Author: Daniel Klaidman Publisher: HMH ISBN: 0547547781 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
“Divulge[s] the details of top-level deliberations—details that were almost certainly known only to the administration’s inner circle” (The Wall Street Journal). When he was elected in 2008, Barack Obama had vowed to close Guantánamo, put an end to coercive interrogation and military tribunals, and restore American principles of justice. Yet by the end of his first term he had backtracked on each of these promises, ramping up the secret war of drone strikes and covert operations. Behind the scenes, wrenching debates between hawks and doves—those who would kill versus those who would capture—repeatedly tested the very core of the president’s identity, leading many to wonder whether he was at heart an idealist or a ruthless pragmatist. Digging deep into this period of recent history, investigative reporter Daniel Klaidman spoke to dozens of sources to piece together a riveting Washington story packed with revelations. As the president’s inner circle debated secret programs, new legal frontiers, and the disjuncture between principles and down-and-dirty politics, Obama vacillated, sometimes lashed out, and spoke in lofty tones while approving a mounting toll of assassinations and kinetic-war operations. Klaidman’s fly-on-the-wall reporting reveals who had his ear, how key national security decisions are really made, and whether or not President Obama lived up to the promise of candidate Obama. “Fascinating . . . Lays bare the human dimension of the wrenching national security decisions that have to be made.” —Tina Brown, NPR “An important book.” —Steve Coll, The New Yorker
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0375703837 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 385
Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Author: Helen Wheatley Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474451756 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 431
Book Description
Television/Death intertwines the study of death, dying and bereavement on television with discussion of the ways that television (and the TV archive) provides access to the dead. Section One looks at the representation of death, dying and the afterlife on television, in historical and contemporary factual television (from around the world) and in US television drama. Section Two focuses on dramas of grief and bereavement and discusses how the long form seriality and narrative complexity of television, from family melodramas to the ghost serial, allows for an emotionally realist representation of experiences of grief, bereavement and death-related trauma. Finally, Section Three proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of recorded sounds' and images' propensity to 'bring back the dead'. It argues that television is the posthumous medium par excellence and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring television out of the archive.
Author: Michele Aaron Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443864196 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying enters the expanding field of Death Studies and connects some of its key interpretive frameworks – such as issues of internment practice, trauma, or end of life care – to visual culture, and, more than that, to visual culture’s socio-political, geographic and aesthetic specificities. Where the prevailing picture of death within this field is as a Western experience framed by its denial on one side and its sensationalism on the other, this collection confronts the specifics of death’s marginalisation: its experience as local rather than universal, and the precise relationship between the context and the cultural mediation of death. Who and where you are – which part of the world you live in, whether you are famous or wealthy, subject to “natural” catastrophe, civil unrest or high-tech healthcare – has enormous influence on how your death is marked, imaged and imagined. As such, this book addresses the socio-cultural factors permeating and styling the visual and inevitably material treatment of death and dying in a broad array of personal and national settings. “Advanced” society has been characterised by an increased distancing of death from the everyday, and its distortion or invisibility within the public sphere. The essays collected here return some shape and context, and geo-politics, to the treatment of death and dying within contemporary culture, and specifically within contemporary visual culture which provides an ever more dominating forum for society’s depiction of and dealings with death. Charting important new interdisciplinary terrain, scholars and practitioners from a wide range of fields address an assortment of cultural mediations of real, fictional or fictionalised death. They navigate, in different ways, the fraught, policed, but always relative, distance between the living and the dead which characterises these mediations, a distance which works, inevitably, to reassure and re-secure those supposedly untouched by death and dying. Envisaging Death, whether through discussion of the cemetery landscape, the still or moving image, the therapeutic or educational art practice, addresses how such a distance is reinforced. It also, crucially, explores countless cases of, and increasing possibilities for, the disruption of this distance. With the various crises of current times, be they economic, environmental or regional, such possibilities for this disruption, and the altered dynamics of human connection that they represent, can only gain in significance.
Author: Austin Sarat Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195349180 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
Over 7,000 people have been legally executed in the United States this century, and over 3,000 men and women now sit on death rows across the country awaiting the same fate. Since the Supreme Court temporarily halted capital punishment in 1972, the death penalty has returned with a vengeance. Today there appears to be a widespread public consensus in favor of capital punishment and considerable political momentum to ensure that those sentenced to death are actually executed. Yet the death penalty remains troubling and controversial for many people. The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture explores what it means when the state kills and what it means for citizens to live in a killing state, helping us understand why America clings tenaciously to a punishment that has been abandoned by every other industrialized democracy. Edited by a leading figure in socio-legal studies, this book brings together the work of ten scholars, including recognized experts on the death penalty and noted scholars writing about it for the first time. Focused more on theory than on advocacy, these bracing essays open up new questions for scholars and citizens: What is the relationship of the death penalty to the maintenance of political sovereignty? In what ways does the death penalty resemble and enable other forms of law's violence? How is capital punishment portrayed in popular culture? How does capital punishment express the new politics of crime, organize positions in the "culture war," and affect the structure of American values? This book is a timely examination of a vitally important topic: the impact of state killing on our law, our politics, and our cultural life.
Author: Roger A. Mitchell Jr. Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421447088 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
"This work focuses on the stories of several individuals who died while in custody to illustrate the long history of policy and practice that at best provides toothless regulation (often unfunded, or without accountable parties), and at worst is officially dismissive of the human lives lost, deliberately making it harder to get to the truth. The authors also tell the stories of activists and journalists, who have often been the ones making the greatest effort to uncover the true scope of deaths in custody"--
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309047757 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 149
Book Description
The Hawaiian Crow, or 'Alala, once an inhabitant of large forested areas of Hawaii, is now found only in the wild in a relatively small area of the central Kona coast. The decline of the 'Alala is part of a larger phenomenon of reduction and extinction of forest birds throughout Polynesia that has been associated with human colonization. It is a symptom of underlying ecological problems. In this book, a committee of experts in ornithology, captive propagation, conservation biology, population genetics, and ecology analyzes existing data about the 'Alala and details its findings, conclusions, and recommendations concerning recovery efforts for this endangered bird.
Author: Charissa Dufour Publisher: Charissa Dufour ISBN: 1370654464 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 152
Book Description
Life doesn’t always turn out as we hope. Some fortunes we just can’t avoid. And some of those unavoidable chances threaten the very fabric of our reality. Samantha Gollet has lived her life protecting the downtrodden and fighting the good fight, but outside the mystical reservation, she finds her life becoming increasingly attached to Darrius Halls, one of Chicago’s mystic businessmen which means fighting his fight. But when she gives birth to a magically-conceived child, her priorities change. And when the Djinni High Counsel come to take said child, Sam has no choice but to jump through their hoops no matter what Halls says. The question is: When her child is safe, will Halls still have her under his control?
Author: Daniel Klaidman
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Author: Helen Wheatley
Author: Robert Cormier
Author: Michele Aaron
Author: Austin Sarat
Author: Roger A. Mitchell Jr.
Author: National Research Council
Author: Charissa Dufour
Author: