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Scalia A Court of One
Brief Summary
An authoritative, deeply researched biography of the most controversial and outspoken Supreme Court justice of our time and how he chose to be "right” rather than influential.
Antonin Scalia knew only success in the first fifty years of his life. His sterling academic and legal credentials led to his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1982. In four short years there, he successfully outmaneuvered the more senior Robert Bork to be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986.
Scalia’s evident legal brilliance and personal magnetism led everyone to predict he would unite a new conservative majority under Chief Justice William Rehnquist and change American law in the process. Instead he became a Court of One. Rather than bringing the conservatives together, Scalia drove them apart. He attacked and alienated his more moderate colleagues Sandra Day O’Connor, then David Souter, and finally Anthony Kennedy. Scalia prevented the conservative majority from coalescing for nearly two decades.
Scalia: A Court of One is the compelling story of one of the most polarizing figures ever to serve on the nation’s highest court. It provides an insightful analysis of Scalia’s role on a Court that, like him, has moved well to the political right, losing public support and ignoring public criticism. To the delight of his substantial conservative following, Scalia’s "originalism” theory has become the litmus test for analyzing, if not always deciding, cases.
But Bruce Allen Murphy shows that Scalia’s judicial conservatism is informed as much by his highly traditional Catholicism, mixed with his political partisanship, as by his reading of the Constitution. Murphy also brilliantly analyzes Scalia’s role in major court decisions since the mid-1980s and scrutinizes the ethical controversies that have dogged Scalia in recent years. A Court of One is a fascinating examination of one outspoken justice’s decision not to play internal Court politics, leaving him frequently in dissent, but instead to play for history, seeking to etch his originalism philosophy into American law.
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ISBN:9780743296496
Author:Bruce Allen Murphy
Safe House: Explorations in
Brief Summary
Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
A Ghanaian explores the increasing influence of China across the region, a Kenyan student activist writes of exile in Kampala, a Liberian scientist shares her diary of the Ebola crisis; a Nigerian journalist travels to the north to meet a community at risk, a Kenyan travels to Senegal to interview a gay rights activist and a South African writer recounts a tale of family discord and murder in a remote seaside town.
With an introductory essay by Ellah Allfrey, this anthology gathers new stories of contemporary Africa.
ISBN:9781911115168
Author:Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
S Is for Samora
Brief Summary
S Is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream.
Samora Machel led FRELIMO, the Mozambican Liberation Front, to victory against Portuguese colonialism in 1974, and the following year became independent Mozambique's first President. He died eleven years later in a mysterious plane crash.
Drawing on stories, speeches, documents, and the memories of those who knew him, this biography presents the many different faces of the man Nelson Mandela called "a true African revolutionary." Machel was a trained nurse who became a consummate military strategist, a farmer's son with the diplomatic skills first to tread the tightrope between China and the Soviet Union and then to charm Margaret Thatcher, a man of the people who found himself utterly alone, a dedicated seeker of peace who never saw anything but war.
The book examines the discourse of equality, liberty and comradeship that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s in the liberation struggles of the countries of southern Africa, in the face of the dominant rhetoric of the cold war. It meditates on the different languages through which the Mozambican dream was articulated: the linguistic currencies of anti-colonialism, of anti-racism, and of Marxism-Leninism, while exploring the gaps between then and now, between Mozambicans and the western idealists who wanted to be part of their new society, and between the polyglottal Mozambicans themselves.
ISBN:9781849041942
Author:Sarah Lefanu
Roots by Alex Haley
Brief Summary
When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, Alex Haley's grandmother used to tell him stories about their family—stories that went back to her grandparents, and their grandparents, down through the generations all the way to a man she called "the African." She said he had lived across the ocean near what he called the "Kamby Bolongo" and had been out in the forest one day chopping wood to make a drum when he was set upon by four men, beaten, chained and dragged aboard a slave ship bound for Colonial America.
Still vividly remembering the stories after he grew up and became a writer, Haley began to search for documentation that might authenticate the narrative. It took ten years and a half a million miles of travel across three continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not only the name of "the African"--Kunta Kinte—but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.
Haley has talked in Juffure with his own African sixth cousins. On September 29, 1967, he stood on the dock in Annapolis where his great-great-great-great-grandfather was taken ashore on September 29, 1767. Now he has written the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six generations who came after him—slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lumber mill workers and Pullman porters, lawyers and architects—and one author.
But Haley has done more than recapture the history of his own family. As the first black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took away from them, along with their names and their identities. But Rootsspeaks, finally, not just to blacks, or to whites, but to all people and all races everywhere, for the story it tells is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to the indomitability of the human spirit.
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ISBN:9780440174646
Author:Alex Haley
The Roaring Nineties
Brief Summary
The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade
With his best-selling Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz showed how a misplaced faith in free-market ideology led to many of the recent problems suffered by the developing nations. Here he turns the same light on the United States.
The Roaring Nineties offers not only an insider's illuminating view of policymaking but also a compelling case that even the Clinton administration was too closely tied to the financial community—that along with enormous economic success in the nineties came the seeds of the destruction visited on the economy at the end of the decade.
This groundbreaking work by the Nobel Prize-winning economist argues that much of what we understood about the 1990s' prosperity is wrong, that the theories that have been used to guide world leaders and anchor key business decisions were fundamentally outdated. Yes, jobs were created, technology prospered, inflation fell, and poverty was reduced. But at the same time the foundation was laid for the economic problems we face today. Trapped in a near-ideological commitment to free markets, policymakers permitted accounting standards to slip, carried deregulation further than they should have, and pandered to corporate greed. These chickens have now come home to roost.
The paperback includes a new introduction that reviews the continued failure of the Bush administration's policies, which have taken a bad situation and made it worse.
ISBN:9780393326185
Author:Joseph E. Stiglitz
Rivals How the Power Struggle
Brief Summary
Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade.
The former editor in chief of the Economist returns to the territory of his best-selling book The Sun Also Sets to lay out an entirely fresh analysis of the growing rivalry between China, India, and Japan and what it will mean for America, the global economy, and the twenty-first-century world.
Though books such as The World Is Flat and China Shakes the World consider them only as individual actors, Emmott argues that these three political and economic giants are closely intertwined by their fierce competition for influence, markets, resources, and strategic advantage.
Rivals explains and explores the ways in which this sometimes bitter rivalry will play out over the next decade—in business, global politics, military competition, and the environment—and reveals the efforts of the United States to manipulate and benefit from this rivalry. Identifying the biggest risks born of these struggles, Rivals also outlines the ways these risks can and should be managed by all of us.
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ISBN:9780151015030
Author:Bill Emmott
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign P...
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938.
Since it first appeared in 1971, Rise to Globalism has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The ninth edition of this classic survey, now updated through the administration of George W. Bush, offers a concise and informative overview of the evolution of American foreign policy from 1938 to the present, focusing on such pivotal events as World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and 9/11.
Examining everything from the Iran-Contra scandal to the rise of international terrorism, the authors analyze-in light of the enormous global power of the United States-how American economic aggressiveness, racism, and fear of Communism have shaped the nation's evolving foreign policy.
Spontaneous Healing
Brief Summary
Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself.
In this revolutionary book, Dr Andrew Weil shows how the concept of spontaneous healing can change all our lifes for the better.
Drawing on his training as a doctor and his in-depth first-hand knowledge of alternative treatments, he describes in clear, accessible language the operation of the body's healing system and the various methods with which we can support its natural ability to maintain and heal itself - not only in our everyday lifes, but also in the face of devastating illness.
Dr Andrew Weil suggests practical ways in which all of us can get healthy and fit, providing specific and detailed information: on food, drink and diet; on environmental factors and how to avoid toxins; on exercise and stress reduction; and on vitamins, supplements, herbs and tonics. Numerous case histories provide evidence of the remarkable success of spontaneous healing in dealing with serious medical conditions.
SPONTANEOUS HEALING is an essential book for everyone who wishes to lead a healthy life.
ISBN:9780751540819
Author:Dr. Andrew Weil MD
Spillover Animal Infections and the N...
Brief Summary
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
A masterpiece of science reporting that tracks the animal origins of emerging human diseases.
The emergence of strange new diseases is a frightening problem that seems to be getting worse. In this age of speedy travel, it threatens a worldwide pandemic. We hear news reports of Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and something called Hendra killing horses and people in Australia?but those reports miss the big truth that such phenomena are part of a single pattern.
The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. David Quammen tracks this subject around the world. He recounts adventures in the field?netting bats in China, trapping monkeys in Bangladesh, stalking gorillas in the Congo?with the world’s leading disease scientists.
In Spillover Quammen takes the reader along on this astonishing quest to learn how, where from, and why these diseases emerge, and he asks the terrifying question: What might the next big one be?
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ISBN:9780099522850
Author:David Quammen
South Sudan The Untold Story
Brief Summary
South Sudan: The Untold Story from Independence to Civil War
In July 2011, South Sudan was granted independence and became the world's newest country. Yet just two-and-a-half years after this momentous decision, the country was in the grips of renewed civil war and political strife. Hilde F. Johnson served as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan from July 2011 until July 2014.
As such, she was witness to the many challenges which the country faced as it struggled to adjust to its new autonomous state. In this book, she provides an unparalleled insider's account of South Sudan's descent from the ecstatic celebrations of July 2011 to the outbreak of the disastrous conflict in December 2013 and the early, bloody phase of the fighting.
Johnson's frequent personal and private contacts at the highest levels of government, accompanied by her deep knowledge of the country and its history, make this a unique eyewitness account of the turbulent first three years of the world's newest?and yet most fragile? country.
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ISBN:9781784536442
Author:Hilde F. Johnson
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Brief Summary
Sometimes finding your own voice
is a matter of listening to the heart....
Jodi Picoult's powerful novel portrays an emotionally charged marriage that changes course in one explosive moment....For years, Jane Jones has lived in the shadow of her husband, renowned San Diego oceanographer Oliver Jones.
But during an escalating argument, Jane turns on him with an alarming volatility. In anger and fear, Jane leaves with their teenage daughter, Rebecca, for a cross-country odyssey charted by letters from her brother Joley, guiding them to his Massachusetts apple farm, where surprising self-discoveries await.
Now Oliver, an expert at tracking humpback whales across vast oceans, will search for his wife across a continent -- and find a new way to see the world, his family, and himself: through her eyes.
ISBN:9780743431019
Author:Jodi Picoult
So Good They Cannot Ignore You by Cal...
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice.
Not only is the cliché flawed-preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work-but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping.
After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do.
Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers.
Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before.
In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.
With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love.
SO GOOD THEY CAN'T IGNORE YOU will change the way we think about our careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.
Shah Of Shahs
Brief Summary
In Shah of Shahs Kapuscinski brings a mythographer's perspective and a novelist's virtuosity to bear on the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran, one of the most infamous of the United States' client-dictators, who resolved to transform his country into "a second America in a generation," only to be toppled virtually overnight.
From his vantage point at the break-up of the old regime, Kapuscinski gives us a compelling history of conspiracy, repression, fanaticism, and revolution.
ISBN:9780679738015
Author:Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
The Shield of Achilles
Brief Summary
The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History.
For five centuries, the State has evolved according to epoch-making cycles of war and peace. But now our world has changed irrevocably.
What faces us in this era of fear and uncertainty? How do we protect ourselves against war machines that can penetrate the defenses of any state? Visionary and prophetic, The Shield of Achilles looks back at history, at the "Long War” of 1914-1990, and at the future: the death of the nation-state and the birth of a new kind of conflict without precedent.
ISBN:9780385721387
Author:Philip Bobbitt
Serious Sweet
Brief Summary
A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts. A man of conscience.
Meg Williams is ‘a bankrupt accountant — two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV’. She’s 45 and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill, where she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety.
Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a mobile phone and a letter-writing habit he can’t break. He’s a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection as he runs for his life.
Set in 2014, this is a novel of our times. Poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written, Serious Sweet is about two decent, damaged people trying to make moral choices in an immoral world: ready to sacrifice what’s left of themselves for honesty, and for a chance at tenderness. As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London — passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever — they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story.
ISBN:9780224098441
Author:A.L. Kennedy
The Politics of Betrayal: Diary of a ...
Brief Summary
The Politics of Betrayal: Diary of a Kenyan Legislator
In this provocative treatise, author Joe Khamisi catalogues the events that took place during one of Kenya's most important periods in history. This period began in 2002, when Daniel Arap Moi stepped down after twenty-four years as president of Kenya.
Khamisi reviews events up to the time when the country exploded in post-election violence in 2007 and the subsequent formation of the Grand Coalition Government between President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Amolo Odinga the following year.
Khamisi explores the leadership betrayals that he believes are responsible for the political, social, and economic rot that are pervasive in Kenya. He recounts how he helped a presidential poll loser in the 2007 elections, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, capture the coveted role of vice president.
He also presents an in-depth analysis of Senator Barack Obama's visit to Kenya in 2006, as well as his own personal experiences with Barack's late father, who he describes as a person who "chain-smoked contentedly, drank copiously, and partied spiritedly." The Politics of Betrayal is critical reading for anyone who is interested in the transformation of Kenya from a one-party dictatorship to a pluralistic nation.
The Selfless Gene
Brief Summary
The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin.
In THE SELFLESS GENE, Charles Foster assesses the claims of Neo-Darwinists and Young Earth Creationists, demonstrating that orthodox Christianity is not incompatible with what evolutionary biology says about our world.
The real issue, he argues, centers around the ethical implications of natural selection, and what such a system - based on selfishness, waste and death - might say about the loving creator God of the Christian faith. Intelligent, provocative and accessible, THE SELFLESS GENE offers the prospect of a reasoned dialogue between faith and scientific study, and a reconciliation of what are popularly seen as two opposing worldviews.
ISBN:9780340964415
Author:Charles Foster
Eat Yourself Young
Brief Summary
Eat Yourself Young: Take Years Off Your Looks with This Revolutionary New Eating Plan.
'Eat Yourself Young' is a practical guide to help you look, feel and live younger. Forget Botox, fillers and face-lifts - the quickest and most effective way to take years off your looks is simply by changing what you eat.
On this programme, you'll quickly lose weight and feel lighter, more energetic and less stressed.
ISBN:9781844009893
Author:Elizabeth Peyton-Jones
Sugar Street
Brief Summary
Sugar Street is the third and concluding volume of the celebrated Cairo Trilogy, which brings the story of Al-Sayid Ahmad and his family up to the middle of the twentieth century.
Aging and ill, the family patriarch surveys the world from his housewares’ latticed balcony, as his long-suffering wife once did. While his children face middle age, it is through his grandsons that we see a modern Egypt emerging.
ISBN:9780552995825
Author:Naguib Mahfouz
Indian Africa
Brief Summary
Indian Africa: Minorities of Indian-Pakistani Origin in Eastern Africa
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have minorities from the Indian sub-continent amongst their population. The East African Indians mostly reside in the main cities, particularly Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Kampala; they can also be found in smaller urban centers and in the remotest of rural townships.
They play a leading social and economic role as they work in business, manufacturing and the service industry, and make up a large proportion of the liberal professions. They are divided into multiple socio-religions communities, but united in a mutual feeling of meta-cultural identity. This book aims at painting a broad picture of the communities of Indian origin in East Africa, striving to include changes that have occurred since the end of the 1980s.
The different contributions explore questions of race and citizenship, national loyalties and cosmopolitan identities, local attachment and transnational networks. Drawing upon anthropology, history, sociology and demography, Indian Africa depicts a multifaceted population and analyses how the past and the present shape their sense of belonging, their relations with others, their professional and political engagement.
This book is a must-read for contemporary researchers, students, policy practitioners as well as the general reader.
ISBN:9789987082971
Author:Michel Adam
