Friday, November 23, 2007

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Much has been written about the "Valerie Plame" story, but Valerie herself has been silent, until now. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. And some has been completely false--distorted characterizations of Valerie and her husband and their shared integrity.
Valerie Wilson retired from the CIA in January 2006, and now, not only as a citizen but as a wife and mother, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and the sister of a U.S. marine, she sets the record straight, providing an extraordinary account of her training and experiences, and answers many questions that have been asked about her covert status, her responsibilities, and her life. As readers will see, the CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. As a service to readers, an afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story. [Description provided by the publisher]

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Bad Girls

Bad Girls examines representational practices of film and television stories beginning with post-Vietnam cinema and ending with postfeminisms and contemporary public disputes over women in the military. The book explores a diverse range of popular media texts, from the Alien saga to Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, from The Net and VR5 to Sportsnight and G.I. Jane. The research is framed as a study of intergenerational tensions in portrayals of women and public institutions - in careers, governmental service, and interactions with technology. Using iconic texts and their contexts as a primary focus, this book offers a rhetorical and cultural history of the tensions between remembering and forgetting in representations of the American feminist movement between 1979 and 2005. Looking forward, the book sets an agenda for discussion of gender issues over the next twenty-five years and articulates with authority the manner in which «transgression» itself has become a site of struggle. [Description provided by the publisher]

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Noted historian Charles Adams has assembled an extraordinary collection of articles—never before collected and made available for easy study—written by foreign journalists at the time of the U.S. Civil War. These journals are a fount of insights about the war, and readers will be rewarded with a new appreciation for the views of contemporary foreign observers of America's war. Readers will realize that the Europeans seemed to know more about America's "quarrel," as they liked to call the war, than previously thought possible.

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.

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Friday, November 02, 2007

The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938

When African American intellectuals announced the birth of the "New Negro" around the turn of the twentieth century, they were attempting through a bold act of renaming to change the way blacks were depicted and perceived in America. By challenging stereotypes of the Old Negro, and declaring that the New Negro was capable of high achievement, black writers tried to revolutionize how whites viewed blacks--and how blacks viewed themselves. Nothing less than a strategy to re-create the public face of "the race," the New Negro became a dominant figure of racial uplift between Reconstruction and World War II, as well as a central idea of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture.

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]

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The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot

In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile. [Description provided by the publisher]

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Monday, October 22, 2007

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land.

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

The Black Power movement represented a key turning point in American politics. Disenchanted by the hollow progress of federal desegregation during the 1960s, many black citizens and leaders across the United States demanded meaningful self-determination. The popular movement they created was marked by a vigorous artistic renaissance, militant political action, and fierce ideological debate.

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


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Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak

Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable.

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]

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The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America

One hundred years ago America’s richest man established a dynastic seat, the granite-clad Kykuit, high above the Hudson River. Though George Vanderbilt’s 255-room Biltmore had recently put the American country house on the money map, John D. Rockefeller, who detested ostentation, had something simple in mind—at least until his son John Jr. and his charming wife, Abby, injected a spirit of noblesse oblige into the equation. Built to honor the senior Rockefeller, the house would also become the place above all others that anchored the family’s memories. There could never be a better picture of the Rockefellers and their ambitions for the enormous fortune Senior had settled upon them.

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

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Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of LA Causa

Mexican-American civil rights leader and labor acitivist Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) comes to life in this vivid portrait of the charismatic and influential fighter who boycotted supermarkets and took on corporations, the government, and the powerful Teamsters Union. [Description provided by the publisher]

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The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor

Women now comprise the majority of the working class. Yet this fundamental transformation has gone largely unnoticed. This book is about how the sex of workers matters in understanding the jobs they do, the problems they face at work, and the new labor movements they are creating in the United States and globally. In The Sex of Class, twenty prominent scholars, labor leaders, and policy analysts look at the implication of this "sexual revolution" for labor policy and practice. In clear, crisp prose, The Sex of Class introduces readers to some of the most vibrant and forward-thinking social movements of our era: the clerical worker protests of the 1970s; the emergence of gay rights on the auto shop floor; the upsurge of union organizing in service jobs; worker centers and community unions of immigrant women; successful campaigns for paid family leave and work redesign; and innovative labor NGOs, cross-border alliances, and global labor federations. The Sex of Class reveals the animating ideas and the innovative strategies put into practice by the female leaders of the twenty-first-century social justice movement. The contributors to this book offer new ideas for how government can help reduce class and sex inequalities; they assess the status of women and sexual minorities within the traditional labor movement; and they provide inspiring case studies of how women workers and their allies are inventing new forms of worker representation and power. [Description provided by the publisher]

Image Source: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/WWII_Industry/Aero7G6.jpg

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Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind

When the state of Massachusetts electrocuted Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on August 23, 1927, it concluded one of the most controversial legal cases in American history. In the eight decades since, debate has raged over what was probably a miscarriage of justice.

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.

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Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush

In this ambitious work of political narrative, Robert Draper takes us inside the Bush White House and delivers an intimate portrait of a tumultuous decade and a beleaguered administration. Virtually every page of this book crackles with scenes, anecdotes, and dialogue that will surprise even long-time observers 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]

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Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

From the greatly admired author of The Work of Nations and The Future of Success, one of America's greatest economic and political thinkers as well as a distinguished public servant in three national administrations, a breakthrough book on the clash between capitalism and democracy.

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]

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Friday, October 12, 2007

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn't experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was...nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly.

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]

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Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity)

In our culture, porn makes the man. So argues Robert Jensen in Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Jensen's treatise begins with a simple demand: "Be a man." It ends with a defiant response: "I chose to struggle to be a human being." The journey from masculinity to humanity is found in the candid and intelligent exploration of porn's devastating role in defining 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.

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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.

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.

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The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and best-selling author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree gives a bold, timely, and surprising picture of the state of globalization in 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.



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The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions

Terrorism is the most clear and present danger we confront today, yet no phenomenon is more poorly understood by policymakers, the media, and the general public. The Faces of Terrorism is the first serious interdisciplinary examination of terrorism in all its facets. What gives rise to it, who are its proponents and how do they think, and how--and why--does it work?

Neil Smelser begins by tackling the fundamental problem of defining what exactly terrorism is. He shows why a precise definition has eluded us until now, and he proposes one that takes into account the full complexities of this unconventional and politically charged brand of violence. He explores the root causes and conditions of terrorism, and examines the ideologies that inspire and fuel it throughout the world. Smelser looks closely at the terrorists themselves--their recruitment, their motivations, the groups they form, their intended audiences, and their uses of the media in pursuing their agendas. He studies the target societies as well, unraveling the complicated social and psychological impacts of having to cope with the ever-present threat of a terrorist strike--and responding when one occurs. He explains what it means to live under constant threat of terrorism, and addresses the thorny domestic and foreign policy challenges this poses. Throughout, Smelser draws from the latest findings in sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, psychology, psychiatry, and history.
The Faces of Terrorism provides the breadth of scope necessary to understand--and ultimately eliminate--this most pressing global threat. [Description provided by the publisher]
About the Author Neil J. Smelser is university professor of sociology emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His many books include "Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, Problematics of Sociology", and "Social Paralysis and Social Change".
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Friday, September 28, 2007

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law.


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.

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The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS

In 1993, Helen Epstein, a scientist working with a biotechnology company searching for an AIDS vaccine, moved to Uganda, where she witnessed firsthand the suffering caused by the epidemic. Now, in her unsparing and illuminating account of this global disease, she describes how international health experts, governments, and ordinary Africans have struggled to understand the rapid and devastating spread of the disease in Africa, and traces the changes wrought by new medical developments and emerging political realities. It is an account of scientific discovery and intrigue with implications far beyond the fight against one tragic disease.


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.


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The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance


The Harlem Renaissance (1918–1937) was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. Its key figures include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. The movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. With chapters by a wide range of well-known scholars, this Companion is an authoritative and engaging guide to the movement. It first discusses the historical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance, both national and international; then presents original discussions of a wide array of authors and texts; and finally treats the reputation of the movement in later years. Giving full play to the disagreements and differences that energized the renaissance, this Companion presents the best of current wisdom as well as a set of new readings encouraging further exploration of this dynamic field. [Descriptive information provided by the publisher]
About the Author George Hutchinson is Chairman of the Department of English and Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Friday, September 21, 2007

Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence


In this gripping chronicle of America's struggle for independence, award-winning historian John Ferling transports readers to the grim realities of that war, capturing an eight-year conflict filled with heroism, suffering, cowardice, betrayal, and fierce dedication. As Ferling demonstrates, it was a war that America came much closer to losing than is now usually remembered. General George Washington put it best when he said that the American victory was "little short of a standing miracle." Almost a Miracle offers an illuminating portrait of America's triumph, offering vivid descriptions of all the major engagements, from the first shots fired on Lexington Green to the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, revealing how these battles often hinged on intangibles such as leadership under fire, heroism, good fortune, blunders, tenacity, and surprise. The author paints sharp-eyed portraits of the key figures in the war, including General Washington and other American officers and civilian leaders. Some do not always measure up to their iconic reputations, including Washington himself. Others, such as the quirky, acerbic Charles Lee, are seen in a much better light than usual. The book also examines the many faceless men who soldiered, often for years on end, braving untold dangers and enduring abounding miseries. The author explains why they served and sacrificed, and sees them as the forgotten heroes who won American independence. Ferling's narrative is also filled with compassion for the men who comprised the British army and who, like their American counterparts, struggled and died at an astonishing rate in this harsh war. Nor does Ferling ignore the naval war, describing dangerous patrols and grand and dazzling naval actions. Finally, Almost a Miracle takes readers inside the legislative chambers and plush offices of diplomats to reveal countless decisions that altered the course of this war. The story that unfolds is at times a tale of folly, at times one of appalling misinformation and confusion, and now and then one of insightful and dauntless statesmanship.
About the author John Ferling brings to this book nearly forty years of experience as a historian of early America. He is the author of nine books and numerous articles on the American Revolution and early American wars, and has appeared in four television documentaries devoted to the Revolution and the War of Independence. His book A Leap in the Dark won the Fraunces Tavern Book Award as the year's best book on the American Revolution. He and his wife live in metropolitan Atlanta.
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Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans

The brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking–and virtually unexplored–chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of communities of thousands of Chinese residents–and how the victims bravely fought back. In town after town, as races and classes were pitted against one another in the raw and anarchistic West, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives, were gathered up at gunpoint and marched out of town, sometimes thrown into railroad cars along the very tracks they had built.

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


Intimate apparel, a term in use by 1921, has played a crucial role in the development of the "naughty but nice" feminine ideal that emerged in the twentieth century. Jill Fields's engaging, imaginative, and sophisticated history of twentieth-century lingerie tours the world of women's intimate apparel and arrives at nothing less than a sweeping view of twentieth-century women's history via the undergarments they wore. Illustrated throughout and drawing on a wealth of evidence from fashion magazines, trade periodicals, costume artifacts, Hollywood films, and the records of organized labor, An Intimate Affair is a provocative examination of the ways cultural meanings are orchestrated by the "fashion-industrial complex," and the ways in which individuals and groups embrace, reject, or derive meaning from these everyday, yet highly significant, intimate articles of clothing. (Descriptive information provided by the publisher)
GT2073.F54

Thursday, September 20, 2007

The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism


Beginning with America's first newspaper, investigative reporting has provided journalism with its most significant achievements and challenging controversies. Yet it was an ill-defined practice until the 1960s when it emerged as a potent voice in newspapers and on television news programs. In The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, James L. Aucoin provides readers with the first comprehensive history of investigative journalism, including a thorough account of the founding and achievements of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).
About the Author James L. Aucoin is Associate Professor of Communications at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He is the author of Water in Nebraska: Uses, Politics, Policies.
PN4888.I56.A83

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief


Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists. He works at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God and scripture.
Dr. Collins believes that faith in God and faith in science can coexist within a person and be harmonious. In The Language of God he makes his case for God and for science. He has heard every argument against faith from scientists, and he can refute them. He has also heard the needless rejection of scientific truths by some people of faith, and he can counter that, too. He explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes readers for a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry, and biology can all fit together with belief in God and the Bible. The Language of God is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of faith: Why are we here? How did we get here? What does life mean? (Descriptive information provided by the publisher)
BL240.3.C66

Black Fathers in Contemporary American Society: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Strategies for Change

The majority of African American children live in homes without their fathers, but the proportion of African American children living in intact, two-parent families has risen significantly since 1995. Black Fathers in Contemporary American Society looks at father absence from two sides, offering an in-depth analysis of how the absence of African American fathers affects their children, their relationships, and society as a whole, while countering the notion that father absence and family fragmentation within the African American community is inevitable. Editors Obie Clayton, Ronald B. Mincy, and David Blankenhorn lead a diverse group of contributors—encompassing a range of disciplines and ideological perspectives—who all agree that father absence among black families is one of the most pressing social problems today. In part I, the contributors offer possible explanations for the decline in marriage among African American families. William Julius Wilson believes that many men who live in the inner city no longer consider marriage an option because their limited economic prospects do not enable them to provide for a family. Part II considers marriage from an economic perspective, emphasizing that it is in part a wealth-producing institution. Maggie Gallagher points out that married people earn, invest, and save more than single people, and that when marriage rates are low in a community, it is the children who suffer most. In part III, the contributors discuss policies to reduce absentee fatherhood. Wornie Reed demonstrates how public health interventions, such as personal development workshops and work-related skill-building services, can be used to address the causes of fatherlessness. Wade Horn illustrates the positive results achieved by fatherhood programs, especially when held early in a man’s life. In the last chapter, Enola Aird notes that from 1995 to 2000, the proportion of African American children living in two-parent, married couple homes rose from 34.8 to 38.9 percent—a significant increase indicating the possible reversal of the long-term shift toward black family fragmentation.

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


A Kenyan woman theologian examines arguments for and against the controversial practice of female circumcision. Based on interviews with 50 Kenyan women representing Christianity, Islam, African Initiated Churches, and traditional religion, Wangila emphasizes the importance of understanding the gender relationships and cultural beliefs behind the practice and the important role played by religion. Wangila calls for eradication of the practice to carefully designed educational efforts sensitive to religious and cultural beliefs.
GN659.K4.W34

Underground Railroad in New Jersey And New York


Tells the story of the network that guided escaped slaves to freedom, its operation, its important figures, and its specific history in New York and New Jersey. Pinpoints major routes in the states, with maps and information for locating them today. (Descriptive information provided by the publisher)
E450.S985

Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas


SUPREME DISCOMFORT originated from a much-commented-upon profile of Clarence Thomas that appeared in an August 2002 issue of The Washington Post Magazine. In it, Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, both Post staffers, both black, crafted a haunting portrait of an isolated and bitter man, savagely reviled by much of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society, internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural poverty in Georgia to elite educational institutions to the pinnacle of judicial power. He has clearly never recovered from the searing experience of his Senate confirmation hearings and the "he said/she said" drama of the accusations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill.
SUPREME DISCOMFORT tracks the personal odyssey of perhaps the least understood man in Washington, from his poor childhood in Pin Point and Savannah, Georgia, to his educational experiences in a Catholic seminary and Holy Cross, to his law school years at Yale during the black power era, to his rise within the Republican political establishment. It offers a window into a man who straddles two different worlds and is uneasy in both—and whose divided personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply influence American life for years to come.
KF8745.T48.M47

Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration and the Tradition of Cather and Austin


Picturing a Different West addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women s tradition of the pictured West. Both Cather and Austin moved west in their youth and spent much of their lives there. Cather lived on the Great Plains, while Austin resided in California and the Southwest. Cather s travels repeatedly took her to the Southwest, and she wrote three novels with Southwestern settings. Starting with the masculine tradition of Western art that was prevalent when Austin and Cather launched their careers, Janis P. Stout shows how the authors challenged and revised that tradition. Rather than a West of adventure, violence, and conquest, open only to rugged and daring men, the authors envisioned a new West not conventionally feminine so much as an androgynous space of freedom for women and men alike. Their vision of an alternative West and their alternative ways of thinking about and portraying gender are inseperable.
Placing Cather and Austin alongside contemporaries Elsie Clews Parsons, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Laura Gilpin, Stout emphasizes the visual nature of Austin s and Cather s personal experiences of the West and Southwest, their awareness of the prevailing visual representations of the West, and the visual nature of their books about the West, with respect to both prose style and illustrations. In closing, Stout demonstrates the continuance of their tradition in illustrated western books by Leslie Marmon Silko and by Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers.
PS3505.A87.Z862

Language, Symbols, and the Media: Communication in the Aftermath of the World Trade Center Attack


Offers insights into the impact and influence of 9/11 upon our cultural, social and political life. As historians and other analysts work towards greater understanding of the event that triggered our "war on terror," the role and function of language and communications will take on greater urgency. (Descriptive information provided by the publisher)
P96.W36.L36

Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema (Wisconsin Film Studies)


Julia Roberts played a prostitute, famously, in Pretty Woman. So did Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Jane Fonda in Klute, Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie, Greta Garbo in Anna Christie, and Charlize Theron, who won an Academy Award for Monster. This engaging and generously illustrated study explores the depiction of female prostitute characters and prostitution in world cinema, from the silent era to the present-day industry. From the woman with control over her own destiny to the woman who cannot get away from her pimp, Russell Campbell shows the diverse representations of prostitutes in film.
Marked Women classifies fifteen recurrent character types and three common narratives, many of them with their roots in male fantasy. The “Happy Hooker,” for example, is the liberated woman whose only goal is to give as much pleasure as she receives, while the “Avenger,” a nightmare of the male imagination, represents the threat of women taking retribution for all the oppression they have suffered at the hands of men. The “Love Story,” a common narrative, represents the prostitute as both heroine and anti-heroine, while “Condemned to Death” allows men to manifest, in imagination only, their hostility toward women by killing off the troubled prostitute in an act of cathartic violence.
The figure of the woman whose body is available at a price has fascinated and intrigued filmmakers and filmgoers since the very beginning of cinema, but the manner of representation has also been highly conflicted and fiercely contested. Campbell explores the cinematic prostitute as a figure shaped by both reactionary thought and feminist challenges to the norm, demonstrating how the film industry itself is split by fascinating contradictions. (Descriptive information provided by the publisher)
PN1995.9.P76.C36

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita

In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade.

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)


When The Age of Innocence appeared in 1920, it was read by a public still disturbed by World War I. While the highly structured New York life the novel describes could offer its readers return to safety, ultimately such safety also comes with a price. Edith Wharton tells her story through the voice of her main male character, indicating that women are not the only ones who have to pay that price. They, too, can be victims of overpowering and destructive social norms. And when Wharton's male character throws open the window sash because he literally needs to breathe fresh air rather than the air in his own stifling home, we realize it can be suffocating following not just the rules of the early 1900s but those of our own times as well. (Descriptive information provided by the publsiher)
PS3545.H16.E35

Religion and Film: An Introduction


Studies of religion and film have long been dominated by the question of a film's fidelity to a religious text or worldview, or its value as a tool in ministry and mission. Religion and Film seeks to redress this balance, and will have strong appeal to students as well as general readers interested in all aspects of the inter-relationship of religion and the cinema. Drawing on cultural studies approaches, and focusing on such films as La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc, Lagaan, My Son the Fanatic, The Wicker Man and The Passion of the Christ, Melanie Wright looks at varied screen representations of religion; at films shaped by strong convictions about the place of religion in society; and at the roles that people play as consumers of film. (Descriptive information provided by the publisher)
PN1995.9.R4.W75

Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences

Nervous, inexperienced, confused. For most, losing your virginity is one of life's most significant moments, always to be remembered. Of course, experiences vary, but Laura Carpenter asks: Is there an ideal way to lose it? What would constitute a "positive" experience? What often compels the big step? And, further, what does "going all the way" really mean for young gays and lesbians?
In this first comprehensive study of virginity loss, Carpenter teases out the complexities of all things virgin by drawing on interviews with both young men and women who are straight, gay or bisexual. Virginity Lost offers a rare window into one of life's most intimate and significant sexual moments. The stories here are frank, poignant and fascinating as Carpenter presents an array of experiences that run the gamut from triumphant to devastating.
Importantly, Carpenter argues that one's experience of virginity loss can have a powerful impact on one's later sexual experiences. Especially at a time of increased debate about sexual abstinence versus safe sex education in public schools, this important volume will provide essential information about the sex lives of young people. (Descriptive information proved by the publisher)
Laura Carpenter is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Pagan studies is maturing and moving beyond the context of new religious movements to situate itself within the study of world religions. Introductio


Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, perhaps her most recognizable work, is a story of manners, courtship, and marriage. Elizabeth Bennet, the witty heroine of the novel, is Austen's most vibrant and vital literary character. This updated volume presents a perceptive introduction by series editor Harold Bloom and a collection of full-length essays by respected scholars tell image students whose views on this charming classic. (Description provided by the publisher)
PR4034.P72.J36

Introduction to Pagan Studies

Pagan studies is maturing and moving beyond the context of new religious movements to situate itself within the study of world religions. Introduction to pagan studies is the first and only text designed to introduce the study of contemporary paganism as a world religion. It examines the intellectual, religious, and social spheres of paganism through common categories in the study of religion, which include beliefs, practices, theology, ritual, history, and the role of texts and scriptures. The book is accessible to readers of all backgrounds and religions and assumes no prior knowledge of paganism.

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


Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was born in Martinique, and in 1943 left to fight in Europe with Free French forces. After 1945 he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyons and began to write. His first analysis of the effects of racism and postcolonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, appeared in 1952 and would become a foundational text for the liberation movements of the 1960s and later for postcolonial studies. In 1952 he moved to Algeria and practiced at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in French Algeria until 1957. From that year he worked full time for the Algerian independence movement, including a brief appointment as the movement’s ambassador in Ghana.
One of Fanon’s few surviving contemporaries, Alice Cherki worked closely with Fanon at the psychiatric hospital in Blida and then later for the Algerian cause in Tunisia. This book is a record of "an epoch, a life, and a body of work often viewed as inadmissible." Cherki offers a unique assessment of Fanon’s complex personality, illuminating both his psychiatric practice—of which she says, "Fanon possessed a tremendous intuition about the unconscious and a great erudition in psychoanalytic theory"—and the sources of his political activism, of his intellectual career as a pivot of the quickly changing world. (Description provided by the publisher)
CT2628.F35.C4713

The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films About the New Economic Order


Tom Zaniello's fascinating new guide to films about globalization -- its origins, its relationship with colonialism, neocolonialism, the growth of migratory labor, and movements to counter or protest its adverse effects -- offers readers and viewers the opportunity to both discover new films and see well-known works in a new way.
PN1995.9.G59.Z36

Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

Family physician, research psychologist, and acclaimed author of Why Gender Matters, Leonard Sax reveals the truth about what's driving the decline of American boys--and what parents can do about it.


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

The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Classmates from Revolution to Exile


From the author of Chasing Che, the remarkable tale of a group of boys at the heart of Cuba's political and social history. The Boys from Dolores illuminates the elite island society from which Fidel Castro and his brother Raul emerged.
The Colegio de Dolores was a Jesuit boarding school in Santiago, Cuba's rich and ancient second city, where Fidel and Raul were educated in the 1930s and '40s. Patrick Symmes begins his story here, tracking down dozens of Fidel's schoolmates glimpsed in a single period photograph. And it is through their stories--their time at the Colegio; the catastrophic effects of the revolution on their lives; their fates since--that Symmes opens a door onto a Cuba, and a time in Castro’s life, that have been deliberately obscured from us. Here too is the elusive Raúl Castro, a cipher destined to rule Cuba in Fidel’s place.We see Castro in his formative youth, an adolescent ruling the classrooms of the Colegio and running in the streets of Santiago. Symmes traces the years in which the revolution was conceived, won, and lost, describing the changes it wrought in Santiago and in the lives of Fidel’s own classmates: we follow them through the maelstrom of the 1960s, as most fight to leave Cuba and a few stay behind. And here, in Santiago today, Symmes finds Castro’s most lasting achievement, the creating and sustaining of a myth-soaked revolutionary idealism amid the harshest realities of daily life.Wholly original in its approach, The Boys from Dolores is a powerfully evocative, eye-opening portrait of Cuba--and of the Castro brothers--in the twentieth century.
About the author: Patrick Symmes is the author of Chasing Che and writes for Harper’s, Outside, New York, and Condé Nast Traveler. He lives in New York City.
F1788.S96

After the Reich: The Brutal History of The Allied Occupation


From an expert in German history--a masterful exploration of the horrific aftermath of World War II for the citizens of a ruined nation.
When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, the Allied powers converged on Germany and divided it into four zones of occupation. A nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs, was suddenly subjected to brutal occupation by vengeful victors. Rape was rampant. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and German-speakers died in the course of brutal deportations from Eastern Europe. By the end of the year, Germany was literally starving to death. Over a million German prisoners of war died in captivity, where they were subjected to inadequate rations and often tortured. All told, an astounding 2.25 million German civilians died violent deaths in the period between the liberation of Vienna and the Berlin airlift.
A shocking account of a massive and vicious military occupation, After the Reich offers a bold reframing of the history of World War II and its aftermath. Historian Giles MacDonogh has unearthed a record of brutality which has been largely ignored by historians or, worse, justified as legitimate retaliation for the horror of the Holocaust.
Drawing on a vast array of contemporary firstperson accounts, MacDonogh has finally given a voice to tens of millions of civilians who, lucky to survive the war, found themselves struggling to survive a hellish peace. (Description provided by the purblisher)
About the author: Giles MacDonogh is the author of several books on German history, including The Last Kaiser: A Life of Wilhelm II and Frederick the Great as well as histories of Berlin and Prussia. A graduate of Oxford University, MacDonogh has written for the Financial Times, the Times (London), the Guardian, and the Evening Standard. He lives in London with his family.
DD257.M23

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2007: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers


In the last five years, the United States has lost 2.6 million jobs — the most in any five-year period since the Great Depression. In the 2006 edition of his legendary job-hunting book, WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE? Richard Nelson Bolles offers hope and presents an inspiring and detailed plan for finding your place in this uncertain job market. WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE? has been the best-selling job-hunting book in the world for more three decades, in good times and bad, and it continues to be a fixture on best-seller lists, from Amazon.com to Business Week. It has well over eight million copies in print and has been translated into 12 languages around the world. With an extended preface that addresses job loss, vacancies, and outsourcing and updated references on how to use the Internet in your job-hunt throughout, the 2006 PARACHUTE addresses the top concerns of today ’s job-hunters. In the words of Fortune magazine: "Parachute remains the gold standard of! career guides." (Description provided by the publisher)
HF5382.7.B64

The Terrorist Identity: Explaining the Terrorist Threat


Who would strap a bomb to his chest, walk into a crowded subway station and blow himself up? Only by examining how a terrorist understands his own identity and actions can this question be answered. The authors of The Terrorist Identity explore how the notion of self-concept combined with membership in terrorist and extremist groups, can shape and sustain the identity of a terrorist as well as their subsequent justification for violence and the legitimacy of their actions.
The book provides an understanding of identity that draws on concepts from psychology, criminology, and sociology. Notably, the book examines several case studies of various terrorist groups, including: the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Hamas, the Shining Path, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and racist Skinheads. By making the construct of identity central to this analysis The Terrorist Identity explains how violent and extremist collective behavior emerges culturally, how it informs the identity of group members socially, and how participants assume their place in these groups completely even at the expense of life-threatening harm to others or to themselves. (Description provided by the publisher)
HV6431.A755

Friday, September 14, 2007

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)


Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations.
A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood. (Description provided by the publisher)
HC21.C63

Moby-dick (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)


Herman Melville was already considered to be a successful author when he wrote Moby-Dick in just under two years. Yet despite his earlier success, the novel was widely misunderstood by its 19th-century readers, who expected a more traditional adventure novel. Today Moby-Dick is considered to be an undisputed classic, and many believe it to be the epitome of the great American novel. With an unforgettable cast of characters, inluding the mad Captain Ahab, Melville skillfully documents the Pequod crew's tragic hunt for the great white whale. The full-length essays presented in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Updated Edition provide expert commentary on the huge canvas of symbols themes, and subjects presented in this novel, as well as an introduction, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index, that will help students navigate confidently through Melville's masterpiece. (Description provided by the publisher)
PS2384.M62.H385