When Congress is broken—as its justifiably dismal approval ratings suggest—so is our democracy. Here, Robert G. Kaiser, whose long and distinguished career at The Washington Post has made him as keen and knowledgeable an observer of Congress as we have, takes us behind the sound bites to expose the protocols, players, and politics of the House and Senate—revealing both the triumphs of the system and (more often) its fundamental flaws.  Act of Congress tells the story of the Dodd-Frank Act, named for the two men who made it possible: Congressman Barney Frank, brilliant and sometimes abrasive, who mastered the details of financial reform, and Senator Chris Dodd, who worked patiently for months to fulfill his vision of a Senate that could still work on a bipartisan basis. Both Frank and Dodd collaborated with Kaiser throughout their legislative efforts and allowed their staffs to share every step of the drafting and deal making that produced the 1,500-page law that transformed America’s financial sector. Kaiser explains how lobbying affects a bill—or fails to. We follow staff members more influential than most senators and congressmen. We see how Congress members protect their own turf, often without regard for what might best serve the country—more eager to court television cameras than legislate on complicated issues about which many of them remain ignorant. Kaiser shows how ferocious partisanship regularly overwhelms all other considerations, though occasionally individual integrity prevails. Act of Congress, as entertaining as it is enlightening, is an indispensable guide to a vital piece of our political system desperately in need of reform.

    Figuring out what to say and how to say it seems an impossible task. Robert's Rules in Plain English, 2nd edition, is the solution to that problem. Not only does it provide you with the essential, basic rules in simple, straightforward English, it also includes summaries, outlines, charts, and sample dialogues so you can see exactly how these rules work in practice.With an extended glossary and new chapters on electronic meetings and internet usage, Robert's Rules in Plain English, 2nd edition, is an authoritative, modern guide to running a meeting successfully and keeping it on track.

    What is the psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not? George Marshall’s search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prize–winning psychologists and Texas Tea Party activists; the world’s leading climate scientists and those who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals. What he discovers is that our values, assumptions, and prejudices can take on lives of their own, gaining authority as they are shared, dividing people in their wake.With engaging stories and drawing on years of his own research, Marshall argues that the answers do not lie in the things that make us different, but rather in what we share: how our human brains are wired—our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blind spots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe. Once we understand what excites, threatens, and motivates us, we can rethink climate change, for it is not an impossible problem. Rather, we can halt it if we make it our common purpose and common ground. In the end, Don’t Even Think About It is both about climate change and about the qualities that make us human and how we can deal with the greatest challenge we have ever faced.

    Arendt also reexamines the relationship between war, politics, violence, and power. “Incisive, deeply probing, written with clarity and grace, it provides an ideal framework for understanding the turbulence of our times.”The Nation

    But time in the wards is limited, and clerkship covers only a tiny sample of the surgical universe. Dr. Pestana's Surgery Notes, by distinguished surgery instructor Dr. Carlos Pestana, is a proven guide to ensure your surgical knowledge. With a concise, comprehensive review and 180 high-yield surgical vignettes for self-testing, it contains the surgery knowledge you need to excel on the Surgery shelf exam and USMLE Step 2 CK.Features:— Concise high-yield review of core surgery material— 180 vignettes for self-testing— Used by med students for over a decade— Fully up-to-date— Pocket-sized to carry with you in the wards

    Students lashing out at any speaker brave enough to say something they disagree with. Precious snow flakes demanding “Safe Spaces” to protect them from any idea they haven’t heard from their liberal professors. In this book and the accompanying movie, Dennis Prager, Mark Joseph, and Adam Carolla expose the attack on free speech and free thought. It began in the universities, but—fair warning—it’s coming to your neighborhood and your workplace. “No Safe Spaces is a film every American should see. I could barely move when it was over. Powerful, emotional, and a call to action for anyone worried about the intellectual fascism happening in this country. A brave, timely, and important film.” —MEGYN KELLY, former FOX News anchor and host of Megyn Kelly Today “There is no free speech in America for free thinkers! You can have free speech in America but only if you say what everybody else agrees with. It’s not enough to ‘live and let live’ now. The psycho-elite believe ‘silence is violence’ and you must actively promote what THEY want no matter how vile or reprehensible it is to you. George Orwell lives! They should’ve called Orwell ‘Nostradamus’ because his most frightening prophecies have come to pass, as you will witness in No Safe Spaces!” —MANCOW MULLER, radio phenomenon “An excellent film, the best I’ve seen on the subject of free speech. I especially like Dennis’s line, ‘They have to believe we are evil; otherwise they’d have to debate us.’ Perfect!” —CAL THOMAS, America’s #1 syndicated columnist

    He was the top justice of New York’s highest court. She was a stunning socialite and his wife’s step-cousin. In 1993 Sol Wachtler was convicted of blackmail and extortion against Joy Silverman, his former mistress. How did a respected jurist and one of the most prominent men in America end up serving time in prison? Linda Wolfe starts at the beginning—from Wachtler’s modest Brooklyn upbringing through his courtship and marriage to Joan Wolosoff, the only child of a wealthy real estate developer.   Joy Fererh was three and a half when her father walked out. When she and Sol met, he was fifty-five and nearing the pinnacle of his legal career. She was a thirtysomething stay-at-home mother who, with Sol’s help, made a career for herself as a Republican Party fundraiser. They kept their affair a secret—until an explosive mix of sex, power, betrayal, and prescription-drug abuse set the stage for the tabloid headlines of the decade.

    It covers the historic 2008 Presidential campaign and election while looking ahead to assess what the shifting political winds have in store for the future of the major political parties and Americans' political views.

    Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, missile defense, abstinence education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies, once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents, are increasingly staffed by political appointees and fringe theorists who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science. This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science , Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.

    Transparency: We have the right to know how our food is produced.2. Fairness: Producing food should not impose costs on others.3. Humanity: Inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals is wrong.4. Social Responsibility: Workers are entitled to decent wages and working conditions.5. Needs: Preserving life and health justifies more than other desires.Peter Singer, the groundbreaking ethicist who "may be the most controversial philosopher alive" (The New Yorker), now sets his critical sights on the food we buy and eat: where it comes from, how it's produced, and whether it was raised humanely. Teaming up once again with attorney Jim Mason, his coauthor on the acclaimed Animal Factories, Singer explores the impact our food choices have on humans, animals, and the environment.In The Way We Eat, Singer and Mason examine the eating habits of three American families with very different diets. They track down the sources of each family's food to probe the ethical issues involved in its production and marketing. What kinds of meat are most humane to eat? Is "organic" always better? Wild fish or farmed? Recognizing that not all of us will become vegetarians, Singer and Mason offer ways to make the best food choices. As they point out: "You can be ethical without being fanatical."

    Now with a CJ careers feature and learning objectives aligned with end-of-chapter questions, the book provides both a streamlined and up-to-date look at this ever-evolving field. Known for its unifying theme, its unmatched timeliness and its coverage of the newest criminal justice trends and technology, this book has become THE standard by which all other brief texts are judged.

    In this age of CNN-mediated war, the lives of those wretched populations of the earth—the refugees; the victims of unjust imprisonment and torture; the immigrants virtually enslaved by their starvation and legal disenfranchisement—are always presented to us as already irretrievable and thereby already lost. We may shake our heads at their wretchedness but then we sacrifice them nonetheless, for they are already forgone.By analyzing the different frames through which we experience war, Butler calls for a reorientation of the Left toward the precarity of those lives. Only by recognizing those lives as precarious lives—lives that are not yet lost but are ever fragile and in need of protection—might the Left stand in unity against the violence perpetrated through arbitrary state power.

    

    While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the Deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

    For years, the boys and their legendary coach gave fans in central Kentucky, deep in the heart of basketball country, just what they wanted: state titles, national rankings, and countless trips to Kentucky's one-of-a-kind state tournament, where winning and losing can change a young man's life.But in 2009, with the economy sputtering, anger rising, and Scott County mired in a two-year drought, fans had begun to lose faith in the boys. They weren't the heroes of Scott County anymore; they were "mini-athlete gods," haunted by dreams, burdened by expectations, and desperate to escape through the only means they knew: basketball.In Outside Shot, Keith O'Brien takes us on an epic journey, from the bluegrass hills and broken homes of rural America, to inner-city Lexington, to Kentucky's most hallowed hall: Rupp Arena, where high school tournament games are known to draw twenty-thousand people, and where, for the players and their fans, it feels like anything is possible.The narrative follows four of the team's top seniors and their coach as they struggle to redeem themselves in the face of impossible odds: once-loyal fans now turned against them, parents who demand athletic greatness, and scouts who weigh their every move. It delves deep inside the lives of the boys, their families, and their community---divided along lines of race, politics, religion, and sports. And it chronicles not only the high-stakes world of Kentucky basketball, but the battle for the soul of small-town America.A story of inspiration and poignancy, filled with moments of drama on and off the court, Outside Shot shows that if it's hard to win basketball games, it can be even harder to win at life itself.