Search results for ""basic books""

As public schools in low income areas fell into disrepair and failed to meet the needs of disadvantaged and minority students, charter schools offered an alternative. These schools were born out of the idea that low income families should be allowed to choose where their children went to school, just the same as high income families. If the public school in the community was unsatisfactory, shouldn't they be allowed to seek out an alternative? The alternatives are surprisingly effective. Charter schools located in low income black and Latinx communities achieve results surpassing both traditional public schools in their areas, and also, in many cases, public schools in more affluent neighbourhoods. In Charter Schools and Their Enemies, celebrated conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell explores the surprising success of this model and the surprising backlash that threatens to dismantle it.Instead of being celebrated for their successes, charter schools are caught in political crosscurrents. In addition to uncovering the success of the charter school movement, Sowell pays careful attention to its adversaries to understand how these schools became such a contentious issue and why the controversy rages on. Teachers' unions, fearful of their hold over government-funded education, fund political candidates to oppose the charter school movement. Liberal educators also oppose charter schools, Sowell argues, because they believe that the school system should indoctrinate the young in progressive politics.Deeply researched and amply documented, Charter Schools and Their Enemies is essential reading for anyone concerned with debates over education in America.

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The untold story of two sisters whose discoveries sped the growth of American science in the nineteenth centuryIn Mischievous Creatures, historian Catherine McNeur uncovers the lives and work of Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris, sisters and scientists in early America. Margaretta, an entomologist, was famous among her peers and the public for her research on seventeen-year cicadas and other troublesome insects. Elizabeth, a botanist, was a prolific illustrator and a trusted supplier of specimens to the country's leading experts. Together, their discoveries helped fuel the growth and professionalization of science in antebellum America. But these very developments confined women in science to underpaid and underappreciated roles for generations to follow, erasing the Morris sisters' contributions along the way.Mischievous Creatures is an indelible portrait of two unsung pioneers, one that places women firmly at the center of the birth of American science.

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In War Fever, celebrated sports historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith explore the monumental changes taking place in Boston during the Great War through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard Law Student who was called to service and became an unlikely leader; and perhaps the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth. Each was cast into the turmoil of the war, and each emerged as a public figure of one sort or another: one a villain, one a hero, one an athlete.Throughout the war, Bostonians lived on high alert; fearing an attack on the city's harbor, mines were anchored in the bay and a wire net stretched across the channels to prevent German submarines from encroaching. In an ethnically diverse city, fraught with tension between interventionists and pacifists, the war unleashed intolerance, hostility, and xenophobia. Together, the stories of these three men reveal how a city and a nation confronted the havoc of a new world order, the struggle to endure the war, and all its unforeseen consequences. At once a gripping narrative of American culture in upheaval and a sweeping account of the conflict, War Fever is narrative history at its best.

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In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn takes us to the edge of biology's latest frontier: our own homes. Every house is a wilderness -- from the Egyptian meal moths in our kitchen cupboards and the yeast in a sourdough starter, to the camel crickets living in the basement, to the thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants live literally under our noses. Our reaction, too often, is to sterilise. As we do, we unwittingly cultivate an entirely new playground for evolution. Unfortunately, this means that we have created a range of new parasites, from antibiotic-resistant microbes to nearly impossible to kill cockroaches, to threaten ourselves with and destroyed helpful housemates. If we're not careful, the "healthier" we try to make our homes, the more likely we'll be putting our own health at risk.A rich natural history and a thrilling scientific investigation, Never Home Alone shows us that if are to truly thrive in our homes, we must learn to welcome the unknown guests that have been there the whole time.

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By the time he became president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson had already been looking west for decades. He saw the country's population expanding and he judged that America's territory must expand too, lest America become as crowded and conflict-prone as Europe. He started modestly, by seeking to purchase New Orleans from the French. Napoleon Bonaparte answered with a breathtaking proposal: would the Americans care to purchase all of Louisiana? Jefferson said yes and soon enough had dispatched two explorers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to find a passage across the new territory to the Pacific.In Dreams of El Dorado, the bestselling author H. W. Brands captures the experiences of the men and women who headed into this new territory, from Lewis and Clark's expedition in early 19th century to the closing of the frontier in the early 20th. He introduces us to explorers, mountain men, cowboys, missionaries, and soldiers; he takes us on the Oregon Trail, to John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in the Pacific Northwest, to Texas during its revolution and California during the gold rush and to Little Big Horn on the day of Custer's defeat at the hands of the Indian general Crazy Horse. Not every American who went West sought immense wealth but most expected a greater competence than they could find in the East. Their dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame; their dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples, foreigners and one another.Throughout, Brands explodes many longstanding myths, reorienting our view of the West and of American history more broadly. The West was often viewed as the last bastion of American individualism but woven through its entire history was a strong thread of collectivism. Westerners sneered, even snarled, at federal power but federal power was essential to the development of the West. The West was America's unspoiled Eden but the spoilage of the West proceeded more rapidly than that of any other region. The West was where whites fought Indians but they rarely went into battle without Indian allies and their ranks included black soldiers. The West was where fortune beckoned, where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise, the bonanza farmer's audacity; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.A sweeping, engrossing work of narrative history, Dreams of El Dorado will forever change how we think about the making of the American nation.

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Western medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones.It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring.Before Being Mortal or The Body Keeps the Score, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.

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A sweeping history of America's long and fateful military relationship with the Philippines, amid a century of Pacific warfareEver since US troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the US armed forces. In Bound by War, historian Christopher Capozzola reveals this forgotten history, showing how war and military service forged an enduring, yet fraught, alliance between Americans and Filipinos.As the US military expanded in Asia, American forces confronted their Pacific rivals from Philippine bases. And from the colonial-era Philippine Scouts to post-9/11 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Filipinos were crucial partners in the exercise of US power. Their service reshaped Philippine society and politics and brought thousands of Filipinos to America. Telling the epic story of a century of conflict and migration, Bound by War is a fresh, definitive portrait of this uneven partnership and the two nations it transformed.

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Over the last four decades, neo-liberalism has been the force shaping America and the world, its logic of the market applied to every aspect of life. But now, amid a new Gilded Age of inequality and economic stagnation, and in the wake of Donald Trump's election, it is clear that the neo-liberal era has come to an end. The central question of our time is what comes next.In The Great Democracy, professor of law and progressive policy expert Ganesh Sitaraman argues that the only way forward is more democracy. If America wishes to avoid avoid a future characterised by Trump's oligarchic nationalism - or a warmed-over version of the failed neo-liberal ideas that brought us Trump in the first place - we will need not only to protect and expand political democracy but also to realise true economic democracy in America for the first time in our history. Sitaraman outlines a bold political vision for a "new democracy" resting on three main pillars: (1) protecting and extending political democracy, so that the political process leads to outcomes that represent all Americans, (2) realising an unprecedented level of economic democracy by combating economic inequality and (3) forging social solidarity in a diverse nation, to ensure a united democracy. He proposes policies to achieve these ends, ranging from compulsory voting to statehood for Puerto Rico and other US territories to aggressive regulation of big tech companies to a national service program and a National Endowment for Journalism. At a time when American politics is in disarray, The Great Democracy demonstrates persuasively that we must choose to build a new era of robust democracy, offering a compelling call to action and a realistic road map for achieving it. It is time to play hardball in service of democracy, Sitaraman argues and to win the fight against oligarchy once and for all.

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A "gripping and poignant" (Wall Street Journal) account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, prize-winning historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is an essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War. Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Winner of the California Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Nonfiction Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Finalist for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award

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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY! An "important, deeply affecting-and regrettably relevant" (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans' freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of non-white people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom-their freedom to dominate others.In Freedom's Dominion, prizewinning historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel slavery, freedom became a weapon. With freedom as their cry, white Americans seized Native lands, championed secession, overthrew Reconstruction, questioned the New Deal, and fought against the civil rights movement.Through a riveting account of two centuries of local clashes between white people and federal authorities, Freedom's Dominion offers a radically new history of federal power, democracy, and American freedom. This history summons us today to embrace a vigorous model of American citizenship, backed by a federal government that is not afraid to fight the many incarnations of the freedom to dominate.

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Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics are polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campuses, social media, and sometimes in the streets and public squares. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities.Left and right alike have responded with anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cancelling, defunding, draining the swamp. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation.In A Time to Build, now updated with a new epilogue, Levin argues that today is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. From the military to churches, from families to schools, these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.

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Before becoming the bestselling author we know today, Barbara Kingsolver was a fresh college graduate who had just moved to Tucson, Arizona with hopes of open space and adventure. What she found was quite different, "another America" that she chronicled through her poetry, in which she came to share her home with refugees and committed to paper their tragic stories of life at and beyond the borderland. Interweaving past political events from the US-backed dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, to the government surveillance carried out in the Reagan years, Kingsolver's early poetry expands into a broader examination of the racism, discrimination, and troubled immigration system she lived beside. They coalesce in a record of her emerging adulthood, in which she confronts the realization that the national myth of America she'd signed on to was a hypocrisy -- a realization that would come to shape her not only as an artist, but as a citizen.Written with a balance of clarity regarding America's shortcomings and empathy for her subjects, Another America is a luminous book of poems, a deeply moving and beautifully crafted exploration of American society and our individual place within it. As in her fiction, Kingsolver's poetry rings with a richness of language and spirit, eloquently expressing her insights with great compassion.With a new introduction from Kingsolver that reflects on the current border crisis, Another America is a striking portrait of a country separated by those with privilege, those without, and the lives that are lived in between.

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The Art of War is almost certainly the most famous study of strategy ever written and has had an extraordinary influence on the history of warfare. The principles Sun-tzu expounded were utilized brilliantly by such great Asian war leaders as Mao Tse-tung, Giap, and Yamamoto. First translated two hundred years ago by a French missionary, Sun-tzu's Art of War has been credited with influencing Napoleon, the German General Staff, and even the planning for Desert Storm. Many Japanese companies make this book required reading for their key executives. And increasingly, Western businesspeople and others are turning to the Art of War for inspiration and advice on how to succeed in competitive situations of all kinds. Unlike most editions of Sun-tzu currently available (many simply retreads of older, flawed translations), this superb new translation makes use of the best available classical Chinese manuscripts, including the ancient"tomb text” version discovered by archaeologists at Linyi, China. Ralph Sawyer, an outstanding Western scholar of ancient Chinese warfare and a successful businessman in his own right, places this classic work of strategy in its proper historical context. Sawyer supplies a portrait of Sun-tzu's era and outlines several battles of the period that may have either influenced Sun-tzu or been conducted by him. While appreciative of the philosophical richness of the Art of War , this edition stresses Sun-tzu's practical origins and presents a translation that is both accurate and accessible.

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Iran is a land of contradictions. It is an Islamic republic, but one in which only 1.4 percent of the population attend Friday prayers. Iran's religious culture encompasses the most censorious and dogmatic Shi'a Muslim clerics in the world, yet its poetry insistently dwells on the joys of life: wine, beauty, sex. Iranian women are subject to one of the most restrictive dress codes in the Islamic world, but make up nearly 60 percent of the student population of the nation's universities. In A History of Iran, acclaimed historian Michael Axworthy chronicles the rich history of this complex nation from the Achaemenid Empire of sixth century B.C. to the present-day Islamic Republic. In engaging prose, this revised edition explains the military, political, religious, and cultural forces that have shaped one of the oldest continuing civilizations in the world, bringing us up modern times. Concluding with an assessment of the immense changes the nation has undergone since the revolution in 1979, including a close look at Iran's ongoing attempts to become a nuclear power, A History of Iran offers general readers an essential guide to understanding this volatile nation, which is once again at the center of the world's attention.

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What artifact best captures the spirit of American sports? The bat Babe Ruth used to hit his allegedly called shot, or the ball on which Pete Rose wrote, I'm sorry I bet on baseball"? Could it be Lance Armstrong's red-white-and-blue bike, now tarnished by doping and hubris? Or perhaps its ancestor, the nineteenth-century safety bicycle that opened an avenue of previously unknown freedom to women? The jerseys of rivals Larry Bird and Magic Johnson? Or the handball that Abraham Lincoln threw against a wall as he waited for news of his presidential nomination?From nearly forgotten heroes like Tad Lucas (rodeo) and Tommy Kono (weightlifting) to celebrities like Amelia Earhart, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Phelps, Cait Murphy tells the stories of the people, events, and things that have forged the epic of American sports, in both its splendor and its squalor. Stories of heroism and triumph rub up against tales of discrimination and cheating. These objects tell much more than just stories about great games,they tell the story of the nation. Eye-opening and exuberant, A History of American Sports in 100 Objects shows how the games Americans play are woven into the gloriously infuriating fabric of America itself.

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"I have no special talents," said Albert Einstein. "I am only passionately curious." Everyone is born curious. But only some retain the habits of exploring, learning, and discovering as they grow older. Those who do so tend to be smarter, more creative, and more successful. So why are many of us allowing our curiosity to wane? In Curious, Ian Leslie makes a passionate case for the cultivation of our "desire to know." Just when the rewards of curiosity have never been higher, it is misunderstood, undervalued, and increasingly monopolized by a cognitive elite. A "curiosity divide" is opening up. This divide is being exacerbated by the way we use the Internet. Thanks to smartphones and tools such as Google and Wikipedia, we can answer almost any question instantly. But does this easy access to information guarantee the growth of curiosity? No--quite the opposite. Leslie argues that true curiosity the sustained quest for understanding that begets insight and innovation--is in fact at risk in a wired world. Drawing on fascinating research from psychology, economics, education, and business, Curious looks at what feeds curiosity and what starves it, and finds surprising answers. Curiosity isn't, as we're encouraged to think, a gift that keeps on giving. It is a mental muscle that atrophies without regular exercise and a habit that parents, schools, and workplaces need to nurture. Filled with inspiring stories, case studies, and practical advice, Curious will change the way you think about your own mental habits, and those of your family, friends, and colleagues.

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A leading foreign correspondent looks at how social media has transformed the modern battlefield, and how wars are foughtModern warfare is a war of narratives, where bullets are fired both physically and virtually. Whether you are a president or a terrorist, if you don't understand how to deploy the power of social media effectively you may win the odd battle but you will lose a twenty-first century war. Here, journalist David Patrikarakos draws on unprecedented access to key players to provide a new narrative for modern warfare. He travels thousands of miles across continents to meet a de-radicalized female member of ISIS recruited via Skype, a liberal Russian in Siberia who takes a job manufacturing "Ukrainian" news, and many others to explore the way social media has transformed the way we fight, win, and consume wars-and what this means for the world going forward.

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In The Irony of Modern Catholic History, acclaimed Catholic scholar George Weigel offers a bold reinterpretation of the Church's history since the nineteenth century, completely overturning conventional wisdom about the relationship between Catholicism and modernity. For much of the nineteenth century, both secular and Catholic leaders assumed that the Church and the modern world were locked in a battle to the death. The triumph of secular modernity-democracy, liberalism, mass education, religious freedom-would finish the Church as a consequential player in world history, and it would lead inevitably lead to the death of religious conviction. But today the Catholic Church is far more vital, and far more consequential, than it was 150 years ago, when Pope Pius IX retreated into the Vatican, forced to surrender the Italian lands the popes had ruled for centuries. And even in today's modern world, secularism is the exception, not the rule.In The Irony of Modern Catholic History, Weigel reveals how the encounter with modernity, rather than killing Catholicism, ultimately made the Church more coherent and less defensive. While previous histories of Catholicism posit modernity as the sole protagonist and Catholicism as a reactive force, Weigel asserts that Catholicism was a protagonist in this drama in its own right. He introduces readers to a remarkable cast of churchmen, intellectuals, and public figures whose actions drive both Catholicism and modernity forward - from the revolutionary Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) to the still-disputed work of the Second Vatican Council to the close collaboration of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. Weigel highlights two great ironies: the first is that modernity has led Catholicism to rediscover its own evangelical or missionary essence. And the second is that Catholicism, long derided as the antithesis of the modern project, has developed intellectual tools that can help rescue modernity from deconstructing itself into an incoherence today. A richly rendered, deeply learned, and powerfully argued account of two centuries of profound change in the Church and the world, The Irony of Modern Catholic History ultimately reveals how Catholicism offers the twenty-first century truths-about the inherent dignity and value of every human being, about our moral obligations and responsibilities-essential for our survival and flourishing.

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A preeminent authority on the Catholic Church and papal biographer describes what he learned from chronicling the life of Pope John Paul IIIn Lessons in Hope, George Weigel tells the story of his unique friendship with St. John Paul II. As Weigel learns the pope "from inside," he also offers a firsthand account of the tumult of post-Vatican II Catholicism and the Cold War's endgame, introducing readers to the heroes who brought down European communism. Later, he shows us the aging pope grappling with the post-9/11 world order and teaching new lessons in dignity through his own suffering.A deeply humane portrait of an eminent scholar learning a saint, Lessons in Hope is essential reading for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of a world-changing pope.

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Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, political polarization is at an all-time high, our government seems paralyzed and our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that voters and politicians alike are nostalgic for a better time. The Left is attempting to recreate the middle of the twentieth century, when social movements and anti-poverty programs were at their height, while the Right pines for the Reagan Era, when taxes were low and Americans were optimistic. But America has changed over the past half century. The institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but far less security, stability, and national unity. The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin calls for a modernizing politics that can answer the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life. By embracing individualism and diversity and rejecting extremism and nostalgia, we can revive the middle layers of society and enable an American revival

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In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small cabaret in Zurich, Switzerland. After decorating the walls with art by Picasso and other avant-garde artists, they embarked on a series of extravagant performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand another young man sneered at the audience, snapping a whip as he intoned his Fantastic Prayers." One of the artists called these sessions both buffoonery and a requiem mass." Soon they would have a more evocative name: Dada.In Destruction Was My Beatrice , modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of Dada, showing how this little-understood artistic phenomenon laid the foundation for culture as we know it today. Although the venue where Dada was born closed after only four months and its acolytes scattered, the idea of Dada quickly spread to New York, where it influenced artists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray to Berlin, where it inspired painters George Grosz and Hannah Höch and to Paris, where it dethroned previous avant-garde movements like Fauvism and Cubism while inspiring early Surrealists like André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard. The long tail of Dadaism, Rasula shows, can be traced even further, to artists as diverse as William S. Burroughs, Robert Rauschenberg, Marshall McLuhan, the Beatles, Monty Python, David Byrne, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, all of whom,along with untold others,owe a debt to the bizarre wartime escapades of the Dada vanguard.A globe-spanning narrative that resurrects some of the 20th century's most influential artistic figures, Destruction Was My Beatrice describes how Dada burst upon the world in the midst of total war,and how the effects of this explosion are still reverberating today.

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How do we know what's real? That's not a trick question: sensory science is increasingly finding that we don't perceive reality: we create it through perception. In We Have the Technology , science writer Kara Platoni guides us through the latest developments in the science of sensory perception. We Have the Technology introduces us to researchers who are changing the way we experience the world, whether creating scents that stimulate the memories of Alzheimer's patients, constructing virtual limbs that approximate a sense of touch, or building augmented reality labs that prepare soldiers for the battlefield. These diverse investigations not only explain previously elusive aspects of human experience, but offer tantalizing glimpses into a future when we can expand, control, and enhance our senses as never before.A fascinating tour of human capability and scientific ingenuity, We Have the Technology offers essential insights into the nature and possibilities of human experience.

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A cocktail party. A terrorist cell. Ancient bacteria. An international conglomerate. All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. In Linked , Albert-László Barabási, the nation's foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. Barabási shows that grasping a full understanding of network science will someday allow us to design blue-chip businesses, stop the outbreak of deadly diseases, and influence the exchange of ideas and information. Just as James Gleick and the Erdos-Rényi model brought the discovery of chaos theory to the general public, Linked tells the story of the true science of the future and of experiments in statistical mechanics on the internet, all vital parts of what would eventually be called the Barabási-Albert model.

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A gripping insider account of the clash between America's civilian and military leadershipThe Pentagon's Wars is a dramatic account of the deep and divisive debates between America's civilian leaders and its military officers. Renowned military expert Mark Perry investigates these internal wars and sheds new light on the US military-the most powerful and influential lobby in Washington. He reveals explosive stories, from the secret history of Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy to how the military plotted to undermine Barack Obama's strategy in Afghanistan, to show how internal strife and deep civilian-military animus shapes America's policy abroad, often to the nation's detriment.Drawing on three decades of high-profile interviews, both on and off the record, Perry yields sobering judgments on the tenures of our nation's most important military leaders. The Pentagon's Wars is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of the making of America's foreign policy.

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A bestselling military historian provides a comprehensive account of how World War II was fought, showing how disparate conflicts waged across the globe in the air, on land, and at sea coalesced into a single war-and how the Allied powers won it

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Oh, the humanity!" Radio reporter Herbert Morrison's words on witnessing the destruction of the Hindenburg are etched in our collective memory. Yet, while the Hindenburg ,like the Titanic ,is a symbol of the technological hubris of a bygone era, we seem to have forgotten the lessons that can be learned from the infamous 1937 zeppelin disaster.Zeppelins were steerable balloons of highly flammable, explosive gas, but the sheer magic of seeing one of these behemoths afloat in the sky cast an irresistible spell over all those who saw them. In Monsters , Ed Regis explores the question of how a technology now so completely invalidated (and so fundamentally unsafe) ever managed to reach the high-risk level of development that it did. Through the story of the zeppelin's development, Regis examines the perils of what he calls pathological technologies",inventions whose sizeable risks are routinely minimized as a result of their almost mystical allure.Such foolishness is not limited to the industrial age: newer examples of pathological technologies include the US government's planned use of hydrogen bombs for large-scale geoengineering projects the phenomenally risky, expensive, and ultimately abandoned Superconducting Super Collider and the exotic interstellar propulsion systems proposed for DARPA's present-day 100 Year Starship project. In case after case, the romantic appeal of foolishly ambitious technologies has blinded us to their shortcomings, dangers, and costs.Both a history of technological folly and a powerful cautionary tale for future technologies and other grandiose schemes, Monsters is essential reading for experts and citizens hoping to see new technologies through clear eyes.

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Entering the tumultuous, dissociated world of the adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse presents an intimidating challenge for clinicians. But as the authors of this innovative book argue, therapists must be willing and able to work within the powerful and rapidly shifting relational paradigms of transference and countertransference commonly found in treatment of these patients. Such dual roles enacted in treatment include the unseeing, uninvolved parent and the unseen, neglected child the sadistic abuser and the helpless, enraged victim the idealized rescuer and the entitled child and the seducer and the seduced.This is the first model for treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse that takes advantage of a relational approach and that integrates psychoanalytic thinking with the latest findings from the literature on psychological trauma and sexual abuse. Diverging from a more classical perspective, the authors view dissociation as the means by which a person adapts to and expresses traumatogenic material and by which such patients defend against traumatic memories, affects, and fantasy elabourations emerging into consciousness. The authors also detail how dissociation helps organize the patient's personality and presentation of self.Richly illustrated case examples bring to life the authors' treatment model and show how clinicians can work through the relational paradigms between patient and therapist and, ultimately, reach the core of the patient's deeply buried experiences of self and other.

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Seven years after the financial crisis of 2008, financiers remain villains in the public mind. Most Americans believe that their irresponsible actions and complex financial products wrecked the economy and destroyed people's savings, and that bankers never adequately paid for their crimes.But as Economist journalist Andrew Palmer argues in Smart Money , this much maligned industry is not only capable of doing great good for society, but offers the most powerful means we have for solving some of our most intractable social problems. From Babylon to the present, the history of finance has always been one of powerful innovation. Now a new generation of financial entrepreneurs is working to revive this tradition of useful innovation, and Palmer shows why we need their ideas today more than ever.Traveling to the centres of finance across the world, Palmer introduces us to peer-to-peer lenders who are financing entrepreneurs the big banks won't bet on, creating opportunities where none existed. He explores the world of social-impact bonds, which fund programs for the impoverished and homeless, simultaneously easing the burden on national governments and producing better results. And he explores the idea of human-capital contracts, whereby investors fund the educations of cash-strapped young people in return for a percentage of their future earnings.In this far-ranging tour of the extraordinarily creative financial ideas of today and of the future, Smart Money offers an inspiring look at the new era of financial innovation that promises to benefit us all.

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Anointed with Oil is a groundbreaking new history of the United States that places the relationship between religious faith and oil together at the center of America's rise to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, Americans saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics--boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental uncertainties.Through extensive research in corporate, political, and community archives in the US and around the world, Dochuk brings to life a vast cast of characters: oil hunters, executives, powerbrokers, politicians, muckrakers, preachers, and ordinary oil patch residents. He profiles the generations of geologists and wildcat drillers who understood petroleum as a blessing from God, and the oil executives who developed an ideology of high-risk, high-reward entrepreneurialism by fusing notions of earthly dominion with trust in the supernatural. He examines how many oil workers and their families weathered the boom-bust economies of extraction zones like the Southwest by drawing closer to Christ. And he recounts how, after making their fortunes in "big oil," families such as the Rockefellers constructed enormous philanthropies and sought to uplift America and the world according to Judeo-Christian values and a vision of well-ordered markets--even as other independent tycoons who embraced a more fervent "wildcat religion" and enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism eventually dethroned these centrists and helped to usher conservatives like Ronald Reagan and George Bush to victory.Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil patch boomtowns to the White House, Anointed with Oil a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand modern America.

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A revealing portrait of the end of Franklin Roosevelt's life and presidency, shedding new light on how he made his momentous final policy decisionsThe first hundred days of FDR's presidency are justly famous, a period of political action without equal in American history. Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the last hundred might very well surpass them in drama and consequence.Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR called on every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue what mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, and the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We see a president shorn of the usual distractions of office, a man whose sense of personal responsibility for the American people bore heavily upon him. As Woolner argues, even in declining health FDR displayed remarkable political talent and foresight as he focused his energies on shaping the peace to come.

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