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In prose the Washington Post hailed as "Wolfean or Whitmanesque", Peery writes eloquently of the passions that led him to fight abroad for opportunities denied him at home. Whether describing his childhood in rural Minnesota or his tour of duty as a soldier in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division, Peery's is an intimate account of one soldier's political awakening.
Moshe Lewin's major new book is an original and important work that clarifies the sweeping changes that transformed Russia in the twentieth century from a muzhik country to the urban power we read about today. As in his previous works, Professor Lewin's extraordinary breadth of knowledge and sympathy allow him to deal with the "grand narrative of cultural transformation" that goes well beyond simple studies of urban growth or industrialization. The Soviet Union, as Lewin reminds us, was a rural country well into the post-World War II era, becoming predominantly urban only in the mid-1960s. The fascinating story that emerges from this book is one of a country that is becoming increasingly more complex even as it retains a "relatively primative configuration of power". Professor Lewin goes on to show the historical roots of recent change. In the 1920s it was the government that was impatient to change, while society was transforming itself slowly. Recent years have seen a reversal of this situation, where a largely bureaucratic state simply lost its ability to govern a rapidly changing society. Professor Lewin's analysis lays bare the underlying causes behind the present chaos in the former Soviet Union, where a government that barely understands the new forces that have been so dramatically unleashed finds itself totally unable to control them.
The conservative majority that has dominated the Supreme Court for over a decade was engineered by presidents who claimed to have depoliticized the courts and promoted judicial restraint. Yet the result has been a steady stream of opinions that limit individual rights far more than is commonly understood. In With Liberty and Justice for Some, David Kairys presents a fascinating analysis of the changes brought about by the Reagan-Bush courts, changes that will long outlive those administrations. Kairys, a leading constitutional scholar and litigator, examines thirty-one major Supreme court decisions - covering rights of expression, participation in the political process, religion, equality, privacy and due process - many of them lesser known cases that have not been subjected to intense scrutiny. Arguing that the liberal decisions of the 1960s and early 1970s were an aberration in a larger conservative pattern, Kairys highlights the ongoing erosion of principles and rules typically thought to embody American notions of freedom. Kairys focuses on the people involved, and analyzes these cases to highlight contradictions in conservative legal thinking and practice. He evaluates and criticizes the conservative record, assesses legal reasoning and the rule of law in society, and develops an approach to protection and enforcement of freedom, equality, and democracy. Criticizing both conservative and liberal rules and reasoning, and all the while exploring other alternatives, With Liberty and Justice for Some is a revealing and accessible expose of the role of law, the state of democracy and the retrenchment of our individual rights over the last two decades.
"On the news at this time is the question of the hostages," then vice president George Bush noted in his secret diary on November 5, 1986, two days after a Lebanese newspaper broke the first story of the Reagan administration's efforts to trade arms for hostages with Iran. "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details," Bush continued. "This is one operation that has been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak."But the illicit arms-for-hostages deals did leak, and eventually U.S. citizens discovered that the Reagan administration had been selling munitions to Iran, using funds from those sales for an illicit operation to resupply the Nicaraguan Contras, and systematically deceiving Congress, the press, and the public about these actions. More than six years after the Iran-Contra operations were revealed, we continue to learn more about the scandal that rocked the Reagan White House and haunted George Bush's presidency, and about its implications for our system of governance.The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History provides the 101 most important documents on the policy decisions, covert operations, and subsequent cover-up that created the most serious constitutional crisis of modern times. Drawing on up-to-date information such as the recently discovered Bush diaries, this reader features once top secret, code-word White House memoranda, minutes of presidential meetings, pages from Oliver North's and Caspar Weinberger's personal notebooks, back-channel cable traffic, and investigative records, among other extraordinary materials. To enhance this documentation, the editors provide contextual overviews of the complex components of the Iran-Contra operations, as well as glossaries of the key players, and a detailed chronology of events.The result is a unique guide to the inner workings of national security policy making and the shadowy world of clandestine operations-a singular resource for understanding the Iran-Contra affair and the gravity of the governmental crisis it spawned. The documents, writes noted Iran-Contra scholar Theodore Draper in the Foreword, give the reader "an intimate sense of how the president and his men manipulated the system and perverted its constitutional character." This volume "allows the facts to speak for themselves."
Developed by Martha Minow for use in her own course on family law at Harvard Law School, this book brings together writings from sociology, history, psychology, economics, and fiction, as well as law, to address the gap between existing legislation on familial issues (including marriage, parenthood, and divorce) and family lives as they are really lived today.
One of the most crucial controversies in educational circles today involves the practice of "tracking", or grouping students by ability from the early grades onward. Because the tests that are used to measure "ability" turn out to be a better measure of privilege or deprivation than of innate intelligence, underprivileged children are consistently relegated to the "slow track". Forced into a self-fulfilling and racist prophecy, they must contend with inferior instruction, inequitable resources, and lowered expectations - which all but guarantee their future failure. Crossing the Tracks is a groundbreaking survey of schools throughout the country that have successfully "crossed the tracks" by reintegrating their classrooms. With all the excitement attendant on any effort at monumental reform, schools from Hawaii to Maine, Minnesota to Louisiana, are changing not only the makeup of their classes but their fundamental approach to education. Wheelock documents the actual experiences of schools as they reduce or eliminate ability grouping and strive to offer superior learning environments to all students. With chapters on parental involvement, teacher training, curriculum reform, student aspirations, and examples of programs and practices that have been implemented across the nation, Crossing the Tracks is the first book to outline a specific course of action for parents, teachers, administrators, and others ready to join the "untracking" movement. With its clear writing and many practical features, including a list of successfully-untracked schools and key contact people at each school, Wheelock's text is strongly endorsed by both educators and policy makers. Crossing the Tracks should havea significant impact on our thinking about approaches to elementary and middle-school education and should play a major role in the movement to enrich the learning process for all of our students.
Water activist and author Barlow, founder of the Blue Planet Project, lays out some terrifying unsafe-water statistics as she addresses the need for the international community to move toward a water-secure and water-just world.
When social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to take part in an experiment at Yale in the summer of 1961, none of the participants could have foreseen the worldwide sensation that the published results would cause. Milgram reported that fully 65 percent of the volunteers had repeatedly administered electric shocks of increasing strength to a man they believed to be in severe pain, even suffering a life-threatening heart condition, simply because an authority figure had told them to do so. Such behavior was linked to atrocities committed by ordinary people under the Nazi regime and immediately gripped the public imagination. The experiments remain a source of controversy and fascination more than fifty years later. In "Behind the Shock Machine," psychologist and author Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of this controversial experiment and its startling repercussions. Interviewing the original participants--many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did--and delving deep into Milgram's personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram. Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man's ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.
Elisabeth Gille was five years old when her mother, the Russian writer Irene Nemirovsky, was deported to Auschwitz at the height of her career and never seen again. Gille was hidden in the French countryside with her sister until the war was over. Shadows of a Childhood, winner of Elle's 1997 Grand Prix des Lectrices, is her story, a fictionalized account of one individual's - and one country's - coming to terms with the war.
In America's Court is the thoughtful, witty story of labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan's introduction to the world of criminal law. After twenty years of civil practice, in which "complex litigation" fades slowly into settlement, he is unprepared for the much quicker justice of state criminal court when he assists in the defense of a twenty-two-year-old who, at age fifteen, was sentenced to forty years in prison for acting as the unarmed lookout in a botched holdup. In an America that now routinely imprisons kids as adults, he comes to see this small case as a basic test of human rights.The case leads Geoghegan to reevaluate his own career as a civil lawyer and the ways he might use the law to effect social change. Written with the author's trademark intelligence and humor, In America's Court is a compelling narrative and a candid look at the justice that our society provides for its citizens.
In The New American Empire, leading authorities on U.S. foreign policy examine the historical underpinnings of the new American unilateralism. Offering an accessible, critical overview of U.S. policy in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, they assess both the distinct continuities between past and present U.S. policy, as well as what makes the current administration's policies dramatically different. The essays also reveal how those policies serve the ends of favored groups for whom imperialism pays both ideologically and materially.Both an essential historical primer on America's new imperial role and a thorough dissection of the Bush administration's foreign policy objectives, The New American Empire is sure to become a touchstone for understanding America's role in the twenty-first-century world.Contributors include: Michael Adas, John Dower, Lloyd Gardner, Carole Gluck, Gregory Grandin, Thomas McCormick, Mary Nolan, John Prados, Edward Rhodes, and Marilyn Young.
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