Reflections on the Revolution in France or Foreigners Gift

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Author: Edmund Burk

This new and up-to-date edition of a book that has been central to political philosophy, history, and revolutionary thought for two hundred years offers readers a dire warning of the consequences that follow the mismanagement of change. Written for a generation presented with challenges of terrible proportions--the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions, to name the most obvious--Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France displays an acute awareness of how high political stakes can be, as well as a keen ability to set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory.

The Times Literary Supplement

This edition of Burke's classic text aims to locate Burke once again in his contemporary political and intellectual setting. It reprints the text of the first edition of the Reflections, and provides extensive notes and a comprehensive introduction.

Booknews

Edmund Burke's classic text, which he appended over the years, was originally written in 1790 in the form of a letter to Richard Price. J.C.D. Clark provides us with a lengthy introduction and annotation to the original, unappended text which follows, in order to situate Burke and his canonical work within its original political and intellectual setting. Price's reply, and Burke's subsequent additions are included in appendices. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Editor's Preface
	Introduction: Edmund Burke: The Political Actor Thinking
	Reflections on the Revolution in France	3
	Rethinking Reflections on the Revolution in France	211
	Edmund Burke: Prophet Against the Tyranny of the Politics of Theory	213
	Edmund Burke and the Literary Cabal: A Tale of Two Enlightenments	233
	Why American Constitutionalism Worked	248
	Democracy, Social Science, and Rationality, Reflections on Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France	268
	Suggested Readings	291
	Glossary-Index	293

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Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq

Author: Fouad Ajami

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Old World New World or South Was Right

Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning

Author: Kathleen Burk

Kathleen Burk sets out to tell the whole story of America and Great Britain for the first time. Burk is both a fourth generation Californian and a distinguished professor of history in London, and in this book she draws on her unrivaled knowledge of both countries to explore the totality of the relationship - the politics, economics, culture, and society - beginning with the first British settlement at Jamestown and continuing through our current alliance in Iraq.

Library Journal

The stories of the United States and Great Britain are inexorably linked beyond the Colonial ties and shared language, a connection and relationship that form the basis of this original book by Burk (history, Univ. Coll. London). While there are numerous books about specific links between the countries (see, for instance, Christopher Hitchens's Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship ), Burk's study is vast and complex, assessing the total relationship. She ably addresses the political and diplomatic ties but really shines when discussing the cultural influences between the two countries; a fascinating chapter called "Nineteenth Century Travelers' Tales" explores the writings of British and American voyagers, including Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. The book is well researched-Burk used many archives on both sides of the Atlantic-and, though its heft may be intimidating, it is well written, with a strong narrative that reads like that of a shorter work. Highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/08.]-Mike Miller, Austin P.L., TX

Kirkus Reviews

An ambitious, fittingly sized effort to distill the complex, contentious relations between Mother England and her unruly offspring in the New World. A native Californian who has long lived in England, Burk (Modern and Contemporary History/University College London; Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor, 2001, etc.) is particularly well placed to document that relationship, which has ranged from enmity to mutual distrust to close friendship over the past 500 years. There is plenty deeply buried in British history that explains why things are the way they are in America-for instance, the old law of primogeniture, by which the eldest son inherited the estate and his siblings got nothing, and for which reason "nearly all of Virginia's ruling families were founded by younger sons of eminent English families," men forced to go abroad to seek their fortunes. Much of this deep history is explored by David Hackett Fischer in his now-standard Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), which helps us understand, for instance, why so many Americans are grimly bent on religious fundamentalism (blame it on the Puritans). Burk adds materially to Fischer's kindred work by extending her discussion a couple of hundred years to the present and pointing out the cultural gap between the two nations that has grown since, a "huge and insuperable barrier" that GIs and British civilians faced too often during the war years. Strained by imperial edicts and colonial resentments, Anglo-American relations have lately been buffeted by a shift in power relations, as the British Empire disintegrated and cowboy politics dominated; Tony Blair and now Gordon Brown have learned that, perhaps totheir dismay. Now that the American Empire appears to be disintegrating, too, that asymmetrical relationship may shift-in which case a new chapter will need to be added to this long but always swiftly moving narrative. Exemplary historical writing, to be read alongside Fischer, with Kevin Phillips's The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (1998) thrown in for good measure. Agent: Emma Parry/Fletcher & Parry

Table of Contents:

Prologue Looking Westwards 1

Ch. 1 Conquest and Colonisation: 1607-1763 23

Ch. 2 The War for American Independence: 1763-1783 108

Ch. 3 War and Rumours of War: 1783-1872 189

Ch. 4 Nineteenth-Century Travellers' Tales 277

Ch. 5 Some Elements of Everyday Life in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 308

Ch. 6 The Turning of the Tide: 1871-1945 380

Ch. 7 Anglo-American Marital Relations: 1870-1945 529

Ch. 8 The Alliance since 1945 560

Notes 660

Bibliogmphy 748

Index 776

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South Was Right!

Author: James Ronald Kennedy

An authoritative and documented study of the mythology behind Civil War history, clearly exhibiting how the South was an independent country invaded, captured, and still occupied by a vicious aggressor.

And I Havent Had a Bad Day Since or Health Policy and Politics

And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress

Author: Charles B Rangel

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Health Policy and Politics: A Nurse's Guide

Author: Jeri A Milstead

This research-based text contains contributions from the foremost experts in the field in order to provide detailed information on health policy and politics as they relate to the field of nursing and, more specifically, to the advanced practice nurse. Health Policy and Politics covers the entire policy making process -- not just legislation -- including agenda setting, government response, and program design. Actual nursing research and details of nurses' experiences bring the theoretical content to life, and help readers in the transition from theory to practice. This book can be used to initiate conversations about issues of policy and nurses' opportunities and responsibilities throughout the process, and will serve as an important and often-consulted reference as health care continues to evolve.

Kathleen Becker

This book focuses on the process of making public policy and how the policy process relates to the advance practice nurse in today's healthcare environment. It is a sophisticated policy primer that addresses the key components of the policy process. The purpose is to provide an overview of the policy process at the federal and state level. Components of the process are addressed in the broad categories of agenda setting, government response, and program design, implementation, and evaluation. Contributors make the compelling argument that APNs must clearly understand and become engaged in the policy process to promote their profession as well as the welfare of their clients. The text clearly meets the editor's objectives. This book is intended for a sophisticated audience of nurses and healthcare providers. The editor clearly targets the advance practice nurse. This includes APNs in clinical practice, education, administration, research, and consultation. Additionally, the text would be an excellent resource for graduate and doctoral students. The public policy process is thoroughly covered in this book. Healthcare examples throughout the text are timely and relevant. The use of "key terms" enhances the reader's understanding of this complex subject matter. Additionally, the discussion points at the end of each chapter provide a focused review of the content. The chapter on the Internet and healthcare policy information is a wonderful and extensive resource. This is a very well written, thought-provoking health policy text that is uniquely research based. The authors are nationally recognized nurse experts in the field of health policy. The health policy examples throughoutthe book are current and relevant to advance practice. I highly recommend it as required reading for advanced practice nurses.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer: Kathleen Lent Becker, MS, CRNP (Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing)
Description: This book focuses on the process of making public policy and how the policy process relates to the advance practice nurse in today's healthcare environment. It is a sophisticated policy primer that addresses the key components of the policy process.
Purpose: The purpose is to provide an overview of the policy process at the federal and state level. Components of the process are addressed in the broad categories of agenda setting, government response, and program design, implementation, and evaluation. Contributors make the compelling argument that APNs must clearly understand and become engaged in the policy process to promote their profession as well as the welfare of their clients. The text clearly meets the editor's objectives.
Audience: This book is intended for a sophisticated audience of nurses and healthcare providers. The editor clearly targets the advance practice nurse. This includes APNs in clinical practice, education, administration, research, and consultation. Additionally, the text would be an excellent resource for graduate and doctoral students.
Features: The public policy process is thoroughly covered in this book. Healthcare examples throughout the text are timely and relevant. The use of "key terms" enhances the reader's understanding of this complex subject matter. Additionally, the discussion points at the end of each chapter provide a focused review of the content. The chapter on the Internet and healthcare policy information is a wonderful and extensive resource.
Assessment: This is a very well written, thought-provoking health policy text that is uniquely research based. The authors are nationally recognized nurse experts in the field of health policy. The health policy examples throughout the book are current and relevant to advance practice. I highly recommend it as required reading for advanced practice nurses.

Rating

3 Stars from Doody

Table of Contents:

	Contributors
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
1	Advanced Practice Nurses and Public Policy, Naturally	1
2	Agenda Setting	37
3	Government Response: Legislation	67
4	Government Regulation: Parallel and Powerful	89
5	Policy Design	129
6	Policy Implementation	161
7	Program Evaluation	193
8	The Internet and Health Care Policy Information	229
9	Global Connections	249
	Index	283

The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money or Not a Good Day to Die

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Author: John Maynard Keynes

In 1936 Keynes published the most provocative book written by any economist of his generation. Arguments about the book continued until his death in 1946 and still continue today. This new edition, published 70 years after the original, features a new introduction by Paul Krugman which discusses the significance and continued relevance of The General Theory.

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Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda

Author: Sean Naylor

In this New York Times bestseller, award-winning combat reporter Sean Naylor reveals how close American forces came to disaster in Afghanistan against Al Qaida-after easily defeating the ragtag Taliban that had sheltered the terrorist organization behind the 9/11 attacks.

At dawn on March 2, 2002, over 200 soldiers of the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain Divisions flew into the mouth of a buzz saw in the Shahikot Valley. Believing the war all but over, U.S. military leaders refused to commit the troops and materiel required to fight the war's biggest battle-a missed opportunity to crush hundreds of Al Qaida's fighters and some of its most senior leaders. Eyewitness Naylor vividly portrays the heroism of the young, untested soldiers unprepared for the ferocious enemy they fought; the mistakes that led to a hellish mountaintop firefight; and how thirteen American commandos embodied "Patton's three principles of war"-audacity, audacity and audacity-by creeping unseen over frozen mountains into the heart of an enemy stronghold to prevent a U.S. military catastrophe.

The Washington Post - Linda Robinson

Naylor does an admirable job of exposing the many shortcomings that plagued this chapter of the Afghanistan war, although he does not sort the major from the minor failings or linger over the broader lessons. What the book lacks in analytical heft, however, it more than makes up in drama.

Eleanor Roosevelt 1884 1933 or Why We Want to Kill You

Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1933, Vol. 1

Author: Blanche Wiesen Cook

Part Two Of Two Parts

Eleanor Roosevelt is arguably the most important woman in American political history. She polarized people during her life, and as this biography proves, continues to do so to this day.

Cook rescues Roosevelt from her role as long-suffering matron. In her place stands a woman fully realized--evolving, self-directed. Her life celebrated social justice combined with enduring emotional relationships.

"A great story told with verve and charm." (The New York Times)

Book Magazine

Now that Elizabeth Dole is running for President and Hillary Clinton might run for the Senate, it is fitting that the second volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt should appear. In examining and celebrating her subject's life, Cook never strays far from the topic of women in politics.

Cook devoted her first volume of Eleanor Roosevelt's life to the time before FDR was elected President. As has been well documented, ER (as Cook refers to her) grew up in a family plagued by privilege and power and witnessed abuse and alcoholism throughout her childhood. Cook examines how these experiences shaped ER into a woman who not only fought desperately for her own autonomy but who also relished in the struggle. Despite ER's record as a fierce advocate for liberalism and feminist causes, and despite the hints and rumors that she pursued at least two romantic affairs while married to FDR, there remains on her portrait a patina of demure martyrdom to the demands of a public life and to an unfaithful husband. In her own memoirs, ER maintains a self-effacing tone and refuses to elaborate about her own beliefs and ambitions.

In this volume, which covers the years from 1933-1938, Cook reveals not only how ER took control of her own destiny and identity, but also the destiny of the country. Before she came to the White House, ER had developed a clear political vision, shaped in part by her many friendships with politically minded women such as Elizabeth Read, an attorney, and Narcissa Cox, the chair of the New York State League of Women Voters. ER came to eschew the small aristocratic circle in which she had grown up in favor of political activism.Her work as a member of the League of Women Voters and the Women's City Club drew her into the progressive struggle, helping to shape her views as a social feminist.

While in her first volume, Cook focused on the development of ER's character and her views, in the second she analyzes how she pursued her political agenda. Before FDR's election, ER served primarily as a social reform advocate. But, once she took up residence in the White House, she tacitly assumed the role of policy adviser, not simply receding into the background like the First Ladies who preceded her. Instead, she took advantage of the inherent limitations of her position—because she didn't hold a formal title and was not directly responsible to the constituency, she could speak honestly about issues such as women's rights and racial justice. In effect, she ran an administration parallel to FDR's. And although much of her policy-making and political maneuvering necessarily took place behind the scenes, it nonetheless helped both to bring into being and to shape the New Deal era.

Though their intimate relationship had become increasingly passionless, ER and her husband worked together to bring about social reform. As FDR spent the first hundred days of his term working on legislation that would become the basis for the New Deal, ER drew on a tight network of social feminists to secure an improved life for women. Realizing that her only hope of achieving her goals was to broaden her audience, she changed her regular column of personal reflections in Woman's Home Companion into a "correspondence with the American people,' which served as a conduit between the public and the President. It was popular democracy in its purest sense and it was the technique ER used often to pursue her goals, from the "crusade to end lynching' to ending fascism abroad.

This second volume deals exclusively with the White House years, offering less of the glamour and tumult of ER's early life covered in the first volume. Romantic intrigue is less prominent in the narrative as Cook devotes herself to careful analysis of the genesis and development of ER's social and political consciousness. But what always remains clear is how ER acted on her personal convictions and turned them into political action. —Charles Davis

Publishers Weekly

This highly readable, well-researched work of feminist scholarship erases the image of the young Eleanor Roosevelt as a long-suffering, repressed wife and presents her as a strong, ever-evolving individual. Photos. (Mar.)

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Why We Want to Kill You: The Jihadist Mindset and how to Defeat It

Author: Walid Shoebat

Part autobiographical, part confessional, Why We Want to Kill You helps readers in the West understand the Islamic mindset, what drives Islamic hatred and violence, and to become more aware of the dangers to which many Americans and Europeans have become overly complacent.

Why We Want to Kill You evokes the profound regrets its author, former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat, feels as he looks back over 33 years of violence, the deep passion (Shoebat calls it his driving force) that now heals his soul, the truths he learned regarding the Jews and Israel, and how we can all come to realize that there are those in our midst who, regardless of race or color, may be our enemy as they sit and wait to bring us harm.

Andrew Jackson or Winning the Future

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times

Author: H W Brands

The extraordinary story of Andrew Jackson--the colorful, dynamic, and forceful president who ushered in the Age of Democracy and set a still young America on its path to greatness--told by the bestselling author of The First American.

The most famous American of his time, Andrew Jackson is a seminal figure in American history. The first "common man" to rise to the presidency, Jackson embodied the spirit and the vision of the emerging American nation; the term "Jacksonian democracy" is embedded in our national lexicon.

With the sweep, passion, and attention to detail that made The First American a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a national bestseller, historian H.W. Brands shapes a historical narrative that's as fast-paced and compelling as the best fiction. He follows Andrew Jackson from his days as rebellious youth, risking execution to free the Carolinas of the British during the Revolutionary War, to his years as a young lawyer and congressman from the newly settled frontier state of Tennessee. As general of the Tennessee militia, he put down a massive Indian uprising in the South, securing the safety of American settlers, and his famous rout of the British at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 made him a national hero.

But it is Jackson's contributions as president, however, that won him a place in the pantheon of America's greatest leaders. A man of the people, without formal education or the family lineage of the Founding Fathers, he sought as president to make the country a genuine democracy, governed by and for the people. Jackson, although respectful of states' rights, devoted himself to the preservation of the Union, whose future in that age was still very much in question. When South Carolina, his home state, threatened to secede over the issue of slavery, Jackson promised to march down with 100,000 federal soldiers should it dare.

In the bestselling tradition of Founding Brothers and His Excellency by Joseph Ellis and of John Adams by David McCullough, Andrew Jackson is the first single-volume, full-length biography of Jackson in decades. This magisterial portrait of one of our greatest leaders promises to reshape our understanding of both the man and his era and is sure to be greeted with enthusiasm and acclaim.

The New York Times - William L. O'Neill

A founder of the Democratic Party, Jackson was hot-tempered, arrogant, violent and a ferocious partisan who introduced the spoils system into government. Brands's biography is dramatic; but unlike George Washington, another and greater man with humble roots who became an entrepreneur, general and president, Andrew Jackson makes your blood run cold.

The Washington Post - Ted Widmer

…a most sympathetic portrait…From the start of the story, he writes in the hagiographic voice that biographies of great Americans used to be written in. And frankly, it's a great story, from Jackson's poverty and early scrapes with mortality to his violent encounters with British soldiers when he was a mere stripling to his impressive rise as a Tennessee politician, soldier and statesman. Brands is drawn toward the dramatic and serves up everything you might expect in a ripping yarn: murderous duels, savage Indian raids, equally savage counterattacks and a lot of detail about Jackson's scorched-earth campaigns in Louisiana and Florida…The heavy focus on blood and guts comes at a price, however. Brands's treatment of Old Hickory's political career is comparatively thin.

Publishers Weekly

Sounding like a schoolteacher whiling away a snowy winter's day in his classroom by sharing a historic tale with his students, Montgomery reads Brands's life of the nation's seventh president with careful attention and understated smoothness. Beginning with Jackson's humble roots and Revolutionary War experience in the Carolinas, and taking him through his time in the White House, Brands's biography follows in the footsteps of other recent blockbuster biographies of the presidents. Montgomery's voice maintains a consistent tenor, only occasionally lapsing into clich d emoting, as he treks his way through the ridges and valleys of Jackson's career. With a faint twang underscoring his flat, uninflected tone, Montgomery's voice sometimes lacks the necessary aura of scholarly authority that would invest Brands's book with its full share of historical richness. Even so, Montgomery keeps listeners intrigued, never allowing the fidgets to set in and smoothly moving Jackson's life along without fuss or undue theatrics. A little more theatricality, though, might have made the entire endeavor a more rewarding experience for Montgomery's students. Simultaneous release with the Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, July 11). (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Brands (history, Univ. of Texas, Austin; The Age of Gold) displays his masterly storytelling skills with this thoughtful, frank, and readable biography of a complex individual possessed of many strengths and faults. Brands sees Jackson's greatness as his unshakeable loyalty to the American republic: "His times contributed to the way he turned out. If he defined life as a struggle, it was largely because life for America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a struggle." Using primary sources, Brands covers familiar ground in a candid though not revisionist approach to Jackson's Scots-Irish heritage, elopement with Rachel Robards, military campaigns against Native Americans and the British, and presidency. He also probes Jackson's views on core issues such as slavery and westward expansion. His book differs from Robert Remini's Andrew Jackson and Andrew Burstein's The Passions of Andrew Jackson, among others, by emphasizing Jackson's deep faith in democracy, pointing out the parallels between Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, "who articulated the Jacksonian creed best-better than Jackson himself." Recommended for all public and undergraduate libraries.-Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Industrial-strength historian Brands (Lone Star Nation, 2004, etc.), prolific in the Ambrose-McCullough vein, turns his attention to oft-overlooked Old Hickory. Andrew Jackson still gets more press than contemporaries such as John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren, but the hero of the early Indian wars and the Battle of New Orleans hasn't had a good full-scale biography since Robert Remini's three-volume life, published from 1977 to 1984. Brands's biography is more action-packed than bookish, suiting its subject. He places Jackson's family in the context of the great trans-Appalachian migration of the Scots-Irish, a people known for independence and scrappiness (see James Webb's Born Fighting, 2004); Jackson himself, Brands writes, was a pre-teen champion of the Revolution, his head filled with "an abiding hostility to all things British," an attitude he would have many chances to exercise in the border wars with the British-backed Shawnee and Creek nations and in the War of 1812. Though a military hero, Jackson had a checkered reputation, so that an elderly woman from his home village, on learning that he was running for president, said, "When he was here he was such a rake that my husband would not bring him into the house. . . . If Andrew Jackson can be president, anyone can!" Her compatriots disagreed, and Jackson handily won the popular vote against Adams in 1824, only to have the House of Representatives hand Adams the office. The subsequent outcry forced electoral reform, and Jackson again won by a large margin in 1828. His two terms were marked by controversy, but Jackson remained consistent to his small-d democratic values, opposing a national bank as monopolistic andunconstitutional and thwarting an early effort by his native South Carolina to secede from the Union. Brands illuminates the life of an American original while shedding light on such matters as the conquest of Texas and the origins of the Civil War. A pleasure for history buffs.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue	xi
	Child of the Revolution (1976-1805)
1	The Prize	3
2	I Could Have Shot Him	29
3	Alone	44
4	Away West	63
5	Shadowed Love	85
6	Republicans and Revolutionaries	100
7	Fighting Words	127
8	Rendering Judgment	148
	Son of the West (1805-1814)
9	Conspiracy	175
10	Affair of Honor	201
11	All Must Feel the Injuries	216
12	Master and Slaves	229
13	Nor Infamy upon Us	240
14	Native Genius	256
15	Old Hickory	271
16	Sharp Knife	293
17	The River of Blood	320
	American Hero (1814-1821)
18	Peace Giver	351
19	The Spanish Front	368
20	Pirates and Patriots	389
21	Day of Deliverance	411
22	The Second Washington	444
23	East by Southwest	468
24	Party and Politics	487
25	Judge and Executioner	502
26	The Eye of the Storm	517
27	Conquistador	532
	The People's President (1821-1837)
28	Cincinnatus	565
29	The Death Rattle of the Old Regime	586
30	Democracy Triumphant	607
31	Democracy Rampant	634
32	Spoils of Victory	645
33	Tools of Wickedness	656
34	Jacksonian Theory	671
35	False Colors	683
36	Attack and Counterattack	708
37	Or Die with the Union	735
38	Justice Marshall for the Defense	751
39	Wealth versus Commonwealth	768
40	An Old Friend and a New Frontier	786
	Patriarch of Democracy (1837-1845)
41	The Home Front	823
42	To the Ramparts Once More	841
43	The Soul of the Republic	860
	Sources	872
	Annotated Bibliography	951
	Acknowledgments	978
	Index	979

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Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America

Author: Newt Gingrich

America's future in the twenty-first century, argues Newt Gingrich, will be determined by the decisions we make now. His book is a grass roots call to action--and will set the debate for the new administration and Congress.

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy or William Wilberforce

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Author: John J Mearsheimer

The Israel Lobby,” by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

Now in a work of major importance, Mearsheimer and Walt deepen and expand their argument and confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran. They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror.

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing declared, “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash ofCivilizations?’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.” The publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is certain to widen the debate and to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

Publishers Weekly

Expanding on their notorious 2006 article in the London Review of Books, the authors increase the megatonnage of their explosive claims about the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby on the U.S. government. Mearsheimer and Walt, political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively, survey a wide coalition of pro-Israel groups and individuals, including American Jewish organizations and political donors, Christian fundamentalists, neo-con officials in the executive branch, media pundits who smear critics of Israel as anti-Semites and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which they characterize as having an "almost unchallenged hold on Congress." This lobby, they contend, has pressured the U.S. government into Middle East policies that are strategically and morally unjustifiable: lavish financial subsidies for Israel despite its occupation of Palestinian territories; needless American confrontations with Israel's foes Syria and Iran; uncritical support of Israel's 2006 bombing of Lebanon, which "violated the laws of war"; and the Iraq war, which "almost certainly would not have occurred had [the Israel lobby] been absent." The authors disavow conspiracy mongering, noting that the lobby's activities constitute legitimate, if misguided, interest-group politics, "as American as apple pie." Considering the authors' academic credentials and the careful reasoning and meticulous documentation with which they support their claims, the book is bound to rekindle the controversy. (Sept.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

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William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner

Author: William Hagu

From William Hague comes a major biography of abolitionist William Wilberforce, the man who fought for twenty years to abolish the Atlantic slave trade.

Wilberforce, born to a prosperous family, chose a life of public service and adherence to Evangelical values over the comfortable merchant existence that was laid out for him. Of a conservative bent, Wilberforce was actively hostile to radicals and revolutionaries, but championed one of the great liberal causes of all time—the abolition of slavery—and was an invaluable contributor to its ultimate success. When Parliament finally outlawed the slave trade in 1807, Wilberforce did not rest on his laurels but took part in the campaign for the abolition of slavery itself. He never held or desired a cabinet post, but became an expert in any subject he addressed as a member of Parliament. And although his convictions were informed by deep religious fervor, he never hesitated to change his mind upon reflection. Hague captures all of these nuances and complexities in this clear-eyed, humane, and moving biography.

Publishers Weekly

William Wilberforce was a key figure in Adam Hochschild's 2005 Bury the Chains. Now the British antislavery campaigner gets his own well-deserved biography in this clearly written, sympathetic work by Hague (William Pitt the Younger), a member of Britain's shadow cabinet. A longtime legislator and close associate of William Pitt the Younger, Wilberforce (1759—1833) became convinced of the righteousness of abolition after becoming an evangelical Christian in 1785. Hague devotes some attention to Wilberforce's personal life, but devotes the lion's share of his book to his subject's political activity. A noted speaker, Wilberforce was also amiable and a dogged negotiator, traits that served him well during his decades-long effort. His campaign paid off twice, first in 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade, and then, just months before his death in 1833, with the abolition of slavery. Hague provides plenty of historical context about Britain's involvement in the slave trade and British domestic affairs, making this rewarding reading for those interested in the history of Britain as well as the history of the battle for equality and justice. 24 pages of b&w photos. (June)

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

Kirkus Reviews

Richly satisfying biography of a great humanitarian who was also thoroughly likable. It took 20 years of struggle by William Wilberforce (1759-1833) before the House of Commons finally voted in 1807 to abolish the slave trade, observes former British Conservative Party leader Hague (William Pitt the Younger, 2005). Great parliamentary figures from William Pitt to Charles James Fox loved Wilberforce for his intelligence, wit, warmth and political acumen, even when they did not share his fervent religious convictions. Son of a rich merchant, he entered Parliament in 1780 and in 1785 converted to Evangelicalism, an intense movement that believed Christian principles applied to all areas of life, public as well as private. When Wilberforce decided in 1787 to oppose the slave trade, he joined a tiny group of religious advocates; most Englishmen were indifferent. The abolitionists launched the first modern, issue-oriented PR campaign with a torrent of speeches, rallies, pamphlets and sermons, and within a few years almost everyone had an opinion about slavery. Parliamentary opponents, who claimed that abolishing the trade would impoverish Britain, were on the defensive when disaster struck. The French Revolution threw Europe into turmoil; its armies seemed invincible, and its defenders denounced slavery, tainting the abolitionist cause in patriotic Britons' eyes. Prime Minister Pitt, who was against the slave trade, turned his attention to national defense. Wilberforce became a voice in the wilderness, repeatedly introducing his antislavery bill, eloquently defending it and watching it fail. But the passage of years rendered the issue less controversial, and persistence gradually weakened theopposition. By 1807, even the House of Lords did not object, and Parliament overwhelmingly approved the Abolition Act. Hague paints a dynamic picture of Wilberforce as a man obsessed with his Christian obligations who continually excoriated himself for falling short. Hearing today's leaders proclaim deep religious convictions, especially around election time, readers may feel that they don't make Christians like they used to. Agent: Michael Sissons/PFD

Table of Contents:

List of illustrations

1 One Boy, Two Paths 1

2 Ambition and Election 20

3 The Devoted Acolyte 44

4 Agony and Purpose 70

5 Diligence and New Causes 94

6 The Trade in Flesh and Blood 114

7 Early Optimism 142

8 Eloquence Without Victory 169

9 'An Overflowing Mind' 199

10 The Independent 227

11 Consuming Passions 258

12 Darkness Before Dawn 293

13 Abolition 327

14 High Respect; Low Politics 357

15 The Struggle Renewed 396

16 Under Attack 428

17 Trials of Faith 451

18 'An Increase of Enjoyments' 478

19 His Feet on the Rock 500

Notes 519

Bibliography 543

Index 557

Food Politics or Torture Team

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health

Author: Marion Nestl

We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our overefficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being.
Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is very big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view.
Editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, Nestle is uniquely qualified to lead us through the maze of food industry interests and influences. She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights. When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics--not science, not common sense, andcertainly not health.
No wonder most of us are thoroughly confused about what to eat to stay healthy. An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics will forever change the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. By explaining how much the food industry influences government nutrition policies and how cleverly it links its interests to those of nutrition experts, this pathbreaking book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.

Los Angeles Times

In this readable, if dense, and thought-provoking narrative, Nestle demonstrates how lobbying, public relations, political maneuvering and advertising by the food industry work against public health goals and have helped create a population that's eating itself sick. Most important, she makes clear the need for better nutritional education among consumers. 'Voting with [our] forks' for a healthier society, Nestle shows us, is within our power.

Village Voice

Nestle's controversial new book dishes up many of the industry's dirtiest secrets: how multinational companies spend billions to convince us that unhealthy foods are good for us and lobby the government to sway dietary regulations and subsidies in their favor. (feature story in the Village Voice, 3/26)

Economist

A provocative and highly readable book arguing that America's agribusiness lobby has stifled the government's regulatory power, helped create a seasonless and regionless diet, and hampered the government's ability to offer sound, scientific nutritional advice.

Newsday

Nestle details how the food industry influences nutrition and health and she casts light on manipulations inherent in selling food,unhealthy or not. Must reading.

New York Times

Dr. Nestle examines what she sees as the industry's manipulation of America's eating habits while enumerating many conflicts of interest among nutritional authorities. Combining the scientific background of a researcher and the skills of a teacher, she has made a complex subject easy to understand.

Nation

[A]n excellent introduction to how decisions are made in Washington (and their effects on consumers. Let's hope people take more notice of it than they do of the dietary guidelines.

USA Today

In her new book,Nestle puts much of the blame for the nation's weight problem on the food industry. The book already is generating controversy even though it doesn't arrive in bookstores until next month.

San Francisco Bay Guardian

If it hasn't yet occurred to you that there are striking and ominous parallels between the tobacco and food industries-Big Tobacco,meet Big Fat-it might be time to pick up a copy of Food Politics.

Library Journal

Nestle (chair, nutrition and food studies, NYU) offers an expos of the tactics used by the food industry to protect its economic interests and influence public opinion. She shows how the industry promotes sales by resorting to lobbying, lawsuits, financial contributions, public relations, advertising, alliances, and philanthropy to influence Congress, federal agencies, and nutrition and health professionals. She also describes the food industry's opposition to government regulation, its efforts to discredit nutritional recommendations while pushing soft drinks to children via alliances with schools, and its intimidation of critics who question its products or its claims. Nestle berates the food companies for going to great lengths to protect what she calls "techno-foods" by confusing the public regarding distinctions among foods, supplements, and drugs, thus making it difficult for federal regulators to guard the public. She urges readers to inform themselves, choose foods wisely, demand ethical behavior and scientific honesty, and promote better cooperation among industry and government. This provocative work will cause quite a stir in food industry circles. Highly recommended. Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll., NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Introduction: The Food Industry and "Eat More"

PART ONE
Undermining Dietary Advice
1. From "Eat More" to "Eat Less," 1900-1990
2. Politics versus Science: Opposing the Food Pyramid, 1991-1992
3. "Deconstructing" Dietary Advice

PART TWO
Working the System
4. Influencing Government: Food Lobbies and Lobbyists
5. Co-opting Nutrition Professionals
6. Winning Friends, Disarming Critics
7. Playing Hardball: Legal and Not

PART THREE
Exploiting Kids,
Corrupting Schools
8. Starting Early: Underage Consumers
9. Pushing Soft Drinks: "Pouring Rights"

PART FOUR
Deregulating Dietary Supplements
10. Science versus Supplements: "A Gulf of Mutual
Incomprehension"
11. Making Health Claims Legal: The Supplement Industry's
War with the FDA
12. Deregulation and Its Consequences

PART FIVE
Inventing Techno-Foods
13. Go Forth and Fortify
14. Beyond Fortification: Making Foods Functional
15. Selling the Ultimate Techno-Food: Olestra

Conclusion: The Politics of Food Choice
Appendix: Issues in Nutrition and Nutrition Research
Notes
List of Tables
List of Figures
Index

Go to: Fantastico or Joy of Drinking

Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and The Betrayal of American Values

Author: Philippe Sands

On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation--techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how the Rumsfeld Memo set the stage for a divergence from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.

The Torture Team delves deep into the Bush administration to reveal:

The Fate of Africa or Auschwitz

The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair

Author: Martin Meredith

Fifty years ago, as Europe's colonial powers withdrew, Africa moved with enormous hope and fervor toward democracy and economic independence. Dozens of new states were launched amid much jubilation and the world's applause. African leaders, popularly elected, stepped forward to tackle the problems of development and nation-building. In the Cold War era, the new states excited the attention of the superpowers. Africa was considered too valuable a prize to lose.

Today, Africa is a continent rife with disease, death, and devastation. Most African countries are effectively bankrupt, prone to civil strife, subject to dictatorial rule, and dependent on Western assistance for survival. The sum of Africa's misfortunes — its wars, its despotisms, its corruption, its droughts — is truly daunting.

What went wrong? What happened to this vast continent, so rich in resources, culture and history, to bring it so close to destitution and despair in the space of two generations?

Focusing on the key personalities, events and themes of the independence era, Martin Meredith's riveting narrative history seeks to explore and explain the myriad problems that Africa has faced in the past half-century, and faces still. From the giddy enthusiasm of the 1960s to the "coming of tyrants" and rapid decline, The Fate of Africa is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how it came to this — and what, if anything, is to be done.

November 2004 - Kliatt Paperback Book Guide

"Recommended for its research, compassion, and warning for the future if action is not taken to preserve this species."

San Francisco Chronicle July 31 2005

"Meredith...knew his beat intimately...informing a keen and humane mind... It shows here in the depth and fluid familiarity of... narrative"

Wall Street Journal August 31

"Meredith [has] written a narrative history of modern Africa, devoid of... gender discourse or postcolonial angst... It is a joy."

Reuters International AlertNet blast 8/28/05

"Admiration for the continent's people... comes through in [Meredith's] latest book and he does not ignore... factors stunting African development... "

The Globe & Mail 8/27/05

"Africa's tragedy is all the more moving for his lack of constantly reminding you to be moved..."

The New York Press 8/31/05

"Meredith writes with clearness and objectivity...Meredith splices [the] narratives together in such a way that trends and patterns emerge."

World Magazine 8/27/05

"Meredith is a gifted journalist, able to tell a continent-wide story."

Publishers Weekly

The value of Meredith's towering history of modern Africa rests not so much in its incisive analysis, or its original insights; it is the sheer readability of the project, combined with a notable lack of pedantry, that makes it one of the decade's most important works on Africa. Spanning the entire continent, and covering the major upheavals more or less chronologically-from the promising era of independence to the most recent spate of infamies (Rwanda, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sierra Leone)-Meredith (In the Name of Apartheid) brings us on a journey that is as illuminating as it is grueling. The best chapters, not surprisingly, deal with the countries that Meredith knows intimately: South Africa and Zimbabwe; he is less convincing when discussing the francophone West African states. Nowhere is Meredith more effective than when he gives free rein to his biographer's instincts, carefully building up the heroic foundations of national monuments like Nasser, Nkrumah, and Haile Selassie-only to thoroughly demolish those selfsame mythical edifices in later chapters. In an early chapter dealing with Biafra and the Nigerian civil war, Meredith paints a truly horrifying picture, where opportunities are invariably squandered, and ethnically motivated killings and predatory opportunism combine to create an infernal downward spiral of suffering and mayhem (which Western intervention only serves to aggravate). His point is simply that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely-which is why the rare exceptions to that rule (Senghor and Mandela chief among them) are all the more remarkable. Whether or not his pessimism about the continent's future is fully warranted, Meredith's history provides a gripping digest of the endemic woes confronting the cradle of humanity. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Meredith, a longtime observer of African affairs, has written a reliable introduction to contemporary Africa for the general reader. The book proceeds chronologically from the misdeeds of the colonial era to the optimism of independence, the errors of the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent decay and present-day drift. Although sometimes only faint in this rather discursive book, Meredith's broad point is that postindependence Africa has been the victim of poor leadership by political elites more interested in filling their pockets than in promoting economic development. The narrative is driven by arrestingly told episodes that are meant to be revealing of the continent's ills; many will be well known to Africa hands, but Meredith's well-informed account rarely trades in sensationalism and does not fall prey to the kind of glib pessimism that characterizes much coverage of the region. At the same time, he is forthright regarding what he sees as the failures of most of Africa's leaders, for whom, most readers will agree, this is a damning story.

Library Journal

A scholar of Africa necessarily becomes an expert on death. In Meredith's tome, death comes in huge numbers and in many ways: through famine, ethnic strife, and racial injustice and at the hands of ruthless dictators. It came in the days of European colonialism, but in postcolonial Africa, death pervades the continent. Meredith (Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe) writes with sobriety, intelligence, and a deep knowledge of Africa as he describes individuals responsible for deaths unimaginable to much of the rest of the world. A well-known example is the carnage among Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, claiming 800,000 lives in 100 days in 1994-more people were killed more quickly than in any other mass killing in recorded history. Much of this tragic history has been told in part elsewhere, but Meredith has compiled the text covering the entire continent. Only in the last few pages does Meredith answer the question of Africa's fate-and he thinks it's bleak. Enhanced by a 500-title bibliography, this work is recommended for academic and all African collections. (Index not seen.)-Jim Thorsen, Weaverville, NC Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Africa has been largely free for half a century, and the resources many of its nations contain are ever more precious. Yet, writes long-time Africa observer Meredith (Elephant Destiny: Biography of an Endangered Species in Africa, 2003, etc.), "Africa's prospects are bleaker than ever before."Meredith's complex but highly accessible narrative has a dramatis personae dozens strong. One representative figure is Kwame Nkrumah, who was there at the start of the continent's independence movement. Jailed by the British for antigovernment activity, he was released in 1951 only to become, instantly, prime minister of the new independent nation of Ghana. He began as a sincere left democrat, it seems, then drew closer to socialism as a proven modernizer of developing nations, then claimed for himself the ability "of achieving for Africa what Marx and Lenin had done for Europe and Mao Tse-tung for China" by promulgating "Nkrumahism." He then began to press for leadership of a pan-African union-which peers such as Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta and Hastings Banda did not grant him. Nkrumah's supposedly loyal subjects deposed him in 1966. Military coups would topple similarly ambitious leaders in Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Uganda and elsewhere, and bring down the emperor of Ethiopia, the one country in Africa not to have been colonized. Those military coups often had the effect of instilling yet another cult-of-personality-mad strongman, as with Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic, which he would eventually deem to be an empire. Meredith's account is more descriptive than prescriptive, but he does point to trends that could be repeated anywhere in the world: a strong leaderrises, surrounds himself with a ruling elite, becomes distant from the people, eventually starts thinking of himself as a god, then falls-or, as in the case of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, largely disappears from view while others do the ruling. Sadly, that pattern has been repeated many times over in Africa, the victim of more than its share of "vampire-like politicians."Sharp-edged, politically astute and pessimistic: a good complement to John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent (1999).

Interesting book: CCNA Wireless Official Exam Certification Guide or What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Author: Miklos Nyiszli

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, the prisoner Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the man who became known as the infamous "Angel of Death" - Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. In that capactity he also served as physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months. Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give this horrifying and sobering account.

Donnie Brasco or Power Faith and Fantasy

Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia

Author: Joseph D Piston

Posing as jewel thief "Donnie Brasco", FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone carried out the most audacious sting operation ever, working undercover for six years to infiltrate the flamboyant and deadly community of Mafia soldiers, "connected guys", captains and godfathers.

Library Journal

Author Pistone narrates this thrilling account of his own experiences as an undercover FBI agent who successfully infiltrated the dangerous world of the Mafia. During a six-year period in the 1970s, Pistone adopted the persona of Donnie Brasco, a successful jewel thief who was looking to "get connected." He slowly and carefully ingratiated himself with the Mafiosi and was about to be initiated as a member when his assignment ended. Successfully earning the trust of many high-ranking "wise guys," he was able to expose the activities of several important families, including the Bonannos and the Colombos. Though it reads like a thriller, this work also provides listeners with much concrete information about Mafia financial and familial operations. Pistone's narration and the inclusion of excerpts from actual FBI surveillance tapes bring the events of this tale chillingly to life. Taking into account the recent release of the movie version starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp as Pistone, this excellent production is essential for public libraries with crime collections.Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., Ohio

Books about: Milk Eggs Vodka or Pillsbury 30 Minute Meals

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

Author: Michael B Oren

The history of America's political, military, and intellectual involvement in the Middle East from George Washington to George W. Bush. "Will shape our thinking about America and the Middle East for years."—Christopher Dickey, Newsweek

From the first cannonballs fired by American warships at North African pirates to the conquest of Falluja by the Marines—from the early American explorers who probed the sources of the Nile to the diplomats who strove for Arab-Israeli peace—the United States has been dramatically involved in the Middle East. For well over two centuries, American statesmen, merchants, and missionaries, both men and women, have had a profound impact on the shaping of this crucial region. Yet their story has never been told until now. Drawing on thousands of government documents and personal letters, featuring original maps and over sixty photographs, this book reconstructs the diverse and remarkable ways in which Americans have interacted with this alluring yet often hostile land stretching from Morocco to Iran, from the Persian Gulf to the Bosporus. Covering over 230 years of history, Power, Faith, and Fantasy is an indispensable work for anyone interested in understanding the roots of America's Middle East involvement today. As Niall Ferguson writes, "If you think America's entanglement in the Middle East began with Roosevelt and Truman, Michael Oren's deeply researched and brilliantly written history will be a revelation to you, as it was to me. With its cast of fascinating characters—earnest missionaries, maverick converts, wide-eyed tourists, and even a nineteenth-century George Bush—Power, Faith, and Fantasyis not only a terrific read, it is also proof that you don't really understand an issue until you know its history." 68 illustrations; 4 maps. With a new afterword for the paperback.

The Washington Post - Robert Kagan

Today, the conventional view is that George W. Bush took the United States on a radical departure when he declared a policy to transform the Middle East and that, as soon as he leaves office, U.S. policy will return to an alleged tradition of realism, rooted in the hard-headed pursuit of tangible national interests. This is both bad history and bad prophecy, as Oren shows in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, a series of fascinating and beautifully written stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries and their contact with Middle Eastern cultures.

Publishers Weekly

In this engaging if unbalanced survey, the author of the acclaimed Six Days of War finds continuity in U.S. relations with the Middle East from the early 19th-century war against the Barbary pirates to today's Iraq war. As America's power grew, he contends, strategic considerations became complicated by the region's religious significance, especially to the Protestant missionaries whose interests drove U.S. policy in the 19th century and who championed a Jewish state in Palestine long before the Zionist movement took up that cause. Meanwhile, Oren notes, Americans' romantic fantasies about the Muslim world (as expressed in Mideast-themed movies) have repeatedly run aground on stubborn, squalid realities, most recently in the Iraq fiasco. Oren dwells on the pre-WWII era, when U.S.-Mideast relations were of little significance. The postwar period, when these relations were central to world affairs, gets shoehorned into 127 hasty pages, and the emphasis on continuity gives short shrift to the new and crucial role of oil in U.S. policy making. Oren's treatment views this history almost entirely through American eyes; the U.S. comes off as usually well intentioned and idealistic, if often confused and confounded by regional complexities. Oren's is a fluent, comprehensive narrative of two centuries of entanglement, but it's analytically disappointing. Photos. (Jan. 15) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

In this elegant and engaging overview of U.S. involvement in theMiddle East from the Barbary Wars through the current quagmire in Iraq, Oren, an Israeli historian, explores the peculiar blend of "power, faith, and fantasy" that has guided U.S. policy. From the beginning, there was faith that "God's American Israel" would redeem the Holy Land from Muslim infidels and that the modern world's first republic would inspire the peoples of the Middle East to throw off the yoke of Oriental despotism. There was also fantasy embedded in a popular culture shaped by Thousand and One Nights, nineteenth-century travelogues, and Hollywood feature films, all of which presented the region as "a theater of myth." And finally, there was power, which arrived gradually during the twentieth century as the United States emerged as a force to be reckoned with. Oren makes a compelling case that Woodrow Wilson's ambivalent response to Arab and Zionist calls for self-determination after World War I, Harry Truman's swift recognition of Israel three decades later, and every American response to crisis in the Middle East, from Suez in 1956 through the 1967 Six-Day War to the Islamic upheaval in Iran in 1979, were filtered through these lenses.

He concludes with a brisk account of the ongoing "Thirty Years' War" with radical Islam. For Ronald Reagan and his successors, faith in the goodness of the United States' intentions has collided repeatedly with fantasies about a region cursed by exotic peoples and evil leaders. The end of the Cold War raised the specter of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, in which the United States seemed to possess such a preponderance of power that the contradictions between faith and fantasy could be easily resolved by military force. After Osama bin Laden brought down the World Trade Center on 9/11, Washington attempted just such a resolution. Had George W. Bush been able to read this magnificent new book before he launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, however, he might well have realized just how dangerous it has been to shoot first and ask questions later in the Middle East over the past 200 years.<

Melissa Aho - Library Journal

For more than 230 years, the United States has intertwined itself with the Middle East. Starting in 1776 with the attacks by Barbary pirates on American ships and ending with a discussion of America's current involvement in the region, especially Iraq, Oren (senior fellow, Shalem Ctr.; Six Days of War) does a fine job of showing the circumstances that link our two cultures. As a comprehensive examination of the United States' association with the Middle East, his much-needed book fills a gap in the literature. Oren makes history come alive in the personal stories of famous and not-so-famous Americans and their connection with the Middle East through piracy, slavery, exploration, colonialism, missionary work, diplomacy, political and military issues, culture, tourism, economics, and the extension of such values as democracy and women's rights. This is a wonderfully rich and thought-provoking history, with an extensive bibliography, notes, a chronology, illustrations, and four original maps. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/1/06.]

Kirkus Reviews

American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs is hardly new-and, writes historian Oren (Six Days of War, 2001, etc.), mostly "graced with good intentions."The Middle East-a term, Oren notes, coined by an American admiral a century ago-was a subject of intense interest across the waters in the early days of the Republic, thanks in good measure to the work of Mediterranean privateers who pressed American sailors into slavery. Add to that the natural strangeness of the Arab world, and, writes Oren, for Thomas Jefferson the region was "a bastion of infidel-hating pirates as well as a realm of exotic wonders." Thus it would remain, at least until the piracy problem was attended to. The slavery problem was another matter, and Oren takes up a rewarding theme by examining the uses to which it was put in American abolitionist circles. In decades to come, fast ships would carry Americans across the sea in great numbers. Some made the heart of the Middle East part of the Grand Tour, some made the Holy Land an object of pilgrimage and its inhabitants one of proselytism; and some saw in the region a source of commerce and wealth, even before the discovery of oil. Interestingly, as Oren explores in detail, many travelers of all stripes tended to be anti-imperialist, regarding British designs on the region as a problem, even if Harper's magazine did opine that "Civilization gains whenever any misgoverned country passes under the control of a European race." That proto-neoconservative declaration is one of many parallels that the reader can reasonably draw between then and now. Oren suggests that much American activity in the Middle East, from Red Cross founder Clara Barton's intercession on behalf ofbesieged Armenians to the work of hydrologists and agronomists in making Palestine fertile ground, was benign. When it was not, it had unpleasant consequences, as with the machinations of one anti-Semitic ambassador and the present messy stage of what Oren calls the "thirty years war" following the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. Of considerable interest in that difficult time: well argued, and full of telling moments.

Inside the Stalin Archives or The Madness of Mary Lincoln

Inside the Stalin Archives

Author: Jonathan Brent

A new portrait of Russia from the first Westerner granted access to Stalin's personal archives.

See also: Math for Life and Food Service or Introduction to Health Occupation

The Madness of Mary Lincoln

Author: Jason Emerson

In 2005, historian Jason Emerson discovered a steamer trunk formerly owned by Robert Todd Lincoln's lawyer and stowed in an attic for forty years. The trunk contained a rare find: twenty-five letters pertaining to Mary Todd Lincoln's life and insanity case, letters assumed long destroyed by the Lincoln family. Mary wrote twenty of the letters herself, more than half from the insane asylum to which her son Robert had her committed, and many in the months and years after.

            The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the first examination of Mary Lincoln’s mental illness based on the lost letters, and the first new interpretation of the insanity case in twenty years. This compelling story of the purported insanity of one of America’s most tragic first ladies provides new and previously unpublished materials, including the psychiatric diagnosis of Mary’s mental illness and her lost will.

Emerson charts Mary Lincoln’s mental illness throughout her life and describes how a predisposition to psychiatric illness and a life of mental and emotional trauma led to her commitment to the asylum. The first to state unequivocally that Mary Lincoln suffered from bipolar disorder, Emerson offers a psychiatric perspective on the insanity case based on consultations with psychiatrist experts.

            This book reveals Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of his wife’s mental illness and the degree to which he helped keep her stable. It also traces Mary’s life after her husband’s assassination, including her severe depression and physicalailments, the harsh public criticism she endured, the Old Clothes Scandal, and the death of her son Tad.

          The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the story not only of Mary, but also of Robert. It details how he dealt with his mother’s increasing irrationality and why it embarrassed his Victorian sensibilities; it explains the reasons he had his mother committed, his response to her suicide attempt, and her plot to murder him. It also shows why and how he ultimately agreed to her release from the asylum eight months early, and what their relationship was like until Mary’s death.

This historical page-turner provides readers for the first time with the lost letters that historians had been in search of for eighty years.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     1
Much like an April Day     6
A Most Painful Time of Anxiety     20
No Right to Remain upon Earth     33
Of Unsound Mind     44
Mrs. Lincoln Admitted Today     62
It Does Not Appear That God Is Good     77
No More Insane than I Am     94
A Deeply Wronged Woman     109
Resignation Will Never Come     124
To Be Destroyed Immediately     140
Epilogue     151
Unpublished Mary Todd Lincoln Letters     159
Legal Documents Pertaining to the Sale and Destruction of the Mary Lincoln Insanity Letters     179
The Psychiatric Illness of Mary Lincoln   James S. Brust, M.D.     185
Notes     191
Bibliography     243
Index     251

All the Presidents Children or Conscience of a Conservative

All the Presidents' Children: Triumph and Tragedy in the Lives of America's First Families

Author: Doug Wead

From Abigail "Nabby" Adams to Chelsea Clinton, George Washington Adams to John F. Kennedy, Jr., the children of America's presidents have both suffered and triumphed under the watchful eyes of their powerful fathers and the glare of the ever-changing public. Whether they perished under the pressure like Andrew Johnson, upheld controversial views like Amy Carter, or carried their father's torch right back to the White House like George W. Bush, all presidential children grew up having to share their fathers with the whole of their fellow countrymen -- and, in too many instances, spent the rest of their lives in a desperate search for their own identities.

In this illuminating bestseller, Washington insider Doug Wead offers an authoritative analysis of our nation's presidential offspring. Featuring lively anecdotes, photographs, short biographies, and never-before-published personal accounts, All the Presidents' Children is an important socio-cultural work, a groundbreaking study of American family dynamics, and an entertaining foray into the homes, hearts, and history of our forefathers.

Publishers Weekly

Wead, who was President George H.W. Bush's special assistant, explores the dynamic bond with their presidential fathers that catapulted offspring to great success or, more often it seems, to the depths of despair. The stress of being the son or daughter of one of the most powerful men in the world, the burden of great expectations, wore away at the mental fabric of many. Some sons became alcoholics, womanizers, gamblers or just plain reckless sorts, while daughters made impossible sacrifices to gain their fathers' approval. After the death of her second son from alcoholism (the elder son drowned, perhaps a suicide), Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, said, "[Y]et another son had been sacrificed on the altar of politics." Among the most interesting of those explored are Robert Lincoln, one of the most successful yet darkest presidential sons; Alice Roosevelt, famous for her fearless tongue and her pet snake named Emily Spinach; John Eisenhower, decorated soldier and military historian; and Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who outdid his famous father on the battlefield. Also profiled are the nine weddings held in the White House. Wead includes only short bios on those presidential children still living, out of respect for their privacy. Still, there is no shortage of drama, scandal and emotion in the lives detailed here, for as Wead sums up, "Two things are unforgivable for the child of a president-success and failure." 16 pages of color photos. (Feb. 18) Forecast: Publication on Presidents' Day should be a good hook to boost sales of this unusual look at life in the White House. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Madmen, murderers, miscreants, martyrs: presidents' children are just like the rest of us, only more so. So one would conclude from this thoroughgoing compendium by former Bush I administration staffer Wead, whose researches began as a memorandum to the current president when he was contemplating his first run for Texas governor. (No president's child had ever successfully run for governor, he warned Bush II.) Being the child of a president can be tough duty, Wead capably shows; it makes for loneliness, paranoia, high rates of divorce and alcoholism, and a life expectancy lower than the national norm. It can lead to maladjustment and exceptional nastiness, as witness Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who specialized in bitter complaint about just about every conceivable topic throughout her long life. (Teddy's daughter died at 96 in 1980, having outlived every other presidential child.) It can yield spasms of rebellion: Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan's daughter, for example, "took loud, public stands against her father's policies." Yet there have also been well-adjusted, happy, and productive presidential progeny: William Howard Taft's daughter Helen, a notable suffragette; Gerald Ford's son Steve, an actor familiar to fans of The Young and the Restless and Black Hawk Down; and Amy Carter, a hardworking humanitarian like father Jimmy. Wead's well-written, gossipy narrative is good fun to read, though it doesn't boast much analytical power. Readers can fashion from it just about any case they care to on the question of whether a president's kid is apt to turn out a hero like Webb Hayes (son of Rutherford), who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, or a loser like Marshall Polk (adopted son of James),who died in prison. Light enough for a dentist's waiting room, but substantial enough to amuse and inform White House watchers and students of political history.

New interesting textbook:

Conscience of a Conservative

Author: Barry Goldwater

With a New Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan.



Here is the path-breaking book that rocketed a political philosophy into the forefront of the nation's consciousness, written in words whose vigor and relevance have not tarnished with age:



I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not pass laws, but to repeal them. it is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall replay that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am dong the very best I can.

Table of Contents:

General Editor's Introduction     vii
Foreword   George F. Will     ix
Preface     xxi
The Conscience of a Conservative     1
The Perils of Power     7
States' Rights     17
And Civil Rights     25
Freedom for the Farmer     33
Freedom for Labor     39
Taxes and Spending     53
The Welfare State     63
Some Notes on Education     71
The Soviet Menace     81
Afterword   Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.     121
Index     139

Unequal Democracy or Philanthrocapitalism

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

Author: Larry M Bartels

Unequal Democracy debunks many myths about politics in contemporary America, using the widening gap between the rich and the poor to shed disturbing light on the workings of American democracy. Larry Bartels shows that increasing inequality is not simply the result of economic forces, but the product of broad-reaching policy choices in a political system dominated by partisan ideologies and the interests of the wealthy.

Bartels demonstrates that elected officials respond to the views of affluent constituents but ignore the views of poor people. He shows that Republican presidents in particular have consistently produced much less income growth for middle-class and working-poor families than for affluent families, greatly increasing inequality. He provides revealing case studies of key policy shifts contributing to inequality, including the massive Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the erosion of the minimum wage. Finally, he challenges conventional explanations for why many voters seem to vote against their own economic interests, contending that working-class voters have not been lured into the Republican camp by "values issues" like abortion and gay marriage, as commonly believed, but that Republican presidents have been remarkably successful in timing income growth to cater to short-sighted voters.

Unequal Democracy is social science at its very best. It provides a deep and searching analysis of the political causes and consequences of America's growing income gap, and a sobering assessment of the capacity of the American political system to live up to its democratic ideals.

The Washington Post - Dan Balz

…a provocative new book by Princeton professor Larry M. Bartels, one of the country's leading political scientists.

Table of Contents:

Preface     ix
The New Gilded Age     1
Escalating Economic Inequality     6
Interpreting Inequality     13
Economic Inequality as a Political Issue     19
Inequality and American Democracy     23
The Partisan Political Economy     29
Partisan Patterns of Income Growth     31
A Partisan Coincidence?     34
Partisan Differences in Macroeconomic Policy     42
Macroeconomic Performance and Income Growth     47
Partisan Policies and Post-Tax Income Growth     54
Democrats, Republicans, and the Rise of Inequality     61
Class Politics and Partisan Change     64
In Search of the Working Class     66
Has the White Working Class Abandoned the Democratic Party?     72
Have Working-Class Whites Become More Conservative?     78
Do "Moral Values" Trump Economics?     83
Are Religious Voters Distracted from Economic Issues?     90
Class Politics, Alive and Well     93
Partisan Biases in Economic Accountability     98
Myopic Voters     99
The Political Timing of Income Growth     104
Class Biases in Economic Voting     110
The Wealthy GiveSomething Back: Partisan Biases in Campaign Spending     116
Political Consequences of Biased Accountability     120
Do Americans Care about Inequality?     127
Egalitarian Values     130
Rich and Poor     136
Perceptions of Inequality     143
Facts and Values in the Realm of Inequality     148
Homer Gets a Tax Cut     162
The Bush Tax Cuts     164
Public Support for the Tax Cuts     170
Unenlightened Self-Interest     176
The Impact of Political Information     181
Chump Change     186
Into the Sunset     193
The Strange Appeal of Estate Tax Repeal     197
Public Support for Estate Tax Repeal     198
Is Public Support for Repeal a Product of Misinformation?     205
Did Interest Groups Manufacture Public Antipathy to the Estate Tax?     214
Elite Ideology and the Politics of Estate Tax Repeal     217
The Eroding Minimum Wage     223
The Economic Effects of the Minimum Wage     227
Public Support for the Minimum Wage     229
The Politics of Inaction     232
Democrats, Unions, and the Eroding Minimum Wage     239
The Earned Income Tax Credit     246
Reversing the Tide     247
Economic Inequality and Political Representation     252
Ideological Representation     254
Unequal Responsiveness     257
Unequal Responsiveness on Social Issues: The Case of Abortion     265
Partisan Differences in Representation     267
Why Are the Poor Unrepresented?     275
Unequal Democracy     283
Who Governs?     285
Partisan Politics and the "Have-Nots"     288
Political Obstacles to Economic Equality     294
The City of Utmost Necessity     298
Selected References     305
Index     317

Look this:

Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich are Trying to Save the World

Author: Matthew Bishop

An examination of how today’s leading philanthropists are revolutionizing the field, using new methods to have a vastly greater impact on the world. For philanthropists of the past, charity was often a matter of simply giving money away. For the philanthrocapitalists – the new generation of billionaires who are reshaping the way they give – it’s like business. Largely trained in the corporate world, these “social investors” are using big-business-style strategies and expecting results and accountability to match. Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is leading the way: he has promised his entire fortune to finding a cure for the diseases that kill millions of children in the poorest countries in the world.  In Philanthrocapitalism, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green examine this new movement and its implications. Proceeding from interviews with some of the most powerful people on the planet—including Gates, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, among others—they show how a web of wealthy, motivated donors has set out to change the world. Their results will have huge implications: In a climate resistant to government spending on social causes, their focused donations may be the greatest force for societal change in our world, and a source of political controversy. Combining on-the-ground anecdotes, expert analysis, and up-close profiles of the wealthy and powerful, this is a fascinating look at a small group of people who will change an enormous number of lives.

On Liberty or 1948

On Liberty

Author: John Stuart Mill

Published in 1859, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty presented one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom in nineteenth-century social and political philosophy and is today perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support of the value of liberty. Mill's passionate advocacy of spontaneity, individuality, and diversity, along with his contempt for compulsory uniformity and the despotism of popular opinion, has attracted both admiration and condemnation.

About the Author:
John Stuart Mill was born in a suburb of London on May 20, 1806. By the age of ten he was reading classical authors in the original Greek and Latin, was proficient in history, algebra, and geometry, and soon after began to study logic, political economy, and law. He was elected to Parliament in 1865 and held the Radical seat for Westminster for the next three years. Mill died in Avignon, France, on May 7, 1873.

Books about:

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

Author: Benny Morris

This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side—where the archives are still closed—is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials.

Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.

The Washington Post - Glenn Frankel

[Benny Morris] first came to prominence with his 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, a ground-breaking, revisionist account of how Israeli forces uprooted and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel's independence war. His new book is an ambitious, detailed and engaging portrait of the war itself—from its origins to its unresolved aftermath—that further shatters myths on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide.

The New York Times - David Margolick

The history of the 1948 war desperately needs to be told, since it's so barely understood or remembered and since so many of the issues that plague us today had their roots in that struggle…No one is better suited to the task than Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who, in previous works, has cast an original and skeptical eye on his country's founding myths. Whatever controversy he has stirred in the past, Morris relates the story of his new book soberly and somberly, evenhandedly and exhaustively. Definitely exhaustively, for 1948 can feel like 1948: that is, hard slogging. Some books can be both very important and very hard to read.

Frederic Krome - Library Journal

Morris (history, Ben-Gurion Univ.) offers a study of Israel's war of independence, effectively debunking many of the myths surrounding it. He divides that war into phases: civil war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, begun in November 1947, followed by a Pan-Arab (i.e., Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq) invasion in May 1948. The Arab defeat in the civil war resulted in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fleeing, most expecting to return behind a triumphant Arab invasion force. Although outnumbered, the Israelis had spent months after the UN partition resolution in 1947 preparing for war, while their opponents spent more time calling for jihad against the Jews, which naturally inspired Jewish fear of a second Holocaust. The Israelis had a unified command system, internal lines of communication, and the ideological fervor that came from defending their homes. The invaders (the author's term), meanwhile, lacked coherent leadership and a unified strategy, so by the fall of 1948 the Israelis had achieved local military supremacy. Morris disputes the assertion that Israel had an overall policy of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. He meticulously documents the expulsions and atrocities that occurred on both sides. His work demonstrates that passion, not polemic, about this controversial era leads to good history. Recommended for all libraries.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     ix
Abbreviations     xi
List of Maps     xiii
Staking Claims: The Historical Background     1
The United Nations Steps In: UNSCOP and the Partition Resolution     37
The First Stage of the Civil War, November 1947-March 1948     75
The Second Stage of the Civil War, April-mid-May 1948     113
The Pan-Arab Invasion, 15 May-11 June 1948     180
The First Truce, 11 June-8 July 1948, the International Community, and the War     264
The "Ten Days" and After     273
Operations Yoav and Hiram     320
Operation Horev, December 1948-January 1949     350
The Armistice Agreements, January-July 1949     375
Some Conclusions     392
Notes     421
Bibliography     493
Index     507