"Facing the Unexpected" presents the wealth of information derived from disasters around the world over the past 25 years. The authors explore how these... findings can improve disaster programs, identify remaining research needs, and discuss disaster within the broader context of sustainable development. How do different people think about disaster? Are we more likely to panic or to respond with altruism? Why are 110 people killed in a Valujet crash considered disaster victims while the 50,000 killed annually in traffic accidents in the U.S. are not? At the crossroads of social, cultural, and economic factors, this book examines these and other compelling questions. The authors review the influences that shape the U.S. governmental system for disaster planning and response, the effectiveness of local emergency agencies, and the level of professionalism in the field. They also compare technological versus natural disaster and examine the impact of technology on disaster programs.

Mention Three Mile Island, the Exxon Valdez, the Mozambique floods and the importance of effective disaster preparedness and response is immediately... clear. Facing the Unexpected presents the wealth of information derived from disasters around the world over the past 25 years. The authors explore how these findings can improve disaster programs, identify remaining research needs, and discuss disasters within the broader context of sustainable development.How do different people think about disaster? Are we more likely to panic or to respond with altruism? Why are 110 people killed in a Valujet crash considered disaster victims while the 50,000 killed annually in traffic accidents in the United States are not? At the crossroads of social, cultural, and economic factors, this book examines these and other compelling questions.

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist, producing throughout his life an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected--and... illuminated--the fraught times in which he lived. "As soon as he began to write something," comments George Packer in his foreword, "it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge--in short, to think--as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent."Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites such classics as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.

The ideology of the American dream--the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort--is the very soul of the... American nation. According to Jennifer Hochschild, we have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. In this compassionate but frightening book, Hochschild attributes our national distress to the ways in which whites and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks of various social classes, Hochschild demonstrates that America's only unifying vision may soon vanish in the face of racial conflict and discontent.Hochschild combines survey data and vivid anecdote to clarify several paradoxes. Since the 1960s white Americans have seen African Americans as having better and better chances to achieve the dream. At the same time middle-class blacks, by now one-third of the African American population, have become increasingly frustrated personally and anxious about the progress of their race. Most poor blacks, however, cling with astonishing strength to the notion that they and their families can succeed--despite their terrible, perhaps worsening, living conditions. Meanwhile, a tiny number of the estranged poor, who have completely given up on the American dream or any other faith, threaten the social fabric of the black community and the very lives of their fellow blacks.Hochschild probes these patterns and gives them historical depth by comparing the experience of today's African Americans to that of white ethnic immigrants at the turn of the century. She concludes by claiming that America's only alternative to the social disaster of intensified racial conflict lies in the inclusiveness, optimism, discipline, and high-mindedness of the American dream at its best.

A young woman is murdered at a car wash. An entire family is killed by a drunk driver. The victim of a violent assault survives but spends years... struggling to heal physically and emotionally. Offenders in these crimes are apprehended, convicted and sentenced. But it is not enough. Across the U.S., in increasing numbers, these and other victims of violent crime have sought direct, personal encounters with the offenders who have harmed them. "Facing Violence" tells the stories of courageous victims and offenders who have participated in facilitated dialogue in the aftermath of violent crimes. The book reports findings by a University of Minnesota research team that such victim/offender dialogue programs, when carefully supervised by trained facilitators, have usually resulted in life-transforming emotional healing for both parties. The book distills results of interviews with victims, offenders and staff members in two pioneering victim/offender dialogue programs in Texas and Ohio. What kinds of benefits result from such programs? One parent said: "My daughter's dead. But I know I'm better, I can sleep at night. I know it's a good feeling not to hate some monster." An assault victim commented: "This anger was deep witghin me, and now there's a lightness of my whole soul. It was transforming." And an offender convicted of assault explained: "I wanted to tell her how sorry I was... I always felt like I had the duty to at least try to make things right with her."

From the early years of the republic, many Americans anticipated a Pacific Age in world affairs that the United States would inevitably dominate, not in... a territorial sense so much as in a cultural and commercial one. Despite the reality that Asia was of little real economic importance in American life until recently, a powerful image persisted in the American mind of the promises of riches to be found across the Pacific. This book provides the history of that dream, from the time of Spanish galleons to the hypersonic airplane of the future.With bewildering speed, the North Pacific region has come to rival the North Atlantic as a global center of manufacturing, trade and information, and the generation of wealth. The economic statistics show that the Age of the Pacific has truly arrived. Perry vividly shows that from the early years of the republic many Americans anticipated a Pacific Age in world affairs that the United States would inevitably dominate, not in a territorial sense so much as in a cultural and commercial one. Despite the reality that Asia was of little real economic importance in American life until recently, a powerful image persisted in the American mind of the promise of riches to be found across the Pacific. This book provides the history of that dream, from the time of Spanish galleons to the hypersonic airplane of the future.Countless books have been written about American-East Asian relations, but fewer books have addressed the importance of the Pacific Ocean to the United States. No one before has shown so comprehensively how Americans dominated the creation of trans-Pacific trade routes. This book will be of great interest to professional historians and the general public interested in the history of American-Pacific relations, the history of transportation, and the history of the entrepreneurial doers and dreamers who spearheaded American commerce with Asia.

American expansion, says Richard Drinnon, is characterized by repression and racism. In his reinterpretation of "winning" the West, Drinnon links... racism with colonialism and traces this interrelationship from the Pequot War in New England, through American expansion westward to the Pacific, and beyond to the Phillippines and Vietnam. He cites parrallels between the slaughter of bison on the Great Plains and the defoliation of Vietnam and notes similarities in the language of aggression used in the American West, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia.

Focuses on the kinds of nonfiction writing that real writers do: writing about people, places, performace, how-to, science, humor, controversy. It... treats readers as pre- professional writers who care about style, who are willing to revise their work, and who intend their work to reach a wider audience.

Here, in a new edition, is Nelson Goodman's provocative philosophical classic—a book that, according to Science, "raised a storm of controversy" when... it was first published in 1954, and one that remains on the front lines of philosophical debate. How is it that we feel confident in generalizing from experience in some ways but not in others? How ore generalizations that ore warranted to be distinguished from those that are not? Goodman shows that these questions resist formal solution and his demonstration has been taken by nativists like Chomsky and Fodor as proof that neither scientific induction nor ordinary learning can proceed without an a priori, or innate, ordering of hypotheses. In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims. The controversy surrounding these unsolved problems is as relevant to the psychology of cognitive development as it is to the philosophy of science. No serious student of either discipline can afford to misunderstand Goodman's classic argument.

Fact Investigation, the tenth volume in NITA's popular Practical Guide Series, describes different methods and techniques that lawyers can use to best... serve their client's legitimate needs and wants during client interviewing, fact investigation, witness interviewing, and counseling. These methods help narrow issues and focus litigation so that the attorney/counselor can gather, produce, and impart "practical wisdom" to his or her clients. The book contains practical learning models tested by successful lawyers and teachers for lawyer planning and decision making.

Describes how facts are proved at trial, examining the principal categories of rational and psychological evidence, which is the basis of trial... "stories." How, at trial, does each party tell a story bolstering its own legal position and detracting from that of its adversary? What attributes of stories tend to make them persuasive? From these attributes, the authors derive a set of investigatory objectives that generally apply, regardless of the nature of the case. With objectives in place, turns to the thought processes that lawyers employ to analyze and develop evidence.

Comprehensive and comprehensible, this classic covers the basic and advanced topics essential for using factor analysis as a scientific tool in... psychology, education, sociology, and related areas. Emphasizing the usefulness of the techniques, it presents sufficient mathematical background for understanding and sufficient discussion of applications for effective use. This includes not only theory but also the empirical evaluations of the importance of mathematical distinctions for applied scientific analysis.