Oxymorons or The Affirmative Action Empire

Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System

Author: J D Kleink

In this impassioned and often vitriolic book - a follow-up to the author's bestselling Bleeding Edge: The Business of Health Care in the New Century - U.S. health care industry expert J.D. Kleinke offers an unflinching look at our broken health care system. Throughout the book, Kleinke - who was once a vocal advocate of the managed health care system - explains what went wrong and attempts to answer such perplexing questions as:

Who's in charge of the American health care system?
How does managed care work . . . or not work?
Why have hospitals become so complex?
What are the prospects for reform?
Does the Internet change anything?
Can we solve the growing problem of the uninsured?

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	About the Author
1	Wars, Strikes, Riots, and Acts of Congress	1
2	Playing with the Boss's Money	27
3	The HMO Will See You Now	51
4	The Health Care Jobs Program	83
5	Chaos in the Clinic	107
6	Vaporware.com	133
7	A "System" for the Uninsured	165
8	A Simple Plan	177
9	Personal Effects	201
	References	207
	Index	215

See also: Type Talk at Work or Quiet Leadership

The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,1923-1939

Author: Terry Martin

The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government, seeking to defuse nationalist sentiment, created tens of thousands of national territories. It trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed the production of national-language cultural products.

This was a massive and fascinating historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Terry Martin provides a comprehensive survey and interpretation, based on newly available archival sources, of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. He traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of dozens of official national languages, and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programs.

Martin examines the contradictions inherent in the Soviet nationality policy, which sought simultaneously to foster the growth of national consciousness among its minority populations while dictating the exact content of their cultures; to sponsor national liberation movements in neighboring countries, while eliminating all foreign influence on the Soviet Union's many diaspora nationalities. Martin explores the political logic of Stalin's policies as he responded to a perceived threat to Soviet unity in the 1930s by re-establishing the Russians as the state's leading nationality and deporting numerous "enemy nations."

About the Author:
Terry Martin is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University.

New Yorker

In the popular imagination, the Soviet Union was always synonymous with Russia, but in the U.S.S.R.'s early days Soviet leaders had a very different idea in mind: they wanted to establish a true multinational, multi-ethnic empire. To that end, they attacked Russian nationalism as a vestige of Tsarism, and instituted a set of policies that looked very much like affirmative action, enforcing the use of local languages and fostering the development of ethnic leaders, even at the cost of discriminating against Russians. Yet, as Martin shows in this fascinating history, simply giving an order was not enough, even in the Stalin years, and the complex relationship between socialism and nationalism in places like Ukraine often frustrated Soviet intentions. More important, ethnicity, once fostered, was frequently a counterweight to, rather than a bulwark of, Communist ideology; although Stalin remained rhetorically committed to the multi-state idea, he ended up terrorizing those ethnic leaders he saw as threats.

Force of the Example or Handbook of Public Finance

Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment

Author: Alessandro Ferrara

During the twentieth century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self, understood as responsive to recognition. Defenses of universalism have by and large taken the form of a thinning out of substantive universalism into various forms of proceduralism.

Alessandro Ferrara instead launches an entirely different strategy for transcending the particularity of context without contradicting our pluralistic intuitions: a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment. Whereas exemplarity has long been thought to belong to the domain of aesthetics, this book explores the other uses to which it can be put in our philosophical predicament, especially in the field of politics. After defining exemplarity and describing how something unique can possess universal significance, Ferrara addresses the force exerted by exemplarity, the nature of the judgment that discloses exemplarity, and the way in which the force of the example can bridge the difference between various contexts.

Drawing not only on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment but also on the work of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity that is applicable to today's central philosophical issues, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, and religion in the public sphere.

New interesting textbook: Convicted In The Womb or Battleground Chicago

Handbook of Public Finance

Author: J Backhaus

The Handbook of Public Finance provides a definitive source, reference, and text for the field of public finance. In 18 chapters it surveys the state of the art - the tradition and breadth of the field but also its current status and recent developments. The Handbook's intellectual foundation and orientation is truly multidisciplinary. Throughout its examination of the standard material of public finance, it explores the connections between that material and such neighboring fields as political science, sociology, law, and public administration.

The editors and contributors to the Handbook are distinguished scholars who write clearly and accessibly about the political economy of government budgets and their policy implications. To address the needs and interests of international scholars, they place European issues next to the American agenda and give attention to the issues of transformation in Central Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

General Editors: Jürgen G. Backhaus, University of Erfurt
Richard E. Wagner, George Mason University
Contributors: Andy H. Barnett, Charles B. Blankart, Thomas E. Borcherding, Rainald Borck, Geoffrey Brennan, Giuseppe Eusepi, J. Stephen Ferris, Fred E. Folvary, Andrea Garzoni, Heinz Grossekettaler, Walter Hettich, Scott Hinds, Randall G. Holcombe, Jean-Michel Josselin, Carla Marchese, Alain Marciano, William S. Peirce, Nicholas Sanchez, David Schap, A. Allan Schmid, Russell S. Sobel, Stanley L. Winer, Bruce Yandle.

The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth or The British Empire

The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860

Author: Eileen Ka May Cheng

American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other "modern" issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that, by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America's first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation.

New interesting textbook: Weekend Cooking or James Beards Shellfish

The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset

Author: Philippa Levin

This is a meticulous and energetic synthesis that has the hallmarks of Levine's scholarship: narrative cogency, attention to gender and sexuality and broad geographical sweep. For those convinced that the British Empire was acquired in a 'fit of absence of mind', this is a carefully plotted and empirically grounded rejoinder.  Antoinette Burton, Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This is an excellent history. I am very impressed by its breadth, its readability, and the strong narrative that is produced of the rise and fall of the British Empire... The story is so complex that it is a triumph to make it so accessible.  Professor Catherine Hall, University College London

Violent, powerful, vast: the British Empire affected everyone who lived within its sphere.  Colonialism’s impact could be felt in every aspect of life: food, language, work and education.

The empire is typically viewed as distant and tropical; by contrast, this book examines the effects of the empire on men, women and children across the globe: both those under imperial rule and those who implemented it.  Looking beyond politics and diplomacy, Philippa Levine combines a traditional approach to colonial history with an investigation of the experience of living within the empire. 

Spanning the period from Cromwell’s rule to decolonization in the late twentieth century, and including an extensive chronology for ease of reference, Levine considers the impact of British rule for people in Africa, India and Australia, as well as for the English rulers, and forthe Welsh, Scots and Irish who were subject to 'internal colonialism' under the English yoke. Imperialism often led to serious unrest; Levine examines the cruel side of imperialism’s purportedly 'civilizing' mission unflinchingly.

Comprehensive, subtle and innovative, The British Empire:  Sunrise to Sunset tells the human story of colonialism alongside the political drama. 

Philippa Levine is a professor at the University of Southern California.  She has written and edited several books, including Gender and Empire (2004), Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Veneral Disease in the British Empire (2003), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire (2000) and Feminist Lives in Victorian England (1990).

Table of Contents:

List of illustrations     vi
List of maps     vii
Preface     ix
Acknowledgements     xi
Publisher's acknowledgements     xii
Uniting the kingdom     1
Slaves, merchants and trade     13
Settling the 'New World'     31
After America     43
Britain in India     61
Global growth     82
Ruling an empire     103
Being ruled     123
Gender and sexuality     142
Contesting empire     166
Decolonization     191
Further reading     210
Chronology     220
Index     244

The Moral Imagination or Postcolonial Disorders

The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace

Author: John Paul Lederach

John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. As founding Director of the Conflict Transformation Program and Institute of Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University, he has provided consultation and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. This new book represents his thinking and learning over the past several years. He explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding by reflecting on his own experiences in the field. Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act - an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination."

Table of Contents:

1	On stating the problem and thesis	3
2	On touching the moral imagination : four stories	7
3	On this moment : turning points	21
4	On simplicity and complexity : finding the essence of peacebuilding	31
5	On peace accords : image of a line in time	41
6	On the gift of pessimism : insights from the geographies of violence	51
7	On aesthetics : the art of social change	65
8	On space : life in the Web	75
9	On mass and movement : the theory of the critical yeast	87
10	On Web watching : finding the soul of place	101
11	On serendipity : the gift of accidental sagacity	113
12	On time : the past that lies before us	131
13	On Pied Pipers : imagination and creativity	151
14	On vocation : the mystery of risk	163
15	On conclusions : the imperative of the moral imagination	171
	Epilogue : a conversation	179

New interesting textbook: Explorer Extraordinaire or Fancy Nancy

Postcolonial Disorders

Author: Mary Jo DelVecchio Good

The essays in this volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia.
Painting on book jacket by Entang Wiharso

George Washingtons War on Native America or The Politics Presidents Make

George Washington's War on Native America

Author: Barbara Alice Mann

The Revolutionary War is ordinarily presented as a conflict exclusively between colonists and the British, fought along the northern Atlantic seacoast. This important work recounts the tragic events on the forgotten Western front of the American Revolution--a war fought against and ultimately won by Native America. The Natives, primarily the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union, are erroneously presented in history texts as "allies" (or lackeys) of the British, but Native America was working from its own internally generated agenda: to prevent settlers from invading the Old Northwest. Native America won the war in the West, holding the land west and north of the Allegheny-Ohio River systems. While the British may have awarded these lands to the colonists in the Treaty of Paris, the Native Americans did not concur. Throughout the war, the unwavering goal of the Revolutionary Army, under George Washington, and their associated settler militias was to break the power of the Iroquois League, which had successfully held off invasion for the preceding two centuries, and the newly formed Ohio Union. To destroy the Natives in the way of land seizure, Washington authorized a series of rampages intended to destroy the League and the Union by starvation. Food, livestock, homes, and trees were destroyed, first in the New York breadbaskets, then in the Ohio granaries--spreading famine across Native lands. Uncounted thousands of Natives perished from New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio. This book tells how, in the wake of the massive assaults, the Natives held back the American onslaught.

Interesting textbook: Think Big or The Teenage Investor

The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton

Author: Stephen Skowronek

Stephen Skowronek's wholly innovative study demonstrates that presidents are persistent agents of change, continually disrupting and transforming the political landscape. In an afterword to this new edition, the author examines "third way" leadership as it has been practiced by Bill Clinton and others. These leaders are neither great repudiators nor orthodox innovators. They challenge received political categories, mix seemingly antithetical doctrines, and often take their opponents' issues as their own. As the 1996 election confirmed, third way leadership has great electoral appeal. The question is whether Clinton in his second term will escape the convulsive end so often associated with the type.