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    On October 21, 1996, attorney Michael Hausfeld, with a team of lawyers, filed a class-action complaint against Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse on behalf of Holocaust victims. The suit accused the banks of, among other things, acting as the chief financiers for Nazi Germany. Hausfeld wanted to use the suit to prove that the banks not only concealed and refused to return millions of dollars in dormant accounts, but that they acted as a conduit for looted assets and slave labor profits. Such behavior, he charged, violated the code of ethics known as customary international law. On August 12, 1998, the plaintiffs and banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement.
    Through interviews with a wide range of people involved in the case and detailed research of documents and court transcripts, Jane Schapiro shows the ways that egos, personalities, and values clash in such a complex and emotionally charged case. Inside a Class Action provides an insider’s view of a major lawsuit from its inception to its conclusion, which will appeal to anyone interested in human rights, reparations, and international law.

Where tradition meets bureaucracy—Native students redefine education on their own terms.

Inside the Eagle’s Head offers a compelling and deeply human portrait of the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI), a federally operated college serving Native American students from across the United States. In it, anthropologist Angelle Khachadoorian draws on years of teaching experience and extensive student interviews to illuminate the challenges and successes of life at SIPI. Far more than an institutional history, this book captures the voices of students navigating a complex educational landscape shaped by federal oversight, tribal identity, and personal ambition.

Through vivid metaphors—SIPI as a family, a prison, a reservation—students articulate their struggles and resilience within a system that is at once empowering and restrictive. Khachadoorian’s analysis reveals how SIPI’s hybrid nature—part community college, part BIA legacy—creates both opportunities and obstacles for its students. With empathy and insight, she explores how young Native Americans forge identity, community, and purpose in a setting few outsiders understand. Inside the Eagle’s Head is essential reading for educators, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of Indigenous education, federal institutions, and student agency. It is a powerful testament to the transformative potential of listening to students’ stories.

A firsthand account of the remarkable rise of Minnesota’s unconventional governor.

Jesse Ventura burst into national consciousness-and late-night punch lines-when the former professional wrestler was unexpectedly elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. An overnight political sensation whose only previous relevant experience was a brief period as mayor of a Minneapolis suburb, Ventura became a lightning rod for the media, combining the bravado of a Navy SEAL, the showmanship of a movie actor, and the blunt speech and bluff humor of a talk-radio host with a surprising passion for public policy and legislative reform.

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.

While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.

Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

An incisive critique of the corporatized university, tracing the entanglement of academic missions with economic, political, and cultural systems.

Advocates of higher education have long contended that universities should operate above the crude material negotiations of economics and politics. Such arguments, ignore the historical reality that the American university system emerged through, and in service to, a capitalist political economy that unevenly combines corporate, state, and civil interests.

As the corporatization of U.S. universities becomes nearly impossible to deny, the common response from many academics has been a superior stand against the contamination of the professional ideal by tainted corporate interests. Inside the Teaching Machine proposes a correction to this view through the lens of historical materialism.

Chaput argues that the U.S. public research university has always been a vital component of the capitalist political economy. While conventional narratives of public higher education emphasize civic preparation and upward mobility, Chaput demonstrates that supposedly egalitarian policies like the Morrill Land-Grant Act and the G.I. Bill served the changing interests of capitalism much as education, creating a professional class that supports the capitalist political economy. Chaput also focuses on the relationship between American universities and globalization, showing how the trend toward professionalization contributes to the production of surplus value, and the ways that the American university model circulates outside the United States. Chaput concludes by advocating rhetorical strategies for the professional who opposes the capitalist logic of the global university system, proposing concrete options for engaging and redirecting globalization within the university system.