As the petroleum minister for Saudi Arabia and the leading force behind OPEC, he was the biggest player in the world's biggest business - oil.His is a story of ultimate political power, of the Middle East, of the "oil weapon" and the embargoes, of a brilliant young Saudi lawyer who emerged from the desert sands to walk comfortably through the halls of power in Washington DC, in London, in Paris, and throughout much of the rest of the world.It is also the story of a man who, in 1975, faced sudden death not once but twice. His mentor and lifelong support, the legendary King Faisal, was shot dead at his feet; and nine months later Yamani himself was kidnapped by the terrorist who was known as, "Carlos the Jackal," only narrowly escaping with his life.Co-starring Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Colonel Qaddafi, Jimmy Carter, the CIA, the Shah of Iran, Ronald Reagan and Nat King Cole, this is the up close and personal story of a man who strode across the world's stage a superstar in the media, was heralded as "the best friend the West had in the Middle East," and yet became the face of the oil embargoes that threatened to cripple Western economies.A brilliant and enormously charming man who could move markets with a few simple words, Sheikh Yamani earned the respect of political leaders in the West while suffering the jealousy of kings and princes back home. His sudden and abrupt firing in October 1986 made front page headlines throughout the world.Written in 1988 with the unprecedented cooperation of Sheikh Yamani - meeting with him regularly over the course of a year in five countries - plus hundreds of interviews with the people who knew him best, Jeffrey Robinson's gripping and intimate account opens a door to the very heart of one of the world's most controversial and fascinating statesmen.Heralded in the West as "the best book ever written about the oil business," and banned in Saudi Arabia when it was first published, this #1 international bestseller is now, finally, available as an eBook for the first time.*** "A sizzler" - Today*** "Bestselling writer Jeffrey Robinson has taken the lid off Yamani's life" - Sunday Express*** "Rich in entertaining anecdote" - Financial Times*** "Superb" - The Sunday Times*** "Robinson provides the reader with a portrait of a man who, while claiming he was nothing more than a simple Bedouin, became a deft politician and media personality indelibly associated in the public mind with the rise in OPEC economic power and Saudi Arabia's leading position in global oil production" - Washington Report*** "In crisp, straightforward sentences, Robinson describes how Ahmed Zaki Yamani's close relationship with King Faisal, and his own urbane intelligence, made him the dominant industry figure worldwide" - Publishers Weekly*** "Yamani emerges from the book as a man of intelligence and charm, deeply devoted to his family and his Muslim faith, who rose from a Mecca boyhood to become a jet-setting world figure and custodian of one-third of the non-communist world's oil" - Houston Post*** "Riveting, fast paced" - Globe and Mail*** "Robinson weaves a fascinating tale" - San Francisco Chronicle*** "A colorful, well rounded biography." - Philadelphia Inquirer*** "Oil gagsters were referring to the hot book as "the OPEC version of the Andy Warhol Diaries" - Liz Smith*** "A Fascinating portrait of this master politician" - Wall Street Journal

    Foreign Policy offers a conceptual and historical overview of American foreign relations from the founding to the present. Kaufman begins the book with a thorough explanation of major themes, concepts, and actors in international relations that gives students a solid foundation on which to analyze U.S. foreign policy. Subsequent chapters explore how these theories and concepts apply to political and historical actions, placing the evolution of foreign policy decisions within the context of the international situations and domestic priorities. Kaufman concludes with a look forward to the twenty-first century and uses case studies to encourage students to form their own ideas about American foreign policy.

    Through statistics like these, we feel that we understand our fellow citizens. But remarkably, such data now woven into our social fabric became common currency only in the last century. Sarah Igo tells the story, for the first time, of how opinion polls, man-in-the-street interviews, sex surveys, community studies, and consumer research transformed the United States public.Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as the average American and as intimate as the sexual self.With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.

    In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, American journalist Michael Weiss and Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan explain how these violent extremists evolved from a nearly defeated Iraqi insurgent group into a jihadi army of international volunteers who behead Western hostages in slickly produced videos and have conquered territory equal to the size of Great Britain. Beginning with the early days of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s first incarnation as “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Weiss and Hassan explain who the key players are—from their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the former Saddam Baathists in their ranks—where they come from, how the movement has attracted both local and global support, and where their financing comes from. Political and military maneuvering by the United States, Iraq, Iran, and Syria have all fueled ISIS’s astonishing and explosive expansion. Drawing on original interviews with former US military officials and current ISIS fighters, the authors also reveal the internecine struggles within the movement itself, as well as ISIS’s bloody hatred of Shiite Muslims, which is generating another sectarian war in the region. Just like the one the US thought it had stopped in 2011 in Iraq. Past is prologue and America’s legacy in the Middle East is sowing a new generation of terror.

    Analyzing four European nations and Japan at some length and four Third World nations more briefly, this text studies the history, institutions, geography, and political culture of each to provide valuable comparative information in the course of the semester. - Updated and revised - Enables students to stay abreast of the latest events in the global-political environment. - Expanded political-geography material - Provides students with geographical insight that prepares them for globalization. Aids students preparing for the state teacher certification exams. - Insights - Includes some rational-choice perspectives, more geography, and Russia as a quasi-authoritarian system. - Improved Pedagogy includes highlighted boxes, glossary, maps and chapter-opening questions. - Nine countries represented - Extensive coverage of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan; more brief coverage of four Third World

    Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible--if no less troubling--the tangled origins of the war.

    These stories are unique in time and circumstance, yet they address a common dilemma: how to reconcile America's mythologized "promise" with its more complex reality. New to the collection are Sherman Alexie, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Chitra Divakaruni, Jewelle Gomez, Thomas King, Bruce Morrow, Agnes Rossi, and David Wong Louie. They join Toni Cade Bambara, Richard Bausch, Marita Bonner, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Mei Mei Evans, Oscar Hijuelos, Gish Jen, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Kim Yong Ik, Monfoon Leong, Bernard Malamud, Paule Marshall, Nicholasa Mohr, Toshio Mori, Bharati Mukherjee, Mikhail Naimy, Tahira Naqvi, Gregory Orfalea, Grace Paley, Jeanne Schinto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Stephens, Sui Sin Far, Alice Walker, and Hisaye Yamamoto—making this, once again, the most authoritative and useful multicultural collection available.

    At eighteen she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran-Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes in her life and community—primarily the disparate religions and cultures.In 1979 under the Ayatollah regime, Iran became increasingly unfamiliar and hostile to Saper. Seemingly overnight she went from living a carefree life of wearing miniskirts and attending high school to listening to fanatic diatribes, a Jewish girl forced to veil her body as the rest of the country, and hiding in the basement as bombs fell all over the city. She fled to the United States in 1987 with her husband and children after witnessing her six-year-old daughter’s indoctrination into radical politics at school. At the heart of Saper’s story is a harrowing and instructive tale of how extremist ideologies seized a Westernized, affluent country and transformed it into a fundamentalist society.

    In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization.Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

    A teeming world is evoked vividly through the relationships, memories, and inner lives of these political prisoners, many of whom were eventually executed.Told through a series of linked memories by the narrator, Akbar, whose striking candor is infused with a mordant sense of humor, the story takes the reader beyond mere political struggles and revelations, to a vibrant alternative history, written, as it were, by the losers.The characters whose stories Akbar recounts are brought to life within the mundane rhythms of a bleak institution, in its simple pleasures as well as its frequent horrors, and in the unexpected connections that emerge between the world inside and a past before imprisonment.Rather than exalting the heroic, or choosing to focus merely on despair or redemption, Remembering Akbar reveals eloquently how life unfolds when death is starkly imminent. It is a deeply moving story of great camaraderie, biting humor, and soulful remembrance.

    While development can use the productive resources of society to improve the living conditionsof the world's most vulnerable people, it can also form the basis of intense manipulative power on behalf of elites. This important new text surveys theleading theories and models of economic and social development. Chapters examine sociological, economic, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, feminist, andradical democratic approaches, as well as an array of development models including modernization, dependency, and neoliberalism. Reaching conclusionsat odds with much of the recent literature, this volume is critical of neoliberal, market-driven economic growth, arguing instead that an alternative, democratic form of development remains a viable possibility.

    Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America’s two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime. In It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress—and the United States—to the brink of institutional collapse. The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call “asymmetric polarization,” with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost. With dysfunction rooted in long-term political trends, a coarsened political culture and a new partisan media, the authors conclude that there is no “silver bullet” reform that can solve everything. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring of the House and Senate, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle. Until voters learn to act strategically to reward problem solving and punish obstruction, American democracy will remain in serious danger.

    Austin's magnum opus tells the very human story of how the social, political, and day-to-day realities of the Indian people have been reflected in and directed the course of constitutional reforms since 1950.

    The world's worst problems--terrorism, drugs and human trafficking, absolute poverty, ethnic conflict, disease, genocide--originate in such states, and the international community has devoted billions of dollars to solving the problem. Yet by and large the effort has not succeeded.Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart have taken an active part in the effort to save failed states for many years, serving as World Bank officials, as advisers to the UN, and as high-level participants in the new government of Afghanistan. In Fixing Failed States, they describe the issue--vividly and convincingly--offering an on-the-ground picture of why past efforts have not worked and advancing a groundbreaking new solution to this most pressing of global crises. For the paperback edition, they have added a new preface that addresses the continuing crisis in light of ongoing governance problems in weak states like Afghanistan and the global financial recession. As they explain, many of these countries already have the resources they need, if only we knew how to connect them to global knowledge and put them to work in the right way. Their state-building strategy, which assigns responsibility equally among the international community, national leaders, and citizens, maps out a clear path to political and economic stability. The authors provide a practical framework for achieving these ends, supporting their case with first-hand examples of struggling territories such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo and Nepal as well as the world's success stories--Singapore, Ireland, and even the American South.