“A sprightly and clear-eyed testimonial to the value of globalization” ( The Wall Street Journ al ) as seen through six surprising everyday goods—the taco salad, the Honda Odyssey, the banana, the iPhone, the college degree, and the blockbuster HBO series Game of Thrones. Trade allows us to sell what we produce at home and purchase what we don’t. It lowers prices and gives us greater variety and innovation. Yet understanding our place in the global trade network is rarely simple. Trade has become an easy excuse for struggling economies, a scapegoat for our failures to adapt to a changing world, and—for many Americans on both the right and the left—nothing short of a four-letter word. But as Fred P. Hochberg reminds us, trade is easier to understand than we commonly think. In Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word , you’ll learn how NAFTA became a populist punching bag on both sides of the aisle. You’ll learn how Americans can avoid the grim specter of the $10 banana. And you’ll finally discover the truth about whether or not, as President Trump has famously tweeted, “trade wars are good and easy to win.” (Spoiler alert—they aren’t.) Hochberg debunks common trade myths by pulling back the curtain on six everyday products, each with a surprising story to tell: the taco salad, the Honda Odyssey, the banana, the iPhone, the college degree, and the smash hit HBO series Game of Thrones . Behind these six examples are stories that help explain not only how trade has shaped our lives so far but also how we can use trade to build a better future for our own families, for America, and for the world. Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word is the antidote to today’s acronym-laden trade jargon pitched to voters with simple promises that rarely play out so one-dimensionally. Packed with colorful examples and highly digestible explanations, Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word is “an accessible, necessary book that will increase our understanding of trade and economic policies and the ways in which they impact our daily lives” ( Library Journal , starred review).

This selection from the first ten years of the Evergreen Review gives the full flavor of the energy, savvy, excitement, and gall that characterized the magazine during the days of its publication. It also happens to bring together some of the world’s best writers in one volume, in the company of their peers. Evergreen was more than another literary magazine. Founded by Barney Rossett of Grove Press and publishing from 1957 through 1973 (it now exists as an online only magazine), it was the voice of a movement that helped to change the attitudes and prejudices of the culture at large through the language of art—and succeeded. It was always damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Here are original short stories by Samuel Beckett and Jack Kerouac (with his “October in the Railroad Earth” predating the publication of On the Road ); Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (previously published only as a pamphlet); a selection from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind ; and a passage from Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book . Also included are a fantastic sample of the original and iconic magazine covers which were works of art themselves—a heavily bearded Ginsberg cavorting in a sport coat and Uncle Sam top hat in 1966—and several reprinted comic strips; notably, Michael O’Donoghue’s “The Adventure of Phoebe Zeit-geist.”

âeoeFor the sake of argument, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does it lies somewhere in between.âe

A brazen guide for sane Americans to bypass trench warfare and win our life or death struggle for civilization. Are we in phase 8 of America's 250 year civil war? This book explores the possibility of using agility -- winning political battles with the shifting dexterity of jiu jitsu -- that never occurs to many politicians or strategists. Sure, talk show hosts milk each day's outrage for humor, indignation and ratings. But does anyone consider ways to get off the hoary, insipid "left-right political axis" and maneuver in three dimensions? Amid the latest tweet-storm and news-grabbing stunt, what pundit ever steps back to ask "Hey, what actually just happened?" Across today's fast-changing political landscape, Brin explores how to confront our neighbors not with familiar chasms, but commonalities - things both you and they know to be true. How to counter the all-out war against facts and all fact-using professions, including science and the "fake news" media. Using actual outcomes to demolish comfy oft-told narratives -- by seeking better strategies against deficits, at engendering a healthy economy and even at fostering open-creative-competitive enterprise. Polemical Judo ranges from electoral cheating to the economy; from saving the planet to troubles with Russia and China; from conspiracies to racism, to forging a Big Tent Coalition. It also explores more extreme "exit strategies" -- impeachment, indictment, the 25th Amendment and all that, as well as incorporating bold ideas from Lincoln, FDR, MLK and the Greatest Generation. Because those brave geniuses fought earlier battles for us. And they won.... plus tactics, tactics, tactics that you've never seen before. They might -- or might not work. But shouldn't someone at least try some of them? David Brin's best-selling novels include The Postman (filmed in 1997) plus explorations of our near-future in Earth and Existence. His award-winning novels and short stories explore vividly speculative ideas through a hard-science lens. His nonfiction book, The Transparent Society, won the American Library Association's Freedom of Speech Award for exploring 21st Century concerns about security, secrecy, accountability and privacy.

A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable." Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.