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Blaming No One
Personal and professional reflections from a former US Foreign Service officer. This book is a series of reflections at the point of retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service after a career spent in locations around the globe. The collection of public blog postings, all colored by the author’s experience, include short essays on the following themes: personal anecdote, people/profiles, foreign policy as seen by a mid-level official, human nature, government functions, and “other”—ranging from music to immigration to condominium rules on dog comportment. Marked by a tone of light humor and social and institutional criticism, Blaming No One is an easy, entertaining read that also questions and challenges facile suppositions and notes many historic moments of interest.
The Italians of New York
An overview of generations of Italians in the Big Apple, weaving together numerous stories from different epochs and different backgrounds. “If you want to learn something about Italian creativity, come to New York. Here, you will find the pride of flying the Italian colors at the Fifth Avenue Columbus Day Parade, the American patriotism of those who perished at Ground Zero, the courage of firefighters and marines on the frontline of the war against terrorism, the babel of dialects at the Arthur Avenue market, portrayals of social change in the writings of Gay Talese, stories of successful business ventures on the TV shows of Maria Bartiromo and Charles Gasparino, political passion in the battles of Mario Cuomo and Rudy Giuliani, creative imagination in the works of Gaetano Pesce, Renzo Piano and Matteo Pericoli, and provocation in the attire of Lady Gaga . . . The Midtown top managers, who arrived in the past twenty years, operate in the XXI century, while on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood the panelle are still prepared according to the Sicilian recipes transmitted from one generation to the next.” —From the Introduction
Pot Shards
“Donald Gregg’s career . . . would make a great spy novel. This autobiography makes an even better book.” —Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and bestselling author of Enemies Pot Shards is a memoir, based on the author’s unforgettable experiences. He served as a CIA agent on the island of Saipan, during ten years in Japan, and a tour in Burma. He then spent four years tied up in the Vietnam War, two tours in Korea, the second time as ambassador, and spent ten years in the White House, where he worked for Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. “Don Gregg is that authentic and admirable thing: a great American. He spent most of his life serving his country:...
To Kill a Tsar
An unusual Russian police detective must stop a plot to kill the tsar in this historical thriller. Eccentric and fiercely independent Inspector Vasiliev exposes a conspiracy by a high-ranking nobleman and a top official in the secret police to assassinate the tsar in late imperial Russia. He finds unexpected help from Irina, a member of the revolutionary underground, with whom he falls in love . . . "Unique among books about Russia written by western authors: being extremely rich in details it contains no factual errors at all.” —Alexei Miller, Senior Researcher in the Institute of Scientific Information in Humanities of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow “In this masterful thri...
Rude Awakenings
The story of a man navigating an era of upheaval, persecution, and suspicion: “A must read for students of 20th-century political and intellectual history.” —Robert Cohen, Professor of History and Social Studies Education, New York University Drawing on family papers, wide-ranging interviews, FBI files, American and German newspapers, a wide array of published sources, and her own memories, Carol Sicherman traces Harry Marks’s German American heritage, his education both formal and informal, his marriage to a fellow Communist from a poor Russian family, his rocky start as an academic, his anguish when confronted by his Communist past, and his ultimate creation of a satisfying career....
The Rise of the Therapeutic Society
An examination of the Western world’s contemporary fascination with psychological life, and the historical developments that fostered it. In this book, sociologist Katie Wright traces the ascendancy of therapeutic culture, from nineteenth-century concerns about nervousness, to the growth of psychology, the diffusion of an analytic attitude, and the spread of therapy and counseling, using Australia as a focal point. Wright’s analysis, which draws on social theory, cultural history, and interviews with therapists and people in therapy, calls into question the pessimism that pervades many accounts of the therapeutic turn and provides an alternative assessment of its ramifications for social, political, and personal life in the globalized West. Special Commendation, TASA Raewyn Connell Prize
The American Consul
This definitive study of the U.S. Consular Service examines its history from the Revolutionary War until its integration with the Foreign Service in 1924. As a British colony, Americans relied on the British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants. But after the Revolution they scrambled to create an American service. While the American diplomatic establishment was confined to the world’s major capitals, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. Mostly untrained political appointees, each consul was a lonely individual relying on his native wits to provide help to distressed Americans. Appointments w...
I Hear a Song in My Head
“[Tejani] shares her stories of succeeding as a doctor in Uganda during the 1960s . . . a must for those seeking a medical memoir collection.” —Midwest Book Review Set in Uganda of the sixties with bookends in India and New York, this doctor’s story tells of a turbulent political time when colonial Uganda graduated to self-rule. It is also the personal story of an Indian woman living in an independent African country wanting and needing assimilation but regretfully recognizing rejection. It is the story of the exhilaration of living in a country more beautiful than Eden, if sometimes a threatened Eden. But most of all it tells doctoring tales made delicate by seeing them through the ...
What Is God?
An eminent psychologist and engineer presents a provocative analysis of the concept of God through the lens of scientific inquiry. This is a study of the concept of God, not from the perspective of any religious tradition, but as a pervasive social phenomenon that has prevailed through the ages. An expert in engineering and applied psychology, author Thomas B. Sheridan offers unique perspective on the subject. In What Is God?, he asks whether the concept of God can be modeled in denotative language (much as modeling in science, medicine and modern professions) in contrast to connotative language (e.g., myth, metaphor, art and music). Sheridan adopts the assumption of model-based reality, as ...
Peter Strickland
The first biography of this nineteenth-century sea captain, adventurer, and State Department official: “A vivid picture of [a] unique career.” —The Day (New London, CT) This is the first biography of Capt. Peter Strickland, a little-known Connecticut Yankee who crossed the Atlantic one hundred times in command of a sailing vessel, traded with French and Portuguese colonies during the period 1864-1905, and served as the first American consul to French West Africa for over twenty years. We know about Peter Strickland’s long life because he wrote a daily journal from the age of nineteen until the year he died. He broke away from a long line of farmers to adopt a seafaring life at age fi...
