Through Our Enemies Eyes or The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn

Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America

Author: Michael Scheuer

This seminal work on modern terrorism assesses the changes and continuities in Osama bin Laden's thinking since 2002. In order to win the war against terrorism, argues Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's bin Laden Unit, we must first stop dismissing militant Muslims as "extremists" or "religious fanatics." Formulating a successful military strategy requires that we see the enemy as they perceive themselves-highly trained and motivated soldiers who believe their cause is righteous. Scheuer shows that the war has accelerated the transformation of bin Laden and al Qaeda from man and organization to, respectively, a symbol of leadership and heroism and a worldwide movement.

New interesting textbook: Acupressure Taping or Eight Weeks to Optimum Health New Edition Updated and Expanded

The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII

Author: Retha M Warnick

The events which led to the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second queen, in 1536 have traditionally been explained by historians in terms of a factional conspiracy masterminded by Henry's minister Thomas Cromwell. Retha Warnicke's fascinating and controversial reinterpretation focuses instead on the sexual intrigues and family politics pervading the court, offering a new explanation of Anne's fall. The picture which emerges - placing Anne's life in the context of social and religious values, and superstitions about witches and the birth of deformed children - changes our perception of her role within the court, and suggests that her execution (occurring only four months after a miscarriage) was the tragic consequence of Henry's profound concern about the continuation of the Tudor dynasty.

Library Journal

Thanks to the events surrounding her courtship with and ultimate marriage to Henry VIII, the tempestuous nature of that union, and the sordid yet mysterious circumstances of her excution, Anne Boleyn has always been a fascinating figure. Both popular and scholarly biographies of her have come along with some regularity. Quite simply though, this one transcends all previous efforts. Thanks to painstaking research and shrewd analytical skills, Warnicke (history, Arizona State Univ.) gives us substantial new insight on both the woman and her times. Her central thesis, that the execution derived in large measure from Henry's concern with perpetuating his dynasty, is a convincing one, and she shows clearly that previous biographers have been all too ready to accept distorted evidence at face value. Essential for academic libraries and recommended for public ones as well.-- James A. Casada, Winthrop Coll., Rock Hill, S.C.

Table of Contents:

List of illustrations; Preface; Introduction: Queen Anne;

1. Boleyn origins;
2. Family alliances;
3. Henry's challenge;
4. Papal response;
5. Anne's turn;
6. Queen's patronage
7. Harem politics;
8. Sexual heresy;
9. Royal legacy; Appendix A. The legacy of Nicholas Sander; Appendix B. The choirbook of Anne Boleyn; Appendix C. Two poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt; Notes; Index.

Abraham Lincoln or Outrage

Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865 (Library of America), Vol. 2

Author: Abraham Lincoln

The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

Look this: Vision of the Anointed or Worlds at War

Outrage: How Illegal Immigration, the United Nations, Congressional Ripoffs, Student Loan Overcharges, Tobacco Companies, Trade Protection, and Drug Companies Are Ripping Us Off . . . And What to Do About It

Author: Dick Morris

Half of all illegal immigrants came into this country legally -- and we have no way of knowing they're still here!

Congressmen are putting their wives on their campaign payrolls -- so that campaign contributions are really personal bribes!

The ACLU won't allow its own directors free speech.

Liberals want to strip us of the tools to stop terrorism.

The UN is a cover for massive corruption -- and eighty countries, who pay 12 percent of the budget, are blocking reform.

Drug companies pay off doctors to write scripts -- whether we need them or not.

Teachers unions block the firing of bad teachers -- and battle against higher education standards!

Katrina victims are being stiffed by their insurance companies!

Special interests cost our consumers $45 billion -- through trade quotas that save only a handful of jobs!

Never heard of these abuses? You won't in the mainstream media. That's why Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote Outrage. Their proposals:

• Ban immigration from terrorist countries
• Ban Congress putting spouses on their payroll
• Ban lobbyists who are related to senators or congressmen
• Ban nicotine additives to cigarettes
• Ban trade quotas that drive up prices and save few jobs
• Ban drug company bribes to doctors
• Ban teachers unions' work rules that stop education reform
• Ban insurance companies from backing out on Katrina coverage

In Outrage, you'll get the facts -- and learn what we can do about them. You won't read about these outrages anyplace else; too many people are working hard to cover them up. Get them here instead -- and learn how to fight the special interests of the left and right.

The Israel Lobby and U S Foreign Policy or Sweet Mandarin

The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy

Author: John J Mearsheimer

The Israel Lobby,” by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy.  Now in a work of major importance, Mearsheimer and Walt deepen and expand their argument and confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran. They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror.  Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing declared, “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash ofCivilizations?’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.” The publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is certain to widen the debate and to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

Publishers Weekly

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

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

What People Are Saying

Controversial. --NPR's Fresh Air

Ruthlessly realistic. --William Grimes, The New York Times

It could not be more timely. --David Bromwich, The Huffington Post

Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Walt, on the faculty at Harvard, set off a political firestorm. --Jay Solomon, The Wall Street Journal (online)

The strategic questions they raise now, particularly about Israel's privileged relationship with the United States, are worth debating. --David Remnick, The New Yorker

Promises controversy on a scale not seen since Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations sought to reframe a new world order. --Stefan Halper, The National Interest (online)

Deals with Middle East policymaking at a time when America's problems in that region surpass our problems anywhere else . . . People are definitely arguing about it. It is also the kind of book you do not have to agree with on every count (I certainly don't) to benefit from reading. --M. J. Rosenberg, Israel Policy Forum Friday

Interesting book: Eat Dessert First or Simple Vegetarian Pleasures

Sweet Mandarin: The Courageous True Story of Three Generations of Chinese Women and Their Journey from East to West

Author: Helen Ts

Spanning almost a hundred years, this rich and evocative memoir recounts the lives of three generations of remarkable Chinese women.

Their extraordinary journey takes us from the brutal poverty of village life in mainland China, to newly prosperous 1930s Hong Kong and finally to the UK. Their lives were as dramatic as the times they lived through.

A love of food and a talent for cooking pulled each generation through the most devastating of upheavals. Helen Tse's grandmother, Lily Kwok, was forced to work as an amah after the violent murder of her father. Crossing the ocean from Hong Kong in the 1950s, Lily honed her famous chicken curry recipe. Eventually she opened one of Manchester's earliest Chinese restaurants where her daughter, Mabel, worked from the tender age of nine. But gambling and the Triads were pervasive in the Chinese immigrant community, and tragically they lost the restaurant. It was up to author Helen and her sisters, the third generation of these exceptional women, to re-establish their grandmother's dream. The legacy lived on when the sisters opened their award-winning restaurant Sweet Mandarin in 2004.

Sweet Mandarin shows how the most important inheritance is wisdom, and how recipes--passed down the female line--can be the most valuable heirloom.

Publishers Weekly

For Tse, looking ahead to her future meant taking a step back into family history. In 2004, Tse and her two sisters all abandoned promising professional careers to follow a family tradition and opened a family restaurant. "My sisters and I were immersed from birth in the Chinese catering business-the fourth generation of our family to make a living from food." Tse begins with her grandmother's birth in 1918 in a small farming village in southeastern China. Each successive chapter chronologically follows the family's struggles and triumphs from peasant life to prosperity and heartache in Hong Kong in the 1930s, the horrors of the Japanese occupation, life in England from the 1950s to today. Tse poses a question that serves as the core of this delightful, well-written and at times painful memoir: Why would three young, successful 21st-century women, Tse an attorney, one sister an engineer, the other a financier, return to a family business they struggled to escape? In answering this question, Tse engagingly tells the larger story not only of her grandmother's and mother's struggles but the shared story of the many Chinese immigrants who made the journey from mainland China to England and "who also carved out a place in their new homeland through the catering trade." (July)

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

Stacy Russo - Library Journal

This memoir by Tse, a finance attorney who studied law at Cambridge University, tells of three generations of Chinese women but focuses on the triumphs and hardships of Lily Kwok, Tse's grandmother. Lily's story is nothing short of remarkable. Tse recounts the early death of Lily's father, her work as a wet nurse and maid to wealthy British families in Hong Kong, and her disastrous marriage. The benevolence of Lily's British employers ultimately enabled her to open her own Chinese restaurant in England. Mabel, Tse's mother, followed tradition years later when she, too, opened a restaurant with her husband. Sweet Mandarin is the name of the restaurant Tse and her sisters opened in 2004, bringing the narrative full circle. Wrapped in the cultural and ancestral mystery of food, this memoir will be appreciated by general readers and students of Asian and women's studies. Recommended for public and academic libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

An intimate, unhistorical, uneven synthesis of the stories of three generations of Chinese wives, mothers and daughters. The author, a Chinese-British financial lawyer who now runs a restaurant called Sweet Mandarin with her two sisters in Manchester, England, begins her affectionate, family narrative with the hardscrabble story of her grandmother Lily, born to an entrepreneur and his wife in Guangzhou who only wanted sons but got six daughters instead. Despite a growing business making and selling soy sauce, which took them to Hong Kong in 1925, the family's fortunes turned sour when Lily's father was murdered in his Guangzhou factory by a jealous local gang. Due to the nation's patrilinear traditions, his widow and daughters were essentially turned out of their home. Lily's job as a maid/nanny to the wealthy British Woodmans in Hong Kong eventually brought her to England in the early 1950s. By then estranged from a philandering gambler of a husband, she saved up to bring her children to England and was able to start a Chinese takeout restaurant in Manchester with the money Mrs. Woodman left Lily in her will. Lily's daughter, Mabel, was brought up working in the business and in the late '70s started her own "corner chippy" in Middleton; the author and her siblings toiled there during their growing-up years. Although she belonged to one of the first Chinese families in Middleton, Tse did not feel herself a victim of racism and became thoroughly assimilated into British life. She offers interesting takes on her family's gambling, gang culture in Hong Kong and the stunning misogyny still rampant in Chinese society. An easy-flowing tale that subsumes historical changes in personal histories,especially the plight of the author's grandmother.

Table of Contents:

Preface     1
The Little Sack of Rice - Guangzhou, China 1918-1925     7
Soy Sauce Delight - Hong Kong 1925-1930     29
Bitter Melon - Guangzhou, China 1930     53
Jade and Ebony - Hong Kong 1930s-1950s     77
Firecracker Chan - Hong Kong 1930s-1950s     103
Lily Kwok's Chicken Curry - Somerset and Manchester, UK 1950s     147
Lung Fung - Manchester, UK 1959-early 1960s     179
Mabel's Claypot Chicken - Manchester 1959-1974     199
Chips, Chips, Chips - Manchester 1975-2003     217
Buddha's Golden Picnic Basket - Hong Kong 2002, Guangzhou 2003     243
Sweet Mandarin - Manchester 2003-     263
Afterword     273
Acknowledgements     279

The Way of the World or The Conquerors

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism

Author: Ron Suskind

Ron Suskind’s book promises to be a bracing international thriller – an ensemble of uranium merchants and panicked diplomats, stealthy Jihadist soldiers and CIA operatives, anxious Muslim children and angry world leaders – a diverse cast of players who will define the struggle between hope and fear in the modern era. Suskind will close the Bush years – a period he has helped to define – with a startling glimpse at what America actually faces across the roiling world. In the intelligence and military communities, the overwhelming concern is the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons and the ingredients from which weapons can be composed across a globe exploding with conflict and anti-American fervour. It is a failure of government that we are left with this overwhelming security issue – both domestically, where our security is deeply compromised, and internationally, where we face a host of seen and unseen threats.

This book will explode in the middle of an election year with unparalleled disclosures and analysis. The book’s nature and timing will place it at the very centre of the election battle as it enters its final six months. It will be a must-read for anyone hoping to exercise truly informed consent.

The New York Times - Michael Crowley

The rare writer who combines excellent reporting with a knack for novelistic writing about real people, [Suskind] skillfully traces several inter­woven stories of cultural clashes and cross-pollination, all of them pursuing the question of whether America and the Muslim world can ever look past their differences and find understanding…Much like Suskind's previous books about the Bush administration, The Price of Loyalty and The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World, though occasionally breathless, is a reportorial feat—particularly when it comes to chronicling the internal machinations of the administration's national security team.

The New York Times - Mark Danner

…a complex, ambitious, provocative, risky and often maddening book. In a crowded, highly talented field, Mr. Suskind bids fair to claim the crown as the most perceptive, incisive, dogged chronicler of the inner workings of the Bush administration…Behind the highly promoted scandals in The Way of the World lies a complex web of intersecting stories, the plotlines of a varied traveling company of actors whose doings Mr. Suskind chronicles with meticulous care…These narratives and others perform, in Mr. Suskind's hands, an intricate arabesque and manage, to a rather remarkable degree, to show us, in this age of terror, "the true way of the world."

The Washington Post - Alan Cooperman

Let's put aside, for a moment, the question of whether investigative reporter Ron Suskind's new book is properly considered nonfiction (as he and his publisher assert) or fiction (as the Bush administration and various critics contend). It's unquestionably a narrative: a humorous, indignant, touching story whose "characters"—as Suskind revealingly calls them—learn that America's most effective defense against international terrorism is not torture or wiretapping but the "moral energy" that flows from truthfulness, generosity, integrity and optimism.

Publishers Weekly

Suskind's take on the downfall of America's authority begins with what led to the attacks on September 11 and charts the country's subsequent tarnished international identity. Tackling tough issues with historic disclosures (including the accusation that members of the U.S. government forged documents and lied to win approval for going to war in Iraq), the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter offers compelling and provocative stories. Unfortunately, Alan Sklar's narration will surely cause many listeners to lose interest. Sklar tends to drone and his dry, monotone voice bears very little passion or intensity. His uninspired reading lessens the impact of Suskind's masterful research. A HarperCollins hardcover. (Sept.)

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

See also: A Handbook on the GATS Agreement or Native American Issues

The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945

Author: Michael Beschloss

A New York Times bestseller, The Conquerors reveals how Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's private struggles with their aides and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin affected the unfolding of the Holocaust and the fate of vanquished Nazi Germany.

With monumental fairness and balance, The Conquerors shows how Roosevelt privately refused desperate pleas to speak out directly against the Holocaust, to save Jewish refugees and to explore the possible bombing of Auschwitz to stop the killing. The book also shows FDR's fierce will to ensure that Germany would never threaten the world again. Near the end of World War II, he abruptly endorsed the secret plan of his friend, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, to reduce the Germans to a primitive existence -- despite Churchill's fear that crushing postwar Germany would let the Soviets conquer the continent. The book finally shows how, after FDR's death, President Truman rebelled against Roosevelt's tough approach and adopted the Marshall Plan and other more conciliatory policies that culminated in today's democratic, united Europe.

Publishers Weekly

Beschloss provides an engaging, if not revelatory, narrative of key events leading up to the conferences at Yalta (Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin) and Potsdam (Truman, Churchill, Stalin) and the Allies' decisions about how to prevent future aggression by post-WWII Germany. In his preface, Beschloss makes much of the fact that this study draws on newly released documents from the former Soviet Union, the FBI and private archives. But Beschloss has unearthed nothing to change accepted views of how FDR developed and then began to implement his vision for postwar Germany. The tales Beschloss gathers here are no different from those already told in such books as Eric Larrabee's Commander-in-Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War (1987) and Henry Morgenthau III's Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (1991). With reference to the latter volume, one of Beschloss's major subplots traces Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s efforts to interest FDR in a draconian, retributive plan (the "Morgenthau Plan") to destroy what little might remain of Germany's infrastructure after the war. Wisely, FDR demurred. Although breaking no new ground, this book by noted presidential historian Beschloss (who has published a trilogy on Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes) will fill the bill for those who need a readable account of how American officials and their Allied counterparts came to draw the map of postwar Europe. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

World War II is the most intensively studied conflict in history, and nearly 60 years after its end, fresh information is still emerging. Beschloss' account of U.S. policy toward Germany during the war integrates new archival research to place some of the war's crucial actors and events in illuminating new perspective. In particular, Beschloss's account of the relationship between Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and the president he served for 12 years leads to surprising and disquieting insights into Franklin Roosevelt's failure to publicize — much less to obstruct — the Holocaust. John McCloy emerges from these pages with a reputation considerably enhanced. Often singled out as the official responsible for blocking proposals to bomb Auschwitz or its feeder railroads, McCloy is shown here to have acted under direct and specific orders from Roosevelt — a source he loyally concealed for decades after the war. Beschloss' sensitive portrayal of the difficulties of assimilated, educated Jews such as Morgenthau with a political culture still strongly influenced by antisemitism is both disturbing and moving. Some of the material he handles is radioactive, such as antisemitic comments from Roosevelt and Harry Truman against the background of the Holocaust, yet Beschloss neither palliates evil nor imposes the standards of the present on the past.

Library Journal

Beschloss draws on newly opened archives to show how Roosevelt and Truman decided Germany's fate. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A lucid study of how FDR's evolving vision of postwar Europe, enacted by Truman, prevented a recapitulation of Versailles and allowed for the rise of a prosperous, democratic, peaceable Germany. Political historian Beschloss (Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965, not reviewed, etc.), both an able scholar and a gifted interpreter of the past for a popular audience, addresses episodes of wartime diplomacy that have been well studied in the professional literature. Even so, he turns up a few surprises, notably Roosevelt's changing view of how Germany would best be kept from rearming itself after Hitler's fall and starting trouble again, as seemed to be a well-established pattern. In 1943, Roosevelt was inclined to carve up postwar Germany into three or more states, "bound only by a system of common services, and strip those new states of 'all military activities' and 'armament industries' "; two years later, having gained greater insight into Josef Stalin's ambitions thanks in part to constant admonitions from Winston Churchill-who warned, presciently, "Sooner or later they will reunite into one nation. . . . The main thing is to keep them divided, if only for fifty years"-Roosevelt was inclined to a clement but firm peace that would draw the defeated nation into the Western camp. His view was sharpened when it became apparent that Stalin was eager to keep Germany whole so that it could be milked for billions of dollars in reparations and be drawn into the Soviet bloc. Roosevelt died just before Hitler's regime ended-Beschloss offers the fascinating tidbit that FDR's last act before expiring was to throw away his draft card-but the underestimated Trumandid a remarkable job of negotiating a pact that "created the opportunity for the United States, Great Britain, and France . . . to create, at least in part of Germany, a democratic state whose system . . . would one day spread to the East." As it did, Beschloss observes, in some measure because of the foresight of the American leadership. An altogether valuable addition to the historical literature.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
Ch. 1	The Plot to Murder Hitler	1
Ch. 2	"Unconditional Surrender"	9
Ch. 3	"Fifty Thousand Germans Must Be Shot!"	18
Ch. 4	"On the Back of an Envelope"	29
Ch. 5	The Terrible Silence	38
Ch. 6	The "One Hundred Percent American"	44
Ch. 7	"Oppressor of the Jews"	56
Ch. 8	"We Will Have to Get Awfully Busy"	70
Ch. 9	"Not Nearly as Bad as Sending Them to Gas Chambers"	82
Ch. 10	"Somebody's Got to Take the Lead"	91
Ch. 11	"Christianity and Kindness"	98
Ch. 12	"It Is Very, Very Necessary"	113
Ch. 13	"Do You Want Me to Beg Like Fala?"	121
Ch. 14	"A Hell of a Hubbub"	136
Ch. 15	"As Useful as Ten Fresh German Divisions"	150
Ch. 16	"Lord Give the President Strength"	166
Ch. 17	"The Only Bond Is Their Common Hate"	178
Ch. 18	"Arguing About the Future of the World"	189
Ch. 19	"No Earthly Powers Can Keep Him Here"	203
Ch. 20	"What Will We Make of It?"	216
Ch. 21	"I Was Never in Favor of That Crazy Plan"	226
Ch. 22	"You and I Will Have to Bear Great Responsibility"	238
Ch. 23	"How I Hate This Trip!"	247
Ch. 24	"We Are Drifting Toward a Line Down the Center of Germany"	260
Ch. 25	"The Spirit and Soul of a People Reborn"	271
Ch. 26	The Conquerors	283
	Author's Note and Acknowledgments	293
	General Sources	297
	Notes	315
	Index	361

Imagined Communities or Dear Senator

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Author: Benedict Anderson

A new edition of the definitive book on nationalism—over a quarter of a million copies sold worldwide.

Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson's brilliant book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question: what makes people live, die and kill in the name of nations? He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was adopted by popular movements in Europe, by imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa, and explores the way communities were created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism and printing, and the birth of vernacular languages-of-state. Anderson revisits these fundamental ideas, showing how their relevance has been tested by the events of the past two decades.

Look this: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave or The Sustainability Revolution

Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

Author: Essie Mae Washington Williams

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

Henry Knox or The Island at the Center of the World

Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution

Author: Mark Puls

Here is a compelling portrait of the Revolutionary War general whose skills as an engineer and artilleryman played a key role in all of George Washington's battles including the Siege of Boston (where his use of cannons at Dorchester Heights won back the city) and the Battle of Trenton (where he was in charge of Washington's crossing of the Delaware River). Knox became an major advocate of the U.S. Constitution and served as the nation’s first Secretary of War. He was co-founder of the U.S. Navy, laid the foundations for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and negotiated treaties and set policy with Native Americans.With nail-biting battle scenes, patriotism and deep understanding of his subject, Mark Puls breathes new life into the American Revolution and firmly assigns Knox to his deserved place in history.

Publishers Weekly

In this brisk, informative biography, journalist and author Puls (Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution) celebrates Gen. Henry Knox, "a remarkably ubiquitous presence during America's founding generation," who has been "curiously overlooked by historians." At age 18, Knox (1750-1806) joined the local Boston militia and became a self-taught "skilled engineer and military tactician." Once the American Revolution began, General Washington appointed Knox to build and lead the army's artillery corps. Knox remained at Washington's side and supervised the 1776 Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware. He went on to command the Yorktown artillery in 1781. The then "youngest major general in the American army" retired to become secretary at war and to lay the basis for a visionary citizen army. Knox later sanctioned the American navy and promoted the creation of a military academy at West Point. His private life was burdened by years of separation from his wife and the untimely deaths of nine of their 12 children. In 1806 Knox died unexpectedly from an infection caused by a chicken bone lodged in his throat. Puls's authoritative and absorbing account of Knox's life is a fitting tribute to General Washington's "indispensable man." (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Read also Power to the People or Whats the Matter with Kansas

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

Author: Russell Shorto

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative–a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan–that transforms our understanding of early America.

The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

The New York Times

Relying on the fruits of Dr. Gehring's enterprise, Mr. Shorto has created far more than an addendum to familiar American history: a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past. Without the adventurous Dutch spirit and the internecine power struggle described here, "the English would probably have swept in before Dutch institutions were established, New York would have become another English New World port town like Boston, and American culture would never have developed as it did." — Janet Maslin

NY Times Sunday Book Review

New York history buffs will be captivated by Shorto's descriptions of Manhattan in its primordial state, of bays full of salmon and oysters, and blue plums and fields of wild strawberries in what is now Midtown. Here the reader may learn, among many other historical tidbits, what the Dutch really paid for Manhattan (it wasn't $24), or the key role that Flushing played in securing freedom of conscience, or why the Knicks wear blue-and-orange uniforms, or how Yonkers, the Hutchinson River and Saw Mill River Parkways, Greenwich Village and Staten Island got their names. Yet Shorto never overwhelms one with trivia, and he writes at all times with passion, verve, nuance and considerable humor. — Kevin Baker

The New York Observer - John Jeremiah Sullivan

This is one of those rare books in the picked-over field of colonial history, a whole new picture, a thrown-open window onto the intra-European struggles for dominance and the disputes over political philosophy that did indeed shape this country. With his full-blooded resurrection of an unfamiliar American patriot, Russell Shorto has made a real contribution...

Publishers Weekly

Drawing on 17th-century Dutch records of New Netherland and its capital, Manhattan, translated by scholar Charles Gehring only in recent decades, Shorto (Gospel Truth) brings to exuberant life the human drama behind the skimpy legend starting with the colony's founding in 1623. Most Americans know little about Dutch Manhattan beyond its first director, Peter Minuit, who made the infamous $24 deal with the Indians, and Peter Stuyvesant, the stern governor who lost the island to the English in 1664. These two seminal figures receive their due here, along with a huge cast of equally fascinating characters. But Shorto has a more ambitious agenda: to argue for the huge debt Americans owe to the culture of Dutch Manhattan, the first place in the New World where men and women of different races and creeds lived in relative harmony. The petitions of the colony's citizens for greater autonomy, penned by Dutch-trained lawyer Adriaen van der Donck, represented "one of the earliest expressions of modern political impulses: an insistence by the members of the community that they play a role in their own government." While not discounting the British role in the shaping of American society, the author argues persuasively for the Dutch origins of some of our most cherished beliefs and their roots in "the tolerance debates in Holland" and "the intellectual world of Descartes, Grotius, and Spinoza." Shorto's gracefully written historical account is a must-read for anyone interested in this nation's origins. (Mar. 16) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

For this popular narrative, Shorto (Gospel Truth) draws on some 12,000 public and private documents from a Dutch outpost that archivist Charles Gehring painstakingly translated for researchers in the 1960s. Shorto's resulting portrait of the vibrant society that became New York City is an entrancing one, focusing in particular on the oppositional forces of the controlling Peter Stuyvesant and the more tolerant Adriaen Van der Donck, bringing the latter, lesser-known colonial officer to light. The author exaggerates in asserting that the diversity of Dutch New York and its lasting effects on American character traits have been overlooked before his project. (See Philip Greven's 1977 study, The Protestant Temperament). However, Shorto does correctly point out that Dutch tolerance, a "grudging acceptance," was far from a belief in equality but nevertheless was forward-looking for its time. Two works published in 2003-Thelma Foote's Black and White Manhattan and Leslie Harris's In the Shadow of Slavery-provide more scholarly insights into the contradiction of the pluralistic Dutch as slave holders and traders. Shorto's book, a good read that links some characteristics of Dutch New York to today's bustling city of finance, is well worth the time of the general history enthusiast and is most appropriate for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/03.]-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The all-but-forgotten origins of Manhattan, told with humor and an acute eye for primary sources. It's good to remember, the author suggests, that the early 17th century was the age of Shakespeare, Descartes, Vermeer, and Bacon, a time of change and tumult. Not the least part of that tumult was Dutch political and legal progressivism, "their matter-of-fact acceptance of foreignness, of religious differences, of odd sorts." Tolerance, in a word, though Shorto (Saints and Madmen, 1999, etc.) is quick to point out that that meant "putting up with" rather than celebrating diversity. By the time New Amsterdam had been established, more as a business settlement of the West India Company than as a colony, its babel of nationalities were seeking balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression. "Pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, and business sharks held sway," he notes. "It was Manhattan . . . right from the start." Despite the tyrannical leanings of the colony's early directors, from Willem Kieft to Peter Stuyvesant, the crucial element that set New Amsterdam apart from its neighbors north and south was its striving toward democracy, largely in the person of Adriaen van der Donck, student of Rene Descartes and of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, of natural law and human reason. Van der Donck was a veritable Founding Father, the author asserts, though admitting that his authorship of many of the documents illustrating the push toward relative democracy in the colony can only be inferred. "Who was there, how they got along, how they mixed-that is the colony's unheralded legacy," writes Shorto. A struggle played out among military and diplomatic maneuverings and the revamping of the colony'spolitical structure. It was a legacy lived by the gallimaufry of Manhattanites, and it was written by Grotius as much as by John Locke. A bright social history of New Amsterdam that gives the Dutch their due as the first facilitators of its fabled diversity. Agent: Anne Edelstein/Anne Edelstein Agency

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Prologue: The Missing Floor	1
Pt. I	"A Certain Island Named Manathans"
1	The Measure of Things	15
2	The Pollinator	25
3	The Island	37
4	The King, the Surgeon, the Turk, and the Whore	67
Pt. II	Clash of Wills
5	The Lawman	93
6	The Council of Blood	110
7	The Cause	129
8	The One-Legged Man	146
9	The General and the Princess	167
10	The People's Champion	191
11	An American in Europe	209
12	A Dangerous Man	233
Pt. III	The Inheritance
13	Booming	257
14	New York	284
15	Inherited Features	301
	Epilogue: The Paper Trail	319
	Notes	326
	Bibliography	352
	Index	373

Parliament of Whores or Spy

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U. S. Government

Author: P J ORourk

P.J. O'Rourke does it again. You hate yourself for laughing, but so much of it is true.

Publishers Weekly

Conservative O'Rourke takes no prisoners in this deadly accurate number-one bestseller, which spent 28 weeks on PW 's hardcover list. O'Rourke's latest essay collection, Give War a Chance , will be published by Atlantic Monthly Press in May. Author tour. (May)

Booknews

O'Rourke has lost his timing since Holidays in hell. In Whores he separates his brilliant mots with too little substance. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Interesting book: Betty Crocker PocketChef Appetizers or Candy Christmass Christmas Collection

Spy: The Inside Story of How The FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America

Author: David Wis

Spy tells, for the first time, the full, authoritative story of how FBI agent Robert Hanssen, code name grayday, spied for Russia for twenty-two years in what has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history”–and how he was finally caught in an incredible gambit by U.S. intelligence.

David Wise, the nation’s leading espionage writer, has called on his unique knowledge and unrivaled intelligence sources to write the definitive, inside story of how Robert Hanssen betrayed his country, and why.

Spy at last reveals the mind and motives of a man who was a walking paradox: FBI counterspy, KGB mole, devout Catholic, obsessed pornographer who secretly televised himself and his wife having sex so that his best friend could watch, defender of family values, fantasy James Bond who took a stripper to Hong Kong and carried a machine gun in his car trunk.

Brimming with startling new details sure to make headlines, Spy discloses:

-the previously untold story of how the FBI got the actual file on Robert Hanssen out of KGB headquarters in Moscow for $7 million in an unprecedented operation that ended in Hanssen’s arrest.

-how for three years, the FBI pursued a CIA officer, code name gray deceiver, in the mistaken belief that he was the mole they were seeking inside U.S. intelligence. The innocent officer was accused as a spy and suspended by the CIA for nearly two years.

-why Hanssen spied, based on exclusive interviews with Dr. David L. Charney, the psychiatrist who met with Hanssen in his jail cell more than thirty times. Hanssen, in an extraordinary arrangement, authorized Charney to talkto the author.

-the full story of Robert Hanssen’s bizarre sex life, including the hidden video camera he set up in his bedroom and how he plotted to drug his wife, Bonnie, so that his best friend could father her child.

- how Hanssen and the CIA’s Aldrich Ames betrayed three Russians secretly spying for the FBI–including tophat, a Soviet general–who were then executed by Moscow.

-that after Hanssen was already working for the KGB, he directed a study of moles in the FBI when–as he alone knew–he was the mole.

Robert Hanssen betrayed the FBI. He betrayed his country. He betrayed his wife. He betrayed his children. He betrayed his best friend, offering him up to the KGB. He betrayed his God. Most of all, he betrayed himself. Only David Wise could tell the astonishing, full story, and he does so, in masterly style, in Spy.

Common Sense or While America Aged

Common Sense

Author: Thomas Pain

Thomas Paine arrived in America from England in 1774. A friend of Ben Franklin, he was a writer of poetry and tracts condemning the slave trade. In 1775, as hostilities between Britain and the colonies intensified, Paine wrote "Common Sense" to encourage the colonies to break the British exploitative hold through independence. The little booklet of 50 pages was published January 10, 1776 and sold a half-million copies, approximately equal to 75 million copies today.

Library Journal

Penguin strikes again with a wonderful new series called "Great Ideas" featuring 12 books by great thinkers dating back to the first millennium B.C.E. through the mid-20th century, covering art, politics, literature, philosophy, science, history, and more. Each slim paperback is individually designed, and all are affordable at $8.95. A great idea indeed. Snap 'em up! Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

New interesting textbook: Complete Diabetic Cookbook or Le Cordon Bleu Dessert Techniques

While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis

Author: Roger Lowenstein

From the bestselling author of Buffett, When Genius Failed, and Origins of the Crash, a wake-up call to the pension and retirement crisis facing America and the road map for a way out

In While America Aged, bestselling author Roger Lowenstein explains how corporations and governments ran up ruinous pension and health-care promises to workers—promises that are now coming due and that will hit America like a tsunami if nothing is done.

Negotiating high benefits means gambling with future finances—and when the farm gets sold out from underneath major corporations or public institutions, it affects all of us, and in ways we might not imagine. With his trademark narrative panache, Lowenstein unravels the truth about how pensions work in America and illuminates the impending crisis. While America Aged is comprised of three fascinating case studies— each an object lesson and a compelling historical saga. The first goes back to the early days of the United Auto Workers and its crusading leader, Walter Reuther, to tell the story of how pensions and health-care obligations destroyed the American auto industry, in particular General Motors.

Lowenstein then shifts the scene to New York City to tell the story of the rise of public pensions and public sector unions through the vehicle of the Communist-led Transport Workers Union. Once again, justifiable benefits were followed by outrageous ones, such as the right to retire at age fifty. The saga reached a dramatic climax in 2005, when workers responded to proposed pension cutbacks with a massive strike that brought New York's subways and buses to a screeching halt days beforeChristmas.

In the concluding episode, Lowenstein visits a metropolis even more reckless in doling out benefits—San Diego. Desperate not to impose higher taxes, city officials in this highly conservative enclave cut a series of deals with unions to short-change the retirement system and use pension funds to run the city. A massive scandal ensued—two mayors resigned, officials were indicted, and San Diego lost its bond rating. Lowenstein warns that the pension wars that erupted in Detroit, New York City, and San Diego are only the first. But he also recognizes that workers are entitled to decent security in their retirement—a critical problem as the country ages. While America Aged explains how we came to this crisis, and it also proposes a way out. Arming readers with knowledge of the consequences of doing nothing, While America Aged, first and foremost, a call to action.

The Washington Post - Phillip Longman

Having struggled for years to make my own writing on pension issues interesting enough for anyone to want to read, I particularly appreciate Lowenstein's use of real people to illustrate the deeper financial issues involved. Even if they sometimes contain too much detail, there is a kind of gripping, slow-motion train wreck quality to the long, sad stories Lowenstein tells about people and institutions in deep denial. And those stories certainly have a clear moral. Boiling it down to its essence on the book's final page, he concludes, "The most effective remedy—in pensions, health care, and even in Social Security—is to banish the credit card. Benefits should not be charged to a future generation; they should be paid for now." Sadly, though, even if we can refrain from borrowing more from our children, we will still bear the dead weight of past borrowing that now falls to us.

The New York Times - Jeff Madrick

as Roger Lowenstein nicely illustrates in While America Aged, the country "is sitting on a retirement time bomb." He is not talking about Social Security, which, he writes, is among the more manageable of future concerns. He is addressing the large-scale failure of America's once-enviable private pension system. Lowenstein is one of the nation's most talented business writers, with a particular ability to make obscure financial issues clear as the morning light.

Publishers Weekly

America's impending pension problem is brutally simple: private companies and governments have pledged to provide retirement income and health care for workers, but have not set aside the money to make good on their promises. Typical accounts of the crisis tend to obfuscate the issue and fixate on laying blame, but Lowenstein (Origins of the Crash) has a refreshing perspective-he tells three fascinating stories in American economic history and situates the current pension problems in the struggle for dignity for workers. Lowenstein regards fixing pensions as a worthy culmination to a century's struggle for justice rather than a painful chore unfairly foisted on the present by the past. Unfortunately, after this incisive and inspiring history lesson, the 10 pages at the end devoted to solutions are too abstract and unoriginal. The book gives the reader lively stories and historical insight, but may disappoint those looking for policy recommendations. (May 5)

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

Kirkus Reviews

Lowenstein (Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing, 2004, etc.) probes a dangerous miscalculation made by American private and public enterprise: laying off responsibility for workers' pensions and retirement health benefits on some unspecified future. As baby boomers move into the retirement mainstream, the former Wall Street Journal columnist warns, the worst is yet to come. Examining how such situations evolved at General Motors, one of capitalism's former crown jewels, and in two of the nation's largest cities, he argues that confrontation-averse executives and pension trustees allowed hardball labor unions threatening crippling strikes to leverage benefit packages that were unsustainable from the beginning. Competitive pressures on the GM side and electoral politics in New York and San Diego also played their part in getting the unions attractive early retirement deals that, when workers began opting for them, brought crushing "future costs" closer than anyone had imagined. The GM story is perhaps the most tragic. In the late '90s, the company found itself with some 180,000 hourly employees on its payroll-and 400,000 retirees. Unable competitively to raise prices, GM cuts its dividend; stockholders, the company's nominal owners, begin to pick up the bill for retirees. In the cases of New York's Transit System workers and San Diego city employees, the same syndrome was made more sordid by political infighting and backroom deals. Others simply buried their heads in the sand. Former New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman, for example, bet that pension-fund investments in a booming stock market would cover unfunded liabilities-then the market went down. Some form of paidnational healthcare is inevitable for the future, says Lowenstein: "Business is global, and U.S. companies compete against foreign-based firms whose home-countries do pick up the tab." Fixing pensions, he notes, will be even tougher, but at minimum Congress needs to regulate 401(k)s, which were "essentially developed in a social and legislative vacuum."A chilling anatomy of one bad decision followed by another-and another. Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency

Table of Contents:

Pt. 1 Who Owns General Motors? 7

1 Walter Reuther and the Treaty of Detroit 9

2 The Anti-Reuther 39

Pt. 2 The Public Freight 81

3 An Entitled Class 83

4 On Strike! 117

Pt. 3 Debacle in San Diego 153

5 Finest City 155

6 Pension Plot 175

7 The Bill Comes Due 195

Conclusion: The Way Out 221

Acknowledgments 233

Notes 235

Index 267

Hacking or Under the Overpass

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

Author: Jon Erickson

Hacking is the art of creative problem solving, whether that means finding an unconventional solution to a difficult problem or exploiting holes in sloppy programming. Many people call themselves hackers, but few have the strong technical foundation needed to really push the envelope.

Rather than merely showing how to run existing exploits, author Jon Erickson explains how arcane hacking techniques actually work. To share the art and science of hacking in a way that is accessible to everyone, Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition introduces the fundamentals of C programming from a hacker's perspective.

The included LiveCD provides a complete Linux programming and debugging environment-all without modifying your current operating system. Use it to follow along with the book's examples as you fill gaps in your knowledge and explore hacking techniques on your own. Get your hands dirty debugging code, overflowing buffers, hijacking network communications, bypassing protections, exploiting cryptographic weaknesses, and perhaps even inventing new exploits. This book will teach you how to:

• Program computers using C, assembly language, and shell scripts
• Corrupt system memory to run arbitrary code using buffer overflows and format strings
• Inspect processor registers and system memory with a debugger to gain a real understanding of what is happening
• Outsmart common security measures like nonexecutable stacks and intrusion detection systems
• Gain access to a remote server using port-binding or connect-back shellcode, and alter a server's logging behavior to hide your presence
• Redirect network traffic, conceal open ports, and hijack TCP connections
• Crack encrypted wireless traffic using the FMS attack, and speed up brute-force attacks using a password probability matrix

Hackers are always pushing the boundaries, investigating the unknown, and evolving their art. Even if you don't already know how to program, Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition will give you a complete picture of programming, machine architecture, network communications, and existing hacking techniques. Combine this knowledge with the included Linux environment, and all you need is your own creativity.

See also: Eating in America or Anne Lindsays New Light Cooking

Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America

Author: Mike Yankoski

After meals from garbage cans and dumpsters, night after night Mike and Sam found their beds under bridges and on the streets. They were forced to depend on the generosity and kindness of strangers as they panhandled to sustain their existence. For more than five months, the pair experienced firsthand the extreme pains of hunger, the constant uncertainty and danger of living on the streets, exhaustion, depression, and social rejection—and all of this by their own choice. This is their story. Through Mike’s firsthand account, Under the Overpass provides important insight into the truths of the street and calls the younger generation of believers to take great risks of faith to bring Christ’s love to the neediest corners of the world.

“I Am Disgusting.”

Mike Yankoski’s life went from upper-middle class plush to scum-of-the-earth repulsive overnight. By his own choice. From the United States capital to San Diego, Mike and his traveling companion, Sam, journeyed as homeless men for five months. Not for a project or even in response to a dare. He needed to know if his faith in God was real—if he could actually be the Christian he said he was apart from the comforts he’d always known.

So with only a bag on his back, a guitar in his hand, and Sam by his side, he set out. And like any traveler in a foreign land, he returned a different man. Mike’s unusual, captivating, and challenging story will rock your own world…perhaps even change your life.

Pull out quote/sidebar/starburst:

“Thoreau said, ‘Simplify, simplify, simplify!,’ but at that moment Icouldn’t help wondering if I had gone too far.”


Endorsements: Please leave room for one more.

“Mike Yankoski hangs out with alcoholics and drug addicts. He panhandles for bus fare and eats from dumpsters. Yes, he has guts. But he also has faith.”

Dean R. Hirsch

President, World Vision

“Everyone with a beating heart will benefit from reading this book.”

Kim Meeder

Bestselling author of Hope Rising

Story Behind the Book

“Faith is more than just an emphatic ‘Amen’ at the end of the sermon on Sunday morning. Frustrated with the feeling of having strong convictions and yet not being able to do anything about them, I began to understand Paul’s promise of contentment in Christ ‘whether with everything or with nothing.’ What would it look like to give up the comfortable life and live homeless? Is God enough to sustain me? Is He trustworthy? Is He worth staking my life on? What happens if I die? Will I even survive? Such questions rang loudly in my mind as we decided to lay down everything in a full embrace of the homeless life. Some experiences were uncomfortable, some shocking, some disturbing, some hilarious, and still others frustrating, but five months of life on the streets has left us, our faith, and our lives forever changed.”

Publishers Weekly

Yankoski's parents were right: It was crazy to live as a homeless person in six American cities for five months; fortunately, this crazy idea makes for quite a story. Yankoski, a Christian college student, challenges the reader to learn about faith, identify with the poor and find more forgotten, ruined, beautiful people than we ever imagined existed, and more reason to hope in their redemption. The journey begins at a Denver rescue mission and ends on a California beach. Along the way, Yankoski and a friend learn the perils of poor hygiene and the secrets of panhandling. They meet unfortunates like Andrew, who squanders his musical talent to feed his drug habit, and hustlers like Jake, who gives the pair tips about how to look and sound more pitiful to get more money. Yankoski tends to moralize: If we respond to others based on their outward appearance, haven't we entirely missed the point of the Gospel? Still, the book features fine writing (I awoke, rolled over and saw beads of sweat already forming on my arms. Saturday, early morning, Phoenix) and vivid stories, authentically revealing an underworld of need. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-As a college student in Santa Barbara, Yankoski was comfortable with his life. However, listening to a Sunday sermon one morning, he began to wonder whether his faith would remain as strong if his privileged upbringing and typical college existence were taken away. So began his decision to put his faith to the test. After discussing his plans with his family and various advisors, he and a friend took a leave of absence from their studies and their middle-class lives to enter the world of the homeless. They spent five months in 2003 on the streets of Denver; Phoenix; Washington, DC; and other cities. Playing their guitars and panhandling, they relied entirely on charity. The harshness, hunger, dangers, and indignities they faced are reported in detail. They formed friendships with other homeless people and watched many of them struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. Yankoski steers clear of preachy or patronizing tones, and his dry sense of humor makes the book thoroughly readable. Teens will appreciate the frankness with which he approaches the day-to-day challenges and his personal struggles.-Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword	7
	Note to the Reader	9
Section 1	Twenty Minutes Past the World	11
	Payback
	A Flicker of Lightning
	Why Would You Want to Do That?
	The Counsel of Friends
	Enter Sam
	Traveling Papers
	Invitation to the Journey
Section 2	Denver	25
	A Long Way from Home
	Cold Turkey
	The Breakfast Club
	Hell Fire
	Exit to Street Level
Section 3	Washington, D.C.	55
	The World Is Changed
	You Like Chicken Parmesan?
	Most Important Meal of the Day
	A Song for Pamela
	We Have a Policy
	Cowbell Door Chime
	Like a Child
	Seed Money
	Photo Op
Section 4	Portland	95
	The Idea of Comfort
	Worship Under a Bridge
	Sugar Man's Gospel
	Body Basics
	Church Lock Down
	The Stupid, Small Things
Section 5	San Francisco	121
	In the Presence of My Enemies
	Bed for the Night
	Wake-Up Call
	You Just Know It's Dark in There
	The Other Jesus Guy
	The Grace of Pizza
	Bloody Sandals
	Berkeley Booh Yah
Section 6	Phoenix	157
	We Don't Go to Church
	Return to Forgiveness
	Fix or Fish Sandwich?
	On Begging
	Road Rash Carnival
Section 7	San Diego	181
	Shuffling Home
	Old Yellers
	Circle of Light
	Freedom Rings
	Ashes and Snow
Section 8	Coming Back to Normal	209
	Wanting More (and More)
	Street Visitor
	Now What?
	The Risk of Your Life
	Acknowledgments	222

Heart behind the Hero or Is the American Dream Killing You

Heart behind the Hero: A Heartwarming and Inspirational Collection of True Firefighter and Paramedic Stories from across America

Author: Curt D Yoder

Curt Yoder, a twenty-five year veteran firefighter of the Costa Mesa Fire Department in California, and his wife, Karen, bring you this heartwarming and inspirational collection of true stories, essays and poems from firefighters and paramedics across America.

These touching and beautifully written stories, from the hearts and souls of the firefighters and paramedics who wrote them, reveal the emotions, feelings and spirit of today's American firefighters and rescue workers.

Experience, through their own words, the emotional trauma of holding a dying child--and the fear and adrenaline rush of battling a wild fire.

Relive the drama as they recount their responses to America's most recent heartbreaking tragedies--the bombing of the Alfred E. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

Laugh with them as they tell stories from their rookie years--and share their sorrow and pain as they pay tribute to their own, their brothers and sisters who sacrificed their lives doing the job they loved.

The Heart Behind the Hero offers an in-depth insight to the lifestyles and daily thoughts of these brave men and women who, while waiting to serve those in need, develop lifetime bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood.

This book is sure to warm the hearts and souls of all firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical professionals and citizens who wish to catch a glimpse of...

Internet Book Watch

The Heart Behind the Hero is a compelling anthology of true life stories, essays and poems contributed by firefighters and paramedics across the country. Touching, inspiring, heartwarming, dramatic, superbly written and presented, The Heart Behind the Hero reveals the emotions, feelings, and spirit of today's American firefighters and rescue workers in their own words. The humor, pathos, heartbreak, and hard work is clearly evident as the contributors pay tribute to their colleagues and comrades who sacrificed their lives doing a job they loved in service to the communities in which they lived. Here is a fascinating "window" into the lifestyles and thoughts of brave men and women whose heroism is routine and whose sacrifices are the stuff of which legends are made.

Look this: Fandango or Passion for Parties

Is the American Dream Killing You?: How The Market Rules Our Lives

Author: Paul Stiles

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

Path Out of the Desert or Founders on the Founders

Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East

Author: Kenneth M Pollack

“A persuasive but painful solution for dealing with the mess in the Middle East.” –Kirkus

The greatest danger to America’s peace and prosperity, notes leading Middle East policy analyst Kenneth M. Pollack, lies in the political repression, economic stagnation, and cultural conflict running rampant in Arab and Muslim nations. By inflaming political unrest and empowering terrorists, these forces pose a direct threat to America’s economy and national security. The impulse for America might be to turn its back on the Middle East in frustration over the George W. Bush administration’s mishandling of the Iraq War and other engagements with Arab and Muslim countries. But such a move, Pollack asserts, will only exacerbate problems. He counters with the idea that we must continue to make the Middle East a priority in our policy, but in a humbler, more humane, more realistic, and more cohesive way.

Pollack argues that Washington’s greatest sin in its relations with the Middle East has been its persistent unwillingness to make the sustained and patient effort needed to help the people of the Middle East overcome the crippling societal problems facing their governments and societies. As a result, the United States has never had a workable comprehensive policy in the region, just a skein of half-measures intended either to avoid entanglement or to contain the influence of the Soviet Union.

Beyond identifying the stagnation of civic life in Arab and Muslim states and the cumulative effect of our misguided policies, Pollack offers a long-term strategy to ameliorate the political, economic, and social problems thatunderlie the region’s many crises. Through his suggested policies, America can engage directly with the governments of the Middle East and indirectly with its people by means of cultural exchange, commerce, and other “soft” approaches. He carefully examines each of the region’s most contested areas, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and explains how the United States can address each through mutually reinforcing policies.

At a time when the nation will be facing critical decisions about our continued presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, A Path Out of the Desert is guaranteed to stimulate debate about America’s humanitarian, diplomatic, and military involvement in the Middle East.

The Washington Post - Greg Myre

Kenneth M. Pollack, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, has written an authoritative new book that spells out the full range of threats the United States faces in the region and offers prudent advice on how to defuse them.

Publishers Weekly

Former CIA analyst Pollack (The Threatening Storm) has devised an eloquent argument in favor of long-term American involvement in Middle East politics, arguing that American security and prosperity is contingent upon an orderly and democratic Middle East. A self-professed "liberal internationalist," the author advocates sustained engagement rather than a foreign policy that has been characterized by "reluctance" and is consistently "episodic, tried on the cheap, and shortsighted." Pollack keeps his sweeping survey lucid and readable and is refreshingly frank with the reader ("let's not kid ourselves: America's first and most important interest in the Middle East is the region's oil exports"). This book provides a thorough-if disheartening-diagnosis of the region's ailments-the burgeoning unemployment, poverty and population growth-and analyzes how repressive governments, a hidebound education system and a self-serving bureaucracy have destroyed the region's potential for foreign investment. Pollack's "grand strategy"-a decades-long commitment similar to the Marshall Plan to transform despotisms into democracies that promote economic expansion-should stimulate animated and necessary debate and a recasting of America's role in the Middle East. (July 22)

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

Kirkus Reviews

A former supporter of the Iraq invasion, former National Security Council director for Gulf Affairs Pollack (The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, 2004, etc.) now admits it was a terrible idea. Yet America must not only remain involved in the Middle East, he declares, it must bring harmony to that volatile region. Oil is our overwhelming interest in the area, the author states bluntly. Western economies are addicted to it, price increases provoke recessions (including the present one) and exhortations to reduce our dependence on foreign oil are mindless platitudes since it will be impossible for decades. Today's Middle Eastern leaders work responsibly to keep the supply stable, he adds. Unfortunately, all are autocrats, and their seething populations hate them no less than they hate the United States. Pollack emphasizes that America's greatest threat from the region is not terrorism or oil blackmail by current governments but revolutionary chaos that would disrupt oil supplies and skyrocket the price. Perhaps the most disturbing chapters describe Middle Eastern demographics. Despite oil wealth, most of the region's people are desperately poor, getting poorer and reproducing more rapidly than those in sub-Saharan Africa. Corrupt political systems discourage reform. Entrepreneurship is virtually absent. Tiny Israel exports more manufactured goods than 20 Islamic nations from Morocco to Iran. Readers may or may not agree with Pollack's remedies, but they will certainly wonder about their practicality. All mandate decades of involvement and no small expense as we patiently guide these countries toward democracy, the rule of law, free markets and honest government. Ourleaders must behave like statesmen instead of politicians (i.e., be willing to share unpleasant news with the public), and our citizens must be willing to sacrifice short-term benefits for long-term gains. Alas, readers may conclude that none of the current presidential candidates shows evidence of such statesmanship and it's doubtful the electorate would vote for any who did. A persuasive but painful solution for dealing with the mess in the Middle East.

Book about: New American Chef or Educating Peter

Founders on the Founders: Word Portraits from the American Revolutionary Era

Author: John P Kaminski

"I never indeed thought him an honest, frank-dealing man, but considered him as a crooked gun, or other perverted machine, whose aim or stroke you could never be sure of."—Thomas Jefferson on Aaron Burr

"[A]lways an honest Man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."—Benjamin Franklin on John Adams

"I do now know [Jefferson] to be one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America."—John Nicholas to George Washington

"I shall really regret to leave Mr. Jefferson, he is one of the choice ones of the Earth."—Abigail Adams

More than two centuries after the ground-breaking events of the American struggle for independence, its key figures strike us more as players in a myth than as people who lived, worked, and interacted with one another. To recover the human dimension of the founders, we need look no further than their own words. Through a series of revealing quotations, historian John P. Kaminski profiles thirty of the era's best-known individuals, including Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry ("all tongue without either head or heart," according to Thomas Jefferson), as well as the early presidents and their first ladies.

The discourse is unfailingly respectful, and yet this is no mutual admiration society. The subjects are not afraid to be sharp about one another, but this only makes their words of praise more convincing and poignant. One could hardly ask for a more clear-eyed, and touching, tribute than Thomas Jefferson's appraisal of George Washington: "He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with thecalmest unconcern.... His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man."

Beginning with an introductory essay that provides an overview of the relationships between the founders, the book then presents each individual, providing a biographical sketch and a chronologically arranged series of quotations, clarifying not only each person's place within the independence movement but the contours of their character. The authors strike us with their candor, their insight, and their eloquence as they make their subjects come alive for us. As this book reveals, greatness is not only a matter of responding to the times; the people themselves were remarkable.

Words That Work or America Speaks

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear

Author: Frank Luntz

The nation's premier communications expert shares his wisdom on how the words we choose can change the course of business, of politics, and of life in this country

In Words That Work, Luntz offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the tactical use of words and phrases affects what we buy, who we vote for, and even what we believe in. With chapters like "The Ten Rules of Successful Communication" and "The 21 Words and Phrases for the 21st Century," he examines how choosing the right words is essential.

Nobody is in a better position to explain than Frank Luntz: He has used his knowledge of words to help more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies grow. He'll tell us why Rupert Murdoch's six-billion-dollar decision to buy DirectTV was smart because satellite was more cutting edge than "digital cable," and why pharmaceutical companies transitioned their message from "treatment" to "prevention" and "wellness."

If you ever wanted to learn how to talk your way out of a traffic ticket or talk your way into a raise, this book's for you.

Dr. Frank Luntz is one of the most respected communication professionals in America. With his firm, Luntz Maslansky Strategic Research, he has conducted more than 1,500 surveys and focus groups for corporate, public affairs, and political clients in twenty countries. Luntz lives in McLean, Virginia.

Los Angeles Times

The media made a linguistic Svengali out of GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz, who was credited with getting the Republicans to adopt phrases such as 'opportunity scholarships' for vouchers and 'climate change' for global warming. Wherever you went, Democrats were talking about the importance of 'framing' and 're-messaging'

Investors Business Daily

Change "estate tax" to "death tax" and you see how words pack an emotional punch. Luntz knows about delivering word blows.

The Wall Street Journal

Words That Work deserves an attentive read. Mr. Luntz offers a fair amount of good advice to anyone who must communicate publicly.

The Financial Times

A fine book that teaches us a great deal about politics in today's America and about the minutely analysed mindset of the electorate.

Washington Post.com

One of the nation's leading pollsters and political language specialists.

Businessweek Magazine

Luntz' forte is constructing the phrase that persuades -- always a skill in demand in Corporate America.

Publishers Weekly

After repeating his mantra-"it's not what you say, it's what people hear"-so often in this book, you'd think that Republican pollster Luntz would have taken his own advice to heart. Yet in spite of an opening anecdote that superficially attempts a balanced tone, the book as a whole truly reads more like a manual for right-wing positioning. Even in the sections where he is less partisan, Luntz's advice is not particularly insightful. For instance, his first chapter, on "Ten Rules of Effective Language," starts by instructing readers to use small words and short sentences in their communications. The least effective section in the book is the chapter on "Personal Language for Personal Scenarios," where Luntz advocates manipulative strategies for getting out of traffic tickets, boarding airplanes at the last minute and apologizing to one's wife with the "miracle elixir" of flowers. The most readable and redeeming feature is the two case studies, where Luntz demonstrates his skill as a communicator by identifying real-world communications successes and failures. Unfortunately, by the time nonpartisan readers reach these chapters, they will have already lost patience. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Frederick W. Smith
"If you really want to capture the power of communication, "Words that Work" can help you."
—Chairman & CEO, FedEx Corporation

Al Franken
"Language is like music. Unfortunately, the Republicans have a Paul McCartney in the person of Frank Luntz. Somehow, we Democrats got stuck with Yoko Ono.

Senator John Kerry
"Frank Luntz understands the power of words to move public opinion and communicate big ideas. Any Democrat who writes off his analysis and decades of experience just because he works for the other side is making a big mistake. His lessons don't have a party label. The only question is, where's our Frank Luntz?

Steve Wynn
If you can't afford to hire Frank Luntz, you have to read Words that Work.

Tony Robbins
Words can injure our egos and inflame our hearts. They can shape our beliefs, impacting the actions of generations to come. For the last 15 years, Frank Luntz has been behind some of the most important words ever spoken. this book is no different - a MUST read!

Interesting textbook:

America Speaks: The Historic 2008 Election

Author: USA Today

Triumph Books has joined forces with ABC News and USA TODAY to create a commemorative volume that will be on the wish list of every voter -- America Speaks, a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute wrap-up of the historic 2008 presidential election. Packed with gorgeous color photographs and buoyed by the insightful journalism of two of the world's news giants, this must-have book will examine every aspect of the riveting campaign. Readers will also travel through "50 States in 50 Days" on the historic joint ABC News/USA TODAY tour of the nation, which captures the voices of the voters as they weigh the merits of the candidates and the challenges being faced by the nation.

In addition to Gibson's foreword and Paulson's preface, a special introductory section will feature essays by some of ABC's most popular journalists reflecting on their campaign experiences, including:

Robin Roberts, anchor, Good Morning America
Cynthia McFadden, anchor, Nightline
Jake Tapper, chief political correspondent, ABC News
Ron Claiborne, anchor, Good Morning America Weekend
David Muir, anchor, World News Weekend
Dan Harris, anchor, World News Weekend
Kate Snow, anchor, Good Morning America Weekend

America Speaks also includes a companion DVD introduced by Charles Gibson of ABC News that provides a summary of the very best of "50 States in 50 Days."

My Soul Looks Back in Wonder or Tragic Legacy

My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience

Author: Juan Williams

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

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Foreword	xvii
	Introduction: The Soul of Change	1
Section I	The Weight
[1]	I Am a Man	19
[2]	A Dream Is a Good Place to Start	25
[3]	King of the Blues	31
[4]	Twisted Steel and Sex Appeal	37
[5]	Gentleman of the Press	40
[6]	Skin Dive	44
[7]	American Gandhi	48
[8]	The Birth of Elvis	55
[9]	The Jump-off Point	60
[10]	"Like Little Tortures Each Day"	65
Section II	We Shall Not Be Moved
[11]	A Blinding Flash Opened Our Eyes	75
[12]	Justice Never Sleeps	79
[13]	The Veil of Amnesia	84
[14]	Heaven Can Wait	92
[15]	Cracking the System	98
[16]	Louisiana Moon	104
[17]	Wake Up, Washington!	111
[18]	The Brutal Truth	118
[19]	Mother Courage	125
[20]	Hour of Power	129
[21]	Love Story in Black and White	134
[22]	Hard-Wired for Freedom	141
[23]	Help from on High	148
[24]	At History's Elbow	153
Section III	The Wings of the Future
[25]	Founding Sisters	161
[26]	Unprincipled Principal	167
[27]	Shooting for Big Fish	173
[28]	Wheels of Progress	178
[29]	Threads in the Civil Rights Quilt	182
[30]	Rewriting the Lies	188
[31]	The Latino Underground Railroad	192
[32]	A More Perfect Union	199
[33]	A Living Hope	203
	Afterword	211

Interesting textbook:

Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

Author: Glenn Greenwald

The first true character study of a lost president and his disastrous legacy

In this fascinating, timely book, Glenn Greenwald examines the Bush presidency and its long-term effect on the nation, charting the rise and steep fall of the current administration, dissecting the rhetoric, and revealing the faulty ideals upon which George W. Bush built his policies. Enlightening and eye-opening, this is a powerful look at the man whose incapability and cowboy logic have left America at risk.

Kirkus Reviews

A constitutional-law attorney submits a blistering, highly tendentious brief against President George W. Bush. Greenwald (How Would a Patriot Act?, 2006) unambiguously declares the Bush legacy "one of colossal failure" due almost entirely to the president's response to the attacks of 9/11. According to the author, echoing what has become a well-worn trope on the Left, this response unmasked Bush's Manichean world view, a simplistic proclivity to see events in terms of Good and Evil that precludes any possibility of reexamination or change. This cramped vision, Greenwald argues, is reinforced by the President's "hungry, crazed, warmongering 'base' " composed of Middle East oil interests, Christian evangelicals and an Israel-centric strain of neoconservatives. The combined interests of these forces, requiring a seemingly endless stream of enemies, accounts for the restriction of our civil liberties, the intimidation of the press, the muzzling of dissent, the alienation of our allies. Where others might congratulate Bush for his moral clarity, Greenwald sees him as the leader of an administration obsessed with its own power. Among his more incendiary charges: Bush wanted to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to demonstrate "he is more powerful than the law"; he has replaced his alcohol addiction with fervent evangelicalism; and any U.S. action against Iran will be dictated not by geopolitical considerations, but rather by the "President's personality." One endless denunciation follows another in prose so overheated and with judgments so uniformly negative and absolute as to mimic the very worldview the author rails against. What might have made a rousing article for, say, TheNation, collapses at book length, a victim of its own relentless, wild-eyed partisanship. Red meat for Bush haters; a tedious, predictable bore for everyone else.