Although he left office nearly 20 years ago, Ronald Reagan remains a potent symbol for the conservative movement. The Bush administration frequently invokes his legacy as it formulates and promotes its fiscal, domestic, and foreign policies. His name is watchword for campus conservatives who regard him in a way that borders on hero worship. Conservative media pundits often equate the term "Reagan-esque" with personal honor, fiscal rectitude, and unqualified success in dealing with foreign threats. But how much of the Reagan legacy is based on fact, how much on idealized myth? And what are the reasons - political and otherwise - behind the mythmaking? "Deconstructing Reagan" is a fascinating study of the interplay of politics and memory concerning our fortieth president. While giving credit where credit is due, the authors scrutinize key aspects of the Reagan legacy and the conservative mythology that surrounds it.
The study of Latin America has long been an ideological battleground. Scholars disagree on every major issue: the impact of the U.S. influence in the region, the political orientation of the middle class, the role of the military, the rate of socioeconomic change, and the viability of reform. Public Policy in Latin America is a masterful synthesis of scholarship on the region. Sloan studies political phenomena not by making superficial comparisons between leaders, parties or styles, but by examining what governments do-the creation of public policy through political process. The decisions to stress accumulation versus distribution of economic goods, the role of the bureaucracy, and the quality of political participation tell more about a nation than what party or persons are in power.
JOHN GRIDER joined the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State as a Research Fellow in November 2015. He recently completed this captivating project, which investigates the complex interplay between gender, class and race sourced from the narratives of men who found themselves working in the transforming Pacific maritime industry during the mid-nineteenth century.
In Latin America the state is the prime regulator, coordinator, and pace-setter of the entire national system, the apex of the pyramid from which patronage, wealth, power, and programs flow. The state bears responsibility for the realization of civic needs, providing goods and services to each citizen. Doing so requires the exercise and maintenance of social and political control. It is John Martz's contention that clientelism underlines the fundamental character of Latin American social and political life. As the modernizing bureaucratic state has developed in Latin America, there has been a concurrent shifting away from clientelistic relationships. Yet in one form or another, political clientelism still remains central.Clientelism occurs when large numbers of low-status individuals, such as those in the slums of rural and underdeveloped areas, are protected by a powerful patron who defends their interests in return for deference or material reward. In Colombia the rural patron has become a member of the higher clientelistic system as well; he is dependent on a patron who operates at the national level. This enables urban elites to mobilize low-status clients for such acts as mass demonstrations of political loyalty to the regime. Thus, traditional clientelism has been modified through the process of modernization.Part One of The Politics of Clientelism examines Colombian politics, focusing on the incarnation and traditional forms of clientelism. Part Two explores the policies of Colombian governance, from the administrations of Lleras Camargo through Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala. Part Three discusses the modernization and restructuring of Colombia in recent decades under Belisario Betancur, Virgilio Barco, and Cesar Gaviria.As the modernizing bureaucratic state has unfolded, there has been a similar shift in many clientelistic relationships. Martz argues that, whether corporate clientelism remains or more democratic organization develo
We live these days in a virtual nation of cities and celebrities, dreaming a small-town America rendered ever stranger by purveyors of nostalgia and dark visionaries from Sherwood Anderson to David Lynch. And yet it is the small town, that world of local character and neighborhood lore, that dreamed the America we know today—and the small-town boy, like those whose stories this book tells, who made it real. In these life-stories, beginning in 1890 with frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner and moving up to the present with global shopkeeper Sam Walton, a history of middle America unfolds, as entrepreneurs and teachers like Henry Ford, George Washington Carver, and Walt Disney; artists and entertainers like Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Carl Sandburg, and Johnny Carson; political figures like William McKinley, William Jennings Bryan, and Ronald Reagan; and athletes like Bob Feller and John Wooden by turns engender and illustrate the extraordinary cultural shifts that have transformed the Midwest, and through the Midwest, the nation--and the world. Many of these men are familiar, icons even—Ford and Reagan, certainly, Ernie Pyle, Sinclair Lewis, James Dean, and Lawrence Welk—and others, like artists Oscar Micheaux and John Steuart Curry, economist Alvin Hansen and composer Meredith Willson, less so. But in their stories, as John E. Miller tells them, all appear in a new light, unique in their backgrounds and accomplishments, united only in the way their lives reveal the persisting, shaping power of place, and particularly the Midwest, on the cultural imagination and national consciousness. In a thoroughly engaging style Miller introduces us to the small-town Midwestern boys who became these all-American characters, privileging us with insights that pierce the public images of politicians and businessmen, thinkers and entertainers alike. From the smell of the farm, the sounds and silences of hamlets and county seats, the schoolyard athletics and classroom instruction and theatrical performance, we follow these men to their moments of inspiration, innovation, and fame, observing the workings of the small-town past in their very different relationships with the larger world. Their stories reveal in an intimate way how profoundly childhood experiences shape personal identity, and how deeply place figures in the mapping of thought, belief, ambition, and life's course.
It has been more than fifty years since presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, RFK, was murdered at the fashionable Ambassador Hotel in L.A. only five years after his brother John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The alleged shooter who gunned down RFK, the man with an odd name, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, (Sirhan) a twenty-four-year old Palestinian was apprehended at the scene of the crime with the smoking gun still in his hand leading to the conclusion that this seemingly was an open and shut case, or was it? Subsequently, Sirhan was tried and convicted of first-degree murder though his appointed defense team stitched together a poorly formed, modified insanity defense complicated by many unforced errors made by attorneys and expert psychologists and internationally known psychiatrist, Dr. Bernard Diamond. In PSYCH DNA, Dr. Brady who was immersed in the case from the beginning using modern criminological methods and new psychological assessment tools not available five decades ago has reassessed Sirhan' s mental state arriving at five current mental conditions that, in his opinion, if presented at trial could have changed the jury' s verdict and spared Sirhan a trip to San Quentin' s death row. What follows is Dr. Brady chronicling an amazing journey into the darkest recesses of Sirhan' s unconscious, altered mind where homicidal thoughts had percolated for years. At long last, Sirhan' s criminal mystery wrapped in a psychological enigma is unraveled helping us understand the psychodynamics of a would-be assassin.
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