"Examines first years of the Obama presidency and effects on American foreign policy, including the U.S. relationships with China and Pakistan, war in Afghanistan and withdrawal from Iraq, movement toward Middle East peace, response to the Arab Spring, agendas involving energy, climate, and weak states, and approaches to rogue states"--Provided by publisher.

Who was the inventor of the steamboat? James Thomas Flexner is frankly more interested in personalities than in mechanics. Exploring the fascinating byways of early America, he has packed his book with personal histories: John Fitch, the driven genius; Fulton, the brilliant schemer; Ramsey, the charming backwoods tavern-keeper, playing for Washington's political favor--and many others, no less alive and interesting. He tells their stories as a race for success, and he does not award the verdict until the last page. He completely satisfies those who want to know the mechanical facts; but his emphasis is on the nature of inventive genius, and its effect on the world of men.

At this critical point in the history of U.S. - China relations, Living with China offers an essential assessment of U.S. foreign policy. From Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and the legacy of Tiananmen Square to trade, markets, and commercial diplomacy, these essays address the complex web of issues that will shape future relations with China. Leading scholars and political experts delve into history and analyze current events to identify obstacles to cooperation and propose possible foundation for building a better understanding --

Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space--political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O. J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal--Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights." Lakoff's introduction to linguistic theories and the philosophy of language lays the groundwork for an exploration of news stories that meet what she calls the UAT (Undue Attention Test). As the stories became the subject of talk-show debates, late-night comedy routines, Web sites, and magazine articles, they were embroidered with additional meanings, depending on who was telling the story. Race, gender, or both are at the heart of these stories, and each one is about the right to construct meanings from languagein short, to possess power. Because language tells us how we are connected to one another, who has power and who does not, the stories reflect the language war. We use language to analyze what we call "reality," the author argues, but we mistrust how language is used today--witness the "politics of personal destruction" following the Clinton impeachment. Yet Lakoff sees in the struggle over language a positive goal: equality in the creation of our national discourse. Her writing is accessible and witty, and her excerpts from the media are used to great effect.

Rev. ed. of: Child of light. 1951. Describes the life of the author of "Frankenstein" and wife of the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelly.

One of the most imaginative figures to emerge from the science fiction field. Olaf Stapledon left an indelible mark on many other writers, from Arthur C. Clarke to Saul Bellows, but never won a mass following himself. This study by a renowned American literary critic provides a long-needed introduction to the life and work of the man Brian Aldiss called "the great classical example, the cold pitch of perfection as he turns scientific concepts into ontological epic prose poems, the ultimate science fiction writer." Probing the recurrent themes and images of Stapledon's novels -- which include Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker, and Sirius -- Leslie A. Fiedler brilliantly illuminates the complexity and richness that underlie Stapledon's fiction. As Fiedler demonstrates, Stapledon was very much a product of the 1930s, embracing a set of leftist attitudes that were common to many other "Oxbridge-educated sons of the English upper classes." But, as Fiedler further shows, there is much more to Stapleton's books than their superficial ideological content: his works are unique in their awe-inspiring vision of the breadth of the physical universe and the depths of the human psyche. "Certainly since encountering him," Fielder writes, "I have never been able to stare up at thee night sky with the same secure faith that either God exists or he does not; anymore than I have been able between sleeping and waking to be sure that the nighttime "I" preparing to dream is identical with or totally different from the conscious "I" about to surrender its dominion."

Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium--the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture? Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, and more. What Leavy uncovers is not only what's wrong with baseball--and how to fix it--but also what's right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.

Most histories of Reconstruction deal primarily with political issues and the larger conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, notherners and southerners. The Trouble They Seen departs from this approach to examine in their own words the lives of ordinary ex-slaves who had few skills and fewer opportunities. People are by now familiar with names like Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Robert Smalls, but they know little of the men and women of more modest distinction, less still of the anonymous millions whose lives have been recorded in letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and official documents. Editor Dorothy Sterling has drawn on these primary sources and with cogent commentary depicts the African American experience during Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877. The period unfolds with immediacy and drama in the voices of African Americans: the problems and promise of the first year; the role of the Freedmen's Bureau; anti-black violence; the initiation of political participation; the development of black colleges; the renaissance in the African American community, a time of unprecedented progress in the fields of politics, education, economics, and culture; and the inevitable tragic struggle by African Americans against southern white efforts to resume political power and to fetter black freedom with a thousand chains more durable than slavery.

Examines the efforts of creationists to require the teaching of the biblical account of creation in American schools and analyzes the reactions of the scientific community to the controversy

Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common (and decent, and hard-working) man. Abe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. He was given to swearing off things—coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses, such as "May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation." Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical "You might as well be a mensch." Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly. The author's unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir, Messages from My Father .

The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine is the latest installment in the Beatles Album Series by Beatles historian Bruce Spizer. The book covers the songs and projects undertaken by the Beatles shortly after completion of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in April 1967. In following ten months, the group wrote and recorded the song "All You Need Is Love" for the Our World TV program that was broadcast by satellite throughout the world, wrote the songs for and filmed the TV spectacular Magical Mystery Tour , wrote the songs for their feature length cartoon film Yellow Submarine , and recorded the songs "Lady Madonna" and "Across The Universe" before heading to India to study transcendental meditation in mid-February 1968. The book covers these remarkable achievements from the British, American, and Canadian perspectives, and includes chapters on the packaging of the albums and the writing and recording of the songs. It also has chapters on how the Beatles influenced our world, the friendly rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Beatles Saturday morning cartoons, dozens of fan recollections, and more. The book has over 150 images.

American democracy is a government of men as well as laws, and politics as much as legal precedent determines whether the decisions of the Supreme Court become the policy of society. This is the argument of a provocative book on the Warren Court by one of the country's most distinguished authorities on the Court.

"Thirty-one, in part or in full, of the forty-six Constant Reader pieces are gathered here for the first time in book form. They not only belong with the body of her work, but also express the essence of the period in a telling way" -- Front jacket flap.

In a model study Jacob Price illuminates the dynamic growth of Britain’s foreign trade in the eighteenth century through an investigation of the investment patterns and credit institutions that financed that expansion. Concentrating on the trade between Britain and the Chesapeake tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland, for which a unique set of records exists, Price surveys the ways in which commerce developed and working capital was mobilized in Britain to support expanding overseas trade. Price develops the clearest picture ever of the financial environment within Britain as it affected Southern colonies in the preindustrial age. He does so by determining the kind of capital resources merchants in foreign trade actually commanded and measuring how much of their own wealth merchants brought to trade. In great and absorbing detail he discusses also the development of merchant-oriented banks in London and other ports, reinvestment of profits, long-term borrowing on bond, and the long-term credit provided to export merchants by wholesalers in textiles, ironmongery, and other industries. The relationship of debt to the coming of the American Revolution is also treated. Tobacco growers suffered more than others from a psychological unease caused by immense debt and were more revolutionary than farmers with less intensive capital needs and, hence, with lighter debt. This history will enlighten Anglo-American historians, economic historians, and historians of the American revolutionary era.

With her perfect memory (and plenty of zip), ninety-five-year-old Ruth Gruber - adventurer, international correspondent, photographer, maker of (and witness to) history, responsible for rescuing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II and after - tells her story in her own words and photographs. In Witness, Gruber writes about what she saw and shows us, through her photographs - taken on each of her assignments - the worlds, the people, the landscapes, the courage, the hope, the life she witnessed up close and firsthand: the Siberian gulag of the 1930s and the new cities being built there (Gruber, then untrained as a photographer, brought her first Rolleicord with her) ... the Alaska highway of 1943, built by 11,000 soldiers, mostly black men from the South (the highway went from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, 1,500 miles to Fairbanks) ... her thirteen-day voyage on the army-troop transport Henry Gibbins with refugees and wounded American soldiers, escorting and then photographing the refugees as they arrived in Oregon, New York (they arrived in upstate New York as Adolf Eichmann was sending 750,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz).

Hilary Putnam's unceasing self-criticism has led to the frequent changes of mind he is famous for, but his thinking is also marked by considerable continuity. A simultaneous interest in science and ethics - unusual in the current climate of contention - has long characterized his thought. In "Philosophy in an Age of Science", Putnam collects his papers for publication - his first volume in almost two decades. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur's introduction identifies central themes to help the reader negotiate between Putnam past and Putnam present: his critique of logical positivism; his enduring aspiration to be realist about rational normativity; his anti-essentialism about a range of central philosophical notions; his reconciliation of the scientific worldview and the humanistic tradition; and his movement from reductive scientific naturalism to liberal naturalism. Putnam returns here to some of his first enthusiasms in philosophy, such as logic, mathematics, and quantum mechanics. The reader is given a glimpse, too, of ideas currently in development on the subject of perception. Putnam's work, contributing to a broad range of philosophical inquiry, has been said to represent a "history of recent philosophy in outline."

"The third edition of this classic and indispensable work, first published in 1940 and last revised in 1976, has been updated completely for a new generation of students and scholars. Recognizing that the ways in which history is understood and interpreted have changed drastically over the past six decades, the editors have revised 448 articles, replaced 1,360 articles, and added 841 new entries. Gender, race, and social-history perspectives have been added to many entries for the first time. In another departure from the earlier editions, the editors have added maps and illustrations throughout the text, providing helpful visual cues to readers. No library should be without these new volumes."--"The Best of the Best Reference Sources," American Libraries, May 2003.