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 InformationWhat People Are Saying
Controversial. --NPR's Fresh Air
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 1The 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
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