Booknotes

Items

• Absolutely American : four years at West Point

  Drawing on complete, unprecedented access to West Point and its cadets, David Lipsky explores the academy's rich history, describes the demanding regimen that swallows students' days, and examines the Point as a reflection of our society. Is it a quaint anachronism, or does it still embody the ideals of equality, honesty, and loyalty that moved Theodore Roosevelt to proclaim it the most "absolutely American" institution? Lipsky tackles these questions through superbly crafted portraits of cadets and the elite officers who mold them, following them into classrooms, barracks, mess halls, and military exercises. His reportage extends from 1998 through 2002, arguably the most eventful four years in West Point history. He witnesses the end of hazing, the arrival of TV and telephones in dorm rooms, the exposure and concealment of several scandals, and the dramatic aftermath of 9/11. He depicts young people of every race and class, and details a rigorous training program that erases their preconceptions and makes them a tight-knit community.
• Forty ways to look at Winston Churchill : a brief account of a long life

  An accessible portrait of Winston Churchill captures the contradictions and complexities of the legendary British leader as it presents forty contrasting views of the man, his life, his accomplishments, and his contributions to history.
• In praise of nepotism : a natural history

  Presents an exploration of nepotism, the favored treatment of one's relatives, arguing that the practice has its roots in human biological behavior and that it represents the bonds of human society and the transmission of family legacies.
• Callus on my soul : a memoir

  Memoir by humorist Dick Gregory.
• Free agent nation : how America's new independent workers are transforming the way we live

  Daniel Pink's work about self-employed Americans.
• Open wide the freedom gates : a memoir

  [The author] marched at major civil rights rallies, sat through tense White House meetings, and witnessed every significant victory in the struggle for racial equality. Yet as the sole woman among powerful, charismatic men, and as someone whose personal ambition was always secondary to her passion for her cause, she has received little mainstream recognition ... In [this] memoir, [she] reflects on a life of service and leadership.--Jacket.
• Achievement matters : getting your child the best education possible

  Presents tips and stategies for African American parents that reveal how to attain higher educational standards in the schools.
• Tearing down the walls : how Sandy Weill fought his way to the top of the financial world-- and then nearly lost it all

  The very night that Sanford Sandy" Weill, the chairman and chief executive officer of Citigroup, was being feted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as CEO of the Year, the television screens above the floor were flashing danger: A congressional panel was tearing into Jack Grubman, the $20-million-a-year telecommunications analyst who worked for Sandy. Had Grubman and Citigroup favored corporate clients at the expense of average investors? Was Citigroup recommending stocks of troubled companies to get their business? The worst scandal of Sandy Weill's long career was breaking around him."."Tearing Down the Walls provides an unprecedented look at how business and finance are conducted at the highest levels, with extraordinary insight into the character and motivations of powerful men and women. And it's the account of the interplay between power and personality - Sandy Weill, the son of an immigrant dressmaker, is a larger-than-life character, a legendary Wall Street CEO whose innovativeness, opportunism, and even fear drove him from the lowliest job on Wall Street to its most commanding heights.Over a span of five decades he has tangled with - and usually bested - some of the most prominent and powerful titans of finance, including the elitist financier John Loeb, the mutual-fund gunslinger and conglomerateur Gerald Tsai, the patrician American Express chairman Jim Robinson, and the cerebral banking visionary John Reed. A consummate deal maker, Sandy Weill amassed and then lost an astounding assemblage of securities firms, only to plunge ahead to rebuild his empire and ultimately create the modern American financial-services supermarket. At the center of Citigroup's recent crises, he's the mogul many are waiting to see topple, while many more are trying to figure out how he succeeded."."Using nearly five hundred firsthand interviews with key players in his life and career - including Weill himself - The Wall Street Journal's Monica Langley chronicles not only his public persona, but his hidden side: blunt and often crude, yet unpretentious and sometimes disarmingly charming. Tearing Down the Walls reveals Weill's tyrannical rages as well as his tearful regrets, the crass stinginess and the unprecedented generosity, the fierce sense of loyalty and the ruthless elimination of potential rivals - even those he loves.Langley illuminates a climb to the top filled with class conflict - Jew against WASP, immigrant against Mayflower descendant, entrepreneur against establishment - and explores the volatile personality that inspires slavish devotion or utter disdain. By highlighting in new and startling detail one man's life in a narrative as richly textured and compelling as a novel, Tearing Down the Walls provides the historical context of the dramatic changes not only in business but also in American society in the last half century. It is essential for understanding the forces that are reshaping the American financial system today."--BOOK JACKET.
• Mexifornia : a state of becoming

  Discusses the historical, political, and personal aspects regarding immigration policies for Mexico and how these policies are effecting Mexican immigrants, illegal aliens, and Californians.
• George Washington's False Teeth : An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century

  A collection of articles concentrated on the Enlightenment in France argues for a scaled-down interpretation of the significance of the movement.
• When Hollywood had a king : the reign of Lew Wasserman, who leveraged talent into power and influence

  A history of the Music Corporation of America traces the entertainment giant from its founding in 1924, through its rise to become the most powerful force in the film world under the visionary leadership of Lew Wasserman.
• Fraud of the century : Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the stolen election of 1876

  In this work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr., tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. "The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier." "Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace."--BOOK JACKET.
• Khrushchev : the man and his era

  Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, Taubman (political science, Amherst College) writes a thorough biography of one of the most complex and important political figures of the 20th century whose life and career spanned revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, the Cold War, Stalinism, and post-Stalinism. Includes two sections of good quality b&w photographs.
• Reefer madness : sex, drugs, and cheap labor in the American black market

  Reports on America's "shadow" economy of illegal drugs, pornography, and illegal migrant workers, arguing that these underground industries continue to grow with government intervention.
• Gulag : a history

  A fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.
• The older the fiddle, the better the tune : the joys of reaching a certain age

  The author collects advice, anecdotes, and opinions from friends, family, and celebrities--including Maya Angelou, Yogi Berra, Bill Cosby, and others--to capture the joys of turning older and the challenges that accompany the process.
• Useful idiots : how liberals got it wrong in the Cold War and still blame America first

  The author attacks American liberals as naive and disingenuous in their dealings with the world, accusing them of rewriting history to portray themselves as "Cold Warriors" along with conservatives.
• A wilderness so immense : the Louisiana Purchase and the destiny of America

  Publisher's description: The remarkable story of the land purchase that doubled the size of our young nation, set the stage for its expansion across the continent, and confronted Americans with new challenges of ethnic and religious diversity. In a saga that stretches from Paris and Madrid to Haiti, Virginia, New York, and New Orleans, Jon Kukla shows how rivalries over the Mississippi River and its vast watershed brought France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States to the brink of war and shaped the destiny of the new American republic. We encounter American leaders--Jefferson and Jay, Monroe and Pickering among them--clashing over the opening of the West and its implications for sectional balance of power. We see these disagreements nearly derailing the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and spawning a series of separatist conspiracies long before the dispute over slavery in the territory set the stage for the Missouri Compromise and the Civil War. Kukla makes it clear that as the French Revolution and Napoleon's empire-building rocked the Atlantic community, Spain's New World empire grew increasingly vulnerable to American and European rivals. Jefferson hoped to take Spain's territories--piece by piece, --while Napoleon schemed to reestablish a French colonial empire in the Caribbean and North America. Interweaving the stories of ordinary settlers and imperial decision-makers, Kukla depicts a world of revolutionary intrigue that transformed a small and precarious union into a world power--all without bloodshed and for about four cents an acre.
• Terror and liberalism

  Berman shows how a genuine spiritual inspiration can be twisted into a fanatical demand for murder. He offers remarkable insights into the trends and conflicts influencing Islamic radicalism. He illuminates the surprising connections between very different political movements, and he reveals the several ways in which Islamic extremism resembles some all-too-familiar episodes in American and European experience. "Berman draws on sources that range from Albert Camus's The Rebel to the Book of the Revelation - from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb's magisterial In the Shade of the Koran. Berman condemns the foreign policy "realism" of the political right, and he diagnoses the naivete of the political left. He calls for a "new radicalism" and a "liberal American interventionism" to promote democratic values throughout the world - a vigorous new politics of American liberalism."--BOOK JACKET.
• No crueler tyrannies : accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our times

  No Crueler Tyrannies recalls the hysteria that accompanied the child sex-abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s: how a single anonymous phone call could bring to bear an army of recovered-memory therapists, venal and ambitious prosecutors, and hypocritical judges - an army that jailed hundreds of innocent Americans. The overarching story of No Crueler Tyrannies is that of the Amirault family, who ran the Fells Acres day care center in Malden, Massachusetts: Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl, and her son Gerald, victims of perhaps the most biased prosecution since the Salem witch trials. Woven into the fabric of the Amirault tragedy an unfinished story - with Gerald Amirault still incarcerated for crimes that, Rabinowitz persuasively argues, not only did he not commit, but which never happened - are other, equally alarming tales of prosecutorial terrors: the stories of Wenatchee, Washington, where the single-minded efforts of chief sex crimes investigator Robert Perez jailed dozens of his neighbors; Patrick Griffin, a respected physician whose life and reputation were destroyed by a false accusation of sexual molestation; John Carroll, a marina owner from Troy, New York, now serving ten to twenty years largely at the behest of the same expert witness used to wrongly jail Kelly Michaels fifteen years previously; and Grant Snowden, the North Miami policeman sentenced to five consecutive life terms after being prosecuted by then Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno ... who spent eleven years killing rats in various Florida prisons before a new trial affirmed his innocence. "No Crueler Tyrannies is at once a truly frightening and at the same time inspiring book, documenting how these citizens, who became targets of the justice system in which they had so much faith, came to comprehend that their lives could be destroyed, that they could be sent to prison for years - even decades. No Crueler Tyrannies shows the complicity of the courts, their hypocrisy and indifference to the claims of justice, but also the courage of those willing to challenge the runaway prosecutors and the strength of those who have endured their depredations."--Jacket.
• Dark star safari : overland from Cairo to Cape Town

  Thoroughly updated to reflect the past decade's technological advances, this edition of the only authorized parliamentary procedure guide contains new information on conducting meetings over the Internet, on phone and video conference calls, and with members in absentia. Other editors are William J. Evans, Daniel Honemann, and Thomas Balch. The only authorized guide to parliamentary procedure, completely updated for the internet age.
• Secret empire : Eisenhower, the CIA, and the hidden story of America's space espionage

  In a brief period of explosive, top-secret innovation during the 1950s, a small group of scientists, engineers, businessmen, and government officials rewrote the book on airplane design and led the nation into outer space. In an effort no less audacious than the creation of the atomic bomb, they designed, built, and operated the U-2 and supersonic SR-71 spy planes and Corona, the first reconnaissance satellites - machines that could collect more information about the Soviet Union's weapons in a day than an army of spies could assemble in a decade. "Their remarkable inventions and daring missions made possible arms control agreements with Moscow that helped keep the peace during the cold war, as well as the space-based reconnaissance, mapping, communications, and targeting systems used by America's armed forces in the Gulf War and most recently in Afghanistan. These hugely expensive machines also led to the neglect of more traditional means of intelligence gathering through human spies." "Philip Taubman follows this dramatic story from the White House to the CIA, from the Pentagon to Lockheed's Skunk Works in Burbank, from the secret U-2 test base in Nevada to the secret satellite assembly center in Palo Alto and other locations here and abroad. He reveals new information about the origins and evolution of the projects and how close they came to failing technically or falling victim to bureaucratic inertia and Washington's turf wars." "The incredibly sophisticated spies in the skies were remarkably successful in proving that the missile gap was a myth in protecting us from surprise Soviet attack. But in some ways, the failure to detect the planning for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, can also be attributed to these powerful machines as the government became increasingly dependent on spy satellites to the neglect of human agents and informants. Now, as we wage a new and more vicious war against terrorism, we will need both machines in space and spies on the ground to fight back."--BOOK JACKET.
• Authentically Black : essays for the Black silent majority

  In his New York Times bestseller, Losing the Race, John McWhorter, a Berkeley linguistics professor, tried to make sense of why so many African-Americans continue to define themselves by race and examined what he calls the cult of Victimology, Separatism, and Anti-Intellectualism he has witnessed on America's college campuses. In Authentically Black, McWhorter broadens his lens in this penetrating and profound collection of essays that continue his exploration of what it means to be black in America today. According to McWhorter, nearly forty years after the Civil Rights Act, African-Americans in this country still remain "a race apart." He feels that modern black Americans have internalized a tacit message: "authentically black" people stress initiative in private but cloak the race in victimhood in public in order to protect black people from an ever-looming white backlash. McWhorter terms this phenomenon the "New Double Consciousness" in homage to W. E. B. Dubois's description of a different kind of double consciousness in blacks a century ago. It is within this context that McWhorter takes us on a guided tour through the race issues dominating our current discourse: racial profiling, getting past race, the reparations movement, black stereotypes in film and television, black leadership, diversity, affirmative action, the word nigger, and Cornel West's resignation from Harvard. With his fierce intelligence and fervent eloquence, John McWhorter makes a powerful case for the advancement of true racial equality. Authentically Black is a timely and important work about issues that must be addressed by blacks and whites alike. Authentically Black is a book for Americans of every racial, social, political, and economic persuasion.
• The mission : waging war and keeping peace with America's military

  An account of America's growing dependence on its military to manage world affairs describes the cultural clashes experienced by the nation's generals, soldiers, and Green Berets in eighteen different countries.
• Of paradise and power : America and Europe in the new world order

  After years of mutual resentment and tension, there is a sudden recognition that the real interests of America and its European allies are diverging sharply and that the trans-atlantic relationship itself has changed, possibly irreversibly. Europe sees the United States as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the United States sees Europe as spent, unserious, and weak. The anger and mistrust on both sides are hardening into incomprehension. Author Robert Kagan reached incisively into this impasse to force both sides to see themselves through the eyes of the other. Tracing the widely differing histories of Europe and America since the end of World War II, he makes clear how for one the need to escape a bloody past has led to a new set of transnational beliefs about power and threat, while the other has evolved into the guarantor of that "postmodern paradise" by dint of its might and global reach.