Witty, thought-provoking exploration of government newspeak, exaggerated advertising claims, propaganda and other misuses of language — and how to... combat them.

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Preservationist comes a provocative retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel: a novel that... gives new meaning to the words "temptation," "rivalry," and "murder."Their expulsion from the Garden is only the beginning: Eve and Adam have to find their way past recriminations and bitterness, to construct a new life together in a harsh land. But the challenges are many for the world's first family. Among their children are Cain and Abel, and soon they must discover how to be parents to one son who is everything they could hope for, and another who is sullen, difficult, and rife with insecurities and jealousies. In the background, always, is the incomprehensibility of God's motives as He watches over their faltering attempts to build a life. In Fallen, David Maine has drawn a convincing, wryly observant, and enthralling portrait of a family--one driven (and riven) by passions, irrationality, and love. The result is an intimate, in-depth story of brothers, a husband, and a wife--people whose struggles are both completely familiar and yet utterly original. 

A coming-of-age tale for young adults set in the trenches of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, this is the story of Perry, a Harlem teenager who... volunteers for the service when his dream of attending college falls through. Sent to the front lines, Perry and his platoon come face-to-face with the Vietcong and the real horror of warfare. But violence and death aren't the only hardships. As Perry struggles to find virtue in himself and his comrades, he questions why black troops are given the most dangerous assignments, and why the U.S. is there at all.

Genre: Comedy Characters: 3 males, 3 females Scenery: Interior Best friends now happily married to others, Julia and Jane both once counted the... dashing Frenchman Maurice as their lover. Guess who's back in town and requesting the pleasure of the ladies company? Coward at his inimitable best, the story is a champagne cocktail of wit and charm.

Despite its suspected prevalence, no comprehensive analysis of police corruption has been published for nearly three decades. Fallen Blue Knights... provides a systematic, in-depth analysis of the subject, while also addressing the question of what can be done to ensure successful corruption control. Kutnjak Ivkovi'c argues that the current mechanisms for control--the courts, prosecutors, independent commissions, and the media, as well as the internal control mechanisms within a police agency itself--suffer from severe shortcomings that substantially limit their effectiveness. In this much-needed analysis, Kutnjak Ivkovi'c redefines the roles of major players and develops a novel, comprehensive model of corruption control.

A controversial challenge to the works of Ron Chernow and David McCullough With Fallen Founder , Nancy Isenberg plumbs rare and obscure sources to shed... new light on everyone?s favorite founding villain. The Aaron Burr whom we meet through Isenberg?s eye-opening biography is a feminist, an Enlightenment figure on par with Jefferson, a patriot, and?most importantly?a man with powerful enemies in an age of vitriolic political fighting. Revealing the gritty reality of eighteenth-century America, Fallen Founder is the authoritative restoration of a figure who ran afoul of history and a much-needed antidote to the hagiography of the revolutionary era.

Since publishing his bestselling The Blue Zones, longevity expert and National Geographic Explorer Dan Buettner has discovered a new Blue Zone and... launched a major public health initiative to transform cities based on principles from this book. The Blue Zones, Second Edition is completely updated and expands his bestselling classic on longevity, drawing on his research from extraordinarily long-lived communities--Blue Zones--around the globe to highlight the lifestyle, diet, outlook, and stress-coping practices that will add years to your life and life to your years.The new Blue Zone is Ikaria, Greece, where strong, sweet wine, family, and a Mediterranean diet all play a role in longer life. Also new in this book is a reading group guide, designed for groups to read about, discuss, and implement many of the simple changes advocated for better health.A long, healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you adopt the right lifestyle, experts say, chances are you may live up to a decade longer. Buettner has led teams of researchers across the globe--from Costa Rica to Sardinia, Italy, to Okinawa, Japan and beyond--to uncover the secrets of Blue Zones. He found that the recipe for longevity is deeply intertwined with community, lifestyle, and spirituality. People live longer and healthier by embracing a few simple but powerful habits, and by creating the right community around themselves. In The Blue Zones, Second Edition, Buettner has blended his lifestyle formula with the latest longevity research to inspire lasting, behavioral change and add years to your life.Region by region, Buettner reveals the "secrets" of longevity through stories of his travels and interviews with some of the most remarkable--and happily long-living people on the planet. It's not coincidence that the way they eat, interact with each other, shed stress, heal themselves, avoid disease, and view their world yield them more good years of life. Buettner's easy to follow "best practices" and list of healthy lifestyle choices from the Blue Zones will empower readers to live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives.

At the outbreak of the First World War, an entire generation of young men charged into battle for what they believed was a glorious cause. Over the next... four years, that cause claimed the lives of some 13 million soldiers--more than twice the number killed in all the major wars from 1790 to 1914. But despite this devastating toll, the memory of the war was not, predominantly, of the grim reality of its trench warfare and battlefield carnage. What was most remembered by the war's participants was its sacredness and the martyrdom of those who had died for the greater glory of the fatherland. War, and the sanctification of it, is the subject of this pioneering work by well-known European historian George L. Mosse. Fallen Soldiers offers a profound analysis of what he calls the Myth of the War Experience--a vision of war that masks its horror, consecrates its memory, and ultimately justifies its purpose. Beginning with the Napoleonic wars, Mosse traces the origins of this myth and its symbols, and examines the role of war volunteers in creating and perpetuating it. But it was not until World War I, when Europeans confronted mass death on an unprecedented scale, that the myth gained its widest currency. Indeed, as Mosse makes clear, the need to find a higher meaning in the war became a national obsession. Focusing on Germany, with examples from England, France, and Italy, Mosse demonstrates how these nations--through memorials, monuments, and military cemeteries honoring the dead as martyrs--glorified the war and fostered a popular acceptance of it. He shows how the war was further promoted through a process of trivialization in which war toys and souvenirs, as well as postcards like those picturing the Easter Bunny on the Western Front, softened the war's image in the public mind. The Great War ended in 1918, but the Myth of the War Experience continued, achieving its most ruthless political effect in Germany in the interwar years. There the glorified notion of war played into the militant politics of the Nazi party, fueling the belligerent nationalism that led to World War II. But that cataclysm would ultimately shatter the myth, and in exploring the postwar years, Mosse reveals the extent to which the view of death in war, and war in general, was finally changed. In so doing, he completes what is likely to become one of the classic studies of modern war and the complex, often disturbing nature of human perception and memory.

During the first half of the twentieth century, out-of-wedlock pregnancy came to be seen as one of the most urgent and compelling problems of the day.... The effort to define its meaning fueled a struggle among three groups of women: evangelical reformers who regarded unmarried mothers as fallen sisters to be saved, a new generation of social workers who viewed them as problem girls to be treated, and unmarried mothers themselves. Drawing on previously unexamined case records from maternity homes, Regina Kunzel explores how women negotiated the crisis of single pregnancy and analyzes the different ways they understood and represented unmarried motherhood. Fallen Women, Problem Girls is a social and cultural history of out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the United States from 1890 to 1945. Kunzel analyzes how evangelical women drew on a long tradition of female benevolence to create maternity homes that would redeem and reclaim unmarried mothers. She shows how, by the 1910s, social workers struggling to achieve professional legitimacy tried to dissociate their own work from that earlier tradition, replacing the reform rhetoric of sisterhood with the scientific language of professionalism. By analyzing the important and unexplored transition from the conventions of nineteenth-century reform to the professional imperatives of twentieth-century social welfare, Kunzel offers a new interpretation of gender and professionalization. Kunzel places shifting constructions of out-of-wedlock pregnancy within a broad history of gender, sexuality, class, and race, and argues that the contests among evangelical women, social workers, and unmarried mothers distilled larger generational and cross-class conflicts among women in the first half of the twentieth century.

"Dean Young is a high-energy poet. . . . His vigorous, vibrant, fast-paced poems make startling connections."—Judges' citation, Griffin Poetry Prize... shortlist"Anyone with a heartbeat knows that Dean Young has become a crucial nucleotide in the DNA of American poetry."—Tony Hoagland"The language, the invention, the imagination, and the sheer fun of his poems are astounding."—Charles SimicDean Young surmounts the failures of love and the body with his signature humor, verbal banter, and wild imaginative leaps. Embracing the elegiac, angry, and amorous with surrealistic wordplay and off-kilter music, Young coaxes us to "fall higher" into an intimate, vulnerable, expansive exchange. This is a major new book by one of America's most inventive poets.I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5,but now I want a Russian novel,a 50 page description of you sleeping,another 75 of what you think staring outa window. I don't care about the plotalthough I suppose there will have to be one,the usual separation of the lovers, turbulentseas, danger of de-commission in spiteof constant war, time in gulps and glitchespassing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sledout-racing the wolves on the steppes, the hugeglittering ball where all that mattersis a kiss at the end of a dark hall . . .Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

"Young has always stood out for his sharp humor, boundless poetic energy, and sheer readability. If adventurous poetry can sometimes feel like a tenuous... tightrope walk, Young's poems feel more like zip lines."—The Boston Globe"This book reads like a long, breathless thank-you for life's seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness, and joy."—Los Angeles TimesFall Higher is a major collection by one of America's most inventive and entertaining writers. In this paperback release, Dean Young's work contends with the challenges of love, wryly cataloging mistakes, deterioration, and broken vows. Young's humor is as sharp as ever, and coupled with a vulnerability that renders Fall Higher his most intimate collection to date."The True Apology Takes Years"The true apology takes years.Terrible dry eyes!The tree rings grow closer and closer togetherbut the nail is swallowed.Great heaps of rubble are moved up and down the shore.Finally a dance is performed to complete the forgiveness,stamping out small fires,the whole palladium decorated with thistleslike the last twenty pages of a Victorian novel.Now that your hunger is gone you're welcome to the banquet . . . Dean Young has published twelve books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and Griffin Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, as well as an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the University of Texas and lives in Austin, Texas.

In 1700, Latin America and British North America were roughly equal in economic terms. Yet over the next three centuries, the United States gradually... pulled away from Latin America, and today the gap between the two is huge. Why did this happen? Was it culture? Geography? Economic policies? Natural resources? Differences in political development? The question has occupied scholars for decades, and the debate remains a hot one. In Falling Behind, Francis Fukuyama gathers together some of the world's leading scholars on the subject to explain the nature of the gap and how it came to be. Tracing the histories of development over the past four hundred years and focusing in particular on the policies of the last fifty years, the contributors conclude that while many factors are important, economic policies and political systems are at the root of the divide. While the gap is deeply rooted in history, there have been times when it closed a bit as a consequence of policies chosen in places ranging from Chile to Argentina. Bringing to light these policy success stories, Fukuyama and the contributors offer a way forward for Latin American nations and improve their prospects for economic growth and stable political development. Given that so many attribute the gap to either vast cultural differences or the consequences of U.S. economic domination, Falling Behind is sure to stir debate. And, given the pressing importance of the subject in light of economic globalization and the immigration debate, its expansive, in-depth portrait of the hemisphere's development will be a welcome intervention in the conversation.

Although middle-income families don't earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for... them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. In a book that explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today, Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.Copub: Russell Sage Foundation