Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator
Author: Gary Noesner File Type: mobi From Publishers WeeklyNoesner, a former FBI hostage negotiator for 23 years, was the first person to run the bureaus Crisis Negotiation Unit. Looking back, he recalls some major standoffs along with his efforts to understand and interpret the behavior of hostage takers, sometimes finding negotiations thwarted by the actions of his own colleagues. The compelling centerpiece of the book is Noesners analysis of what went wrong at Waco with the Branch Davidians when negotiation and tactical teams were working at cross purposes. After opening with a dramatic account of a man who abducted his estranged common-law wife and their son and was holding a gun to her head, Noesner describes his own quintessentially American childhood, when he got the idea for his lifes work from a segment about the FBI on The Mickey Mouse Club. Drawing on official reports, personal notes, memos, and memories of conversations, he writes with a simple style that nevertheless generates much suspense, recreating past events with a vivid intensity certain to fascinate true crime readers. br Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. FromFormerly chief of the FBIs unit for hostage negotiation, Noesner interlinks principles for talking to cornered desperadoes with cases from his career. Some of those caught nationwide attention, such as the disastrous 1993 siege of religious zealots in Waco, Texas, and here Noesner tells his side of the story. In his discussion of less-well-known incidents, Noesner underlines his core belief that negotiation is more effective in peacefully resolving standoffs than law enforcements method of tactical assault. Although professionals are the audience for that debate, true-crime readers have plenty to absorb in Noesners accounts, which include several episodes of the husband-abducting-wife-and-kids scenario, a couple of prison riots, three 1990s showdowns between the law and beleaguered fanatics (the Branch Davidians, the Montana Freemen, and the Republic of Texas), and a miscellany of terrorism and kidnapping incidents. Working his ideas into the narrative, Noesner reconstructs negotiating dialogue both as a critique of techniques, such as establishing rapport with a hostage taker, and as life-or-death drama. The latter, plus the inside-the-FBI tone, renders Noesners recollections a guaranteed attraction in new-books displays. --Gilbert Taylor
Author: Carlos Smaniotto Costa (ed)
File Type: pdf
font face=.SF NS Text, serifspan 14pxThe essays of this book discuss what is new about Mediated Public Open Space 30 international authors and researchers engage in the nexus people - places and technology from different positions and perspectives. They shed light to emerging socio-spatial and technical mechanisms and the multiplicity of interaction of human with urban spaces supported by pervasive technologies.spanfontspan 14pxspanspan 14pxCan the Mediated Public Open Space that hybrid space where the physical space gets a new layer - a virtual environment - enable new interactive experiences and leads to the hybrid realities where the community celebrate publicness enlivening public spaces? These are questions posed in this volume, from which the different perspectives aim at increasing the understanding of public spaces in the digital era. spanspan 14pxspanspan 14pxThe book is available at httpcyberparks-project.eupublicationsspan
Author: James Chappel
File Type: epub
In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against human rights, religious freedom, and the secular state. According to the Catholic view, modern concepts like these, unleashed by the French Revolution, had been a disaster. Yet by the 1960s, those positions were reversed. How did this happen? Why, and when, did the worlds largest religious organization become modern? James Chappel finds an answer in the shattering experiences of the 1930s. Faced with the rise of Nazism and Communism, European Catholics scrambled to rethink their Church and their faith. Simple opposition to modernity was no longer an option. The question was how to be modern. These were life and death questions, as Catholics struggled to keep Church doors open without compromising their core values. Although many Catholics collaborated with fascism, a few collaborated with Communists in the Resistance. Both strategies required novel approaches to race, sex, the family, the economy, and the state. Catholic Modern tells the story of how these radical ideas emerged in the 1930s and exercised enormous influence after World War II. Most remarkably, a group of modern Catholics planned and led a new political movement called Christian Democracy, which transformed European culture, social policy, and integration. Others emerged as left-wing dissidents, while yet others began to organize around issues of abortion and gay marriage. Catholics had come to accept modernity, but they still disagreed over its proper form. The debates on this question have shaped Europes recent pastand will shape its future. **
Author: Hussein Fancy
File Type: pdf
Over the course of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the Christian kingdoms of Iberia subdued, expelled, and enslaved resident Muslim populations, a curious alliance was also forged between the kings of Aragon in eastern Iberia and Muslim soldiers from southern Iberia (al-Andalus) and from North Africa. Besides contesting with the Crown of Castile for control of the peninsula, the Aragonese rulers of this period, until at least the middle of the fifteenth century, also had extensive holdings throughout the Mediterranean (including Majorca, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy, and parts of Greece) and were always in need of soldiers outside of the peninsula to maintain their territories. Hence thousands of Muslim soldiers (jenets, as they were called) were recruited to serve in Aragonese armies as well as in their courts, as personal bodyguards, as members of their entourages, and, on occasion, as their sporting entertainment. Why would a Muslim, if not just for money, agree to fight alongside a Catholic king to protect the Catholic kings territories in Iberia or elsewhere in the Mediterranean? Hussein Fancys purpose in this study is twofold first, like the jenets themselves, Fancy wishes to cross both linguistic and political boundaries by bringing Arabic sources into conversation with traditional Latin and Romance archives employed in western scholarship on the subject. While earlier studies have either focused on Christian Iberia, or on Arabic sources in al-Andalus and North Africa, Fancy discusses the Arabic, Latin, and Romance documents together to create a different picture of the interaction among the populations based in Iberia, especially those in Aragon, which had aspirations stretching across the Mediterranean. Second, he asks must mercenaries always act on political rather than religious grounds, by rational self-interest rather than spiritual belief. Fancy complicates the issue by suggesting that Muslim mercenaries were also motivated to fight for Catholic kings on religious grounds, contending that the relation between the jenets and Aragon is more complex than is understood in current scholarship, and that both depended upon and reproduced ideas of religious difference. As such their shared history is a unique opportunity to reconsider the relation of religion to politics in the medieval Mediterranean on its own terms, and to demonstrate the manner in which competing and overlapping conceptions of religious and political authority evolved across and between Christian and Islamic contexts.
Author: Justin Nystrom
File Type: pdf
In Creole Italian, Justin A. Nystrom explores the influence Sicilian immigrants have had on New Orleans foodways. His culinary journey follows these immigrants from their first impressions on Louisiana food culture in the mid-1830s and along their path until the 1970s. Each chapter touches on events that involved Sicilian immigrants and the relevancy of their lives and impact on New Orleans. Sicilian immigrants cut sugarcane, sold groceries, ran truck farms, operated bars and restaurants, and manufactured pasta. Citing these cultural confluences, Nystrom posits that the significance of Sicilian influence on New Orleans foodways traditionally has been undervalued and instead should be included, along with African, French, and Spanish cuisine, in the broad definition of creole. Creole Italian chronicles how the business of food, broadly conceived, dictated the reasoning, means, and outcomes for a large portion of the nearly forty thousand Sicilian immigrants who entered America through the port of New Orleans in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and how their actions and those of their descendants helped shape the food town we know today. **
Author: Frank T. Kryza
File Type: epub
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographersand fortune huntersthan the lost city of Timbuktu. Africas legendary City of Gold, not visited by Europeans since the Middle Ages, held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize to the first expedition from any nation to visit Timbuktu and return to tell the tale. One of the contenders was Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a thirtyyearold army officer. Handsome and confident, Laing was convinced that Timbuktu was his destiny, and his ticket to glory. In July 1825, after a whirlwind romance with Emma Warrington, daughter of the British consul at Tripoli, Laing left the Mediterranean coast to cross the Sahara. His 2,000mile journey took on an added urgency when Hugh Clapperton, a more experienced explorer, set out to beat him. Apprised of each others mission by overseers in London who hoped the two would cooperate, Clapperton instead became Laings rival, spurring him on across a hostile wilderness. An emotionally charged, actionpacked, utterly gripping read, The Race for Timbuktu offers a close, personal look at the extraordinary people and pivotal events of nineteenthcentury African exploration that changed the course of history and the shape of the modern world.
Author: Joan Cutting
File Type: pdf
The ability to use vague language (bags of time, doing stuff, sort of thing, and all that) is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. This volume explores the function of vague language in context. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, in a variety of world cultures. It suggests applications in TOEFL, asking questions such as What should learners be taught to understand and use, and why? and suggesting directions for future research.About the AuthorJOAN CUTTING is Senior Lecturer in TESOL at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh.
Author: Stephen Birmingham
File Type: epub
The New Worlds earliest Jewish immigrants and their unique, little-known history A New York Times bestseller from the author of Life at the Dakota. In 1654, twenty-three Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled from their homeland by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers, earning great wealth. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washingtons army during the American Revolution. Yet despite its major role in the birth and growth of America, this extraordinary group has remained virtually impenetrable and unknowable to outsiders. From author of Our Crowd Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees delves into the lives of the Sephardim and their historic accomplishments, illuminating the insulated world of these early Americans. Birmingham reveals how these families, with descendants including poet Emma Lazarus, Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, influencedand continue to influenceAmerican society.
Author: Stephen Schryer
File Type: epub
Fantasies of the New Class examines the terms through which U.S. writers and critics imagined a new and distinctly literary model of professionalism in the years after World War II. According to this model---as it was professed by writers like John Crowe Ransom, Lionel Trilling, Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow---the newfound institutions of the welfare state needed a new class of university-educated knowledge workers possessed of a heightened moral and cultural sensibility---a sensibility understood to require aesthetic modes of thinking. These writers imagined that the new class would embrace the non-instrumental values embodied in modernist literature and use them to check the rationalism of bourgeois society. In arguing thusly, they defined their work against the social sciences, which they claimed embodied the technical model of new class agency that their aesthetics counteracted. However, they paralleled a paradigm shift within the social sciences themselves, which also imagined the new class as a cohort of culturally enlightened experts committed to non-rational values and beliefs. Hence, contrary to the view of Cold War writers as embattled and elitist aesthetes, Fantasies of the New Class demonstrates the extent to which their modernist aesthetics served a trans-disciplinary ideal of public service. This project also demonstrates how this ideal influenced the next generation of political writers---exemplified by Marge Piercy and Ursula K. Le Guin---who continued to imagine new class agency in non-instrumental terms. As my title indicates, however, this notion of professionalism was a fantasy that disguised the subordination of the new class to market forces. Fantasies of the New Class shows how postwar writers and sociologists facilitated this trend by militating their model of professionalism against an older model of professionals as social engineers. Postwar writers thus generated a new conception of literature as simultaneously a vehicle for the new classs cultural instruction and a warning against its managerial ambitions.
Author: Jean-Philippe Deranty
File Type: pdf
Few thinkers have made such significant contribution to social and political thinking over the last three decades as Axel Honneth. His theory of recognition has rejuvenated the political vocabulary and allowed Critical Theory to move beyond Habermas. Beyond Communication is the first full-scale study of Honneth s work, covering the whole range of his writings, from his first sociological articles to the latest publications. By relocating the theory of recognition within the tradition of European social theory, the book exposes the full depth and breadth of Honneth s philosophical intervention. The book will be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and the social sciences.