Having reported on some of the world's most violent, least understood regions in his bestsellers Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, Robert Kaplan now returns to his native land, the United States of America. Traveling, like Tocqueville and John Gunther before him, through a political and cultural landscape in transition, Kaplan reveals a nation shedding a familiar identity as it assumes a radically new one. An Empire Wilderness opens in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the first white settlers moved into Indian country and where Manifest Destiny was born. In a world whose future conflicts can barely be imagined, it is also the place where the army trains its men to fight the next war. "A nostalgic view of the United States is deliberately cultivated here," Kaplan writes, "as if to bind the uncertain future to a reliable past." From Fort Leavenworth, Kaplan travels west to the great cities of the heartland--to St. Louis, once a glorious shipping center expected to outshine imperial Rome and now touted, with its desolate inner city and miles of suburban gated communities, as "the most average American city." Kaplan continues west to Omaha; down through California; north from Mexico, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; up to Montana and Canada, and back through Oregon. He visits Mexican border settlements and dust-blown county sheriffs' offices, Indian reservations and nuclear bomb plants, cattle ranches in the Oklahoma Panhandle, glacier-mantled forests in the Pacific Northwest, swanky postsuburban sprawls and grim bus terminals, and comes, at last, to the great battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where an earlier generation of Americans gave their lives for their vision of an American future. But what, if anything, he asks, will today's Americans fight and die for? At Vicksburg Kaplan contemplates the new America through which he has just traveled--an America of sharply polarized communities that draws its population from pools of talent far beyond its borders; an America where the distance between winners and losers grows exponentially as corporations assume gov-ernment functions and the wealthy find themselves more closely linked to their business associates in India and China than to their poorer neighbors a few miles away; an America where old loyalties and allegiances are vanishing and new ones are only beginning to emerge. The new America he found is in the pages of this book. Kaplan gives a precise and chilling vision of how the most successful nation the world has ever known is entering the final, and highly uncertain, phase of its history.

A revised edition of this celebrated cultural history features a new afterword and three new chapters focusing on the global K-pop phenomenon BTS, as well as the Academy Award–winning film Parasite and the hit Netflix series Squid Game. In this fresh, funny, and insightful cultural history, Euny Hong recounts how South Korea vaulted itself into the twenty-first century, becoming a global leader in business, technology, education, and pop culture. Along the way we meet teachers, cultural critics, Michelin-starred chefs, pop music superstars, and government ministers in charge of creating boy bands with highly synchronized dance moves. The strict rigors of the Korean education system now lead to a society that works and plays hard—with a Ministry of Culture that churns out movies, television dramas, pop bands, and video games exported throughout the world. The Birth of Korean Cool reveals how a really uncool country became cool, and how a nation that once banned miniskirts, long hair on men, and rock and roll could come to be known for its pop music and the smartphone in everyone’s pocket. This revised edition features a new afterword and three new chapters focusing on the global K-pop phenomenon BTS, as well as the Academy Award-winning film Parasite and the hit Netflix series Squid Game.

Product Description Set in the magnificent culture of the Middle East more than four thousand years ago, Lilah is a rich and emotionally resonant story of faith, love, and courage. Living in exile, Lilah is in love with Antinoes, a Persian warrior. They have known each other since they were children, and Antinoes dearly wants to make Lilah his wife. Yet Lilah does not feel she can marry without the blessing of her brother, Ezra. She and Ezra are close, and Lilah knows her brother well—he does not want his sister to have a husband outside their faith. Ezra is a scholar of the laws of Moses, and Lilah believes it is her brother’s destiny to lead the Jewish people back to the Promised Land. While Antinoes pressures her to accept his proposal, Lilah realizes that before she can consider her own happiness, it is her duty to help her brother accomplish the seemingly impossible task that is before him. Putting herself in grave danger, and with the help of Antinoes, Lilah wins Ezra an audience with Artaxerxes II, the King of Kings, who grants permission to lead the exiles on their journey back to the Promised Land. After a hazardous trip across the desert, Lilah, Ezra, and the thousands who join them arrive in Jerusalem. But the hardship of rebuilding the Temple takes its toll, and the religious enthusiasm of some turns to extremism. Ezra, listening to the zealots, orders all non-Jewish wives and their children banished from Jerusalem. Lilah, whose love for Antinoes has never wavered, is horrified by this command. She knows she must now choose between her brother and her conscience, which tells her that the time has come to defy him. Lilah is a timeless story of one woman’s stand against intolerance; it will linger in the reader’s mind long after the last page has been turned. From Publishers Weekly In his final installment of the Canaan Trilogy ( Sarah; Zipporah), Halter ambitiously tackles portions of the complicated biblical book of Ezra, which centers on the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and calls Israel to ethnic and religious purity. In the Persian town of Susa, the beautiful Lilah dreams of marrying her Persian lover and childhood sweetheart, Antinoes. However, her beloved brother Ezra, who has immersed himself in studying the laws of God, refuses to approve of their union since Antinoes is not a Jew. As the story unfolds, with scenes full of rich detail, Lilah becomes the unlikely instrument of gaining royal approval for the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the holy city. However, once there, Ezra orders all non-Jewish wives and children driven away in what is surely one of the most heart-wrenching episodes directly from scripture. A horrified Lilah repudiates her brother and leaves with them. As the cast-off women wander unprotected outside the city, rape, murder and mayhem ensue. (It's confusing that Lilah narrates one violent scene, but readers are unsure how she survives it.) As in Sarah and Zipporah, there is plenty of highly charged sexuality and some imaginative storytelling. Unfortunately, as with its predecessors, the story trails off, and the ending is unsatisfactory. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From AudioFile Ellen Reilly brings the story of Lilah, sister of Ezra, the biblical prophet, to life. Perhaps not many are familiar with the story of Ezra, which takes place more than four thousand years ago during a sad time in Israel's history. Lilah is torn between her love for her brother, Ezra, and her love for a Persian warrior. She must choose, and her choice will bring far-reaching consequences. All the emotion and turmoil in the story are made real by the talented Ellen Reilly. One can easily feel the heartache, passion, and drama of this book. Fascinating and well worth a listen. N.L. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine About the Author Mar

Sketches of eminent Americans and a pointed reconsideration of the ingredients of the American Dream form a fascinating social history. Should be must reading in executive suites as well as college classrooms. --Forbes

In Third Wave Capitalism, John Ehrenreich documents the emergence of a new stage in the history of American capitalism. Just as the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century gave way to corporate capitalism in the twentieth, recent decades have witnessed corporate capitalism evolving into a new phase, which Ehrenreich calls "Third Wave Capitalism." Third Wave Capitalism is marked by apparent contradictions: Rapid growth in productivity and lagging wages; fabulous wealth for the 1 percent and the persistence of high levels of poverty; increases in the standard of living and increases in mental illness, personal misery, and political rage; the apotheosis of the individual and the deterioration of democracy; increases in life expectancy and out-of-control medical costs; an African American president and the incarceration of a large percentage of the black population. Ehrenreich asserts that these phenomena are evidence that a virulent, individualist, winner-take-all ideology and a virtual fusion of government and business have subverted the American dream. Greed and economic inequality reinforce the sense that each of us is "on our own." The result is widespread lack of faith in collective responses to our common problems. The collapse of any organized opposition to business demands makes political solutions ever more difficult to imagine. Ehrenreich traces the impact of these changes on American health care, school reform, income distribution, racial inequities, and personal emotional distress. Not simply a lament, Ehrenreich's book seeks clues for breaking out of our current stalemate and proposes a strategy to create a new narrative in which change becomes possible.--Book flap

Town and Gown is the story of the birth in the 1960s and survival through the 1970s of an inner city college, York College of the City University of New York, in Jamaica, Queens. Created as a liberal arts college to provide increased access to minority students, it was placed in a mainly minority neighborhood, where it received exceptionally strong support from a middle class African American community seeking access to quality higher education for its children and a business community striving to overcome the effects of “white flight.” Operating in rented quarters without a permanent campus and regarded as academically illegitimate owing to its location, the college was regarded as expendable in hard times. From 1971 to 1979 critics both inside and outside of the City University, such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor Edward Koch, questioned the school’s right to exist, especially during the New York City and State Fiscal Crisis of 1975 and 1976. Undaunted, the college and its diverse supporters rallied and won. An amazing groundswell of support from Southeast Queens, and intense political pressure, saved it. Though the fight was often bitter, York College and Jamaica would not be denied. The college moved onto its permanent campus as a new Jamaica Center emerged.

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the Jewish-run tavern was often the center of leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. This unusual situation came about because the nobles who owned taverns throughout the formerly Polish lands believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably, a belief so ingrained as to endure even the rise of Hasidisms robust drinking culture. As liquor became the regions boom industry, Jewish tavernkeepers became integral to both local economies and local social life, presiding over Christian celebrations and dispensing advice, medical remedies and loans. Nevertheless, reformers and government officials, blaming Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Their efforts were particularly intense and sustained in the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous province of the Russian empire that was often treated as a laboratory for social and political change. Historians have assumed that this spelled the end of the Polish Jewish liquor trade. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns. The resulta vast underground Jewish liquor tradereflects an impressive level of local Polish-Jewish co-existence that contrasts with the more familiar story of anti-Semitism and violence. By tapping into sources that reveal the lives of everyday Jews and Christians in the Kingdom of Poland, Yankels Tavern transforms our understanding of the region during the tumultuous period of Polish uprisings and Jewish mystical revival.