Thursday, December 16, 2010

Inside the Indian Business Mind: A Tactical Guide for Managers

This practical guide identifies the ingredients that make up Indian culture and uniquely translates them into useful tools to help Western commercial initiatives succeed. [from the publisher] HD70.I4.Z83

Impact of 9/11 on Economics: the Business of Terror: The Day That Changed Everything?

The Impact of 9-11 on Business and Economics is the second volume of the six-volume series The Day that Changed Everything? edited by Matthew J. Morgan. The series brings together from a broad spectrum of disciplines the leading thinkers of our time to reflect on one of the most significant events of our time. The volume reflects on the changes in organizational practices, changes to various industries from transportation and logistics, risk management, food, and the emerging war service industry, and changes to the international financial system. Contributors include Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Paul Smith, Jay Sultan, and other leading scholars. [description provided by the publisher] HV6432.7.I437
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Issues in Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class: Selections from CQ Researcher

Synopsis

  • The Obama Presidency: Can Barack Obama deliver the change he promises?
  • Middle-Class Squeeze: Is more government aid needed?
  • Gay Marriage Showdowns: Will voters bar marriage for same-sex couples?
These are just a few of the provocative questions contested in Issues in Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class. This engaging reader allows students to see an issue from all sides and to think critically about topics that matter to them. Classroom discussion will never be dull again!

In the tradition of nonpartisanship and current analysis that is the hallmark of Congressional Quarterly, CQ Researcher titles investigate important and controversial policy issues. Offer your students the balanced reporting, complete overviews and engaging writing that CQ Researcher has consistently provided for more than 80 years. Each article gives substantial background as well as current analysis of the issue as well as useful pedagogical features to inspire critical thinking and to help students grasp and review key material:
  • A Pro/Con box that examines two competing sides of a single question
  • A detailed chronology of key dates and events
  • An annotated bibliography and Web resources
  • Outlook sections that address possible regulation and initiatives from Capitol Hill and the White House over the next 5 to 10 years
  • Photos, charts, graphs, and maps
[product description provided by the publisher] E184.A1.I8453
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The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture

Patrick Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In joining these stories, he shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe.

Manning begins in 1400 and traces the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community. He tracks discourses on race, changes in economic circumstance, the evolving character of family life, and the growth of popular culture. He underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history and demonstrates the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity. Inclusive and far-reaching, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be fully understood without taking the African peoples and the African continent into account. [from the publisher] DT16.5.M35
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Hybrid Learning: The Perils and Promise of Blending Online and Face-to-Face Instruction in Higher Education

A call for the extension of hybrid learning urges that it become not just a quick fix or a boon for the bottom line, but an educational mode that re-envisions quality teaching and learning for the 21st century. [from the publisher] LB2395.7.S545

The Decline and Fall of the U.S. Economy: How Liberals and Conservatives Both Got It Wrong

This highly original book puts the crash of 2008 into a broad perspective by digging deeply into the misguided theories behind the policies that allowed it to happen. [from the publisher] HC106.83.W55

Friday, December 10, 2010

Prelude to Catastrophe: FDR's Jews and the Menance of Nazism

The Jews who so deeply admired Roosevelt made up the richest, most influential Jewish community in the world, leaders in government, commerce, and the arts. Yet by the time Franklin Roosevelt died in office, six million European Jews had been murdered by the Nazis while neither FDR nor American Jews lifted much more than a finger to help them. How did the president, the nation he led, and American Jewry allow this to happen? There is no simple answer, but Robert Shogan seeks a partial explanation by examining the behavior of a handful of Jews, so close to Roosevelt and supposedly so influential that they could be considered the president's Jews. [provided by the publisher]
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With All Thine Heart: Love and the Bible

Is the Bible actually a love story between a deity and a people? And what does this love story have to do with the modern world? In With All Thine Heart distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans speaks to freelance writer Mordecai Drache about love in the Bible.

Presented in an engaging, conversational format and touched with striking artwork, the textured dialogue between Stavans and Drache is meant to show how the Bible is a multidimensional text and one that, when considered over the course of history, still has the power to shape our world. The theme of love provides the connective tissue that binds this work.

Addressing a wide range of topics, from biblical archaeology and fundamentalism to Hollywood movies, lexicography, and the act of praying, With All Thine Heart suggests that the Hebrew Bible is a novel worth decoding patiently, such as one does with classics like Don Quixote de la Mancha, In Search of Lost Time, and Anna Karenina. Similar to the protagonists in these tales, biblical characters, although not shaped with the artistic nuance of modern literature, allow for astonishing insight. This exploration of love through the pages of the Bible—organized chronologically from Genesis to Exodus and followed by insightful meditations on the Song of Songs and the Book of Job-is a delightful intellectual and spiritual treat . . . Shema Ysrael!
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Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror

"At a time and on an issue that cry out for fresh, critical, and constructive thinking, Ian Shapiro has performed a great service by laying out a bold yet pragmatic idea for dealing with the threats America faces in the post-September 11 world. He has adapted an old idea that worked--the containment of communist expansion during the Cold War--to the task of replacing a policy that has, to a spectacular and tragic degree, not worked: military preemption and the attempt to impose democracy in the name of waging 'the War on Terror.' His critique of both the Bush administration and many of its Democratic opponents is hard-hitting and well substantiated; his recommendations are compelling; and his presentation is concise and forceful. The result is a major contribution to the debate over the single most vexing and important political challenge facing the U.S. and the world."--Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution, former Deputy Secretary of State
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Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society

The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison populations have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and "zero-tolerance" policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice has come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal justice in America and Britain over the past twenty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the distinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and security—and the changing class, race, and gender relations that underpin them—are linked to the fundamental problems of governing contemporary societies, as states, corporations, and private citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded personal freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with control and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals. David Garland's The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences. [from the publisher]
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Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell

"This book helps to set the record straight, not just through the facts of O'Dell's life, but through introducing the reader to O'Dell's powerful analysis."—Bill Fletcher Jr., coauthor of Solidarity Divided

"Jack O'Dell describes an 'easy journey. . .[and] an easy course' through his extraordinary life. But there was and is nothing easy about the roles Jack played—and continues to play—as strategist, tactician, mentor, and leader in so many campaigns for justice. As often behind the scenes as in front of the microphone, Jack fought for internationalism in the African-American freedom movement and held the internationalist movement accountable for fighting racism. Jack O'Dell resides among the greats in the pantheon of our movements and of our country. His words continue to shape our history."—Phyllis Bennis, author of Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy U.S. Power

"Jack O'Dell is one of the great unsung heroes of the Black Freedom Movement. Climbin' Jacob's Ladder offers a fascinating and inspiring chronicle of O'Dell's long career through his own writings. With a brilliant and exhaustive introduction by Nikhil Singh, one of the sharpest radical thinkers of his generation, this collection is a vital addendum and corrective to our existing knowledge of the 'long' Civil Rights Movement and its legacy."—Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
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The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam

The tenth parallel—the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator—is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel; so do sixty percent of the world’s 2 billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles of Africa and Asia, is where the two religions meet; their encounter is shaping the future of each faith, and of whole societies as well.

An award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in The Tenth Parallel show us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil, and other natural resources, and that local and tribal issues are often shaped by religious ideas. Above all, she makes clear that, for the people she writes about, one’s sense of God is shaped by one’s place on earth; along the tenth parallel, faith is geographic and demographic.
An urgent examination of the relationship between faith and worldly power, The Tenth Parallel is an essential work about the conflicts over religion, nationhood and natural resources that will remake the world in the years to come. [from the publisher]
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Cather Studies, Volume 8: Willa Cather: A Writer's Worlds

The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather’s fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds: for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather’s intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both people and cultural mores between the two. But her worlds extended far beyond France, or even geographical locations. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences—theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical—and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduously exploring a diverse range of places, ethnicities, and professions. [from the publisher]
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Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom

Dance and the Hollywood Latina asks why every Latina star in Hollywood history, from Dolores Del Rio in the 1920s to Jennifer Lopez in the 2000s, began as a dancer or danced onscreen. While cinematic depictions of women and minorities have seemingly improved, a century of representing brown women as natural dancers has popularized the notion that Latinas are inherently passionate and promiscuous. Yet some Latina actresses became stars by embracing and manipulating these stereotypical fantasies.

Introducing the concepts of "inbetween-ness" and "racial mobility" to further illuminate how racialized sexuality and the dancing female body operate in film, Priscilla Peña Ovalle focuses on the careers of Dolores Del Rio, Rita Hayworth, Carmen Miranda, Rita Moreno, and Jennifer Lopez. Dance and the Hollywood Latina helps readers better understand how the United States grapples with race, gender, and sexuality through dancing bodies on screen. [from the publisher]
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1776 History!


Extremely well researched, and written only as David McCullough can, 1776 is a tremendously meticulous insight into both sides of the American Revolution!
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With All Thine Heart: Love and the Bible

Is the Bible actually a love story between a deity and a people? And what does this love story have to do with the modern world? In With All Thine Heart distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans speaks to freelance writer Mordecai Drache about love in the Bible.
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