In Confirmation Wars, Benjamin Wittes examines the degradation of the judicial nominations process over the past fifty years. Drawing on years of reporting on judicial nominations, including numerous interviews with nominees and sitting judges, he explains how the process has changed and how these changes threaten the independence of the courts. Getting beyond the partisan blame game that dominates most discussion of nominations, he argues that the process has changed as an institutional response by Congress to modern judicial power and urges basic reforms to better insulate the judiciary from the nastiness of contemporary politics.

A collection of all of the puns Mr. Cerf has hoarded over the years. Some were written for the Saturday Review, This Week, King Features, Reader's Digest, and Playboy. Some have never appeared in print before.

"Sidney Reilly (c. 1873-1925) is one of the most colorful and best-known spies of the twentieth century. Emerging from humble beginnings in southern Russia, Reilly was an inventive multilingual businessman and conman who enjoyed espionage as a sideline. By the early twentieth century he was working as an agent for Scotland Yard, spying on émigré communities in Paris and London, with occasional sorties to Germany, Russia, and the Far East. He spent World War I in the United States, brokering major arms deals for tsarist Russia, and then decided to become a professional spy, joining the ranks of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service. He came close to overthrowing the Bolshevik regime in Moscow before eventually being lured back to Russia and executed. Said to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming's iconic James Bond character, Reilly was simultaneously married to three or four women and had mistresses galore. Sifting through the reality and the myth of Reilly's life, historian Benny Morris offers a fascinating portrait of one of the most intriguing figures from the golden age of spies"--Amazon.com.

Benoit Mandelbrot¿s pioneering research in fractal geometry has affected many areas of mathematics, physics, finance and other disciplines. The papers reprinted in this third volume of his Selected Works center on a detailed study of fractional Brownian functions, best known as the mathematical tools behind the celebrated fractal landscapes. Extensive introductory material preceding the reprints incorporates striking new observations and conjectures. This book explores the fractal themes of ¿self-affinity¿ and ¿globality.¿ The ubiquity of ¿wild¿ temporal and spatial variability led Mandelbrot, in the early 1960¿s, to conclude that those phenomena lie beyond the usual statistical techniques and represent a new state of indeterminism. New mathematical tools are needed, and this book contributes to their development.

To modern man, the Middle Ages is a distant, mysterious and forbidding period. It is primitive in technology, brutal in violence, and superstitious and servile in society. But it was also a time of pageant and grandeur, of discovery and wonder, of great achievements and lasting progress, when men of genius and industry laid the foundations for our modern world. Those who have preceded us have in the main been neglected in our assessment of current life. Jews in the Middle Ages achieved great heights of power, wealth, scholarship and creativity - the Golden Age of Spain, of Rashi and the Tosafists, R' Yehuda Halevi and Maimonides. The Jews were part of the Renaissance, the catalysts for the Reformation, sponsors of arts, exploration, and commerce. But it was also a terrible time for Israel. The Almohad persecutions, the Crusades, the Black Death, the burning of the Talmud in Paris, the bitter rivalries, and quarrels within Jewish society itself all combined to paint the era in blood and despair. Rabbi Berel Wein, in this book, has woven an informative tapestry out of the events of the Jewish Middle Ages. Its historic figures come alive and we appreciate their greatness. The Sephardic world and the Ashkenazic society, the longing for Zion and redemption, the intrigues and truths of history are here faithfully explained. The story of the Jewish people in the Medieval Era is told with wit, knowledge, accuracy and emotion. As in Triumph of Survival, Rabbi Wein has not settled merely for a history of the Jews. Herald of Destiny will make our modern Jewish milieu and its problems more understandable by illuminating for us the great medieval Jewish world that preceded us.

In 1925, the 22-year-old Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) and the legendary art critic and historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) met in Italy. From that moment, they began a correspondence that lasted until Berenson's death at age 94. This book makes available, for the first time, the complete correspondence between two of the most influential figures in the 20th-century art world, and gives a new and unique insight into their lives and motivations. The letters are arranged into ten chronological sections, each accompanied by biographical details and providing the context for the events and personalities referred to. They were both talented letter writers: informative, spontaneous, humorous, gossipy, and in their frequent letters they exchanged news and views about art and politics, friends and family life, collectors, connoisseurship, discoveries, books read and written, and travel. Berenson advised Clark on his blossoming career, warning against the museum and commercial art worlds while encouraging his promise as a writer and interpreter of the arts. Above all, these letters trace the development of a deep and intimate friendship.

"Music of a Distant Drum marks a literary milestone. For the first time in English, poems from four leading literary traditions of the Middle East representing a wide sweep of medieval history appear in a single volume compiled by a single translator. Bernard Lewis, one of the world's greatest authorities on the region's culture and history, offers a work of startling beauty that leaves no doubt as to why such poets were courted by kings in their day. Like those in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the poems here--as ensured by Lewis's mastery of all the source languages and his impeccable style and taste--come fully alive in English. They are surprising and sensuous, disarmingly witty and frank. They provide a fascinating and unusual glimpse into Middle Eastern history. Above all, they are a pleasure to read.

-Appeals to popular culture book buyers and collectors, especially those dealing in biographies and memoirs, popular music history, punk culture, or the Clash -Published to follow the Clash's 40th anniversary in 2016, this is a testament to the man who both facillitated the band's formation and held it together From the growth of punk and beyond, this visually rich collection of art, fashion and ephemera, accompanied by essays, draws from the archives and philosophy of one of the 'prime instigators' of UK punk - Bernard Rhodes. Wake Up! To the World of Bernard Rhodes is a first-hand account of the punk movement. Bernard Rhodes shares his title of 'prime instigator of UK punk' with Malcom McLaren. Been there, seen it, done it hardly does Rhodes' story justice. Inspired by the avant-garde Situationist movement, and the designer of radical t-shirts for McLaren and the Vivienne Westwood Kings Road shop, it was Rhodes who introduced John Lydon to the Sex Pistols before engineering the formation of the Clash. With him as their manager, and the co-creator of their super-committed style, the Clash became and remains one of the biggest bands of the era, and a symbol of punk as a positive force. Alongside his two stints with them, Rhodes also nurtured the Specials and Dexy's Midnight Runners to huge success.

Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe was first published in 1977. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This is the first study of early medieval Jewish policy in the West which examines the nature of this policy from the perspective and aims of its formulators. As the author points out, most specialists in Jewish history have been dominated by what the historian Salo Baron has called the lachrymose conception, ' a view which emphasized persecution and suffering as a fundamental theme of Jewish history. Professor Bachrach challenges this view and attacks what he calls the myth of Christian church domination of the early medieval world.

This is an inspiring and thought-provoking inside story of a foreign correspondent's two adventurous careers, marked by personal crises, battles for principles and brushes with danger. It is also a candid observer's compassionate account of his role in war and peace, in the sweep of history, and is a thoughtful commentary on the urgent problems of journalism and communication today. Contents: PART I: Foundations: Born with a Caul; The Education of a Journalist; Oaths of Devotion; Round Trip to War; Present at the Creation; Peron and Evita; PART II: Milestones: Scoundrel Time; A Movable Feast; The Human Radar; Nothing But the Truffe; PART III: Encounters: Reverence for Life; Swords and Ploughshares; Future Indicative: The Vietnam Peace Story; the Unknown DeGaulle; Mission to Moscow; A Hero of Our Time: Sakharov; Links and Chains; PART IV: Homecomings: Return to America; Vermont: A State of Mind; Academic Adventures; Afghanistan and Academia; PART V: Foreign Correspondent: Endangered Species?; Why Do They Hate Us?; Cherchez la Femme; The Spiritual Dimension.

‘A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.’ This was how Jean-Paul Sartre characterized himself at the end of his autobiographical study, Words . And Bernard-Henri Lévy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate. His thinking was essentially a tumultuous dialogue with his whole age and himself. He learned from Gide the art of freedom, and how to experiment with inherited fictional forms. He was a fellow-traveller of communism, and yet his relations with the Party were deeply ambiguous. He was fascinated by Freud but trenchantly critical of psychoanalysis. Beneath Sartre’s complex and ever-mutating political commitments, Lévy detects a polarity between anarchic individualism on the one hand, and a longing for absolute community that brought him close to totalitarianism on the other. Lévy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth century’s catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings.

Story of the raider's exploits in the World War, as told by her commander to Wolfgang Frank.

In a rare foray outside that natural home, Booker Prize-winner Bernice Rubens penned these memoirs 'while I still have a memory'. Poignantly, the highly-acclaimed author, literary bon-vivante and celebrated film-maker died shortly after completing them. She wasn't quite expecting that but nor, as she reveals in these pages, did she expect to become a writer. It wasn't the sort of thing that happened to girls born in Glossop Terrace in Splott, the 'unmentionable and indisputable armpit of Cardiff'. In this delightful evocation of her own life, Rubens escorts us, with a flotilla of anecdotes, away from that armpit through her wartime childhood, her first 'major folly' (studying English at University) to stints as a teacher, lady's maid and actress before stumbling upon a career that bemused her until the end of her days. 'What shall I do,' was her constant internal refrain, 'when I grow up?' Bernice Rubens died in the autumn of 2004.

Analyzes the evolution of Marxist doctrine in theory and in practice, focusing on the tensions inherent in the application of a nineteenth-century ideology to twentieth-century politics

"Aptheker 'weaves together the voices of women survivors of the Holocaust and of the U.S. concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Chicana cannery workers and southern cotton-mill girls, older lesbians and elderly Jews, Afro-American women in slavery and contemporary Afro-American writers, and others, in order to explore women's ways of seeing. Her analyses of oral histories, novels, legends, poetry, and art show how we can use these records of women's and men's lives" -- Sandra Harding, Women's Review of Books.

A non-binary teenager may be from a small town but they remember at least a dozen past lives; a young trans woman auditions as an anime voice actor while the world is ending; in a future of constant change and transformation, one person is hesitant to undergo the next metamorphosis; a trans man comes back home to discover his parents have added to the household an android that has his deadface installed. Award-winning editor Bogi Takács has assembled a stellar line-up of stories that explore the frontiers of gender--using the imaginative tools of speculative fiction.

In this illuminating discussion of the role of animals in Western thought, the author shows, through his analysis of folklore, popular ideas, and natural history, that man's traditional fascination with animals is more than it appears. Professor Sax asserts that "animals put us in touch with modes of perception that are prior to culture. Encounters with animals compel us to question what it means to be human." After summarizing recent research on the bonds between animals and people, the author discusses the two major traditions of animal tales in Western culture, fables and fairy tales. Also discussed is what role specific animals, such as the beaver, stag, and elephant, have played in Western thought.