frustrations in the war against terrorism, and the numerous personal controversies that time and again threatened to consume his presidency, Bill Clinton could never manage to outrun his tendency to favor conciliation over clarity, or his own destructive appetites.The Survivor is the best kind of history, a book filled with major revelations–the tense dynamic of the Clinton inner circle and Clinton’s professional symbiosis with Al Gore to the imprint of Clinton’s immense personality on domestic and foreign affairs–as well as the minor details that leaven all great political narratives. This long-awaited synthesis of the dominant themes, events, and personalities of the Clinton years will stand as the authoritative and lasting work on the Clinton Presidency.

Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture


Harold Pinter - 2005
    

The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation - How Corrupt Economic Development Brings Us Layoffs, Outsourcing, Overcrowded Schools, Runaway Sprawl and Higher Taxes


Greg LeRoy - 2005
    Under the guise of "economic development," big companies have gotten extraordinary tax breaks, from property tax abatements to land write-downs. Promises of job creation in exchange for these tax breaks have proven hollow, with companies continuing to downsize and outsource at record levels. Government officials are no help - they're well compensated major players in this troubling drama. This timely book explores these abuses in depth, but also offers hope with a series of commonsense reforms that would give taxpayers powerful new tools to reverse this situation - and redirect monies in ways that will really pay off. By popularizing these grassroots reforms - which are already taking hold - this book is taking a movement that is percolating in the states and putting it on the national stage.

War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death


Norman Solomon - 2005
    This guide to disinformation analyzes American military adventures past and present to reveal striking similarities in the efforts of various administrations to justify, and retain, public support for war. War Made Easy is essential reading. It documents a long series of deliberate misdeeds at the highest levels of power and lays out important guidelines to help readers distinguish a propaganda campaign from actual news reporting. With War Made Easy, every reader can become a savvy media critic and, perhaps, help the nation avoid costly and unnecessary wars.

Stikky Trees


Laurence Holt - 2005
    We spent hundreds of hours with readers testing and refining it to be sure it will work for you.You'll learn the secret to identifying 15 common trees: ash, aspen, birch, cedar, douglas-fir, elm, fir, hemlock, hickory, maple, oak, pine, sourgum, spruce, and sweetgum. Together, these account for 80% of US trees and two of the top three trees in every state.Along the way, you'll reconnect with our ancestors who would not have gotten far without knowing the trees of the enormous forests around them.Includes a comprehensive Next Steps section with guides to the top 10 trees in your state, tree field manuals, how trees work (in six bullet points), their five biggest enemies, and more.

Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture


Natalie J. SokoloffKathryn Laughon - 2005
    Campbell, Anna D. Wolf Chair, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing"An exciting and powerful collection that eloquently critiques some of the current thinking in domestic violence and raises key concerns for advocates and scholars working in the area."—Sujata Warrier, president, board of directors, Manavi: An organization for South Asian women"Sokoloff has assembled an impressive array of authors who challenge us to ‘think outside of our contemporary domestic violence box.’"—Angela M. Moore Parmley, chief, violence and victimization research division, National Institute of JusticeThis groundbreaking anthology reorients the field of domestic violence research by bringing long-overdue attention to the structural forms of oppression in communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or social class.Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.The most up-to-date and comprehensive picture of domestic violence available, this anthology is an essential text for courses in sociology, criminology, social work, and women’s studies. Beyond the classroom, it provides critical information and resources for professionals working in domestic violence services, advocacy, social work, and law enforcement.

The Southern Question


Antonio Gramsci - 2005
    During ten years of political imprisonment under Mussolini's Fascist government, Gramsci produced The Prison Notebooks, a continued meditation on subjects and relationships first proposed within the pages of this essay. The purpose in re-introducing the essay is to emphasize how Gramsci's analysis of social stratification of Northern and Southern Italy in 1926 is relevant to current discussions about state formation, diasporas, and strategic alliances.

One Nation Under God


David C. Gibbs Jr. - 2005
    David Gibbs presents ten incontrovertible, heavily documented, and politically incorrect historical facts which prove that Christianity played a pivotal role in uniquely shaping the most free, prosperous, and powerful nation in history.

Because I Have A Voice: Queer Politics In India


Arvind Narrain - 2005
    What is most impressive, however, is that it confronts the unquestioned, “compulsory” nature of heterosexuality in India, in a language that is not restricted to the academic.

Gilles Deleuze from A to Z


Gilles Deleuze - 2005
    These DVDs, elegantly transtlated and subtitled in English, make these conversations available for English-speaking audiences? for the first time.In dialogue with Parnet (a journalist and former student of Deleuze), the philosopher exhibited the modest and thrilling transparency that his seminal works (such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) reveal. The sessions were taped when Deleuze was already terminally ill; he and Parnet agreed that the film would not be shown publicly until after his death. The awareness of mortality floats through the dialogues, making them not just intellectually stimulating but also emotionally engaging. Because Parnet knew Deleuze so well, she was able to draw him out--as no one else had--to what might be the 1001st plateau: a place of brilliance, rigor, and charm.In "A as in Animal," for example, Deleuze vents his hatred of pets: "A bark," he declares, "really seems to me the stupidest cry." Instead, he praises the tick: "... in a nature teeming with life, [the tick] extracts three things" light, smell, and touch. This, he claims, in a sense is philosophy. "And that is your life's dream?" Parnet wryly asks. "That's what constitutes a world," he replies. For Deleuze, doing philosophy meant not just creating concepts but living a life in philosophy. Gilles Deleuze from A to Z presents the mind of a great philosopher at work.

Israel/Palestine


Alan Dowty - 2005
    New edition of this widely adopted introduction to the Isreali-Palestinian conflictFully revised and updated, the second edition also includes a new chapter on the so-called fourth stage of the conflict.Written by one of the worlds leading authorities on the conflict, who is recognized for the even-handedness of his approach to this complex and sensitive topicAssumes no prior knowledge on the part of the readerIncludes an extensive chronology of events at the back of the book

Outside Ethics


Raymond Geuss - 2005
    Seeking to expand the scope of contemporary moral and political philosophy, Raymond Geuss here presents essays bound by a shared skepticism about a particular way of thinking about what is important in human life--a way of thinking that, in his view, is characteristic of contemporary Western societies and isolates three broad categories of things as important: subjective individual preferences, knowledge, and restrictions on actions that affect other people (restrictions often construed as ahistorical laws). He sets these categories in a wider context and explores various human phenomena--including poetry, art, religion, and certain kinds of history and social criticism--that do not fit easily into these categories. As its title suggests, this book seeks a place outside conventional ethics.Following a brief introduction, Geuss sets out his main concerns with a focus on ethics and politics. He then expands these themes by discussing freedom, virtue, the good life, and happiness. Next he examines Theodor Adorno's views on the relation between suffering and knowledge, the nature of religion, and the role of history in giving us critical distances from existing identities. From here he moves to aesthetic concerns. The volume closes by looking at what it is for a human life to have gaps--to be incomplete, radically unsatisfactory, or a failure.

The Quotable Mises


Ludwig von Mises - 2005
    In some ways, it is the perfect introduction to Mises's thought, something that immediately grabs one's attention and gives a fast and accessible presentation of the range of his ideas. The content is Mises in a brand-new way, in a way that you have never encountered him before. Each page exudes energy and wisdom. After we sent it to Bettina-Bien Greaves, she wrote us to say: "A thrilling project, a thorough job, and a marvelous result. The Quotable Mises performs a great service." The biggest struggle in putting the book together was not in finding enough quotes but in limiting the number. The editor tried to provide a representative list of topics and subjects that Mises is most famous for such as socialism, bureaucracy, interventionism, money, government, and war. But he also included many subject areas for which Mises is not often quoted, including arts, fate, health, instinct, martyrdom, religion, and youth. Most economists don't write enough memorable material in an entire lifetime to fill 20 pages. But Mises was different. He was brilliant, brave, and tenacious. He could also write. He wanted to reach all people, not just specialists. This serves as an introduction and guide to his thought, or even a kind of concordance, all in his own words. Mostly it is a means for putting Mises's ideas in even greater circulation.

America's "War on Terrorism"


Michel Chossudovsky - 2005
    This title states that the 'war on terrorism' is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus.

Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character, and Other Lies


Steven Farron - 2005
    First passed off as compensation for discrimination, then as a means to achieve “diversity,” it is nothing less than official, government-mandated discrimination against whites.Professor Steven Farron of Witwatersrand University in South Africa, has written the definitive account of this pernicious policy, which whites have chosen to impose on themselves. Drawing on extensive academic experience and exhaustive research, he has written a uniquely undeceived and devastating analysis that will leave neither partisan nor critic unmoved.

Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq


Ghaith Abdul-Ahad - 2005
    The Pentagon's largely successful effort to embed the press with the troops has served to obscure much of the truth of the War in Iraq, a point that is vividly illustrated by this collection of photographs by four independent photojournalists, whose refusal to be embedded have allowed them to capture images of the war not commonly seen in mainstr

More Than a Grain of Truth: The official true story behind the film Mr. Jones, starring James Norton


Margaret Siriol Colley - 2005
    Jones, starring James Norton. Who murdered Gareth Jones? Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist and Foreign Affairs adviser to Lloyd George, died in mysterious circumstances on the eve of his 30th birthday in 1935 in Inner Mongolia having been captured and held for ransom by bandits. He flew with Hitler in February 1933 and a month later became the first journalist to expose the famine then raging across the Soviet Union. In telling the truth, instead of being feted, he was denigrated by other Moscow correspondents, blackballed by the British establishment and blacklisted by the Soviet secret police. In this stunning biography Margaret Siriol Colley uses her uncle's letters, articles and diaries to create a picture of a man who was not afraid to tell the truth, whatever the cost. This new and revised edition of More Than a Grain of Truth is a fascinating account of the life of a brave Welsh hero written by someone who knew him personally. It is also a searing social and political history of the early thirties More Than a Grain of Truth is a fascinating account of one brave journalist and is a social history of the early thirties. Print version coming soon.

Clueless George Goes to War


Pat Bagley - 2005
    The illustrations and text evoke the original stories of a monkey in trouble, but with a twist that turns this terrific little book into a political parable for our times.

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment


Mark A.R. Kleiman - 2005
    Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade. Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution--largely unnoticed by the press--in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible--and essential--to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken. Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.

The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib


Karen J. Greenberg - 2005
    These documents present for the first time a compilation of materials that prior to publication have existed only piecemeal in the public domain. The Bush Administration, concerned about the legality of harsh interrogation techniques, understood the need to establish a legally viable argument to justify such procedures. The memos and reports document the systematic attempt of the US Government to prepare the way for torture techniques and coercive interrogation practices, forbidden under international law, with the express intent of evading legal punishment in the aftermath of any discovery of these practices and policies.

Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation


Robin Hahnel - 2005
    He presents a coherent set of economic institutions and procedures that can deliver economic justice and democracy through a "participatory economy." But this is a long-run goal; he also explores how to promote the economics of equitable cooperation in the here and now by emphasizing ways to broaden the base of existing economic reform movements while deepening their commitment to more far reaching change.

Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State


Götz Aly - 2005
    Buoyed by millions of packages soldiers sent from the front, Germans also benefited from the systematic plunder of Jewish possessions. Any qualms were swept away by waves of tax breaks and government handouts.Hitler's Beneficiaries has been hailed as "startling" by Richard Evans, and as "fascinating and important" by Christopher Browning. Above all, as Omer Bartov testifies, this remarkable book "irreversibly transforms our understanding of the Third Reich."

Trade-Offs: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and Social Issues


Harold Winter - 2005
    But economists also analyze issues that, to others, do not typically fall within the realm of economic reasoning, such as organ transplants, cigarette addiction, smoking in public, and product safety. Trade-Offs is an introduction to the economic approach to analyzing these controversial public policy issues.Harold Winter provides readers with the analytical tools needed to identify and understand the trade-offs associated with these topics. By considering both the costs and benefits of potential policy solutions, Winter stresses that real-world policy decision making is best served by an explicit recognition of as many trade-offs as possible.Intellectually stimulating yet accessible and entertaining, Trade-Offs will be appreciated by students of economics, public policy, health administration, political science, and law, as well as by anyone who follows current social policy debates.

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?


Philip E. Tetlock - 2005
    This book fills that need. Here, Philip E. Tetlock explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events, and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat.Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making.

Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington


Paul Sperry - 2005
    In this startling book, investigative journalist Paul Sperry uses revealing new interviews and classified documents to courageously explain how, for the past thirty years, these Islamist extremists have been covertly working to destroy our constitutional government and the Judeo-Christian ethics on which our nation was built. Their goal, according to Sperry, is to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Quran and turn America into an Islamic state. And, as Sperry details point-by-point, they have been unwittingly aided in their sinister aims by the politically correct media, government, and citizens, who don't fully understand the dangers of the Muslim faith.Infiltration explodes the facade of moderation and patriotism that Muslim scholars, imams, clerics, businessmen, and other leaders in the burgeoning Muslim community in America have conveyed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In reality, the Muslim establishment that publicly decries the radical fringe-represented by al-Qaida's brand of Islam known as Wahhabism, the official religion of Saudi Arabia-is actually a part of it. The only difference is that they use words and money instead of bombs to accomplish their goals. Now, thanks to Sperry's peerless research, piquant prose, and forthright presentation, their cover is blown. He will not only make readers forget nearly everything they've been told about these "moderate" and "mainstream" leaders, he will expose the true agenda of these "moderate" and "mainstream" leaders, and he will explain the full scope of the dangerous threat of Islam in America.With everyone still on edge after 9/11, this book will garner wide interest, appealing specifically to people interested in current events and/or religion. Additionally, the book will appeal strongly to women whose roles, values, and rights are greatly threatened by fundamentalist Islam.

Point of No Return


André Vltchek - 2005
    The narrator of Point of No Return struggles to document many of these crises and scandals, all the while trying to sort out his complicated life - including his love for a possibly unreachable woman, and the level of his personal involvement in the stories he covers. By the end of the novel, he has gone all the way, in his personal, professional, and political life as well. This global novel vividly describes reality, the state of the world, and the grievances and hopes of people the world over.

The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective


John Quigley - 2005
    Since 2000, the cycle of bloodshed and retribution has spiraled increasingly out of control. Quigley attributes the breakdown of negotiations in 2000 to Israel’s unwillingness to negotiate on the basis of principles of justice and law. He argues that throughout the last century, established tenets of international law—and particularly the right of self-determination—have been overlooked or ignored in favor of the Zionists and then the Israelis, to the detriment of the Palestinians. In this volume, Quigley provides a thorough understanding of both sides of the conflict in the context of international law. He contends that the Palestinians have a stronger legal claim to Jerusalem than do the Israelis; that Palestinian refugees should be repatriated to areas including those within the borders of Israel; and that Israel should withdraw from the territory it occupied in 1967. As in his earlier volume, Quigley provides an extensively documented evaluation of the conflict over the last century, discussing the Zionist movement, the League of Nations’ decision to promote a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the 1948 war and creation of Israel, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights during the 1967 war.

Sorry, Everybody: An Apology to the World for the Re-Election of George W. Bush


James Zetlen - 2005
    The apologies range from the silly to the sublime, and their collected effect is awesome; a heart-stopping, inspiring, and hopeful portrait of America--or at least around half of it. Foreword by Ted Rall, cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.

Porridge and Passion


Jonathan Aitken - 2005
    How this Old Etonian former Cabinet Minister on Mrs Thatcher's inner circle managed to establish new relationships and lasting friendships with fellow prisoners is fascinating - so too is this account of how religious belief transformed his life. Aitken has lost none of his charm, fluency and determination - and he has found an authentic new life which readers of this entertaining new book will be able to judge for themselves.'A rich collection of humorous tales of prison life... Aitken seems to have found a new vocation of both a funny writer and a serious prison reformer.' Tablet

The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium


Paul Edward Gottfried - 2005
    Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices.            Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe.                       American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans.            Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.

Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds: Poems


Eleanor Lerman - 2005
    She’s a solid witness to the 1960s, Cold War, Vietnam, sexual revolution, and drugs. However, in her favor, she’s traveled through baby boomer irony, bought the T-shirt, and found her way back.Eleanor Lerman has been nominated for a National Book Award, received the inaugural Juniper Prize, and was the recipient of a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a lifelong New Yorker.

Passing for Who You Really Are


A.D. Powell - 2005
    - William Javier Nelson, sociologist and author of _The Racial Definition Handbook_. She reminds you of H.L. Menken, driving intellectual midgets into frenzies of outrage, a spectacle that entertains her fans. - Frank W. Sweet, author of the series _Paths Not Taken_. No spokesperson of the movement to abolish government sponsorship of the "race" notion has been more eloquent than A.D. Powell. And none has been more harshly criticized. It is not that she in error or that she does not describe reality. To the contrary, she writes with crystalline precision and merciless accuracy. But she writes of Things Best Left Unsaid in America. Powell aims her barbs at liberals of all complexions who preach the one-drop rule. She is the nemesis of those who advocate the uniquely American notion that there is no such thing as a White per-son with African ancestry-that such a person is, at best, a "light-skinned Black." Powell believes that the one-drop rule ignores sci-ence, crushes tolerance, and mocks the American Dream. And yet it is preached by Liberals, and its enforcement is demanded by most Black leaders. She argues that coercing someone's ethnic choice is tyranny. This collection of essays on multiracialism originally appeared in Interracial Voice magazine.

Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam


Gareth Porter - 2005
    It provides an authoritative challenge to the prevailing explanation that U.S. officials adhered blindly to a Cold War doctrine that loss of Vietnam would cause a "domino effect" leading to communist domination of the area. Gareth Porter presents compelling evidence that U.S. policy decisions on Vietnam from 1954 to mid-1965 were shaped by an overwhelming imbalance of military power favoring the United States over the Soviet Union and China. He demonstrates how the slide into war in Vietnam is relevant to understanding why the United States went to war in Iraq, and why such wars are likely as long as U.S. military power is overwhelmingly dominant in the world. Challenging conventional wisdom about the origins of the war, Porter argues that the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam came not from presidents Kennedy and Johnson but from high-ranking national security officials in their administrations who were heavily influenced by U.S. dominance over its Cold War foes. Porter argues that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were all strongly opposed to sending combat forces to Vietnam, but that both Kennedy and Johnson were strongly pressured by their national security advisers to undertake military intervention. Porter reveals for the first time that Kennedy attempted to open a diplomatic track for peace negotiations with North Vietnam in 1962 but was frustrated by bureaucratic resistance. Significantly revising the historical account of a major turning point, Porter describes how Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara deliberately misled Johnson in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, effectively taking the decision to bomb North Vietnam out of the president's hands.

Silent No More: Bringing moral clarity to America…while freedom still rings


Rod Parsley - 2005
    Parsley believes a consensus of common sense can be crafted even in the midst of inflamed and polarized passions.IT'S TIME TO SPEAK OUT! " America's future depends on moral champions like Rod Parsley." -The Honorable Walter Jones, U.S. Congressman, North CarolinaThis book should inspire men and women of faith...and make 'values voters' a force that politicians can no longer ignore." -The Honorable Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State, Ohio "Silent No More does not merely lay out the scope of the challenge, but also offers the information and action steps essential to the solution." -The Honorable Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council "Rod Parsley is the real deal-a bold, dynamic man of faith who's committed to doing the right thing no matter what. This book...is a proven, winning game plan." -Ted Haggard, Sr. Pastor, New Life Church, Colorado President, National Association of Evanelicals

Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States


Sheila Jasanoff - 2005
    Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may in a globalizing world act as obstacles to free trade, scientific inquiry, and shared understandings of human dignity.In this magisterial look at some twenty-five years of scientific and social development, Sheila Jasanoff compares the politics and policy of the life sciences in Britain, Germany, the United States, and in the European Union as a whole. She shows how public and private actors in each setting evaluated new manifestations of biotechnology and tried to reassure themselves about their safety.Three main themes emerge. First, core concepts of democratic theory, such as citizenship, deliberation, and accountability, cannot be understood satisfactorily without taking on board the politics of science and technology. Second, in all three countries, policies for the life sciences have been incorporated into nation-building projects that seek to reimagine what the nation stands for. Third, political culture influences democratic politics, and it works through the institutionalized ways in which citizens understand and evaluate public knowledge. These three aspects of contemporary politics, Jasanoff argues, help account not only for policy divergences but also for the perceived legitimacy of state actions.

The Anti-Development State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines


Walden Bello - 2005
    The way out, he argues, is through the wholesale overhaul of the system of governance, leading to a new development strategy based on more, not less, state intervention, the domestic market as the driver of growth, and working together with other countries in the South.

The Battle for Social Security: From Fdr's Vision to Bush's Gamble


Nancy J. Altman - 2005
    After a brief introduction describing the dramatic response of the Social Security Administration to the 9/11 terrorist attack, the book recounts Social Security� s lively history. Although President Bush has tried to convince Americans that Social Security is designed for the last century and unworkable for an aging population, readers will see that the President's assault is just another battle in a longstanding ideological war. Prescott Bush, the current President� s grandfather, remarked of FDR, The only man I truly hated lies buried in Hyde Park. The book traces the continuous thread leading from Prescott Bush and his contemporaries to George W. Bush and others who want to undo Social Security. The book concludes with policy recommendations which eliminate Social Security's deficit in a manner consistent with the program's philosophy and structure.

Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath


Paul Berman - 2005
    Yet, thirty-five years later, many in that radical generation had come into conventional positions of power: among them Bill Clinton (who reportedly stayed up all night reading this book) and Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany. During a 1970s street protest, Fischer was photographed beating a cop to the ground; during the 1990s, he was supporting Clinton in a NATO-led military intervention in the Balkans.Here Paul Berman, "one of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history" (The Economist), masterfully traces the intellectual and moral evolution of an impassioned generation—and gives an acute analysis of what it means to go to war in the name of democracy and human rights.

Living White


Robert S. Griffin - 2005
    Griffin's writing on race during the 2000-2005 period. Included are excerpts from his two books published during this time, The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce and One Sheaf, One Vine: Racially Conscious White Americans Talk About Race. Also here, in total or in large part, are eleven published articles, one unpublished article, and a speech. In addition, there is a published article about Professor Griffin, and a published interview in which he was the subject. Last, there are excerpts from two earlier books of his that relate to the story he is telling in this book. The writings are ordered chronologically for the most part and the author provides commentaries to accompany them. This gives Living White a narrative line and lends an autobiographical quality to it. In large measure, Living White is Dr. Griffin's own story over these past few years as it relates to race. Living White is about white people, and it is for white people. Its focus is on the personal, in contrast to the public, dimensions of the racial challenges that whites confront at this time in their history. This book isn't an analysis of race in America or elsewhere. It isn't about public policy or politics or organizational activity. It isn't about how the outside world is doing but how individual white people are doing. This book will support readers in living more honorable lives as white men and women.