Monday, November 30, 2009

Spying on Ireland or Becoming Winston Churchill

Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality during the Second World War

Author: Eunan OHalpin

Irish neutrality during the Second World War presented Britain with significant challenges to its security. Exploring how British agencies identified and addressed these problems, this book reveals how Britain simultaneously planned sabotage in and spied on Ireland, and at times sought to damage the neutral state's reputation internationally through black propaganda operations. It analyses the extent of British knowledge of Axis and other diplomatic missions in Ireland, and shows the crucial role of diplomatic code-breaking in shaping British policy. The book also underlines just how much Ireland both interested and irritated Churchill throughout the war.
Rather than viewing this as a uniquely Anglo-Irish experience, Eunan O'Halpin argues that British activities concerning Ireland should be placed in the wider context of intelligence and security problems that Britain faced in other neutral states, particularly Afghanistan and Persia. Taking a comparative approach, he illuminates how Britain dealt with challenges in these countries through a combination of diplomacy, covert gathering of intelligence, propaganda, and intimidation. The British perspective on issues in Ireland becomes far clearer when discussed in terms of similar problems Britain faced with neutral states worldwide.
Drawing heavily on British and American intelligence records, many disclosed here for the first time, Eunan O'Halpin presents the first country study of British intelligence to describe and analyse the impact of all the secret agencies during the war. He casts fresh light on British activities in Ireland, and on the significance of both espionage and cooperation between intelligence agenciesfor developing wider relations between the two countries.



Book review: Greenspans Bubbles or Small Business Owners Manual

Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor

Author: Michael McMenamin

Today a forgotten figure, Bourke Cockran was acclaimed during his lifetime as America's greatest orator. He was also the lover of Jenny Churchill - Winston's mother - after the death of Lord Randolph. And, for twelve years (1895 to 1906), he was the young Winston's mentor. Until now, the story of the extraordinary and crucial relationship between them has not been told. At one level, the story is about politics, exploring the ways the young Churchill adopted Cockran's political and economic views - on democracy, capitalism, the Gold Standard, Free Trade, Socialism: issues that Churchill was to make his own. On another level, the story is biographical, chronicling the meetings between the men, and reproducing - for the first time in full - their private correspondence. It is the story of Churchill growing up. On yet another level, it is historical, vividly evoking the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, when Churchill was often in the thick of the action - fighting at the Khyber Pass in India or escaping from a Boer camp in Pretoria (and becoming a household name as a consequence) - all the while keeping up his correspondence with Cockran. The drama of such events is part of the book's irresistible appeal.

The book is written with a dramatic flair, bringing out the personalities of the two men. Each section begins, like a historical novel, with a recreation of a crucial moment in their lives. The general narrative is chronologically structured, with a powerful momentum, tracing the two men's growing intimacy over the years and interweaving their letters and meetings with the historical events in which they were involved. The story began in 1895 in New York, where Cockran took the young Winston under his wing. The following years, marked by turmoil in Cuba and Ireland, included the 1896 Presidential election, the great public debate about the gold standard and Cockran's private insistence to Churchill that principle must always be placed over party (something Churchill was to remember later when he crossed the floor of the House). 1899 saw Churchill's involvement in the Boer War, and his dramatic escape from a Boer prison camp, followed by his election to Parliament, visits to Cockran in America and, between 1901 and 1906, hard political fighting over the crucial issue of free trade, over which Churchill eventually left the Conservatives to join the Liberal party. The final years of Churchill and Cockran's friendship were dramatised by a number of public events - the American occupation of the Philippines, the victory of the Liberal Party in the British General Election, the First World War, about which they continued to correspond - but dominated by private ones: Cockran's remarriage, the death of Churchill's mother, and Churchill's own marriage. Throughout, the two men remained close, and, to the end, Cockran's influence on Churchill was unique and profound.



Sunday, November 29, 2009

Indian Orphanages or The Dark Side of Democracy

Indian Orphanages

Author: Marilyn Irvin Holt

With their deep tradition of tribal and kinship ties, Native Americans had lived for centuries with little use for the concept of an unwanted child. But besieged by reservation life and boarding school acculturation, many tribes—with the encouragement of whites—came to accept the need for orphanages.

The first book to focus exclusively on this subject, Marilyn Holt's study interweaves Indian history, educational history, family history, and child welfare policy to tell the story of Indian orphanages within the larger context of the orphan asylum in America. She relates the history of these orphanages and the cultural factors that produced and sustained them, shows how orphans became a part of native experience after Euro-American contact, and explores the manner in which Indian societies have addressed the issue of child dependency.

Holt examines in depth a number of orphanages from the 1850s to1940s—particularly among the "Five Civilized Tribes" in Oklahoma, as well as among the Seneca in New York and the Ojibway and Sioux in South Dakota. She shows how such factors as disease, federal policies during the Civil War, and economic depression contributed to their establishment and tells how white social workers and educational reformers helped undermine native culture by supporting such institutions. She also explains how orphanages differed from boarding schools by being either tribally supported or funded by religious groups, and how they fit into social welfare programs established by federal and state policies.

The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 overturned years of acculturation policy by allowing Native Americans to finally reclaim their children, and Holt helps readers to better understand the importance of that legislation in the wake of one of the more unfortunate episodes in the clash of white and Indian cultures.

Publishers Weekly

Riding the wave of interest in adoption issues and Native American history, Holt (The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America) examines the development of orphanages in a half-dozen major Native American tribes, covering the late 1800s, the Depression and the decades up to the 1978 federal reversal on Indian adoption policy. From the outset, community-oriented Indian society bewildered white missionaries and social workers, who deemed deviations from the nuclear family pernicious. Yet "orphans" didn't exist in, for instance, Shawnee culture, where tribal "grandmothers" helped raise the young, and families welcomed parentless children. Holt's balanced view of orphans' dual experience being equipped for mainstream culture and stripped of their own distinguishes her account. While most poor ethnics were subject to Americanization, Indians had it worse: many whites, bent on eliminating Native Americans, targeted orphanages, often the only available school. While many may have been awful (Holt doesn't say much about daily life), the orphanages kept kids on the reservation, unlike subsequent programs. Holt combs official reports, teasing her story out of dry numbers (enrollment stats, spending per pupil) from several orphanages. Thematic organization and further Indian perspectives (understandably scarce) would have made her book more accessible and compelling. Still, it's a useful, if turgid, volume for specialists. 19 photos not seen by PW. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Holt (The Orphan Trains) carefully examines the establishment of Indian orphanages in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a previously little-studied subject. She discusses the emergence of orphanages in tribal communities ranging from the Seneca to the Sioux and their provision of basic care, including education. In reality, those orphanages underscored the destructive interchange with Euro-American peoples. Orphanages became necessary, Holt contends, after "war, disease, starvation, relocation, removal, ill-conceived federal policies, and missionary influences" had transformed traditional networks and kinships. Many non-Indian administrators viewed orphanages as a means to ward off complete immersion in white society. All the while, the orphanages worked to acculturate Indian children into the mainstream. Beginning in the 1930s, social welfare programs, foster care, and adoptions supplanted orphanages, whose closure often resulted in children being separated from "their own people." Not until 1978, with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, did Congress recognize "the transmission of Indian culture to future generations." Though the chronological makeup can be confusing and the prose occasionally leaden, this is a solid, well-researched study that scholars will appreciate. Recommended for academic libraries. R.C. Cottrell, California State Univ., Chico Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.



Table of Contents:
Introduction : roots of protest1
1Crumbling culture18
2First solution : Seneca49
3Orphans among us : Cherokee84
4After the war : Chickasaw115
5The missionaries : Choctaw and Creek148
6Tribal dissolution : Oklahoma182
7Catholic outposts : Ojibway and Sioux216
Epilogue : final transition251

Interesting book: Our Iceberg Is Melting or The Gone Fishin Portfolio

The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

Author: Michael Mann

This comprehensive study of international ethnic cleansing provides in-depth coverage of its occurrences in Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, as well as cases of lesser violence in early modern Europe and in contemporary India and Indonesia. After presenting a general theory of why serious conflict emerges and how it escalates into mass murder, Michael Mann offers suggestions on how to avoid such escalation in the future. Michael Mann is the author of Fascists (Cambridge, 2004) and The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge 1986).

Publishers Weekly

In addressing the origins of ethnic cleansing, UCLA sociologist Mann (Fascism) locates differing stages of political participation as a major factor. He begins with stable authoritarian regimes (e.g., Tito's Yugoslavia) that exclude participation; when such regimes break down, there is a period of everybody scrambling for power and trying to exclude somebody else with the "else" usually defined on ethnic lines. Other examples include Armenia, the Holocaust and Rwanda, as well as India (the Sikhs and Muslims) and Indonesia (the Chinese). Eventually, the author's somewhat optimistic scenario argues, we arrive at stable participatory societies, with everybody somewhat included and limits set on what can be done to exclude groups (the Voting Rights Act of 1964 in the U.S.). Free from sociological jargon and abundant in historical data, this study sufficiently allows lay readers access. It can be difficult at moments to tell if Mann's prediction of the high body count in the Third World's coming century or so of ethnic cleansing is Eurocentric, callous or grimly realistic, but such moments always resolve into that last choice. Mann proposes some feasible remedies and scales of intervention. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Ethnic cleansing is typically seen as the work of primitive evildoers operating outside of modernity. In this important and provocative book, the distinguished sociologist Mann argues that murderous ethnic cleansing is in fact an ugly facet of our modern democratic age-that "it belongs to our own civilization and to us." Mann suggests that democratization in particular multiethnic settings can create situations in which "rule by the people" is defined in ethnic terms, leading a majority group to tyrannize minorities. A "danger zone" is reached when rival ethnic groups lay claim to the same territory, and do so with some legitimacy and prospect of success. Often an outgrowth of an unrelated crisis such as a war, ethnic cleansing breaks out when the weaker side fights because of the promise of outside aid-as in the Yugoslav, Rwandan, Kashmiri, and Chechen cases-or when the stronger side believes it can cleanse a state at considerable profit and little risk-as in the Armenian and Jewish genocides. Mann's account is not the last word on ethnic cleansing, but it certainly is among the most sophisticated yet.



Saturday, November 28, 2009

Mortal Evidence or The Second Plane September 11

Mortal Evidence: The Forensics Behind Nine Shocking Cases

Author: Cyril H Wecht

Foreword by Dr. Henry C. Lee

World-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht leads you into the heart of nine fascinating investigations, focusing each chapter on a single engrossing drama. He reveals the most startling evidence that shows why JonBenet Ramsey's killer most likely came from within her home, why O. J. Simpson probably had an accomplice in the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, shocking revelations about Robert Berdella's grisly torture and sex-abuse crimes against young men, and many intriguing facts about other infamous cases.

If you find the fictional plots of such dramas as C. S. I. exciting, you will be amazed by the true stories told by Dr. Wecht, with the help of two top-flight veteran reporters, Greg Saitz and Mark Curriden.



Table of Contents:
Foreword   Dr. Henry C. Lee     7
Preface     11
Acknowledgments     17
Teenage Baby Killers? The Truth behind the Death of Baby Boy Grossberg     19
A Fallen Beauty Queen: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?     43
Sex, Drugs, and a Dead Casino Magnate: How Ted Binion Died     87
The Real Fugitive: Sam Sheppard and His Wife's Murder     125
Shoot-out in Miracle Valley: The Killing of Religious Sect Members     157
Standing by Her Man: Tammy Wynette's Final Song     185
The Trials of O. J.: The Final Verdict     199
Robert Berdella: Madman or Just Murderer?     243
Heavy Metal Murder: The Curious Demise of Robert Curley     275
Afterword     297
Notes     299
Bibliography     307
Index     309

New interesting textbook: Dear Mrs Roosevelt or U S Presidents Factbook

The Second Plane. September 11: Terror and Boredom

Author: Martin Amis

A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative, and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time.

At the heart of this collection is the long essay “Terror and Boredom,” an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West’s flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran, and Tony Blair’s lingering departure from Downing Street (and also his trips to Washington and Iraq). Amis’s reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a far-ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: “The Last Days of Muhammed Atta,” its subject self-evident, and “In the Palace of the End,” narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant’s double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture, and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts.

Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his common sense, wide reading, and astute perspective, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read—informed, elegant, surprising—and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with.

The Washington Post - Warren Bass

…the argument in The Second Plane bristles with intelligence.

Publishers Weekly

These chronologically ordered essays and stories on the September 11 attacks proceed from initial bewilderment to coruscating contempt for radical Islam. Novelist Amis (House of Meetings) rejects all religious belief as "without reason and without dignity" and condemns "Islamism" as an especially baleful variant. Amis attacks Islamism's tenets as "[a]nti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic" and characterizes its adherents, from founding ideologue Sayyid Qutb to the ordinary suicide bomber, as sexually frustrated misogynists entranced by a "cult of death." He also takes swipes at Bush and the Iraq war, which he describes as botched and tragically counterproductive, if well intentioned, but scorns those who draw a moral equivalence between Western misdeeds and the jihadist agenda. Amis's concerns are cultural and aesthetic as well as existential: terrorism threatens a reign of "boredom" in the guise of tedious airport security protocols, pedantic conspiracy theories and the dogma-shackled "dependent mind" fostered by Islamist theocracy. As much as Amis's opinions are scathing, blunt and occasionally strident, his prose is subtle, elegant and witty-and certainly never boring. (Apr.)

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

Stephen K. Shaw - Library Journal

Amis has a reputation, well deserved, for being an intellectual provocateur. This reputation will only grow with the publication of these latest musings on life in what he calls "the Age of Vanished Normalcy." As John Updike, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and others have before him, Amis seeks to make sense of a world in which passenger airplanes are used as weapons of destruction and religious fanaticism has muscled out reasoned deliberation. His critique of Islamism may seem enlightened to some, imbecilic to others. Amis rejects the chimera of moral equivalence between modern, secular civilization and radical Islamic jihadists. He argues that he is not Islamophobic but rather Islamismophobic-that is, opposed to militant Islam. Amis contends that the West shares no common discourse with jihadism and contrasts the Western, secular mind of intellectual curiosity with the strident, noncurious mind of the likes of Mohamed Atta. The most impressive of these 14 pieces is "Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind," in which Amis mounts his own crusade against religious violence and secular triumphalism. Amis is intentionally and controversially combative in this work, which makes it essential reading. Recommended for all libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Fourteen essays on the theme that "our understanding of September 11 is incremental and can never hope to be intact and entire."Islamism (Islamic fascism to some, Islamofascism to others), notes the ever-provocative British novelist and essayist Amis (House of Meetings, 2007, etc.), may be associated with Saudi Arabia, but it had its modern origins in Greeley, Colo., in 1949. "The story is grotesque and incredible," he writes, "but then so are its consequences." One of those curious consequences, familiar to anyone who has experienced war, terror or extreme stress, is boredom, for in such endeavors when one is not scared witless there is by definition not much going on. The war against Islamist terror has, Amis hazards, an especially boring additional component, our presumed inability to begin to communicate with "a mind with which we share no discourse." Amis's alignment as a self-described "Islamismophobe" puts him in a similar orbit with sometime friend and sometime rival Christopher Hitchens, save that, unlike Hitchens, Amis does not support the war in Iraq, as one of the pieces, an in-flight interview with Tony Blair, makes clear. (But then, that interview hints, Blair didn't much like the war either.) Amis is rather less blustery than Hitchens; one piece is a surprisingly empathetic attempt to get inside 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta's mind. As always, Amis proves eminently readable, his observations enlightening. Who other would ascribe to Kuwait City an "almost artistic cheerlessness" that speaks to the deadening touch of women-hating fundamentalism "under a sinister mist of damp dust"? Amis may not make any friends among the PC set, but he makes clear and inarguable the fact thatthe Islamist enemy is an enemy of reason, just like Hitler and Stalin. "The only thing Islamism can dominate, for now, is the evening news," Amis concludes in good fighting spirit. His book fires a welcome, left-tending salvo.



Thursday, November 26, 2009

Freire for the Classroom or Compassionate Statistics

Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching

Author: Ira Shor

An anthology of essays by teachers using Paulo Freire's methods in their classrooms.



Books about: Regolazioni di sicurezze in breve

Compassionate Statistics: Applied Quantitative Analysis for Social Services (With Exercises and Instructions for SPSS)

Author: Vincent E Faherty

Compassionate Statistics: Applied Quantitative Analysis for Social Services (With Instructions for SPSS 14.0) is an attempt to "de-mythologize" a content area that is both essential for professional social service practitioners, yet dreaded by some of the most experienced among them. Using friendly, straightforward language as well as concrete illustrations and exercises from social service practice, author Vincent E. Faherty catapults students and experienced professionals to a pragmatic level where they can handle quantitative analysis for all their research and evaluation needs.

Key Features

  • Provides comprehensive coverage of the most important aspects of quantitative analysis: This is a complete, yet pragmatic, resource for social service professionals to use standard descriptive and inferential statistical techniques.
  • Offers an accessible format: Using unpretentious and plain language, this book introduces essential statistical procedures, one-at-a-time, in relatively short chapters in order to assist recall and facilitate new learning.
  • Applies statistical content to social service practice situations: Concrete applications are drawn from counseling, criminal justice, human services, social work, therapeutic recreation and vocational rehabilitation.
  • Presents case illustrations of how statistical material is reported in professional literature: Since social service professionals need to write up the results of their quantitative analysis, this book provides actual illustrations of how the various statistical procedures and tests are presented inpublished articles.
  • Addresses the use of SPSS on each covered statistical procedure and test: Specific directions are given so students can use the latest version of SPSS to complete each assigned exercise.
  • Includes in-chapter exercises: A series of realistic data sets that students can use to perform a number of planned exercises are offered in each chapter.
Intended Audience
This is an excellent core or supplemental text for a variety of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses such as Statistics for Social Services, Applied Statistics, Quantitative Analysis for Social Services, Statistics for Social Work, Social Science Research, Research Methods, Program Evaluation, and Grant Writing in the departments of counseling, human services, social services, social work, therapeutic recreation, and vocational rehabilitation.



Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction, Overview, and Nondefinitions
2. Levels of Data: Nominal, Ordinal, and Scale
3. Presenting Data in Tables
4. Presenting Data in Figures
5. The 3 Ms: Mean, Median, and Mode
6. Standard Deviations, Ranges, and Quartiles
7. Other Descriptive Statistics
8. Probability and Statistical Significance
9. Chi-Square Test of Independence
10. Correlation: Scattergrams
11. Correlation: Spearman's rho and Pearson's r
12. t-Test for Paired Samples
13. t-Test for Independent Samples
14. One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) With Post Hoc Tests
15. Nonparametric Alternatives to Common Parametric Tests Appendix A: Getting Started With SPSS Appendix B: SPSS Data Sets Appendix C: Outline of Common Univariate and Bivariate Statistical Procedures Appendix D: Outline of Common Parametric and Nonparametric Inferential Tests Appendix E: Table of Random Numbers With Instructions Appendix F: Glossary of Terms Index About the Author Appendix E: Table of Random Numbers with Instructions Appendix F: Glossary of Terms About the Author

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Financial Statecraft or Freedoms Power

Financial Statecraft: The Role of Financial Markets in American Foreign Policy

Author: Benn Steil

As trade flows expanded and trade agreements proliferated after World War II, governments—most notably the United States—came increasingly to use their power over imports and exports to influence the behavior of other countries. But trade is not the only way in which nations interact economically. Over the past two decades, another form of economic exchange has risen to a level of vastly greater significance and political concern: the purchase and sale of financial assets across borders. Nearly $2 trillion worth of currency now moves cross-border every day, roughly 90 percent of which is accounted for by financial flows unrelated to trade in goods and services—a stunning inversion of the figures in 1970. The time is ripe to ask fundamental questions about what Benn Steil and Robert Litan have coined as “financial statecraft,” or those aspects of economic statecraft directed at influencing international capital flows. How precisely has the American government practiced financial statecraft? How effective have these efforts been? And how can they be made more effective? The authors provide penetrating and incisive answers in this timely and stimulating book.

Foreign Affairs

Steil and Litan note an increasing tendency by the United States to try to influence international capital flows in order to further its foreign policy goals — whether to punish errant countries, inhibit the proliferation of nuclear weapons, slow the financing of terrorism, or prevent the laundering of drug money. The authors call this "financial statecraft" and provide a trenchant critical analysis of these efforts, which often turn out to involve symbolic politics at its worst: they have no impact on the stated objective, because the scope and operation of financial markets are now worldwide; they harm U.S. economic interests; and in some cases, they harm the alleged beneficiaries (refugees in the Sudan, for example). But the authors also argue that in certain respects the United States has engaged in too little financial statecraft. They attribute the financial crises of emerging markets during the past decade largely to the existence of separate national currencies and make a spirited case for "dollarization" — the adoption of the U.S. dollar, or perhaps the euro, as a replacement for national currencies by many developing countries. The United States, they argue, should facilitate that policy by sharing with such adopters the modest financial gains, called seigniorage, that arise from issuing a currency widely used by the public.



Read also John Barleycorn or Lemongrass and Sweet Basil

Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism

Author: Paul Starr

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and intellectual argues for liberalism as the only viable response to the political and economic challenges of the modern world.

Liberalism in America is in greater peril than at any other time in recent history. Conservatives treat it as an epithet, and even some liberals have confused it with sentimentality and socialism. But Paul Starr, one of America's leading intellectuals, claims that, properly understood, liberalism is a sturdy public philosophy, deeply rooted in our traditions, capable of making America a freer and more secure country.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" remains as good a definition of liberalism's aims today as it was when Thomas Jefferson borrowed the language of John Locke for the Declaration of Independence. From its origins as constitutional liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the complexities of today's global political systems liberalism has provided the basis of the most prosperous and powerful states in the world. At a time when conservative policies are weakening America's long-term fiscal, economic, and international strength as well as its liberties, reinstating the power of liberalism is more urgent than ever.

The New York Times - Michael Lind

Freedom's Power is an impressive achievement that deserves to be pondered by the critics of contemporary American liberalism no less than by its supporters.

The Washington Post - Lynn Hunt

Riding to the rescue of those still traumatized by 20 years or more of successful demonization by the Republicans, Paul Starr…offers a lucid and well-informed explanation of the origins, history and current prospects of liberalism. Starr's achievement is not minor, for liberalism is devilishly difficult to pin down…Starr has more in mind, however, than a useful historical survey; he aims to provide a guide for the present. Believing that American conservatives have failed to achieve much of substance while in power these past decades, he senses an "opportunity to rebuild a political majority by showing how liberal ideas make sense for America and by reopening a conversation with people who believe that liberals have not shown any concern or respect for them." He is much more successful at justifying liberal ideas than at reaching out to skeptics.

Publishers Weekly

Part political theory and part intellectual history, this book tracks the development of liberalism as the world's dominant political tradition and argues for its continued ascendancy as the best guarantor of individual rights and prosperity on the global stage. Starr, a Princeton sociology and public affairs professor and founding editor of the American Prospect, explains modern liberalism as an evolutionary process, rooted in classical laissez-faire liberalism, and gradually accreting a greater role for the state to provide a social safety net, defend equal rights for all and institute true democratic pluralism. Defending liberalism from its socialist as well as its conservative critics, Starr sees his ideology as a middle path, harnessing the creative power of the free market while tempering some of its capriciousness. A central thesis is that "[t]he peculiar internal tension of liberal constitutions is that they constrain power even as they authorize it—that is, they attempt to curb the despotic power and ambitions of individual rulers and officials and, by doing so, to permit stronger systemic capacities." The first section of the book discusses the causes and consequences of liberal revolutions in Britain, America and France, while later chapters cover recent events, including the 2006 congressional elections. Complex macroeconomic, demographic and philosophical trends are presented engagingly and understandably for casual readers and political buffs alike. (Apr.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Foreign Affairs

Starr, a distinguished political sociologist, offers an eloquent restatement of the principles and promise of modern liberalism. In recent decades, the "liberal project" in the United States seems to have lost its way, while conservatism has come into its own. Starr sets out to recover the guiding ideas of American liberalism and defend their relevance today. Part of his book is a sweeping intellectual history of "constitutional liberalism" -- a retelling of the great movements of Anglo-American liberal political development, in which citizenship rights and limited government were secured. He argues that liberalism is not simply a set of principles about freedom and equality but a "discipline of power" -- ideas about how to both control and create power. Accordingly, the singular achievement of liberalism has been restricting arbitrary power and thereby unleashing the ability of society to generate wealth, knowledge, inclusion, and opportunity. Starr acknowledges the decline of liberal innovation in recent the decades, but he resists the conservative charge that New Frontier and Great Society liberalism was tried and failed. To reinvigorate the liberal project, he urges a public philosophy of "partnership," which at home means moving beyond interest-group liberalism and abroad means a return to multilateralism and a community of democracies. Starr's contribution is to help restart the national conversation about the sources of American greatness.

Jack Forman - Library Journal

Written as "a rebuttal to contemporary conservatism and as a corrective to some currents of liberal thought and progressive politics," this intellectual history and political analysis attempts to show that modern liberalism is really a continuation of the classic liberal tradition, emphasizing constitutional government and individual rights. Starr (sociology & public affairs, Princeton Univ.; editor, The American Prospect; The Social Transformation of American Medicine) defines liberalism as "a design of power in support of freedom" and argues clearly and convincingly for liberalism as a middle ground between conservatism and socialism. In discussing the development of classical liberalism and modern democratic liberalism, Starr ranges far and wide over English, French, and American history. In looking at the present, he attacks Bush's unilateralism, insensitivity to the world's environmental problems, and lack of concern for economic equality. He believes that liberalism can regain a national majority by looking at domestic bread-and-butter issues in terms of the national interest rather than the objectives of specific interest groups and by recommitting to a multilateral approach to foreign policy. For academic and larger public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Pulitzer Prize-winner Starr (The Creation of the Media, 2004, etc.) is liberal and proud of it. The editor of The American Prospect offers a decidedly upbeat account of the liberal tradition. It best reflects America's founding ideals of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," argues Starr (Sociology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.), and has proven a workable basis for strong, enduring liberal democracies in our time. In its broadest meaning, he writes, liberalism refers to the principles of constitutional government and individual rights that emerged in the 17th- and 18th-century writings of such thinkers as Locke, Montesquieu and Madison. It animated the American and French Revolutions and led to the birth of the modern liberal state. By constraining arbitrary power and unleashing freedom's power, constitutional liberalism sought to create a free, fair and prosperous society. Beginning in the late-19th century, democratic forces spurred the rise of modern liberalism, with its penchant for government regulation, stronger protection of civil liberties and respect for cultural diversity. While criticized from both the right and left, liberal democracies work, Starr avers. They have proven flexible, pragmatic and successful; they have weathered depressions and world wars. In the 1960s, when many deemed liberalism a failure, they fostered a great moral transformation that rectified injustices, expanded freedom and democracy and changed America for the better. Analyzing the consequences of the Bush administration's conservative policies-growing economic inequality, environmental deterioration, long-term fiscal problems, the Iraq War-the author believes liberals now have anopportunity to build a political majority and lead the nation in a progressive direction. To do so, they must develop organizational strength, achieve intellectual coherence reflecting liberal principles and create a program based on shared prosperity. An informed and eloquent case for liberalism as the American way.