Other books that might interest you

• 

  Healing the Heart of Democracy -...

  Parker J. Palmer

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In his newest book, Parker J. Palmer builds on his own extensive  experience as a an inner life explorer and social change activist  to examine the personal and social infrastructure of American  politics. What he did for educators in The Courage to Teach  he does here for citizens by looking at the dynamics of our inner  lives for clues to reclaiming our civic well-being. In Healing  the Heart of Democracy, he points the way to a politics rooted  in the commonwealth of compassion and creativity still found among  We the People.    Democracy, writes Palmer, is a  non-stop experiment in the strengths and weaknesses of our  political institutions, local communities, and the human  heartand its outcome can never be taken for granted. The  experiment is endless, unless we blow up the lab, and the  explosives to do the job are found within us. But so also is the  hearts alchemy that can turn suffering into compassion,  conflict into community, and tension into energy for creativity  amid democracys demands.   Healing the Heart of Democracy names the  habits of the heart we need to revitalize our  politics and shows how they can be formed in the everyday venues of  our lives. Palmer proposes practical and hopeful methods to hold  the tensions of our differences in a manner that can help us  restore a government of the people, by the people, for the  people.

  Show book

• 

  Ragged Glory - The Rainbow...

  Ray Hartley

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  As a leading political journalist and newspaper editor, Hartley had the best seat in the house for the unfolding drama of the new South Africa, as well as privileged access to many key players, including Nelson Mandela himself. Admirably concise but rich in detail, drawing on a wide spectrum of interviews, documents and experiences, Ragged Glory offers a bracingly critical look back at the achievements and the failures of two turbulent decades, during which South Africa took its place at the table of free nations but lost something of its moral authority. On a cold Highveld morning in May 1994, Nelson Mandela took the oath of office to become South Africa's first democratically elected president. A new era had begun. The promise of those heady days of political transition soon gave way to a more sober view on the magnitude of the challenges facing the new government. Under Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, the country grappled with the restructuring of the state, massive inequality and poverty, rising crime, battles over economic policy, the arms deal, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the BEE era, the cancer of political corruption and the rise of a new and predatory political elite. With the removal of Mbeki, followed by the interregnum of Kgalema Motlanthe, the stage was set for the coming to power of the controversial Jacob Zuma. All of these are key threads in Ray Hartley's rich and complex narrative history of the democratic era.

  Show book

• 

  An Arrow Against All Tyrants -...

  Richard Overton

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In 1646 in Newgate Gaol in London, a political activist, Richard Overton, penned a pamphlet that contained dangerous ideas. An Arrow Against All Tyrants asserted the inalienable rights of the individual.
  'No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's... For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom.'
  The thoughts contained within were radical at a time of historic upheaval in England.
  This book reprints Overton's bold, declamatory pamphlet, carefully typeset from the original at the British Library.
  It is introduced by Ian Gadd, Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University, who sets Overton's work into its literary and historical context.
  An Arrow Against All Tyrants is deal for anyone interested in the tumult of radical ideas during the English civil wars and the both of human rights.
  Introduction by Ian Gadd (excerpt)
  In October 1646, somewhere on the streets of London, the bookseller George Thomason picked up a scruffily printed work entitled An Arrow Against all Tyrants and Tyranny by Richard Overton (fl. 1640-63) and, as was his habit, noted the date of his latest acquisition on its title-page. Thomason had been systematically collecting all sorts of printed items since 1640 and An Arrow was just the latest example of what he and his contemporaries would have called a pamphlet – a word that, of course, still has currency today but that lacks much of the potency and meaning that it had for Overton's first readers.
  First of all, a pamphlet was not a book. This may seem a curious thing to say, especially as you're currently holding this book in your hands, but a 17th Century reader would have understood the distinction. For a start, a pamphlet was not bound. Many printed works in England in this period were sold unbound – as folded, printed sheets ó in the expectation that a purchaser would get them bound, but some kinds of printed items, including pamphlets, were never intended for binding. Instead, a pamphlet like An Arrowwould have been 'stab stitched': simply held together by coarse thread that had been stabbed through the left-hand margin when the pamphlet was closed. In contrast to the careful, precise, and hidden sewing of a book binding, stab-stitching signalled a pamphlet's sense of urgency and directness – and also its likely ephemerality.
  More in book
   

  Show book

• 

  Gaddafi's Harem - The Story of a...

  Annick Cojean

  • 0
  • 1
  • 0

  This international bestseller is a “horrifying inside look at the lives of Libyan women under the Gaddafi regime . . . Powerful and compelling” (Booklist, starred review).   Soraya was just fifteen, a schoolgirl in the coastal town of Sirte, when she was given the honor of presenting a bouquet of flowers to Colonel Gaddafi, “the Guide,” on a visit he was making to her school the following week. This one meeting—a presentation of flowers, a pat on the head from Gaddafi—changed Soraya’s life forever. Soon afterwards, she was summoned to Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi’s palatial compound near Tripoli, where she joined a number of young women who were violently abused, raped, and degraded by Gaddafi. Heart-wrenchingly tragic but ultimately redemptive, Soraya’s story is the first one of many that are just now beginning to be heard. But sex and rape remain the highest taboo in Libya, and women like Soraya (whose identity is protected by a pseudonym here) risk being disowned or even killed by their dishonored family members.   In Gaddafi’s Harem, an instant bestseller on publication in France, Le Monde special correspondent Annick Cojean gives a voice to Soraya’s story, and supplements her investigation into Gaddafi’s abuses of power through interviews with people who knew Soraya, as well as with other women who were abused by Gaddafi.   “A moving and disturbing wake-up call to the personal costs of totalitarianism.” —Publishers Weekly

  Show book

• 

  The Slave's Cause - A History of...

  Manisha Sinha

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  “Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America.”—Florida Courier   Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor.   Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.   “A full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”—Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review   “A stunning new history of abolitionism . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest.”—The Atlantic   “Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era.”—The Wall Street Journal   “A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States . . . as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”—The Boston Globe

  Show book

• 

  The Case of the Piglet's...

  Jon C. Blue

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  “Incomparable insight into an early colonial legal system thoroughly influenced by Biblical interpretations . . . sure to appeal.” —Harvard Law Review In the mid-seventeenth century, judges in the short-lived New Haven Colony presided over a remarkable series of trials ranging from murder and bestiality, to drunken sailors, frisky couples, faulty shoes, and shipwrecks. The cases were reported in an unusually vivid manner, allowing readers to witness the twists and turns of fortune as the participants battled with life and liberty at stake. When the records were eventually published in the 1850s, they were both difficult to read and heavily edited to delete sexual matters. Rendered here in modernized English and with insightful commentary by eminent judge Jon C. Blue, the New Haven trials allow readers to immerse themselves in the exciting legal battles of America’s earliest days.The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity assembles thirty-three of the most significant and intriguing trials of the period. As a book that examines a distinctive judicial system from a modern legal perspective, it is sure to be of interest to readers in law and legal history. For less litigious readers, Blue offers a worm’s-eye view of the full spectrum of early colonial society—political leaders and religious dissidents, farmhands and apprentices, women and children.“An engaging and intelligent microhistory of this time period and colony that nonlegal scholars can understand” —Journal of American Culture

  Show book