In the next two installments of the four-book arc that began with City Secrets, the tide has turned at the elite Canterwood Crest Academy….Will Sasha Silver dethrone Heather Fox and become the school’s Queen Bee? Packed with BFF scandal, lying roommates, secrets between teammates, and more, these are two of the most dramatic Canterwood books ever!
What binds overseas Chinese communities together? Traditionally scholars have stressed the interplay of external factors (discrimination, local hostility) and internal forces (shared language, native-place ties, family) to account for the cohesion and "Chineseness" of these overseas groups. Andrew Wilson challenges this Manichean explanation of identity by introducing a third factor: the ambitions of the Chinese merchant elite, which played an equal, if not greater, role in the formation of ethnic identity among the Chinese in colonial Manila. Drawing on Chinese, Spanish, and American sources and applying a broad range of historiographical approaches, this volume dissects the structures of authority and identity within Manila’s Chinese community over a period of dramatic socioeconomic change and political upheaval. It reveals the ways in which wealthy Chinese merchants dealt in not only goods and services, but also political influence and the movement of human talent from China to the Philippines. Their influence and status extended across the physical and political divide between China and the Philippines, from the villages of southern China to the streets of Manila, making them a truly transnational elite. Control of community institutions and especially migration networks accounts for the cohesiveness of Manila’s Chinese enclave, argues Wilson, and the most successful members of the elite self-consciously chose to identify themselves and their protégés as Chinese.
A groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation’s top schools should be—but aren’t—providing: “The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those ‘sheep’), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem” (People). As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass. Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to “practical” subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it. “Excellent Sheep is likely to make…a lasting mark….He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America….Mr. Deresiewicz’s book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness” (The New York Times).
"[Explores] how athletes, scientists, therapists, companies, and musicians around the world are learning to break through their plateaus--to turn off the forces that cause people to 'get used to' things--and turn on human potential and happiness in ways that seemed impossible"--
An engaging account of ambition, the forces that drive and constrain it, and whether it serves our deepest needs. Ambition is a dominant force in for human civilization, driving its greatest achievements and most horrific abuses. Our striving has brought art, airplanes, and antibiotics, as well as wars, genocide, and despotism. This mixed record raises obvious concerns about how we can channel ambition in the most productive directions. In Ambition, Deborah L. Rhode offers a comprehensive and engaging survey of the topic that focuses in particular on the nature of ambition in contemporary American life. To do this, she first explores three central focuses of ambition-recognition, power, and money-and argues that an excessive preoccupation with these external markers for success can be self-defeating for individuals and toxic for society. She then shifts to discussing the obstacles to constructive ambition and the consequences when ambitions are skewed or blocked by inequality and identity-related characteristics such as gender, race, class, and national origin. Rhode further addresses the ways that families, schools, and colleges might play a more effective role in developing positive ambition. Finally, she examines what sorts of ambitions contribute to sustained well-being, such as building relationships and contributing to society, rather than chasing extrinsic rewards such as wealth, power, and fame. Drawing upon leading thinkers on the topic and contemporary social science research while laying out an agenda for how ambition can be better developed, Ambition will force us reconsider the factors that shape our ambitions, and whether those ambitions meet our deepest needs and highest aspirations.
A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous. In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.
A Companion to the Roman Empire provides readers with aguide both to Roman imperial history and to the field of Romanstudies, taking account of the most recent discoveries. This Companion brings together thirty original essays guidingreaders through Roman imperial history and the field of Romanstudies Shows that Roman imperial history is a compelling and vibrantsubject Includes significant new contributions to various areas of Romanimperial history Covers the social, intellectual, economic and cultural historyof the Roman Empire Contains an extensive bibliography
The idea of the book initially emerged from a panel discussion at the Specialist Group on South Asia of the Political Studies Association, UK, in March 1993. On its tortuous path to publication, it has been enriched by critical comments from Sumit Ganguly, Vernon Hewitt, Iftikhar Malik, Gurharpal Singh and David Taylor. The volume has benefited fromSubrata Mitra's long association with the Centre for Indian Studies at the University of Hull and stimulating discussions with members of the Center for South Asian Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, during his sabbatical term (spring 1994). The contributions, although completed by summer 1994, recognise the ongoing changes throughout the region.
The new exchange student means serious competition for Lauren and her friends—because at Canterwood Crest, only one rider can be at the top. Rankings on Canterwood’s intermediate team are falling into place—in Lauren’s favor. Then blond, beautiful foreign exchange student Carina arrives. The new girl puts on a million-watt smile, but it doesn’t dazzle LT. Carina is out to show Canterwood students just how riders from her home country of Sweden take the arena. And with a local show on the horizon, Carina’s especially ready to impress—which means Lauren and her friends better be especially ready to represent, because Carina’s in place to steal the spotlight.
In October 1911 the governor of Oaxaca, Mexico, ordered a detachment of approximately 250 soldiers to take control of the town of Juchitán from Jose F. “Che” Gomez and a movement defending the principle of popular sovereignty. The standoff between federal soldiers and the Chegomistas continued until federal reinforcements arrived and violently repressed the movement in the name of democracy. In A Revolution Unfinished Colby Ristow provides the first book-length study of what has come to be known as the Chegomista Rebellion, shedding new light on a conflict previously lost in the shadows of the concurrent Zapatista uprising. The study examines the limits of democracy under Mexico’s first revolutionary regime through a detailed analysis of the confrontation between Mexico’s nineteenth-century tradition of moderate liberalism and locally constructed popular liberalism in the politics of Juchitán, Oaxaca. Couched in the context of local, state, and national politics at the beginning of the revolution, the study draws on an array of local, national, and international archival and newspaper sources to provide a dramatic day-by-day description of the Chegomista Rebellion and the events preceding it. Ristow links the events in Juchitán with historical themes such as popular politics, ethnicity, and revolutionary state formation and strips away the romanticism of previous studies of Juchitán, offering a window into the mechanics of late Porfirian state-society relations and early revolutionary governance.