Download or read book American Amnesia written by Jacob S. Hacker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “provocative” (Kirkus Reviews), timely, and topical work that examines what’s good for American business and what’s good for Americans—and why those interests are misaligned. In American Amnesia, bestselling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson trace the economic and political history of the United States over the last century and show how a viable mixed economy has long been the dominant engine of America’s prosperity. We have largely forgotten this reliance, as many political circles and corporate actors have come to mistakenly see government as a hindrance rather than the propeller it once was. “American Amnesia” is more than a rhetorical phrase; elites have literally forgotten, or at least forgotten to talk about, the essential role of public authority in achieving big positive-sum bargains in advanced societies. The mixed economy was the most important social innovation of the twentieth century. It spread a previously unimaginable level of broad prosperity. It enabled steep increases in education, health, longevity, and economic security. And yet, extraordinarily, it is anathema to many current economic and political elites. Looking at this record of remarkable accomplishment, they recoil in horror. And as the advocates of anti-government free market fundamentalist have gained power, they are hell-bent on scrapping the instrument of nearly a century of unprecedented economic and social progress. In the American Amnesia, Hacker and Pierson explain the full “story of how government helped make America great, how the enthusiasm for bashing government is behind its current malaise, and how a return to effective government is the answer the nation is looking for” (The New York Times).
Download or read book Looking for the Good War written by Elizabeth D. Samet and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.
Download or read book Amnesia written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-time Booker Prize winner now gives us an exceedingly timely, exhilarating novel—at once dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny—that journeys to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international power politics. When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons (let’s be honest: as they do in so many parts of her country) the doors of some five thousand jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? And does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975? Felix Moore, known to himself as “our sole remaining left-wing journalist,” is determined to write Gaby’s biography in order to find the answers—to save her, his own career, and, perhaps, his country. But how to get Gaby—on the run, scared, confused, and angry—to cooperate? Bringing together the world of hackers and radicals with the “special relationship” between the United States and Australia, and Australia and the CIA, Amnesia is a novel that speaks powerfully about the often hidden past—but most urgently about the more and more hidden present.
Download or read book Cultural Amnesia written by Stephen Bertman and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2000-02-28 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Applying the metaphor of Alzheimer's disease to our national state of mind, Bertman offers a chilling prognosis for our country's future unless radical steps for recovery are taken. ... [He] looks beyond the classroom to the larger social forces that conspire to alienate Americans from their past: a materialistic creed that celebrates transience and disposability, and an electronic faith that worships the present to the exclusion of all other dimensions of time."--Jacket.
Download or read book Imperial America written by Gore Vidal and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gore Vidal has been described as the last 'noble defender" of the American republic. In Imperial America, Vidal steals the thunder of a right wing America -- those who have camouflaged their extremist rhetoric in the Old Glory and the Red, White, and Blue -- by demonstrating that those whose protest arbitrary and secret government, those who defend the bill of rights, those who seek to restrain America's international power, are the true patriots. "Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic," he writes. "They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America."
Download or read book An American Amnesia written by Bruce Herschensohn and published by Beaufort Books. This book was released on 2010-08-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: January 27th, 1973: the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the Viet Cong sign the Paris Peace Accords, guaranteeing the right of self-determination to the South Vietnamese people. April 30th, 1975: President Duong Van Minh of South Vietnam announces the nation's unconditional surrender to the North, ending the decade-long conflict and enabling the merger of both countries into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. What happened in two short years to cause such a dramatic reversal? In An American Amnesia, respected political commentator Bruce Herschensohn re-examines the incredible actions taken by the 94th Congress and by many American citizens which forced South Vietnam's surrender, an event that brought about immense tragedy for Southeast Asians and haunts our political landscape to this day. Drawing on notes, speeches, and writings from his own experiences in Southeast Asia, as well as in the United States Information Agency and in the White House, Herschensohn fills in important facts in that period of history and warns against the danger of succumbing to a similar voluntary amnesia in the future.
Download or read book Winner Take All Politics written by Jacob S. Hacker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the growing divide between the incomes of the wealthy class and those of middle-income Americans, exonerating popular suspects to argue that the nation's political system promotes greed and under-representation.
Download or read book The Perpetual Now written by Michael D. Lemonick and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of a shattering illness, Lonni Sue Johnson lives in a "perpetual now," where she has almost no memories of the past and a nearly complete inability to form new ones. The Perpetual Now is the moving story of this exceptional woman, and the groundbreaking revelations about memory, learning, and consciousness her unique case has uncovered. Lonni Sue Johnson was a renowned artist who regularly produced covers for The New Yorker, a gifted musician, a skilled amateur pilot, and a joyful presence to all who knew her. But in late 2007, she contracted encephalitis. The disease burned through her hippocampus like wildfire, leaving her severely amnesic, living in a present that rarely progresses beyond ten to fifteen minutes. Remarkably, she still retains much of the intellect and artistic skills from her previous life, but it's not at all clear how closely her consciousness resembles yours or mine. As such, Lonni Sue's story has become part of a much larger scientific narrative—one that is currently challenging traditional wisdom about how human memory and awareness are stored in the brain. In this probing, compassionate, and illuminating book, award-winning science journalist Michael D. Lemonick uses the unique drama of Lonni Sue Johnson's day-to-day life to give us a nuanced and intimate understanding of the science that lies at the very heart of human nature.
Download or read book Geopolitical Amnesia written by Vibeke Schou Tjalve and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far-right movements, parties, and governments are changing the language and logic of international order. Zero-sum geopolitics - from Donald Trump to Brexit - and the rhetoric of putting the national interest "first" are back, and along with them come a deep fascination with the values of patriarchy, masculinity, and strength. Putting these dramatic shifts in contemporary American and European foreign policy into wider historical and intellectual context, Geopolitical Amnesia explores the liberal crisis beneath the resurgence of far-right ideas. Drawing on memory studies, it addresses the ways in which the new geopolitics intersects and interplays with an exhausted and amnesiatic liberalism. Scholars with expertise on national and regional ideological traditions look at contemporary memory wars - competing revisionist histories - from Washington to Warsaw, and from the Anglosphere to Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe. They address the changing conditions of memory and nostalgia and discuss how and why it matters that the new geopolitics takes place in an age of accelerated, fragmented, and digitalized global media. Timely and ambitious, this accessible collection reveals the far-right ideas behind the return of geopolitics and the crisis of liberalism that paved its way.
Download or read book American Amnesia written by Jacob S. Hacker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : prosperity lost -- Coming up short -- The great divide -- The trouble with markets -- How America got rich -- "An established and useful reality" -- American amnesia -- We're not in Camelot anymore -- This is not your father's party -- The modern robber barons -- A crisis of authority -- Conclusion : the positive-sum society.
Download or read book Isles of Amnesia written by Mark J. Rauzon and published by Latitude 20. This book was released on 2016-01-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over a quarter century, biologist Mark J. Rauzon worked in the field of island restoration, traveling throughout the American Insular Pacific to eradicate invasive plants and animals introduced by humans. The region spans from Hawai`i to Samoa to Guam, and their neighbors—small, obscure tropical islands that are hundreds, if not thousands, of nautical miles from each other. These little-known US possessions and territories include various islands and atolls: Jarvis, Howland, Baker, the Northern Marianas, Wake, Palmyra, Johnston, and Rose Atoll, among others. They anchor a vast National Marine Monument program created in 2009, and expanded in 2014, to protect the largest area in the world from exploitation. In Isles of Amnesia, Rauzon chronicles the ecological and human history of these islands, enlivened with his first-hand experiences of eradication efforts to restore atoll ecosystems and maximize native biodiversity. Each chapter focuses on an individual island or island group, revealing how each location has its own particular story, secret past, or ecological lesson to be shared. Taken as a whole, the region has played a unique role in American history, with the remoteness of the islands having served the needs of whalers and guano miners in the 1800s and, in later years, that of military secret projects, missile launching, chemical weapon incinerations, and air bases. Rauzon further explores the creation of the National Marine Monuments and what their protection means to a changing ocean, and presents original research about the US military’s Pacific Project and germ warfare testing. Illustrated with over seventy historical photographs and original drawings, this much-needed work tells the fascinating story of America’s forgotten Pacific islands.
Download or read book Against Amnesia written by Nancy J. Peterson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2001-04-23 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An important study in American literature."--
Download or read book Memory and Amnesia written by Paloma Aguilar Fernández and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a rich variety of sources, this book explores how the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War influenced the transition to democracy in Spain after Franco's death in 1975.
Download or read book Displays of Power written by Steven C. Dubin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1999-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of some of the USA's most controversial museum exhibitions of the 1990s. In its analysis of these episodes of America struggling to redefine itself in the late-20th century, the book draws upon interviews with museum administrators, community activists, curators and scholars.
Download or read book The People s Republic of Amnesia written by Louisa Lim and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR correspondent explains how the Tiananmen Square massacre changed China, and how China changed the events of that day by rewriting its own history.
Download or read book Amnesia written by Douglas Cooper and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 1992 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stranger enters the city archives, corners a librarian, and begins to tell him a story. The librarian is supposed to be married in four hours' time, but the stranger compels him to listen. Many hours later he is still listening, and still unmarried. The stranger's name is Izzy Darlow, and the story revolves around his fractured family and their obsessions. The family home is a labyrinth. His older brother, Aaron, conducts secret and increasingly perilous experiments in his attic bedroom. His younger brother, Josh, who speaks with a lisp but sings like an angel, wanders the streets at night consumed by visions of destruction. Izzy's own place in this curious family is complicated by disturbing influences: the terrifying books he reads compulsively in the school library, his charismatic but dangerous friend Campbell, the vicious force of his emerging sexuality. Woven into Izzy's tale is the story of a young woman called Katie, who has been confined to a mental hospital as a result of a cruel violation suffered in her youth. Where do these two stories meet? What is Izzy leaving out, what has he forgotten? And why can the anxious librarian not extricate himself from the web that Izzy weaves around him? As the story swirls deeper, taking reference from architecture, literature, history and myth, the reader is drawn into Izzy's frighteningly dislocated world, where the only response to suffering and guilt is amnesia.
Download or read book Blackface written by Ayanna Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Statesman essential non-fiction book of 2021 Featured in Book Riot's 12 best nonfiction books about Black identity and history A Times Higher Education Book of the Week 2022 Finalist for the Prose Awards (Media and Cultural Studies category) Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren't there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread-sometimes it's tied into a noose-that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism. Blackface examines that history and provides hope for a future with new performance paradigms. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
