On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolcothe by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The massacre does not receive much international attention and though many students are detained, no officials are held accountable. The story then skips ahead two years to a hospital in Mexico City and introduces Nestor, a fictional journalist who witnessed the shootings at Tlatelolcothe. He has been admitted to the hospital for a knife wound, and as he lies in bed, his fevered imagination goes back to the day of the riot. In his delirious state, he becomes so desperate he calls on the heroes of his youth—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, and D'Artagnan among them—to join him in launching a new movement of reform.

    

    Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicalia dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians.Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Ze created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation's idealized image as a peaceful tropical "garden" and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.

    Travelling on public buses, visiting with families, hanging out in shops and cafes, he brings out for all of us what made ordinary people erupt, what happened to them during those days and now, what their hopes, fears and dreams are, how they see us in the West, how each country is different but how they see themselves as part of a joint Arab culture, before Islamists. Johnny West's long experience in the area enables him to set all this in context, while never losing the vividness of a travel book or the characters of a novel. This is not a political treatise but a journey of discovery - of people, of places, of life under extraordinary circumstances - which this book allows us to share and makes one feels as if one had been there.

    Had they known what a fickle muse Clio would prove to be, they might have been more anxious. The making of myths and legends, complete with a hagiology and demonology, is inherent in the process of evolution toward nationhood. Consequently, individual actors in the original drama have often been consigned by History to roles they did not actually play, and the most important of them have played shifting roles, being heroes in one generation and villains in the next. It is therefore not surprising that Alexander Hamilton—along with Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison—has had his ups and downs at the hands of historians.

    Linz and Alfred Stepan have increasingly focused on the questions of how, in the modern world, nondemocratic regimes can be eroded and democratic regimes crafted. In Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, they break new ground in numerous areas. They reconceptualize the major types of modern nondemocratic regimes and point out for each type the available paths to democratic transition and the tasks of democratic consolidation. They argue that, although "nation-state" and "democracy" often have conflicting logics, multiple and complementary political identities are feasible under a common roof of state-guaranteed rights. They also illustrate how, without an effective state, there can be neither effective citizenship nor successful privatization. Further, they provide criteria and evidence for politicians and scholars alike to distinguish between democratic consolidation and pseudo-democratization, and they present conceptually driven survey data for the fourteen countries studied.Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation contains the first systematic comparative analysis of the process of democratic consolidation in southern Europe and the southern cone of South America, and it is the first book to ground post-Communist Europe within the literature of comparative politics and democratic theory.

    The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror–its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy.As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

    This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency.Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.

    In Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the global order that nourished those dreams is on the brink of disintegration. Pointing to the globalization of commerce, the changing nature of work and the family, the failures of traditional liberal ideology, and the danger of profound environmental crises, the founder of world-systems analysis argues that the nation-state system no longer works. The next twenty-five to fifty years will see the final breakdown of that system, and a time of great conflicts and disorder. It will also be a period in which individual and collective action will have a greater impact on the future than has been possible for 500 years. Utopistics distills Wallerstein’s hugely influential work on the modern world-system in an accessible way. This fascinating and provocative look into our collective political destiny poses urgent questions for anyone concerned with social change in the next millennium.

    Through an examination of three clearly defined genocides — the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, and the European Holocaust — Coloroso deconstructs the causes and consequences, both to its immediate victims and to the fabric of the world at large, and proposes the conditions that must exist in order to eradicate this evil from the world. Coloroso is well known for her best-selling books that explore why children bully. In Extraordinary Evil she builds upon that research to explain why the impulse to bully is mirrored by the act of genocide. By linking the psychology of the bully to the motivation that leads a community to murder, Coloroso provides devastating and vital insight into why people kill their neighbors. Based on the author's 15 years of research and extensive travel, Extraordinary Evil is an urgently needed work in an age when acts of genocide seem to occur more frequently and are in the public's consciousness more than ever before.

    The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dream-world, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of grown-ups around them the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies, and violence.In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazire, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raul Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. If their parents manage to remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.At the time, the urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.

    But it has been the terror of the capitalist rulers against which an outraged majority eventually rises. Trotsky explains why the working class is the only social force capable of leading the toiling majority in overthrowing the capitalist exploiters and beginning the construction of a new society and why individual terrorism -- whatever its intention -- relegates the workers to the role of spectators and opens the workers movement to provocation and victimization.

    Under what conditions is it appropriate, or necessary, for a country to use force when diplomacy has failed? Michael Byers, a widely known world expert on international law, weighs these issues in War Law.Byers examines the history of armed conflict and international law through a series of case studies of past conflicts, ranging from the 1837 Caroline Incident to the abuse of detainees by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Byers explores the legal controversies that surrounded the 1999 and 2001 interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan and the 2003 war in Iraq; the development of international humanitarian law from the 1859 Battle of Solferino to the present; and the role of war crimes tribunals and the International Criminal Court. He also considers the unique influence of the United States in the evolution of this extremely controversial area of international law.War Law is neither a textbook nor a treatise, but a fascinating account of a highly controversial topic that is necessary reading for fans of military history and general readers alike.

    Presidential chronicles and other outside sources have tried to capture it in full, but Nixon: A Life is the first to succeed. Nixon: A Life is the first entirely objective biography of Richard Nixon. Jonathan Aitken, who, in addition to serving in Parliament, serves as Her Majesty's Minister of State for Defense, conducted over sixty hours of interviews with Nixon and was granted unprecedented access to thousands of pages of Nixon's previously sealed private documents. The results of Aitken's interviews and research shed new light on a presidency that is just now beginning to be understood by serious students of history. Among the questions Aitken answers with fresh insight are: . Why didn't Nixon burn the Watergate tapes? How did he achieve his astonishing comebacks after being defeated by Kennedy in 1960 and resigning from the presidency in 1974? What were his relationships with political figures such as Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and personal friends such as Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp? What caused him to overcome his doubts and pursue the Alger Hiss spy case in Congress? What are Nixon's innermost spiritual beliefs and intellectual influences? What drives him now? Previously published in Great Britain to rave reviews, Nixon: A Life is the first Nixon biography written by a non-American author. Aitken's refreshingly unencumbered positions on Watergate and Vietnam provide a unique perspective on Nixon's life and his presidency. Nixon: A Life breaks important new ground as a major work of political biography. It is a work that will inspire historiansto recognize the outstanding diplomatic achievements of a man whose journey from tainted politician to respected foreign policy expert and elder statesman has been nothing short of remarkable.

    In Havana Nocturne, T.J. English offers a multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution & international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the Mob in Havana & the event that would overshadow it, the Cuban Revolution.As the Cuban people labored under a violently repressive regime throughout the 50s, Mob leaders Meyer Lansky & Charles "Lucky" Luciano turned their eye to Havana. To them, Cuba was the ultimate dream, the greatest hope for the future of the US Mob in the post-Prohibition years of intensified government crackdowns. But when it came time to make their move, it was Lansky, the brilliant Jewish mobster, who reigned supreme. Having cultivated strong ties with the Cuban government & in particular the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, Lansky brought key mobsters to Havana to put his ambitious business plans in motion. Before long, the Mob, with Batista's corrupt government in its pocket, owned the biggest luxury hotels & casinos in Havana, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, the world's biggest celebrities, the most beautiful women & gambling galore. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara & others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government & its foreign partners—an epic cultural battle that English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory. Bringing together long-buried historical information with English's own research in Havana—including interviews with the era's key survivors—Havana Nocturne takes readers back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders. English deftly weaves together the parallel stories of the Havana Mob—featuring notorious criminals such as Santo Trafficante Jr & Albert Anastasia—& Castro's 26th of July Movement in a riveting, up-close look at how the Mob nearly attained its biggest dream in Havana—& how Fidel Castro trumped it all with the revolution.