Accelerants: Twelve Strategies to Sell Faster, Close Deals Faster, and Grow Your Business Faster
ISBN: 159184150X
Author: Michael A. Boylan
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Rating: 3.33
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Thursday, December 28, 2006
Friday, June 30, 2006
European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power
European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power
How ideas such as civilization and progress have been used as a smoke screen for western dominance, by the world-renowned sociologist.
Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intervention around the world has been justified by appeals to notions of civilization, development, and progress. The assumption has been that such ideas are universal, encrusted in natural law. But, as Immanuel Wallerstein argues in this short and elegant philippic, these concepts are, in fact, not global. Rather, their genesis is firmly rooted in European thought and their primary function has been to provide justification for powerful states to impose their will against the weak under the smoke screen of what is supposed to be both beneficial to humankind and historically inevitable.
With great acuity Wallerstein draws together discussions of the idea of orientalism, the right to intervene, and the triumph of science over the humanities to explain how strategies designed to promote particular Western interests have acquired an all-inclusive patina.
Wallerstein concludes by advocating a true universalism that will allow critical appraisal of all justifications for intervention by the powerful against the weak. At a time when such intervention--in the name of democracy and human rights--has returned to the center stage of world politics, his treatise is both relevant and compelling.
ISBN: 1595580611
Author: Immanuel Wallerstein
Publisher: New Press, The
Rating: 3.94
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Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair
Few American writers have revealed their private as well as their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur weaves the strands of Sinclair’s contentious public career and his often-troubled private life into a compelling personal narrative.
An unassuming teetotaler with a fiery streak, called a propagandist by some, the most conservative of revolutionaries by others, Sinclair was such a driving force of history that one could easily mistake his life story for historical fiction. He counted dozens of epochal figures as friends or confidants, including Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry Ford, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung.
Starting with The Jungle in 1906, Sinclair’s fiction and nonfiction helped to inform and mold American opinions about socialism, labor and industry, religion and philosophy, the excesses of the media, American political isolation and pacifism, civil liberties, and mental and physical health.
In his later years, Sinclair twice reinvented himself, first as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, and later, in his sixties and seventies, as a historical novelist. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, one of eleven novels featuring super-spy Lanny Budd.
Outside the literary realm, the ever-restless Sinclair was seemingly everywhere: forming Utopian artists’ colonies, funding and producing Sergei Eisenstein’s film documentaries, and waging consciousness-raising political campaigns. Even when he wasn’t involved in progressive causes or counterculture movements, his name often was invoked by them–an arrangement that frequently embroiled Sinclair in controversy.
Sinclair’s passion and optimistic zeal inspired America, but privately he could be a frustrated, petty man who connected better with his readers than with members of his own family. His life with his first wife, Meta, his son David, and various friends and professional acquaintances was a web of conflict and strain. Personally and professionally ambitious, Sinclair engaged in financial speculation, although his wealth-generating schemes often benefited his pet causes–and he lobbied as tirelessly
ISBN: 1400061512
Author: Anthony Arthur
Publisher: Random House
Rating: 3.78
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Thursday, June 1, 2006
Nobody s Perfect
Nobody s Perfect
"She's practically perfect," Megan said thoughtfully. She repeated the new girl's name, practicing the way Ms. Endee had written it on the whiteboard. "Alexis Powell."
Megan has spent forever planning her positively purple birthday sleepover. She's even made glittery purple invitations for every girl in her class. Then a new girl, Alexis, joins their class. Alexis seems perfect: She's smart, pretty, and rules the soccer games on the playground. But no matter how hard Megan tries to be a friend to Alexis, the new girl is aloof or rude. At first, Megan thinks Alexis is shy. Then Megan starts to fear that Alexis is treating her differently because she's deaf. When the girls are forced to collaborate on a science fair project, Megan learns the truth -- and realizes that nobody's perfect.
Once again Marlee Matlin draws on experiences from her own childhood to tell Megan's story. In this funny, poignant book, readers will root for Megan, a spirited young girl who doesn't let anything stand in her way.
ISBN: 068986986X
Author: Marlee Matlin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Rating: 4.02
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Monday, April 10, 2006
Towelhead
Towelhead
Thirteen-year-old Jasira wants what every girl wants: love and acceptance and the undivided attention of whoever she's with. And if she can't get that from her parents, then why not from her mother's boyfriend, or her father's muscle-bound neighbor, Mr. Vuoso? Alicia Erian's incandescent debut novel, Towelhead, will ring true for readers who remember the rarely poetic transition from childhood to young adulthood. Jasira is a creature of contradiction: both innocent (reading romantic intentions into the grossest displays of lust) and oddly clear-sighted, especially when it comes to the imbalance of power, and the things we do for love. When her mother exiles her to Houston to live with Jasira's strict, quick-to-anger Lebanese father, she quickly learns what aspects of herself to suppress in front of him. In private, however, she conducts her sexual awakening with all the false confidence that pop culture and her neighbor's Playboy magazines have provided.
Jasira tells her story with candor and glimmers of dark, unexpected humor--as when she describes her mother's boyfriend Barry's assistance in her personal grooming: "A week later, Barry broke down and told her the truth. That he had shaved me himself. That he had been shaving me for weeks. That he couldn't seem to stop shaving me." The freshness of her narrative voice sets Towelhead apart from the sentimental or purely harsh treatment of similar subject matter elsewhere, and makes the novel a promising follow-up to Erian's well-regarded short story collection, The Brutal Language of Love. --Regina Marler
ISBN: 0743285123
Author: Alicia Erian
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: 3.58
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Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran
Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran
As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense standoff between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution.
Moaveni's homecoming falls in the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran's rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran — ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes — is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.
ISBN: 1586483781
Author: Azadeh Moaveni
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Rating: 3.66
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Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Born To Kvetch CD: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
Born To Kvetch CD: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
As the main spoken language of the Jews for more than a thousand years, Yiddish has had plenty to lament, plenty to conceal. Its phrases and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled the Jews of Europe to survive persecution: they never stopped kvetching about God, gentiles, children, and everything else.
In Born to Kvetch, Michael Wex looks at the ingredients that went into this buffet of disenchantment and examines how they were mixed together to produce an almost limitless supply of striking idioms and withering curses. Born to Kvetch includes a wealth of material that's never appeared in English before.
This is no bobe mayse (cock-and-bull story) from a khokhem be-layle (idiot, literally a "sage at night" when no one's looking), but a serious yet fun and funny look at a language. From tukhes to goy, meshugener to kvetch, Yiddish words have permeated and transformed English as well. Through the fascinating history of this kvetch-full tongue, Michael Wex gives us a moving and inspiring portrait of a people, and a language, in exile.
ISBN: 0061131229
Author: Michael Wex
Publisher: HarperAudio
Rating: 3.55
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Tuesday, February 7, 2006
Acculturation and Parent Child Relationships: Measurement and Development
Acculturation and Parent Child Relationships: Measurement and Development
Although many researchers agree on a general definition of acculturation, the conceptualization and measurement of acculturation remain controversial. To address the issues, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) sponsored a conference that brought together scholars who work to define and develop assessments of acculturation, and who study the impact of acculturation on families. The goals of the conference were to evaluate both the status of acculturation as a scientific construct and the roles of acculturation in parenting and human development. The goal of this volume is to advance the state-of-the-art.
"Acculturation and Parent-Child Relationships: Measurement and Development" is a must-read for researchers, students, and policymakers concerned with cultural factors that affect the lives of parents and children.
ISBN: 0805858725
Author: Marc H. Bornstein
Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Rating: 0.00
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Sunday, January 1, 2006
Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378 1417
Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378 1417
For almost forty years, from 1378 to 1417, the Western Church was divided into rival camps headed by two and eventually three competing popes. The so-called Schism provoked a profound and long-lasting anxiety throughout Europe an anxiety that reverberated throughout clerical circles and among the ordinary faithful. In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary, and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late Middle Ages.
Modern historians have analyzed the Great Schism mostly from the perspective of church politics. Blumenfeld-Kosinski shifts our attention to several groups that have not before been considered together: saintly men and women (such as Catherine of Siena, Pedro of Aragon, Vincent Ferrer, and Constance de Rabastens), politically aware and committed poets (such as Philippe de Mezieres and Christine de Pizan), and prophets (for example, the mysterious Telesphorus of Cosenza and the authors of the anonymous Prophecies of the Last Popes). Not surprisingly, these groups often saw the Schism as an apocalyptic sign of the end times. Images abounded of the divided Church as a two-headed monster or suffering widow.
A twelfth-century prelude looks at the schism of 1159 and the role the famous visionaries Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schonau played in this earlier crisis in order to define common threads of mystical activism as well as the profound differences with the later Great Schism. Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval and early modern history, religious studies, and literature."
ISBN: 0271027495
Author: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Rating: 3.50
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