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Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11
Zuckoff, Mitchell
(Compact Disc)
List Price: $55.99 Our Price: $21.19
This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerizing, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day.In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After further years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book, filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across country to see loved ones or for work who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder.Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life - and in some cases, bringing back to life - the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history.Destined to be a classic, Fall and Rise will move, shock, inspire, and fill hearts with love and admiration for the human spirit as it triumphs in the face of horrifying events.
Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
Zeihan, Peter
(Hardcover)
List Price: $35.00 Our Price: $14.19
A forward-thinking geopolitical guru explains who will win and who will lose in the coming global Disorder.The world is entering its greatest period of change in nearly a century. America's allies depend on her commitments for their economic and physical security, and they hope the Trump administration's positions are an aberration. This hope is misplaced. The world has gotten so used to the "normal" of an American-dominated Order that we all have forgotten the historical norm: several smaller, competing powers and economic systems throughout Europe and Asia. The period of American hyper-involvement in global affairs is ending. The impacts on global energy and agricultural markets, finance and technology will be transformative, but the heirs to the dying Order are not who you think. Russia, India, China and Brazil will not be the superpowers and wunderkind of the future. Rather, names familiar and new will be taking charge of the emerging global Disorder. Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not the rise of North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: it is no longer Iran that is the region's most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia.Smart, gripping, and essential reading, Disunited Nations is a sure-to-be-controversial guidebook that analyzes the emerging shifts and resulting problems and issues that will arise in the next two decades. We are entering a period of profound upheaval; no political or corporate leader can ignore Zeihan's insights or his message if they want to survive and thrive in this uncertain new time.In Disunited Nations, Zeihan presents a compelling, unique vision about the future of the world.
90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality
Yarrow, Allison
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Our Price: $6.09
To understand how we got here, we have to rewind the VHS tape. 90s Bitch tells the real story of women and girls in the 1990s, exploring how they were maligned by the media, vilified by popular culture, and objectified in the marketplace. Trailblazing women like Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Marcia Clark, and Roseanne Barr were undermined. Newsmakers like Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, and Lorena Bobbitt were shamed and misunderstood. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle reinforced society's deeply entrenched sexism. Meanwhile, marketers hijacked feminism and poisoned girlhood for a generation of young women.Today, there are echoes of 90s “bitchification” nearly everywhere we look. To understand why, we must revisit and interrogate the 1990s—a decade in which female empowerment was twisted into objectification, exploitation, and subjugation.Yarrow’s thoughtful, juicy, and timely examination is a must-read for anyone trying to understand 21st century sexism and end it for the next generation.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Wright, Lawrence
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Our Price: $5.59
A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Packed with detailed information and a deep historical perspective, The Looming Tower is the definitive history of the long road to September 11.
The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State
Wright, Lawrence
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.95 Our Price: $6.89
These powerful investigative pieces, which take us from the religious police of Saudi Arabia to the rise of the Islamic State, comprise an essential primer on jihadist movements in the Middle East—and the attempts of the West to contain them. In these pages, Lawrence Wright examines al-Qaeda as it experiences a rebellion from within and spins off a growing web of worldwide terror. He shows us the Syrian film industry before the civil war—compliant at the edges but already exuding a barely masked fury. He gives us the heart-wrenching story of American children kidnapped by ISIS—and Atlantic publisher David Bradley’s efforts to secure their release. And he details the roles of key FBI figures John O’Neill and his talented protégé Ali Soufan in fighting terrorism. In a moving epilogue, Wright shares his predictions for the future. Rigorous, clear-eyed, and compassionate, The Terror Years illuminates the complex human players on all sides of a devastating conflict.
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (Large Print)
Winchester, Simon
(Paperback)
List Price: $29.99 Our Price: $11.99
The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement - precision - in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools - machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras - and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Winchester, Simon
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.99 Our Price: $10.89
The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement - precision - in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools - machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras - and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
Becoming Queen Victoria: The Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch
Williams, Kate
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $6.59
In 1819, a girl was born to the fourth son of King George III. No one could have expected such an unassuming, overprotected girl to be an effective ruler - yet Queen Victoria would become one of the most powerful monarchs in history.Writing with novelistic flair and historical precision, Kate Williams reveals a vibrant woman in the prime of her life while chronicling the byzantine machinations that continued even after the crown was placed on her head. Upon hearing that she had inherited the throne, 18-year-old Victoria banished her overambitious mother from the room, a simple yet resolute move that would set the tone for her reign. The queen clashed constantly not only with her mother and her mother's adviser, the Irish adventurer John Conroy, but with her ministers and even her beloved Prince Albert - all of whom attempted to seize control from her.Williams lays bare the passions that swirled around the throne - the court secrets, the sexual repression, and the endless intrigue. The result is a grand tale of a woman whose destiny began long before she was born and whose legacy lives on.
Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War
White, Duncan
(Hardcover)
List Price: $32.50 Our Price: $9.89
In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West.During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield.In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher.Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world.
Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War
White, Duncan
(Paperback)
List Price: $24.99 Our Price: $9.89
In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West.During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield.In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher.Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world.
Getting to Maybe
Westley, Frances
(Softcover)
List Price: $21.00 Our Price: $6.35
A practical, inspirational, revolutionary guide to social innovation Many of us have a deep desire to make the world around us a better place. But often our good intentions are undermined by the fear that we are so insignificant in the big scheme of things that nothing we can do will actually help feed the world's hungry, fix the damage of a Hurricane Katrina or even get a healthy lunch program up and running in the local school. We tend to think that great social change is the province of heroes - an intimidating view of reality that keeps ordinary people on the couch. But extraordinary leaders such as Gandhi and even unlikely social activists such as Bob Geldof most often see themselves as harnessing the forces around them, rather than singlehandedly setting those forces in motion. The trick in any great social project - from the global fight against AIDS to working to eradicate poverty in a single Canadian city - is to stop looking at the discrete elements and start trying to understand the complex relationships between them. By studying fascinating real-life examples of social change through this systems-and-relationships lens, the authors of Getting to Maybe tease out the rules of engagement between volunteers, leaders, organizations and circumstance - between individuals and what Shakespeare called "the tide in the affairs of men." Getting to Maybe applies the insights of complexity theory and harvests the experiences of a wide range of people and organizations - including the ministers behind the Boston Miracle (and its aftermath); the Grameen Bank, in which one man's dream of micro-credit sparked a financial revolution for the world's poor; the efforts of a Canadian clothing designer to help transform the lives of aboriginal women and children; and many more - to lay out a brand new way of thinking about making change in communities, in business, and in the world.
Forgotten Sacrifice: The Arctic Convoys of World War II (General Military)
Walling, Michael G.
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.95 Our Price: $6.09
Hitler called Norway the "Zone of Destiny" for Nazi Germany because convoys from Churchill's Britain and Roosevelt's United States supplied Stalin's Soviet Russia with critical equipment and foodstuffs during the darkest days of the German invasion. The words "Murmansk Run" conjure visions of ice-laden ships and thoughts of freezing to death in seconds. For five long years, thousands of men and women fought ferociously in the coldest corner of hell on earth. Some fought for survival, some struggled to help others survive, and some sought to crush their enemies. If man-made death didn't get you, the Arctic's weapons of ice and cold would. These natural weapons killed regardless of whose side you were on or how just was your cause. No one escaped unscathed. Author Mike Walling captures the Arctic convoys' bitter essence in Forgotten Sacrifice.
Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima
Walker, Stephen
(Softcover)
List Price: $14.95 Our Price: $5.59
At 31,000 feet above Japan, Tom Ferebee sits hunched over his bombsight. Below him lies the primary target of an operation called "Special Mission Number 13" by the few military personnel aware of its existence - Hiroshima, a city of over 300,000. He waits until the aiming point is directly below the crosshairs and releases his cargo - a five-ton bomb known as Little Boy by the scientists who built it. If all goes as theorized, the resulting destruction will lead to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II. But right now, a very real question occupies the minds of everyone involved: Will it work? The historical record is clear: It did work. On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, the bomb detonated as expected, resulting in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people. The Japanese Supreme Council surrendered nine days later, after a second bomb, to similarly devastating effect, had leveled Nagasaki. But if, in retrospect, the bombing of Hiroshima represents the climax of one of the signal events of the twentieth century - indeed, in the history of mankind - at the time it was but another episode in an unprecedented drama whose final act had begun three weeks earlier, at Los Alamos, a secret laboratory in the high plains of New Mexico. Shockwave is the story of those terrible three weeks, as seen through the eyes of the pilots, victims, scientists, and world leaders at the center of the drama.
Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace
von Tunzelmann, Alex
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Our Price: $7.45
A lively, revelatory popular history that tells the story of both the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony under the heroic leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower - which shaped the Middle East and Europe we know today.The year 1956 was a turning point in history. Over sixteen extraordinary days in October and November of that year, the twin crises involving Suez and Hungary pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict and what many at the time were calling World War III. Blood and Sand delivers this story in an hour-by-hour account through a fascinating international cast of characters: Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, caught in a trap of his own making; Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bold young populist leader of Egypt; David Ben-Gurion, the aging Zionist hero of Israel; Guy Mollet, the bellicose French prime minister; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American president, torn between an old world order and a new one in the very same week that his own fate as president was to be decided by the American people.This is a revelatory history of these dramatic events and people, for the first time setting both crises in the context of the global Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the treacherous power politics of imperialism and oil. Blood and Sand resonates strikingly with the problems of oil control, religious fundamentalism, and international unity that face the world today, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of the modern Middle East and Europe.
Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace
von Tunzelmann, Alex
(Hardcover)
List Price: $32.50 Our Price: $6.35
A lively, revelatory popular history that tells the story of both the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony under the heroic leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower - which shaped the Middle East and Europe we know today.The year 1956 was a turning point in history. Over sixteen extraordinary days in October and November of that year, the twin crises involving Suez and Hungary pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict and what many at the time were calling World War III. Blood and Sand delivers this story in an hour-by-hour account through a fascinating international cast of characters: Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, caught in a trap of his own making; Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bold young populist leader of Egypt; David Ben-Gurion, the aging Zionist hero of Israel; Guy Mollet, the bellicose French prime minister; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American president, torn between an old world order and a new one in the very same week that his own fate as president was to be decided by the American people.This is a revelatory history of these dramatic events and people, for the first time setting both crises in the context of the global Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the treacherous power politics of imperialism and oil. Blood and Sand resonates strikingly with the problems of oil control, religious fundamentalism, and international unity that face the world today, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of the modern Middle East and Europe.
1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies
Vinen, Richard
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.99 Our Price: $4.99
A major new history of one of the seminal years in the postwar world, when rebellion and disaffection broke out on an extraordinary scale.The year 1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications - terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important roots to 1968.1968 is a striking and original attempt half a century later to show how these events, which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies which are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time. 1968 pursues the story into the 1970s to show both the ever more violent forms of radicalization that stemmed from 1968 and the brutal reaction that brought the era to an end.
1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies
Vinen, Richard
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Our Price: $3.39
A major history of one of the seminal years in the postwar world, when rebellion and disaffection broke out on an extraordinary scale.The year 1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary—around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications—terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important roots to 1968.1968 is a striking and original attempt half a century later to show how these events, which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies which are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time. 1968 pursues the story into the 1970s to show both the ever more violent forms of radicalization that stemmed from 1968 and the brutal reaction that brought the era to an end.
Road to Disaster - A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam
VanDeMark, Brian
(Softcover)
List Price: $18.99 Our Price: $8.19
Though many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam, no historian has been able to fully explain why the stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations got Vietnam so terribly wrong.In Road to Disaster, Brian VanDeMark draws upon two decades of research, exclusive interviews, previously unheard recordings, as well as recent findings in cognitive science and organizational theory to explain why the "best and brightest" were so blind to their own errors - and why today's leaders keep repeating their mistakes.
The Times Were a Changin': The Sixties Reader
Unger, Irwin (Edt)
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $7.89
From Betty Friedan to Barry Goldwater, from the formidable presence of the Kennedy brothers to the unimaginable influence of Woodstock, Irwin Unger and journalist Debi Unger present the complexities of a volatile and tumultuous decade, while explaining how and why each significant event took place and how it shifted the country's consciousness. From the antiwar movement to the moon race, from the burgeoning counterculture to the Warren and Berger courts, and from the civil rights movement to the 1968 presidential campaign, The Times Were a Changin' will tantalize and confound readers, while inspiring and enraging them as well.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
Trippi, Joe
(Softcover)
List Price: $15.95 Our Price: $8.05
When Joe Trippi signed on to manage Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, the long-shot candidate had 432 known supporters and $100,000 in the bank. Within a year the most obscure horse in the field was the front-runner, with $50 million in the campaign till, thanks to Trippi and his team. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is the incredible story of how Joe Trippi's revolutionary use of the Internet forever changed politics as we know it. Trippi's memoir cum manifesto offers a blueprint for engaging Americans in real dialogue - and is an instruction manual for how businesspeople, government leaders, and anyone else can make use of democracy. In a new afterword, Trippi reviews how these lessons have influenced the 2008 campaign, a race marked by higher voter interest than any other in recent history.
A Curious Friendship: The Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing
Thomasson, Anna
(Paperback)
List Price: $13.40 Our Price: $5.59
The winter of 1924: Edith Olivier, alone for the first time at the age of 51, thought her life had come to an end. For Rex Whistler, a 19-year-old art student, life was just beginning. They were to start an intimate and unlikely friendship that would transform their lives. Gradually Edith's world opened up and she became a writer. Her home, the Daye House, in a wooded corner of the Wilton estate, became a sanctuary for Whistler and the other brilliant and beautiful younger men of her circle: among them Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Tennant, William Walton, John Betjeman, the Sitwells and Cecil Beaton - for whom she was 'all the muses'.The story is set against the backdrop of a period that spanned the madcap parties of the 1920s, the sophistication of the 1930s and the drama and austerity of the Second World War. With an extraordinary cast of friends and acquaintances, from the Royal Family to Tallulah Bankhead, Anna Thomasson's A Curious Friendship brings to life, for the first time, the curious, unlikely and fascinating friendship of a bluestocking and a bright young thing.
The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound
Swift, Daniel
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $7.69
In 1945, the American poet Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War.Before the trial could take place, however, he was pronounced insane. Escaping a possible death sentence, he was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, D.C., where he was held for more than a decade.At the hospital, Pound was at his most infamous, and most contradictory. He was a genius and a traitor, a great poet and a madman. He was also an irresistible figure and, in his cell on Chestnut Ward and on the elegant hospital grounds, he was visited by the major poets and writers of his time. T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Charles Olson, and Frederick Seidel all went to sit with him. They listened to him speak and wrote of what they had seen. This was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum, with chocolate brownies and mayonnaise sandwiches served for tea.Pound continues to divide all who read and think of him. At the hospital, the doctors who studied him and the poets who learned from him each had a different understanding of this wild and most difficult man. Tracing Pound through the eyes of his visitors, Daniel Swift’s The Bughouse tells a story of politics, madness, and modern art in the twentieth century.
The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Right
Sullivan, Andrew
(Softcover)
List Price: $14.95 Our Price: $6.59
"What does it mean to be a conservative any more?" With the Iraq war, the rise of Christian fundamentalism, exploding government spending, soaring debt, insecure borders, and an executive branch with greater and greater power, Republicans and conservatives are debating this question with more and more urgency. In The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan, one of the nation's leading political commentators, makes an impassioned call to rescue conservatism from the corruption of the Republican far right, which has become the first fundamentally religious political party in America. Through an incisive look at the rise of Western fundamentalism, Sullivan argues that conservatives cannot in good conscience keep supporting a party that believes in its own God-given mission to change people's souls, instead of protecting their liberties. He carefully charts the arguments of the new conservatism, showing why they cannot work in today's America, why they fail the test of logic and pragmatism, and why they betray the conservative tradition from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan.
City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War
Strausbaugh, John
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Our Price: $4.49
In a single definitive narrative, CITY OF SEDITION tells the spellbinding story of the huge - and hugely conflicted - role New York City played in the Civil War. No city was more of a help to Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money, and material for the war, and no city raised more hell against it. It was a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, but simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance, and sedition. Without his New York supporters, it's highly unlikely Lincoln would have made it to the White House. Yet, because of the city's vital and intimate business ties to the Cotton South, the majority of New Yorkers never voted for him and were openly hostile to him and his politics. Throughout the war New York City was a nest of antiwar "Copperheads" and a haven for deserters and draft dodgers. New Yorkers would react to Lincoln's wartime policies with the deadliest rioting in American history. The city's political leaders would create a bureaucracy solely devoted to helping New Yorkers evade service in Lincoln's army. Rampant war profiteering would create an entirely new class of New York millionaires, the "shoddy aristocracy." New York newspapers would be among the most vilely racist and vehemently antiwar in the country. Some editors would call on their readers to revolt and commit treason; a few New Yorkers would answer that call. They would assist Confederate terrorists in an attempt to burn their own city down, and collude with Lincoln's assassin.Here in CITY OF SEDITION, a gallery of fascinating New Yorkers comes to life, the likes of Horace Greeley, Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, Boss Tweed, Thomas Nast, Matthew Brady, and Herman Melville. This book follows the fortunes of these figures and chronicles how many New Yorkers seized the opportunities the conflict presented to amass capital, create new industries, and expand their markets, laying the foundation for the city's-and the nation's-growth.
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