The Shackled Continent or All the Centurions

The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives

Author: Robert Guest

A scathing critique of Africa's governments by the Africa editor at The Economist.

Why is Africa so poor? Why are so many of its nations at war? Why is AIDS devastating Africa like nowhere else? And why do African entrepreneurs find it so hard to borrow money?

In this provocative and thoughtful book, Guest argues that the continent remains poor primarily because it is badly governed. Since the colonial powers pulled out, the autocrats who largely replaced them have struggled to keep order, let alone create an atmosphere conducive to economic development. The results have been devastating: Two-fifths of African nations are at war, AIDS has lowered life expectancy to as young as 40 years, lack of collateral makes investment almost impossible, and foreign aid has had very little effect on the daily lives of the poor. The Shackled Continent provides a persuasive look into the persistent problems of modern Africa and offers some possible solutions.

What Africa needs is peace, the rule of law, and greater freedom for individuals to pursue prosperity without hindrance from their rulers. The prescription may sound simple, but it is tough to administer, as Guest's investigations from Angola to Zimbabwe reveal.

Author Biography: Robert Guest is the Africa editor of The Economist. In 2003, he won both the Queen's English Society's and Foreign Press Association's award for Best Economic Story of the Year. He lives in London.

Book about: Das Bilden der Wirtschaftsgesellschaft

All the Centurions: A New York City Cop Remembers His Years on the Street, 1961-1981

Author: Robert Leuci

The bestselling book and acclaimed film Prince of the City told only part of Robert Leuci's story. In All the Centurions, he shares the full account of his years as a narcotics detective with the New York Police Department -- a tale of daring adventure, shattered illusions, and finally, astonishing spiritual growth.

Leuci reminisces about cops both celebrated and notorious, like Frank Serpico, Sonny Grosso, and Frank King from the French Connection case. Also here are politicians, Mafia figures, corrupt defense lawyers, and district attorneys, including a young Rudolph Giuliani. Leuci reveals the dark side of the criminal justice system: the bitterness, greed, cruelty, and ambition that eventually overflowed into the streets, precinct houses, and courtrooms of the city.

As vivid and entertaining as the best crime novels, All the Centurions is the story of a man descending into a hell of his own making who ultimately finds his way out through truth and justice.

Publishers Weekly

Ex-cop Leuci presents an unflinching if familiar tale of the ravages of drug-related police corruption in New York City. The broad aspects of his story were previously treated in Robert Daley's Prince of the City, later adapted into a Sidney Lumet movie starring Treat Williams as Leuci. Here the author traces in detail the incremental steps that turned him from a naive and idealistic beat cop into an arrogant dirty one, who easily rationalized ripping off drug dealers and playing along with rampant graft. To his credit, Leuci doesn't sugarcoat or paper over his lies, his betrayal of the public and his family, or pretend that he was unaware at the time that what he was doing was wrong. These flaws make him a classic tragic figure, especially when he begins to make a belated effort to redeem himself by cooperating with the Knapp Commission. Though Leuci still lectures to police departments around the country, and presumably continues to follow the NYPD, his failure to comment on more recent scandals or offer insights as to how corruption could be minimized is unfortunate. Still, for those new to his story, this will be an eye-opening look at some of the wages of the war on drugs during the 1960s and '70s. Agent, Esther Newburg at ICM. (On-sale June 29) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

It has often been said that the police are a type of fraternity bound together by a sense of loyalty and commitment. Leuci felt the ugly side of that brotherhood when he testified in a landmark police corruption trial, an experience portrayed in Robert Daly's Prince of the City. Having mined his cop experiences in several best-selling novels (e.g., Blaze), Leuci tells it straight in a gritty memoir that provides graphic and realistic descriptions of life in the NYPD, giving the reader an insightful glimpse inside the world of law enforcement. His fascinating personal stories range widely, reflecting U.S. history itself; for instance, he worked in Harlem during the 1964 riots and then only a few weeks later was guarding the stage at a Beatles concert, where a 19-year-old George Harrison helped him up when he tripped. Highly recommended for all true-crime and criminal-justice collections.-Tim Delaney, SUNY at Oswego Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Archetypal street-smart cop Leuci (Blaze, 1999, etc.) initiates us into the workings of the brotherhood of New York's finest a generation ago. And he should know: his experiences as a crooked detective who cooperated in a corruption investigation were the basis for Robert Daley's Prince of the City (1978). Leuci, a neighborhood guy who spent decades out there, vividly depicts his adventures from the day he first twirled a nightstick. He quickly learned the rules: if it doesn't fold, don't take it; never rat out a partner; there is no such thing as a warning shot; show the skels and the yoms who's in charge. (The text sometimes sounds like cop-bar repartee, but there are explanations for readers who never met a skel or a yom). The author guarded the Beatles. He landed in the heart of a riot. He went undercover as a high-school student scoring drugs and soon was known on the street as "Babyface." In the vaunted Special Investigations Unit, the scrupulous cop with all the great collars became the bought cop. He made cases and he made money. Dealing with informants, wiseguys, and top-of-the-line narcs, he yearned to surpass the haul in the recent French Connection, much of which went missing. Leuci turned, finally, against the bad cops, fixers, crooked bondsmen, judges, shysters, and the whole corrupt system. He wore a wire and came under the protection of bodyguards as intrigue and danger mounted. Old friends were jammed as he became an important witness. Before being retired, Babyface grew up. It's a dramatic police story, worthy of Wambaugh presenting with vitality players from Mario Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani, Vinny Albano, and Leuci's cousin Johnny Tarzan to bimbos, pimps, pushers, made guys,and, especially, lieutenants, sergeants, and all the brothers on the job (generally described as attractive). A shrewd confessional by a knowing veteran-and a helluva cop book. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM

Table of Contents:

	The Biggest, Baddest Gang in Town	1
	Heave Heaven	11
	Commandos	45
	Combat	58
	Dope Street	108
	A Partner	147
	The Dark Side of the Moon	183
	The Awakening	230
	Mounting Casualties	301
	Prince of the City	344
	At the End of the Day	367
	Acknowledgments	369

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or Red White Liberal

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Author: Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771 to 1790; however, Franklin himself appears to have called the work his Memoirs. Although it had a torturous publication history after Franklin's death, this work has become one of the most famous and influential examples of autobiography ever written.

See also: Where In the World Is Osama bin Laden or Its Your World

Red, White & Liberal: How Left Is Right & Right Is Wrong

Author: Alan Colmes

As one of the foremost liberal voices in television and radio today, Alan Colmes has long been braving the wilds of controversial issues and conservative slander. The host of the talk-radio show Fox News Live with Alan Colmes and cohost of Fox News Channel's hit debate show Hannity & Colmes, Colmes now offers this witty, passionate wake-up call to America.

Colmes takes on the fundamental question: How can we protect our nation without diminishing our liberties, and regain our place in the world as an example of democracy? Colmes urges Americans to see past the government's manipulation of the War on Terror to silence critics; the lies we've been force-fed about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the conservative smear campaign that has turned "liberal" into a four-letter word. From debunking the myth of the liberal media to exposing conservative hypocrisy, Colmes presents the issues with thoughtful, provocative arguments, hard facts and logic, and searing humor.

Certain to spark debate and cause readers to reevaluate and reaffirm their beliefs, Red, White & Liberal powerfully argues that despite our differences, we must extend our hands across party lines to find solutions, protect our shores, and preserve our freedoms.

Publishers Weekly

The liberal half of Hannity & Colmes breaks free of his cohost to deliver a blandly pious "can't we all just get along?" homily without interruption. Racism is bad, conservatives should stop being such bullies and antiwar protestors are Americans, too. Oh, and Fox News isn't really that conservative. But who'll buy it? As numerous excerpts from viewer e-mails reveal, Colmes's TV audience is largely hostile to him, while potential liberal readers are probably still chuckling over Al Franken's portrayal of him in Lies as a milquetoast. That he's nowhere near as funny (or energetic) as Franken or Michael Moore doesn't help. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Why You Need This Book	1
1	Red, White & Liberal	7
2	"The 'War' on Terror"	37
3	Uncivil Liberties: America's War on Americans	81
4	The Myth of Liberal Media	101
5	Straw Men, Hypocrisy, and Conservative Lies	129
6	Bill Clinton, Our Greatest President	173
7	OJ Is Innocent	191
8	Jesus Was a Liberal	209
9	Conservatives Say the Darndest Things	235
10	Conservatives Are Downright Mean	253
11	Where Right Is Right	287
12	Liberal Liberal Liberal Liberal	299
	Notes	309
	Index	331

China Threat or Statehouse and Greenhouse

China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America

Author: Bill Gertz

Bill Gertz, author of the best-selling Betrayal, has now written the definitive book on China's threat to the United States.

Booknews

Gertz, a reporter for , takes a vehement stand on American foreign policy with China, arguing that the US has made a grave error in assisting China in its rise to global power. He accuses the Clinton administration of deliberately leaking information about Chinese intelligence to avert the FBI's campaign finance investigation, as well as covering up intelligence on China that would have exposed their espionage abilities and arms sales. Strongly worded, accusatory, and verging on the conspiratorial, this book should be read with some reservations. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Look this: Contemporary Labor Economics or Understanding the Digital Economy

Statehouse and Greenhouse: The Stealth Politics of America Climate Change Policy

Author: Barry G Rab

No environmental issue triggers such feelings of hopelessness as global climate change. Many areas of the world, including regions of the United States, have experienced a wide range of unusually dramatic weather events recently. Much climate change analysis forecasts horrors of biblical proportions, such as massive floods, habitat loss, species loss, and epidemics related to warmer weather. Such accounts of impending disaster have helped trigger extreme reactions, wherein some observers simply dismiss global climate change as, at the very worst, a minor inconvenience requiring modest adaptation. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that an American federal government known for institutional gridlock has accomplished virtually nothing in this area in the last decade.

Policy inertia is not the story of this book, however. Statehouse and Greenhouse examines the surprising evolution of state-level government policies on global climate change. Environmental policy analyst Barry Rabe details a diverse set of innovative cases, offering detailed analysis of state-level policies designed to combat global warming. The book explains why state innovation in global climate change has been relatively vigorous and why it has drawn so little attention thus far. Rabe draws larger potential lessons from this recent flurry of American experience. Statehouse and Greenhouse helps to move debate over global climate change from bombast to the realm of what is politically and technically feasible.

Author Description:

Barry G. Rabe is a professor of environmental policy in the School of Natural Resources and Environment and professor of public policy in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He also directs the university's new Program in Environment. Rabe is the author of two previous Brookings books, When Federalism Works and Beyond NIMBY.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
1	The Politics of Climate Change, State Style	1
2	The Economics of Climate Change Policy	38
3	The Mechanics of Climate Change Policy	74
4	An Unlikely Front-Runner in Climate Change Policy	109
5	Looking Ahead to the Next Generation of Climate Change Policy	146
	Notes	181
	Index	201

The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton or Seven Fires

The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America's Most Elusive Founding Father

Author: Douglas Ambros

Revolutionary War officer, co-author of the Federalist Papers, our first Treasury Secretary, Thomas Jefferson's nemesis, and victim of a fatal duel with Aaron Burr: Alexander Hamilton has been the focus of debate from his day to ours. On the one hand, Hamilton was the quintessential Founding Father, playing a central role in every key debate and event in the Revolutionary and Early Republic eras. On the other hand, he has received far less popular and scholarly attention than his brethren. Who was he really and what is his legacy?

Scholars have long disagreed. Was Hamilton a closet monarchist or a sincere republican? A victim of partisan politics or one of its most active promoters? A lackey for British interests or a foreign policy mastermind? The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton addresses these and other perennial questions. Leading Hamilton scholars, both historians and political scientists alike, present fresh evidence and new, sometimes competing, interpretations of the man, his thought, and the legacy he has had on America and the world.

What People Are Saying

Lance Banning
"Here are many fresh thoughts by many of the most innovative scholars at work on Alexander Hamilton today. Every student of the new republic and many general readers who are captivated by the subject will want to read this volume."
—author of Conceived in Liberty: The Struggle to Define the New Republic, 1789-1793

Paul A. Rahe
"Talleyrand, who was acquainted with all of the statesmen of Europe, once remarked that he had never encountered anyone 'equal to Alexander Hamilton.' Hamilton may, in fact, have been the greatest of the American Founding Fathers. He was certainly one of the most important. Despite this, he has rarely been given his due. This superb collection of essays goes a considerable distance towards redressing the balance and towards restoring an American statesman to the central place that he occupied in his own time."
—author of Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction : the life and many faces of Alexander Hamilton	1
2	"Opposed in death as in life" : Hamilton and Jefferson in American memory	25
3	The Hamiltonian invention of Thomas Jefferson	54
4	Alexander Hamilton's view of Thomas Jefferson's ideology and character	77
5	Reforming republicanism : Alexander Hamilton's theory of republican citizenship and press liberty	109
6	Understanding the confusing role of virtue in The federalist : the rhetorical demands of two audiences	134
7	Madison versus Hamilton : the battle over republicanism and the role of public opinion	165
8	Alexander Hamilton and the 1790s economy : a reappraisal	211
9	Hamilton and Haiti	231
10	Hamilton, Croly, and American public philosophy	247
11	Epilogue : Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and the spirit of capitalism	267

New interesting textbook: Runners World Best Injury Free Running or Combat Techniques of Taiji Xingyi and Bagua

Seven Fires: The Urban Infernos That Reshaped America

Author: Peter Charles Hoffer

This resonant and fascinating book by a renowned historian examines how seven fires shaped the larger course of American history. The Boston fire of 1760 set the stage for the American Revolution. The Pittsburgh fire of 1845 opened the way to larger scale industrial plants. Out of the ashes of the Chicago fire of 1871 came the modern skyscraper, the Haymarket Riots, and the Pullman Strike. The Baltimore fire of 1904 showed how a city's downtown, utterly destroyed, could re-invent itself after a catastrophe. The Detroit fire of 1967 forced politicians to concede what people of Detroit already knew—that racism and racially-based deprivation were not changed by the civil rights movement. The Oakland Hills tragedy demolished a landscape of private privilege and imperiled the dream of leisure living in natural settings. Apart from their domestic and global political implications, the fires of 9/11 have prodded a complacent nation to admit to itself that twentyfirst century emergency services, and the urban lifestyles they protected, have to be thoroughly rethought. Told through gripping narrative chronicles of the catastrophic events, memorable portraits of historic figures, and incisive, thought-provoking analysis, Seven Fires reveals a nation and a people at its best and worst and illustrates how disasters teach lessons that, if we grasp them, can help us better our society.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

Hoffer, who teaches history at the University of Georgia, writes vividly and knowledgeably about fires: what causes them, how they grow from small flames into firestorms, how we fight them. His chapter on the Oakland Hills wildfire is especially good. He also understands that for all the inadequacy of our preparations for the fires that we think never will happen, we sometimes have made our cities into better places in the wake of them.

Publishers Weekly

The "best-known conflagration in our nation's history," the 1871 Chicago fire was ignited not by a cow kicking over a lantern but by two laborers having a careless smoke in a barn. The fiasco enriched the moguls who redeveloped the city and disenfranchised the poor, sowing the seeds for a class conflict that would culminate in the 1886 Haymarket riot and the 1894 Pullman strike. According to historian Hoffer (Past Imperfect), the Chicago fire and six others are "critical moments in our urban development." The 1760 Boston fire helped spark the American Revolution, and firefighters became Sons of Liberty led by such fire wardens as Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The wreckage of Baltimore's 1904 blaze catalyzed the growth of the Inner Harbor, and Pittsburgh romanticized its 1845 fire to attract new investment capital, while the 1967 Detroit arson fires led to white flight and a blighted inner city. Hoffer fears that the present debate over the replacement for the World Trade Center sidesteps fire safety, and that new Oakland residents, after a 1991 firestorm, are complacently building multistory mansions surrounded by trees. Although cogent and thoughtful, this specialized study will appeal mainly to fire buffs and urban planners. B&w photos, maps. (May 1) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Hoffer (history, Univ. of Georgia; Sensory Worlds in Early America) provides a gripping narrative of seven transforming urban conflagrations that affect the social, economic, and political structure of the United States to this day. His work is enhanced not only by the requisite and expected use of archival sources and the consultation of fellow historians but by information provided by current fire fighters on the distinct sights and smells of various combusted materials. The fires that Hoffer includes are the pre-Revolutionary War Boston fire of 1760; the preindustrial Pittsburgh fire of 1845; the iconic Chicago fire of 1871; the Baltimore fire of 1904; the Detroit race riot fire of 1967; the Oakland Hills, CA, fire of 1991; and the 9/11 fire in New York City. Although one may wonder why the famed 1906 San Francisco earthquake fire was not included while the more obscure though more recent California blaze was, Hoffer offers a distinct and valuable comparative history of these tragedies and of the individuals who endured these disasters and rebuilt their cities. His book belongs in specialist and general collections with other social analyses of catastrophes, such as floods and hurricanes-a recently popular genre.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Scholarly recounting of America's most catastrophic urban disasters, from the tipped-over lantern that set colonial Boston ablaze in 1760 to the flames that erupted when terrorist-piloted airliners slammed into the World Trade Center. Hoffer (History/Univ. of Georgia; Past Imperfect, 2004, etc.) is as much interested in the causes and effects of the fires as in the blazes themselves. His inclination for historical detail and academic analysis often bogs down the narrative in a blizzard of digressions, statistics and footnotes. The frequently wooden, inert prose doesn't help; portions of the text read like a committee report. Elsewhere, however, the narrative is more compelling, especially when Hoffer embellishes the history with anecdotal detail. He tracks the origin of Pittsburgh's famous 1845 fire to an Irish washwoman who left a kettle untended, then explains why the city's insurance companies promptly went bankrupt (gross under-funding). He blames Chicago's 1871 blaze not on Mrs. O'Leary's cow, but on two careless youngsters who stopped in her barn for a smoke. He describes dramatically the heroic last stand by 37 fire companies from Baltimore, New York and Washington that saved what was left of Baltimore from the fire of 1904. Heroes and villains abound as the story moves to more modern times. During the four hellish days of arson and looting that nearly destroyed Detroit in 1967, firefighters dodged sniper bullets to doggedly extinguish the multiplying fires. When wildfires tore through the stately homes lining the hillsides above Oakland in 1991, volunteers and desperate homeowners joined overworked California firefighters to contain the blaze. The book's high point is Hoffer'sexamination of the World Trade Center attack, which couples numerous tales of bravery on the part of rescue workers with some well-researched observations on how more lives might have been saved. Fires can never be completely prevented, the author acknowledges, but their effects can be ameliorated by proper planning. Timely and thoughtful, if not always well told.