Other books that might interest you

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  Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts -...

  Jeremy L. Wallace

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  A unique analysis of the numbers that came to define Chinese politics and how this quantification evolved over time.For decades, a few numbers came to define Chinese politics—until those numbers did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideological leadership. Jeremy Wallace explains how that system worked and analyzes how the problems that accumulated in its blind spots led Xi Jinping to take drastic action. Xi's neopolitical turn—aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, reassertion of party authority, and personalization of power—is an attempt fix the problems of the prior system, as well as a hedge against an inability to do so. The book argues that while of course dictators stay in power through coercion and cooptation, they also do so by convincing their populations and themselves of their right to rule. Quantification is one tool in this persuasive arsenal, but it comes with its own perils.

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  Under Jackie's Shadow - Voices...

  Mitchell Nathanson

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  The stories of thirteen Black Minor League baseball players during the post–Jackie Robinson era, from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, who were figuratively and literally left behind even as both baseball and the country claimed a newfound racial progressiveness.

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  A Spy Like No Other - The Cuban...

  Robert Holmes

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  The arms race between the Soviet Union and the USA was the most dangerous confrontation in the history of the world. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, and US President John F. Kennedy's willingness to call his bluff, brought the Soviet Union and the West to the edge of a cataclysmic nuclear war. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Holmes, a British diplomat in Moscow during the early 1960s, provides an answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the Cold War. Kennedy's confidence in his brinkmanship hung on the evidence provided by Oleg Penkovsky, the MI6/CIA agent inside Soviet military intelligence. While working on A Spy Like No Other, Holmes set out to tell Penkovsky's story. But, in doing so, he stumbled upon an astonishing chain of intrigue, betrayal and revenge that suggested a group of maverick Soviet intelligence officers had plotted the crime of the century. When Penkovsky's treachery was discovered, in the middle of the Missile Crisis, he was executed and his boss, General Ivan Serov (the head of Soviet military intelligence and a former head of the KGB), was subsequently dismissed. The Soviet propaganda machine then thoroughly discredited Serov and consigned him to obscurity. In this extraordinary new study, Holmes suggests Serov's anger at the West's 'victory' in Cuba and his resentment at the treachery of his protégé and his own downfall turned into an obsessive determination to gain revenge - and reveals the opportunity he had to do so by working with KGB rogue officers to enlist a young American loner, Lee Harvey Oswald, to assassinate the President.

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  Hot Planet Cool Media -...

  Stephen Harper

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  From the Arab Spring and London riots through the era of Brexit and Trump, the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Europe, this volume collects eleven years of lively, informative and entertaining essays and polemics, focusing on media treatment of major world events, political entanglements and culture-war squabbles.
  Taking aim at the distortions and omissions of news reports and cultural narratives in the Western world, Stephen Harper highlights the dislocation between humanity's existential crisis and the failure of the corporate media to register its underlying causes – or even to entertain any real discussion of its solution. Instead, he argues, the media blithely serve the narrow interests of a global elite that is subjecting the planet to a reign of fire in the form of endless wars and ecological destruction.
  Harper reviews contemporary journalistic, cinematic and televisual coverage, engaging with broad cultural topics such as 'cancel culture', the incel phenomenon and Covid conspiracy theories, as well as key events like the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. For all its eclecticism, Hot Planet, Cool Media has an ideological cohesiveness, rejecting popular left and right political positions and advocating the cause of socialism or communism in the Marxian sense of a classless, leaderless, moneyless society.

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  Inquiry into the Human Mind on...

  Thomas Reid

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  "That excellent book by Thomas Reid, the Inquiry into the Human Mind (first edition, 1764; 6th edition, 1810), as a negative proof of the Kantian truths, affords us a very thorough conviction of the inadequacy of the senses to produce the objective perception of things, and also of the non-empirical origin of the perception of space and time. Reid refutes Locke's doctrine that perception is a product of the senses, by a thorough and acute demonstration that the collective sensations of the senses do not bear the least resemblance to the world as known in perception, and especially that the five primary qualities of Locke (extension, form, solidity, movement, and number) absolutely could not be afforded us by any sensation of the senses. Accordingly he gives up the question as to the mode of origination and the source of perception as completely insoluble; and although altogether unacquainted with Kant, he gives us, as it were, according to the regula falsi, a thorough proof of the intellectual nature of perception (really first explained by me as a consequence of the Kantian doctrine), and also of the a priori source, discovered by Kant, of its constituent elements, space, time, and causality, from which those primary qualities of Locke first proceed, but by means of which they are easily constructed. Thomas Reid's book is very instructive and well worth reading—ten times more so than all the philosophy together that has been written since Kant."  (Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. R. B. Haldane, M.A. and J. Kemp, M.A. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 1909 Vol II, Ch. 2. pg. 187) 
  Prooflisteners for this book were MaryAnn Spiegel and denisedee.  Metacoordination and cataloging done by TriciaG and J. M. Smallheer

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  Resistance and the Politics of...

  Iain MacKenzie

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  `The truth will set you free' is a maxim central to both theories and practices of resistance. Nonetheless, it is a claim that has come under fire from an array of critical perspectives in the second half of the 20th century. Iain MacKenzie analyses two of the most compelling of these perspectives: the poststructuralist politics of truth formulated by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the alternative post-foundational account of truth and militancy developed by Alain Badiou. He argues that a critically oriented version of poststructuralism provides both an understanding of the deeply entwined nature of truth and power and a compelling account of the creative practices that may sustain resistance.

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