I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That


Ben Goldacre - 2014
    In 'Bad Science', Ben Goldacre hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science. In 'Bad Pharma', he put the $600 billion global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. Now the pick of the journalism by one of our wittiest, most indignant and most fearless commentators on the worlds of medicine and science is collected in one volume.

Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations


Michael Walzer - 1976
    He studies a variety of conflicts over the course of history, as well as the testimony of those who have been most directly involved--participants, decision makers, and victims. In his introduction to this new edition, Walzer specifically addresses the moral issues surrounding the war in and occupation of Iraq, reminding us once again that "the argument about war and justice is still a political and moral necessity."

The Truth Hurts


Andrew Boe - 2020
    

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics


Tim Marshall - 2015
    Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and concrete. To understand world events, news organizations and other authorities often focus on people, ideas, and political movements, but without geography, we never have the full picture. Now, in the relevant and timely Prisoners of Geography, seasoned journalist Tim Marshall examines Russia, China, the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Japan and Korea, and Greenland and the Arctic—their weather, seas, mountains, rivers, deserts, and borders—to provide a context often missing from our political reportage: how the physical characteristics of these countries affect their strengths and vulnerabilities and the decisions made by their leaders.In ten, up-to-date maps of each region, Marshall explains in clear and engaging prose the complex geo-political strategies of these key parts of the globe. What does it mean that Russia must have a navy, but also has frozen ports six months a year? How does this affect Putin’s treatment of Ukraine? How is China’s future constrained by its geography? Why will Europe never be united? Why will America never be invaded? Shining a light on the unavoidable physical realities that shape all of our aspirations and endeavors, Prisoners of Geography is the critical guide to one of the major (and most often overlooked) determining factors in world history.

Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity


David Campbell - 1992
    In this new edition of a groundbreaking work -- one of the first to bring critical theory into dialogue with more traditional approaches to international relations -- David Campbell provides a fundamental reappraisal of American foreign policy, with a new epilogue to address current world affairs and the burgeoning focus on culture and identity in the study of international relations.Extending recent debates in international relations, Campbell shows how perceptions of danger and difference work to establish the identity of the United States. He demonstrates how foreign policy, far from being an expression of a given society, constitutes state identity through the interpretation of danger posed by others.

The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World


Dominique Moïsi - 2008
    In The Geopolitics of Emotion Dominique Moïsi, a leading authority on international affairs, demonstrates that our post-9/11 world has become divided by more than cultural fault lines between nations and civilizations. Moïsi brilliantly chronicles how the geopolitics of today is characterized by a “clash of emotions,” and how cultures of fear, humiliation, and hope are reshaping the world.Moïsi contends that both the United States and Europe have been dominated by fears of the “other” and of their loss of a national identity and purpose. Instead of being united by their fears, the twin pillars of the West are more often divided by them—or, rather, by bitter debates over how best to confront or transcend them. For Muslims and Arabs, the combination of historical grievances, exclusion from the economic boon of globalization, and civil and religious conflicts extending from their homelands to the Muslim diaspora have created a culture of humiliation that is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred. Meanwhile, Asia has been able to concentrate on building a better future and seizing the economic initiative from the American-dominated West and so creating a new culture of hope.Do these emotions represent underlying cultural tendencies characteristic of particular regions and populations today? How will these varying emotions influence the political, social, and cultural conflicts that roil our world? How can the West transcend its fear and avoid sliding into protectionism or militarism? What can the Muslim world do to overcome is legacy of humiliation? Will China and India manage to maintain their status as the cultures of hope? And what will the effect of the world economic crisis be? By delineating the necessity of confronting emotions to understand our changing world and deciphering the driving emotions behind our cultural differences, The Geopolitics of Emotion presents a provocative new perspective on globalization.

Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam


Mark Bowden - 2006
    On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took fifty-two Americans hostage, and kept nearly all of them hostage for 444 days.In Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the hostages, the soldiers in a new special forces unit sent to free them, their radical, naïve captors, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Bowden takes us inside the hostages' cells and inside the Oval Office for meetings with President Carter and his exhausted team. We travel to international capitals where shadowy figures held clandestine negotiations, and to the deserts of Iran, where a courageous, desperate attempt to rescue the hostages exploded into tragic failure. Bowden dedicated five years to this research, including numerous trips to Iran and countless interviews with those involved on both sides.Guests of the Ayatollah is a detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.

Letter from Birmingham Jail


Martin Luther King Jr. - 1963
    There is an alternate edition published under ISBN13: 9780062509550. 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.This edition also contains the sermon 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life'.

On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks


Simon Garfield - 2012
    Now Garfield takes on a subject even dearer to our fanatical human hearts: maps.Imagine a world without maps. How would we travel? Could we own land? What would men and women argue about in cars? Scientists have even suggested that mapping—not language—is what elevated our prehistoric ancestors from ape-dom. Follow the history of maps from the early explorers’ maps and the awe-inspiring medieval Mappa Mundi to Google Maps and the satellite renderings on our smartphones, Garfield explores the unique way that maps relate and realign our history—and reflect the best and worst of what makes us human.Featuring a foreword by Dava Sobel and packed with fascinating tales of cartographic intrigue, outsize personalities, and amusing “pocket maps” on an array of subjects from how to fold a map to the strangest maps on the Internet, On the Map is a rich historical tapestry infused with Garfield’s signature narrative flair. Map-obsessives and everyone who loved Just My Type will be lining up to join Garfield on his audacious journey through time and around the globe.

China: Fragile Superpower


Susan L. Shirk - 2007
    But in China: Fragile Superpower, Susan L. Shirk opens up the black box of Chinese politics and finds that the real danger lies elsewhere--not in China's astonishing growth, but in the deep insecurity of its leaders. China's leaders face a troubling paradox: the more developed and prosperous the country becomes, the more insecure and threatened they feel. Shirk, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for China, knows many of today's Chinese rulers personally and has studied them for three decades. She offers invaluable insight into how they think--and what they fear. In this revealing book, readers see the world through the eyes of men like President Hu Jintao and former President Jiang Zemin. We discover a fragile communist regime desperate to survive in a society turned upside down by miraculous economic growth and a stunning new openness to the greater world. Indeed, ever since the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, Chinese leaders have been afraid of its own citizens, and this fear motivates many of their decisions when dealing with the U.S. and other nations. In particular, the fervent nationalism of the Chinese people, combined with their passionate resentment of Japan and attachment to Taiwan, have made relations with this country a minefield. The paperback edition features a new preface by the author.

Storming the Court: How a Band of Yale Law Students Sued the President--And Won


Brandt Goldstein - 2005
    "Storming the Court" takes readers inside this modern-day atrocity to tell the tale of Yvonne Pascal -- a young, charismatic activist -- and other Haitian refugees who had fled their violent homeland only to end up prisoners at Guantanamo. They had no lawyers, no contact with the outside world, and no hope...except for a band of students at Yale Law School fifteen hundred miles away.Led by Harold Koh, a gifted but untested law professor, these remarkable twentysomethings waged a legal war against two U.S. presidents to defend the Constitution and the principles symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. It was an education in law unlike any other. With the refugees' lives at stake, the students threw aside classes and career plans to fight an army of government attorneys in a case so politically volatile that the White House itself intervened in the legal strategy.Featuring a real-life cast that includes Kenneth Starr and other top Justice Department officials, U.S. marines, radical human-rights lawyers, and Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, "Storming the Court" follows the students from the classrooms at Yale to the prison camp at Guantanamo to the federal courts in NewYork and Washington as they struggle to save Yvonne Pascal and her fellow Haitian refugees.At a time when the treatment of post-9/11 Guantanamo detainees has been challenged in the public arena and the courts, this book traces the origins of the legal battle over America's use of the naval base as a prison and illuminates the troubling ways that politics can influence legal decisions. Above all, though, "Storming the Court" is the David-and-Goliath story of a group of passionate law students who took on their government in the name of the greatest of American values: freedom.

Sex Crimes: Ten Years on the Front Lines Prosecuting Rapists and Confronting Their Collaborators


Alice Vachss - 1993
    From her ten years of experience in the Queens, New York, district attorney's office, the author offers a searing indictment of our justice system and how it "collaborates" with rapists.

Law Man: Memoir of a Jailhouse Lawyer


Shon Hopwood - 2017
    Those who knew him well would never have imagined that, as a young man, he’d be adrift with few prospects and plotting to rob a bank. But he did, committing five armed bank robberies before being apprehended. Serving ten years in federal prison, Shon feared his life was over. He wasn’t sure if he could survive a cell block, but he was determined to try. Hopwood pumped-up in the prison gym to defend himself and earned respect on the basketball court. He reconnected with the girl of his dreams from high school through letters and prison visits; and, crucially, he talked his way into a job in the prison law library. Hopwood slowly taught himself criminal law and began to help fellow inmates rather than himself. He wrote one petition to the Supreme Court, which was chosen to be heard from over 7,000 other petitions submitted by the greater legal community that year. The Justices voted 9-0 in favor of Hopwood’s petition when the case was finally heard. What might have been considered luck by some, was dispelled when a second petition from him was selected to be heard by the Supreme Court. He didn’t grasp it yet, but Shon’s legal work was the start of a new life. Shon works on policy reform, and he is a cofounder of PrisonProfessors.com. He strives to improve outcomes of America’s prison system, and he tells his amazing story in Law Man.

Law and Disorder: Confessions of a Pupil Barrister


Tim Kevan - 2010
    He has just one year to win, by foul means or fair, the sought-after prize of a tenancy in chambers. Competition is fierce, but, armed with a copy of Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War', BabyBarista launches a no-holds barred fight to the death to claim the prize.

Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics


Margaret E. Keck - 1998
    Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances include anti-slavery and woman suffrage campaigns. In the past two decades, transnational activism has had a significant impact in human rights, especially in Latin America, and advocacy networks have strongly influenced environmental politics as well. The authors also examine the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women.