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RingsidePolitics
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The Political Bookstore
World Politics
The Political Bookstore spans the world (or at least the world wide web) in finding books that give us a sense of history but also are relevant to the present.
Click on the book cover for reviews, pricing, and to order!
The Sword and the Shield Shocking information from a KGB defector |
Disclosures from The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, based on a secret archive of top-KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union, are sure to make the front pages of newspapers throughout the West. According to the FBI, this archive is "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network. |
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman List Price: $27.50 Also available in paperback |
One day in 1992, Thomas Friedman toured a Lexus factory in Japan
and marveled at the robots that put the luxury cars together. That evening, as he ate
sushi on a Japanese bullet train, he read a story about yet another Middle East squabble
between Palestinians and Israelis. And it hit him: Half the world was lusting after those
Lexuses, or at least the brilliant technology that made them possible, and the other half
was fighting over who owned which olive tree. Friedman, the well-traveled New York Times foreign - affairs columnist, peppers The Lexus and the Olive Tree with stories that illustrate his central theme: that globalization -- the Lexus -- is the central organizing principle of the post-cold war world, even though many individuals and nations resist by holding onto what has traditionally mattered to them--the olive tree. Problem is, few of us understand what exactly globalization means. As Friedman sees it, the concept, at first glance, is all about American hegemony, about Disneyfication of all corners of the earth. But the reality, thank goodness, is far more complex than that, involving international relations, global markets, and the rise of the power of individuals (Bill Gates, Osama Bin Laden) relative to the power of nations. No one knows how all this will shake out, but The Lexus and the Olive Tree is as good an overview of this sometimes brave, sometimes fearful new world as you'll find. --Lou Schuler |
| George Bush's presidency occurred during such a event-packed
era for international affairs that he limits A World Transformed to the first two years of
his term, marked by the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the Persian Gulf War. List
Price: $30.00 |
A World |
Masters
of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations List Price: $27.50 |
Globalization and Its Discontents List Price: $25.00 |
The Road to Hell: List Price: $25.00 |
Before you mail another check to Save the Children or
join the Peace Corps, read this book. Michael Maren shows that the international aid industry is a big business more concerned with winning its next big government contract than helping needy people. The problem isn't a lack of charity missions in the Third World, but that the best intentions of these idealists are often inadvertently destructive, thanks to a deadly combination of their naivet� and the willingness of native elites to exploit them. Maren spent many years in Africa living this life. This is a splendid, literate, muckraking memoir of his experiences. |
| The New York Times Book Review, John Lewis
Gaddis: ...Kissinger has produced the memoirist's equivalent of a battleship, intimidating
in appearance, heavy with armor and bristling with armaments, equipped to fire salvos at
past critics while launching pre - emptive strikes against histories as yet unwritten. It
is, by any standard, a remarkable achievement. List Price: $35.00 |
Years of Renewal
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Chile, the Great Transformation |
Two Chilean scholars and activists cut through the
rhetoric surrounding "the Chilean miracle" and provide an integrated analysis of
the process of socioeconomic and political change that transformed their country between
1970 and 1990. List Price: $14.95 |
| In a collection of colloquies over seventeen years,
Vyacheslav M. Molotov recounts his comradeship with Lenin, his role in the November coup,
his time as premier under Stalin and as negotiator of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and his
demotion under Khrushchev. |
Molotov |
The Politics of China: |
Bringing together substantial essays by leading scholars, this volume offers a comp- rehensive introduction to and analysis of the politics of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the mid-1990s. The last two chapters have been written specifically for the paperback volume. Richard Baum's chapter covers the events of the 1980s, and Joseph Fewsmith's concluding essay extends the second edition's coverage into the 1990s. |
| The New York Times Book Review, Max Frankel -
Burr succinctly summarizes Kissinger's cagey but admiring pursuit of cooperation with the
Chinese and his earnest but mistrustful search for agreements with the Soviets. He provides much needed context for the encounters recorded here at the peak of Nixon's power and in the tense years after his Watergate collapse. He also explains how much material is still secret and what can be usefully gleaned from other sources. |
Kissinger Transcripts: |
The Coming Conflict With China |
A timely study of the growing friction between the United States and China examines the causes of increasing tensions - such as China's human rights violations and political ambitions--and discusses ways in which strategists are preparing for future conflicts. |
| Postcolonial Theory is a critical introduction to the
burgeoning field of postcolonial studies. Leela Gandhi is the first to clearly map out
this field in terms of its wider philosophical and intellectual context, drawing important
connections between postcolonial theory and poststructuralism, postmodernism, marxism and feminism. |
Postcolonial |
Peace to End |
This definitive, fascinating account of the creation of the modern Middle East is panoramic, absorbing, highly readable and richly detailed. Depicting the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the states known collectively as the Middle East, Fromkin's descriptions involve some of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century. Chosen as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Best Book of 1989. |
| First published in 1989, just before the Gulf War broke out, REPUBLIC OF FEAR was the only book that explained the motives of the Saddam Hussein regime in invading and annexing Kuwait. This updated edition relates how the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party has transformed and controlled Iraq with fear since 1968. An important and timely book. | Republic of Fear : The Politics of Modern Iraq |
The Ends of |
"The future here could be sadder than the present," writes Robert Kaplan in a chapter about the African nation of Sierra Leone. The same could be said of virtually the entire Third World, which he spends the bulk of this book visiting and describing. Kaplan, author of Balkan Ghosts, is congenitally pessimistic about the developmental prospects of West Africa, the Nile Valley, and much of Asia. This traveler's tale offers dire warnings about over- population, environ- mental degradation, and social chaos. We should all hope that Kaplan's forecast is wrong, but we ignore him at our peril. |