Author: Bob Woodward File Type: epub Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year. This was the secret Pentagon assessment sent to the White House in May 2006. The forecast of a more violent 2007 in Iraq contradicted the repeated optimistic statements of President Bush, including one, two days earlier, when he said we were at a turning point that history would mark as the time the forces of terror began their long retreat. State of Denial examines how the Bush administration avoided telling the truth about Iraq to the public, to Congress, and often to themselves. Two days after the May report, the Pentagon told Congress, in a report required by law, that the appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007. In this detailed inside story of a war-torn White House, Bob Woodward reveals how White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, with the indirect support of other high officials, tried for 18 months to get Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld replaced. The president and Vice President Cheney refused. At the beginning of Bushs second term, Stephen Hadley, who replaced Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser, gave the administration a D minus on implementing its policies. A secret report to the new Secretary of State Rice from her counselor stated that, nearly two years after the invasion, Iraq was a failed state. The book reveals that at the urging of Cheney and Rumsfeld, the most frequent outside visitor and Iraq adviser to President Bush is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, haunted still by the loss in Vietnam, emerges as a hidden and potent voice. Woodward reveals that the secretary of defense himself believes that the system of coordination among departments and agencies is broken, and in a secret May 1, 2006 memo Rumsfeld stated, that the current system of government makes competence next to impossible. State of Denial answers the core questions What happened after the invasion of Iraq? Why? How does Bush make decisions and manage a war that he chose to define his presidency? And is there an achievable plan for victory? **
Author: Murray N. Rothbard
File Type: epub
This fiery monograph shows a side of Murray Rothbard not seen in his theoretical work his ability to employ power-elite analysis to investigate the relationship between money, power, and war. Rather than allow the Left to dominate this approach to history, Rothbard shows how wealthy elites are only able to manipulate world affairs via their connections to state power. Mainstream historians might deride Rothbards history as a conspiracy approach Rothbard himself is only out to show that world affairs are not random historical forces but the consequences of paths chosen by real human beings. Here he gives the grim details of how a network of banks, bond dealers, and Wall Street insiders have both favored war and profited from it. This volume includes a long and thoughtful introduction by Anthony Gregory and an afterword by Justin Raimondo. To search for Mises Institute titles, enter a keyword and LvMI (short for Ludwig von Mises Institute) e.g., Depression LvMI**
Author: Thich Nhat Hanh
File Type: pdf
Love in Action is a collection of over two decades of Thich Nhat Hanhs writing on nonviolence, peace, and reconciliation. Reflecting on the devastation of war, he makes the strong argument that mindfulness, insight, and altruistic love are the only sustainable bases for political action. This timeless book is an important resource for those interested in social change. **About the Author Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most revered Zen teachers in the world today. He played a central role in theh Buddhist nonviolent movement for peace in Vietnam during the 1960s and served as Chair of the Buddhist Peace delegation to the Paris Peace Talks. His best-selling books include Happiness and Peace Is Every Step. He lives in Plum Village in southwest France, where he teaches the art of mindful living.
Author: Peter Bengelsdorf
File Type: pdf
-----Updated with hundreds of examples from 2015!----- For teachers, students and all who love language, this indispensable resource has more than 3,200 examples of more than 1,000 idiomatic phrases. Americans love to use idioms, phrases that are colorful and mysterious. Idioms in the News investigates how the 800-pound gorilla got mixed up with the elephant in the room. Learn what mumbo jumbo means and where it came from. Find out why greasing someones palm may not be messy but may be illegal. Every entry starts with examples, which give you a much better understanding than definitions alone. And there are entertaining notes on the origin and history of the phrases. The author, Peter Bengelsdorf, is a former newspaper editor and executive. Idioms in the News was inspired by students in his English classes.**
Author: Gillian B. Pierce
File Type: pdf
Scapeland Writing the Landscape from Diderots Salons to the Postmodern Museum is a comparative, interdisciplinary study tracing theories of the sublime and a history of spectatorship from Diderots eighteenth-century French Salons, through art criticism by Baudelaire and Breton, to Jean-Francois Lyotards postmodern exhibition Les Immateriaux. In the Salons, an exploration of the painted landscape becomes an encounter with both the limits of representation and the infinite possibilities of fiction. Baudelaire and Breton explore similar limits in their work, set against the backdrop of the modern city. For them, as for Diderot, the attempt to render visual objects in narrative language leads to the development of new literary forms and concerns. Lyotards concept of the postmodern museum frames the sublime encounter, once again, in terms that expressly evoke Diderots verbal rendering of painted spaces as a personal promenade. According to Lyotard, Diderot ouvre, par ecrit, les surfaces des tableaux comme les portes dune exposition.. . . [il] abolit . . . lopposition de la nature et de la culture, de la realite de limage, du volume et de la surface. Reading the literary production of these four writers alongside their art criticism, Scapeland considers narrative responses to art as imaginative assertions of human presence against the impersonal world of objects.**
Author: David Morley
File Type: pdf
This pioneering book introduces students to the practice and art of creative writing and creative reading. It offers a fresh, distinctive and beautifully written synthesis of the discipline. David Morley discusses where creative writing comes from, the various forms and camouflages it has taken, and why we teach and learn the arts of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. He looks at creative writing in performance as public art, as visual art, as e-literature and as an act of community. As a leading poet, critic and award-winning teacher of the subject, Morley finds new engagements for creative writing in the creative academy and within science. Accessible, entertaining and groundbreaking, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing is not only a useful textbook for students and teachers of writing, but also an inspiring read in its own right. Aspiring authors and teachers of writing will find much to discover and enjoy.ReviewNo writer-teacher is better qualified than David Morley to lift the veils on the discipline of Creative Writing. He writes with all his feelings and a richness of metaphor that is beguiling for the general reader, the general writer, and the teacher. The exercises are inspired, growing out of the authors profound understanding of the inviolable connection between good writing and good and various reading. This book will be an inspiration and tool for teachers and writers who, like Morley, understand that the development of writing involves acquiring skills, and that inborn genius benefits from training and understanding. Professor Michael Schmidt, University of Glasgow Book DescriptionAccessible, entertaining and groundbreaking, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing is not only useful textbook for students and teachers of writing, but also an entertaining and inspiring read in its own right. Aspiring authors and teachers of writing will find much to discover and enjoy.
Author: William H. F. Altman
File Type: pdf
Brills Companion to the Reception of Cicero is a collection of essays by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars that situates Cicero in the context of his use and abuse from antiquity to the present, and is intended to provide readers with several good reasons to return to the study of Ciceros writings with greater interest and respect.Contributors are William H.F. Altman, Elisabeth Begemann, Caroline Bishop, JoAnn DellaNeva, Alex Dressler, Kathy Eden, Robert G. Ingram, Gaabor Kendeffy, Carlos Laevy, Martin McLaughlin, Paul Allen Miller, Carl J. Richard, Matthew Joel Sharpe and John Oastler Ward--Provided by publisher. **
Author: Gergana Ivanova
File Type: pdf
An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is frequently paired with The Tale of Genji as one of the most important works in the Japanese canon. Yet it has also been marginalized within Japanese literature for reasons including the gender of its author, the works complex textual history, and its thematic and stylistic depth. In Unbinding The Pillow Book, Gergana Ivanova offers a reception history of The Pillow Book and its author from the seventeenth century to the present that shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions. Ivanova examines how and why The Pillow Book has been read over the centuries, placing it in the multiple contexts in which it has been rewritten, including womens education, literary scholarship, popular culture, pleasure quarters, and the formation of the modern nation-state. Drawing on scholarly commentaries, erotic parodies, instruction manuals for women, high school textbooks, and comic books, she considers its outsized role in ideas about Japanese women writers. Ultimately, Ivanova argues for engaging the works plurality in order to achieve a clearer understanding of The Pillow Book and the importance it has held for generations of readers, rather than limiting it to a definitive version or singular meaning. The first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shonagon, Unbinding The Pillow Book sheds new light on the construction of gender and sexuality, how womens writing has been used to create readerships, and why ancient texts continue to play vibrant roles in contemporary cultural production. **Review Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, Unbinding The Pillow Book offers a dynamic portrait of one of the most important works of world literature and of the woman who wrote it more than a millennium ago. The Pillow Book has long been one of my favorite books now, having read this engaging, wide-ranging exploration of the different meanings it has come to embody in everything from seventeenth-century commentaries to twenty-first-century popular culture, I see it as I have never seen it before. (Michael Emmerich, University of California, Los Angeles) Ivanovas work is a fascinating exploration of the reception, reproduction, and reimagination of Sei Shonagons The Pillow Book over time, focusing in particular on book history and publishing cultures of the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. (Keller Kimbrough, University of Colorado, Boulder) In this exceptionally clear and clear-headed work, Ivanova tells us exactly how and why we are able to read The Pillow Book today. Tracing the ways in which the three commentaries of the Edo period elevate the work to a genre (while also relegating that genre to the sidelines), she makes a firm case for a much overdue new reading. (Linda H. Chance, University of Pennsylvania) Unbinding The Pillow Book is an erudite and often entertaining guide to the persona of Sei Shonagon and her peripatetic text, The Pillow Book. Ivanova elucidates the complex reception of the text as an ongoing dialogue between the irretrievable past and the dynamic present. I cannot think of a better match between a scholar and her subject. It is a dazzling accomplishment. (Paul Schalow, Rutgers University) About the Author Gergana Ivanova is associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Cincinnati.
Author: Annelise Riles
File Type: epub
Who are the agents of financial regulation? Is good (or bad) financial governance merely the work of legislators and regulators? Here Annelise Riles argues that financial governance is made not just through top-down laws and policies but also through the daily use of mundane legal techniques such as collateral by a variety of secondary agents, from legal technicians and retail investors to financiers and academics and even computerized trading programs. Drawing upon her ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Japanese derivatives market, Riles explores the uses of collateral in the financial markets as a regulatory device for stabilizing market transactions. How collateral operates, Riles suggests, is paradigmatic of a class of low-profile, mundane, but indispensable activities and practices that are all too often ignored as we think about how markets should work and be governed. Riles seeks to democratize our understanding of legal techniques, and demonstrate how these day-to-day private actions can be reformed to produce more effective forms of market regulation.ReviewProfessor Riles offers a lucid and illuminating investigation of the role that legal elites played in reforming legal doctrines to facilitate trillions of dollars of trading in OTC derivatives. --(Howell E. Jackson, Harvard Law School) A brilliant exploration of the legal infrastructure that underlies global financial markets.Combining legal expertise and sociological insight, Professor Riles offers a lucid and illuminating investigation of the role that legal elites in Japan and other developed economies played in reforming legal doctrines to facilitate trillions of dollars of trading in OTC derivatives. While these reforms are often characterized as freeing private markets to shoulder financial risks, Collateral Knowledge persuasively arguesand the global financial crisis confirmsthat the legal infrastructure for derivative transactions could not protect private investors from their own folly nor insulate the general public from the consequences of private miscalculation.(Howell E. Jackson, Harvard Law School) Collateral Knowledge is a complex, clever, stimulating, and ambitious text on an important topic. Annelise Riles upends current debates about regulation and deregulation, private versus public interest, and financial globalization by calling our attention to the unobtrusive yet pervasive technical devices that private actors use to do their business. Innovative and interesting, the book makes a key scholarly contribution while engaging a wide audience concerned with global markets. Collateral Knowledge is a real blockbuster.(Bruce Carruthers, Northwestern University) Collateral Knowledge provides a complex, rigorous, and compelling analysis of collateralthe tools and techniques that are meant to assert that property lies somehow behind a financial transaction and underwrites it. Riles shows how the set of legal techniques and knowledges that constitute collateral is centrally implicated in the practices of global finance and in the ideological discourses promoted by figures from Hayek to De Soto on the privatization of public goods and the substitution of law by arbitration. She unpacks collaterals technicalities, its position in a network of technocratic rationalities and actions, and its political effects in relation to legal process and understandings of law and state in the financial markets.(Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine) [A] fresh and thought-provoking perspective. . . . Collateral Knowledge is a worthwhile contribution to the discussion of the global financial crisis and the more democratic path we should forge in its wake.(Harvard Law Review) Collateral Knowledge surely inspires difficult thinking about private law and financial regulation, using collateral in derivatives markets as a complex and interesting context.(Heather Hughes Journal of Law and Commerce) Riles, an expert on East Asia (and on Japan in particular), has spent years talking with Japanese finance lawyers and bureaucrats, and observing their activities. Empirically, she provides a firsthand account of all the legal issues and uncertainties related to exchanges of collateral, of the definitional issues, and of the daily negotiations that make such exchanges possible. She shows a deep knowledge of both theoretical legal issues and her particular field, and argues convincingly that all social scientists interested in global financial markets should pay close attention to the latters legal knowledge and institutions.(Alex Preda, Kings College London Law & Society Review) Collateral Knowledge provides compelling evidence that global finance arises out of a distinct form of technical regulation. This work is essential reading because it sheds light on the constitutive power of the law in financial activity, which is being egregiously ignored in both scholarship and public policy discourse. Riles shears away laborious literature reviews and superfluous ethnographic detail to provide a robust example of what interdisciplinary financial scholarship can accomplish.(Martha Poon, New York University American Anthropologist) A refreshingly unconventional addition to the literature on law and finance.(Political and Legal Anthropology Revew) About the AuthorAnnelise Riles is the Jack G. Clarke 52 Professor of Far Eastern Legal Studies, professor of anthropology, and director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture, all at Cornell University.
Author: Richard D. Ryder
File Type: pdf
Richard Ryder created the term speciesism in early 1970 and shared the idea with Peter Singer, who popularised it in his classic work Animal Liberation (1975). A key figure in the modern animal rights revival Ryder appeared on the first-ever televised discussion of animal rights (The Lions Share, Scottish Television) in December 1970. He further promoted the ideas around speciesism in recorded discussions with Bridget Brophy, for the Open University, and in his contribution to the seminal philosophical work Animals Men and Morals edited by the Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris in 1971. From 1969 Ryder organised protests against animal experiments and bloodsports. He continued to promote his ideas about speciesism in leaflets and broadcasts, culminating in the publication of his Victims of Science in 1975 - a book that provoked debates in Parliament and on television and was described by The Spectator at the time as a morally and historically important book. Dr Ryder was elected to the RSPCA Council in 1971, first becoming Chairman in 1977. In 1980 he was founding Chairman of the Liberal Democrat Animal Protection Group, and later ran for Parliament, was Director of the Political Animal Lobby and then Mellon Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane University. Ryder coined the term painism to describe his wider moral theory in 1990. He has several times broadcast on the BBCs Moral Maze.