Del Spier's Books

An Impossible Situation

A True Story of Patriotism, Dedication, and Retribution While Helping America Rebuild Afghanistan

By: Del Spier,Barbara Spier

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An Impossible Situation

A True Story of Patriotism, Dedication, and Retribution While Helping America Rebuild Afghanistan

By: Del Spier,Barbara Spier

The true story of how lives were lost, taxpayer money squandered, and reputations destroyed as part of an ill-conceived effort to remake Afghanistan into something akin to our own image. What started as a project to reconstruct the highway between Kabul and Kandahar evolved into an ambitious effort to provide Afghanistan with new roads, bridges, schools, clinics, power plants, and irrigation projects. These assignments fell to a Texas-based security firm, US Protection & Investigation, LLC (USPI), which in the space of a few years rose to become the most pervasive and effective paramilitary force in Afghanistan. The initiatives required weapons, health and death benefits, ammunition, uniforms, and vehicles, which the underfunded Government of Afghanistan could not supply, but still mandated. Amendment 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1972 prohibited USAID from funding these items. Aware of these Vietnam-era legal restraints, Del Spier of USPI alerted U.S. officials to the implications and was assured repeatedly that a way would be found to solve the problem. This is the unbelievable true story of a normal American couple, Del and Barbara Spier, in unfriendly enemy territory, in the middle of a war. Unknown to Barbara, Del was forced to take matters into his own hands to accomplish U.S. objectives. He was caught in the crossfire of Afghanistan's endemic corruption, criminals, and ethnic rivalries and Washington's shifting military strategies and bureaucratic inertia. USPI security personnel worked across the country, where they encountered ambushes, IEDs (improvised explosive devices), warlords, drug kingpins, criminals and ordinary Afghans coping with the horrors of everyday life. These horrors struck a humanitarian nerve in the Spiers and without any government assistance they provided clothing, medicine, training, fuel, food and shelter to the unfortunate. As American troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan, one overriding question will occupy the public for years: How could an endeavor that began with the toppling of the Taliban regime in Kabul a decade ago have evolved into the longest war in American history? The Spiers' path ultimately led them into a protracted legal battle. USAID turned on the very company that for years had protected its construction sites in Afghanistan and enlisted the FBI and the Justice Department in a three-year, multi-million dollar investigation vendetta against the Spiers and their company. Only dramatic courtroom decisions handed down in March and July 2010 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. brought the matter to a surprising conclusion. The Spiers' tragedy is a microcosm of America's misadventure in Afghanistan.

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361

Publisher

Advantage Media Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

1599324156

ISBN 13

9781599324159

Introduction To Metabolic And Cellular Engineering, An (Second Edition)

By: Sonia Del Carmen Cortassa,Miguel Antonio Aon,Juan Carlos Aon,Alberto Alvaro Iglesias,David Lloyd

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Introduction To Metabolic And Cellular Engineering, An (Second Edition)

By: Sonia Del Carmen Cortassa,Miguel Antonio Aon,Juan Carlos Aon,Alberto Alvaro Iglesias,David Lloyd

Metabolic and Cellular Engineering (MCE) is more than an exciting scientific enterprise. It has become the cornerstone for coping with the challenges ahead of mankind. Continuous developments, new concepts, and technological innovations will enable us to deal with emerging challenges, and solve problems once thought impossible ten years ago. Challenges in MCE are broad- from unraveling fundamental aspects of cellular function to meeting unsatiated energy and food demands that are rising in parallel with population growth.In charting the progress of MCE during the last decade, we could not help but feel in awe of the enormous strides of progress made from the nascent Metabolic Engineering to the Systems Bioengineering of today. The burgeoning availability of genomic sequences from diverse species has been spectacular. It has become the engine that drives the genetic means for the modification of existing organisms and the generation of synthetic, man-made ones. From the initial attempts at purposeful genetic modification of a cell for the production of valuable compounds, we have now moved on to changing microbes genetically or metabolically.The arsenal of experimental and theoretical tools available for Metabolic and Cellular Engineering has expanded enormously, driven by the re-emergence of Physiology as Systems Biology. The revival of the concept of networks fueled by new developments has become central to Systems Biology. Networks represent an integrative vision of how processes of disparate nature relate to each other, and as such is becoming a key analytical and conceptual tool for MCE. This book reflects and addresses all these ongoing changes while providing the essential conceptual and analytical tools needed to understand and work in the MCE research field.

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Page Count

447

Publisher

World Scientific

Published Date

ISBN 10

9814405175

ISBN 13

9789814405171

Beaten Down

A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West

By: David Peterson del Mar

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Beaten Down

A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West

By: David Peterson del Mar

Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 The word “violence” conjures up images of terrorism, bombings, and lynchings. Beaten Down is concerned with more prosaic acts of physical force—a husband slapping his wife, a parent taking a birch branch to a child, a pair of drunken friends squaring off to establish who was the “better man.” David Peterson del Mar accounts for the social relations of power that lie behind this intimate form of violence, this “white noise” that has always been with us, humming quietly between more explosive acts of violence. Broad in its chronological and cultural sweep, Beaten Down examines interpersonal violence in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia beginning with Native American cultures before colonization and continuing into the mid-twentieth century. It contrasts the disparate ways of practicing and punishing interpersonal violence on each side of the U.S.-Canadian border. Del Mar concludes that we cannot comprehend the causes and moral consequences of a violent act without considering larger social relations of power, whether between colonizers and original inhabitants, between spouses, between parents and children, or between and among different ethnic groups. The author has drawn on a vast array of vivid sources, including newspaper accounts, autobiographies, novels, oral histories, historical and ethnographic publications, and hundreds of detailed court cases to account for not only the relative frequency of different forms of violence, but also the shifting definitions and perceptions of what constitutes violence. This is a thoughtful and probing account of how and why people have hit each other and the manner in which opinion makers and ordinary citizens have censured, defended, or celebrated such acts. Del Mar’s conclusions have important implications for an understanding of violence and perceptions of violence in contemporary society.

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313

Publisher

University of Washington Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0295800453

ISBN 13

9780295800455

Examination Notes in Psychiatry 4th Edition

By: Peter Buckley,Del Prewette,Jonathan Byrd,Glynn Harrison

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Examination Notes in Psychiatry 4th Edition

By: Peter Buckley,Del Prewette,Jonathan Byrd,Glynn Harrison

Over the last 20 years, Examination Notes in Psychiatry has become one of the leading texts for trainee psychiatrists. The 4th edition maintains the core of valuable information that is required by any would-be psychiatrist, but has been completely revised and updated. Assessment and diagnosis form the foundation to each section, but are now enhanced by the inclusion of treatment algorithms and evidence based medicine. Changes to the nomenclature have been made to reflect current practice. The fully revised reading lists lead the reader to the latest papers and publications, and a glossary of relevant websites will provide even further resources - whether during the revision process, or for the professional requiring a rapid reference between consultations. The sheer volume of essential information, provided in a structured, focused format, makes Examination Notes in Psychiatry 4e essential reading for trainees, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals alike.

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Page Count

367

Publisher

CRC Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0340810033

ISBN 13

9780340810033

What Trouble I Have Seen

A History of Violence against Wives

By: David Peterson del Mar

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What Trouble I Have Seen

A History of Violence against Wives

By: David Peterson del Mar

It was 1869 and Sarah Moses, with "a very black eye," told her father: The world will never know what trouble I have seen. What she'd seen was violence at the hands of her husband. Does the world know any more of such things today than it did in Sarah's time? Sarah, it so happens, lived in Oregon, that Edenic state on the Pacific Coast, and it is here that David Peterson del Mar centers his history of violence against wives. What causes such violence? Has it changed over time? How does it relate to the state of society as a whole? And how have women tried to stop it, resist it, escape it? These are the questions Peterson del Mar pursues, and the answers he finds are as fascinating as they are disturbing. Thousands of thickly documented divorce cases from the Oregon circuit courts let us listen to voices who often go unheard. These are the people who didn't keep diaries or leave autobiographies, who sometimes could not write at all. Here they speak of a society that quietly condoned wife beating until the spread of an ethos of self-restraint in the late nineteenth century. And then, Peterson del Mar finds, the practice increased with a vengeance with the florescence of expressive individualism during the twentieth century. What Trouble I Have Seen also traces a dramatic shift in wives' response to their husbands' violence. Settler and Native American women commonly fought abusive mates. Most wives of the late nineteenth century acted more cautiously and relied on others for protection. But twentieth-century privatism, Peterson del Mar discovers, often isolated modern wives from family and neighbors, casting abused women on the mercy of the police, women's shelters, and, most important, their own resources. Thus a new emphasis on self-determination, even as it stimulated violence among men, enhanced the ability of women to resist and escape violent husbands. The first sustained history of violence toward wives, What Trouble I Have Seen offers remarkable testimony to the impact of social trends on the most private arrangements, and the resilience of women subject to a seemingly timeless crime.

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258

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674042085

ISBN 13

9780674042087

An Impossible Situation

A True Story of Patriotism, Dedication, and Retribution While Helping America Rebuild Afghanistan

By: Del Spier,Barbara Spier

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An Impossible Situation

A True Story of Patriotism, Dedication, and Retribution While Helping America Rebuild Afghanistan

By: Del Spier,Barbara Spier

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

361

Publisher

Advantage Media Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

1599324156

ISBN 13

9781599324159

Book's by Del Spier

An Impossible Situation

An Impossible Situation

Introduction To Metabolic And Cellular Engineering, An (Second Edition)

Introduction To Metabolic And Cellular Engineering, An (Second Edition)

Beaten Down

Beaten Down

Examination Notes in Psychiatry 4th Edition

Examination Notes in Psychiatry 4th Edition

What Trouble I Have Seen

What Trouble I Have Seen

An Impossible Situation

An Impossible Situation

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