front cover of The Birth of the World as We Know It
The Birth of the World as We Know It
Or Teiresias
Meredith Steinbach
Northwestern University Press, 1996
In her fourth book of fiction, award-winning American novelist Meredith Steinbach reimagines the life of the Greek seer Teiresias. Having outlived everyone he ever knew, the seer looks back at the most significant episodes in his life—a visit to the Delphic oracle, mediating arguments between Hera and Zeus, his experiences as both man and woman—as he confronts the traveler Odysseus in the Underworld. Narrated from shifting points of view with tremendous psychological acuity, Steinbach's novel intertwines time, event, and narrative.
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front cover of The End of Stress As We Know It
The End of Stress As We Know It
Bruce S. McEwen, Ph.D.
Dana Press, 2002
The End of Stress as We Know It provides readers with the "gold standard" in understanding how their bodies work under stress and why they have the power to avoid its debilitating effects. Bruce McEwen, Ph.D., one of the world's authorities on the subject of stress, here provides unshakable evidence of how mind and body work together either for good or for ill when we are challenged by life's events. Describing the subtle damage that comes from failing to turn off the body's danger alert system, Dr. McEwen shows how chemicals activated during stressful situations can protect the body under acute conditions, and how, when chronically activated, they can cause long-lasting harm. He counsels that many stress management programs can help us, if we understand the powerful mind-body forces activated by stress. The premise of this book is that knowledge is power. By learning how the body reacts to large and small challenges in our lives, by understanding how we put ourselves in situations that cause upheaval in our minds and bodies, we can make the best choices--backed up by the latest scientific knowledge.
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front cover of End of the World as We Know It
End of the World as We Know It
Social Science for the Twenty-First Century
Immanuel Wallerstein
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
A respected thinker points the way ahead. "Immanuel Wallerstein has long conceived of social science grandly. He was an innovator of world systems analysis, which portrays societies, sectors within societies, and the very disciplines of the social science as linked, bound, and analytically inseparable: To parse them is to misconceive them. As recent president of the International Sociological Association (1994 to 1998), Wallerstein continued to develop such grand thinking through numerous addresses on the state of the social sciences, capitalism, political justice, and the world. Here, he offers these collectively. He divides them into two topics-the world of capitalism and the world of knowledge. Toward both grand worlds, his thesis is similar: they are in crisis. . . . The scope of his career's thought is remarkable, his expertise impressively broad." Political Science Quarterly This book is nothing short of a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book's first half reviews the major happenings of recent decades--the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us. The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowledge--the vanishing faith in rationality, the scattering of knowledge activities, the denunciation of Eurocentrism, the questioning of the division of knowledge into science and humanities, and the relation of the search for the true and the search for the good. Wallerstein explores how these questions have arisen from larger social transformations, and why the traditional ways of framing such debates have become obstacles to resolving them. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it and suggests possible responses to them. Immanuel Wallerstein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. Among his numerous books are The Modern World-System (1974, 1980, 1989), Unthinking Social Science (1991), and After Liberalism (1995).
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front cover of Ending Poverty As We Know It
Ending Poverty As We Know It
Guaranteeing A Right To A Job
William P. Quigley
Temple University Press, 2003
Across the United States tens of millions of people are working forty or more hours a week...and living in poverty. This is surprising in a country where politicians promise that anyone who does their share, and works hard, will get ahead. In Ending Poverty As We Know It, William Quigley argues that it is time to make good on that promise by adding to the Constitution language that insures those who want to work can do so—and at a wage that enables them to afford reasonable shelter, clothing, and food.
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front cover of Greenback Planet
Greenback Planet
How the Dollar Conquered the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
University of Texas Press, 2011

The world runs on the U.S. dollar. From Washington to Beijing, governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the dollar to conduct commerce and invest profitably and safely—even after the global financial meltdown in 2008 revealed the potentially catastrophic cost of the dollar's hegemony. But how did the greenback achieve this planetary dominance a mere century and a half after President Lincoln issued the first currency backed only by the credit—and credibility—of the federal government?

In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power—and the enormous risks—of the dollar's worldwide reign.

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