Search results for ""Ivan R Dee, Inc""

A reappraisal of American communism and anticommunism in the cold war era, focusing on episodes, personalities, and institutions, and based upon fresh evidence that overturns a great deal of received wisdom. Haynes argues convincingly that after the Second World War the American Communist Party was indeed a serious danger to the American body politic....He has begun the necessary reexamination of a squalid era. —Ronald Radosh, Times Literary Supplement. American Ways Series.

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Since the advent of the New Deal, unbalanced budgets have become an almost permanent feature of American government-enlightened economic policy to some, a scourge to others. In Deficit Government, Iwan Morgan makes understandable the main trends of budget policy from the Roosevelt to the Clinton presidencies, and surveys the political and partisan debates surrounding the budget during these years. While focusing on federal expenditure and tax policies, Mr. Morgan explains why budget deficits have become the norm in modern American history, what impact they have had on the economy, and why the size of the deficit has grown so vast in recent years. He evaluates the importance of the budget as an instrument of economic management, including the development of Keynesian fiscal policy and the emergence of conservative doctrines that culminated in the supply-side approaches of the Reagan era. In all, readers who find their eyes glazing over at the thought of reading about budget policy will find Mr. Morgan's refreshing clarity a revelation.

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A masterful account of Lyndon Johnson and America's fall into Vietnam by one of our finest historians, filled with fresh interpretations, deft portraits, and new perspectives. Absolutely terrific...simply the best book on the period. —Marilyn B. Young

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The murderous war in Yugoslavia brings a daily round of revulsion, with the world's press fixed on the Serbs as children of darkness. "A valiant and warlike race," Churchill called the Serbs. Certainly their reputation for war has stuck. But as Florence Levinsohn finds in this penetrating look at the Balkan conflict, the Serbs are complex and often misunderstood. During an intensive stay in Belgrade, Ms. Levinsohn talked with a cross-section of Serbian intellectuals and absorbed the mood of a city enduring a draconian UN embargo. In Belgrade she unpeels the many layers of confusion, despair, cynicism, anger, and yearning felt by Serbs living under a government they neither understand nor endorse, but feel hopeless to unseat. She finds a proud people involved with a war for which they have no sympathy and only long for an end. There is, Ms. Levinsohn concludes, enough guilt in this conflict to satisfy Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims alike, and a great measure of misdirected policy in the West. As she shows, the roots of the war lie in the political exploitation of ethnic and religious hatreds by the leaders of the several groups. Belgrade is a mind-changing book about the bitterest conflict to come out of the end of the Cold War.

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Was J. Edgar Hoover a homosexual? And did organized-crime leaders, knowing this, blackmail the FBI director into leaving them alone? These charges won almost instant popular acceptance when they were aired in a sensational biography of Hoover in 1993. But Athan Theoharis, the foremost authority on Hoover and the FBI, here shows that the accusations are spurious—and not nearly as intriguing as Hoover's real attitudes toward sex and organized crime. Theoharis takes apart the argument for Hoover's homosexuality, then goes on to paint a chilling portrait of a moralistic bureaucrat who would not hesitate to use sex-related information against his political enemies—when it could not be traced to FBI investigations. Theoharis explains why the FBI's ineffectiveness in pursuing organized-crime leaders stemmed from the same political priorities that gave Hoover broad authority during the cold war years to use illegal investigative techniques and to focus on political activities. Punctuating his narrative with case materials from the FBI's secret files—on presidential candidates, senators, congressmen, artists and writers, college presidents, and others—Theoharis unravels the brilliantly devious means that Hoover used to accomplish his political ends. And he shows how they contributed to a culture of lawlessness within the FBI itself.

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"The Texas School Book Depository, once a warehouse for books, today houses our imagination," Paul Henggeler writes. Today many Americans share a nostalgia for the Kennedy years and their imagined hope and promise; in polls they reaffirm a yearning for the optimism and confidence associated with JFK’s brief presidency. American political leaders, keenly aware of the "mystique" and its effects on the electorate, have energetically laid claim to the Kennedy mantle. Mr. Henggeler traces this phenomenon in an engaging and original piece of history. Using fresh archival sources, he describes how Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, have invoked the Kennedy mythology, adopted the Kennedy strategy, even tried to summon up the Kennedy appearance in order to influence Congress, the media, and the American public. As a consequence, John Kennedy is now larger and more influential in American politics than he ever was in the flesh. Used and abused, the Kennedy legend has inspired an entire generation of American politicians, from Lyndon Johnson through Bill Clinton—but our political life may be poorer for it. The Kennedy Persuasion is a convincing, often surprising case study of the great historical image of our time.

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A brilliant and original account of how Gorbachev's easing of information controls destroyed the illusions of communism and drove the Soviet system to ruin. Shane writes with such bracing authority, such startling insight, that Dismantling Utopia must be regarded as one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union. —Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

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The most gripping of Ibsen's later, brooding self-portraits, The Master Builder explores the nature of a messianic hero pulled down from the heights to reside in the community of men, and now painfully laboring to drag himself up again. Plays for Performance Series.

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The medieval Mysteries are, above all, wonderful stories involving families at work and play, all in relationship to an idea of a God who was not walled up in church to be visited only on Sunday but who was ever-present. Mr. Sahlins has adapted these stories to make their language available to a present-day American audience, preserving the verse in all its alliterative beauty while replacing medieval and regional words. The resulting play is joyous, suspenseful, and satisfying, an unusually engaging drama for all ages.

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By far Strindberg's most aggressive work, The Father is a feverish nightmare of the struggle he saw between defiant masculinity and the treacherous weakness of woman. Plays for Performance Series.

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The story of baseball in America begins not with the fabled Abner Doubleday but with a generation of mid-nineteenth-century Americans who moved from the countryside to the cities and brought a cherished but delightfully informal game with them. But Didn't We Have Fun? will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about baseball's origins. Peter Morris, author of the prizewinning A Game of Inches, takes a fresh look at the early amateur years of the game. Mr. Morris retrieves a lost era and a lost way of life. Offering a challenging new perspective on baseball's earliest years, and conveying the sense of delight that once pervaded the game and its players, Mr. Morris supplants old myths with a story just as marvelous-but one that really happened. With 25 rare photographs and drawings.

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The Lisbon Route tells of the extraordinary World War II transformation of Portugal's tranquil port city into the great escape hatch of Nazi Europe. Royalty, celebrities, diplomats, fleeing troops, and ordinary citizens desperately slogged their way across France and Spain to reach the neutral nation. Here the exiles found peace and plenty, though they often faced excruciating delays and uncertainties before they could book passage on ships or planes to their final destinations. As well as offering freedom from war, Lisbon provided spies, smugglers, relief workers, military figures, and adventurers with an avenue into the conflict and its opportunities. Ronald Weber traces the engaging stories of many of these colorful transients as they took pleasure in the city's charm and benign climate, its ample food and drink, its gambling casino and Atlantic beaches. Yet an ever-present shadow behind the gaiety was the fragile nature of Portuguese neutrality, which at any moment the Axis or Allies might choose to end.

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At age twenty-eight, Charlie Chaplin was a millionaire and one of the world's most famous personalities. He had grown rich playing the poorest of men. He was to go on playing unforgettable characters in timeless films, but now the psychology of celebrity began both to drive and to damage his creativity. Richard Schickel, the distinguished film critic, has called Chaplin the first victim of modern celebrity culture, “driven by his relentless ego, by his helpless need for an audience to dominate, to lead. All the tragedies of his life stemmed from those drives and needs.” Mr. Schickel is the rarest of Chaplin enthusiasts, an unabashed fan who can celebrate the object of his affection without looking away when his subject deserves a poking. In this indispensable collection of some thirty essays, he has selected the most provocative and insightful criticisms of Chaplin's life and work, from the great comedian's beginnings through his early features, his mid-life crisis, and his late films. The contributors include Andrew Sarris, David Thomson, Andre Bazin, Gilbert Seldes, Alistair Cooke, Frances Hackett, Robert E. Sherwood, Stark Young, Penelope Gilliatt, Edmund Wilson, Stanley Kauffmann, Alexander Woollcott, George Jean Nathan, Winston Churchill, Max Eastman, Graham Greene, Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Robert Warshow, Walter Kerr, J. Hoberman, and others. Mr. Schickel, the last critic to study Chaplin intensively (for his award-winning documentary of a year ago), offers a long Introduction.

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This new collection of essays by the author of Life at the Bottom bears the unmistakable stamp of Theodore Dalrymple's bracingly clearsighted view of the human condition. In these pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx, from the breakdown of Islam to the legalization of drugs. Here is a book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization. Theodore Dalrymple is the best doctor-writer since William Carlos Williams. —Peggy Noonan. Includes When Islam Breaks Down, named the best journal article of 2004 by David Brooks of the New York Times.

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Graham Hettlinger's brilliant translations of Bunin's stories in Sunstroke (2002) were widely acclaimed. In The Elagin Affair, Mr. Hettlinger continues to acquaint English-language readers with a Bunin they may not have appreciated. Bunin's sensual, elaborate, and highly rhythmic prose has proven deeply resistant to earlier translations. In these new stories, Mr. Hettlinger captures both the music and the grace, as well as the literal meaning, of Bunin's renowned prose. The Elagin Affair contains three of the author's greatest novellas, the title piece, "Mitya's Love," and "Sukhodol" as well as a broad range of stories written between 1900 and 1940 and centered on themes of love, loss, and the Russian landscape, including several of Bunin's most haunting stories from his final collection, Dark Avenues. Praise for Sunstroke, Graham Hettlinger's first translations of Ivan Bunin: "Bunin is, unaccountably, the least translated of the great Russian writers (and his best work ranks with that of Turgenev and Chekhov). This splendid volume takes an important step toward righting a long-standing wrong."—Kirkus Reviews "Graham Hettlinger's new translation...gives us a Bunin startling in his vividness, sensuality, and restraint."—Virginia Quarterly Review "Vibrant...a fine introduction to Bunin's work and a reminder of its importance."—New York Sun

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Following on the success of his Theatergoer’s Guide to Shakespeare, Robert Fallon now examines the themes in Shakespeare’s plays, the revelations about human nature that give them substance and weight and such an enduring quality. Again Mr. Fallon sets aside academic jargon and the machinery of scholarship; he writes for intelligent playgoers, seeking to enhance their enjoyment of a performance. (Of course, casual readers too will find his interpretations absorbing.) The book surveys the most pervasive of Shakespeare’s themes, among them love, war, illusion, statecraft, heroism, the supernatural, and the comic. In chapters devoted to each of eleven such themes, Mr. Fallon explains how these patterns of meaning were viewed in Shakespeare’s time, what history the poet draws upon in presenting them on the stage, and how he suggests them through his pageant of men and women engaged in the business of living. Mr. Fallon offers a wealth of illustrative examples from all thirty-eight plays attributed to the Bard. His lively narrative provides ample detail, ensuring that the examples are accessible to readers who may not be familiar with some of the less frequently staged works. As in A Theatergoer’s Guide to Shakespeare, Mr. Fallon succeeds in capturing Shakespeare’s endless appeal: his ability to place before us figures with whom we are familiar—the ardent lover, the swaggering soldier, the tyrant, villain, and clown, as well as mothers, fathers, and children, both treacherous and devoted—all of whom confront the experiences that define the eternal themes of the human condition.

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Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives. Drawn from the pages of the cutting-edge political and cultural quarterly City Journal, Dalrymple's book draws upon scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes that are by turns hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and all too revealing-sometimes all at once. And Dalrymple writes in prose that transcends journalism and achieves the quality of literature.

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This little book will teach you all you need to know about the most frustrating yet entertaining pitch in baseball: the knuckleball. It makes batters look foolish when it works; it embarrasses pitchers when it doesn't...or if it works too well. It humiliates catchers and umpires. It confounds spectators. Dave Clark has spent most of a lifetime studying the knuckleball, talking to the major league pitchers who have thrown it, and throwing a few of his own. His book explains the strange workings of the pitch and how it's used, no matter what your interest—whether you're a pitcher, batter, catcher, umpire, coach, spectator, or parent of any of the above. Everything Mr. Clark demonstrates in The Knucklebook is carefully illustrated with line drawings, so if you're an average high school pitcher who can throw strikes, you'll be able to throw a knuckleball exactly like a legendary Hall of Famer. You'll find appropriate and hilarious comments from those who have experienced the game of baseball as it's been affected by the wandering floater. Like those who throw the knuckler, all this information was scattered to far-flung corners of the baseball world until Mr. Clark gathered and compiled it. Reading his little book, you'll end up less mystified and more enlightened about this antic pitch. Or, like the pitch itself, you can just ride the breezes and enjoy the dancing flight from beginning to end. With 51 black-and-white line drawings.

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Ireland's Easter Rising of 1916 is one of the handful of modern historical events that instantly created its own mythology and changed millions of lives forever. Charles Townshend's remarkable new book vividly re-creates this extraordinary time when a powerful narrative was born and Ireland was launched into a new world.

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"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy," said F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps no event in American history better illustrates this view than the Civil War and its principal players in the years after the conflict. The value of military glory and ties to greatness would turn toward the tragic even among the victors—like earthquake survivors stumbling into another world, simply trying to make a new life. Their struggle would be a constant tug back toward a destroyed past, and a confrontation with the reality of being strangers in their own land. David Hardin's stories of eleven such figures are revealing and touching: the explosive romance between Jefferson Davis's daughter and the grandson of a Yankee abolitionist; the struggle between the irreligious William T. Sherman and his devout Catholic wife for the soul of their unstable son; the bankrupt Ulysses Grant's heroic race to complete his memoirs and provide for his family while dying of cancer. These are among the stories and people in After the War, which also includes the Southern diarist Mary Chesnut, the luckless Confederate John Bell Hood, the sometimes Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest, the shopaholic Mary Lincoln, the gentlemanly Joe Johnston, the mythological Robert E. Lee, the underappreciated Union general George Thomas, and the plucky Libbie Custer, who defended her husband best known for his reckless disaster. Whether Northerner or Southerner, their lives did not end at Appomattox. Their dissimilar outcomes are a feast of irony and, collectively, a portrait of national change. With eleven black-and-white photographs.

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The poems in William Virgil Davis's Landscape and Journey constitute forays onto actual terrain—either close to home in Texas or farther off in Wales—as well as exploring what the poet Guy Davenport once called the geography of the imagination. A number of the poems here recount the closely observed details of journeys the poet has made, travels he has literally taken. At other times they tell of imaginary journeys—travels the poet would like to take or "travels" to places only "visible" in the mind's eye. Often Davis's elegant lyrics combine a bit of both. They take off from a particular painting or line of poetry—by Geoffrey Hill or Charles Tomlinson—and carry the reader beyond the surfaces of art to the very heart of things. His poems are, in this sense, like travelers sent out into the world to make their way, to survive and to endure. The New Criterion, which has published poetry since 1984, is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry with a regard for traditional meter and poetic form. The magazine was thus an early leader in that poetic renaissance that has come to be called the New Formalism. Building on its commitment to serious poetry, The New Criterion in 2000 established an annual poetry prize, which carries an award of $3,000. In 2001, Ivan R. Dee began publication of the annual New Criterion poetry prizewinner.

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It was a long way from the gritty streets of Springfield Avenue on Chicago's West Side, and hawking stockings in the old Maxwell Street marketplace, to a position as sports columnist and feature writer for the New York Times, and a share in the Pulitzer Prize. But Ira Berkow made that improbable journey. In this joyful, moving, and often funny memoir, he describes how he climbed up to become not just a sportswriter but a writer. His early years were not exactly promising. For someone who suffered through poor grades in high school and flunked out of his first crack at college in his first semester, it was a revelation to discover as a junior in college that he had a passion for writing. He pursued it with determination and became one of America's most thoughtful writers on sports, a man interested as much in the people who play the games as in the scores and statistics. His father had not a little to do with forming Mr. Berkow's character and his concern for matters like truth and justice. But there were others who pitched in to help suggest a path for a young man who wasn't always sure what he wanted to do with his life. Like the great sports columnist Red Smith, a mentor who took the time to critique a young writer's efforts; and Red Holzman, the Hall of Fame coach of the New York Knicks, who inspired Mr. Berkow as well as his players. Add E. B. White, Muhammad Ali, Saul Bellow, Mike Royko, Ted Williams, P. G. Wodehouse, Michael Jordan—the cast of characters in Full Swing is as broad as Mr. Berkow's interests and as instructive as a day at training camp. This is a writer's memoir with the warts as well as the wows, and with all the intelligence and charm that readers of Mr. Berkow have grown accustomed to. With 12 black-and-white photographs.

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When Josiah Quincy adopted the word veritas (meaning truth) as Harvard’s motto in the mid-nineteenth century, he saw the mission of the college as seeking new knowledge in order to come closer to God. It was a radical proposition. The imperatives of veritas are openness, freedom of thought, clash of opinions, resolution, truth-telling. In Veritas, Andrew Schlesinger traces some of the conflicts in Harvard‘s history between the forces of veritas and the inertial forces, the impediments to truth—sectarianism, statism, aristocracy, racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, the "shackles of ancient discipline." With this theme in mind, Mr. Schlesinger tells the fascinating story of Harvard College as an American institution. He examines the important actions and decisions of its leadership from Puritan times to the present, and provides lively details of its college life since 1636. There was no guarantee that Harvard would become a great university. But the commitment to veritas compelled the institution to change in the face of new knowledge or cease to be. Mr. Schlesinger’s book is about how Harvard changed. The tale includes a great many familiar names: Cotton Mather, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, John Hancock, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gould Shaw, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Henry Adams, William James, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ada Louise Comstock, James Conant, John Kennedy. Mr. Schlesinger punctuates his narrative with a great many marvelous anecdotes: George Burroughs, Class of 1670, condemned as a witch and hung on Gallows Hill; the "Butter Rebellion" of the undergraduates; President Willard receiving a sack of coins from the Charles River Bridge toll as his salary; Teddy Roosevelt getting tipsy at his Porcellian initiation; the l939 Communist cell that included the future Librarian of Congress. The men and women who shaped Harvard and were shaped by it were in many cases fine writers, speechmakers, preachers, journalists, historians, correspondents, diarists, and memoirists, providing a high tone to the proceedings. The history of Harvard is the story of the quintessential American university. With 32 black-and-white illustrations.

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Raymond-Raoul Lambert's Diary has been among the most important untranslated records of the experience of French Jews in the Holocaust. Lambert, a leader of the Union of French Jews (UGIF), was, in the words of the historian Michael Marrus, "arguably the most important Jewish official in contact with the Vichy government and the Germans." Lambert's Diary survived the war and was published in France in 1985. It reveals Lambert's efforts to save the Jews in France, particularly the children.

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Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer select the very best cultural criticism from the first 25 years of America's premier literary magazine. The many contributors include Brooke Allen, Stefan Beck, James Bowman, Theodore Dalrymple, Guy Davenport, John Derbyshire, Ben Downing, Paul Dean, Daniel Mark Epstein, Joseph Epstein, John Gross, Laura Jacobs, William Logan, Harvey Mansfield, Kenneth Minogue, Jay Nordlinger, Eric Ormsby, Cynthia Ozick, David Pryce-Jones, Mordecai Richler, Roger Scruton, John Simon, Mark Steyn, and David Yezzi.

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The Game Behind the Scenes continues and concludes Peter Morris's superb encyclopedia of the national pastime. The initial volume, The Game on the Field, was called by Library Journal "charming, densely packed, yet entirely accessible.... This is heaven for fans of the game and a required addition to all baseball collections." Endlessly fascinating, impeccably researched, and engagingly written, this treasure trove will surprise, delight, and educate even the most knowledgeable fan by dispelling cherished myths and revealing the source of many of baseball's features that we now take for granted. Together, both volumes of A Game of Inches contain nearly a thousand entries that illuminate the origins of items ranging from catchers' masks to hook slides to intentional walks to cork-center baseballs to the reserve clause of baseball's Basic Agreement. The volume on The Game Behind the Scenes concentrates on ballparks, fans, marketing, statistics, the building of teams, and other related aspects of the game—but this is much more than just a reference guide. Award-winning author Peter Morris explains the context that led each new item to emerge when it did, and chronicles the often surprising responses to these innovations. Of few books can it genuinely be said that once you start reading, it's hard to put it down, but A Game of Inches is one of them. It belongs in the pantheon of great baseball books, and will give any reader a deeper appreciation of why baseball matters so much to Americans. Praise for Peter Morris's Volume One: The Game on the Field

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In August 1942 a thirty-year-old counsel in the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress sent a cable to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York with the following message: RECEIVED ALARMING REPORT THAT IN FUHRERS HEADQUARTERS PLAN DISCUSSED AND UNDER CONSIDERATION ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED GERMANY NUMBER 3-1/2 TO 4 MILLION SHOULD AFTER DEPORTATION AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED TO RESOLVE ONCE FOR ALL JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE. Sent by Gerhart Riegner, this first recorded notice of the "Final Solution" came to be known as the Riegner Telegram. It was perhaps the most famous and tragic moment in Riegner's career, but there were many other important and fascinating episodes in his life of service, told now in Never Despair, Riegner's impressive memoir. He recounts his youth in a cultivated, middle-class Jewish family in Germany, and as a young lawyer in Leipzig who fled to Switzerland after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. He worked all his life for the World Jewish Congress and was involved in its most important undertakings: rescue programs and diplomacy in response to the Holocaust; the struggle for broad-scale human rights at the League of Nations and later at the United Nations; relations with Christian churches; advocacy in behalf of North African Jewry; German reparations; and work with international student organizations. In Never Despair he recounts his efforts behind the scenes and offers a firsthand estimate of many of the leading international figures of the past century. This is an essential book for students of the Holocaust and of the Jewish role in world affairs from World War II to the end of the century. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented. Applause for Paul Strathern's Philosophers in 90 Minutes series: Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization.—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented. Applause for Paul Strathern's Philosophers in 90 Minutes series: Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization.—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

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The seduction of some of the twentieth century's great thinkers by Communist ideology and ideals is one of the most intriguing stories in the history of that ill-fated century. How was it that these distinguished intellectuals, public figures, and revolutionaries could enlist in the service of ideas which, when put in practice, proved repressive? Much has been written about the durable attraction of communism; we know far less about the disillusionment it spawned. In The End of Commitment, the distinguished sociologist Paul Hollander investigates how and why those individuals who were attracted to communism finally abandoned the cause that moved them. His is the first book to take a comprehensive, historically comparative view of disillusionment with Communist ideologies and systems, both in the countries where they were introduced and in the West. Relying chiefly on the autobiographies and memoirs of defectors, exiles, and dissidents from Communist states (the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, and in the Third World) as well as similar writings of major Western figures, Mr. Hollander examines and compares the sources and expressions of this political disenchantment. Concentrating on the moral conflicts created by the clash of unrealized ideals and actual practice, The End of Commitment sheds new light on the failings and malfunctions of these systems that were fully grasped only by those who lived under them. In a final, provocative section, Mr. Hollander explores the attitudes of some distinguished Western intellectuals who resisted disillusionment and clung to their commitment in the face of a welter of discrediting information. In all, his book offers a new insight into the patterns and processes of political attitude formation, persistence, and change in different social and historical settings.

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Everyone knew him then: Bruce Barton was a cultural icon. Two-thirds of American history textbooks today cite him to illustrate the 1920s adoration of the business mentality that then dominated American culture. Historians quote from his enormous best-seller, The Man Nobody Knows, in which Barton called Jesus the "founder of modern business" who "picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world." But few know Bruce Barton now: he is the most famous twentieth-century American not to rate a biography. Richard M. Fried's compelling new study captures the full dimensions of Barton's varied and fascinating life. More than a popularizer of the entrepreneurial Jesus, he was a prolific writer—of novels, magazine articles, interviews with the mighty, pithy editorials of uplift. He edited a weekly magazine that anticipated the format of Life. Most famously, he co-founded the advertising agency that became Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn and grew to symbolize "Madison Avenue." He made GM and GE household initials. Barton's religious writings, especially The Man Nobody Knows, epitomized modernist religious thought in the twenties—at one point he had two religious books on the best-seller list. As a political spin merchant, he advanced the careers of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover; his agency scripted later campaigns for Republicans, notably Dwight Eisenhower. Barton himself was twice elected to Congress, ran for the U.S. Senate in 1940, and that year lent his name to FDR's famous mocking litany, "Martin, Barton, and Fish." In Richard M. Fried's illuminating biography, Barton comes to life as a man who often initiated, sometimes followed, and occasionally fought the social and political trends of his times—but always defined their essential qualities. He can truly be called a key figure in a large territory of the American mind. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

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Will Carroll, an acknowledged authority on baseball conditioning and injuries, calls for a scientific, reasoned approach to the steroids problem. He first explains the science of steroids and other drugs, describes how athletes are tested, considers the scientific evidence of effects and side effects, and, most important, analyzes whether and how these drugs impact the game.

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What was it like growing up in the Great Depression, and how did America's youngest citizens contribute to the history of that fateful decade? In The Greatest Generation Grows Up, Kriste Lindenmeyer shows that the experiences of depression-era children help us understand the course of the 1930s as well as the history of American childhood. For the first time, she notes, federal policy extended childhood dependence through the teen years while cultural changes reinforced this ideal of modern childhood. Grade-based grammar schools and high schools expanded rapidly, strengthening age-based distinctions among children and segregating them further from the world of adults. Radio broadcasters, filmmakers, and manufacturers began to market their products directly to children and teens, powerfully linking consumerism and modern childhood. In all, the thirties experience worked to confer greater identity on American children, and Ms. Lindenmeyer's story provides essential background for understanding the legacy of those men and women whom Tom Brokaw has called "America's greatest generation." While many children suffered terribly during these years—and are remembered vividly in the Farm Security Administration's stunning photographs of the era—Ms. Lindenmeyer argues that an exclusive focus on those who were ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-clothed neglects the contributions and widely varied experiences of American youngsters. The decade's important changes touched the lives of all children and teenagers. By 1940, the image of an idyllic modern childhood had been strengthened in law and confirmed in culture by the depression years. With 21 black-and-white illustrations.

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented. Applause for Paul Strathern's Philosophers in 90 Minutes series: "Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe "Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise."—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented. Applause for Paul Strathern's Philosophers in 90 Minutes: "Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe "Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise."—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal In preparation: Jane Austen, Borges, Cervantes, Chekhov, Conrad, Dante, Dickens, Faulkner, Hardy, Hemingway, Hugo, Henry James, Joyce, Mann, Tolstoy, Twain, Virginia Woolf.

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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A critical history of Just War thinking, beginning with ancient epics and extending through American responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Mr. Temes's book proposes a radically new vision, one that respects the received tradition but takes account of the moral experience of the world today.

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A writer who does stupid things in his youth is like a woman with a shameful past—never forgiven, never forgotten. E. M. Cioran, the renowned Romanian-French nihilist philosopher and literary figure, knew this better than anyone. Alongside Heidegger, Sartre, Paul de Mann, and others, Cioran was one of the great scholars of the twentieth century to be seduced by totalitarianism: he experienced a most disturbing intellectual and moral drama. More than any other study of Cioran, Marta Petreu's intensive investigation of his life and work confronts the central problem of his biography: his relationship with political extremism. The scene of Cioran's excesses is Romania and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, a time of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, Nazism, and Stalinism. In an incendiary book published in the mid-thirties, Cioran openly praised Hitler and Lenin and compared the leader of the fanatical Romanian Iron Guard to Jesus himself. This book, The Transfiguration of Romania, is the focal element of Ms. Petreu's analysis, which she carries on to Cioran's posthumously published Notebooks, characterized by the regret and remorse of his twilight years. In straightforward and lucid prose, grounded in a wealth of documentary evidence, she provides the entire history of a painful individual and collective drama. For many of Cioran's yearnings would later be realized in Ceausescu's dictatorship of Romania—to the regret of the Romanian people. Norman Manea's Foreword reminds us of Cioran's stature in Western intellectual circles and explains the critical importance of An Infamous Past.

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More than most wars in American history, the long and contentious Vietnam War had a profound effect on the home front, during the war and especially after. In At the Water's Edge, Melvin Small delivers the first study of the war's domestic politics. Most of the military and diplomatic decisions made by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Mr. Small shows, were heavily influenced by election cycles, relations with Congress, the state of the economy, and the polls. Although all three presidents and their advisers claimed that these decisions were taken exclusively for national security concerns, much evidence suggests otherwise. In turn, the war had a transforming impact on American society. Popular perceptions of the "war at home" produced a dramatic and longstanding realignment in political allegiances, an assault on the media that still colors political debate today, and an economic crisis that weakened the nation for a decade after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. Domestic conflict over the war led to the abolition of the draft, the curtailment of the intelligence agencies' unconstitutional practices, formal congressional restraints upon the imperial presidency, and epochal Supreme Court rulings that preserved First Amendment rights. The war ultimately destroyed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and indirectly forced the resignation of Richard Nixon. Those presidents who followed through the remainder of the twentieth century constructed their foreign policies mindful that they would not survive politically if they were to lead the nation into another protracted limited war in the Third World.

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented. Applause for Paul Strathern's Philosophers in 90 Minutes series: "Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe "Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise."—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal In preparation: Jane Austen, Borges, Cervantes, Chekhov, Conrad, Dante, Dickens, Faulkner, Hardy, Hemingway, Hugo, Henry James, Joyce, Mann, Tolstoy, Twain, Virginia Woolf.

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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A revolutionary analysis of pitching injuries and how to prevent them, addressing all aspects of pitcher injuries, workload, mechanics, abuse, and, most important, injury prevention. Information from doctors, trainers, coaches, pitchers, biomechanical experts, and researchers make this the first complete book on pitcher health. Saving the Pitcher is a must read for anyone who wants solidly researched data from an impartial baseball thinker....It is the right book, by the right guy, for the right reason, at the right time. —Dr. Tom House, National Pitching Association.

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In November 1919 D. H. Lawrence arrived in Venice, thirty-four years old, a big name with a banned book behind him, scraping by on very little but with a zest for life undiminished by shaky health. He had had a bleak war—hounded out of Cornwall, humiliated in army medicals—and was now overjoyed to be free and on the move, a twentieth-century English exile who would remain passionately English to the end of his days. Philip Callow's account of Lawrence's last years and his almost relentless travels between New Mexico, Europe, and England brings the great writer to life in intimate detail. As Lawrence's disgust with the Western world grew more intense, his rage ebbed and flowed erratically, but between the rages he knew rapture. He relished his workingman's aptitude, but what sustained him was his writing. "Without it," he once said, "I would have been dead long ago." His anger finally found an outlet that earned him money: he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover and broke the taboo against explicit sex in literature. In poetry, novellas, travel writing, and the painting of visceral canvases, Lawrence continued to respond to the demands of his art. And, to the end, he clung to his wife, the fundamentally married man he had always been. In Body of Truth, Philip Callow gives us a poignant and revealing story of the artist at life's end.

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A new view of the Cuban missile crisis which argues that JFK's actions faithfully reflected a dominant cold war consensus. Incisive.... Redefines the problems confronting President Kennedy at this most dangerous moment. —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.” Katherine A. Powers— Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensible and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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The abortive U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year were two of the most important moments in American foreign policy in the twentieth century. They were also early hallmarks of the presidency of John F. Kennedy in which his brother Robert played key roles. The involvement of the Kennedys with Fidel Castro’s Cuba began in JFK’s earliest days in the White House and extended until well after the missile crisis, almost until the assassination in Dallas. In this intriguing collection of documents, drawn from the State Department, the Kennedy Library, private papers, and the Assassination Records Review Board, and including newly released materials, Mark White traces the attitudes and actions of the Kennedys in their fateful dealings with Castro and Cuba. In his selection and commentary, Mr. White has constructed a virtual narrative which allows the reader to see, through the documents, how the story developed. It becomes clear that the Kennedys’ fervent desire was to oust Castro by any means possible short of all-out war. Yet in JFK’s last days, as Mr. White reveals, the United States signaled some movement towards rapprochement. The Kennedys and Cuba is an important record of one of America’s thorniest and most persistent foreign policy problems.

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The New Criterion, which has published poetry since 1984, is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry with a regard for traditional meter and poetic form. The magazine was thus an early leader in that poetic renaissance that has come to be called the New Formalism. Building on its commitment to serious poetry, The New Criterion has established an annual poetry prize, which carries an award of $3,000. The first winner is Donald Petersen, for his book Early and Late. Judges for the year 2000 were Donald Justice, Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, Robert Richman, and Elizabeth Spires. Of Mr. Petersen, Donald Justice writes: "He has long been an underappreciated master of formal verse. He is a perfectionist, willing to spend actual years polishing and repolishing his poems. If it is hard to tell the older poems from the new, that is because what they really are is timeless."

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