Policy Studies for Educational Leaders or Fear and Loathing

Policy Studies for Educational Leaders: An Introduction

Author: Frances C Fowler

This comprehensive book encourages future educational leaders to be proactive rather than reactive, and arms them with an understanding of educational policy and the important political theories upon which it is based. Coverage addresses theory, analysis, development, and implementation of educational policy, with the knowledge base of the typical reader in mind. It explores the reasons for change in educational policy, ways to track its evolution, and techniques for influencing its ultimate destination.Includes updated statistics drawn from the 2000 Census and explores economic changes expected from the business cycle downturn and the effect of war. Features new news stories for analysis—related to chapter content as well as key current issues, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001; New case studies on the teaching of Darwinian evolution and on parent revolts against state testing programs; An entire chapter devoted to policy values and ideology. Extensive coverage on educational policy at the state level. For future educators and educational leaders.

Book review: Social Life of Information or Data Mining

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

Author: Hunter S Thompson

Hilarious, terrifying, insightful, and compulsively readable, these are the articles that Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone magazine while covering the 1972 election campaign of President Richard M. Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George S. McGovern. Hunter focuses largely on the Democratic Party's primaries and the breakdown of the national party as it splits between the different candidates.

With drug-addled alacrity and incisive wit, Thompson turned his jaundiced eye and gonzo heart to the repellent and seductive race for president, deconstructed the campaigns, and ended up with a political vision that is eerily prophetic

The New York Times - Tom Seligson

Thompson's book, with its mixed, frenetic construction, irreverent spirit and, above all, unrelenting sensitivity to the writer's own feelings while on the political road, most effectively conveys the adrenaline-soaked quest that is the American campaign. Crisscrossing the country often two times a day, stopping in hotels, shopping marts and factories in obscure Midwestern towns, Thompson might have been running for office himself. By monitoring his own instincts and observations in the process, he shows us what it must be like for the candidates … Fear and Loathing lets us understand why the men we elect to the Presidency may have needle tracks on their integrity.

The Way to Win or The First 90 Days in Government

The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008

Author: Mark Halperin

In The Way to Win, two of the country’s most accomplished political reporters explain what separates the victors from the victims in the unforgiving environment of modern presidential campaigns.

Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News, and John F. Harris, the national politics editor of The Washington Post, tell the story of how two families–the Bushes and the Clintons–have held the White House for nearly a generation and examine Hillary Clinton’s prospects for extending this record in 2008. Based on years of research, including private campaign memos and White House communications, The Way to Win reveals the surprising details of how the Bushes and Clintons have closely studied each the other’s successes and failures and used these lessons to shape their own strategies for winning elections and wielding power.

In the case of George W. Bush, the strategic genius is Karl C. Rove, arguably the most influential White House aide in history. For the first time, Halperin and Harris cut through the myths and controversies surrounding Rove to illuminate in brilliant, behind-the-scenes detail what he actually does–his Trade Secrets for winning elections.

In the case of the Clintons, the chief strategist is Bill Clinton himself. Drawing on their fifteen years reporting on and interviewing him, Halperin and Harris deconstruct and decipher the Clinton style, identifying the methods that all candidates can use in their pursuit of the White House.

The Way to Win takes a lively and irreverent approach, but Halperin and Harris also show the disturbing ways that American politics has become aFreak Show–their name for a political culture that provides incentives for candidates, activists, interest groups, and the news media to emphasize ideological extremism and personal attack. For the first time, Halperin and Harris describe how Freak Show campaigns orchestrated by the likes of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge forced Al Gore and John Kerry to lose control of their public images (with considerable help from the candidates’ own ineptitude) and lose the White House.

On the brink of what will be one of the most intense, most exciting presidential elections in American history, The Way to Win is the book that armchair political junkies have been waiting for. Filled with peerless analysis and eye-opening revelations from the trenches, it is a must read for everyone who follows American politics.

Publishers Weekly

Halperin (ABC News) and Harris (the Washington Post and The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House) illustrate "trade secrets" to political victory with this penetrating examination of the personal lives and political histories of the biggest names in recent presidential politics. From the losers (John Kerry and Al Gore, defeated because they "lost control of their public images") to the potential winners (Hillary Clinton, who, they assert, will have a significant fund-raising and fame advantage if she runs in 2008), the authors extract canny lessons in political strategy. But they offer particularly valuable insights into inadequately understood players like Matt Drudge, whom the authors credit as one of the greatest forces behind the Clinton impeachment and the Gore and Kerry losses, and Karl Rove, a man who, regardless of one's politics, "deserves unique notice for one reason: he is an exceptionally good political strategist." The authors' analyses are savvy and unsentimental, without collapsing into cynicism. Though very topical, the book's comprehensiveness should make it a lasting piece of scholarship-an in-depth, indefatigable examination of American media and politics at the turn of the millennium. (Oct. 3) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

(See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06).-Ann Kim Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Talking points, on-message admonitions and Machiavellian strategies for would-be presidents. One of Bush brain Karl Rove's great insights as a political strategist was that this hearts-and-minds stuff is for conquered Third World countries; in America, the object is "to get 50 percent plus one." So it was in 2004, give or take. And so it was, give or take, in 2000. Perhaps that's the way it will be in 2008, though ABC news producer Halperin and Washington Post political editor Harris (The Survivor, 2005) remark that this will depend on which vision of politics prevails: the inclusive, governing-from-the-center Clinton doctrine, or the exclusive, appealing-to-the-base Bush doctrine. Either way, the authors hold, most of the old rules won't count; we are in a time of noise and what they call the Freak Show, when New Media outlets such as blogs-which overwhelmingly favor the technologically savvy right wing-have far more authority and audience than the Old Media of Dan Rather and company. Given that the predominant mode of the Freak Show is attack-and-smear-attack and smear the non-Republican candidate, that is-then it's small wonder that John Kerry was swiftboated in 2004; still, the authors write, he should have seen it coming, and he should have known a grand Machiavellian principle: You wanna be in charge, you gotta control your narrative. Halperin and Harris digest a couple of score of these non-bulleted bullet points, all of which seem perfectly sensible-for instance, "Being kind to those on your own team allows you to conserve your brutish tendencies to destroy political adversaries" and "Think ruthlessly and systematically about the Electoral College-only losers let their mindswander elsewhere."Q.E.D. A deeply cynical enterprise, this book. But then, so is American politics, all the more reason this will doubtless wind up on the nightstands of candidates everywhere.

Book review: The Art Student Survival Guide or Key Issues in Development

The First 90 Days in Government: Critical Success Strategies for New Public Managers at All Levels

Author: Peter H Daly

More than 250,000 public sector managers in the United States take on new positions each year and many more aspire to leadership. Each will confront special challenges from higher public profiles to a greater number of stakeholders to volatile political environments that will make their transitions even more challenging than in the business world. Now Michael Watkins, author of the bestselling book The First 90 Days, applies his proven leadership transition framework to the public sector. Watkins and coauthor Peter Daly address the crucial differences between the private and public sectors that go to the heart of how success and failure are defined, measured, and rewarded or penalized.

This concise, practical book provides a roadmap that will help new government leaders at all levels accelerate their transitions by overcoming nine transition challenges, ranging from clarifying expectations to defining goals to building a team to managing personal stress. The authors also offer detailed strategies for avoiding major transition traps.

Zeroing in on the challenges faced by new government leaders, The First 90 Days in Government is the indispensable guide for anyone seeking to lead and succeed in the public sector.

Facing Unpleasant Facts or The Last Campaign

Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

Author: George Orwell

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected—and illuminated—the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. "As soon as he began to write something," comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, "it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge—in short, to think—as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent."

Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites classics such as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.

Publishers Weekly

Best known for his late-career classics Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell-who used his given name, Eric Blair, in the earliest pieces of this collection aimed at the aficionado as well as the general reader-was above all a polemicist of the first rank. Organized chronologically, from 1931 through the late 1940s, these in-your-face writings showcase the power of this literary form. The range of subjects is considerable, from "Shooting an Elephant" to remembrances of working in a bookshop ("The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence..."); from recollections of fighting in the Spanish Civil War to culinary oddities such as a "Defence of English Cooking" and "A Nice Cup of Tea"; to the broad-stroke masterwork of boarding-school irony, "Such, Such Were the Joys." New Yorker contributor Packer (The Assassins' Gate) keenly assembles and introduces this selection, bringing into high relief Orwell's range of experience and committed humanism, showing how, as Orwell put it, "to make political writing into an art." (Oct. 13)

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

Library Journal

George Orwell (1903-50) is best remembered for his dark and prophetic political novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). In addition to four other novels, he also produced some of the best book-length nonfiction of the modernist era, including Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and Homage to Catalonia (1939). Harcourt is now republishing in two volumes his collected essays, compiled by Packer (The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq ). What is most astonishing about these essays are their continuing freshness and relevancy more than half a century after Orwell's death. All are worth reading for some combination of literary, historical, or cautionary merit. His criticism of art and politics (and sometimes both) remains spot-on, and the "unpleasant facts" he considers, including war, poverty, homelessness, lack of adequate medical care, and even schoolboy bullying, are unfortunately still familiar topics. Orwell's crisp and clear journalistic writing style remains highly accessible to 21st-century readers, with the occasional, now obscure reference illuminated by Packer's notes. Essential for academic libraries; highly recommended for public libraries.-Alison M. Lewis, formerly with Drexel Univ. Lib., Philadelphia

Kirkus Reviews

The first of two volumes of the British author's essays, compiled by journalist George Packer. Orwell (1903-50) was no Flaubert closeted in aesthetic concentration. He was a vigorous participant in the chaotic life of his time, traveling to dangerous places (Burma under British rule, Spain fragmented by civil strife) and venturing into the culture of poverty-in his documentary masterpiece Down and Out in Paris and London and in such memorable transcriptions of personal experience as reports on his day spent in a filthy workhouse ("The Spike") and a similar adventure in a festering prison ("Clink"). Readers familiar with Orwell's work will not be surprised to find the aforementioned, or a kindred depiction of "Marrakech" as a swamp of poverty, overpopulation and disease, or a thoughtful if embittered retrospective essay, "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War," which forms a bridge to his great nonfiction book Homage to Catalonia. Some may be surprised, however, to encounter a memoirist who displays a quirky affection for the minutiae of the quotidian ("The Case for the Open Fire," "In Defence of English Cooking," "Bookshop Memories") and a keen observer who always zeroes in on the broader ramifications of a simple subject (e.g., describing English football in "The Sporting Spirit" as "an unfailing cause of ill will"). The journalistic virtue Orwell does not possess in abundance is, oddly enough, objectivity. Readers will feel his inquiring, combative, judgmental sensibility lurking everywhere in his best work: bitter self-criticism in the twin classics "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant"; stoical courage and depressive exhaustion in his immensely detailed "War-time Diary" (1940); hisneed "to make political writing into an art" in "Why I Write"; and the salutary indignation that enlivens his justly famous remembrance of public-school experiences ("Such, Such Were the Joys"). A generous display of the great English journalist's distinctive honesty, clarity and reverence for the pertinent fact and the perfect phrase.

New interesting book: The Ownership of Enterprise or Lessons in Learning e Learning and Training

The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America

Author: Thurston Clark

After John Kennedy's assassination, Robert—formerly his brother's no-holds-barred political warrior—was left stunned and grieving. He was haunted by his brother's murder and by the nation's failure to address its most pressing challenges—race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. When he announced that he was running for president, much of the country was thrilled to hear his message of healing and hope. Although fearing that there were, as he told one confident, "guns between me and the White House," he risked his life to ask Americans to help him reclaim "the generous impulses that are the soul of this nation."

Kennedy stirred huge crowds, who would often tear his clothes, and moved even the most hard-bitten of journalists and other intimate observers. After spending most of the campaign at Kennedy's side, reporter Richard Harwood, a former marine who had initially been suspicious of Kennedy, asked his editors at the Washington Post to replace him, telling them, "I'm falling in love with the guy."

Four days after Robert Kennedy was assassinated, two million grieving Americans lined the tracks to watch his funeral train carry his body from New York to Washington. In The Last Campaign, Thurston Clarke explains how one man could have this effect on so many people.

Publishers Weekly

Forty years before Obamamania, there was another White House run that was so frenzied, reporters feared they'd be crushed to death by the electrified crowds he generated. Clarke's encyclopedic study of that short-lived, 11th-hour bid in the spring of 1968 reminds listeners that Robert F. Kennedy understood that the fanaticism toward his campaign was a transmutation of the grief the nation felt over the assassination of his brother. In less than three months, RFK became presidential in his own right, inspiring Americans with both his message of hope and unparalleled oratory gifts. It's precisely this finesse with speech that proves the greatest challenge for this audio: Pete Larkin's reading of Kennedy's addresses simply can't compete with the late politician's familiar delivery. Larkin has the daunting task of calibrating his tone so as to match the optimism of the campaign's first 81 days, while acknowledging the horror of day 82. Without doing impersonations, Larkin uses slight pitch changes to differentiate between Kennedy and others. A Henry Holt hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 31). (June)

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

Kirkus Reviews

Tremendously moving chronicle of Bobby Kennedy's 1968 run for president. Addressing the needs of a "wounded nation"-mired in the Vietnam War, complacent about poverty and inequity-Senator Kennedy announced his candidacy on March 16, 1968, offering to lead America back to "those ideals which are the source of national strength and generosity and compassion of deed." Clarke (Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech that Changed America, 2004, etc.) follows on Bobby's heels as he plunged headlong into his campaign, from Kansas and Indiana to Oregon and California, throwing off his brother's mantle and becoming at last his own man. He spoke passionately, almost recklessly, inciting crowds to frenzy with his idealistic speeches about the moral shame of Vietnam, the needs of the poor and minorities and the responsibility of each American. Incorporating accounts by a gamut of reporters, politicians, family and "Honorary Kennedys," as well as extracts from Bobby's own stunning stump speeches, Clarke compellingly recreates this "huge, joyous adventure." Seized by grief and guilt over his brother's assassination and morally opposed to the war and to President Johnson's reelection yet unable to reconcile himself to Eugene McCarthy's candidacy, Kennedy (but not all his advisers) decided it was now or never, and his gradual but determined evolution into a fearless, formidable, winning candidate makes stupendous reading. Johnson's decision not to seek reelection robbed him of an antagonist, but when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Kennedy quelled riots with his heartfelt speeches and become King's "real successor." Many worried that King and JFK would not be the last; Clarke quotesaheartbreaking comment from one reporter, who dubbed Bobby's decision to campaign virtually unprotected by security as "slow-motion suicide." The hope he inspired, though eclipsed by his assassination on June 6, still proves instructive and pertinent, especially in this election year. Generous without being slavish, beautifully capturing Kennedy's passion and dignity. Agent: Kathy Robbins/The Robbins Office

Table of Contents:

Prologue: June 8, 1968     1
Early Days
No Choice: March 16-17, 1968     19
"He's Going All the Way": March 17-18, 1968     39
"Bobby Ain't Jack": March 21-31, 1968     51
"Prophets Get Shot"
The Era of Good Feelings: March 31-April 4, 1968     71
A Prayer for Our Country: April 4-5, 1968     91
"Guns Between Me and the White House": April 5-7, 1968     112
"Prophets Get Shot": April 9, 1968     122
Red State Primaries
Like Frank Sinatra Running for President: April 10-15, 1968     139
Brave Heart and Christopher Pretty Boy: April 16 and May 11, 1968     153
"How Does It Look for Me Here?": April 22-24, 1968     166
"From You!": April 26, 1968     183
Riding with the Next President: April 27, 1968     193
Mother Inn: May 3-14, 1968     206
The West Coast
"This Is Peanuts": May 15-28, 1968     227
Resurrection City: May 29, 1968     239
"The Last of the Great Believables": May 30-June 3, 1968     249
"So This Is It": June 4-5, 1968     265
Postscript     276
Notes     283
Bibliography     307
Acknowledgments     311
Index     313