The explosive narrative of the life, captivity, and trial of Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who was abducted by the Taliban and whose story has served as a symbol for America's foundering war in Afghanistan ”An unsettling and riveting book filled with the mysteries of human nature.” —Kirkus Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl left his platoon's base in eastern Afghanistan in the early hours of June 30, 2009. Since that day, easy answers to the many questions surrounding his case—why did he leave his post? What kinds of efforts were made to recover him from the Taliban? And why, facing a court martial, did he plead guilty to the serious charges against him?—have proved elusive. Taut in its pacing but sweeping in its scope, American Cipher is the riveting and deeply sourced account of the nearly decade-old Bergdahl quagmire—which, as journalists Matt Farwell and Michael Ames persuasively argue, is as illuminating an episode as we have as we seek the larger truths of how the United States lost its way in Afghanistan. The book tells the parallel stories of a young man's halting coming of age and a nation stalled in an unwinnable war, revealing the fallout that ensued when the two collided: a fumbling recovery effort that suppressed intelligence on Bergdahl's true location and bungled multiple opportunities to bring him back sooner; a homecoming that served to deepen the nation's already-vast political fissure; a trial that cast judgment on not only the defendant, but most everyone involved. The book's beating heart is Bergdahl himself—an idealistic, misguided soldier onto whom a nation projected the political and emotional complications of service. Based on years of exclusive reporting drawing on dozens of sources throughout the military, government, and Bergdahl's family, friends, and fellow soldiers, American Cipher is at once a meticulous investigation of government dysfunction and political posturing, a blistering commentary on America's presence in Afghanistan, and a heartbreaking story of a naïve young man who thought he could fix the world and wound up the tool of forces far beyond his understanding.
This booklet gives an overview of the Search Conference, a change strategy which uses open systems principles in strategic planning, thereby creating a well-articulated, achievable future with identifiable goals, a timetable, and action plans for realizing that future. Here, in their own inspiring words, over 100 CEOs, board chairs, and company presidents share their insights in one-page letters focusing on the qualities necessary for effective leadership and career success. The men and women featured in Pathways to Success come from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their companies range from small entrepreneurial firms to large corporations. Organized by topic, these letters provide practical and encouraging insights on: o Hard work o Imagination o Tolerance o Honesty o Self-knowledge o Team-building, and more Each letter is self-contained and to-the-point, capturing the personal experience and positive convictions of these distinguished business leaders. A biographical sketch accompanies each letter, describing the career path of the contributor as well as the major challenges and obstacles that person has overcome to achieve success. The book also contains thought-provoking exercises for individual use or group discussion. Written for young people who aspire to successful business careers and leadership roles, this book will also be valuable for executives and managers, entrepreneurs, academics, consultants, and those who work with young people-counselors, teachers, mentors, and parents.
A highly regarded impressionist-style artist, George Ames Aldrich drew on his years of experience living and studying in Europe to create beautiful landscape paintings. His life and work are explored in this gorgeous book. Many of the artist's finest creations, some representing French subjects and others depicting the midwestern steel industry and American landscapes, are included in this book. It features color reproductions, along with other archival and contextual images. Essays by Michael Wright and Wendy Greenhouse explore in detail Aldrich's life, influences, sources of inspiration, and art historical context. Exploiting a wide variety of sources, Wright and Greenhouse have discovered exciting new information about the artist and his times.
Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes poses a number of probing questions about the role and responsibility of museums and anthropology in the contemporary world. In it, Michael Ames, an internationally renowned museum director, challenges popular concepts and criticisms of museums and presents an alternate perspective which reflects his experiences from many years of museum work. Based on the author's previous book, Museums, the Public and Anthropology, the new edition includes seven new essays which argue, as in the previous volume, that museums and anthropologists must contextualize and critique themselves -- they must analyse and critique the social, political and economic systems within which they work. In the new essays, Ames looks at the role of consumerism and the market economy in the production of such phenomena as worlds' fairs and McDonald's hamburger chains, referring to them as "museums of everyday life" and indicating the way in which they, like museums, transform ideology into commonsense, thus reinforcing and perpetuating hegemonic control over how people think about and represent themselves. He also discusses the moral/political ramifications of conflicting attitudes towards Aboriginal art (is it art or artifact?); censorship (is it liberating or repressive?); and museum exhibits (are they informative or disinformative?). The earlier essays outline the development of museums in the Western world, the problems faced by anthropologists in attempting to deal with the often conflicting demands of professional as opposed to public interests, the tendency to both fabricate and stereotype, and the need to establish a reciprocal rather than exploitative relationship between museums/anthropologists and Aboriginal people. Written during the course of the last decade, these essays offer an accessible, often anecdotal, journey through one professional anthropologist's concerns about, and hopes for, his discipline and its future.
CRUISERS offers and insider's look at the latest and greatest cruiser bicycle styles and designs, and provides tips on how people can trick out their own bikes to proclaim their individuality. It also tells the unique history and development of cruiser bikes, from their pre-World War II origins to the popular California beach bikes of the 1970s to today's retro-chic bikes. Without style, a bike is just a bike, a means of getting from here to there. With style, the bikes people ride become a defining stamp of who they are. The modern cruiser-with its oversized balloon tires, solid steel framing, shock-absorbing suspension, and custom colors and modifications-is a testament to individual style. So saddle up in the seat of a classic bike and rediscover the smooth rolling freedom.
Reel Life is a loose parody of the various "simple words of wisdom" books, i.e., Life's Little Instruction Book and Everything I need to know I learned in Kindergarten, that have been released in years past. Reel Life is written by and for people who spent an inordinate amount of time staring at the TV watching movie after movie on cable. As a result, the lessons imparted are not of the easily anticipated "don't chew with your mouth open" or "be nice to people" variety. Rather, they range from what might be called practical advice for highly unlikely circumstances to purely absurd.
An illustrated romp through one of the oddest and most fiercely competitive global competitions: the World Beard and Moustache Championships. Since its humble beginnings in Germany in 1990, the World Beard and Moustache Championships has blossomed into an international event that has since been staged in Norway, Sweden, and, in 2003, the United States. The competition awards prizes in seventeen categories, such as Dali Moustache, Freestyle Goatee, Garibaldi, and German Imperial, and some of the best and most notable contestants from the last ten years are featured here. You will encounter Ted Sedman, president of London's Handlebar Club, who was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having Britain's longest moustache; Paul Miller and his impressive Fu Manchu; Gary Johnson and his award-winning Musketeer; and Bruce Roe and his manly Wild West-all brave, bold, and creative men united by a single goal: the pursuit of true individuality. It's impossible not to be won over by this dedicated group of facial hair fantasists. Chock-full of photos that will tickle and fascinate, The World Beard and Moustache Championships is an irresistible tribute to these stylish and passionate creations.
Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body.
Yesterday is lost quickly in Florida. Citizens never know what oddball changes to expect when step out of their houses in the morning. Speaking of Florida is a postcard from some of today's residents to future generations.
For more than a century scholars both inside and outside of China have undertaken the project of modernizing Confucianism, but few have been as successful or influential as Li Zehou (b. 1930). Since the 1950s, Li’s extensive efforts in this regard have in turn exerted a profound influence on Chinese modernization and resulted in his becoming one of China’s most prominent social critics. To transform Confucianism into a contemporary resource for positive change in China and elsewhere, Li has reinterpreted major ideas and concepts of classical Confucianism, including a rereading of the entire Analects, replete with his own philosophical speculations derived from other Chinese and Western traditions (most notably, the ideas of Kant and Marx), and developed an aesthetical theory that has proved especially far-reaching. Although the authors of this volume hail from East Asia, North America, and Europe and a wide variety of academic backgrounds and fields of study, they are unanimous in their appreciation of Li’s contributions to not only an evolving Confucian philosophy, but also world philosophy. They view Li first and foremost as a sui generis thinker with broad global interests and not one who fits neatly into any one philosophical category, Chinese or Western. This is clearly reflected in the chapters included here, which are organized into three parts: Li Zehou and the Modernization of Confucianism, Li Zehou’s Reconception of Confucian Philosophy, and Li Zehou’s Aesthetical Theory and Confucianism. Together they form a coherent narrative that reveals how Li has, for more than half a century, creatively studied, absorbed, and reconceptualized the Confucian ideational tradition to integrate it with Western philosophical elements and develop his own philosophical insights and original theories. At the same time, he has transformed and modernized Confucianism for the purpose of both coalescing with and reconstructing a new world cultural order.
Lee Child recruits Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Ames, Cara Black, and others to reveal nicotine’s scintillating alter egos. “Sixteen tributes to America’s guiltiest pleasure . . . Even confirmed anti-smokers will find something to savor.” —Kirkus Reviews In recent years, nicotine has become as verboten as many hard drugs. The literary styles in this volume are as varied as the moral quandaries herein, and the authors have successfully unleashed their incandescent imaginations on the subject matter, fashioning an immensely addictive collection.
Relates the trials and eventual transformation of Richard--a Yale tennis captain, surgeon, Lt. Commander in the navy, and a happily married man into Renee Richards, a woman with many accomplishments in her own right
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