- Table View
- List View
In Other Words: 40 Years of Writing on Indonesia
by Goenawan MohamadA wide-ranging and beautiful collection of essays from one of world literature’s most important writers.Goenawan Mohamad is one of Indonesia’s foremost public intellectuals, and this translated volume of essays-spanning from 1968 to the present day-demonstrates the breadth of his perceptive and elegant commentary on literature, faith, mythology, politics, and history.Through the worst days of Indonesia's authoritarianism, in the face of the trauma of great violence and the chaos of democratic transition, Goenawan has never lost faith in the act of writing. Many of his essays from In Other Words were first published for Tempo, the Indonesian weekly magazine that he founded in 1971. His writings bring nuance and sympathy to difficult histories, introduce doubt to damaging certainties, and apply clarity of thought and action to times of great upheaval. Activist, journalist, editor, essayist, poet, commentator, theater director, and playwright, Goenawan Mohamad brings an unparalleled and wide-ranging perspective to the world. These essays, translated by his long-time collaborator Jennifer Lindsay, reveal a vision both uniquely Indonesian and completely universal, and indisputably establish him as one of the leading political thinkers and cultural observers in the world today.
In Our Backyard: Keeyask and the Legacy of Hydroelectric Development
by Aimée Craft Jill BlakleyBeginning with the Grand Rapids Dam in the 1960s, hydroelectric development has dramatically altered the social, political, and physical landscape of northern Manitoba. The Nelson River has been cut up into segments and fractured by a string of dams, for which the Churchill River had to be diverted and new inflow points from Lake Winnipeg created to manage their capacity. Historic mighty rapids have shrivelled into dry river beds. Manitoba Hydro's Keeyask dam and generating station will expand the existing network of 15 dams and 13,800 km of transmission lines. In Our Backyard tells the story of the Keeyask dam and accompanying development on the Nelson River from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, academics, scientists, and regulators. It builds on the rich environmental and economic evaluations documented in the Clean Environment Commission’s public hearings on Keeyask in 2012. It amplifies Indigenous voices that environmental assessment and regulatory processes have often failed to incorporate and provides a basis for ongoing decision-making and scholarship relating to Keeyask and resource development more generally. It considers cumulative, regional, and strategic impact assessments; Indigenous worldviews and laws within the regulatory and decision-making process; the economics of development; models for monitoring and management; consideration of affected species; and cultural and social impacts. With a provincial and federal regulatory regime that is struggling with important questions around the balance between development and sustainability, and in light of the inherent rights of Indigenous people to land, livelihoods, and self-determination, In Our Backyard offers critical reflections that highlight the need for purposeful dialogue, principled decision making, and a better legacy of northern development in the future.
In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action
by Caroline Kennedy Ellen AldermanWe The People The Bill of Rights defines and defends the freedoms we enjoy as Americans -- from the right to bear arms to the right to a civil jury. Using the dramatic true stories of people whose lives have been deeply affected by such issues as the death penalty and the right to privacy, attorneys Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy reveal how the majestic principles of the Bill of Rights have taken shape in the lives of ordinary people, as well as the historic and legal significance of each amendment. In doing so, they shed brilliant new light on this visionary document, which remains as vital and as controversial today as it was when a great nation was newly born.
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
by Charles MurrayAmerica's population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirement, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people. This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. Murray suggests eliminating all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels and substituting an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older. In Our Hands describes the financial feasibility of the Plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work, neighborhoods and civil society.
In Our Hands: The Struggle for U.S. Child Care Policy (Families, Law, and Society #8)
by Corey S. Shdaimah Elizabeth PalleyA call for better child care policies, exploring the reasons why there has been so little headway on a problem that touches so many families. Working mothers are common in the United States. In over half of all two-parent families, both parents work, and women’s paychecks on average make up 35 percent of their families’ incomes. Most of these families yearn for available and affordable child care—but although most developed countries offer state-funded child care, it remains scarce in the United States. And even in prosperous times, child care is rarely a priority for U.S. policy makers. In In Our Hands: The Struggle for U.S. Child Care Policy, Elizabeth Palley and Corey S. Shdaimah explore the reasons behind the relative paucity of U.S. child care and child care support. They examine the history of child care advocacy and legislation in the United States, from the Child Care Development Act of the 1970s that was vetoed by Nixon through the Obama administration’s Child Care Development Block Grant. The book includes data from interviews with 23 prominent child care and early education advocates and researchers who have spent their careers seeking expansion of child care policy and funding and an examination of the legislative debates around key child care bills of the last half-century. Palley and Shdaimah analyze the special interest and niche groups that have formed around existing policy, arguing that such groups limit the possibility for debate around U.S. child care policy.
In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy
by Eric BeerbohmWhen a government in a democracy acts in our name, are we, as citizens, responsible for those acts? What if the government commits a moral crime? The protestor's slogan--"Not in our name!"--testifies to the need to separate ourselves from the wrongs of our leaders. Yet the idea that individual citizens might bear a special responsibility for political wrongdoing is deeply puzzling for ordinary morality and leading theories of democracy. In Our Name explains how citizens may be morally exposed to the failures of their representatives and state institutions, and how complicity is the professional hazard of democratic citizenship. Confronting the ethical challenges that citizens are faced with in a self-governing democracy, Eric Beerbohm proposes institutional remedies for dealing with them. Beerbohm questions prevailing theories of democracy for failing to account for our dual position as both citizens and subjects. Showing that the obligation to participate in the democratic process is even greater when we risk serving as accomplices to wrongdoing, Beerbohm argues for a distinctive division of labor between citizens and their representatives that charges lawmakers with the responsibility of incorporating their constituents' moral principles into their reasoning about policy. Grappling with the practical issues of democratic decision making, In Our Name engages with political science, law, and psychology to envision mechanisms for citizens seeking to avoid democratic complicity.
In Our Own Best Interest: how Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All
by William F. SchulzAppeal to those who do not traditionally care about human rights around the world to do so out of self-interest by the executive director of Amnesty International USA.
In Praise Of Indecency
by Paul KrassnerPaul Krassner's style of personal journalism constantly blurs the line between observer and participant. Nowhere is this more apparent than this collection of essays and interviews culled from his columns at AVN Online. Whether being interviewed by Susie Bright, or imagining a conversation between Pee-Wee Herman and Pete Townshend about their busts by overzealous cops, or reminiscing about his friend Lenny Bruce, Krassner shines his keen satirical mind on the so-called taboos of today's society and breaks them down to show the hypocrisy of the world's "culture warriors." With a biting wit and tongue firmly planted in cheek, Mr. Krassner reveals the absurdity of our oppressive social mores in this stark, funny, and ultimately thought-provoking collection.
In Praise Of Indecency: The Leading Investigative Satirist Sounds Off on Hypocrisy, Censorship and Free Expression
by Paul KrassnerPaul Krassner's style of personal journalism constantly blurs the line between observer and participant. Nowhere is this more apparent than this collection of essays and interviews culled from his columns at AVN Online. Whether being interviewed by Susie Bright, or imagining a conversation between Pee-Wee Herman and Pete Townshend about their busts by overzealous cops, or reminiscing about his friend Lenny Bruce, Krassner shines his keen satirical mind on the so-called taboos of today's society and breaks them down to show the hypocrisy of the world's "culture warriors." With a biting wit and tongue firmly planted in cheek, Mr. Krassner reveals the absurdity of our oppressive social mores in this stark, funny, and ultimately thought-provoking collection.
In Praise Of Public Life
by Joseph I. LiebermanIn a vigorous defense of public life, Senator Joseph Lieberman, one of the most articulate and respected of our politicians, defines the duty, the honor and the privilege of public life in the face of Americans' perennial cynicism about it. Americans have always been suspicious of government and have misunderstood and mistrusted those in public life. This attitude is even more prevalent as the boundaries that once separated public and private have fallen. Lieberman argues that some of the public's mistrust is based on a misconception of what public life is and why we need it. He then describes that life as he has lived it over the last three decades -- with all its purpose, privileges, pressures and pleasures. Drawing widely from his own experience as a politician and his pride in public service, Lieberman makes a passionate, hopeful argument for the value of public life -- its place and necessity in our democracy and our need for more Americans to embrace it if we are to sustain our self-government. Lieberman asks fundamental questions about what standards of behavior should be expected of politicians in the sharply partisan, big-money, search-and-destroy atmosphere of politics today. Who should set these standards? Is there room for a public figure to "be human," to "make mistakes"? Is there a line beyond which the personal behavior of a public official is nobody's business? Do citizens have an obligation to understand and determine the responsibilities of public life?
In Praise of Blood: The Crimes Of The Rwandan Patriotic Front
by Judi ReverA stunning work of investigative reporting by a Canadian journalist who has risked her own life to bring us a deeply disturbing history of the Rwandan genocide that takes the true measure of Rwandan head of state Paul Kagame.Through unparalleled interviews with RPF defectors, former soldiers and atrocity survivors, supported by documents leaked from a UN court, Judi Rever brings us the complete history of the Rwandan genocide. Considered by the international community to be the saviours who ended the Hutu slaughter of innocent Tutsis, Kagame and his rebel forces were also killing, in quiet and in the dark, as ruthlessly as the Hutu genocidaire were killing in daylight. The reason why the larger world community hasn't recognized this truth? Kagame and his top commanders effectively covered their tracks and, post-genocide, rallied world guilt and played the heroes in order to attract funds to rebuild Rwanda and to maintain and extend the Tutsi sphere of influence in the region. Judi Rever, who has followed the story since 1997, has marshalled irrefutable evidence to show that Kagame's own troops shot down the presidential plane on April 6, 1994--the act that put the match to the genocidal flame. And she proves, without a shadow of doubt, that as Kagame and his forces slowly advanced on the capital of Kigali, they were ethnically cleansing the country of Hutu men, women and children in order that returning Tutsi settlers, displaced since the early '60s, would have homes and land. This book is heartbreaking, chilling and necessary.
In Praise of Disobedience: The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Works
by Oscar Wilde Neil BartlettWorks of Wilde's annus mirabilis of 1891 in one volume, with an introduction by renowned British playwright.The Soul of Man Under Socialism draw on works from a single miraculous year in which Oscar Wilde published the larger part of his greatest works in prose -- the year he came into maturity as an artist. Before the end of 1891, he had written the first of his phenomenally successful plays and met the young man who would win his heart, beginning the love affair that would lead to imprisonment and public infamy.In a witty introduction, playwright, novelist and Wilde scholar Neil Bartlett explains what made this point in the writer's life central to his genius and why Wilde remains a provocative and radical figure to this day.Included here are the entirety of Wilde's foray into political philosophy, The Soul of Man Under Socialism; the complete essay collection Intentions; selections from The Portrait of Dorian Gray as well as its paradoxical and scandalous preface; and some of Wilde's greatest fictions for children. Each selection is accompanied by stimulating and enlightening annotations. A delight for fans of Oscar Wilde, In Praise of Disobedience will revitalize an often misunderstood legacy.
In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini (Transformation of the Classical Heritage #21)
by C. E. Nixon Barbara Saylor RodgersHere, for the first time, is an annotated English translation of the eleven later panegyrics (291-389 C.E.) of the XII Panegyrici Latini, with the original Latin text prepared by R. A. B. Mynors. Each panegyric has a thorough introduction, and detailed commentary on historical events, style, figures of speech, and rhetorical strategies accompanies the translations. The very difficult Latin of these insightful speeches is rendered into graceful English, yet remains faithful to the original.
In Praise of Nepotism
by Adam BellowA wide-ranging, surprising, and eloquently argued book that offers a pragmatic and erudite look at the innate human inclination toward nepotism—from ancient Chinese clans to families like the Gores, Kennedys, and Bushes. • &“Fascinating and well-researched.&” —Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Code Breaker and Steve JobsNepotism is one of those social habits we all claim to deplore in America; it offends our sense of fair play and our pride in living in a meritocracy. But somehow nepotism prevails; we all want to help our own and a quick glance around reveals any number of successful families whose sons and daughters have gone on to accomplish objectively great things, even if they got a little help from their parents.Bellow explores how nepotism has produced both positive and negative effects throughout history. As he argues, nepotism practiced badly or haphazardly is an embarrassment to all (including the incompetent beneficiary), but nepotism practiced well can satisfy a deep biological urge to provide for our children and even benefit society as a whole. In Praise of Nepotism is a judicious look at a controversial but timeless subject that has never been explored with such depth or candor, and a fascinating natural history of how families work.
In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions: And Other Essays in the Philosophy of Education (Routledge Revivals)
by Israel SchefflerFirst published in 1991, In Praise of Cognitive Emotions comprises fourteen of Scheffler's most recent essays – all of which challenge contemporary notions of education and rationality. While defending the ideal of rationality, he insists that rationality not be identified with a mental faculty or a mechanism of inference but taken rather as the capactity to grasp principles and purposes and to evaluate them in the light of relevant reasons. Examining a broad range of issues – from computers in school to math education, from metaphor to morality – these essays are unified by Scheffler's conviction of the primacy of critical thought in education. Scheffler is especially concerned to promote a broad interpretation of rationality to counteract the narrowing of vision accompanying the technological revolution now sweeping education. Addressing three specific areas of curriculum, the work offers a critique of computer applications to education, develops a notion of strategic rationality in understanding mathematical reasoning, and, contrary to prevalent notions of moral education, connects reason with care, thus emphasizing the intimate connection between emotion and reason and challenging the dominant perception of the two as oppositional.
In Pursuit Of Contemporary East Asian Culture
by Stephen Snyder Xiaobing TangThese critical essays examine East Asian culture through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural lens. Readings of film, television, and visual and literary texts reveal the historical condition as well as the contemporary impulses driving East Asian culture today. We feel the muted tension in a rural South Korean village; we walk down the bustling streets of Hong Kong and witness the city's protean possibilities for a postrevolutionary reality. The boisterous tarento shows on Japanese television force us to rethink the nature of information and image production in relation to leisure management; cinematic spectacles in Japan, North Korea, Taiwan, and China point to complex issues of agency, the formation of the public sphere, and postnationalist identities. We see contemporary fiction from China and Japan engage themes of desire and remembrance as metaphors to express a profound historical anxiety. Mirroring the fast-moving and multifaceted landscape is our ability to move freely through time as we confront legitimizing narratives of modernization in early-twentieth-century Japan and, against an emerging regime of global capitalism, reexamine the approaching century in imagined historical hindsight. By anticipating the geocultural shift to the Asian Pacific Rim in the twenty-first century, this volume serves as both an introduction to contemporary East Asian culture and an exploration of its global context.
In Pursuit of Disobedient Women: A Memoir of Love, Rebellion, and Family, Far Away
by Dionne SearceyWhen a reporter for The New York Times uproots her family to move to West Africa, she manages her new role as breadwinner while finding women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a forgotten place for much of the Western world. <P><P>In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside down as they struggled to figure out their place in this new region, along with a new family dynamic where she was the main breadwinner flying off to work while her husband stayed behind to manage the home front. <P><P>In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, center on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. <P><P>As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, covering stories like Boko Haram–conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. <P><P>Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent. Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. <P><P>The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered. Readers will find Searcey’s struggles, both with her family and those of the women she meets along the way, familiar and relatable in this smart and moving memoir.
In Pursuit of Jefferson: Traveling through Europe with the Most Perplexing Founding Father
by Derek BaxterA debut that combines historical nonfiction with travel books, for fans of Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, In Pursuit of Jefferson is the story of an American on a journey through Europe, following the epic trail of Thomas Jefferson.A controversial founding father. A man ready for a change. And a completely unique trip through Europe.In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was a broken man. Reeling from the loss of his wife and stung from a political scandal during the Revolutionary war, he needed to remake himself. To do that, he traveled. Wandering through Europe, Jefferson saw and learned as much as he could, ultimately bringing his knowledge home to a young America. There, he would rise to power and shape a nation.More than two hundred years later, Derek Baxter, a devotee of American history, stumbles on an obscure travel guide written by Jefferson—Hints for Americans Traveling Through Europe—as he's going through his own personal crisis. Who better to offer advice than a founding father himself? Using Hints as his roadmap, Baxter follows Jefferson through six countries and countless lessons. But what Baxter learns isn't always what Jefferson had in mind, and as he comes to understand Jefferson better, he doesn't always like what he finds.In Pursuit of Jefferson is at once the story of a life-changing trip through Europe, an unflinching look at a founding father, and a moving personal journey. With rich historical detail, a sense of humor, and boundless heart, Baxter explores how we can be better moving forward only by first looking back.
In Pursuit of Justice: Collected Writings 2000-2003
by Ralph NaderRalph Nader is one of America's most controversial--and uncompromising-- public figures. He is a man on a mission who believes that taking on the powers that be involves more than just talking about it--it also means taking action. From car safety in the 1960s to opposition to the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, Nader's work has increased government responsiveness to citizens, served as a check against the abuse of power by big business, and shaped the political consciousness of a nation. Nader's sense of mission is infused in all of his work, especially his weekly columns. In Pursuit of Justice, a collection of Nader's most recent, trenchant articles written in the years immediately following the publication of The Ralph Nader Reader, Nader addresses a broad array of issues, among them: corporate crime and power, government accountability, media control, consumer rights, healthcare, congressional reform, nuclear power and energy, racial discrimination, poverty, food and drug safety, air and water pollution, fair taxation, product liability protection, union democracy, living family wage, unfair lending practices, community radio, industrial hemp, banking, pension law, telecommunications and the importance of character. Nader has even sponsored consumer initiatives to reform university governance, educational testing, daily newspapers, women's health care, legal services, and professional sports--all of which are reflected in these sharp and sometimes humorous essays. As informative as it is pleasurable to read, section after section of In Pursuit of Justice slices through government and corporate propaganda and reveals the corruption, bias and injustice that all too often connect politics with big business, thereby impeding the pursuit of justice. Collecting more than one hundred of his most recent writings, In Pursuit of Justice conveys Nader's inimitable sense of both the global political economy and our nation's democratic promise.
In Pursuit of Liberalism: International Institutions in Postcommunist Europe
by Rachel A. EpsteinThough the fall of the Soviet Union opened the way for states in central and eastern Europe to join the world of market-oriented Western democracies, the expected transitions have not been as easy, common, or smooth as sometimes perceived. Rachel A. Epstein investigates how liberal ideas and practices are embedded in transitioning societies and finds that success or failure depends largely on creating a social context in which incentives held out by international institutions are viewed as symbols of an emerging Western identity in the affected country.Epstein first explains how a liberal worldview and institutions like the European Union, World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization go hand-in-hand and why Western nations assume that a broad and incremental program of incentives to join will encourage formerly authoritarian states to reform their political and economic systems. Using Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine as case studies, she demonstrates the limits of conditionality in the face of national social perceptions and elucidates the three key points around which a consensus within the state must emerge before international institutions can expect liberalization: domestic officials must be uncertain about how changing policies will affect their interests; the status of international and domestic institutions must not be in jeopardy; and the proposed polices must seem credible. In making her case, Epstein cleverly bridges the gap between the rationalist and constructivist schools of thought.Offering new data on and fresh interpretations of reforming central bank policies, privatizing banks with foreign capital, democratizing civil-military relations, and denationalizing defense policy, In Pursuit of Liberalism extends well beyond the scope of previous book-length studies.
In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Cummings Center Series #Vol. 7)
by Shimon NavehThis book offers a scientific interpretation of the field of military knowledge situated between strategy and tactics, better known as operational art', and traces the evolution of operational awareness and its culmination in a full-fledged theory. The author, a Brigadier General (ret.) in the Israeli Defence Forces and Doctor of History, King's College, London, clarifies the substance of operational art' and constructs a cognitive framework for its critical analysis. He chronicles the stages in the evolution of operational theory from the emergence of 19th-century military thought to Blitzkrieg. For the first time the Soviet theories of Deep Operations' and Strike Manoeuvre' that emerged in the 1920s and 1930 are discussed. The author argues that it is these doctrines that eventually led to the crystallization of the American Airland Battle theory, successfully implemented in the Gulf War.
In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine
by Gershon BaskinGershon Baskin's memoir of thirty-eight years of intensive pursuit of peace begins with a childhood on Long Island and a bar mitzvah trip to Israel with his family. Baskin joined Young Judaea back in the States, then later lived on a kibbutz in Israel, where he announced to his parents that he had decided to make aliya, emigrate to Israel. They persuaded him to return to study at NYU, after which he finally emigrated under the auspices of Interns for Peace. In Israel he spent a pivotal two years living with Arabs in the village of Kufr Qara.Despite the atmosphere of fear, Baskin found he could talk with both Jews and Palestinians, and that very few others were engaged in efforts at mutual understanding. At his initiative, the Ministry of Education and the office of right-wing prime minister Menachem Begin created the Institute for Education for Jewish-Arab Coexistence with Baskin himself as director. Eight years later he founded and codirected the only joint Israeli-Palestinian public policy think-and-do tank in the world, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. For decades he continued to cross borders, often with a kaffiyeh (Arab headdress) on his dashboard to protect his car in Palestinian neighborhoods. Airport passport control became Kafkaesque as Israeli agents routinely identified him as a security threat.During the many cycles of peace negotiations, Baskin has served both as an outside agitator for peace and as an advisor on the inside of secret talks—for example, during the prime ministership of Yitzhak Rabin and during the initiative led by Secretary of State John Kerry. Baskin ends the book with his own proposal, which includes establishing a peace education program and cabinet-level Ministries of Peace in both countries, in order to foster a culture of peace.
In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine
by Gershon BaskinGershon Baskin's memoir of thirty-eight years of intensive pursuit of peace begins with a childhood on Long Island and a bar mitzvah trip to Israel with his family. Baskin joined Young Judaea back in the States, then later lived on a kibbutz in Israel, where he announced to his parents that he had decided to make aliya, emigrate to Israel. They persuaded him to return to study at NYU, after which he finally emigrated under the auspices of Interns for Peace. In Israel he spent a pivotal two years living with Arabs in the village of Kufr Qara. Despite the atmosphere of fear, Baskin found he could talk with both Jews and Palestinians, and that very few others were engaged in efforts at mutual understanding. At his initiative, the Ministry of Education and the office of right-wing prime minister Menachem Begin created the Institute for Education for Jewish-Arab Coexistence with Baskin himself as director. Eight years later he founded and codirected the only joint Israeli-Palestinian public policy think-and-do tank in the world, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. For decades he continued to cross borders, often with a kaffiyeh (Arab headdress) on his dashboard to protect his car in Palestinian neighborhoods. Airport passport control became Kafkaesque as Israeli agents routinely identified him as a security threat. During the many cycles of peace negotiations, Baskin has served both as an outside agitator for peace and as an advisor on the inside of secret talks—for example, during the prime ministership of Yitzhak Rabin and during the initiative led by Secretary of State John Kerry. Baskin ends the book with his own proposal, which includes establishing a peace education program and cabinet-level Ministries of Peace in both countries, in order to foster a culture of peace.
In Pursuit of Performance: Management Systems in State and Local Government (Johns Hopkins Studies in Governance and Public Management)
by Patricia W. IngrahamBased on five years of extensive research by the Government Performance Project, this volume offers a comprehensive analysis of how government managers and elected officials use management and management systems to improve performance. Drawing on data from across the nation, it examines the performance of state, county, and city governments between 1997 and 2002 within the framework of basic management systems: financial information, human resources, capital and infrastructure, and results evaluation. Key issues addressed:• How governments strategically select elements of management to emphasize the role of leadership• How those governments that aim to improve performance differ from those that do not • What "effective management" looks likeThrough this careful, in-depth investigation, the contributors conclude that the most effective governments are not those with the most resources, but those that use the resources available to them most carefully and strategically. In Pursuit of Performance is an invaluable tool for government leaders and the scholars who study them.
In Pursuit of Prosperity: U.S Foreign Policy in an Era of Natural Resource Scarcity
by David ReedIn Pursuit of Prosperity provides a much needed exploration of the evolution of environmental sustainability in U.S. foreign policy. Through expert analysis of nine countries and regions of strategic importance, David Reed and his stellar team of experts in foreign policy and environmental affairs identify emerging threats to the prosperity and national security of the United States. They assert that U.S. foreign policy must shift away from its 100-year-old focus on obtaining energy and mineral inputs for the industrial economy. In the new millennium, U.S. foreign policy must be geared toward ensuring the prosperity of the country’s trading and political partners around the globe. To the degree that our partners’ economies and social stability are threatened by the natural resource scarcities and environmental change unfolding within their borders and in neighboring countries, threats to U.S. prosperity and national security increase proportionately. Directed to U.S. foreign policy makers, the intelligence and security communities, and influential think tanks and research organizations, the book proposes specific recommendations the U.S. government should embrace to respond to the disruption of global supply chains, social instability in partner countries, disruptive impacts on regional relations, and expansion of illegal trade and criminal networks. This unique focus establishes In Pursuit of Prosperity as a seminal work in understanding the challenges facing the United States in this period of global environmental change.