Friday, November 23, 2007
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Bad Girls
HQ1421.O94
Foreign observers wrote in an atmosphere of freedom, without the dangers that crippled and destroyed journalism in America. Foreign writers were not arrested and locked up; nor were foreign journals silenced by armed soldiers, mobs, or by censorship of the mails, nor were their editors hauled off to prison. Also, the American Civil War was not their struggle, and, as the reader will discover, by looking at the quarrel from a distance the foreign correspondents could see what Americans at the scene could not. A broad sweep of views running from pro-North to pro-South, with foreign writers marshalling their arguments with facts and information that had come to their attention, is presented.
Among the many distinguished British journals represented are Blackwood's Magazine, The Saturday Review, Macmillan's Magazine, The Athenaeum, The Cornhill Magazine, The Economist, The Times and two periodicals edited by Charles Dickens—Household Words and All the Year Round. From the continent there are translated articles from the French La Presse and Revue des Deux Monde, the Italian La Civilta Cattolica and Scritti Editie Inediti, and the Spanish Pensamiento Espanol and La Iberia. Civil War historians and students will certainly benefit from the fascinating observations afforded by the golden age of periodical literature presented in Slavery, Secession, and Civil War.
About the Author: Charles Adams, the world's leading scholar on the history of taxation, is the author of the best selling books For Good and Evil, Those Dirty Rotten Taxes, and Fight, Flight, and Fraud.
E469.8.A19
Friday, November 02, 2007
The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938
These readings--by writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright--discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry, drama, music, painting, and sculpture. More than fascinating historical documents, these essays remain essential to the way African American identity and history are still understood today.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. His most recent books include Finding Oprah's Roots and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. Gene Andrew Jarrett is associate professor of English and African American studies at Boston University. He is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. [All descriptive information contained in this post has been provided by the publisher, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8492.html]
PS153.N5.N49
The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot
JC599.U6.W63
Monday, October 22, 2007
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
Just in time for the 2008 presidential election—where the future of the Court will be at stake—Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of conservative disgust with the Court have finally produced a conservative majority, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.
Based on exclusive interviews with justices themselves, The Nine tells the story of the Court through personalities—from Anthony Kennedy's overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas's well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter's odd nineteenth-century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the-scenes story of Bush v. Gore—and Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office.
The Nine is the book bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin was born to write. A CNN senior legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, no one is more superbly qualified to profile the nine justices. [All descriptive information provided by the publisher]
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics
Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement’s most radical aims—the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution—were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics.
Johnson offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated critique of the rhetoric and strategies that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, he reinterprets the place of key intellectual figures, such as Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka, and influential organizations, including the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Political Assembly, and the National Black Independent Political Party in postsegregation black politics, while at the same time identifying the contradictions of Black Power radicalism itself.
Documenting the historical retreat from radical, democratic struggle, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders ultimately calls for the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics. [Description provided by the publisher]
Image source: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/winter/images/march-on-washington.jpg
E185.6151.J59
Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak
This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo. {Description provided by the publisher]
PJ7694.E3.P56
The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America
The authors take us inside the house and the family to observe a century of building and rebuilding—the ebb and flow of events and family feelings, the architecture and furnishings, the art and the gardens. A complex saga, The House the Rockefellers Built is alive with surprising twists and turns that reveal the tastes of a large family often sharply at odds with one another about the fortune the house symbolized. [Description provided by the publisher]
Image source: http://www.house.gov/salazar/images/money.jpg
CT274.R59.D35
Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of LA Causa
HD6509.C48.L48
The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor
Image Source: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/WWII_Industry/Aero7G6.jpg
HD6079.2.S49
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind
In the first full-length narrative of the case in thirty years, Bruce Watson unwinds a gripping tale that opens with anarchist bombs going off in a posh Washington, D.C., neighborhood and concludes with worldwide outrage over the execution of the “good shoemaker” and the “poor fish peddler.” Sacco and Vanzetti mines deep archives and new sources, unveiling fresh details about these naïve dreamers and militant revolutionaries. This case still haunts the American imagination. Authoritative and engrossing, Sacco and Vanzetti will capture fans of true crime books and everyone who enjoys riveting American history. [Description provided by the publisher]
About the Author
Bruce Watson is an award-winning journalist whose articles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Reader’s Digest, and Yankee magazine. His previous books are Bread & Roses, which was a New York Public Library Books to Remember selection, and The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made.
KF224.S2.W38
Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush
With unprecedented access to all the key figures of this administration from six one-on-one sessions with the president, to Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Karl Rove, and perhaps 200 other players, some well-known, some not Draper has achieved what no other journalist or contemporary historian has done thus far: he has told the story of the Bush White House from the inside, with a special emphasis on how the very personality of this strong-willed president has affected the outcome of events. Bush loyalists and the growing number of Bush detractors will all find much to savor in this riveting political page-turner.
We revisit the primaries of election-year 2000, in which the character of the candidate and indeed the future of the Republican Party were forged in the scalding South Carolina battle with Senator John McCain. We proceed forward to witness intimately the confusion and the eloquence that followed the September 11 attacks, then the feckless attempts to provide electricity to a darkened Baghdad, the high- and lowlights of the 2004 re-election bid, the startling and fruitless attempt to spend capital by overhauling the Social Security system, the inept response to Katrina, the downward spiraling and increasingly divisive war in Iraq.
Though the headlines may be familiar, the details, the utterly inside account of how events transpired will come as fresh reportage to even the most devoted followers of mainstream media coverage. In this most press-wary of administrations, Robert Draper has accomplished a small miracle: He has knocked on all on the right doors, and thus become the first author to tell a personality-driven history of the Bush years. In so doing, he allows us to witness in complete granularity the personal force of a president determined to achieve big things, who remained an optimist in the face of a sometimes harsh unpopularity, who confronted the history of his time with what can surely be described as dead certainty. [Description provided by the publisher]
E902.D73
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Mid-twentieth-century capitalism has turned into global capitalism, and global capitalism—turbocharged, Web-based, and able to find and make almost anything just about anywhere—has turned into supercapitalism. But as Robert B. Reich makes clear in this eye-opening book, while supercapitalism is working wonderfully well to enlarge the economic pie, democracy—charged with caring for all citizens—is becoming less andReich explains how widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and the spreading effects of global warming are the logical outcomes of supercapitalism. He shows us why companies, fighting harder than ever to maintain their competitive positions, have become even more deeply involved in politics; and how average citizens, seeking great deals and invested in the stock market to an unprecedented degree, are increasingly loath to stand by their values if it means biting the hands that feed them. He makes clear how the tools traditionally used to temper America's societal problems—fair taxation, well-funded public education, trade unions—have withered as supercapitalism has burgeoned. less effective under its influence.
Reich sets out a clear course to a vibrant capitalism and a concurrent, equally vibrant democracy. He argues forcefully that the spheres of business and politics must be kept distinct. He calls for an end to the legal fiction that corporations are citizens, as well as the illusion that corporations can be "socially responsible" until laws define social needs. Reich explains why we must stop treating companies as if they were people—and must therefore abolish the corporate income tax and levy it on shareholders instead, hold individuals rather than corporations guilty of criminal conduct, and not expect companies to be "patriotic." For, as Reich says, only people can be citizens, and only citizens should be allowed to participate in democratic decision making.[Description provided by the publisher]
JK275.R45
Friday, October 12, 2007
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change.
Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy. [Description provided by the publisher]
HB119.G74.A3
Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity)
Getting Off seamlessly blends personal anecdotes from Jensen's years as a feminist anti-pornography activist with scholarly research. In his trademark conversational style, he shows how mainstream pornography reinforces social definitions of manhood and influences men's attitudes about women and how to treat them.
Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.
Robert Jensen is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity.
HQ471.J47
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.
About the Authors
Gene Roberts is a retired journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was a reporter and editor with the Detroit Free Press, The Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and The Goldsboro News-Argus before joining The New York Times in 1965, where until 1972 he served as chief Southern and civil rights correspondent, chief war correspondent in South Vietnam, and national editor. During his 18 years as executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, his staff won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. He later became managing editor of the Times.
A native of Alabama, Hank Klibanoff is the Managing editor/news at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is the former Deputy Managing Editor for ThePhiladelphia Inquirer, where he worked for 20 years. He was also a reporter for three years at the Boston Globe and six years in Mississippi for The Daily Herald, South Mississippi Sun (now the Sun-Herald) and the Greenville Delta Democrat Times.
PN4888.R3.R63
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
In this brilliant #1 bestseller, "the most important columnist in America today" (Walter Russell Mead, The New York Times) demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Thomas L. Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.
HM846.F74
The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions
Friday, September 28, 2007
Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
About the Author
Sharon Marcus is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London.
HQ1599.E5.M37
The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS
The AIDS epidemic is partly a consequence of the rapid transition of African societies from an agrarian past to an impoverished present. Millions of African people have yet to find a place in an increasingly globalized world, and their poverty and social dislocation have generated an earthquake in gender relations that deeply affects the spread of HIV. But Epstein argues that there are solutions to this crisis, and some of the most effective ones may be simpler than many people assume. [Description provided by the publisher]
About the Author
Helen Epstein writes frequently on public health for various publications, including The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Magazine. She is currently a visiting research scholar at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.
RA643.86.A35.E674
The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance
Friday, September 21, 2007
Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence
Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans
Here, in vivid detail, are unforgettable incidents such as the torching of the Chinatown in Antioch, California, after Chinese prostitutes were accused of giving seven young men syphilis, and a series of lynchings in Los Angeles bizarrely provoked by a Chinese wedding. From the port of Seattle to the mining towns in California’s Siskiyou Mountains to “Nigger Alley” in Los Angeles, the first Chinese Americans were hanged, purged, and banished. Chinatowns across the West were burned to the ground.
Driven Out features riveting characters, both heroic and villainous, white and Asian. Charles McGlashen, a newspaper editor, spearheaded a shift in the tactics of persecution, from brutality to legal boycotts of the Chinese, in order to mount a run for governor of California. Fred Bee, a creator of the Pony Express, became the Chinese consul and one of the few attorneys willing to defend the Chinese. Lum May, a dry goods store owner, saw his wife dragged from their home and driven insane. President Grover Cleveland, hoping that China’s 400,000 subjects would buy the United States out of its economic crisis, persuaded China to abandon the overseas Chinese in return for a trade treaty. Quen Hing Tong, a merchant, sought an injunction against the city of San Jose in an important precursor to today’s suits against racial profiling and police brutality.
F870.C5.P484
An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality
Thursday, September 20, 2007
The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
Black Fathers in Contemporary American Society: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Strategies for Change
Black Fathers in Contemporary American Society provides an in-depth look at a problem affecting millions of children while offering proof that the trend of father absence is not irrevocable.
HQ756.B55
Female Circumcision: The Interplay of Religion, Culture and Gender in Kenya
Underground Railroad in New Jersey And New York
Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas
Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration and the Tradition of Cather and Austin
Language, Symbols, and the Media: Communication in the Aftermath of the World Trade Center Attack
Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema (Wisconsin Film Studies)
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita
Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured in the formula "art for art's sake"--the notion that a work of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second is realism, vilified by its critics as "dirt for dirt's sake." In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to "dirt for art's sake"--the idea that the work of art may legitimately include the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the sordid.
Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit. (Descriptive information provided by the publisher)
PQ295.C47.L33
The Age Of Innocence (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
Religion and Film: An Introduction
Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences
Pagan studies is maturing and moving beyond the context of new religious movements to situate itself within the study of world religions. Introductio
Introduction to Pagan Studies
This text will also serve as a general introduction to pagan studies for nonspecialist scholars of religion. It will be of interest to academics and related disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as students taking courses in religious studies, pagan studies, nature religion, new religious movements, and religion in America. This book will also be useful to nonacademic practitioners of paganism interested in current scholarship.
BP605.N46.D38
Frantz Fanon: A Portrait
The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films About the New Economic Order
Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men
Something scary is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, they are less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere twenty years ago. As for young men, it turns out the film Failure to Launch is not far from the truth. Fully one-third of men ages 22-34 are still living at home with their parents--about a 100 percent increase in the past twenty years. Boys nationwide are increasingly dropping out of school; fewer are going to college; and for the first time in American history, women are outnumbering men at undergraduate institutions three to two.
Parents, teachers, and mental health professionals are worried about boys. But until now, no one has come up with good reasons for their decline--and, more important, with workable solutions to reverse this troubling trend. Now, family physician and research psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on his vast clinical experience to propose an entirely original view of why boys and young men are failing in school and at home. He argues that a combination of social, cultural, and biological factors is creating an environment that is literally toxic to boys, ranging from environmental estrogens to the over-prescription of ADHD drugs. And he presents practical solutions--from new ways of controlling boys' use of video games, to innovative (and workable) education reforms.
About the author: Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., is a family physician, research psychologist, and acclaimed author of Why Gender Matters. He is founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in Montgomery County, Maryland (NASSPE). Dr. Sax's scholarly work has been published in a wide variety of prestigious journals, including American Psychologist, Behavioral Neuroscience, and Journal of the American Medical Association. He is a popular speaker and has been a featured guest on CNN, PBS, Fox News, NPR's "Talk of the Nation," "The Today Show," and many other programs. He lives in Montgomery County, Maryland. (All information description provided by the publisher)
LC1390.S29