Best of
United-States

2007

The Complete Buddy Bradley Stories from Hate Comics, Vol. 2: Buddy Does Jersey, 1994-1998


Peter Bagge - 2007
    Older teens.

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest


Craig Childs - 2007
    Drawing on scholarly research and archaeological evidence, the author examines the accomplishments of the Anasazi people of the American Southwest and speculates on why the culture vanished by the 13th century.

John Muir Trail: The essential guide to hiking America's most famous trail


Elizabeth Wenk - 2007
    Each year, thousands of backpackers traverse some or all of the trail, relying on Wilderness Press's John Muir Trail. The completely updated edition of this Sierra classic includes significant information found nowhere else. The new John Muir Trail meticulously describes the entire trail and is written for today's hikers. The book includes GPS coordinates, not only for every junction, but also for every established campsite, bear box, and mountain pass that the trail crosses. The guide has separate descriptions for northbound and southbound hikers; for each direction, a junction chart shows all the trail's ups and downs.

Obama: From Promise to Power


David Mendell - 2007
    Kennedy. His meteoric rise from promise to power has stunned even the cynics and inspired a legion of devout followers.For anyone who wants to know more about the man, David Mendell's Obama is essential reading. Mendell, who covered Obama for the Chicago Tribune, had far-reaching access to the Chicago politician as Obama climbed the ladder to the White House, the details of which he shares in this compelling biography. Positioning Obama as the savior of a fumbling Democratic party, Mendell reveals how Obama conquered Illinois politics and paved the way brick by brick for a galvanizing, historic presidential run.With a new afterword by the author, which includes a fresh perspective on Barack Obama following his two historic terms as the first African-American president, and with exclusive interviews with family members and top advisers, and details on Obama's voting record, David Mendell offers a complete, complex, and revealing portrait. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in American politics in general and President Barack Obama in particular.

Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's


Lauren Kessler - 2007
    To deal with the pain of her loss, and to better understand the confounding aspects of living with a disease that afflicts four and a half million people every year, Kessler enlisted as a caregiver at a facility she calls Maplewood. Life inside the facility is exhausting and humbling, a microenvironment built upon the intense relationships between two groups of marginalized people: the victims of Alzheimer's and the underpaid, overworked employees who care for them. But what surprises Kessler more than the disability and backbreaking work is the grace, humor, and unexpected humanity that are alive and well at Maplewood.Dancing with Rose is forceful and funny, clear-eyed and compelling. An intriguing narrative about the relationships and realities of end-of-life care, it stars an endearing cast of characters who give a human face to what has always been considered a dehumanizing condition. Illuminating and beautifully written, Kessler's immersion offers a new, optimistic view on what Alzheimer's has to teach us.

Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas


Emory Douglas - 2007
    Founded by the charismatic Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the party sounded a defiant cry for an end to the institutionalized subjugation of African Americans. The Black Panther newspaper was founded to articulate the party's message and artist Emory Douglas became the paper's art director and later the party's Minister of Culture. Douglas's artistic talents and experience proved a powerful combination: his striking collages of photographs and his own drawings combined to create some of the era's most iconic images, like that of Newton with his signature beret and large gun set against a background of a blood-red star, which could be found blanketing neighborhoods during the 12 years the paper existed. This landmark book brings together a remarkable lineup of party insiders who detail the crafting of the party's visual identity.

Zeroville


Steve Erickson - 2007
    Vikar Jerome steps into the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs, and — far more important to him — the decline of the movie studios and the rise of the independent director. Jerome will become a film editor of astonishing vision. Then through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the astonishing secret that lies in every movie ever made.

The Last Novel


David Markson - 2007
    In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") announces that since this will be his final effort, he has "carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases."Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists — their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.

My Men Are My Heroes: The Brad Kasal Story


Brad Kasal - 2007
    It's a page-turning, first-hand account of Kasal's courageous mission to rescue fallen comrades under intense enemy fire during the Battle of Fallujah-actions that earned him the distinguished Navy Cross, America's second highest military award. This stunning, unforgettable account shows an American hero rising to the challenge of world events with leadership, valor, and loyalty.

Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America


Elliot Jaspin - 2007
    The call heralded not a tornado or a hurricane, but a very unnatural disaster--a manmade wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation. We have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, but the story of widespread racial cleansingabove and below the Mason-Dixon line--has remained almost entirely unknown. Time after time, in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s, whites banded together to drive out the blacks in their midst. They burned and killed indiscriminately and drove thousands from their homes, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." The expulsions were swift-in many cases, it took no more than twenty-four hours to eliminate an entire African-American population. Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day. Based on nearly a decade of painstaking research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race. In this groundbreaking book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has rewritten American history as we know it.

Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail


Keith Heyer Meldahl - 2007
    Lured by the promise of riches, thousands of settlers left behind the forests, rain, and fertile soil of the eastern United States in favor of the rough-hewn lands of the American West. The dramatic terrain they struggled to cross is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts seemed to our forebears.        Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses the diaries and letters of the settlers themselves—as well as the countless hours he has spent following the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West directly affected our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a corrugated landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place. “Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled. . . . The reader comes away with both an appreciation for the arduous cross-continental wagon journey and an understanding of the events that created such a vast and difficult landscape.”—Library Journal “[Meldahl] draws on his professional knowledge to explain the geology of the West, showing how centuries of geological activity had a direct effect on the routes taken by the travelers. . . . Meldahl provides a novel account of the largest overland migration since the Crusades.”—Science News

Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment


Peter Hallward - 2007
    In the late 1980s a remarkable popular mobilization known as Lavalas, or “the flood,” sought to liberate the island from decades of US-backed dictatorial rule. After winning a landslide election victory, in 1991 the Lavalas government led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown by a bloody military coup. Damming the Flood analyzes how and why Aristide’s enemies in Haiti, the US and France made sure that his second government, elected with another overwhelming majority in 2000, was toppled by a further coup in 2004.The elaborate international campaign to contain, discredit and then overthrow Lavalas at the start of the twenty-first century was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. Its execution and its impact have much to teach anyone interested in the development of today’s political struggles in Latin America and the rest of the post-colonial world.

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies


M. Stanton Evans - 2007
    History has judged him such a loathsome figure that even today, a half century after his death, his name remains synonymous with witch hunts. But that conventional image is all wrong, as veteran journalist and author M. Stanton Evans reveals in this groundbreaking book. The long-awaited "Blacklisted by History," based on six years of intensive research, dismantles the myths surrounding Joe McCarthy and his campaign to unmask Communists, Soviet agents, and flagrant loyalty risks working within the U.S. government. Evans's revelations completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. Drawing on primary sources--including never-before-published government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow spymasters and their agents in the United States--Evans presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration. All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended. "Blacklisted by History" shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been identified by Communist leaders as a party member; that high-level U.S. officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy came on the scene. Evans also shows that practically everything we've been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the McCarthy era ("I have here in my hand . . ."), the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and much more. In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues and condemned by the press and historians. But as Evans writes, "The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him." "Blacklisted by History" provides the first accurate account of what McCarthy did and, more broadly, what happened to America during the Cold War. It is a revealing expose of the forces that distorted our national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history since.

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic


Chalmers Johnson - 2007
    The tragic aftereffects of war; social consequences; medical; financial; all catastrophic and lingering problems."...in Nemesis, the final volume in what has become the Blowback Trilogy, he (Chalmers Johnson) shows how imperial overstretch is undermining the republic itself, both economically and politically...Nemesis offers a striking description of the trap into which the grandiose dreams of America's leaders have taken us." Inside book cover comments.

The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II


Judith M. Heimann - 2007
    Instead they found themselves unexpectedly facing a Japanese fleet—and were shot down. When they cut themselves loose from their parachutes, they were scattered across the island’s mountainous interior. Then a group of loincloth-wearing natives silently materialized out of the jungle. Would these Dayak tribesmen turn the starving airmen over to the hostile Japanese occupiers? Or would the Dayaks risk vicious reprisals to get the airmen safely home? The tribal leaders’ unprecedented decision led to a desperate game of hide-and-seek, and, ultimately, the return of a long-renounced ritual: head-hunting. A cinematic survival story that features a bamboo airstrip built on a rice paddy, a mad British major, and a blowpipe-wielding army that helped destroy one of the last Japanese strongholds, The Airmen and the Headhunters is a gripping, you-are-there journey into the remote world and forgotten heroism of the Dayaks.

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


Noam Chomsky - 2007
    midterm elections and the upcoming presidential race. As always, Chomsky presents his ideas vividly and accessibly, with uncompromising principle and clarifying insight.The latest volume from a long-established, trusted partnership, What We Say Goes shows once again that no interlocutor engages with Chomsky more effectively than David Barsamian. These interviews will inspire a new generation of readers, as well as longtime Chomsky fans eager for his latest thinking on the many crises we now confront, both at home and abroad. They confirm that Chomsky is an unparalleled resource for anyone seeking to understand our world today.

Attempts at a Life


Danielle Dutton - 2007
    Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.

The Early Years: The Lyrics, 1971-1983


Tom Waits - 2007
    The Early Years collects the lyrics—formative and classic—from the first ten albums of this true bard of hard living. A celebration of both his words and of the artist himself, this lyrical biography charts the course from Wait's emotional debut album, Closing Time (1977), to the experimental stirrings in Heartattack and Vine (1991) and One from the Heart (1992). Here the words achieve a new potency, adding further dimension to this singularly gifted artist.

Partial List of People to Bleach


Gary Lutz - 2007
    A stunning collection of new and rare stories by Gary Lutz, the celebrated author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive.

Poolside With Slim Aarons


Slim Aarons - 2007
    However, the main character is the pool and everything that goes with them - magnificent suntanned bodies, well-oiled skin, bikini-clad women, yachts, summer cocktails, sumptuous buffets, and, above all, fun.

Journals, 1952-2000


Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. - 2007
    For more than a half century, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was at the vital center of American political and cultural life. From his entrance into political leadership circles in the 1950s through his years in the Kennedy White House and up until his very last days, he was that rare thing, a master historian who enjoyed an extraordinary eyewitness vantage on history as it was being made. On intimate terms with many of the most prominent political, cultural and intellectual figures of the last fifty years, he was a man whose proximity to power never obscured his appreciation for the reality of those who have none. For that capacity for empathy and for much else, he was often called American liberalism's greatest voice. For most of his adult life, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. dutifully recorded his experiences and opinions in journals that, until now, have never been seen. Edited by his oldest sons, they offer remarkably fresh and lucid observations on a half century of public life, and a rare and privileged view into the mind of one of America's most distinguished men of letters. Frank, revelatory, suffused with wit and humanity, these entries offer an intimate history of postwar America, from his days on Adlai Stevenson's campaign team to his years in JFK and RFK's inner circle, through to the election of George W. Bush. They contain his candid reminiscences about many of the signal events of our time - the Bay of Pigs, the devastating assassinations of the 1960s, Vietnam, Watergate, the fall of the Soviet Union, Bush v. Gore. These journals also offer an extraordinary window into the lives of the wide range of politicians, intellectuals, writers and actors who were his friends - from the Kennedys to the Clintons, from Henry Kissinger to Adlai Stevenson, from Norman Mailer to Lauren Bacall. Together they form an astonishingly vivid portrait of American politics and culture in the second half of the 20th century - one that only a man who knew everyone and missed nothing, could provide. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was one of America's greatest moral and intellectual forces, and the publication of his journals is both itself an epic event in the history of American letters, and a fitting opportunity to celebrate this most remarkable American life.

The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America


Allan M. Brandt - 2007
    It is hard to find a photo of Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall without a cigarette. No product has been so heavily promoted or has become so deeply entrenched in American consciousness.And no product has received such sustained scientific scrutiny. The development of new medical knowledge demonstrating the dire harms of smoking ultimately shaped the evolution of evidence-based medicine. In response, the tobacco industry engineered a campaign of scientific disinformation seeking to delay, disrupt, and suppress these studies. Using a massive archive of previously secret documents, historian Allan Brandt shows how the industry pioneered these campaigns, particularly using special interest lobbying and largesse to elude regulation.But even as the cultural dominance of the cigarette has waned and consumption has fallen dramatically in the U.S., Big Tobacco remains securely positioned to expand into new global markets. The implications for the future are vast: 100 million people died of smoking-related diseases in the 20th century; in the next 100 years, we expect 1 billion deaths worldwide.

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present


Michael B. Oren - 2007
    Bush. As Niall Ferguson writes, “If you think America’s entanglement in the Middle East began with Roosevelt and Truman, Michael Oren’s deeply researched and brilliantly written history will be a revelation to you, as it was to me. With its cast of fascinating characters—earnest missionaries, maverick converts, wide-eyed tourists, and even a nineteenth-century George Bush—Power, Faith, and Fantasy is not only a terrific read, it is also proof that you don’t really understand an issue until you know its history.”

Poetry and Commitment


Adrienne Rich - 2007
    In this essay, which was the basis for her speech upon accepting the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she ranges among themes including poetry's disparagement as "either immoral or unprofitable," the politics of translation, how poetry enters into extreme situations, different poetries as conversations across place and time. In its openness to many voices, Poetry and Commitment offers a perspective on poetry in an ever more divided and violent world."I hope never to idealize poetry—it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard."

Yosemite, The Complete Guide: Yosemite National Park


James Kaiser - 2007
    More than 20 hikes, ranging from easy to difficult, are covered in depth, with trail descriptions, elevation charts, maps, and photos. Chapters on history, geology, ecology, and wildlife are included along with essential information on lodging, camping, outdoor adventures, and popular park activities in Yosemite Valley, Tuolumne Meadows, Wawona, and Hetch Hetchy. From the world-famous views of cliffs, waterfalls, polished granite domes, and giant sequoia groves to fine dining at the High Sierra Camp, this comprehensive travel companion allows anyone to access this fascinating park.

Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case


Stuart Taylor Jr. - 2007
    In this ever-deepening American tragedy, Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson argue, law enforcement, a campaigning prosecutor, biased journalists, and left-leaning academics repeatedly refused to pursue the truth while scapegoats were made of these young men, recklessly tarnishing their lives. The story harbors multiple dramas, including the actions of a DA running for office; the inappropriate charges that should have been apparent to academics at Duke many months ago; the local and national media, who were so slow to take account of the publicly available evidence; and the appalling reactions of law enforcement, academia, and many black leaders. "Until Proven Innocent "is the only book that covers all five aspects of the case (personal, legal, academic, political, and media) in a comprehensive fashion. Based on interviews with key members of the defense team, many of the unindicted lacrosse players, and Duke officials, it is also the only book to include interviews with all three of the defendants, their families, and their legal teams. Taylor and Johnson's coverage of the Duke case was the earliest, most honest, and most comprehensive in the country, and here they take the idiocies and dishonesty of right- and left-wingers alike head on, shedding new light on the dangers of rogue prosecutors and police and a cultural tendency toward media-fueled travesties of justice. The context of the Duke case has vast import and contains likable heroes, unfortunate victims, and memorable villains--and in its full telling, it is captivating nonfiction with broad political, racial, and cultural relevance to our times.

Complete Minimal Poems


Aram Saroyan - 2007
    Visual Poetry. Long-cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and text books, and more recently celebrated on the internet, Aram Saroyan's groundbreaking concrete and minimalist poems of the 1960s are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS includes the entire contents of Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968), Pages (Random House, 1969), The Rest (Telegraph, 1971), as well as Saroyan's contribution, "Electric Poems," to the anthology All Stars (Goliard-Grossman, 1972), and a sequence, "Short Poems," which hasn't appeared previously. With ties to the work of such writers and artists as e.e. cummings, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Donald Judd, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Steve Reich, COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS confirms Aram Saroyan's place among the most daring and engaging figures in modern poetry.

Thanksgiving: : The Pilgrims' First Year in America


Glenn Alan Cheney - 2007
    It's about 102 people who came to the New World, suffered terribly, struggled courageously, and established the foundation of America. The prologue explores the reasons they left Europe. The book then puts the reader on the gun deck of the Mayflower where the passengers endured a horrific 66-day voyage across the Atlantic. The book puts the reader in the Pilgrims' cold, wet boots as they tromp around Cape Cod in search of a place to live as winter sets in. Though "Thanksgiving" holds strictly to fact, the graphic, dramatic presentation shares the Pilgrim experience. It treats the Pilgrims not as super-heroes or cartoon characters but as just plain people who were willing to face death for the values they believed in. You can read excerpts at NLLibrarium dot com.

Newcomer Can't Swim


Renee Gladman - 2007
    Fiction. Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies. In NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, Renee Gladman invites us to accompany her protagonists on their treks into, through and across variegated, mysterious soulspaces and dreamscapes, troubling the surfaces and boundaries of story and genre. Her figures touch down, chapter by chapter, onto beaches, city streets, and unmarked territories, in which echoes, shadows, and parallel presences delineate borders of the cannily strange. As the narrative flickers before us, gathering into an enthralling flow, we find ourselves recording with unmeasured exhilaration that Gladman once again is mapping one of the most original and vital courses in contemporary literature.

Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place


Coll Thrush - 2007
    Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native.On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself.After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms.In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region.Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345

Houses of the Founding Fathers


Hugh Howard - 2007
    But the patriots—landowners, merchants, and professional men who hailed from towns, cities, and plantations scattered along the eastern seaboard—had private lives too, quite apart from the public deeds we know so well. In this breathtaking volume, historian Hugh Howard and photographer Roger Straus examine the everyday lives of the Founding Fathers. Houses of the Founding Fathers takes us on an eye-opening tour of forty stately eighteenth-century houses. We see the mansions of such legendary figures as Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, along with the homes of many other signers of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. At sites from Maine to Georgia, with stops in each of the thirteen colonies, the grand story of the Revolution emerges from unique and individual domestic perspectives. Houses overlooking the sea, in busy townscapes, or atop mountains reveal these patriots’ tastes in architecture, furniture, and horticulture. There are tales of friends and enemies, murderous relatives, reluctant revolutionaries, adoring wives, and runaway servants. The founding families are brought to life in the rituals of birth and death, the food they ate, the archaic medical practices they endured, their household arrangements, and the way their slaves lived. Houses of the Founding Fathers offers a penetrating look at the private lives of the men whose ideas ignited an insurrection against England—and who helped create the modern world.

Imago


Joseph O. Legaspi - 2007
    And like his mentor Pablo Neruda he seems able to locate the mysterious and the magical in the most common and overlooked objects. It is difficult to overestimate the daring and resourcefulness required to complete successfully this astonishingly original book. I believe this collection of poetry, so rich in the dailyness of the world and what wisdom we can draw from it, is ample evidence that Joseph O. Legaspi has arrived to a place none of his ancestors in life or in poetry have ever journeyed, and we his readers are the richer for it.”—Philip Levine

Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire


Rita Nakashima Brock - 2007
    He appears as a shepherd, a teacher, a healer, an enthroned god; he is an infant, a youth, and a bearded elder. But he is never dead. When he appears with the cross, he stands in front of it, serene, resurrected. The world around him is ablaze with beauty. These are images of paradise-paradise in this world, permeated and blessed by the presence of God.But once Jesus perished, dying was virtually all he seemed able to do.Saving Paradise offers a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, from its first centuries to the present day, and asks how its early vision of beauty evolved into one of torture. In tracing the changes in society and theology that marked the medieval emergence of images of Christ crucified, Saving Paradise exposes the imperial strategies embedded in theologies of redemptive violence and sheds new light on Christianity's turn to holy war. It reveals how the New World, established through Christian conquest and colonization, is haunted by the loss of a spiritual understanding of paradise here and now.Brock and Parker reconstruct the idea that salvation is paradise in this world and in this life, and they offer a bold new theology for saving paradise. They ground justice and peace for humanity in love for the earth and open a new future for Christianity through a theology of redemptive beauty.

Works of Thomas Jefferson. Including The Jefferson Bible, Autobiography and The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Illustrated), with Notes on Virginia, Parliamentary ... more.


Thomas Jefferson - 2007
    Table of Contents: AutobiographyThe Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of NazarethThe Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Illustrated), including Autobiography, Notes on Virginia, Parliamentary Manual, Official Papers, Messages and Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private Appendix:Thomas Jefferson BiographyAbout and Navigation

Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq


William R. Polk - 2007
    But guerrilla war-fare is not just the tool of modern-day terrorists. Its roots stretch back to our very own revolution.In Violent Politics, William Polk takes us on a concise, brilliant tour of insurgencies throughout history, starting with the American struggle for independence, when fighters had to battle against both the British and the loyalists, those colonists who sided with the monarchy. Instinctively, in a way they probably wouldn't have described as a coherent strategy, the rebel groups employed the tactics of insurgency.From there, Polk explores the role of insurgency in several other notable conflicts, including the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, the Irish struggle for independence, the Algerian War of National Independence, and Vietnam. He eventually lands at the present day, where the lessons of this history are needed more than ever as Americans engage in ongoing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq—and beyond.

Circadian


Joanna Klink - 2007
    Moved by the presence and withdrawal of light, these internal clocks influence rhythms of sleeping and waking: the opening and closing of flowers, the speed at which the heart pumps blood, the migratory cycles of birds. With love poems and wintry prayers, Joanna Klink offers us patterns of glowing alertness and shared life, patterns that speak to the flickering circuit between inner and outer landscapes, that bind each beating heart to the pull of the tides.

The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America


Peter Dale Scott - 2007
    foreign policy since the 1960s has led to partial or total cover-ups of past domestic criminal acts, including, perhaps, the catastrophe of 9/11. Peter Dale Scott, whose previous books have investigated CIA involvement in southeast Asia, the drug wars, and the Kennedy assassination, here probes how the policies of presidents since Nixon have augmented the tangled bases for the 2001 terrorist attack. Scott shows how America's expansion into the world since World War II has led to momentous secret decision making at high levels. He demonstrates how these decisions by small cliques are responsive to the agendas of private wealth at the expense of the public, of the democratic state, and of civil society. He shows how, in implementing these agendas, U.S. intelligence agencies have become involved with terrorist groups they once backed and helped create, including al Qaeda.

The Elephant in the Playroom: Ordinary Parents Write Intimately and Honestly about the Extraordinary Highs and Heartbreaking Lows of Raising Kids with Special Needs


Denise Brodey - 2007
    As she struggled to make sense of her new, often chaotic, often lonely world, what she found comforted her "most" was talking with other harried, hopeful, and insightful parents of kids with special needs, learning how they coped with the feelings they encountered throughout the day.In "The Elephant in the Playroom," moms and dads write intimately and honestly about the joyful highs and disordered lows of raising children who are ?not quite normal.? Laying bare the emotional, medical, and social challenges they face, their stories address issues ranging from if and when to medicate a child, to how to get a child who is overly sensitive to the texture of food to eat lunch. Eloquent and honest, the voices in this collection will provide solace and support for the millions of parents whose kids struggle with #ADHD, #sensory disorders, childhood #depression, Asperger's syndrome, and autism?as well as the many kids who fall between diagnoses.Offering readers comfort, community, and much-needed perspective, "The Elephant in the Playroom" has become essential reading for parents of special needs kids.

Selected Essays


Gore Vidal - 2007
    No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality & provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay. This long-needed volume comprises some 24 of his forays into criticism, reviewing, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, &, occasionally, unfettered score settling. Among them are such classics as The Top Ten Best-Sellers, Dawn Powell: The American Writer; Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy, Pornography, & The Second American Revolution. Edited & introduced by Gore Vidal's literary executor, Jay Parini, it will stand as one of the most enjoyable & durable works from the hand & mind of this vastly accomplished & entertaining immortal of American literature.

Meditation Now or Never


Steve Hagen - 2007
    Inside you will find:Simple practices to avoid needlessly complicating meditationWhere most of us get stuck in meditation—and how to get unstuckA unique focus on meditation not simply as a spiritual technique, but as a way of living

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing


Amiri Baraka - 2007
    Nearly 200 selections, including poetry, essays, short stories, and plays, from over 75 cultural critics, writers, and political leaders, capture the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s. In his new introduction, Amiri Baraka reflects — nearly four decades later — on both the movement and the book.

Mine Eyes Have Seen


Bob Adelman - 2007
    Fuelled by the powerful imagery in "Mine Eyes Have Seen", we take a rollercoaster ride, peering through the eyes of "LIFE" photographer Bob Adelman as America struggles. We are both seared and uplifted by unforgettable photographs of America's dramatic journey through its still aching racial conflicts. Incredibly, only a generation ago, public signs shamefully separated people according to their skin colour. Selfless activists from all walks of life rallied under inspired leaders to dismantle those last vestiges of slavery.Picture by picture, we see racial barriers fall confronted with moral outrage and public scrutiny. In some of the most riveting images we are reminded that racism was not restricted to one section of the nation. Attuned to the vitality and expressiveness of African American culture, we see evocative and penetrating portraits of artists and writers as diverse as the Quilters of Gees Bend, Ralph Ellison, Sidney Poitier, James Baldwin, and Miles Davis. Together with the Black Church, the extraordinary creativity of artists and ordinary folk were formidable resources from which the Movement drew its strength and its inventiveness. Concluding on a note of celebration, the photographs reveal ever-increasing signs of racial reconciliation.

America in Space: Nasa's First Fifty Years


Steven J. Dick - 2007
    Until then, America's space exploration had been entrusted to the military, but immediately following Sputnik, the United States began to plan for the first civilian space agency. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) was officially born on July 29, 1958.America in Space is a visual history of NASA, from its early days as a pioneer in supersonic flight, through the first manned space missions of the 1960s, to the shuttle and international space station missions that are still underway. It also covers NASA's exploration of the Solar System using unmanned probes and the imagery from satellite telescopes like Hubble.In fall 2007, NASA begins to celebrate its 50th Anniversary and Abrams is privileged to publish the official visual history of its many achievements in manned and unmanned space travel. Written and edited by a team of experienced NASA staffers and illustrated with many unpublished and rare images from the voluminous NASA archives scattered across the country, America in Space offers an unparalleled view of the human need to explore unknown places.

Hogs in the Shadows: Combat Stories from Marine Snipers in Iraq


Milo S. Afong - 2007
    In Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is a special breed of marine for whom the prey is the enemy-and every day is hunting season. This marine is a HOG-a Hunter of Gunman. These are the gripping, gut-wrenching true stories of those marines in Iraq whose sole purpose on the battlefield is to take out the enemy-one combatant at a time. Every time a HOG puts his eye to the glass, it means death for whoever is unlucky enough to end up in his crosshairs. No warning shots. No disabling wounds. No regrets. That's what a HOG does. Here, former Scout/Sniper Team Leader Milo S. Afong reveals what it takes to be a Hunter of Gunmen. He describes the intensive training that turns expert infantrymen into one-shot life-takers, building Marine Scout/Sniper teams and how they operate in the field-and under fire-and how HOGs get the job done under any conditions. From sniping from a rooftop in Baghdad, to unknowingly being surrounded in a palm grove in the city of Hit, these stories will transport you right into the heat of the desert war, where one squeeze of the trigger can make all the difference.

Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam


Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz - 2007
    Spoken word icons such as Saul Williams, Maggie Estep, Bob Holman and John S. Hall join scores of other poets, organizers, filmmakers, scholars and critics in bringing the story of the New York City Poetry Slam movement to life. Author Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz tells the story of slam's origins in the roofless, unheated Nuyorican Poets Cafe and then traces the explosive growth of slam as the media pick up on the trend--MTV's Unplugged begins to feature slam poets; PBS runs the mini-series The United States of Poetry, produced by then-Nuyorican impressario, Bob Holman; Lollapalooza adds a spoken word tent; and Holman also launches a spoken word label with Mercury Records. Aptowicz shows how, rather than depend on the fickle media for continued support, Slam instead deepens and broadens organically, avoiding the flash-in-the-pan flame-out of, say, the grunge scene. The author also establishes a relationship between the poetry slam world and the academic poetry world, encouraging interaction between academia and slammers, especially the poets of color, the youth slammers and the burgeoning hip hop poetry scene. She also shows how the scene has created the only non-academic way to make a living as a poet, as many poets are able to quit the day job through the opportunities created from touring, publishing, performing, audio downloads and matures to where it is a key component of educational initiatives and political campaigns.

The Buffalo Storm


Katherine Applegate - 2007
    When her family decides to join a wagon train and go west, leaving her grandmother--and everything Hallie has ever known--behind, Hallie knows she will have to be braver than she's ever been before. Then one day on the trail she witnesses the wildest, most glorious storm imaginable. How can she be afraid of anything after that?Lyrical text from an exceptional writer is paired with gorgeous, jewel-like paintings in this evocative story of westward expansion.

After the Deluge


Kara Walker - 2007
    Championed by the art world for her fearless embrace of challenging subject matter, Walker has created a body of work that looks unflinchingly at racial inequality in the United States. Known for her bold images using the traditional silhouette, Walker upends the genteel, Victorian origins of the medium by graphically portraying scenes from the antebellum South to explore the politics of slavery, race, and gender. Inspired by the tragedy that beset the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, Walker has created a volume exploring the interconnectedness of the subject of the sea, race, and poverty by juxtaposing examples of her work and historical works from the 19th century. This unique and important book capitalizes on Walker’s deftness at graphic and visceral storytelling, affording the reader a deeply intimate experience of the difficult themes the artist explores.

Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians


Chris Hedges - 2007
    The testimonies of these soldiers--many of who remain deeply traumatized by their experiences--uncover how the very conduct of the war and occupation have turned the American forces into agents of terror for most Iraqis.Collateral Damage is organized around key military operations--Convoys, Checkpoints, Detentions, Raids, Suppressive Fire, and "Hearts and Minds." Military convoys traveling at tremendous speeds through towns have become trains of death. Civilians are routinely run over or shot to death. Soldiers fire upon Iraqi vehicles with impunity at checkpoints. Late-night detentions based on shoddy intelligence terrify women, traumatize children, and radicalize the young men caught in their dragnet.These soldiers have found the moral courage to speak out about the true nature of a war that has become one long, unchecked atrocity, and has given rise to the instability, sectarian violence and chaos that we witness today in Iraq.

Red Clay Suite


Honorée Fanonne Jeffers - 2007
    Her two earlier books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues, use the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma. Now, in Red Clay Suite, Jeffersapproaches the southern landscape as utopia and dystopia—a crossroads of race, gender, and blood. These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and complete the last four “bars” of a blues song, resting on the final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation.

At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches


Susan Sontag - 2007
    Sontag's incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer's responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag's life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty. She considers the works of writers from the little-known Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, who struggled and eventually succeeded in publishing his only book days before his death; to the greats, such as Nadine Gordimer, who enlarge our capacity for moral judgment. Sontag also fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.At the Same Time, which includes a foreword by her son, David Rieff, is a passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers, who always saw literature "as a passport to enter a larger life, the zone of freedom."

Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That...


Joe Carducci - 2007
    This, though, is a memoir of the west coast music world in the years 1976 to 1986, with special attention paid to Los Angeles, SST Records and the late music photographer Naomi Petersen. Other Carducci titles available from Redoubt are Life Against Dementia, Wyoming Stories, and Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Carducci lives and writes in Wyoming.

Honor Betrayed: Sexual Abuse in America's Military


Mic Hunter - 2007
    Presenting first-person accounts, the author of Hope and Recovery probes beyond the headlines to reveal the reality of sexual abuse in the military.

A Play of Selves


Cindy Sherman - 2007
    She began by experimenting with makeup and costumes, getting dressed up for parties and surprising her friends. She then moved on to photograph herself in the various personas she had created, producing highly inventive but somewhat more primitive versions of the seminal work for which she would later become known, the Untitled Film Stills series. It was during this early period that Sherman created A Play of Selves--a visual tale of a young woman overwhelmed by various alter-egos that compete inside of her, and her final conquering of self-doubt. Acted out with 16 separate characters, these 72 photographic assemblages mark Sherman's earliest explorations of herself-as-subject in a series of staged photographs. Published here for the first time, these photographs include hundreds of shots of the artist costumed as various characters in dozens of poses. Organized in a four-act "play" with an elaborate, handwritten script, the individual images were cut by the artist from original black-and-white prints. Preface by Cindy Sherman.

A Man for All Seasons: The Life of George Washington Carver


Stephen Krensky - 2007
    His passion for learning about nature was boundless. And, despite financial struggles and racial discrimination throughout his schooling, by 1896 Carver, a former slave, was appointed by Booker T. Washington to head the agricultural department at the prestigious Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.During his tenure at Tuskegee and beyond, George Washington Carver made significant contributions to the study of agriculture, and particularly the innovative uses of the peanut. Yet his most enduring legacy was his love of learning and teaching and his deep respect for nature. Now, acclaimed nonfiction author Stephen Krensky and Coretta Scott King Honor artist Wil Clay create a spirited tribute to one of America's greatest educators and agricultural pioneers.

ULULU (Clown Shrapnel)


Thalia Field - 2007
    In a furious performance of text and imagery, Thalia Field introduces us to the stock characters of the commedia, the famous plays, operas, and silent films in which Lulu appeared, the artists who brought her to life, and the censorship and controversy that she engendered.The myth of “Lulu” began during the height of late-nineteenth-century Viennese culture with a sequence of two plays by Frank Wedekind (Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box), and continued through the two world wars with Lulu, an unfinished opera by Alban Berg, and Pandora’s Box, a highly acclaimed film by G.W. Pabst, starring Louise Brooks. Throughout all of Lulu’s incarnations she met with censure—Wedekind’s plays were banned from the stage, Berg’s opera, which contained a secret score for his young lover, was kept from the public by his widow, and Pabst’s erotic film was too risqué for many.As Field’s story peeks into the dressing rooms and back alleys of history, words take the stage, “fictional” and “historical” characters speak side by side, and lyrical symbolism undulates throughout the pages. Original and treated footage from award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison and illustrations from artist Abbot Stranahan complete this masterful work of avant-garde fiction, presented in a numbered and signed first edition limited to 1,500 copies.In addition to her multimedia performance work, Thalia Field, an assistant professor at Brown University, is the author of Point and Line and Incarnate: Story Material.

Railroads Across North America: An Illustrated History


Claude Wiatrowski - 2007
    From the first steam-powered locomotives of the early nineteenth century to the high-speed commuter trains of today, the American railroad has been a great engine powering the nations growth and industry.This book celebrates the glory and grandeur of that legacy with a lavish tour of the history of the American railroad and the culture surrounding it.Generously illustrated with vintage photographs, modern images, maps, timetables, tickets, brochures, and all manner of memorabilia, this volume offers a fascinating look at the rail industrys beginnings and development, as well as its place in American history.From the might of the major rail companies and their empires to the romance of rail travel, this is the full and fabulously colorful story of the industry that moved a nation--and stirs our imaginations to this day.

Complex Sleep


Tony Tost - 2007
    Each leap marks a sure and precise entry into a world of images, ideas, and sensations that is brand new - the true accomplishment of any poetic work. audacious in scope, swiping at meaning via language as fragmented music. Tost takes on the problem of physical shape, reorchestrates phrases according to the alphabet, and writes himself into the hypnagogic state between waking and dreaming. Informed by their own procedural constraints, these poems invent forms that tap the unconscious poetic, the very complexity embodied in sleep. All the while, Tost reforms utterance beyond the mere epistemology of much contemporary poetry. discovering the what, Complex Sleep is about discovering how to say what needs to be said. Skip the opera, this book performs.

The Fall of the House of Bush: How a Group of True Believers Put America on the Road to Armageddon


Craig Unger - 2007
    Bush has led to the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the United States -- the bloody, unwinnable war in Iraq. How did this happen? Bush's fateful decision was rooted in events that began decades ago, and until now this story has never been fully told. From Craig Unger, the author of the bestseller "House of Bush, House of Saud," comes a comprehensive, deeply sourced, and chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right, and how they assaulted the most vital safeguards of America's constitutional democracy while pushing the country into the catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East that is getting worse day by day.Among the powerful revelations in this book: Why George W. Bush ignored the sage advice of his father, George H.W. Bush, and took America into war. How Bush was convinced he was doing God's will. How Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated George W. Bush, disabled his enemies within the administration, and relentlessly pressed for an attack on Iraq. Which veteran government official, with the assent of the president's father, protested passionately that the Bush administration was making a catastrophic mistake -- and was ignored. How information from forged documents that had already been discredited fourteen times by various intelligence agencies found its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in which he made the case for war with Iraq. How Cheney and the neocons assembled a shadow national security apparatus and created a disinformation pipeline to mislead America and start the war.A seasoned, award-winning investigative reporter connected to many back-channel political and intelligence sources, Craig Unger knows how to get the big story -- and this one is his most explosive yet. Through scores of interviews with figures in the Christian Right, the neoconservative movement, the Bush administration, and sources close to the Bush family, as well as intelligence agents in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Israel, Unger shows how the Bush administration's certainty that it could bend history to its will has carried America into the disastrous war in Iraq, dooming Bush's presidency to failure and costing America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Far from ensuring our security, the Iraq War will be seen as a great strategic pivot point in history that could ignite wider war in the Middle East, particularly in Iran.Provocative, timely, and disturbing, "The Fall of the House of Bush" stands as the most comprehensive and dramatic account of how and why George W. Bush took America to war in Iraq.

Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II


Cedric J. Robinson - 2007
    Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Robinson's analysis marks a new way of approaching the intellectual, political, and media racism present in the beginnings of American narrative cinema.

The Crisis of Imprisonment


Rebecca McLennan - 2007
    Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor system as immoral and unbefitting of a free republic: it fostered torture and other abuses, degraded free citizen-workers, corrupted government and the legal system, and stifled the supposedly ethical purposes of punishment. The Crisis of Imprisonment tells the remarkable story of this controversial system of penal servitude: --how it came into being, how it worked, how the popular campaigns for its abolition were ultimately victorious, and how it shaped and continues to haunt the American penal system. The author takes the reader into the morally vital world of nineteenth-century artisans, industrial workers, farmers, clergy, convicts, machine politicians, and labor leaders and shows how prisons became a lightning rod in a determined defense of republican and Christian values against the encroachments of an unbridled market capitalism. She explores the vexing ethical questions that prisons posed then and remain exigent today: What are the limits of state power over the minds, bodies, and souls of citizens and others--is torture permissible under certain circumstances? What, if anything, makes the state morally fit to deprive a person of life or liberty? Are prisoners slaves and, if so, by what right? Should prisoners work? Is the prison a morally defensible institution? The eventual abolition of prison labor contracting plunged the prisons into deep fiscal and ideological crisis. The second half of the book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Progressive Era prison reform as, above all, a response to this crisis. It concludes with an exploration of the long-range impact of both penal servitude and the anti-prison labor movement on the modern American penal system.

America's Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power


Nicholas Spykman - 2007
    In America's Strategy in World Politics, Spykman examined world politics from a realist geopolitical perspective. The United States, he explained, was fighting for its very survival as an independent country because the conquests of Germany and Japan raised the specter of our geopolitical encirclement by hostile forces controlling the power centers of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Spykman warned that the United States could not safely retreat to a defensive position in the Western Hemisphere.Spykman looked beyond the immediate strategic requirements of the Second World War, envisioning a postwar world in which the United States would help shape the global balance of power to meet its security needs. Even though Soviet Russia was our wartime ally, Spykman recognized that a geopolitically unbalanced Soviet Union could threaten to upset the postwar balance of power and thereby endanger U.S. security. Spykman also foresaw the rise of China in postwar Asia, and the likely need for the United States to ally itself with Japan to balance China's power. He also recognized that the Middle East would play a pivotal role in the postwar world.Spykman influenced American postwar statesmen and strategists. During the Cold War, the U.S. sought to deny the Soviet Union political control of Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Spykman's geopolitical vision of U.S. security, supported by a balanced Eurasian land mass, coupled with his focus on power as the governing force in international relations, makes America's Strategy in World Politics relevant to the twenty-first century.

Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia


Peter Cole - 2007
    For much of its time, Local 8's majority was African American and included immigrants from Eastern Europe as well as many Irish Americans. In this important study, Peter Cole examines how Local 8, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), accomplished what no other did at the time. He also shows how race was central not only to the rise but also to the decline of Local 8, as increasing racial tensions were manipulated by employers and federal agents bent on the union's destruction.

Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II


Kenneth D. Rose - 2007
    Issues of racial, labor unrest, juvenile delinquency, and marital infidelity were rampant, and the black market flourished.This book delves into both personal and national issues, calling into questions the dominant view of World War II as 'The Good War'.

Continuum: New and Selected Poems


Mari Evans - 2007
    Written without the flourish of fancy language, the poems are full of Evans’s brilliance, humor, and musical expression. Included are signature poems such as “I am a Black Woman” as well as new works that paint an intimate portrait of contemporary African American life.

Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy


Joy James - 2007
    Although most of the U.S. population is non-Hispanic and white, the vast majority of the incarcerated—and policed—is not. In this compelling collection, scholars, activists, and current and former prisoners examine the sensibilities that enable a penal democracy to thrive. Some pieces are new to this volume; others are classic critiques of U.S. state power. Through biography, diary entries, and criticism, the contributors collectively assert that the United States wages war against enemies abroad and against its own people at home.Contributors consider the interning or policing of citizens of color, the activism of radicals, structural racism, destruction and death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the FBI Counterintelligence Program designed to quash domestic dissent. Among the first-person accounts are an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a Black Panther and former political prisoner; a portrayal of life in prison by a Plowshares nun jailed for her antinuclear and antiwar activism; a discussion of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement by one of its members, now serving a seventy-year prison sentence for sedition; and an excerpt from a 1970 letter by the Black Panther George Jackson chronicling the abuses of inmates in California’s Soledad Prison. Warfare in the American Homeland also includes the first English translation of an excerpt from a pamphlet by Michel Foucault and others. They argue that the 1971 shooting of George Jackson by prison guards was a murder premeditated in response to human-rights and justice organizing by black and brown prisoners and their supporters.Contributors. Hishaam Aidi, Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Richard Moore), Marilyn Buck, Marshall Eddie Conway, Susie Day, Daniel Defert, Madeleine Dwertman, Michel Foucault, Carol Gilbert, Sirène Harb, Rose Heyer, George Jackson, Joy James, Manning Marable, William F. Pinar, Oscar Lòpez Rivera, Dylan Rodríguez, Jared Sexton, Catherine vön Bulow, Laura Whitehorn, Frank B. Wilderson III

Moon Oregon


Elizabeth Morris - 2007
    Making sure you will have the best time possible in Oregon this guide covers all corners of the "Beaver State," all the way from big buildings of downtown Portland to Umpqua Hot Springs.Self-proclaimed lovers of the Pacific Northwest Elizabeth and Mark have a history of guide writing, but what they relish most is helping you find new ways to enjoy Oregon for the first, second or fifteenth time. They even include updated strategies:• Best of Oregon• Wine Lover's Tour• Oregon Outdoors• Long Weekend in OregonMoon Oregon is sure to answer any of your questions while visiting the lush locales of Southeast Oregon's Lost Forest, The Cascades Sparks Lake or dining on orange almond chicken at Williamette Valley's Sassy Onion Grill. In a state filled with fishing, foilage, and Fat Tire Festivals you're sure to see it all with Moon Oregon.

Big Man Coming Down the Road


Brad Smith - 2007
    In death, he becomes really aggravating. In a farewell gesture to his three scattered offspring, he bequeaths each one of them a tarnished jewel from his declining empire.The slothful and duplicitous Ben receives the thriving auto parts plant that he already oversees. He immediately sets his sights on acquiring all three companies. Reality-challenged Ethan gains ownership of a failing distillery. Their sister, the independent Kick, reluctantly assumes the reins of Great North, a small publishing company and sometime music producer.The trio learn from the will's executor—former NHL-er turned farmer Will Montgomery—that the departing Everett has seen fit to challenge them with a series of codicils. Ben is required to fulfill a major parts contract while Ethan has to get the whisky plant back in the black. And Kick—a chronically impoverished documentary film-maker with a project on the go in Wyoming—is dismayed to learn that she is required to produce a “back tax” album with a fading country music star. The singer, Jonah Peck, proves to be every bit as cantankerous and difficult as Everett Eastman himself. Which means that Kick is out of the frying pan.And into the fire.

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


Sean Michael Flynn - 2007
    Most of its soldiers were immigrant kids with no prior military experience and no intention of serving their country any longer than it took to get a paycheck or college credit. Once a respected all-Irish outfit, the 69th was now a Technicolor mix of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, African Americans, Russians, Poles, Koreans, Chinese, and a few token Irish Americans. Their uniforms were incomplete and their equipment was downright derelict. The thought of deploying such a unit was laughable. But that is exactly what happened. With a charismatic mix of irreverent humor and eye-opening honesty, Sean Flynn, himself a member of the 69th, memorably chronicles the transformation of this motley band of amateur soldiers into a battle- hardened troop at work in one of the most lethal quarters of Baghdad: the notorious Airport Road, a blood- soaked strand that grabbed headlines and became a bellwether for progress in postinvasion Iraq. At home on the concrete and asphalt like no other unit in the U.S. Army, Gotham’s Fighting 69th finally brings its own rough justice to this lawless precinct by ignoring army discipline and turning to the street-fighting tactics they grew up with and know best. The Fighting 69th is more than a story about the impact of terrorism, the war on Iraq, or the current administration’s failures. It is the story of how regular citizens come to grips with challenges far starker than what they have been prepared for. Flynn’s dark humor, empathy, and candor make for a fresh look at who our soldiers are and what they do when faced with their toughest challenges.

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928


Bryan D. Palmer - 2007
    Palmer's award-winning study of James P. Cannon's early years (1890-1928) details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era. This historical drama unfolds alongside the life experiences of a native son of United States radicalism, the narrative moving from Rosedale, Kansas to Chicago, New York, and Moscow. Written with panache, Palmer's richly detailed book situates American communism's formative decade of the 1920s in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context. Our understanding of the indigenous currents of the American revolutionary left is widened, just as appreciation of the complex nature of its interaction with international forces is deepened.

Women Travelers: A Century of Trailblazing Adventures, 1850-1950


Alexandra Lapierre - 2007
    From deserts and jungles to mountains and icebergs, they faced unimaginable dangers as they crossed all five continents, often armed with little more than a corset and an umbrella. Spanning a decade, this book mixes triumph and tragedy. The featured women include Fanny Vandegrift, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, who ventured all the way from Indiana to Samoa, and Nellie Bly, journalist and social reformer, who went around the world in seventy-two days. The thirty-one women celebrated here hail from fourteen countries and traveled to the farthest reaches of our planet. Twice as brave as their male counterparts, in the face of social convention, these women set off into the unknown. Their bold journeys across the globe had long-lasting effects on the role and status of women in society, and they made important contributions to disciplines as varied as medicine, archeology, and anthropology.

To My Senses


Alexandrea Weis - 2007
    She yearns to break free of the confines of her small-minded world, and when a handsome artist named David Alexander enters her life, she discovers her chance. David has found his muse in Nicci beauty, but all is not what it seems with the talented painter. David’s affection could jeopardize Nicci's family’s business, and her future. Nicci is about to face a dangerous world filled with betrayal, intrigue, and heartache. For Nicci Beauvoir, falling in love was only the beginning.

On the Vanishing of Large Creatures


Susan Hutton - 2007
    Moving deftly from Houdini to the backyard, from Euclid’s proofs to an inexplicable suicide, Hutton’s poems are about finding, collecting, and saving, are themselves dazzling little assemblages of the ordinary and the incredible, one inside the other. They are lovely, mysterious, and rewarding.

The Sorta Sisters


Adrian Fogelin - 2007
    Mica Delano likes living aboard her sailboat at a marina in the Florida Keys, but Mica fears that her restless father will soon pull anchor, taking them away from the safety of the familiar marina.A chance correspondence between these two girls becomes a flourishing friendship. As they share their love of nature, each helps the other cope with uncertainty, loneliness, and profound change. Mica enrolls in public school for the first time since first grade, and Anna must make room in her heart when her beloved foster mother becomes serious about a suitor. In the end, Anna and Mica save each other and themselves with hope, humor, and a shared love of the natural world.Award-winning author Adrian Fogelin's latest book for middle readers follows an unlikely but enduring friendship that is forged between two adolescent girls.

The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past


Catherine A. Brekus - 2007
    Mary Dyer, a Quaker who was hanged for heresy; Lizzie Robinson, a former slave and laundress who sold Bibles door to door; Sally Priesand, a Reform rabbi; Estela Ruiz, who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary--how do these women's stories change our understanding of American religious history and American women's history?In this provocative collection of twelve essays, contributors explore how considering the religious history of American women can transform our dominant historical narratives. Covering a variety of topics--including Mormonism, the women's rights movement, Judaism, witchcraft trials, the civil rights movement, Catholicism, everyday religious life, Puritanism, African American women's activism, and the Enlightenment--the volume enhances our understanding of both religious history and women's history. Taken together, these essays sound the call for a new, more inclusive history.The contributors are Ann Braude, Catherine A. Brekus, Anthea D. Butler, Emily Clark, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Amy Koehlinger, Janet Moore Lindman, Susanna Morrill, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Pamela S. Nadell, Elizabeth Reis, and Marilyn J. Westerkamp. Contributors: Ann Braude, Harvard Divinity SchoolCatherine A. Brekus, University of Chicago Divinity SchoolAnthea D. Butler, University of RochesterEmily Clark, Tulane UniversityKathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre DameAmy Koehlinger, Florida State UniversityJanet Moore Lindman, Rowan UniversitySusanna Morrill, Lewis and Clark CollegeKristy Nabhan-Warren, Augustana CollegePamela S. Nadell, American UniversityElizabeth Reis, University of OregonMarilyn J. Westerkamp, University of California, Santa Cruz

The World in Place of Itself


Bill Rasmovicz - 2007
    With fervent physical and metaphysical detail, and narrating from an unexpected angle of perception, Bill Rasmovicz plumbs the world ghosting this one, exposing the true nature of the unconscious—a superconscious whose language is startlingly apt imagery and ecstatic description.

Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice


Annie Merrill Ingram - 2007
    They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, including the teaching of green design in composition classes, the restoration of damaged landscapes, the persuasive strategies of environmental activists, the practice of urban architecture, and the impact of human technologies on nature.The essays also put ecocriticism into greater contact with the natural sciences, including elements of evolutionary biology, biological taxonomy, and geology. Engaging both ecocritical theory and practice, these authors more closely align ecocriticism with the physical environment, with the wide range of texts and cultural practices that concern it, and with the growing scholarly conversation that surrounds this concern.

Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal


Grant F. Smith - 2007
    FOREIGN AGENTS begins with testimony and subpoenaed documents from the 1963 Senate investigation into the activities of the agents of foreign principals. Senator J.W. Fulbright's discovery of "conduit" money-laundering operations in the US financed by Israeli principals touched off deep and important questions about US lobbying on behalf of the fledgling nation and the applicability of laws such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Logan Act. The book then uncovers AIPAC election law skirmishes in the 1980s-1990s, analyzing the lobby's role in establishing and coordinating political action committees and AIPAC's role in alleged election law violations. FOREIGN AGENTS then turns to the question of espionage. In 2005, two AIPAC executives, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were criminally indicted for violating the 1917 Espionage Act. FOREIGN AGENTS reviews behind-the-scenes defense team motions and judicial decisions affecting First Amendment freedom of speech issues and questions about "inside the Beltway" trafficking in classified US defense information by lobbies. FOREIGN AGENTS evaluates Rosen and Weissman's assertions that the conduct alleged in the indictment was within the scope of their employment with AIPAC and was undertaken for AIPAC's benefit. FOREIGN AGENTS then makes comprehensive recommendations for legal oversight in the context of AIPAC's history as a powerful and secretive foreign agent for Israel.

Puerto Rico in the American Century: a History Since 1898


César J. Ayala - 2007
    rule, Cesar Ayala and Rafael Bernabe connect the island's economic, political, cultural, and social past. "Puerto Rico in the American Century" explores Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as well as the island residents, who experience an unusual and daily conundrum: they consider themselves a distinct people but are part of the American political system; they have U.S. citizenship but are not represented in the U.S. Congress; and they live on land that is neither independent nor part of the United States. Highlighting both well-known and forgotten figures from Puerto Rican history, Ayala and Bernabe discuss a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural debates and social and labor struggles that previous histories have neglected. Although the island's political economy remains dependent on the United States, the authors also discuss Puerto Rico's situation in light of world economies. Ayala and Bernabe argue that the inability of Puerto Rico to shake its colonial legacy reveals the limits of free-market capitalism, a break from which would require a renewal of the long tradition of labor and social activism in Puerto Rico in connection with similar currents in the United States.

Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals


Brian Luke - 2007
    Employing philosophical analysis, reference to empirical research, and relevant personal experience, Luke develops a new theory of how exploitative institutions do not work to promote human flourishing but instead merely act as support for a particular construction of manhood. The resulting work is of significant interest both to animal advocates and opponents of sexism.

The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America


Charles E. Orser Jr. - 2007
    He demonstrates this in two case studies, one from the Five Points excavation in New York City focusing on an immigrant Irish population, the second from a Chinese laundry in Stockton, California. Orser argues that race has not always been defined by skin color; through time, its meaning has changed. The process of racialization has marked most groups who came to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; this book demonstrates ways that historical archaeology can contribute to understanding a fundamental element of the American immigrant experience.

The Understory


Pamela Erens - 2007
    Ex-lawyer Jack Gorse walls off his inner life with elaborate rituals and routines. Threatened with eviction from his longtime apartment and caught off-guard by an attraction to a near stranger, he takes steps that lead to the dramatic dissolution of the existence he's known.

Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops


Ginetta E.B. Candelario - 2007
    For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

Slow Road Home


Frederick Blair First - 2007
    For those who have lived other places only to discover home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there is a mystery and allure that draws them there. This pull First describes as a "magnetic resonance in our bones that pulls us toward an altitude, latitude and slant of sun that simply feels right for us like no place else." For such souls "the mountains hold a nutrient that we can not live without." At fifty four, the author left his profession in healthcare to explore where it was that he lived; for a time, this became what he did for a living. The daily discipline of intentional immersion in small wonders close at hand ultimately grew to become the story of the book, a celebration of one special mountain place that seems to have been waiting all his life for the author to find, to know and to share. Slow Road Home a Blue Ridge Book of Days was published by Goose Creek Press in April, 2006. The author's background as naturalist, teacher and photographer inform this collection of more than a hundred lyrical essays and stories, many originally shared with weblog readers in the author's weblog, Fragments from Floyd. Slow Road Home is a book to read slowly as it unfolds through the seasons. Readers have commented that having read through once, they intend to read it again. Another reader states that Slow Road stays by her bedside where "it just makes me thankful and at peace, and I go to bed looking forward to what the next morning will bring." If you live in or long for the southern mountains, the pages of this book will remind you of the unique sights, sounds and smells of Virginia's Appalachian hills and home. Fred First is a physical therapist who practices part time at a clinic near Radford, Virginia and teaches as adjunct faculty for the biology department at Radford University. He lives on the headwaters of the Roanoke River in a remote part of Floyd County, Virginia, with his wife Ann and yellow lab, Tsuga.

Hotel Theory


Wayne Koestenbaum - 2007
    Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum’s invigoratingly inventive style, the two books — one fiction, one nonfiction — run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles “a,” “an,” and “the” never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author’s dreams as well as in literature, film, and history. Guest stars include everyone from Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe. Hotel Theory gives (divided) voice to an aesthetic of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. It is an oblique manifesto, the place where writing disappears. A new mode of theorizing — in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest — arises in this dazzling work.

Marxism, Reparations the Black Freedom Struggle


Monica Moorehead - 2007
    Illuminating the often forgotten history of this diaspora and the legacy of brutal prejudice that stemmed from it, this critical argument discusses the fight for reparations within the United States as well as among the peoples of Africa and the Caribbean.

New Hampshire's General John Stark - Live Free or Die: Death Is Not the Worst of Evils


Clifton La Bree - 2007
    John Stark was a courageous New Hampshire citizen-soldier who fought in both the French and Indian War, and the Revolutionary War. He was a modest man of the forest who had honed his skills in the volatile wilderness frontier that stretched west from the Piscataqua River to the Hudson River-Lake Champlain corridor.His pursuit of leadership excellence on the battlefield distinguished him as one of the most successful combat commanders of the war, and one of the least appreciated. His selflessness, modest life style, and devotion to the cause of freedom are an inspiration that time has not diminished. He remains today the embodiment of the frugal, independent, and cantankerous New Hampshire Yankee.New Hampshire’s General John Stark will appeal to all citizens interested in learning more about the legacy of sacrifice personified by General Stark and his compatriots.

Frederick Hart: The Complete Works


Frederick Hart - 2007
    This magnificent volume is resplendent with more than 246 color plates and 136 black and white illustrations, and provides full specifications and documentation for the artist's 204 sculptural works.