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By looking through the prism of the West's involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia, this book presents a new examination of the end of the Cold War in Europe. Incorporating declassified documents from the CIA, the administration of George H.W. Bush, and the British Foreign Office; evidence generated by The Hague Tribunal; and more than forty personal interviews with former diplomats and policy makers, Glaurdi exposes how the realist policies of the Western powers failed to prop up Yugoslavia's continuing existence as intended, and instead encouraged the Yugoslav Army and the Serbian regime of Slobodan Miloevi to pursue violent means.The book also sheds light on the dramatic clash of opinions within the Western alliance regarding how to respond to the crisis. Glaurdi traces the origins of this clash in the Western powers different preferences regarding the roles of Germany, Eastern Europe, and foreign and security policy in the future of European integration. With subtlety and acute insight, The Hour of Europe provides a fresh understanding of events that continue to influence the shape of the postCold War Balkans and the whole of Europe.
What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens’ lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity. Boyd’s conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.
"e;An incredibly useful and valuable guidebook to the new consumer economy. Buy it. Learn from it. Succeed with it."e;Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do "e;This is the stuff that every business and nonprofit needs to embrace if they're going to succeed in a changing world."e;Vivian Schiller, CEO of NPR With clear analysis and practical frameworks, this book provides a strategic guide that any business or nonprofit can use to succeed in the digital age.Marketing expert David Rogers examines how digital technologiesfrom smartphones to social networksconnect us in frameworks that transform our relationships to business and each other. To thrive today, organizations need new strategiesstrategies designed for customer networks.Rogers offers five strategies that any business can use to create new value:ACCESSbe faster, be easier, be everywhere, be always on ENGAGEbecome a source of valued content CUSTOMIZEmake your offering adaptable to your customer's needs CONNECTbecome a part of your customers' conversations COLLABORATEinvolve your customers at every stage of your enterpriseRogers explains these five strategies with over 100 cases from every type and size of businessfrom shoes to news, and software to healthcare. In The Network Is Your Customer, he shows:How Apple harnessed a host of collaborators to write apps for its iPhone How IBM designed a videogame to help sell its enterprise software How Ford Motors inspired an online community to build brand awareness for its new Fiesta...and countless other cases from consumer, b2b, and nonprofit categories.The book outlines a process for planning and implementing a customer network strategy to match your customers, your business, and your objectiveswhether you need to drive sales, to enhance innovation, to reduce costs, to gain customer insight, or to build breakthrough products and services. Because today, whatever your goals and whatever your business, the network is your customer.
"e;Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust's imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book."e;-Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac's Omelette and Monsieur Proust's Library Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became-against all expectations-one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era. This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust's artistic struggles-the "e;search"e; of the subtitle-and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author's life while exploring how Proust's personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother's Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, "e;Proust's Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey's end, at home in time and in eternity too."e;
Experts believe that Brazil, the world's fifth largest country and its seventh largest economy, will be one of the most important global powers by the year 2030. Yet far more attention has been paid to the other rising behemoths Russia, India, and China. Often ignored and underappreciated, Brazil, according to renowned, award-winning journalist Michael Reid, has finally begun to live up to its potential, but faces important challenges before it becomes a nation of substantial global significance. After decades of military rule, the fourth most populous democracy enjoyed effective reformist leadership that tamed inflation, opened the country up to trade, and addressed poverty and other social issues, enabling Brazil to become more of an essential participant in global affairs. But as it prepares to host the 2014 soccer World Cup and 2016 Olympics, Brazil has been rocked by mass protest. This insightful volume considers the nation's still abundant problems-an inefficient state, widespread corruption, dysfunctional politics, and violent crime in its cities-alongside its achievements to provide a fully rounded portrait of a vibrant country about to take a commanding position on the world stage.
While dozens of recent books and articles have predicted the near-certainty of China’s rise to global supremacy, this book boldly counters such widely-held assumptions. Timothy Beardson brings to light the daunting array of challenges that today confront China, as well as the inadequacy of the policy responses. Threats to China come on many fronts, Beardson shows, and by their number and sheer weight these problems will thwart any ambition to become the world’s “Number One power.” Drawing on extensive research and experience living and working in Asia over the last 35 years, the author spells out China’s situation: an inexorable demographic future of a shrinking labor force, relentless aging, extreme gender disparity, and even a falling population. Also, the nation faces social instability, a devastated environment, a predominantly low-tech economy with inadequate innovation, the absence of an effective welfare safety net, an ossified governance structure, and radical Islam lurking at the borders. Beardson’s nuanced, first-hand look at China acknowledges its historic achievements while tempering predictions of its imminent hegemony with a no-nonsense dose of reality.
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, lives on in popular memory as the "e;Invincible General,"e; loved by his men, admired by his peers, formidable to his opponents. This incisive book revises such a portrait, offering an accurateand controversialnew analysis of Wellington's remarkable military career. Unlike his nemesis Napoleon, Wellington was by no means a man of innate military talent, Huw J. Davies argues. Instead, the key to Wellington's military success was an exceptionally keen understanding of the relationship between politics and war.Drawing on extensive primary research, Davies discusses Wellington's military apprenticeship in India, where he learned through mistakes as well as successes how to plan campaigns, organize and use intelligence, and negotiate with allies. In India Wellington encountered the constant political machinations of indigenous powers, and it was there that he apprenticed in the crucial skill of balancing conflicting political priorities. In later campaigns and battles, including the Peninsular War and Waterloo, Wellington's genius for strategy, operations, and tactics emerged. For his success in the art of war, he came to rely on his art as a politician and tactician. This strikingly original book shows how Wellington made even unlikely victories possiblewith a well-honed political brilliance that underpinned all of his military achievements.
Abraham Lincoln never wrote a book: his ideas are contained in speeches, letters, and occasional writings. By bringing these works together into a single anthology, this book shows that Lincoln deserves to be counted among the great political philosophers.In addition to many examples of Lincoln’s writings, this volume includes four interpretive essays that will provide an intellectual feast for any reader exploring his complex legacy. Danilo Petranovich looks at Lincoln’s conception of the Union and its radically new focus on purging the nation of the problem of slavery. Ralph Lerner reconsiders Lincoln’s relation to the American framers and in particular his effort to put the Declaration of Independence on a new foundation. Benjamin Kleinerman examines Lincoln’s always controversial views on the scope of executive power during war. And Steven Smith considers the place of religion in Lincoln’s political thought through a close reading of his Second Inaugural Address.
From the time that George Bernard Shaw remarked that Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely,” West’s writings and her politics have elicited strong reactions. This collection of her lettersthe first ever publishedhas been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for women’s suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year.The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West’s famous lover H. G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations. Engrossing to read, the collection sheds new light on this important figure and her social and literary milieu.
Stephen Eric Bronner is a prolific author, activist, and one of America's leading political thinkers. His new book presents bigotry as a systematic, all-encompassing mindset that has a special affinity for right-wing movements. In what will surely prove a seminal study, Bronner explores its appeal, the self-image it justifies, the interests it serves, and its complex connection with modernity. He reveals how prejudice shapes the conspiratorial and paranoid worldview of the true believer, the elitist, and the chauvinist. In the process, it becomes apparent how the bigot hides behind mainstream conservative labels in order to support policies designed to disadvantage the targets of his contempt. Examining bigotry in its various dimensions-anthropological, historical, psychological, sociological, and political-Professor Bronner illustrates how the bigot's intense hatred of "e;the other"e; is a direct reaction to social progress, liberal values, secularism, and an increasingly complex and diverse world. A sobering look at the bigot in the twenty-first century, this volume is essential for making sense of the dangers facing democracy now and in the future.
Enlightenment's Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.
The forgotten protagonist of this true account aspired to be a cubist painter in his native Kyïv. In a Europe remade by the First World War, his talents led him to different rolesintelligence operative, powerful statesman, underground activist, lifelong conspirator. Henryk Józewski directed Polish intelligence in Ukraine, governed the borderland region of Volhynia in the interwar years, worked in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground during the Second World War, and conspired against Poland’s Stalinists until his arrest in 1953. His personal story, important in its own right, sheds new light on the foundations of Soviet power and on the ideals of those who resisted it. By following the arc of Józewski’s life, this book demonstrates that his tolerant policies toward Ukrainians in Volhynia were part of Poland’s plans to roll back the communist threat.The book mines archival materials, many available only since the fall of communism, to rescue Józewski, his Polish milieu, and his Ukrainian dream from oblivion. An epilogue connects his legacy to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2004.
Jackson Pollock (19121956) not only put American art on the map with his famous "e;drip paintings,"e; he also served as an inspiration for the character of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desirethe role that made Marlon Brando famous. Like Brando, Pollock became an icon of rebellion in 1950s America, and the brooding, defiant persona captured in photographs of the artist contributed to his celebrity almost as much as his notorious paintings did. In the years since his death in a drunken car crash, Pollock's hold on the public imagination has only increased. He has become an enduring symbol of the tormented artistour American van Gogh.In this highly engaging book, Evelyn Toynton examines Pollock's itinerant and poverty-stricken childhood in the West, his encounters with contemporary art in Depression-era New York, and his years in the run-down Long Island fishing village that, ironically, was transformed into a fashionable resort by his presence. Placing the artist in the context of his time, Toynton also illuminates the fierce controversies that swirled around his work and that continue to do so. Pollock's paintings captured the sense of freedom and infinite possibility unique to the American experience, and his life was both an American rags-to-riches story and a darker tale of the price paid for celebrity, American style.
In this brilliant new book, a preeminent literary thinker muses over the central question of how we can feel at home in the world, given that the world is independent of and indifferent to our wishes. Drawing on books and films, cultural history and his own experiences, Gabriel Josipovici argues that it is possible to feel comfortable in the world and in our relationships with others only if we value touch over sight, if we respect distance but also work to overcome it.Josipovici moves from a Charlie Chaplin movie to passages from Proust, from the world of sport to the world of addiction, from medieval pilgrimages to the cult of relics, from a wedding photograph of his grandparents to some of Chardin's most enigmatic paintings. Through these seemingly disparate topics he provides engaging and wise commentary on connection and communication in life. Contrasting the senses of sight and touch, Josipovici notes that although sight seems to give us the totality of what we behold, it is only when we walk or feel our way across the distances that things become more than images and begin to constitute the world in which we as touchers and not mere observers are included. If we depend on sightwhich seems to offer a frictionless domination over realitywe may avoid the pains and uncertainties of living, but we also lose our involvement with life.Lucid, imaginative, and daring, Josipovici's book will inspire and, yes, deeply touch us all.
Thorstein Veblen is best known for his authorship of The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise, which made him a celebrated figure in the fields of economics and sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. In this book, Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman argue that in addition to his well-known work in these fields Veblen also made importantand until now overlookedstatements about politics.While Veblen's writings seldom mention politics, they are saturated with political ideas: about the relationship among war, executive power, and democracy; about the similarities between modern executive positions and monarchy; about the political influence of corporate power; about the symbolism of politics; and about many other issues. By demonstrating the deep relevance of Veblens writings to today's political troubles, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen offers an important reconsideration of a major American thinker.
Drawing insight from a diverse array of sources including moral philosophy, political theory, cognitive psychology, ecology, and science and technology studies Douglas Kysar offers a new theoretical basis for understanding environmental law and policy. He exposes a critical flaw in the dominant policy paradigm of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, which asks policymakers to, in essence, regulate from nowhere. As Kysar shows, such an objectivist stance fails to adequately motivate ethical engagement with the most pressing and challenging aspects of environmental law and policy, which concern how we relate to future generations, foreign nations, and other forms of life. Indeed, world governments struggle to address climate change and other pressing environmental issues in large part because dominant methods of policy analysis obscure the central reasons for acting to ensure environmental sustainability. To compensate for these shortcomings, Kysar first offers a novel defense of the precautionary principle and other commonly misunderstood features of environmental law and policy. He then concludes by advocating a movement toward environmental constitutionalism in which the ability of life to flourish is always regarded as a luxury we can afford.
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