Subtitle; 'How Thailand was Won and Lost in the 1st Decade of the 21st Century' takes a cheeky view of the topsy turvy career of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin, or 'Sintax' in the book. Whether his clandestine conversations with his wife 'Manpoj', his son 'Elm', or his many lawyers and underlings ring true, is up to the reader. Also offers poignant insight to the Red rallies of 2010.
NAMED ONE OF THE “100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR” BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW From the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—this “rigorously historical” (The Washington Post) and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America keep out “inferiors” in the 1920s is “a sobering, valuable contribution to discussions about immigration” (Booklist). A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than forty years. Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his trademark lively and authoritative style, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is “a masterful, sobering, thoughtful, and necessary book” that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.
Battered and psychologically abused by an alcoholic father and neglected by an equally abused mother, Michael, age seven, descended into rage at the murder of his beloved pet rooster and the death of his adored sister. Consumed by murderous hate, Michael was exiled to an obscure monastery between China and Tibet in the back of beyond, from a place it was assumed he would never return. A very special Buddhist monk,Kako, made it his life's work to reclaim the wreck that was this belligerent boy. It took Kako eleven years to transform Michael into the man of peace and charity he is today. The path was difficult and often seemed impossible as Michael resisted all of Kako's patient teaching. Michaels transformation was aided by a handwoven soccer ball made from bamboo and coconut skin and a team of young monks who played a game they had never seen before in their lives. By the time Kako passed away at the age of forty-four, Michael was ready to return to a world that had long ago forgotten him. Shinawa: The Story of a Reclaimed Life is the remarkable story of the long and difficult path to Michael's transformation.
HE SENTENCED HIMSELF TO PRISON AS A CORRECTIONAL OFFICER The harrowing journey of a boy raised by a brutal criminal father who sentenced himself to prison as a correctional officer rather than be sent there as an inmate. Guarded Moments is an unblinking descent into the solitary confinement of one man's heart Seeing the terror in the eyes of a child visiting his father at San Quentin, the correctional officer finally breaks through the prisons inside him. Walls come tumbling down. Guarded Moments is one man's key to the freedom of himself.
This book briefly takes you through creation, including angels who were given the assignment to find the fluffy planet. The story then changes to follow the chief angel, Lucifer, as he is outcast to earth. You will learn why Lucifer needed to destroy what God created and why, after hearing God tell Eve that one of her descendants would wound Lucifer's head, he followed the chosen people closely, determined to destroy who he called, The Man, as soon as he could be identified; and having destroyed that which God has chosen, actually defeat God and win his freedom from earth and the restoration of his authority as the highest angel. Lucifer discovered that mankind was easily manipulated until he met The Man who he could not defeat. Broken, Lucifer identified the source of The Man's power and dedicated his efforts since then to keep it hidden. I pried the secret out of him and present it to you in this book.
Judges and legal scholars talk past one another, if they have any conversation at all. Academics couch their criticisms of judicial decisions in theoretical terms, which leads many judges—at the risk of intellectual stagnation—to dismiss most academic discourse as opaque and divorced from reality. In Divergent Paths, Richard Posner turns his attention to this widening gap within the legal profession, reflecting on its causes and consequences and asking what can be done to close or at least narrow it. The shortcomings of academic legal analysis are real, but they cannot disguise the fact that the modern judiciary has several serious deficiencies that academic research and teaching could help to solve or alleviate. In U.S. federal courts, which is the focus of Posner’s analysis of the judicial path, judges confront ever more difficult cases, many involving complex and arcane scientific and technological distinctions, yet continue to be wedded to legal traditions sometimes centuries old. Posner asks how legal education can be made less theory-driven and more compatible with the present and future demands of judging and lawyering. Law schools, he points out, have great potential to promote much-needed improvements in the judiciary, but doing so will require significant changes in curriculum, hiring policy, and methods of educating future judges. If law schools start to focus more on practical problems facing the American legal system rather than on debating its theoretical failures, the gulf separating the academy and the judiciary will narrow.
Conversations with Jim Harrison, Revised and Updated offers a judicious selection of interviews spanning the writing career of Jim Harrison (1937–2016) from its beginnings in the 1960s to the last interview he gave weeks before his death in March 2016. Harrison labeled himself and lived as a “quadra-schizoid” writer. He worked in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, and he published more than forty books that attracted an international following. These interviews supply a lively narrative of his progress as a major contemporary American author. This collection showcases Harrison's pet peeves, his candor and humility, his sense of humor, and his patience. He does not shy from his authorial obsessions, especially his efforts to hone the novella, for which he is considered a contemporary master, or the frequency with which he defied polite narrative conventions and created memorable, resolute female characters. Each conversation attests to the depth and range of Harrison’s considerable intellectual and political preoccupations, his fierce social and ecological conscience, his aesthetic beliefs, and his stylistic orientations in poetry and prose.
Insanely Indian is a political romance, which captures the human need for being rooted and asserting one's identity. It is a story about love and marriage, divorce and life after it, parenthood, and "Indian-ness" in contemporary times. Follow Aanya's journey as an educated, affluent Indian woman living in London, who finds that her husband is determined to express his patriotism towards India, and her son to express his religious identity in London. Being a dutiful Indian daughter, Aanya remains deeply attached to her family in India, even though she has not lived there for two decades. Insanely Indian is about the connectedness of the "global Indian" to India, to one's past, and it brings to the forefront the cycle of continuous expectations faced by the global Indian from family and society in India.
