In 1980 newly-elected Margaret Thatcher went forth to do battle against "the British Disease" and immediately set off a bitter war in which her allies and adversaries fought for dominion over economy and culture. In this imaginative, informed account Charles Dellheim tells the story of how the Iron Lady tried to refurbish her rusty realm. More than a sketch of the Thatcher years and its protagonist, The Disenchanted Isle places the 1980s in broad historical perspective, connecting Britain's past and present. This history takes us on a journey into the heart of British politics, culture, and business. We watch the rise and fall of the grocer's daughter who overcame modest origins and sexism to become Britain's first female prime minister. We watch Oxford dons consider whether to confer an honorary degree on an alumna few liked; miners strike to protest plans that threatened their jobs and communities; and Jaguar employees struggle to rescue their failing firm. We meet old-style paternalists, free-market street fighters, corporate raiders, socially committed bishops, and left-wing intellectuals. The result is a dramatic, vivid, and colorful story that captures the ambiguities of British history.
An inside look at Japan's use of professional barriers, both institutional and psychological, against the entire outside world.
Jacob's Ladder delivers a remarkably lucid explanation of what the sequencing of the human genome really tells us. Decoding the sequence, evolutionary biologist Henry Gee shows, is just the beginning: seeing the letters and words. The next frontier is in understanding snatches of conversation between genes-how they interact to direct the growth of an organism. Gee takes us into the heart of that conversation, illuminating how genes govern a single egg cell's miraculous transformation into a human being, and how they continue to direct that person's day-by-day development throughout a lifetime.Gee tells the story of what we know about the genome today and what we are likely to discover tomorrow. As our knowledge advances, we will be able to direct with increasing authority the conversations between genes: not only performing medical interventions but also creating whole scripts directing birth, ancestry, and diversity in a brave new world.
Along with Freud, Jung, Adler, and William James, Wolfgang Kohler, co-founder of Gestalt Psychology, is one of the most valuable and innovative thinkers in modern psychology. Dynamics in Psychology is his most important statement of the application of the Gestalt approach to psychological thinking generally and to perception and memory in particular. He argues here that psychological theories cannot be restricted to the realm of psychology proper, that they must refer to biological and physical concepts. Kohler's scientific precision and continual respect for the whole human being gives his work its lasting value.
Russell Braddon opens this novel of character and suspense with a murder as viewed by the victim herself. Then the body is found in the back row of a rural English cinema, and it appears that the murderer who victimizes only young, blond female hitchhikers has struck for the fourth time in a year. The question unresolved until the very last pages is: Who is the target of the investigation?
In today's society, a wealth of information can be obtained at the touch of a button. But while information is abundant, time, unfortunately, is not. How do you present your material in a way that grabs-and holds-the attention of your audience? Whether you are writing a report, drafting email, creating a Power Point presentation, or building a Web site, this book shows how to use language that is easily accessible, never oppressive. It explains how to organize content in progressive, digestible detail, allowing readers to navigate a document's contents and to move quickly to areas of interest. And it describes how to link ideas within a document and across the mediums of print, Internet, and CD-ROM. Each two-page spread covers one subject and is linked to other subjects for further study. More than one hundred sets of recommendations, backed by concrete examples, cover everything from common grammatical mistakes to the basics of using charts and tables.
Alyson Thomson has left the city for a simpler life on an abandoned farm with her lover, Walker, a potter. Wandering there, she uncovers, in the ruins of a log cabin, the writings of a young woman who lived more than a hundred years before. Into Alyson's story Merilyn Simonds weaves the moving tale of Margaret MacBayne, who, with her family, left behind hardship in a seaside Scottish town in the hope of building a new home in the Canadian wilderness. Margaret, an expert on herbs, contemplates revenge when her brothers rob her of her happiness. When Alyson too suffers great loss, she must decide if retribution is worth the price. Taut and uplifting, sensuous and astute, The Holding is psychologically complex and beautifully rendered. Simonds brings us an intimate journey of discovery into the things we keep most guarded, whose truths often lie in unexpected places.
Teaching philosophy to retired people should be a path to wisdom, Ron Manheimer thought. He was right, but in an unexpected fashion. His lively Socratic "dialogues" with older people led him into hilarious and provocative conversations with a colorful cast of fellow seekers: from his bon vivant Danish mentor Augie Nielsen to his strong-willed elderly student Hildegard, from his ironic teenaged daughter Esther to his wisecracking Uncle Joe.Like James Carse in Breakfast at the Victory, Manheimer reinvigorates the ancient tradition of using storytelling to explore truth. What is romantic love? How do we shape the stories we tell ourselves about our own pasts? Does the purpose of life become clearer in old age? How do we find common meanings across religious, ethnic, and generational divides? What is the essence of a person? What does it mean to live a "full" life?Showing how ideas and lives can illuminate one another, Manheimer's engaging narratives address these questions while providing an inviting exploration of the ideas of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, and Martin Buber. A great teacher, Manheimer shows how these philosophers might provide the footgear for treading everyday paths of human experience, on our inevitable journeys to "the end of time."
Food has never been more exalted as part of a lifestyle, yet fewer and fewer people really know what good food is. Drawing on enough culinary experiences to fill several lifetimes, Gina Mallet's irreverent memoir combines recollections of meals and their milieus with recipes and tasting tips. In loving detail, Last Chance to Eat muses on the fates of foods that were once the stuff of feasts: light, fluffy eggs; rich cheeses; fresh meat; garden vegetables; and fish just hauled ashore. Mallet's gastronomic adventures appeal to any palate: from finding the perfect grilled cheese ("as delicate tasting as any Escoffier recipe") to combing the bustling food department at postwar Harrod's for the makings of "an Elizabeth David meal." The search for taste often takes her far from the beaten path-to an underground "chevaline" restaurant serving horsemeat steaks and to purveyors of contraband Epoisses, for instance-but the journey is always a delight.
"Miss Savarese, who has worked in this area and written one other book like her heroine, Paula Jericho, features Today, one of the seemingly successful subsidiaries of Kimberly Publishing Company (just which empire is toppling might prompt an educated guess)... Paula works for promotion; has just been through an affair with a married man, and is well on her way to another with the head of the magazine division, Dave Wolffe, who offers her the next best of everything, Campari and black pearls." - Kirkus Review
From a lab in the Sahara, where one problem is sand in the petri dishes, to an Israeli lab that narrowly escapes a terrorist bomb, stem cells have gone global. Not only are the cells studied in an escalating number of labs-and lands-but they are already being used. In Japan, a respected doctor uses the cells to make small women better endowed. In Connecticut, stem cell technology has created cloned cows that roam the hills displaying eerily identical personalities. In Texas, stem cells rejuvenate dying hearts. In China, clinics offer stem cells to patients suffering from everything from paralysis to brain trauma.In elegant, cogent prose, science journalist Cynthia Fox has illuminated the reality and promise of stem cell therapies. Cell of Cells illustrates how the extensive, fervent experimentation currently under way is causing a revolution, both in the body and in the international body politic.
Nina and Tony are twenty years into a turbulent marriage-like relationship. Her world is centered at home in rural Pennsylvania: she builds intricate kinetic toys, her solitude both solace and confinement. He is a painter, in New York much of the time. Bill, the ailing caretaker of a nearby farm, a virtual stranger to Nina, tells her the story of his affair with his brother's wife forty years before. In intertwining narratives, we see how Bill's troubled life unfolded, and how his story comes to obsess Nina, triggering her own memories: of fiery years with Tony, of their infidelities and ineluctable passion for each other, and of her struggle with the boundaries of the relationship-real and imagined.
This hard-hitting police procedural-told from a female perspective-recalls the early days of Joseph Wambaugh in its crackling authenticity. With a rush of adrenaline, the novel plunges you into the life of police officer Abigail Fitzpatrick and the seamy world of North Florida as she matures from untested rookie into street-smart veteran. Along the way, Abby comes up against a panoply of crack-heads, domestic batterers, burned-out paramedics, low-lifes, and the everyday stress, danger, and harassment that come with being a cop-especially a female cop.
How did a small southwest town transform itself into a hotbed of research science, advanced technology, and money? Tracking key figures in Santa Fe's emerging industries, Ed Regis explains how entrepreneurial scientists are using complexity theory and powerful, experimental computer programs to create practical-and profitable-applications. Their efforts to convert vast, diverse data, whether chemical or biological or computational, into useful information is leading to new drugs and medical therapies, ultimately revolutionizing our understanding of effective business strategies. With cutting-edge technology, companies are able to test chemicals, drugs, and interactions virtually before committing huge laboratory investments.
Inside, you'll find a stableful of thrills and a few surprises from such famous authors as Arthur Conan Doyle and J.P. Marquand, Beryl Markham and John Galsworthy, Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Wallace. Brimming with color, excitement and atmosphere, here are compelling tales of dreams and treachery, horses and horseplay, Holmes and Watson, love and death, and a full complement of riders, rogues, and the fascinating royalty of the turf.
The Constitution states that "no religious test" may keep a candidate from aspiring to political office. Yet, since John F. Kennedy used the phrase to deflect concerns about his Catholicism, the public has largely avoided probing candidates' religious beliefs. Is it true, however, that a candidate's religious convictions should be off-limits to public scrutiny?Damon Linker doesn't think so, and in this book he outlines the various elements of religious belief-including radical atheism-that are simply incompatible with high office, and sometimes even active citizenship, in a democracy. In six forceful chapters he enlightens us to the complicated interrelations between churches and states, consistently applying a political litmus test to a range of theological views. Along the way, he clearly explains, among other topics, why the government in a religiously tolerant society must not promote a uniform, absolute code of ethics and behavior; why the conviction that America is worthy of divine attention is dangerous; and why the liberal position on the political deregulation of sex is our nation's only hope for conciliation.In this provocative, hard-hitting manifesto, Linker exhorts both believers and atheists to behave better in the public sphere, and he offers a carefully charted road map for doing so.
They speak to anyone who has been baffled by the old conflict between personal freedom and causal order. More widely, they examine the role of action in the projection of any general order, including the physical. They find history as the career and evolution of self-criticizing and self-correcting action. They reject all "theories" of history, whether as a chaos or an episode in an ahistoric totality. They propose a common source of science and the humanities, of laboratory and the Muses. Key words here are act and action. They contrast with passivity and with the convention that requires us to keep out of our own thought in order to avoid illusion and egotistical pretentiousness.
The saga of the Lusitania is one of the most remarkable in the annals of maritime history. State-of-the-art when she went into service and the first express liner to be equipped with steam turbines, she outclassed all her rivals. She triumphantly restored British supremacy on the North Atlantic passenger routes and became an acknowledged commercial success; she was highly popular with her regular passengers. Her sinking in May 1915 by a German U-boat, with heavy loss of life, was at that time the most savage attack on civilians in the course of war, and was widely denounced in allied and neutral countries. From that day her loss has become encrusted with legends (including conspiracy theories), many of them created by German propaganda. In this new book David Ramsay has unraveled those myths and legends and tells a clear and compelling saga of terrible maritime disaster and clashes among three powerful nations. It is a story of potentates and presidents, ambassadors and ministers of state, bankers, shipping magnates, spies, and, not least, Captain William Turner, who had to defend himself against charges of incompetence and fight for his reputation. Based on detailed research, this new book almost certainly contains the most objective account of the history of the liner and the circumstances surrounding her sinking. The sinking of Lusitania, which took a mere eighteen minutes, led to a loss of life comparable with the Titanic disaster, and the ramifications were felt across Europe and America; this masterly telling of the story will intrigue the general reader as much as it does the historian and enthusiast.
A successful magazine editor and prize-winning journalist, Sally Brampton launched Elle magazine in the UK in 1985. But behind the successful, glamorous career was a story that many of her friends and colleagues knew nothing about-her ongoing struggle with severe depression and alcoholism. Brampton's is a candid, tremendously honest telling of how she was finally able to "address the elephant in the room," and of a culture that sends the overriding message that people who suffer from depression are somehow responsible for their own illness. She offers readers a unique perspective of depression from the inside that is at times wrenching, but ultimately inspirational, as it charts her own coming back to life. Beyond her personal story, Brampton offers practical advice to all those affected by this illness. This book will resonate with any person whose life has been haunted by depression, at the same time offering help and understanding to those whose loved ones suffer from this debilitating condition.
At last, the novel for everyone who has ever loved something secondhand-the High Fidelity of garage sales, the On the Road of thrift shopping, The Moviegoer of the flea market. Richard owns a secondhand store ("Satori Junk") just outside Detroit. He's the kind of guy for whom not much happens, until it happens all at once: his mother dies. He rummages his parents' basement for good junk and finds (alongside "every purse my mother has ever owned since the Fifties") a box of photos that changes his view of everything. He falls apart over his mother's notes on his favorite meal in an old cookbook. He meets Theresa, a fellow hipster, a thrift-attired junk goddess who shares his feeling for castaways, and he falls for her-hard. Along the way he acquires some junk wisdom about love and loss.Richard's inimitable, hilarious, philosophical, self-deprecating, yearning voice, and his sharp and loving eye for common foibles and unexpected virtues make for a comic novel crammed full of surprise and pleasure. Second Hand is peppered with insight as unpretentious and satisfying as the unexpected garage sale find. Junk, Richard tells us, "has taught me that to find new use for an object discarded is an act of glistening purity. I have learned that a camera case makes a damn fine purse or that 40 copies of 'Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass's Whipped Cream and Other Delights' may be used to cover a wall of a bedroom...Junk has taught me that all will come to junk eventually, and much sooner than you think."
"When I was thirty-five and freshly separated and still a stouthearted pilgrim to myself, I took a job on the Gulf Coast swindling people. I sold fake trailer lot deeds to investors with souls more crooked than my own." This is the voice of Richard, the winning and irrepressible narrator of this novel in stories. Here, we follow Richard's chaotic childhood informed by his parents' passionate and rocky marriage, his mother's nervous breakdowns, his traveling salesman father's erratic attempts to earn his mother's love again, and their eventual divorce, through Richard's own trials with the women in his life.Richard is like a traveler or pilgrim, moving from Haw River, North Carolina, to Arkansas to the Texas Gulf Coast and finally back to North Carolina again, as he and his people - they drink hard, dance in their kitchens, lie and cheat - struggle with their love and wrestle with their often inharmonious natures. In the end the narrator struggles to straighten out some small piece of his heart's crooked essence. My People's Waltz sadly celebrates the decisions we make to get on with the business of living.The stories in this collection have appeared in the Atlantic, GQ, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best.Here's what Dale Ray Phillips has said of his own work: "Writing a story is a strange act of discovery; generally, I find that what I have uncovered is nothing more than what I have always known. Also - and I'm embarrassed to admit this - I love to lie, and fiction offers an acceptable channel for this compulsion."
Kids today seem to be under more competitive pressure than ever, while studies show that reading, writing, and the arts in schools are suffering. Is there any place for imagination in kids' lives anymore? In a dog-eat-dog world, why dream things that aren't there?In gorgeous prose and through personal stories, Beth Kephart resoundingly affirms the imagination as the heart of our ability to empathize with others, to appreciate the world, and to envision possibilities for the future. The star of her story is once again her son, Jeremy (as in her National Book Award-nominated A Slant of Sun), now fourteen years old-a child who at first resists storytelling, preferring more objective and orderly pursuits, but later leads a neighborhood book club/writing group and aspires to follow Steven Spielberg into moviemaking.Embedded in the text and appendices are examples of how to inspire children to read, write, and dream.
The title of Melvin Jules Bukiet's latest collection hints at the deceitful nature of its multiple protagonists. An aspiring writer stalks Vladmir Nabokov across midtown Manhattan one afternoon in the summer of Watergate. A young co-ed's seduction of her elderly philosophy professor delivers her an A and him lasting happiness. Max, "a liar and a voyeur, like any true artist," wanders the East Village taking photographs of murder victims. A famous Holocaust survivor "with the big eyes and the big prize" conducts an impromptu circumcision.Ranging from 1895 Prague to the site of a Central American rebellion to the home of a certain Seattle software magnate to the roof of an urban skyscraper, each of these outrageous (though occasionally tender) stories offers keen insight into human nature.
The essays in this latest American Assembly title have been conditioned by the harsh fiscal realities facing the U.S. government and the real need for reform in the United Nations system. Assessing the diverse issues that surround the United States's policy toward the UN, contributors from a diversity of fields - law, government, academia, military - are united in their belief that, with work, it will be possible to forge a sound, bipartisan U.S. policy toward the UN system - and that it is critical for such an effort to begin immediately. As in other areas of foreign policy, budgetary considerations are now driving substance. The United Nations should not be shielded from careful budgetary examination, but it is crucial for the American people to engage in a rational debate to examine which UN activities are most in the United States's interest.
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