The re-evolution of American street gangs
The problem of gangs and gang subculture is a growing threat to the stability of neighborhoods and entire communities. During the past two decades, gang members have increasingly migrated from large urban centers to suburban areas and other countries. This book addresses the intricacies and diversities of street gangs, drawing on the expertise of high-ranking law enforcement officials monitoring terrorist activity and gang-related crimes as well as professional private investigators who have spent several decades investigating gangs and learning their subculture, lifestyle, motivations, and relationships.
The self illusion
Most of us believe that we are unique and coherent individuals, but are we? The idea of a "self" has existed ever since humans began to live in groups and become sociable. Those who embrace the self as an individual in the West, or a member of the group in the East, feel fulfilled and purposeful. This experience seems incredibly real but a wealth of recent scientific evidence reveals that this notion of the independent, coherent self is an illusion - it is not what it seems. Reality as we perceive it is not something that objectively exists, but something that our brains construct from moment to moment, interpreting, summarizing, and substituting information along the way. Like a science fiction movie, we are living in a matrix that is our mind.
In The Self Illusion, Dr. Bruce Hood reveals how the self emerges during childhood and how the architecture of the developing brain enables us to become social animals dependent on each other. He explains that self is the product of our relationships and interactions with others, and it exists only in our brains. The author argues, however, that though the self is an illusion, it is one that humans cannot live without.
But things are changing as our technology develops and shapes society. The social bonds and relationships that used to take time and effort to form are now undergoing a revolution as we start to put our self online. Social networking activities such as blogging, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter threaten to change the way we behave. Social networking is fast becoming socialization on steroids. The speed and ease at which we can form alliances and relationships is outstripping the same selection processes that shaped our self prior to the internet era. This book ventures into unchartered territory to explain how the idea of the self will never be the same again in the online social world.
Six authors in search of justice
This book makes an original and readable contribution to defining the nature of justice in the aftermath of a repressive regime. While considering transitional justice as conventionally defined, this work explores broader conceptions of justice and is distinct in approaching the subject through a discussion of the lives and works of six writers: Victor Serge in Stalinist Russia, Albert Camus in Vichy France, Jorge Semprun in Spain under Franco, Ngugi wa Thiong'o in colonial and post-colonial Kenya, Ariel Dorfman in Chile under Pinochet, and Nadine Gordimer in apartheid South Africa. Each lived under a brutal regime, was prepared to take substantial risks in order to contribute to its overthrow, and survived a transition to a new regime. Each thought deeply about the evolving situation with viewpoints derived from a combination of lived experience and intellectual and artistic creation. Each illuminated key questions with reference to a particular country, while developing wider insights.
Newman demonstrates that their writings provide a valuable addition to academic analysis and external policy advice that too often fails to take sufficient account of reflective understanding, social and cultural context and the specificity of each situation. He also highlights the evolving and multi-dimensional nature of justice and injustice in political transitions.
Stamped from the beginning
Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.
In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.
Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.
The Story of Egypt
The story of the world's greatest civilization spans 4,000 years of history that has shaped the world. It is full of spectacular cities and epic stories―an evolving society rich in inventors, heroes, heroines, villains, artisans, and pioneers. Professor Joann Fletcher pulls together the complete story of Egypt―charting the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptians while putting their whole world into a context to which we can all relate.
Fletcher uncovers some fascinating revelations: new evidence shows that women became pharaohs on at least ten occasions; that the ancient Egyptians built the first Suez Canal and then circumnavigated Africa. From Ramses II's penchant for dying his grey hair to how we know that Montuhotep's chief wife bit her nails, Dr. Joann Fletcher brings alive the history and people of ancient Egypt as nobody else can.
The struggle for sea power
The American Revolution involved a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans―to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French, and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea and, of course, off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theaters.
In The Struggle for Sea Power, Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American independence from a naval perspective, and he also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political, and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. In doing so Willis offers valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian history.
This unique account of the American Revolution gives us a new understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, of the American path to independence, and of the rise and fall of the British Empire.
The terror years
With the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. Here, in ten powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker, he recalls the path that terror in the Middle East has taken, from the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s to the recent beheadings of reporters and aid workers by ISIS.
The Terror Years draws on several articles he wrote while researching The Looming Tower, as well as many that he’s written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread. They include a portrait of the “man behind bin Laden,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the tumultuous Egypt he helped spawn; an indelible impression of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom of silence under the control of the religious police; the Syrian film industry, at the time compliant at the edges but already exuding a feeling of the barely masked fury that erupted into civil war; the 2006–11 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, a study in the disparate value of human lives. Other chapters examine al-Qaeda as it forms a master plan for its future, experiences a rebellion from within the organization, and spins off a growing web of worldwide terror. The American response is covered in profiles of two FBI agents and the head of the intelligence community. The book ends with a devastating piece about the capture and slaying by ISIS of four American journalists and aid workers, and our government’s failed response.
On the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, The Terror Years is at once a unifying recollection of the roots of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, a study of how it has grown and metastasized, and, in the scary and moving epilogue, a cautionary tale of where terrorism might take us yet.
The Terror Years draws on several articles he wrote while researching The Looming Tower, as well as many that he’s written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread. They include a portrait of the “man behind bin Laden,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the tumultuous Egypt he helped spawn; an indelible impression of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom of silence under the control of the religious police; the Syrian film industry, at the time compliant at the edges but already exuding a feeling of the barely masked fury that erupted into civil war; the 2006–11 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, a study in the disparate value of human lives. Other chapters examine al-Qaeda as it forms a master plan for its future, experiences a rebellion from within the organization, and spins off a growing web of worldwide terror. The American response is covered in profiles of two FBI agents and the head of the intelligence community. The book ends with a devastating piece about the capture and slaying by ISIS of four American journalists and aid workers, and our government’s failed response.
On the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, The Terror Years is at once a unifying recollection of the roots of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, a study of how it has grown and metastasized, and, in the scary and moving epilogue, a cautionary tale of where terrorism might take us yet.
This is my God
This Is My God is Herman Wouk's famous introduction to Judaism completely updated and revised with a new chapter, Israel at Forty. A miracle of brevity, it guides readers through the world's oldest practicing religion with all the power, clarity and wit of Wouk's celebrated novels.
Understanding Adrienne Rich
Among the most celebrated American poets of the past half century, Adrienne Rich was the recipient of awards ranging from the Bollingen Prize, to the National Book Award, to the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. In Understanding Adrienne Rich, Jeannette E. Riley assesses the full scope of Rich’s long career from 1957 to her death in 2012 through a chronological exploration of her poetry and prose. Beginning with Rich’s first two formally traditional collections, published in the late 1950s, then moving to the increasingly radical collections of the 1960s and 1970s, Riley details the evolution of Rich’s feminist poetics as she investigated issues of identity, sexuality, gender, the desire to reclaim women’s history, the dream of a common language, and a separate community for women.
Riley then tracks how Rich’s writing shifted outward from the 1980s and 1990s to the end of her career as she evaluated her own life and place within her society. Rich examined her country’s history as well, asking readers to consider what responsibility each person has―individually and communally―for changing the conditions under which we live. This book documents Rich’s developing charge that poetry carries the ability to create social change and engage people in the democratic process.
Throughout, Understanding Adrienne Rich interweaves explications of Rich’s poetry with her prose, offering a close look at the development of the author’s voice from formalist poet, to feminist visionary, to citizen poet. In doing so, this volume provides a survey of Rich’s career and her impact on American literature and politics.
Riley then tracks how Rich’s writing shifted outward from the 1980s and 1990s to the end of her career as she evaluated her own life and place within her society. Rich examined her country’s history as well, asking readers to consider what responsibility each person has―individually and communally―for changing the conditions under which we live. This book documents Rich’s developing charge that poetry carries the ability to create social change and engage people in the democratic process.
Throughout, Understanding Adrienne Rich interweaves explications of Rich’s poetry with her prose, offering a close look at the development of the author’s voice from formalist poet, to feminist visionary, to citizen poet. In doing so, this volume provides a survey of Rich’s career and her impact on American literature and politics.
The value of Emily Dickinson
The Value of Emily Dickinson is the first compact introduction to Dickinson to focus primarily on her poems and why they have held and continue to hold such significance for readers. It addresses the question of literary value in light of current controversies dividing scholars, including those surrounding the critical issue of whether her writings are best appreciated as visual works of manuscript art or as rhymed and metered poems intended for the inner ear. Mary Loeffelholz deftly incorporates Dickinson's distinctive biography and her historical, religious, and cultural contexts into close readings, tracing the evolution of Dickinson's style. This volume - which considers not only the complex history of Dickinson's poems in print, but also their future in digital formats - will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate students seeking to better understand the importance of this seminal American poet.
Vietnam: a new history
Vietnam today offers a fascinating mosaic of peoples, languages, and cultures—a small nation that is home to over fifty ethnic groups speaking more than a half-dozen different tongues. The country's extraordinary diversity is the legacy of centuries of imperial collisions and ever-shifting political configurations.
In Vietnam, Christopher Goscha tells the full history of Vietnam, from antiquity to the present day. Generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers left complicated legacies in this remarkable country. Periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule reshaped and modernized Vietnam, but so too did the colonial enterprises of the Vietnamese themselves as they extended their influence southward from the Red River Delta. Over the centuries, numerous kingdoms, dynasties, and states have ruled over—and fought for—what is now Vietnam. Trinh and Nguyen military lords led competing states in the seventeenth century. French colonizers grouped Vietnam with Laos and Cambodia in an Indochinese Union, but governed Vietnam itself as three separate territorial units. The bloody Cold War–era conflict between Ho Chi Minh's communist-backed Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the American-backed Republic of Vietnam was only the most recent instance when war divided and transformed Vietnam.
A major achievement, Vietnam offers the grand narrative of the country's complex past and the creation of the modern state of Vietnam. At a time when more and more visitors come to Vietnam and Southeast Asia is again at the center of intense global rivalries, this is the definitive single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand Vietnam today.
In Vietnam, Christopher Goscha tells the full history of Vietnam, from antiquity to the present day. Generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers left complicated legacies in this remarkable country. Periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule reshaped and modernized Vietnam, but so too did the colonial enterprises of the Vietnamese themselves as they extended their influence southward from the Red River Delta. Over the centuries, numerous kingdoms, dynasties, and states have ruled over—and fought for—what is now Vietnam. Trinh and Nguyen military lords led competing states in the seventeenth century. French colonizers grouped Vietnam with Laos and Cambodia in an Indochinese Union, but governed Vietnam itself as three separate territorial units. The bloody Cold War–era conflict between Ho Chi Minh's communist-backed Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the American-backed Republic of Vietnam was only the most recent instance when war divided and transformed Vietnam.
A major achievement, Vietnam offers the grand narrative of the country's complex past and the creation of the modern state of Vietnam. At a time when more and more visitors come to Vietnam and Southeast Asia is again at the center of intense global rivalries, this is the definitive single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand Vietnam today.
Winning arguments
A lively and accessible guide to understanding rhetoric by the world class English and Law professor and bestselling author of How to Write a Sentence.
Filled with the wit and observational prowess that shaped Stanley Fish’s acclaimed bestseller How to Write a Sentence, Winning Arguments guides readers through the “greatest hits” of rhetoric. In this clever and engaging guide, Fish offers insight and outlines the crucial keys you need to win any debate, anywhere, anytime—drawn from landmark legal cases, politics, his own career, and even popular film and television. A celebration of clashing minds and viewpoints, Winning Arguments is sure to become a classic.
The wisdom of the serpent
The tribal initiation of the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exemplifies the death of the self and rebirth into transcendent, "unknowable" life. Henderson and Oakes trace the images and patterns of spiritual initiation in religious rituals and myths of resurrection, poems and epics, the cycles of nature and universal human responses in art and dreaming. The authors dramatize the metamorphosis from a common experience of death's inevitability into a transcendent freedom beyond the individual's limitations.
Women's rights in the United States: a history in documents
Women's Rights in the United States: A History in Documents uses a diverse collection of documents--including manifestoes, letters, diaries, cartoons, broadsides, legal and court records, poems, satires, advertisements, petitions, photographs, leaflets, maps, posters, autobiographies, and newspapers--to examine major themes in the history of women's rights and women's rights movements in the U.S. The documents encompass the experiences of women from a wide range of racial, ethnic, class, economic, sexual, marital, and social groups. The book covers such topics as organized social movements; changing definitions of rights and different women's access to rights; divisions among women within women's rights movements; global contexts for women's rights activism; and the question of what it means for women and men to be "equal." Each chapter includes an introductory essay, and each document has a headnote or long caption. A picture essay illuminates how both suffragists and anti-suffragists employed cartooning to articulate their political positions.
Writing history essays
To write history successfully, it is essential to understand the nuts and bolts of technique as well as the underlying principles which govern the whole process. Writing History Essays takes you step by step through the process of writing an assignment, breaking it down into a series of manageable tasks, including:
• selecting sources
• reading critically
• taking notes
• planning and drafting your essay
• referencing correctly and avoiding plagiarism
This book also takes you beyond the essay, with practical advice on writing book reviews, reports and dissertations, as well as guidance on sitting examinations. This new edition includes reflective questions at the end of each chapter and discussion of visual and web-based sources, making it an indispensable guide for history students.
• selecting sources
• reading critically
• taking notes
• planning and drafting your essay
• referencing correctly and avoiding plagiarism
This book also takes you beyond the essay, with practical advice on writing book reviews, reports and dissertations, as well as guidance on sitting examinations. This new edition includes reflective questions at the end of each chapter and discussion of visual and web-based sources, making it an indispensable guide for history students.
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