Added by: derrida | Karma: 83.92 | Other | 27 July 2008
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Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace
The author, well-known for his criticism of the U.S. government's Vietnam policy in the 1960s, here turns his attention to Central America. The text wavers between a political broadside and a scholarly analysis of our policy towards the region in the larger context of our Cold War posture and conservative tendencies. Other sources have already better documented the inconsistencies between our purported values and policies abroad, and our support of human rights abuses. The Central American focus is diffused by the emphasis on domestic political conservatism, a connection not particularly well drawn.
This book provides guidelines on making homework relevant to the
students and the curriculum, and integrates homework into classroom
activities.
Homework is a vital part of learning, and it is expected by
students, parents, school directors, and teachers. the benefits of
homework are obvious, yet it is usually seen as a necessary but
unexciting chore. Both students and teachers often fail to take full
advantage of the opportunities it offers to consolidate classroom
teaching, bridge the gap between lessons, and promote independent
learning.
This book demonstrates ways to help learners to enjoy their homework and to make the most of it.
John Milton's Paradise Lost reveals much
about the relationship between God, the world, and the human race. For
Milton, the human condition consists of a tension between demonic and
sacred vices. Thus, the human race stands divided against itself and is
forever expelled from Eden. The
title, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, part of Chelsea House Publishers’
Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important
20th-century criticism on John Milton’s Paradise Lost through extracts
of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of
criticism also features a short biography on John Milton, a chronology
of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold
Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.
The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls “the specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.
In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”
Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Non-Fiction | 31 May 2008
25
Since its emergence in the seventeenthcentury, science fiction
has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and
pitfalls of science. In their turn, invention and discovery have forced
fiction writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. Different Engines explores how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see, do, and dream.
From Johannes Kepler's Somnium to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001,
science fiction has emerged as a mode of thinking, complementary to the
scientific method. Science fiction's field of interest is the gap
between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration,
and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama
in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Its readers,
many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the
contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Brake and Hook's Different Engines is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.