Have human rights as we once understood them become obsolete since 9-11? Aren't new methods needed to combat the apocalyptic violence of al-Qaeda? Shouldn't we sacrifice some rights to make us all safer? And if we can kill a combatant in battle, why shouldn't we torture them if it will save lives? William Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, examines these and other fundamental questions through the prism of our new consciousness about terrorism in this provocative new book. It questions America's own ambivalent record—its tainted legacy—and addresses recent human rights violations: the imprisonment without charge of non-citizens and the violation of the Geneva Convention at Guantanamo Bay. Schulz writes, "One of Osama bin Laden's goals is to destroy the solidarity of the international community and undermine the norms and standards that have sustained that community since the end of World War II. The great irony of the post-9/11 world is that, when it comes to human rights, the United States has been doing his work for him."
On August 25, 1928, a black sedan pulled into the dusty circular driveway of a farmhouse in the tiny rural community of Catawissa, Missouri. The sheriff of St. Louis County emerged from the vehicle and walked slowly up the front steps. A middle-aged farmwife answered his knock. She spoke quietly with him, excused herself to powder her face, then allowed herself to be led outside and taken away. Authorities sought to question her in a mystery which had been building for twenty years: Was she a selfless saint who voluntarily cared for the acutely ill in order to nurse them back to health and restore them to their families, or a minister of death whose crimes would qualify her as Americaas first female serial killer? In this riveting nonfiction memoir, S. Kay Murphy recounts the tale of searching for the truth about her great-grandmotheraaccused murderer Bertha Gifford.
An incisive look at how an egalitarian elite or eglite has in fact, over the past 100 years, led America away from equality and the rule of law as it pursued Rouseau's sterile egalitarianism. Rouseau's model failed, America's Old Left ?red diaper? offspring donned the mantle to begin their ?long march? through our institutions as the New Left, setting out to deconstruct the American Experiment without offering a concrete replacement. In the author's analysis, the extent of their success is alarming. In a fascinating and cogent tale Rumer follows modern man through technical revolution, a world depression, and two world wars, setting the stage for a civil rights struggle soon to be the vehicle for legal and social corruption. In a narrative given breath by first-hand experience, Rumer describes a new eglite representing academia, the law, the arts, religion, politics and media emerging as fellow travelers of the New Left. Far from pessimistic, Rumer finds hope in the ?theory of generations.? Just as their predecessors, the Lost and G.I. generations, overcame seemingly insurmountable adversity in the past, Rumer sees Generation ?X? leading the Millennials out of inevitable future crises engendered by the American egalitarian aberration.
On August 25, 1928, the sheriff of St. Louis County took into custody a fifty-year-old Missouri farmwife. Authorities sought to question her in a mystery which had been building for twenty years: Was she a selfless saint who voluntarily cared for the acutely ill in order to nurse them back to health and restore them to their families? Or a minister of death whose crimes would qualify her as one of America's few female serial killers? In this riveting nonfiction memoir, journalist S. Kay Murphy searches for the truth about her own great-grandmother-accused murderer Bertha Gifford.
Follow the law and you'll stay safe. But what if the law is wrong? Tashué's faith in the law is beginning to crack. Three years ago, he stood by when the Authority condemned Jason to the brutality of the Rift for non-compliance. When Tashué's son refused to register as tainted, the laws had to be upheld. He'd never doubted his job as a Regulation Officer before, but three years of watching your son wither away can break down even the strongest convictions. Then a dead girl washed up on the bank of the Brightwash, tattooed and mutilated. Where had she come from? Who would tattoo a child? Was it the same person who killed her? Why was he the only one who cared?
What do we do when a beloved comedian known as 'America's Dad' is convicted of sexual assault? Or when we discover that the man who wrote 'all men are created equal' also enslaved hundreds of people? Or when priests are exposed as pedophiles? From the popular to the political to the profound, each day brings new revelations that respected people, traditions, and institutions are not what we thought they were. Despite the shock that these disclosures produce, this state of affairs is anything but new. Facing the concrete task of living well when our best moral resources are not only contaminated but also potentially corrupting is an enduring feature of human experience. In this book, Karen V. Guth identifies 'tainted legacies' as a pressing contemporary moral problem and ethical challenge. Constructing a typology of responses to compromised thinkers, traditions, and institutions, she demonstrates the relevance of age-old debates in Christian theology for those who confront legacies tarnished by the traumas of slavery, racism, and sexual violence.
The international bestselling Off-Campus series returns with a collection of four novellas by New York Times bestselling author and TikTok sensation Elle Kennedy! This brand-new installment provides the much-anticipated answer to the question: Where are they now? Four stories. Four couples. Three years of real life after graduation… A wedding. A proposal. An elopement. And a surprise pregnancy. Life after college for Garrett and Hannah, Logan and Grace, Dean and Allie, and Tucker and Sabrina, isn't quite what they imagined it would be. Sure, they have each other, but they also have real-life problems that four years at Briar U didn't exactly prepare them for. As it turns out, for these four couples, love is the easy part. Growing up is a whole lot harder. Come for the drama, stay for the laughs! Catch up with your favorite Off-Campus characters as they navigate the changes that come with growing up and discover that big decisions can have big consequences…and big rewards. *THE LEGACY is an 85,000-word novel that is made up of four novellas.
Strawberries are big business in California. They are the sixth-highest-grossing crop in the state, which produces 88 percent of the nation’s favorite berry. Yet the industry is often criticized for its backbreaking labor conditions and dependence on highly toxic soil fumigants used to control fungal pathogens and other soilborne pests. In Wilted, Julie Guthman tells the story of how the strawberry industry came to rely on soil fumigants, and how that reliance reverberated throughout the rest of the fruit’s production system. The particular conditions of plants, soils, chemicals, climate, and laboring bodies that once made strawberry production so lucrative in the Golden State have now changed and become a set of related threats that jeopardize the future of the industry.
Smelting is an industrial process involving the extraction of metal from ore. During this process, impurities in ore—including arsenic, lead, and cadmium—may be released from smoke stacks, contaminating air, water, and soil with toxic-heavy metals. The problem of public health harm from smelter emissions received little official attention for much for the twentieth century. Though people living near smelters periodically complained that their health was impaired by both sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, for much of the century there was strong deference to industry claims that smelter operations were a nuisance and not a serious threat to health. It was only when the majority of children living near the El Paso, Texas, smelter were discovered to be lead-exposed in the early 1970s that systematic, independent investigation of exposure to heavy metals in smelting communities began. Following El Paso, an even more serious led poisoning epidemic was discovered around the Bunker Hill smelter in northern Idaho. In Tacoma, Washington, a copper smelter exposed children to arsenic—a carcinogenic threat. Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. Marianne Sullivan documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters as well as the long road to protecting public health and the environment. Placing the environmental and public health aspects of smelting in historical context, the book connects local incidents to national stories on the regulation of airborne toxic metals. The nonferrous smelting industry has left a toxic legacy in the United States and around the world. Unless these toxic metals are cleaned up, they will persist in the environment and may sicken people—children in particular—for generations to come. The twentieth-century struggle to control smelter pollution shares many similarities with public health battles with such industries as tobacco and asbestos where industry supported science created doubt about harm, and reluctant government regulators did not take decisive action to protect the public’s health.
