Make Gentle the Life of This World or Founding Fathers on Leadership

Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy

Author: Robert F Kennedy

Throughout the 1960s, Robert Kennedy personally recorded ideas, ideals, and principles that spoke to his mind and his heart in a private journal like one kept by John F. Kennedy. Now, thirty years after Robert's tragic death, his son Maxwell Taylor Kennedy has opened this journal and culled from his father's speeches to offer us the quintessence of his thought. Filled with energy and insight, Make Gentle the Life of This World is the invigorating and thought-provoking portrait of a mind that shaped a generation and of a man who lived for his country.

Whether written in the tumult of his years as Attorney General, in the anguished moments after his brother's assassination, or during the exciting months of his last campaign, Robert F. Kennedy's words are a call for commitment, a reminder of its joys, and an inspiration to act.

Kennedy passionately sought to express the values that surged through his life -- racial justice, the pain of violent crime, fatherhood, family, democracy, leadership, courage, and patriotism. Beautifully illustrated with photos both public and private, some published here for the first time, Make Gentle the Life of This World commemorates how Robert F. Kennedy touched our hearts and energized our lives.

Library Journal

Kennedy's youngest son, only three years old at the time of the assassination, here compiles from his father's long-closed private journal the phrases that helped move a nation and the quotes from the ancient Greek philosophers, poets, and many contemporary figures who inspired RFK. Chapters are arranged by issues that were most important to Kennedy and remain timely today: the responsibilities of citizens to their government, the tragedy of poverty in the midst of plenty, the importance of dissent in a democratic society, and work as the solution for the welfare crises. The book's haunting photos convey Kennedy's spirit as successfully as the words.

Kirkus Reviews

This collection of brief passages drawn from Robert Kennedy's speeches and his journal, along with quotes Kennedy had copied from the works of favored authors, drawn together by his youngest son, is too slight and episodic to serve as a useful survey of Kennedy's thought. But the short passages do remind one of how the Kennedy brothers raised public rhetoric to a level now not often reached, as in a speech on welfare reform:

We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.

Black- and-white period photographs add an appropriately nostalgic touch. A slender, handsomely designed book, clearly intended for browsers and gift givers.

Interesting textbook: 70 Simple Noodle Recipes or Easy Indian in Minutes

Founding Fathers on Leadership: Classic Teamwork in Changing Times

Author: Donald T Phillips

The Founding Fathers on Leadership takes you into the world of "team leaders" Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison as they mapped strategy, forged consensus, picked the right staff people - such heretofore unproven talents as Lafayette and John Paul Jones - and made crucial decisions and daring choices. From Washington's recapture of Boston - achieved through intimidating, outmaneuvering, and outsmarting the British - to Benjamin Franklin's pivotal mission to Paris in search of a strategic alliance, Donald T. Phillips shows how these men faced challenges and dissension in their own ranks with an enlightened vision from which they would not stray. And just as risk-taking entrepreneurs on the business battlefield today must learn to consolidate their gains, the Founding Fathers faced fierce new battles after they had won the War of Independence, leading to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. A book that is as entertaining as it is insightful, The Founding Fathers on Leadership demonstrates some of the essential maxims for successful leadership and teamwork, such as rally every member of the organization to one common cause; turn an unsuccessful event into a clarion call for action; act as an agent of change for the people you manage; and pass the torch of leadership to the next generation. A profile of the great American success story in the making, this is a book that will inspire you to make your own American success story come true today.

Booknews

Extracts valuable lessons on business leadership from the story of the Founding Fathers' struggle to create a new nation. Shows how figures such as Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin faced challenges and dissension in their own ranks with a vision from which they would not stray. Includes checklists of organizational, management, strategic, and leadership lessons learned from the leaders of the American Revolution. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Persian Girls or The Writer as Migrant

Persian Girls: A Memoir

Author: Nahid Rachlin

Praised by V. S. Naipaul, Anne Tyler, and other writers, Nahid Rachlin has spent her career writing novels about hidden Iran-the combustible political passions underlying everyday life and the family dramas of ordinary Iranians. With her long-awaited memoir, Persian Girls, she turns her sharp novelist's eye on her own remarkable life.

When Rachlin was an infant, her mother gave her to Maryam, Rachlin's barren and widowed aunt. For the next nine years, the little girl lived a blissful Iranian childhood. Then one day, Rachlin's father kidnapped his daughter from her schoolyard, and from the only mother she'd ever known, and returned her to her birth family-strangers to the young girl.

In a story of ambition, oppression, hope, heartache, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin's coming of age in Iran under the late Shah-and her domineering father-her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soul mate, Pari. Both girls refused to accept traditional roles prescribed for them under Muslim cultural laws. They devoured forbidden books. They had secret romances.

But then things quickly changed. Pari was forced by her parents to marry a wealthy suitor, a cruel man who kept her a prisoner in her own home. After narrowly avoiding an unhappy match herself with a man her parents chose for her, Nahid came to America, where she found literary success. Back in Iran, however, Pari's dreams fell to pieces.

When news came to Nahid that her sister had died, she traveled back to the country where she had grown up, now under the Islamic regime the West has been keeping a wary eye on for the last few years, to say good-bye to her onlyfriend. It is there she confronts her past, and the women of her family. A story of promises kept and promises broken, of dreams and secrets, and, most important, of sisters, Persian Girls is a gripping saga that will change the way anyone looks at Iran and the women who populate it.

About the Author: Nahid Rachlin is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Foreigner, Married to a Stranger, and The Heart's Desire, as well as a collection of short stories, Veils. Currently a fellow at Yale, Rachlin teaches at the New School and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York.

The Washington Post - Carolyn See

Nahid's life plays out against a backdrop of tragedy. She has escaped to America, but she's lost so much of what she loved…the author doesn't comment directly on the meaning of these events. She just tells the tales of individuals crushed. This is just a story of how it was, during a certain period of time, for one upper-middle-class family in Iran, destroyed from within and without by forces it couldn't begin to reckon with.

Publishers Weekly

This lyrical and disturbing memoir by the author of four novels (Foreigner, etc.) tells the story of an Iranian girl growing up in a culture where, despite the Westernizing reforms of the Shah, women had little power or autonomy. As an infant in 1946, Rachlin was given to her mother's favorite sister, a widow who had been unable to conceive, and was lovingly raised among supportive widows who took refuge in religion from their frustrations as women in an oppressive society. But at the age of nine, Rachlin's father, whom she barely knew, met her at school without warning and brought her to Ahvaz to live with her birth family. Miserable in the new household, young Nahid was befriended by her American movie-obsessed sister Pari. Both sisters developed artistic ambitions, but only Nahid managed to escape the typical female fate, convincing her father to send her to college in the U.S. Less lucky is Pari, whose life of arranged marriage, divorce from an abusive husband and estrangement from her son ends in depression and early death. Exuding the melancholy of an outsider, this memoir gives American readers rare insight into Iranians' ambivalence toward the United States, the desire for American freedom clashing with resentment of American hegemony. (Oct. 5) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Chile or Customer Relations and Rapport

The Writer as Migrant

Author: Ha Jin

As a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature.
Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—questions that take center stage in The Writer as Migrant, his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration.
Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin’s mental library, The Writer asMigrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

Posters of World War II or Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Posters of World War II

Author: Peter Darman

During World War II posters were the most widely used propaganda tools of all the combatant nations. During the war posters were literally everywhere, imparting immediate and forceful messages. Posters were used in a variety of ways: as an appeal to patriotism in aid of recruitment, as warnings to upkeep national security against spies and saboteurs, and general pleas to aid the war effort, either by working in factories or buying war bonds. They highlighted enemy atrocities, reminded the people of the nation’s allies, and gave dire warnings of the consequences of defeat and enemy occupation. As such posters were responsible for arousing a wide range of sentiments: hatred, paranoia, pride, and nationalism.

Posters of World War II is a study of the war poster as a propaganda phenomenon between 1939 and 1945. It considers that they were often excellent and beautiful pieces of artwork as much as they were tools for imparting information. Never before has such a comprehensive collection of World War II posters and authoritative text been combined. Posters of World War II contains 200 posters, which accompanies by detailed captions. The text details the facts about the poster, where possible profiling the artist, explains the significance of its message, and considers its impact in the context of the war. Thus there are posters by such famous artists as Cyril Kenneth Bird, better known as Fougasse, Abram Games, and the Nazi propagandist Hans Schweitzer, who operated under the name Mjölnir.

The book considers the changing nature of posters as the war developed, giving an insight into the thoughts and fears of the officials tasked with producingpropaganda. As such, they reflected the changing strategic situation. In 1941 and 1942, for example, Soviet posters had concentrated on calls to save the Motherland, but after 1943 Russian propaganda changed as a result of battlefield victories on the Eastern Front. Now the call was to destroy the German fascist invader and capture Berlin itself. Posters of World War II is an important contribution to the study of propaganda in warfare.

Read also Nobility and Civility or Degrees of Freedom

Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Barnes & Noble Edition)

Author: Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is one of the most important and influential works in American history. It tells the story of Franklin’s life from his humble beginnings to his emergence as a leading figure in the American colonies.  In the process, it creates a portrait of Franklin as the quintessential American. Because of the book, Franklin became a role model for future generations of Americans, who hoped to emulate his rags to riches story. The Autobiography has also become one of the central works not just for understanding Franklin but for understanding America.

American Dynasty or Undaunted Courage

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

Author: Kevin Phillips

The Bushes are the family nobody really knows, says Kevin Phillips. This popular lack of acquaintance-nurtured by gauzy imagery of Maine summer cottages, gray-haired national grandmothers, July Fourth sparklers, and cowboy boots-has let national politics create a dynasticized presidency that would have horrified America's founding fathers. They, after all, had led a revolution against a succession of royal Georges.

In this devastating book, onetime Republican strategist Phillips reveals how four generations of Bushes have ascended the ladder of national power since World War One, becoming entrenched within the American establishment-Yale, Wall Street, the Senate, the CIA, the vice presidency, and the presidency-through a recurrent flair for old-boy networking, national security involvement, and political deception. By uncovering relationships and connecting facts with new clarity, Phillips comes to a stunning conclusion: The Bush family has systematically used its financial and social empire-its "aristocracy"-to gain the White House, thereby subverting the very core of American democracy. In their ambition, the Bushes ultimately reinvented themselves with brilliant timing, twisting and turning from silver spoon Yankees to born-again evangelical Texans. As America-and the world-holds its breath for the 2004 presidential election, American Dynasty explains how it happened and what it all means.

The New York Times

Mr. Phillips is eloquent on the continuing fallout of American decisions, beginning in the 70's, to pour huge amounts of armaments into the tinderbox of the Persian Gulf and Middle East, into countries "menaced by religious and resource conflicts." He also raises disturbing conflict-of-interest questions about the Bush family's intertwining political and business relationships around the world, relationships embodied by Bush Senior's post-presidential affiliation with the Carlyle Group, a merchant bank with military-sector investments. — Michiko Kakutani

The Washington Post

Tracing the family lineage through four generations -- beginning with the president's great-grandfathers, George Herbert Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush, moving along to his grandfather, Prescott Bush, then to his father and himself -- Phillips paints a portrait that can only be deeply disturbing to anyone concerned about how power is now gained and maintained in this country … American Dynasty is an important, troubling book that should be read everywhere with care, nowhere more so than in this city. — Jonathan Yardley

Publishers Weekly

Political and economics commentator Phillips (The Politics of Rich and Poor, etc.) believes we are facing an ominous time: "As 2004 began, [a] Machiavellian moment was at hand. U.S. president George W. Bush... was a dynast whose family heritage included secrecy and calculated deception." Phillips perceives a dangerous, counterdemocratic trend toward dynasties in American politics-he cites the growing number of sons and wives of senators elected to the Senate as an example. Perhaps less convincingly, he compares the "restoration" of the Bushes to the White House after an absence of eight years to the royal restorations of the Stuarts in England in 1660 and the Bourbons in France in 1814. To underscore the dangers of inherited wealth and power, Phillips delineates a complex case involving a network of moneyed influence going back generations, as well as the Bushes' long-time canny involvement in oil and foreign policy (read: CIA) and, he says, bald-faced appeasement of the nativist/fundamentalist wing that, according to Phillips, is now "dangerously" dominating the GOP. Casting a critical eye at the entire Bush clan serves the useful function of consolidating a wealth of information, especially about forebears George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. Phillips's own status as a former Republican (now turned independent) boosts the force of his argument substantially. Not all readers will share Phillips's alarmist response to the Bush "dynasty," but his book offers an important historical context in which to understand the rise of George W. (On sale Jan. 5) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Phillips' latest book is a bitter disappointment, largely because it cannot decide whether it wants to be a philippic against the shortcomings of George W. Bush and his antecedents or a sweeping history of American power in the twentieth century. The result is an unsatisfying mess. The wide scope and broad range of ideas blur the single-minded focus necessary for a satisfying screed, but the larger themes can never quite emerge amid the accusation, insinuation, and invective. Still, Phillips' central idea is interesting and important. The twentieth century, he argues, saw a fusion of three major interests: the energy industry, Wall Street, and the defense industry. Four generations of Bushes have participated in and furthered the emergence of this finance-security-hydrocarbon complex, and the domestic and foreign policies of the second Bush administration emerge from this background. Phillips could have written a magisterial history of the age. Instead, we have a sloppy, confusing mess that his many admirers will do their best to forget.

Library Journal

A former Republican strategist critiques the Bush family's dynasty-building. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

CONTENTS

preface
ix

Introduction
1

Part I: Family, Dynasty, and Restoration

Chapter 1: The Not-Quite-Royal Family
15
Chapter 2: The Dynastization of America
51
Chapter 3: The First American Restoration
73

Part II: Crony Capitalism, Covert Operations, and Compassionate Conservatism

Chapter 4: Texanomics and Compassionate Conservatism
111
Chapter 5: The Enron-Halliburton Administration
149
Chapter 6: Armaments and Men: The Bush Dynasty and the National Security State
178

Part III: Religion, Oil, Armaments, and War

Chapter 7: The American Presidency and the Rise of the Religious Right
211
Chapter 8: Indiana Bush and the Axis of Evil
245
Chapter 9: The Wars of the Texas Succession
278

Afterword: Machiavelli and the American Dynastic Moment
320
acknowledgments
333
appendix a: Armaments and the Walker-Bush Family, 1914ñ40
335
appendix b: Deception, Dissimulation, and Disinformation
343
notes
349
index
373

Interesting textbook: Food Service Management by Checklist or Financial Accounting

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West

Author: Stephen E Ambros

In this sweeping adventure story, Stephen E. Ambrose, the bestselling author od D-Day, presents the definitive account of one of the most momentous journeys in American history. Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis's lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. Along the way, Ambrose shows us the American West as Lewis saw it -- wild, awsome, and pristinely beautiful. Undaunted Courage is a stunningly told action tale that will delight readers for generations.

Publishers Weekly

Ambrose has written prolifically about men who were larger than life: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Colonel Custer. Here he takes on half of the two-headed hero of American exploration: Meriwether Lewis. Ambrose, his wife and five children have followed the footsteps of the Lewis and Clark expedition for 20 summers, in the course of which the explorer has become a friend of the Ambrose family; the author's affection shines through this narrative. Meriwether Lewis, as secretary to Thomas Jefferson and living in the White House for two years, got his education by being apprenticed to a great man. Their friendship is at the center of this account. Jefferson hand-picked Lewis for the great cross-country trek, and Lewis in turn picked William Clark to accompany him. The two men shook hands in Clarksville, Ohio, on October 14, 1803, then launched their expedition. The journals of the expedition, most written by Clark, are one of the treasures of American history. Here we learn that the vital boat is behind schedule; the boat builder is always drunk, but he's the only one available. Lewis acts as surveyor, builder and temperance officer in his effort to get his boat into the river. Alcohol continues to cause him problems both with the men of his expedition and later, after his triumphant return, in his own life, which ended in suicide at the age of 35. Without adding a great deal to existing accounts, Ambrose uses his skill with detail and atmosphere to dust off an icon and put him back on the trail west. History Book Club main selection; BOMC split selection; QPB alternate

Library Journal

It has been 30 years since the last biography of Meriwether Lewis (Richard Dillon's "Meriwether Lewis: A Biography", 1965). Ambrose (Univ. of New Orleans), best known for his histories and biographies of the 1940-90 period, uses the journals and documents that have turned up since then, as well as the traditional sources, to craft a careful and detailed biography of Lewis that will stand as the standard account for some time to come. Ambrose not only recounts the expedition Lewis led with Clark but also explains how Lewis came to head it, how he prepared for this task, and how his life unfolded after he returned to Washington and reported to Jefferson. Specialists will appreciate this biography, but general readers will also be enthralled by Ambrose's well-written account. This book belongs in all libraries. Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette

School Library Journal

Though principally a biography of Meriwether Lewis, this narrative also provides fascinating portraits of Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, Sacagawea, and other members of the group of explorers who journeyed from the Ohio River to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1803-1806. While scholarly and well documented, this account is at the same time a great adventure story, and Ambrose generates a sense of excitement and anticipation that mirrors, at least to some degree, the feelings Lewis and Clark must have had as they began their journey. Lewis's intense curiosity about the world around him, his training as a naturalist, and his ability to record what he saw and experienced provide YAs with a fascinating picture of the American frontier in the 19th century. The subject's strengths and weaknesses as a leader are revealed as he and his loyal followers meet every kind of challenge in their search for a navigable water route from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Ambrose incorporates recent research and new material on the expedition into this history, and includes detailed maps and examples of Lewis's journal entries. An eminently readable resource. Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA

Public Enemies or The Three Trillion Dollar War

Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

Author: Bryan Burrough

In Public Enemies, bestselling author Bryan Burrough strips away the thick layer of myths put out by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to tell the full story-for the first time-of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover and the assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In an epic feat of storytelling and drawing on a remarkable amount of newly available material on all the major figures involved, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover's G-men overcame their early fumbles to secure the FBI's rise to power.

The New York Times - Mark Costello

Burrough, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of Barbarians at the Gate, has written a book that brims with vivid portraiture. His Dillinger is haunting, a figure out of the fiction of Richard Ford, a man of meanness and sorrow and deep rural pessimism … As the story of the F.B.I.'s emergence from the 10-ring circus that was 1934, Public Enemies is excellent true crime with all the strengths and limitations this implies.

Publishers Weekly

Burrough, an award-winning financial journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent, best known for Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, switches gears to produce the definitive account of the 1930s crime wave that brought notorious criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde to America's front pages. Burrough's fascination with his subject matter stems from a family connection-his paternal grandfather manned a roadblock in Arkansas during the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde-and he successfully translates years of dogged research, which included thorough review of recently disclosed FBI files, into a graceful narrative. This true crime history appropriately balances violent shootouts and schemes for daring prison breaks with a detailed account of how the slew of robberies and headlines helped an ambitious federal bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover transform a small agency into the FBI we know today. While some of the details (e.g., that Dillinger got a traffic ticket) are trivial, this book compellingly brings back to life people and times distorted in the popular imagination by hagiographic bureau memoirs and Hollywood. Burrough's recent New York Times op-ed piece drawing parallels between the bureau's "reinvention" in the 1930s and today's reform efforts to combat the war on terror will help attract readers looking for lessons from history. Agent, Andrew Wylie. 6-city author tour. (July 22) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Burrough (coauthor, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco) is clearly a gifted writer and a skilled researcher. Yet while many of the vignettes in this portrait of a crime era read like the best fiction, the book suffers from considerable back and forth and ends up a disappointing, disjointed affair. Just when the reader starts turning pages faster as the FBI begins to move in on Baby Face Nelson, Burrough switches to the hunt for John Dillinger. However colorful, the various gang members become harder and harder to distinguish, and the uninitiated will find themselves confused by the seemingly bland recitation of FBI agents complete with birth date, service dates, etc. and the criminals they pursued. With so much material, including recently released FBI files, Burrough could easily have filled twice the pages. In fact, he intends this to be serious history and rails against the Hollywood treatment afforded these murderous criminals, yet he, too, is guilty of sensational writing. Of interest mainly to true fans. Karen Sandlin Silverman, CFAR-Ctr. for Applied Research, Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A rollicking, rat-a-tat ride with Clyde Barrow, Ma Barker, and a raft of inept (but a few first-rate) G-men. Though J. Edgar Hoover argued otherwise-and wrote gainsayers out of the official histories-his fledgling FBI was a thoroughly politicized bureaucracy just like any other, torn by rivalries and full of guys who just couldn't handle the work. (And so, it appears from recent testimonials before Congress, it remains.) Hoover's agents were ill-equipped to handle the flood of violent crime that washed over the nation in the first years of FDR's administration-which, Vanity Fair correspondent Burrough notes, "wasn't the beginning of a crime wave, it was the end of one." Where bank robbery had been comparatively rare, those years saw an explosion of attacks across the country, mostly in rural settings; committed by men and women such as Bonnie Parker, John Dillinger, and Machine Gun Kelly, they met with public understanding, if not approbation, for the economy had tanked, and the public blamed bankers for the hardships they now had to endure. Part of Hoover's mission in declaring open warfare on these criminals, writes Burrough, was to battle "the idea of crime, the idea that too many Americans had come to tolerate crime." Given the celebrity that the likes of Ma Barker and Pretty Boy Floyd came to enjoy, Hoover surely had a point, even though he and his boys got it wrong much of the time; Ma Barker, to name one putative public enemy, decried as the murderous, machine-gun-spraying brains of a monstrous ring, "wasn't even a criminal, let alone a mastermind." But plenty of the people the G-men went after were criminals, sometimes even masterminds, and very dangerous, just as likely to gundown passersby as cops and bank dicks; as Burrough writes, Baby Face Nelson in particular lives up to his reputation: "a caricature of a public enemy, a callous, wild-eyed machine-gunner who actually laughed as he sprayed bullets toward women and children."Iconoclastic and fascinating. A genuine treat for true-crime buffs, and for anyone interested in the New Deal era. Agents: Andrew Wylie, Jeffrey Posternak/Wylie Agency

Books about: When Someone You Love Is Depressed or Living Through Breast Cancer

The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict

Author: Joseph E Stiglitz

Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.

The Washington Post - Carlos Lozada

Stiglitz and Bilmes methodically build a compelling case that the costs of the war far exceed the $500 billion or so officially spent on it thus far. Yet by making many assumptions about the future course of the conflict—from its duration (through at least 2017, they predict) to its impact on global oil prices ($5 to $10 extra per barrel, for seven to eight years)—the authors will leave many readers unconvinced. Will the war prove extraordinarily expensive? Absolutely. But will the price tag be $2 trillion? $3 trillion? $5 trillion? It's impossible to know…Stiglitz and Bilmes should be commended—not disparaged—for their painstaking work. But war critics should weigh the numbers carefully…The book's title suggests a level of precision that is not borne out in its pages. The book's stronger lesson is the sheer range of costs—and foregone opportunities—that the authors ably identify.

Table of Contents:

Preface     ix
Acknowledgments     xxi
Is It Really Three Trillion?     3
The Costs to the Nation's Budget     32
The True Cost of Caring for Our Veterans     61
Costs of War That the Government Doesn't Pay     91
The Macroeconomic Effects of the Conflicts     114
Global Consequences     132
Exiting Iraq     164
Learning from Our Mistakes: Reforms for the Future     185
President's Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives on the Emergency Appropriations Act     207
Evolving DOD Web Sites for Operation Iraqi Freedom     210
On Methodologies     216
List of Commonly Used Acronyms     232
Notes     235
Index     297

Guant namo and the Abuse of Presidential Power or A Different Mirror

Guantбnamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power

Author: Joseph Margulies

and/or stickers showing their discounted price. More about bargain books

New interesting textbook: First Time Leaders of Small Groups or Essentials of Economics Study Guide

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Vol. 1

Author: Ronald T Takaki

A dramatic new retelling of our nation's past by today's preeminent multiculturalism scholar, Ronald Takaki, this book examines America's history in "a different mirror"--from the perspective of the minority peoples themselves.

Beginning with the colonization of the "New World" and ending with the Los Angeles riots of 1992, this book recounts the history of America in the voices of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States--Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others--groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture. In this significant work of scholarship, Professor Takaki grapples with the raw truth of American history and examines the ultimate question of what it means to be an American.

Publishers Weekly

In a vibrantly rich, moving multicultural tapestry, Takaki ( Strangers from a Different Shore ) provides a fresh slant on American society by tracing the interwoven histories of Native Americans, Africans, Chinese, Japanese, Chicanos, Irish and Jewish immigrants. We see how 17th-century white planters, anxious to weaken an armed, politicized, white proletariat, enslaved an unarmed black workforce, with explosive consequences. We follow Chicano struggles as an integral part of America's westward expansion and learn how Jewish-black solidarity extends back to John Brown's uprising in 1856 against slavery in Kansas, an insurrection in which Jews participated. We see how oppression of the Irish (the first people the English called ``savages'') foreshadowed the subjugation of Native Americans. Interweaving voices from all points on the ethnic rainbow, Takaki, ethnic studies professor at UC Berkeley, has produced a brilliant revisionist history of America that is likely to become a classic of multicultural studies. Photos. (June)

Library Journal

In his new work, Takaki ( Strangers from a Different Shore , LJ 7/89; Iron Cages , LJ 3/1/80) calls for ``a more inclusive and accurate history of all the peoples of America.'' But the book is limited to accounts of Native Americans, Africans, Irish, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and Eastern European Jews, prefaced with a discussion of English settlers in the 17th century. Even within these limits, this book is not the ``story of multidimensional ethnic interaction'' that the author desires. Beyond victimization, few common themes emerge. Still, the book is useful, notwithstanding the author's sometimes questionable generalizations, oversimplifications, and fuzzy chronology. Not even seasoned historians will be knowledgeable about all the groups included. Takaki fails to show us how to reunite American history, but he provides in one volume a very readable version of some lesser-known parts. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/93.-- Robert W. Frizzell, Hendrix Coll . Lib . , Conway, Ark.

School Library Journal

YA-Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Students will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science assignments, plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.- Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA

Table of Contents:

	Author's Note	v
1	A Different Mirror	1
Part 1	Boundlessness
	Before Columbus: Vinland	21
2	The "Tempest" in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery	24
	Shakespeare's Dream about America	25
	A World Turned Upside Down	44
3	The "Giddy Multitude": The Hidden Origins of Slavery	51
	A View from the Cabins: White and Black Laborers in Early Virginia	52
	"English and Negroes in Armes"	61
	The Wolf by the Ears	68
Part 2	Borders
	Prospero Unbound: The Market Revolution	79
4	Toward the Stony Mountains: From Removal to Reservation	84
	Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age	84
	The Land-Allotment Strategy: The Choctaw Experience	88
	The Treaty Strategy: The Cherokees' Trail of Tears	93
	Where the Buffalo No Longer Roam	98
5	No More Peck o' Corn: Slavery and Its Discontents	106
	Racial Borders in the Free States	107
	Was Sambo Real?	110
	Slave Son, White Father	122
	Black Nationalism: Nostalgia in the Niger	126
	"Tell Linkum Dat We Wants Land"	131
6	Emigrants from Erin: Ethnicity and Class within White America	139
	The Irish Exodus	139
	An "Immortal Irish Brigade" of Workers	146
	The Irish Maid in America	154
	The Irish "Ethnic" Strategy	160
7	Foreigners in Their Native Land: Manifest Destiny in the Southwest	166
	"In the Hands of an Enterprising People"	166
	"Occupied" Mexico	177
	The Making of a Mexican Proletariat	184
8	Searching for Gold Mountain: Strangers from a Pacific Shore	191
	Pioneers from Asia	192
	Chinese Calibans: The Borders of Exclusion	204
	Twice a Minority: Chinese Women in America	209
	A Colony of "Bachelors"	215
Part 3	Distances
	The End of the Frontier	225
9	The "Indian Question": From Reservation to Reorganization	228
	Wounded Knee: The Significance of the Frontier in Indian History	228
	The Father of the Reservation System	231
	Allotment and Assimilation	234
	The Indian New Deal: The Remaking of Native America	238
10	Pacific Crossings: Seeking the Land of Money Trees	246
	Picture Brides in America	247
	Tears in the Canefields	251
	Transforming the Land: From Deserts to Farms	266
11	Between "Two Endless Days": The Continuous Journey to the Promised Land	277
	Exodus from the Pale	277
	A Shtetl in America	283
	In the Sweatshops: An Army of Garment Workers	288
	Daughters of the Colony	293
	Up from Greenhorns: Crossing Delancey Street	298
12	El Norte: The Borderland of Chicano America	311
	The Crossing	312
	A Reserve Army of Chicano Labor	317
	The Internal Borders of Exclusion	326
	The Barrio: Community in the Colony	334
13	To the Promised Land: Blacks in the Urban North	340
	The Black Exodus	341
	The Urban Crucible	347
	Yearning for Blackness in Urban America	355
	"But a Few Pegs to Fall": The Great Depression	366
Part 4	Crossings
	The Ashes at Dachau	373
14	Through a Glass Darkly: Toward the Twenty-first Century	378
	A War for Democracy: Fighting as One People	378
	America's Dilemma	399
	A Note of Appreciation	429
	Notes	430
	Index	495
	About the Author	508

Ultimate George W Bushisms or Truth and Consequences

Ultimate George W. Bushisms: Bush at War (With the English Language)

Author: Jacob Weisberg

"This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all."

As the end of the Bush era approaches, the legacy is clear: George W. Bush is a wartime president. His enemy, battered but not defeated after repeated surges: the English language. The ultimate edition of George W. Bushisms captures this legacy -- from the Gulf Coast to Iraq and back -- with all-new pearls of wisdom and the twenty-five greatest hits of the entire presidency.

"You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one."

"I think -- tide turning -- see, as I remember -- I wasraised in the desert, but tides kind of -- it's easy to see a tide turn -- did I say those words?"

Look this: Jumping into Plyometrics or The Doctors Book of Home Remedies II

Truth and Consequences: Special Comments on the Bush Administration's War on American Values

Author: Keith Olbermann

Short, sharp, and oftentimes shocking, Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments” have made his nightly MSNBC program, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, must-see viewing–and the fastest-growing news show on cable TV. In these segments, Olbermann calls out the perpetrators of mismanagement, brutality, cronyism, and the appalling lack of accountability at the highest levels of the Bush administration. In so doing, Olbermann goes where most of the mainstream media fear to tread–and his rapidly expanding audience eagerly follows.

In Truth and Consequences, Olbermann collects the best of his Special Comments, presented here with additional observations and other new material. Whether taking to task the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and (the thankfully former) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who compare critics of the Iraq War to Nazi appeasers, or giving his impassioned perspective on why torture is un-American and what it really means to support our troops, or grilling timid lawmakers who fail to rein in presidential overreach and abuses of executive power, Olbermann’s devastatingly blunt (and at times wickedly funny) commentary cuts to the core of the duplicity and cynicism of a government that has lost the ability to distinguish between leading our great nation and ruling it.

Naturally, Keith Olbermann’s candor and razor-sharp polemic have earned him many detractors and enemies. His antagonists in the media, such as Bill O’Reilly, have mocked him and accused him of rank intolerance. Yes, Keith Olbermann is intolerant–of hypocrisy, demagoguery, fear-mongering, and especially the equation of dissent with treason.In Truth and Consequences, he fights to reclaim for himself and all Americans the dignity of speaking one’s mind and acting on one’s conscience.

Praise for Keith Olbermann

“A truth-telling, Bush-bashing accidental liberal hero.”

–New York

“The most honest man in news . . . Olbermann clearly relishes his feuds and doesn’t seem to worry much about sparking new ones.”

–Rolling Stone

“Part Jon Stewart (the funny), Dennis Miller (the erudite and biting sub-references), [and] H. L. Mencken (the skewering of power and stupidity in equal doses) as well as crusading journalist . . . Olbermann has emerged as a kind of force of nature.”

–San Francisco Chronicle

“Intelligent, well-read, forceful and incisive.”

–Rocky Mountain News

Publishers Weekly

In just two years, MSNBC host Olbermann (The Worst Person in the World) has become one of the most recognized critics of the George W. Bush administration. This book explains how and why Olbermann's televised "special comments" began, then reprints them from September 2005 through July 2007, with postcomment explanations. Before becoming a Bush administration critic, Olbermann had achieved fame as a sports commentator on the ESPN cable network. The genesis of commentator Olbermann as political celebrity makes it difficult to determine if he ought to be considered a fact-based journalist, but however Olbermann should be labeled journalistically, the commentary collected here demonstrates that he is a first-rate writer unafraid of expressing criticisms of most Republican decision makers and, on occasion, Democrats. Understanding from the start that Bush defenders would label the special comments unpatriotic, Olbermann decided to wear this label as a badge of honor and makes a persuasive argument that he is the upholder of traditional American values, while Bush and his colleagues are the transgressors. Olbermann's editorials are bound to stimulate and incite arguments as election season ratchets up. (Jan. 2)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Lincoln and Douglas or Witness

Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America

Author: Allen C Guelzo

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln was known as a successful Illinois lawyer who had achieved some prominence in state politics as a leader in the new Republican Party. Two years later, he was elected president and was on his way to becoming the greatest chief executive in American history.

What carried this one-term congressman from obscurity to fame was the campaign he mounted for the United States Senate against the country's most formidable politician, Stephen A. Douglas, in the summer and fall of 1858. Lincoln challenged Douglas directly in one of his greatest speeches -- "A house divided against itself cannot stand" -- and confronted Douglas on the questions of slavery and the inviolability of the Union in seven fierce debates. As this brilliant narrative by the prize-winning Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo dramatizes, Lincoln would emerge a predominant national figure, the leader of his party, the man who would bear the burden of the national confrontation.

Of course, the great issue between Lincoln and Douglas was slavery. Douglas was the champion of "popular sovereignty," of letting states and territories decide for themselves whether to legalize slavery. Lincoln drew a moral line, arguing that slavery was a violation both of natural law and of the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. No majority could ever make slavery right, he argued.

Lincoln lost that Senate race to Douglas, though he came close to toppling the "Little Giant," whom almost everyone thought was unbeatable. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas brings alive their debates and this whole year of campaigns and underscores their centrality in the greatest conflict in American history.

The encounters between Lincoln and Douglas engage a key question in American political life: What is democracy's purpose? Is it to satisfy the desires of the majority? Or is it to achieve a just and moral public order? These were the real questions in 1858 that led to the Civil War. They remain questions for Americans today.

Publishers Weekly

Guelzo (Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America) gives us an astute, gracefully written account of the celebrated Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. These seven debates between two powerful attorneys and statesmen, Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, starkly defined the stakes between sharply different positions on slavery and union on the eve of civil war and offered examples of serious, deeply reasoned exchanges of views rarely seen in American politics. As Guelzo wisely shows, the debates did not stand alone but were part of a larger Illinois senatorial campaign. Douglas won re-election that year, but Lincoln gained national recognition despite losing and then defeated Douglas three years later for the presidency. Perhaps more important, the views that Lincoln enunciated in 1858-that the government, heeding the majority's will, should halt slavery's further spread-laid the foundation for emancipation and a new era in the nation's history. Guelzo's smoothly narrated history of this segment of Lincoln's career, packed full of illustrative quotes from primary sources, will become a standard. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal

They were running for the U.S. Senate, with the "little giant" Douglas the incumbent. Lincoln started following him around the state, speaking after him on the campaign trail, so Douglas agreed that they should "canvass the state together." This most accessible of Guelzo's Lincoln books (e.g., Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation) is a rowsing narrative, academically researched, embracingly informative, and deeply thoughful. The legislature picked Douglas. This book is the real winner.

Kirkus Reviews

Two-time Lincoln Prize winner Guelzo (Civil War Era History/Gettysburg Coll.; Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, 2004, etc.) colorfully chronicles the most famous Senate campaign in American history. By 1858, intense controversy over slavery had brought the country to a boil, and partisans rightly looked to the Senate race in the swing state of Illinois for clues to the 1860 presidential election. There, the brilliant orator and incumbent Stephen A. Douglas, father of the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act and champion of the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," battled the little-known, lightly regarded prairie lawyer Abraham Lincoln. Douglas painted Lincoln as a thinly disguised abolitionist and an inconstant patriot, intent on ending the Founders's experiment in diversity by dictating a way of life to the South and inciting civil war. Lincoln attacked Douglas for destroying the Missouri Compromise and refusing to recognize that the moral issue of slavery was not susceptible to the whims of popular demand. Thanks largely to seven joint debates (actually serialized speeches) instantly transcribed and printed in newspapers that transfixed readers far beyond the state's borders, Lincoln emerged from the campaign with a national reputation, the glittering star of the still-new Republican Party. Though Douglas prevailed, he was reduced to an exhausted husk of his once powerful self, his national prospects severely diminished. Guelzo memorably describes the campaign's centerpiece, the Lincoln/Douglas face-offs in the little towns of Freeport, Ottawa, Galesburg, Quincy, Charleston, Alton and Jonesport. He also ably elucidates the importance and the timelessness ofthe philosophical differences at the heart of the Lincoln/Douglas debates, but he excels most at placing them in their original context, as only a part of a sharply contested, often ugly political campaign, wherein each man spent as much time tending to his own splintered party as he did explaining himself or hammering his opponent. A crisply articulated, dynamic presentation of how the debates unfolded and why they still matter today.

Book review: American Dietetic Association Complete Food and Nutrition Guide or Surviving an Eating Disorder

Witness

Author: Whittaker Chambers

Witness has changed the lives of countless readers since it was first published in 1952. This 50th Anniversary Edition recounts Whittaker Chambers' early work with the Communist Party, his later renunciation of communism, and the astounding Hiss-Chambers spy trial in a book that packs the emotional wallop-and literary power-of a classic Russian novel.

The New Criterion - Hilton Kramer

One of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American — and one of the best written too... It deserves to be recognized as a first class achievement.

What People Are Saying

John P. Marquand
Witness is much more than a series of intrigues and trials... no psychological novel can excede it in interest. No study of concflicting characters under stress could go deeper with Chambers, or be more puzzling.... The book was not written as literature, but literature it is of a high order.

Rivals or Ted White and Blue

Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade

Author: Bill Emmott

The former editor in chief of the Economist returns to the territory of his bestselling book The Sun Also Sets to lay out an entirely fresh analysis of the growing rivalry between China, India, and Japan and what it will mean for America, the global economy, and the twenty-first-century world.

Though books such as The World Is Flat and China Shakes the World consider them only as individual actors, Emmott argues that these three political and economic giants are closely intertwined by their fierce competition for influence, markets, resources, and strategic advantage. Rivals explains and explores the ways in which this sometimes bitter rivalry will play out over the next decade—in business, global politics, military competition, and the environment—and reveals the efforts of the United States to manipulate and benefit from this rivalry. Identifying the biggest risks born of these struggles, Rivals also outlines the ways these risks can and should be managed by all of us.

Publishers Weekly

Over the past 20 years, some of the most striking economic growth in history has been taking place in Asia, and former Economisteditor-in-chief Emmott (The Sun Also Sets) combines solid economic and political analysis with entertaining personal accounts to discuss three countries in the center of the phenomenon. Emmott paints richly detailed portraits of China, India and Japan, examining the global implications of their growing rivalry while remaining attentive to issues that extend beyond the region, such as the environment and nuclear weapons proliferation. Several of his conclusions are familiar: China's rapid economic growth is coming into conflict with its political authoritarianism; there is vast potential for India's growth if public policy can properly encourage it; Japan's aging and shrinking population could lead the country into further economic decline. The true strength of the book lies in Emmott's ability to guide the reader through the intricate-often fraught-relationships between these countries without losing focus. Particularly welcome is his ability to discuss potential trouble spots in the region without degenerating into alarmism. This serious and stimulating book will be indispensable to anyone interested in where these countries are headed-and where they might take us. (May)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

The East, to steal a line from Mao, is red: red-hot, that is, economically, and on the way to reshaping the global economy. Former Economist editor-in-chief Emmott (20:21 Vision: Twentieth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-First Century, 2003, etc.) credits George W. Bush with doing one thing-one thing-right in his years in the White House: forging close ties with India, or at least attempting to do so. Though far behind many other Asian economies, by Emmott's account, India has the wherewithal and the population to rival China and neutralize its power in the coming years. "George Bush's recognition of that fact," Emmott writes, "was his Richard Nixon moment"-that is, a climactic moment akin to Nixon's rapprochement with China precisely to balance Soviet power worldwide. The playing fields are different, of course, now that China has extended itself into the global economy and the local economies of most of the world's nations; yet, Emmott hazards, China's economic growth will likely plateau in about 15 years to a comparatively modest but still healthy five percent per annum, whereas India's will keep on growing at ten percent thereafter. It is no small matter that both countries may "treble their economic output" by 2025, and, as Emmott writes, "Asia is going to carry on getting richer and stronger, probably for a long time to come." Japan fits in the scheme less centrally, but Emmott envisions a sort of free-trade zone among Japan, Korea and China, a scenario that becomes happier and more probable under the assumption that Korea unifies and that Chinese communism becomes even less communistic. Japan remains nervous, of course, about its longtime Chinese foe, one reason for "Japan'sanxiousness to involve India in regional affairs." Emmott closes with a series of policy recommendations, including that the U.S. government declare "that it sees Asian integration and intraregional cooperation as desirable."Brightly written, in Economist tradition, and of much interest to fiscal wonks, geopoliticians and investors.

Table of Contents:

Asia's New Power Game     1
A Continent Created     28
China: Middle Country, Central Issue     54
Japan: Powerful, Vulnerable, Aging     96
India: Multitudes, Muddle, Momentum     135
A Planet Pressured     175
Blood, Memory and Land     208
Flash Points and Danger Zones     239
Asian Drama     280
Acknowledgments     312
Endnotes     317
Bibliography     325
Index     328

Books about: Wisconsins Best Breweries and Brewpubs or Best of New Orleans

Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto

Author: Ted Nugent

America has been craving leadership — and at last a gun-slinging, mega-rock star, deerslayer, and patriot has stepped forward to provide it.

Make way for Ted Nugent.

Cocked, locked, and ready to rock, the Motor City Madman, the thinking man's Abraham Lincoln, has unleashed the ultimate high-octane political manifesto for the ages in Ted, White, and Blue — the most important patriotic statement since the Constitution.

In Ted, White, and Blue you'll discover:
• Why war is the answer to so many of our current problems
• Why if Ted were a Mexican, he'd start a revolution (and how, since he's not, we can control our own borders)
• How to put Uncle Sam on a diet (a waste-watchers program for government)
• The Ted Plan for energy independence by 2018 — how to keep America rockin' into the future
• How to change the world for the better through the power of God, guns, and rock 'n' roll

If you care about America, if you want to preserve, protect, and defend the land of the free and the home of the brave, if you're fed up with lazy, whining, fear-mongering, government-gorging Al Gores, Michael Moores, and Obamaniacs, then you need to read Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto.

Publishers Weekly

Love him or loathe him, veteran rocker, commentator, and neo-libertarian rabble-rouser conservationist Nugent is hard to ignore. His "manifesto," a collection of essays and ruminations, will prove bracing but familiar to those acquainted with his antic, aggressive voice-in-the-wilderness style and often controversial stances on hot-button issues like gun control, welfare and self-reliance. Among loud, provocative analysis of a dozen issues (plus a chapter devoted to his last essay collection, 2001's God, Guns & Rock and Roll), Nugent puts together an "If I were president" list that includes eliminating welfare except for military personnel, making prisoners plant trees, forcing people in New Orleans live on higher ground and executing child molesters. While many of his suggestions-meant to "piss you off" as well as think-are pat, or even curmudgeonly ("I am convinced that most kids today have never heard the word 'posture'"), they're balanced by common sense and a healthy respect for the Golden Rule. Longtime fans will revel in Nugent's loudmouth charm and his rhapsodic take on discovering the guitar; whether he'll persuade newcomers that global warming is "the greatest hoax ever played on Americans," or that he himself is "a large, in charge, ruggedly independent, angry black man" is doubtful, but this maverick never claimed to be a uniter.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Cold War or New Firefighters Cookbook

The Cold War: A New History

Author: John Lewis Gaddis

In 1950, when Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-Sung met in Moscow to discuss the future, they had reason to feel optimistic. International communism seemed everywhere on the offensive: Stalin was at the height of his power; all of Eastern Europe was securely in the Soviet camp; America's monopoly on nuclear weapons was a thing of the past; and Mao's forces had assumed control over the world's most populous country. Everywhere on the globe, colonialism left the West morally compromised. The story of the previous five decades, which saw severe economic depression, two world wars, a nearly successful attempt to wipe out the Jews, and the invention of weapons capable of wiping out everyone, was one of worst fears confirmed, and there seemed as of 1950 little sign, at least to the West, that the next fifty years would be any less dark.

In fact, of course, the century's end brought the widespread triumph of political and economic freedom over its ideological enemies. How did this happen? How did fear become hope? In The Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis makes a major contribution to our understanding of this epochal story. Beginning with World War II and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he provides a thrilling account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age, rich with illuminating portraits of its major personalities and much fresh insight into its most crucial events. The first significant distillation of cold war scholarship for a general readership, The Cold War contains much new and often startling information drawn from newly opened Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives. Now, as America once again finds itself in a global confrontation with an implacable ideological enemy, The Cold War tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand.

The Washington Post - James Mann

Gaddis's latest book boils down the history of the entire Cold War to a sometimes brilliant 266 pages of text, in trenchant, lucid prose intended not for historians and specialists but for ordinary readers. He has not done much new archival field work to produce this new synthesis, and, at times, he relies heavily on his previous work. Yet to Gaddis's credit, he does not merely rewrite himself or retrace the main events from 1946 to 1991. Instead, he stretches to find new ways … to cover the subject, stepping back and looking at the entire period with distance and perspective.

The New York Times - William Grimes

In The Cold War: A New History, he offers a succinct, crisply argued account of the Soviet-American conflict that draws on his previous work and synthesizes the mountain of archival material that began appearing in the 1990's. Energetically written and lucid, it makes an ideal introduction to the subject.

Publishers Weekly

Gregory and Sklar, reading Yale history professor Gaddis's study of the American-Soviet standoff, give voice to their inner television announcer, their twin brands of masculine sonorousness verging on virile parody before settling comfortably on the side of familiar voice-over solidity. Gaddis's work unravels the tangled threads of the Cold War, from the tense Allied conferences at the end of WWII to the Korean War and onward, and his book's readers give it the sensation of every word being carefully cultivated and primped before being spoken. If this leads to some of the immediacy, the heart-in-throat sensation, of the events described being diluted, so be it, for Gregory and Sklar give Gaddis's book the grandeur its subject matter so richly deserves. Sounding more professorial, in the I-play-an-Ivy-League-professor-on-television sort of way, than the good professor himself, Gregory and Sklar do an admirable job of making Gaddis's learned words their own. Simultaneous release with the Penguin Press hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 14). (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

In this beautifully written panoramic view of the Cold War, full of illuminations and shrewd judgments, the distinguished diplomatic historian Gaddis brings the half-century U.S.-Soviet struggle to life for a general audience. Seen in retrospect, the Cold War — from the Truman Doctrine and the Korean War to the Cuban missile crisis, dйtente, and the fall of the Berlin Wall — appears to lead inexorably to a Western triumph. Gaddis seeks to show otherwise: the contingencies of individuals, ideas, critical decisions, narrow escapes, lost opportunities, and lurking dangers all intervened to give the great contest its character and trajectory. Drawing on his own earlier work and a synthesis of post-Cold War scholarship, Gaddis sees the conflict less as an inherent element in the bipolar postwar world than as a result of Soviet impulses toward domination, driven by ideology and dictatorship. He is best in depicting the ethical and strategic dilemmas that faced American presidents: the Cold War may have been a global struggle, but leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon struggled at home to square foreign policy with principles of morality, law, and democratic accountability. Gaddis gives credit for the end of the Cold War to visionaries and "saboteurs of the status quo" such as Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, and Deng Xiaoping, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. That Gaddis is now able to see this fifty-year conflict in its totality as a positive, progressive, and necessary struggle is a sign of how far into the past the Cold War era has receded.

Library Journal

Yale University historian Gaddis brings a depth of knowledge-six previous books on the subject-and lucidity of language to a sweeping overview of the Cold War, mostly from the end of World War II to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Personalities are among the dominant features here: Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, was "the most deserving recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize." This is because Gorbachev did not unleash the might of the Soviet military machine even as the Communist government crumbled around him. In this highly significant way, the Cold War can be considered as much for what did not happen as for what did. Among the other notables due praise, many but not all primarily in the realm of ideas, are Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George Orwell, and Pope John Paul II. Totalitarian systems flourished in the early postwar stages of the Cold War, but curiously they began to fade. By the time of the Soviet collapse, authoritarian regimes worldwide were losing control. Narrators Jay Gregory and Alan Sklar are lucid, but they sound much the same. There is no doubt that the book is a classic, sure to be heavily used by students of recent history.-Don Wismer, Cary Memorial Lib., Wayne, ME Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Cold War scholar Gaddis fashions a short but comprehensive account of what JFK called our "long twilight struggle."Following the defeat of the Axis powers in WWII, the western democracies faced off against their former ally, the totalitarian Soviet Union, in a global contest to determine the shape of the future. Each side's nuclear arsenal made total war unthinkable, but neither could afford to back down. Gaddis (History/Yale; The Landscape of History, 2002, etc.) condenses this sprawling story for a new generation of readers. He resuscitates such almost-forgotten acronyms as SALT, START, SEATO, NATO and MAD, and he places the wars in Korea and Vietnam within the context of the larger struggle and reminds us how lesser tussles over the Chinese offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu, the African nation of Angola, Cuba's Bay of Pigs and Afghanistan before al-Qaeda also affected superpower relations. He discusses the impact of the Berlin Wall, the Cultural Revolution and the Marshall Plan, as well as the Berlin airlift, the Cuban missile crisis, the downing of Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane, Solidarity's Gdansk shipyard strike and Nixon's trip to China. The Cold War's surprisingly peaceful outcome was by no means assured. The democracies forged many an unseemly compromise, suffering frequent setbacks and not a few outright defeats before prevailing. In the end, however, as Gaddis demonstrates, Marxism, which failed to ensure economic success even as it stifled political and social justice, proved no match for the vision of George Kennan or the stirring rhetoric of Kennedy and Reagan in Berlin, Churchill at Westminster College and John Paul II in Krakow. A superb introduction to a complex period inworld history.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue : the view forward	1
I	The return of fear	5
II	Deathboats and lifeboats	48
III	Command versus spontaneity	83
IV	The emergence of autonomy	119
V	The recovery of equity	156
VI	Actors	195
VII	The triumph of hope	237
	Epilogue : the view back	259

New interesting book: How to Build a Robot Army or C 30 in a Nutshell

New Firefighter's Cookbook: Award Winning Recipes from a Firefighting Chef

Author: John Sineno

John Sineno, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the fire department and an award-winning cook, is known as "Mama Sineno" because he looks after his firefighting "family" as if he were their mom. Though his days of putting out fires are over, he hasn't hung up his apron and continues to satisfy the appetites of his hardworking colleagues. In this new edition of The Firefighter's Cookbook, John shares old and new favorite recipes from his own kitchen and the kitchens of other firefighting chefs.

Library Journal

Firehouse cookbooks seem to have some sort of enduring fascination, and the first edition of this one sold more than 300,000 copies. Now Sineno, a retired New York City firefighter, presents those recipes plus 50 new ones, both his own and those contributed from fire departments as far away as Italy (the recipes from Rome come complete with wine suggestions). Although the recipes vary quite a bit, most are both cheap and quick to prepare. The collection is like a community cookbook of sorts, with headnotes and instructions in the contributors' own voices; there are anecdotes from Sineno and other firefighters as well. For most collections.

A Problem from Hell or Crazies to the Left of Me Wimps to the Right

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

Author: Samantha Power

In her award-winning interrogation of the last century of American history, Samantha Power—a former Balkan war correspondent and founding executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy—asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policy makers, access to newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power provides the answer in "A Problem from Hell," a groundbreaking work that tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Some books elegantly record history; some books make history. This book does both. Power brings a story-teller's gift for gripping narrative together with a reporter's hunger for the inside story. Drawing on newly declassified documents and scores of exclusive interviews, she has produced an unforgettable history of Americans who stood up and stood by in the face of genocide. It is a history of our country that has never before been told, and it should change the way we see America and its role in the world.

Publishers Weekly

Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th-century acts of genocide and U.S responses to them. In clean, unadorned prose, Power revisits the Turkish genocide directed at Armenians in 1915-1916, the Holocaust, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on Kurdish populations, Rwanda, and Bosnian "ethnic cleansing," and in doing so, argues that U.S. intervention has been shamefully inadequate. The emotional force of Power's argument is carried by moving, sometimes almost unbearable stories of the victims and survivors of such brutality. Her analysis of U.S. politics what she casts as the State Department's unwritten rule that nonaction is better than action with a PR backlash; the Pentagon's unwillingness to see a moral imperative; an isolationist right; a suspicious left and a population unconcerned with distant nations aims to show how ingrained inertia is, even as she argues that the U.S. must reevaluate the principles it applies to foreign policy choices. In the face of firsthand accounts of genocide, invocations of geopolitical considerations and studied and repeated refusals to accept the reality of genocidal campaigns simply fail to convince, she insists. But Power also sees signs that the fight against genocide has made progress. Prominent among those who made a difference are Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who invented the word genocide and who lobbied the U.N. to make genocide the subject of an international treaty, and Senator William Proxmire, who for 19 years spoke every day on the floor of the U.S. Senate to urge the U.S. to ratify the U.N. treaty inspired by Lemkin's work. This is a well-researched and powerful study that is both a history and a call to action. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy presents a superb analysis of the US government's evident unwillingness to intervene in ethnic slaughter. Based on centuries-old hatreds all but inexplicable to outside observers, genocide is indeed "a problem from hell," as then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher put it. In Bosnia, which inspired Christopher's remark, those hatreds resulted in untold thousands of deaths, televised and reported for the world to see. Even so, writes Power (who covered the Balkan conflict for U.S. News and World Report), the Clinton administration was reluctant to characterize the butchery as genocide, preferring instead to cast it in terms of "tragedy" and "civil war" and thus "downplaying public expectations that there was anything the United States could do." The author argues that the Clinton administration's failure to act was entirely consistent with earlier American responses to genocide, which turned on the assumption of policymakers, journalists, and citizens that human beings are rational and in the event of war, innocent civilians can insure their safety merely by keeping out of the line of fire. That failure also fits in with the American government's isolationist tendencies, strong even at a time when the US is the world's sole superpower. Power examines genocide after genocide, including the Turkish slaughter of Armenians during WWI, the Holocaust, and the Cambodian bloodbath of the 1970s, assuring her readers that US officials knew very well what was happening and chose to look the other way. She closes by suggesting that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, "might enhance the empathy of Americans . . . towardpeoples victimized by genocide," although she also guesses that the government may view intervention as an untenable diversion of resources away from homeland defense. A well-reasoned argument for the moral necessity of halting genocide wherever it occurs, and an unpleasant reminder of our role in enabling it, however unwittingly.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
1	"Race Murder"	1
2	"A Crime Without a Name"	17
3	The Crime With a Name	31
4	Lemkin's Law	47
5	"A Most Lethal Pair of Foes"	61
6	Cambodia: "Helpless Giant"	87
7	Speaking Loudly and Looking for a Stick	155
8	Iraq: "Human Rights and Chemical Weapons Use Aside"	171
9	Bosnia: "No More than Witnesses at a Funeral"	247
10	Rwanda: "Mostly in a Listening Mode"	329
11	Srebrenica: "Getting Creamed"	391
12	Kosovo: A Dog and a Fight	443
13	Lemkin's Courtroom Legacy	475
14	Conclusion	503
	Notes	517
	Bibliography	575
	Acknowledgments	589
	Index	593
	About the Author	611

Book review: Chez Panisse Fruit or Frog Commissary Cookbook

Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve

Author: Bernard Goldberg

The number one New York Times bestselling author Bernard Goldberg is back with more hard-hitting observations and no-nonsense advice for saving America from the lunatics on the Left and the sellouts on the Right.

In Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, Goldberg speaks for the millions of Americans who are saying: Enough!

Enough of lunatics like Rosie O'Donnell who think "Radical Christianity" - whatever that means - is "as big a threat to America as Radical Islam." Enough of the hyperbolic liberal rhetoric comparing Bush to Hitler and Abu Ghraib to a Saddam Hussein torture chamber. Enough of the liberal media, in particular the New York Times, which Goldberg claims doesn't publish "all the news that's fit to print" so much as "all the news that fits our ideology." And please, enough of the military-hating crazies who run San Francisco! ("Just what this country needs," Goldberg writes, "a city with Rice-A-Roni and a foreign policy.")

But Goldberg doesn't stop with the crazies on the Left. Speaking for fed-up conservatives, he also goes after the wimps on the Right - the gutless wonders in Washington who sold out their principles for power.

He's had it with hypocritical Republicans who say they're for small government but then spend our hard-earned tax money like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store. He's also had it with the weak and timid Republicans who won't stand up and fight against racial preferences, too afraid that the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world will call them bigots. In plain English, he's had it with Republicans who are afraid to be conservative!

In his most personal, provocative book yet, Bernard Goldberg argues that while conservatives still believe in important things, the jury is out on Republicans. The 2006 election was a wake-up call, he warns, and if the wimps on the Right fail to regain their courage, recover their principles, and reclaim their sense of fiscal responsibility, the crazies on the Left just might win the White House in 2008.

The Plan or Some of It Was Fun

The Plan

Author: Rahm Emanuel

The Plan offers a bold vision of what America can be. It shows the way for both parties to move beyond the old political arguments and make progress for the American people. And it offers an innovative agenda for America – with ideas that address the nation's most pressing challenges by doing more for Americans and asking Americans to do more for their country in return. Each of these ideas offers a clean break with the status quo, yet all are positive, practical, and can be put into action right away. Built on the authors' firm beliefs that politicians owe the people real answers, that citizenship is a responsibility, not an entitlement program, and that the Democratic Party succeeds when America succeeds, the highly anticipated Plan delivers, challenges, and inspires.

Foreign Affairs

Washington, write Emanuel and Reed, is divided between Hacks andWonks. Wonks focus on policy; Hacks want to win. What the country, and especially the Democratic Party, now need, they claim, is a synthesis of both: people with good policy ideas who know how to win elections. This insight does not exactly dazzle with its originality, nor will readers be surprised that the authors modestly suggest that this wondrous synthesis is precisely what they themselves embody — but let all that pass. The book's real importance is as a guide to the thinking of two bright, centrist Democrats whose views will be carefully reviewed as the party prepares for 2008. The most important big idea in the book is that Democrats should stop defending the New Deal and instead concentrate on recasting it for a more mobile society. Portable pensions and health care are two of the cornerstones of this vision. Less hopeful is an idea that the authors appear to set great store by: a compulsory period of three months of national service and training for all Americans under 25. Wonks will observe that the time is too short to teach anything useful and that while the cost would be high, the real benefits would be few. Hacks will wonder whether even a short-term, nonmilitary draft is really the proposal best calculated to build widespread support among younger voters.

New interesting textbook:

Some of It Was Fun

Author: Nicholas Katzenbach

Nicholas de B. Katzenbach's lively, intimate memoir casts an insider's eye over the federal government of the turbulent 1960s.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

…[a] splendid memoir…Some of It Was Fun brings it all back with an immediacy that I find haunting, bracing and ultimately heartbreaking, because nothing else that I have read conveys so vividly and intimately just what we lost with Bobby Kennedy's assassination in 1968.

Publishers Weekly

Katzenbach is perhaps most famous for his role in 1962-1963, as deputy attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy, confronting Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and Alabama governor George Wallace when each was forced to racially integrate their state universities. In this fascinating memoir, Katzenbach gives an invaluable insider's view of life in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in the latter of which he was attorney general and undersecretary of state. Katzenbach is uniquely positioned to throw light on the personal and political animosities between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson: an uncomfortable Katzenbach was often forced to become an emissary between the two. At one private White House meeting, Katzenbach has Johnson accusing the antiwar Senator Kennedy of prolonging the war, causing more American deaths: "You have blood on your hands," Johnson shouted. "I had never seen [Johnson] like this," Katzenbach writes, "almost totally out of control.... 'I don't have to listen to this, I'm leaving,' " Kennedy retorted. Such tales as this, never before told, are more than worth the price of admission. Illus. (Oct.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Library Journal

Katzenbach, IBM's senior vice president, served from 1961 to 1968 as deputy attorney general in Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and then as Lyndon B. Johnson's attorney general and undersecretary of state. Here, he shares his memories about JFK, RFK, LBJ, and Dean Rusk, Johnson's secretary of state and the only one of these officials that the author did not highly regard. The most fascinating chapters describe Katzenbach's important roles in such landmark civil rights victories as the desegregation of the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His narratives about Vietnam are less illuminating because he was not in the diplomatic loop. Katzenbach's writing becomes dull when he digresses in detail about the operations of government and preachy when he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the administrations he served and the current one. Yet, this is a balanced, often insightful insider's account that is recommended for large public and academic libraries.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

Kirkus Reviews

A deputy attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy, then attorney general and undersecretary of state for Lyndon B. Johnson, recounts his experiences. Katzenbach's memoir opens with the 1960 U.S. election, which he followed with interest from abroad in Geneva, where he was on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Sensing a new administration with unprecedented energy, youth and hope, he made some calls to friends and found himself in the attorney general's office. His colleagues come vibrantly to life in this firsthand account, which includes vivid re-creations of conversations among RFK, J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace and LBJ. One brief exchange between LBJ and Wallace perfectly captures each man's personality and positions. Katzenbach does not reveal anything groundbreaking, and his discussions of major political movements are best when they concern something he was passionate about, civil rights in particular. Two especially engrossing sections chronicle his experiences while attempting to enroll African-American students at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama. Explaining the painstaking organization and effort that went into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Katzenbach provides some select anecdotes. Beyond these skillfully told personal histories, he chronicles the decline of the optimism that characterized the Attorney General's office during the Kennedy administration into the faltering uncertainty that followed JFK's assassination and continued into Johnson's term. The author is always candid, though occasionally a bit repetitive, and his devotion to his work comes through clearly. The book is less effective when discussing subjects Katzenbach viewed with pessimism, such as the warin Vietnam. It seems evident that the end of LBJ's term was the right time for him to leave. Not always riveting, but an intelligently written eyewitness account of some of 20th-century America's most critical moments.

Bridges Out of Poverty or God Guns and Rock n Roll

Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities

Author: Ruby K Payn

Bridges Out of Poverty is a unique and powerful tool designed specifically for social, health, and legal services professionals. Based in part on Dr. Ruby K. Payne's myth shattering A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Bridges reaches out to the millions of service providers and businesses whose daily work connects them with the lives of people in poverty. In a highly readable format you'll find case studies, detailed analysis, helpful charts and exercises, and specific solutions you and your organization can implement right now to:

• Redesign programs to better serve people you work with Build skill sets for management to help guide employees;
• Upgrade training for front-line staff like receptionists, case workers, and managers;
• Improve treatment outcomes in health care and behavioral health care;
• Increase the likelihood of moving from welfare to work.

If your business, agency, or organization works with people from poverty, only a deeper understanding of their challenges—and strengths—will help you partner with them to create opportunities for success.

New interesting textbook:

God, Guns and Rock 'n' Roll

Author: Ted Nugent

Rock and Roll legend Ted Nugent contends that a lot of what is wrong with this country could be remedied by a simple, but controversial concept: gun ownership.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword	xvii
Part I	Cocked, Locked, and Ready to Rock, Doc
1	I'm Just a Guitar Player, But...	5
2	Walkin' Tall	13
3	The Lying Media	23
4	Denial as a Lifestyle	35
5	The Planet of the Apes	43
6	The Great Texas Machine Gun Massacre	49
7	Gunspeak	57
8	Wanna Go to a Gun and Knife Show? I'll Open My Jacket	65
9	BloodBrothers	71
10	We the People or We the Sheeple?	81
Part II	The Ballistics of Spirituality--You Can't Grill It 'Til You Kill It
11	Pistolero Steakage	99
12	Rock 'n' Roll Spirit Rehab	107
13	Back to Fang	117
14	Gonzo Recipe: Celebrate the Flesh	121
15	Birdhunt Workout	129
16	Timberdoodle Dandy	135
17	Goodbye, Popeye	141
18	Texas Goose Slam	145
19	Tres Venison Hombres	151
20	The Hotbed Cradle of Man	159
21	Handgun Hunting in Africa	169
22	Shoot, Don't Shoot--The Spirit as My Guide	177
23	Outrageous Witnessed and Otherwise Liar Shots I Have Made	183
24	Projectile Management Marksmanship	191
Part III	Kids, Family, and the Spirit of the Wild
25	The Guitarkid and Guns	201
26	Negligent Discharges I Have Known	209
27	The White Room	223
28	Deercamp	231
29	Up North	237
30	Tribe Nuge--Giving Thanks to the Great Spirit	243
31	How to Inspire a Child into the Wild	255
32	Every Father's Dream	265
33	My Son, the Deerhunter	271
34	My Son, the Pigkiller--How Proud Can a Dad Get?	275
35	Guns and Kids	283
36	Nuge's Message to Kids	289
37	Fred Bear and Beyond	295
	Thanx List	313
	Resources	316