"'I often wonder what Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison ..., and the other Founders would think about today's America ... Of course, they would be mesmerized by all the modern inventions and conveniences of everyday life; but what of the ubiquitous nature of the federal government? Surely they would object.' So begins Rediscovering Americanism, a searing plea by ... bestselling author Mark R. Levin for a return to America's most sacred values. In stunning fashion, Levin revisits the Founders' ideal of limited government based on natural law--and their frequent warnings about the perils of overreach by the federal government--and he concludes that the Founders would be outraged and disappointed to see where we've ended up. Levin condemns the scourge of creeping progressivism and excoriates the statists and progressives for making the Founders' ideals less and less achievable with each year and each so-called victory. He shows how progressivism seeks to refute the American heritage of individual liberty and completely overhaul modern life, growing into a government with no limits and leading us into a new age of authoritarianism, far from the Founders' dream of a limited government as delineated in the Constitution. Levin returns to the impassioned question he's explored in each of his ... books: How do we save our exceptional country? Because our values are in such a precarious state, he argues that a restoration to the essential truths on which our country was founded has never been more urgent. Understanding these principles, in Levin's words, can 'serve as the antidote to tyrannical regimes and governments.' Rediscovering Americanism is not an exercise in nostalgia, but an appeal to his fellow citizens to reverse course. In this crucial thesis, Mark R. Levin brings his celebrated, sophisticated analysis to the troubling question of America's future, and reminds us of what we are losing and what we must restore for the sake of our children and our children's children."--Jacket.

Mimesis: the idea of imitation. Alterity: the idea of difference, the opposition of Self and Other. In his most accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig explores these complex and often interwoven concepts. Arguing that mimesis is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, he maintains that mimesis - variously experienced in different societies - is not only a faculty but also a history. That history, Taussig writes, is deeply tied to "Euroamerican colonialism, the felt relation of the civilizing process to savagery, to aping, sensateness caught in the net of passionful images spun for several centuries by the colonial trade with wildness." For anthropologists, social scientists, cultural critics, artists and everyone else caught up in the enigma of the postmodern, framing the question "What is Reality" is crucial to gaining an understanding of what it is we know and who we are. Why is it important to understand that traditions are inventions and that social life is a construction when they grip us with all the force of the "natural"? And how is it that we understand reality as both real and really made up? In Mimesis and Alterity Taussig undertakes an eccentric history of the mimetic faculty. He moves easily from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, backwards to the fable of colonial "first-contact" and alleged mimetic prowess of "primitives," and then forward to contemporary time, when the idea of alterity is increasingly unstable. Utilizing anthropological theory, Taussig blends Latin American ethnography and colonial history with the insights of Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Vigorous and unorthodox, Taussig's understanding of mimesis in different cultures deepens our meanings of ethnography, racism and society.