The FDA, an agency established with honorable intentions, has become tainted by lobbyists and money. In addition to exposing the FDA's long-standing battle against natural health products, this book examines how big business, industry, globalization, and politics have affected the quality and production of our food supply, destroyed the environment, and compromised our safety and health time and time again. Learn what you can do to take back your health, and your freedom of choice.
He is fifty, a man of middle years with a weak heart and two failed marriages. Mourning the loss of the boundless energy he squandered as a young man, he is a creature of habit now, relying on daily patterns to pace himself, to conserve what is left. She is nineteen, young enough to be his daughter, full of the vitality of youth and fearless—or perhaps only blind to the dangers life brings. Spare and moving, An Elegy for September captures the turning point in the life of a man as he confronts his own mortality—and confronts truths about himself he never suspected. Featuring some of John Nichols’s best writing, An Elegy for September is a brief, poignant, and eloquent novel that renders an age-old story in a fresh and powerful form. “One of the finest things he has ever written.”—Los Angeles Times
Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.
It hadnt seemed possible that a president whose policies had impoverished millions could be reelected. It was the waning years of the American empire and the liberties represented in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were a fading memory. The government monitored every aspect of American life, and the drones buzzing overhead served as a constant reminder, but it was the governments reckless spending that brought the nation to its knees. Now, the economy is in ruin, and the presidents European style welfare state stands at the brink of collapse. The United States is unable to repay its debts. China has come seeking payment in real assets, and they mean business. Chaos reigns; power has been cut; select cities have been decimated by nuclear bombs; and burned out houses occupy neighborhoods like rotting teeth in the mouth of a crack addict. What was new is now old and what was old is now new again. Cliffson Langs son attempts to escape the fires and mobs overrunning the city of Seattle. When Cliffson is called away to help, his other son is kidnapped by occupying forces and placed in a work camp. Truths Blood is the Lang familys story of survival at a time when government dependency must be replaced by self-reliance. As the United States experiences the disintegration of society and foreign occupation, their challenge verges on the impossible.
Shaping Truth, Reshaping Justice explores the realities of the Nigerian truth commission, the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission. In doing so, the book examines the events of the Nigerian truth telling forum, comparing some of its aspects to the South African and Latin American counterparts from which it derived a number of its elements. Using the most public of ethnic conflicts in Nigeria's history as a case study, Shaping Truth, Reshaping Justice scrutinizes the ways in which the HRVIC interacted with the Nigerian socio-political melee and the way in which the pertinent ethnic groups presented a narrative of their 'enduring conflict.' Nwogu argues that this interaction does not indicate the participation of ethnicity in politics; rather, it is the politicization of ethnicity by elite members of these ethnic groups who utilize the official and moral forum that truth commissions provide to revitalize ethnic identities for the purpose of elite political aspirations. Ethno-political groups appropriated the commission as a formal space for the (mis)remembering of histories and the re-arrangement of politicized memory so as to mobilize constituencies, claim and reclaim political territories and gain access to social and economic resources at the national level. The government undermined its own ability to deliver the spectrum of justice that was particularly available through the HRVIC. This severely limits the potential for reconciliation. Looking at the HRVIC from this point of view shows the truth commission, designed to symbolize discontinuity, in reality reflects continuity with the past.
A witty examination of America's bestselling novels, covering works by Danielle Steel, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Nora Roberts, Mary Higgins Clark, Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, Nelson DeMille, Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and many others.
Some women attack and harm men who abuse them. Social norms, law, and films all participate in framing these occurrences, guiding us in understanding and judging them. How do social, legal, and cinematic conventions and mechanisms combine to lead us to condemn these women or exonerate them? What is it, exactly, that they teach us to find such women guilty or innocent of, and how do they do so? Through innovative readings of a dozen movies made between 1928 and 2001 in Europe, Japan, and the United States, Orit Kamir shows that in representing “gender crimes,” feature films have constructed a cinematic jurisprudence, training audiences worldwide in patterns of judgment of women (and men) in such situations. Offering a novel formulation of the emerging field of law and film, Kamir combines basic legal concepts—murder, rape, provocation, insanity, and self-defense—with narratology, social science methodologies, and film studies. Framed not only offers a unique study of law and film but also points toward new directions in feminist thought. Shedding light on central feminist themes such as victimization and agency, multiculturalism, and postmodernism, Kamir outlines a feminist cinematic legal critique, a perspective from which to evaluate the “cinematic legalism” that indoctrinates and disciplines audiences around the world. Bringing an original perspective to feminist analysis, she demonstrates that the distinction between honor and dignity has crucial implications for how societies construct women, their social status, and their legal rights. In Framed, she outlines a dignity-oriented, honor-sensitive feminist approach to law and film.
The name Cheveyo Singer will live forever in infamy. Until my best friend and partner, Tony Romano, was kidnapped, I thought I was the biggest freak on the planet. As it turns out, being an empath doesn’t even make the top ten. When I rescued Tony, nothing could have prepared me for what I uncovered. All the magical creatures from legend truly exist and they want my head. Apparently, exposing the Zephyri on national television is a no-no. Now I have a super-sexy, day-walking vampire hunting me. On top of that, I found a couple of hit men in my apartment, trashing the place. Why do humans want me dead? I have no idea but I’m going to find out—just as soon as I have the time. My first priority is finding and saving Tony though. He’s made a habit of getting snatched. It wasn’t a lunatic this time but I know from experience, the federal government’s methods border on lunacy. Tony and the creatures I discovered are imprisoned in a lab for study. I have to figure out where before it’s too late—for everyone.
This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most charismatic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. Born into bondage among the Hudson Valley Dutch in Ulster County, New York, Isabella was sold several times, married, and bore five children before fleeing in 1826 with her infant daughter one year before New York slavery was abolished. In 1829, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic, preached, joined a religious commune, and then in 1843 had an epiphany. Changing her name to Sojourner Truth, she began traveling the country as a champion of the downtrodden and a spokeswoman for equality by promoting Christianity, abolitionism, and women's rights. Gifted in verbal eloquence, wit, and biblical knowledge, Sojourner Truth possessed an earthy, imaginative, homespun personality that won her many friends and admirers and made her one of the most popular and quoted reformers of her times. Washington's biography of this remarkable figure considers many facets of Sojourner Truth's life to explain how she became one of the greatest activists in American history, including her African and Dutch religious heritage; her experiences of slavery within contexts of labor, domesticity, and patriarchy; and her profoundly personal sense of justice and intuitive integrity. Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of her times, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as Isabella and her embroilments in legal controversy. Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge then propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Sojourner Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity. Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America draws a delicate and compelling balance between Sojourner Truth's personal motivations and the influences of her historical context. Washington provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND COSMOPOLITAN John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it—his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.
