Remembering Jack: Intimate and Unseen Photographs of the Kennedys


Jacques Lowe - 2003
    A stirring collection of never-before-seen photographs of the Kennedy family presented in this seminal work by JFK's personal photographer, Jacques Lowe.

Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State


Mark Lawrence Schrad - 2013
    But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics.In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivanthe Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself-a history that is drenched in liquor. Scrutinizing (rather than dismissing) the role of alcohol in Russian politics yields a more nuanced understanding of Russian history itself: from palaceintrigues under the tsars to the drunken antics of Soviet and post-Soviet leadership, vodka is there in abundance.Beyond vivid anecdotes, Schrad scours original documents and archival evidence to answer provocative historical questions. How have Russia's rulers used alcohol to solidify their autocratic rule? What role did alcohol play in tsarist coups? Was Nicholas II's ill-fated prohibition a catalyst for theBolshevik Revolution? Could the Soviet Union have become a world power without liquor? How did vodka politics contribute to the collapse of both communism and public health in the 1990s? How can the Kremlin overcome vodka's hurdles to produce greater social well-being, prosperity, and democracy intothe future?Viewing Russian history through the bottom of the vodka bottle helps us to understand why the liquor question remains important to Russian high politics even today-almost a century after the issue had been put to bed in most every other modern state. Indeed, recognizing and confronting vodka'sdevastating political legacies may be the greatest political challenge for this generation of Russia's leadership, as well as the next.

The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain's World War II Interrogation Centre


Helen Fry - 2017
    Here recalcitrant German prisoners of war were subjected to “special intelligence treatment.” The stakes were high: the war’s outcome could hinge on obtaining information German prisoners were determined to withhold. After the war, high-ranking Nazi war criminals were housed in the Cage, revamped as an important center for investigating German war crimes.   This riveting book reveals the full details of operations at the London Cage and subsequent efforts to hide them. Helen Fry’s extraordinary original research uncovers the grim picture of prisoners’ daily lives and of systemic Soviet-style mistreatment. The author also provides sensational evidence to counter official denials concerning the use of “truth drugs” and “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Bringing dark secrets to light, this groundbreaking book at last provides an objective and complete history of the London Cage.

Power, Politics And Culture


Edward W. Said - 2001
    In these twenty-nine interviews, Said addresses everything from Palestine to Pavarotti, from his nomadic upbringing under colonial rule to his politically active and often controversial life in America, and reflects on Austen, Beckett, Conrad, Naipaul, Mahfouz and Rushdie as well as fellow critics Bloom, Derrida and Foucault. Said speaks here with his usual candour, acuity and eloquence - confirming that he was in his lifetime among the truly most important intellects of our century.

A First Look at Communication Theory


Em Griffin - 2008
    The 32 theories represented in the text reflect a mix of foundational and recent scholarship and strike a balance of scientific and interpretive approaches.

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations


Sebastian Mallaby - 2004
    This journalistic masterpiece by Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby charts those controversial years at the Bank under the leadership of James Wolfensohn—the unstoppable power broker whose daring efforts to enlarge the planet's wealth in an age of globalization and terror were matched only by the force of his polarizing personality. Based on unprecedented access to its subject, this captivating tour through the messy reality of global development is that rare triumph—an emblematic story through which a gifted author has channeled the spirit of the age.This edition features a new afterword by the author that analyzes the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz as Wolfensohn's successor at the World bank

Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy


Frank Close - 2015
    Who was he, and what caused him to disappear? Was he simply a physicist, or also a spy and communist radical? A protege of Enrico Fermi, Pontecorvo was one of the most promising nuclear physicists in the world. He spent years hunting for the Higgs boson of his day -- the neutrino -- a nearly massless particle thought to be essential to the process of particle decay. His work on the Manhattan Project helped to usher in the nuclear age, and confirmed his reputation as a brilliant physicist. Why, then, would he disappear as he stood on the cusp of true greatness, perhaps even the Nobel Prize? In Half-Life, physicist and historian Frank Close offers a heretofore untold history of Pontecorvo's life, based on unprecedented access to Pontecorvo's friends and family and the Russian scientists with whom he would later work. Close takes a microscope to Pontecorvo's life, combining a thorough biography of one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century with the drama of Cold War espionage. With all the elements of a Cold War thriller -- classified atomic research, an infamous double agent, a possible kidnapping by Soviet operatives -- Half-Life is a history of nuclear physics at perhaps its most powerful: when it created the bomb. Physics at perhaps its most powerful: when it created the bomb.

Dallas, November 22, 1963


Robert A. Caro - 2013
    This account of the Kennedy assassination ("the most riveting ever," says The New York Times) is taken from Robert A. Caro's brilliant and bestselling The Passage of Power. Here is that tragic day in Dallas alive with startling details reported for the first time by the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Just as scandals that might end his career are about to break over Lyndon Johnson's head, the motorcade containing the presidential party is making its slow and triumphant way along the streets of Dallas. In Caro's breathtakingly vivid narrative, we witness the shots, the procession speeding to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the moment when Kennedy aide Lawrence O'Donnell tells Johnson "He's gone," and Johnson's iconic swearing in on Air Force One. Compelling.

Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—and the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future


Harriet A. Washington - 2011
    Think your body is your own to control and dispose of as you wish? Think again. The United States Patent Office has granted at least 40,000 patents on genes controlling the most basic processes of human life, and more are pending. If you undergo surgery in many hospitals you must sign away ownership rights to your excised tissues, even if they turn out to have medical and fiscal value. Life itself is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the medical- industrial complex. Deadly Monopolies is a powerful, disturbing, and deeply researched book that illuminates this “life patent” gold rush and its harmful, and even lethal, consequences for public health. It examines the shaky legal, ethical, and social bases for Big Pharma’s argument that such patents are necessary to protect their investments in new drugs and treatments, arguing that they instead stifle the research, competition, and innovation that can drive down costs and save lives. In opposing the commodification of the body, Harriet Washington provides a crucial human dimension to an often all-too-abstract debate. Like the bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Deadly Monopolies reveals in shocking detail just how far the profit motive has encroached in colonizing human life and compromising medical ethics. It is sure to stir debate—and instigate change.

Tipping Points: How to Topple the Left's House of Cards


Liz Wheeler - 2019
     Liberals know they’re within reach of radically transforming America. They don’t like the U.S. Constitution. They’re allergic to Americans’ “gun culture.” They find our faith and our devotion to family distasteful. And our commitment to liberty positively sends them into a panic. As soon as the Democrats get power anywhere, they stand ready to throw our God-given rights under the bus of political correctness, transgender insanity, and socialism (the economic system that always promises equality and utopia, but somehow always delivers resentment, poverty, and decay). So how can we tip the momentum back in our favor? How can we fight effectively for freedom, the U.S. Constitution, limited government, faith and family, and the survival of the American Republic? Liz Wheeler to the rescue! The popular host of One America News Network’s "Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler" is a brilliant and highly effective debater who shows how we can go on the rhetorical attack against the Left—and win—with a multi-technique program for catching the Left in their inconsistencies and under-handed schemes and skewering them for their bold-faced lies. In  Tipping Points: How to Topple the Left’s House of Cards , Liz Wheeler identifies the five “Tipping Points” where liberals are poised to win, trains you in her proven debating techniques, and deputizes you to take up arms in the fight for our nation’s heart and soul. It’s training you need right now, today. Our country is at a tipping point. And make no mistake—if the Left isn’t defeated, they’re taking down America.

Age of Fracture


Daniel T. Rodgers - 2010
    This book shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. It offers a reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America.

A Short History of Russia


Mary Platt Parmele - 1900
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

An Introduction to the History of Psychology


B.R. Hergenhahn - 1986
    Now in its fifth edition, Hergenhahn's Introduction to the History of Psychology distinguishes itself from others by tracing the intellectual history of psychology back to ancient Greece in order to show the progression of ideas.

Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis–Deuteronomy


David E. Bokovoy - 2014
    In the first of three volumes spanning the entire Hebrew Bible, David Bokovoy dives into the Penateuch, showing how and why textual criticism has led biblical scholars today to understand the first five books of the Bible as an amalgamation of multiple texts into a single, though often complicated narrative; and he discusses what implications those have for Latter-day Saint understandings of the Bible and modern scripture.

A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity


Manuel DeLanda - 2006
    In his new book, he offers a fascinating look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. Since most social entities, from small communities to large nation-states, would disappear altogether if human minds ceased to exist, Delanda proposes a novel approach to social ontology that asserts the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions we have of them.