Download or read book A Choice of Weapons written by Gordon Parks and published by Minnesota Historical Society. This book was released on 2010 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gordon Parks's spectacular rise from poverty, personal hardships, and outright racism is astounding and inspiring." --from the foreword by Wing Young Huie

Download or read book Use of Weapons written by Iain M. Banks and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2008-12-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks and military action. The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought. The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman's life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a lost cause. But not even its machine could see the horrors in his past. Ferociously intelligent, both witty and horrific, Use of Weapons is a masterpiece of science fiction. The Culture Series Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Excession Inversions Look to Windward Matter Surface Detail The Hydrogen Sonata

Download or read book Weapon of Choice written by Ian Ayres and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How ordinary Americans, frustrated by the legal and political wrangling over the Second Amendment, can fight for reforms that will both respect gun owners’ rights and reduce gun violence. Efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States face formidable political and constitutional barriers. Legislation that would ban or broadly restrict firearms runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment. And gun rights advocates have joined a politically savvy firearms industry in a powerful coalition that stymies reform. Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars suggest a new way forward. We can decrease the number of gun deaths, they argue, by empowering individual citizens to choose common-sense gun reforms for themselves. Rather than ask politicians to impose one-size-fits-all rules, we can harness a libertarian approach—one that respects and expands individual freedom and personal choice—to combat the scourge of gun violence. Ayres and Vars identify ten policies that can be immediately adopted at the state level to reduce the number of gun-related deaths without affecting the rights of gun owners. For example, Donna’s Law, a voluntary program whereby individuals can choose to restrict their ability to purchase or possess firearms, can significantly decrease suicide rates. Amending red flag statutes, which allow judges to restrict access to guns when an individual has shown evidence of dangerousness, can give police flexible and effective tools to keep people safe. Encouraging the use of unlawful possession petitions can help communities remove guns from more than a million Americans who are legally disqualified from owning them. By embracing these and other new forms of decentralized gun control, the United States can move past partisan gridlock and save lives now.

Download or read book Weapon of Choice written by Matthew C. Ford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exposes the mechanics of power across the military-industrial complex from battlefield to back office

Download or read book Dark Entries written by Robert Aickman and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully.' Neil Gaiman For fans of the BBC's Inside Number 9 and The League of GentlemenAickman's 'strange stories' (his preferred term) are constructed immaculately, the neuroses of his characters painted in subtle shades. He builds dread by the steady accrual of realistic detail, until the reader realises that the protagonist is heading towards their doom as if in a dream. Dark Entries was first published in 1964 and contains six curious and macabre stories of love, death and the supernatural, including the classic story 'Ringing the Changes'. Robert Aickman (1914-1981) was the grandson of Richard Marsh, a leading Victorian novelist of the occult. Though his chief occupation in life was first as a conservationist of England's canals he eventually turned his talents to writing what he called 'strange stories.' Dark Entries (1964) was his first full collection, the debut in a body of work that would inspire Peter Straub to hail Aickman as 'this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories.'

Download or read book A History of Weapons written by John O'Bryan and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the truth about strange and ancient weapons like the atlatl, the sarissa, the urumi and the maka pahoa ko'oko'o in this fascinating history of weapons.

Download or read book Books As Weapons written by John B. Hench and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only weeks after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, a surprising cargo—crates of books—joined the flood of troop reinforcements, weapons and ammunition, food, and medicine onto Normandy beaches. The books were destined for French bookshops, to be followed by millions more American books (in translation but also in English) ultimately distributed throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The British were doing similar work, which was uneasily coordinated with that of the Americans within the Psychological Warfare Division of General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, under General Eisenhower's command. Books As Weapons tells the little-known story of the vital partnership between American book publishers and the U.S. government to put carefully selected recent books highlighting American history and values into the hands of civilians liberated from Axis forces. The government desired to use books to help "disintoxicate" the minds of these people from the Nazi and Japanese propaganda and censorship machines and to win their friendship. This objective dovetailed perfectly with U.S. publishers' ambitions to find new profits in international markets, which had been dominated by Britain, France, and Germany before their book trades were devastated by the war. Key figures on both the trade and government sides of the program considered books "the most enduring propaganda of all" and thus effective "weapons in the war of ideas," both during the war and afterward, when the Soviet Union flexed its military might and demonstrated its propaganda savvy. Seldom have books been charged with greater responsibility or imbued with more significance. John B. Hench leavens this fully international account of the programs with fascinating vignettes set in the war rooms of Washington and London, publishers' offices throughout the world, and the jeeps in which information officers drove over bomb-rutted roads to bring the books to people who were hungering for them. Books as Weapons provides context for continuing debates about the relationship between government and private enterprise and the image of the United States abroad.

Download or read book Illusions of Choice written by Robert F. Coulam and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Description for this book, Illusions of Choice: The F-111 and the Problem of Weapons Acquisition Reform, will be forthcoming.

Download or read book The Perfect Weapon written by David E. Sanger and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW AN HBO® DOCUMENTARY FROM AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR JOHN MAGGIO • “An important—and deeply sobering—new book about cyberwarfare” (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times), now updated with a new chapter. The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents—Bush and Obama—drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal and, during President Trump’s first year, turned back on the United States and its allies. And if Obama would begin his presidency by helping to launch the new era of cyberwar, he would end it struggling unsuccessfully to defend the 2016 U.S. election from interference by Russia, with Vladimir Putin drawing on the same playbook he used to destabilize Ukraine. Moving from the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese government hackers to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger reveals a world coming face-to-face with the perils of technological revolution, where everyone is a target. “Timely and bracing . . . With the deep knowledge and bright clarity that have long characterized his work, Sanger recounts the cunning and dangerous development of cyberspace into the global battlefield of the twenty-first century.”—Washington Post

Download or read book Weapons of the Middle Ages written by Matt Doeden and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Describes the weapons used in battles during the Middle Ages, including siege weapons and weapons of hand-to-hand combat"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Journey to Star Wars The Force Awakens The Weapon of a Jedi written by Jason Fry and published by Disney Electronic Content. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luke Skywalker returns for an all-new adventure in this thrilling upper middle grade novel. Set between Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the story finds Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, and R2-D2 stranded on a mysterious planet, and explores a dangerous duel between Luke and a strange new villain. Hidden in the story are also clues and hints about the upcoming film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, making this a must-read for fans old and new!

Download or read book The Four False Weapons written by John Dickson Carr and published by Murder Room. This book was released on 2012-11-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is no ordinary murder case that brings the famed French detective Monsieur Bencolin out of retirement, but one that involves a midnight rendezvous on a steamy Paris night, a broken love affair, and four different murder weapons found in the secret villa where the body is discovered. Rose Klonec, whose corpse bears the mark of a particularly horrible wound, had connections - and old lovers - throughout Paris, and soon the number of suspects grows to match the number of possible weapons ...

Download or read book Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy written by Richard Hanania and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that while the US president makes foreign policy decisions based largely on political pressures, it is concentrated interests that shape the incentive structures in which he and other top officials operate. The author identifies three groups most likely to be influential: government contractors, the national security bureaucracy, and foreign governments. This book shows that the public choice perspective is superior to a theory of grand strategy in explaining the most important aspects of American foreign policy, including the war on terror, policy toward China, and the distribution of US forces abroad. Arguing that American leaders are selected to respond to public opinion, not necessarily according to their ability to formulate and execute long-terms plans, the author shows how mass attitudes are easily malleable in the domain of foreign affairs due to ignorance with regard to the topic, the secrecy that surrounds national security issues, the inherent complexity of the issues involved, and most importantly, clear cases of concentrated interests. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of American Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis and Global Governance.

Download or read book The Gun written by C. J. Chivers and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author, a New York Times reporter, traces the invention and mass distribution of the AK-47 assault rifle, and its effects on war. He traces the invention of the assault rifle, following the miniaturization of rapid-fire arms from the American Civil War, through World War I and Vietnam, to present-day Afghanistan, where Kalashnikovs and their knockoffs number as many as 100 million, one for every seventy persons on earth. It is the weapon of state repression, as well as revolution, civil war, genocide, drug wars, and religious wars; and it is the arms of terrorists, guerrillas, boy soldiers, and thugs. From its inception to its use by more than fifty national armies around the world, to its role in modern-day Afghanistan, he discusses how the deadly weapon has helped alter world history.

Download or read book Weapons of Math Destruction written by Cathy O'Neil and published by Crown Publishing Group (NY). This book was released on 2016 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A former Wall Street quantitative analyst sounds an alarm on mathematical modeling, a pervasive new force in society that threatens to undermine democracy and widen inequality,"--NoveList.

Download or read book Introduction to Weapons of Mass Destruction written by R. Everett Langford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2004-02-19 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crucial information on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons From the diseased animal carcass hurled over the wall of a besieged castle to the nuclear suitcase bomb carried by a clandestine operative, the threat of unconventional weapons has always been a feature of warfare. Today's danger comes mainly from the potential use of nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by international terrorists or rogue states. False alarms and misinformation about these weapons have abounded in the jittery post-9/11 atmosphere. To understand and deal with the actual threat posed requires basing response plans, policy, and reporting on actual facts. Introduction to Weapons of Mass Destruction separates fact from fiction about NBC weaponry by providing clear, technically precise information. For each family of weapon, coverage in this handbook includes: * History and background information * Agent types and delivery mechanisms * Effects of exposure * Protection * Safe storage and handling * Decontamination * Medical treatments Drawing from a broad array of military, scientific, and safety resources, this text offers both accessibility to the general public and accuracy and depth for professional emergency responders. Additional resources include a bibliography of references and a list of addresses and telephone numbers of federal and military agencies and professional organizations of interest. With full coverage of WMDs, from high-tech, genetically modified organisms to rudimentary radiological "dirty bombs," Introduction to Weapons of Mass Destruction is an essential reference for understanding and responding to these dangerous warfare agents.

Download or read book Living Weapons written by Gregory D. Koblentz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Biological weapons are widely feared, yet rarely used. Biological weapons were the first weapon prohibited by an international treaty, yet the proliferation of these weapons increased after they were banned in 1972. Biological weapons are frequently called 'the poor man's atomic bomb,' yet they cannot provide the same deterrent capability as nuclear weapons. One of my goals in this book is to explain the underlying principles of these apparent paradoxes."—from Living Weapons Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction. Unlike nuclear and chemical weapons, biological weapons are composed of, or derived from, living organisms. In Living Weapons, Gregory D. Koblentz provides a comprehensive analysis of the unique challenges that biological weapons pose for international security. At a time when the United States enjoys overwhelming conventional military superiority, biological weapons have emerged as an attractive means for less powerful states and terrorist groups to wage asymmetric warfare. Koblentz also warns that advances in the life sciences have the potential to heighten the lethality and variety of biological weapons. The considerable overlap between the equipment, materials and knowledge required to develop biological weapons, conduct civilian biomedical research, and develop biological defenses creates a multiuse dilemma that limits the effectiveness of verification, hinders civilian oversight, and complicates threat assessments. Living Weapons draws on the American, Soviet, Russian, South African, and Iraqi biological weapons programs to enhance our understanding of the special challenges posed by these weapons for arms control, deterrence, civilian-military relations, and intelligence. Koblentz also examines the aspirations of terrorist groups to develop these weapons and the obstacles they have faced. Biological weapons, Koblentz argues, will continue to threaten international security until defenses against such weapons are improved, governments can reliably detect biological weapon activities, the proliferation of materials and expertise is limited, and international norms against the possession and use of biological weapons are strengthened.