The way most Western politicians talk, democracy is the pinnacle of civilization, the best political system there is. Many think it's the system the rest of the world ought to adopt. Bob Rae is not one of them. He is too well informed about the difficulties and dangers of implanting democracy in foreign lands. Exporting Democracy is an eloquently argued book in which Rae brings his lively, nuanced understanding to bear on the history and current fortunes of this powerful idea. He shows how it and the related ideas of freedom, human rights, and federalism have been pushed to centre stage by the collapse of Soviet communism and by ongoing wars to topple secular and religious dictatorships in the Middle East. He's also witnessed attempts to implant democracy in three countries riven by tribal and ethnic divisions, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka, and offers readers a cool appraisal of the effort.

Provides insight into Europe's current political and financial crisis, citing such factors as dependence on foreign oil and a lack of a unified foreign policy and making predictions about future prospects while explaining the role of Europe's success in American security.

`England', Benjamin Disraeli famously said, `does not love coalitions'. But 2010 saw the first peace-time coalition in Britain since the 1930s. The coalition, moreover, may well not be an aberration. For there are signs that, with the rise in strength of third parties, hung parliaments are more likely to recur than in the past. Perhaps, therefore, the era of single-party majority government, to which we have become accustomed since 1945, is coming to an end. But is the British constitution equipped to deal with coalition? Are alterations in the procedures of parliament or government needed to cope with it? The inter-party agreement between the coalition partners proposes a wide ranging series of constitutional reforms, the most important of which are fixed-term parliaments and a referendum on the alternative vote electoral system, to be held in May 2011. The coalition is also proposing measures to reduce the size of the House of Commons, to directly elect the House of Lords and to strengthen localism. These reforms, if implemented, could permanently alter the way we are governed. This book analyses the significance of coalition government for Britain and of the momentous constitutional reforms which the coalition is proposing. In doing so it seeks to penetrate the cloud of polemic and partisanship to provide an objective analysis for the informed citizen.

"A comical and revealing account of what it's like to run for office with no political experience, little money and only a faint hope of winning, told first-hand by celebrated writer Noah Richler. During the 2015 federal election, approximately 1200 political campaigns were held across Canada. One of those campaigns belonged to author, journalist and political neophyte Noah Richler. Recruited by the NDP to run in the bellweather riding of Toronto-St Paul's, he was handed $350 and told he would lose. But as veteran NDP activists and social-media-savvy newbies joined his campaign, Richler found himself increasingly insulated from the stark reality that his campaign was flailing, imagining instead that he was headed to Parliament Hill. In The Candidate, Richler recounts his time on the trail in sizzling detail and hilarious frankness, from door knocking in Little Jamaica to being internet-shamed by experienced opponents. The Candidate lays bare what goes on behind the slogans, canvassing and talking points, told from the perspective of a political outsider. With his signature wit and probing eye, Noah Richler's chronicle of running for office is insightful, brutally honest and devastatingly funny."--

This major collection of essays challenges many of our preconceptions about British political and social history from the late eighteenth century to the present. Inspired by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, twelve leading scholars explore both the long-term structures - social, political and intellectual - of modern British history, and the forces that have transformed those structures at key moments. The result is a series of insightful, original essays presenting new research within a broad historical context. Subjects covered include the consequences of rapid demographic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the forces shaping transnational networks, especially those between Britain and its empire; and the recurrent problem of how we connect cultural politics to social change. An introductory essay situates Stedman Jones's work within the broader historiographical trends of the past thirty years, drawing important conclusions about new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.

With grace and gravity, with a gentle, quiet tenacity, Rachel Tzvia Back brings the poetics of indeterminacy to bear on Israel's over-determined landscape. Her verse hurts as the land itself has been hurt: its rippling music is delicate and achieved, its evocation of intimacy stunning. As political as it is personal, Azimuth shows us again, how history and linguistic horizons meet, and who we are or might be before them. (-Peter Cole)

Headlines from France suggest that the country's Jews and Muslims are inevitably at odds. But the past tells a different story. In this sweeping history from World War I to the present, Ethan Katz shows that Jewish-Muslim relations were more complex, shaped by everyday encounters and perceptions of deeply rooted similarities as well as differences.

In 2001, Ivan R. Dee began publication of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize–winner with the appearance of Donald Petersen’s Early and Late. The New Criterion, which has published poetry since 1984, is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry with a regard for traditional meter and poetic form. The magazine was thus an early leader in that poetic renaissance that has come to be called the New Formalism. For 2002 The New Criterion Poetry Prize was awarded to Adam Kirsch. His first book of poems, The Thousand Wells, is now published. Combining a passionate lyricism with commanding technical skill, Mr. Kirsch offers a beguiling and memorable sequence of poems that are deeply alive to the enchantments of nature and the chastenings of history. This is a remarkable debut by a notable young poet.

Judaism's Promise, Meeting The Challenge Of Modernity follows Seymour W. Itzkoff's well-received three-book series, Who Are the Jews? Judaism's Promise , confronts the many revolutions that have reshaped Judaism over the centuries allowing it and its people a path of leadership into the modern world. It takes the writings of the Torah, Holy Scriptures, and Talmud seriously as exemplars of the human search for civilizational and moral intellectuality. The book's basic concern is with the withering of Judaism as a force in contemporary Western civilization. Sadly millions of Jews have left the faith. Others venture forth only hesitantly into a synagogue, now a bastion of fossilized ritual and conspicuous consumption. These millions needed more from the orthodoxy, and this book attempts to show them the way back by giving renewed life to the heritages of Judaism, and, consequently, to its meaning for the modern world. Judaism's Promise argues for a return to the synagogue's originating Hellenistic commitment «to come together» in intellectual and moral study. As Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan argued, Judaism must once more become in the 20-21st century the civilization that it once represented to the wider world, and not a fossilized ceremonialism.

When Michael Dukakis accused George H. W. Bush of being the "Joe Isuzu of American Politics" during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate often impotently between moral outrage and amoral realism. In The Virtues of Mendacity, Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Jay proceeds to show that each philosopher s argument corresponds to a particular conception of the political realm, which decisively shapes his or her attitude toward political mendacity. He then applies this insight to a variety of contexts and questions about lying and politics. Surprisingly, he concludes by asking if lying in politics is really all that bad. The political hypocrisy that Americans in particular periodically decry may be, in Jay s view, the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth. -- Amazon.com.

Poetry. CAMERA is both paean and lament for a world in flux. To render such a world with its unresolvable tensions between time's embodiment and erasure is the focus of the collection. What does it mean to hold many irreconcilable presences? The task is to measure small changes, arrivals and departures. The work is a border between existence and disappearance. Moments named and described are "framed." Though the created world with its emotional truths will not last, it is a topography of words and a realm of heightened scrutiny. To hold and revere its presence is the poem's agency. A world is predicated by representation of nature, seasons, ritual, location, and the arts. Loss looming, love is attention given and the human bond holding writer and reader. "'I lifted to mind a piece of bright blue air, ' wrote Robert Creeley, in a line Maxine Chernoff quotes in CAMERA. It's apt: this is a book full of air and breezes, populated with doves and thrushes, swallows and crows. It's an earthy book, too, where tender roots push through an eroticized earth ('thigh of hill/breast of leaves/belly of witness'). It's never just a book of the body, though, or of the material world: each sharply sensed moment spirals out into history, geography, biology, or grief. It is a book where the world aspires to be voiced, and where words 'send their tendrils toward the next refrain.' CAMERA lifts a world to mind, and holds it there." --Robert Archambeau

From the romantic, highly detailed realism of his large-scale "Mountain" photographs to multimedia pieces that embrace abstract forms drawn from close observation of nature, Clifford Ross's work is unlike any other. In 2002, Ross invented his R1 camera, with which he has produced some of the highest resolution single shot photographs ever realized. In a Ross landscape, viewers can spot a bird in a tree on a mountain a mile away. Ross's longstanding desire to reconcile realism and abstraction in his art intensified when he took up photography in the mid-1990s. This book offers the first comprehensive survey of his work, from large-scale, highly detailed landscape photographs to his latest "invisible art" -- an augmented reality app for smartphones that reveals a hidden work within a work. Seen & Imagined accompanies a landmark exhibition at MASS MoCA. Featuring 139 images, most of them in color, including such major Ross series as "Mountains," "Mountain Redux," "Harmoniums," and "Digital Waves," it is the first fine-art book to offer readers an augmented reality 3D "pop up" experience (through a free downloadable app) using their smartphones. Texts by noted writers and critics David Anfam, Quentin Bajac, Arthur C. Danto, Jack Flam, Nicholas Negroponte, and Jock Reynolds, comment on Ross's work, placing it within the history of art and technology, alongside an interview by Orville Schell with the artist. -

Written by Alexander Trachtenberg in 1935, The History of May Day is an invaluable asset for any Marxist-Leninist student. In this classic pamphlet Alexander Trachtenberg delivers a concise history of the origins of May Day. The origin of May Day is indissolubly bound up with the struggle for the shorter workday--a demand of major political significance for the working class. This struggle is manifest almost from the beginning of the factory system in the United States. Although the demand for higher wages appears to be the most prevalent cause for the early strikes in this country, the question of shorter hours and the right to organize were always kept in the foreground when workers formulated their demands against the bosses and the government. As exploitation was becoming intensified and workers were feeling more and more the strain of inhumanly long working hours, the demand for an appreciable reduction of hours became more pronounced.

In the summer of 2000 a young Irish journalist returned from New York to launch a magazine about life in boomtown Dublin. The Dubliner was an instant failure, and within a few months it was close to bankruptcy. For the next seven years Trevor White struggled to keep the magazine afloat. Along the way he managed to alienate nearly everyone in Ireland. The Dubliner Diaries is an awkward history of the Celtic Tiger by a man who tried to capture it, and ended up being mauled.

"Tearing down stereotypes about Jews, Richard Marceau tells us about himself, using his own story to convey Jewish history and culture. He draws an original portrait of the State of Israel, the role it plays in today's Jewish identity, and helps us discover Quebec's Jewish community. Denouncing prejudices and intellectual dishonesty, identifying himself as a pro-Palestinian Zionist, Richard Marceau calls for a respectful dialogue, promoting both the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel and the creation of an independent Palestinian state."--Pub. desc.

"Lines that make me want to have sex on the moon."-Thurston Moore Cɶur de Lion is a book-length epistolary love poem that directly addresses a recently lost "you"--in accessible tones yet with extreme erudition and fierce intellect--but that also directly addresses the work of poetic address, how it shifts when the you shifts from a literal recipient, through loss, to poetry itself: art form, tradition; soul-catching medium. It's libidinal, heartful, hot with the memory of what was libidinal and heartfelt and hot. It's also a cult classic: self-published in 2007 and available now to an audience who will recognize the deep influence it has had on contemporary poets and poetry. " Scathing and meek, furious and thoughtful, reckless and careful, brave and frightened , Cɶur de Lion is something you've never seen before that you already know by heart."-- Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket "A book of frank witty poetry that makes me laugh, cry, throw things ."-- Lena Dunham "She is in me now like a hot virus and i am smitten."-- Melissa Broder "In Cɶur de Lion the erotics of power and powerlessness are not opposites--they flirt and morph and clash into a brilliant blast of poetic energy . I saw Ariana read from this book at UC Berkeley, and the walls of the academy rumbled. I fucking love this book ." -- Dodie Bellamy "At the time we thought Cɶur de Lion a more comfortable book than The Cow , for it is, after all, a 'love poem' no matter how perverse, but as I look at it again I'm struck by how fierce its valences are, how intransigent its anti-nationalism. Already I think of Reines' work in art as dividing, like Picasso's, into periods, and if this is the rose period it is also the time in which blood rained down on the peoples' heads. Asked for the history of a certain sort of public sex, I mumble that there was Zabriskie Point , and then there was Peter Hujar, and there was Cɶur de Lion. " -- Kevin Killian

In this engaging dialogue Zygmunt Bauman, sociologist and philosopher, and Stanislaw Obirek, theologian and cultural historian, explore the place of spirituality and religion in the world today and in the everyday lives of individuals. Their conversation ranges from the plight of monotheistic religions cast onto a polytheistic world stage to the nature of religious experience and its impact on human worldviews and life strategies; from Messianic and Promethean ideas of redemption and salvation to the possibility and prospects of inter-religious dialogue and the factors standing in its way. While starting from different places, Bauman and Obirek are driven by the same concern to reconcile the multiplicity of religions with the oneness of humanity and to do so in a way that avoids the trap of adhering to a single truth, bearing witness instead to the multiplicity of human truths and the diversity of cultures and faiths. For everything creative in human existence has its roots in human diversity; it is not human diversity that turns brother against brother but the refusal of it. The fundamental condition of peace, solidarity and benevolent cooperation among human beings is a willingness to accept that there is a multiplicity of ways of being human, and a willingness to accept the model of coexistence that this multiplicity requires.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. "The ruins of Lifta, an archeological site of incalculable value outside Jerusalem is a nexus of 'irreconcilable stories.' To the stones of Lifta and their compelling mute testimony, Kaminsky has bent his poet's ear, transcribing for us their urgent, mournful, bitter and aggrieved voices that witness to the layers of memory and history here. As the poet was summoned to Lifta, this probing and timely book summons the reader with blunt, contentious dialogues, daring and tender monologues, striking allegories, and always, the piercing questions that, seemingly unanswerable, must continue to be asked in the pursuit of understanding and justice."--Jeanne Marie Beaumont

"This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov-poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography"--