About this product: "Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please..." In Without Conscience Robert Hare argues convincingly that "psychopath" and "antisocial personality disorder" (a psychiatric term defined by a cluster of criminal behaviors) are not the same thing. Not all psychopaths are criminals, he says, and not all criminals are psychopaths. He proposes a psychopathy checklist that includes emotional/interpersonal traits such as glibness, grandiosity, lack of guilt, and shallow emotions, as well as social deviance traits such as impulsiveness, lack of responsibility, and antisocial behavior. His writing is lucid and illustrated with numerous anecdotes. The final chapter, "A Survival Guide," is especially recommended: as Hare writes, "Psychopaths are found in every segment of society, and there is a good chance that eventually you will have a painful or humiliating encounter with one."
About this product: Hailed as “America’s finest realistic novelist” by the Boston Globe, Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, garnered rare critical acclaim for his bracing, unsentimental portraits of middle-class American life.Disturbing the Peace is no exception. Haunting, troubling, and mesmerizing, it shines a brilliant, unwavering light into the darkest recesses of a man’s psyche.
To all appearances, John Wilder has all the trappings of success, circa 1960: a promising career in advertising, a loving family, a beautiful apartment, even a country home. John’s evenings are spent with associates at quiet Manhattan lounges and his weekends with friends at glittering cocktail parties. But something deep within this seemingly perfect life has long since gone wrong. Something has disturbed John’s fragile peace, and he can no longer find solace in fleeting affairs or alcohol. The anger, the drinking, and the recklessness are building to a crescendo—and they’re about to take down John’s career and his family. What happens next will send John on a long, strange journey—at once tragic and inevitable.
About this product: The classic intellectual autobiography of a great theoretical physicist Spanning the years from World War II, when he was a civilian statistician in the operations research section of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, through his studies with Hans Bethe at Cornell University, his early friendship with Richard Feynman, and his postgraduate work with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson has composed an autobiography unlike any other. Dyson evocatively conveys the thrill of a deep engagement with the world-be it as scientist, citizen, student, or parent. Detailing a unique career not limited to his groundbreaking work in physics, Dyson discusses his interest in minimizing loss of life in war, in disarmament, and even in thought experiments on the expansion of our frontiers into the galaxies.
About this product: IN "Disturbing the Universe, an award-winning exploration of power and repression in Young Adult literature, Roberta Seelinger Trites expands the notion of the Young Adult novel as a coming-of-age story. By chronicling the dynamics of power and repression that weave their way through YA books, Trites reveals that characters in these novels must learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions in which adolescents function, including family, church, government, and school. Judy Blume, Virginia Hamilton, S. E. Hinton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L'Engle, and Paul Zindel are among the contemporary authors discussed in this groundbreaking study.
About this product: Disturbing the Peace tells the story of a controversial Cajun priest, a former gung-ho Navy officer injured in a bomb blast in Vietnam, who has tirelessly championed human rights and aroused the conscience of a nation. The fast-paced historical biography also profiles the movement he founded to close a notorious U.S. Army school whose graduates have committed atrocities across Latin America.
The journey of this "spiritual hobo" has more twists and turns than the Mississippi River: from love affairs that ended in heartbreak to patriotic impulses that ended in disillusionment. From dreams of wealth to missionary work among the poor. From protests and prison terms to a cloistered monastery. From confrontations with church hierarchy to political battles on Capitol Hill.
Bourgeois’ opposition to militarism began after a blind Vietnamese orphan opened his eyes to the realities of war. Since then, his human rights work has taken him to half a dozen war-torn countries: To Bolivia, where U.S.-backed security forces kidnapped him after he spoke out against torture. To El Salvador, where he disappeared and two of his friends were killed by U.S.-trained death squads. To Nicaragua and Honduras, where the CIA was helping contra commandos overthrow a government. To Colombia, where he witnessed the human toll of the drug war, escorted by an Army general linked to terrorist bombings. To Iraq, where he met with desperately poor Iraqis just before the country became a bloodbath.
The assassinations of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989 spurred Bourgeois to investigate the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, then a little known training installation whose graduates were later linked not only to the Jesuit massacre, but to gross human rights abuses throughout Latin America.
The latter half of the book profiles the movement he founded to close the school; the Congressional battles over its funding; the Pentagon’s forced admission that the school used manuals advocating torture and assassination; and the courage of average Americans – including WWII and Vietnam veterans, students, union workers, professionals, clergy and elderly nuns – who have risked imprisonment each year at the annual November demonstration at Fort Benning, Ga., where the school is located.
In documenting the sordid record of the school’s graduates – from dictators and intelligence agents to death squad leaders and torturers, Disturbing the Peace shines a light on the dark side of U.S. foreign policy – not only in Latin America, but in Iraq, where Bush administration policies on torture led to the disgrace of Abu Ghraib.
While the Pentagon closed and then re-opened the school under a new name -- the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the SOA Watch movement has remained one of the strongest voices of dissent since Sept.11, 2001, winning court battles that have helped safeguard First Amendment rights at a time civil liberties are eroding.
Time and again throughout the struggle, Bourgeois, along with his fellow provocateurs for justice, lend credence to Margaret Mead’s belief "that a small group of committed citizens can change the world."
About this product: That the United States government engaged in dangerous biological research during World War II will come as no surprise to Americans jaded by revelations of secret medical experiments and radiation exposures. But that the accident-plagued facility where it happened--and continues to happen--is just off the coast of Long Island may alarm many readers of Michael Christopher Carroll's Lab 257. Carroll, an attorney by trade, gamely takes on complex microbiology and shady government record-keeping in telling the story of Plum Island, home of the Animal Disease Center--no place for a casual picnic. The lab, initially set up by the Army to research ways of destroying Soviet farm animals (and to keep them from destroying ours), has often dealt with bacteria and viruses that can be passed from animals to humans. Carroll draws compelling causal links between Plum Island and the introduction of Lyme disease, West Nile virus, and duck enteritis, all non-native germs that wreaked sudden havoc in North America, and all germs that Plum Island scientists were allegedly working with. With hurricanes and terrorists on his mind, Carroll asks readers to imagine a scenario in which the Plum Island lab might release pathogens into the most densely populated area in the country. He ends the book with two chilling questions. First, does the United States need a research facility that investigates animal pathogens with potential for human transmission? Second, considering that Plum Island never had a particularly good safety record, is it the right place for such a facility? Lab 257, while occasionally veering into unsupported speculation, introduces key questions to the debate on biological security in the 21st century. --Therese Littleton
About this product: From the murky depths can come the most extraordinary things. . . . Profoundly Disturbing examines the underground cult movies that have--unexpectedly and unintentionally-- revolutionized the way that all movies would be made. Called "exploitation films" because they often exploit our most primal fears and desires, these overlooked movies pioneered new cinematographic techniques, subversive narrative structuring, and guerrilla marketing strategies that would eventually trickle up into mainstream cinema. In this book Joe Bob Briggs uncovers the most seminal cult movies of the twentieth century and reveals the fascinating untold stories behind their making.
Briggs is best known as the cowboy-hat wearing, Texas-drawling host of Joe Bob's Drive-in Theater and Monstervision, which ran for fourteen years on cable TV. His goofy, disarming take offers a refreshingly different perspective on movies and film making. He will make you laugh out loud but then surprise you with some truly insightful analysis. And, with more than three decades of immersion in the cult movie business, Briggs has a wealth of behind-the-scenes knowledge about the people who starred in, and made these movies. There is no one better qualified or more engaging to write about this subject.
All the subgenres in cult cinema are covered, with essays centering around twenty movies including Triumph of the Will (1938), Mudhoney (1965), Night of the Living Dead (1967), Deep Throat (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Drunken Master (1978), and Crash (1996). Accompanying the text are dozens of capsule reviews providing ideas for related films to discover, as well as kitschy and fun archival film stills. An essential reference and guide to this overlooked side of cinema, Profoundly Disturbing should be in the home of every movie fan, especially those who think they've seen everything.
About this product: This book covers the many passages of scriptures typically difficult to understand. Sometimes the old English contributes to our modern-day misunderstanding of texts that if misapplied can lead to a shipwreck of faith. The purpose of the work is to explain in simple language scriptural verses which otherwise seem perplexing.
About this product: When Edouard and Stéphane offer Dephpine shelter for the night, they become caught in the maelstorm of her swirling tales, her gusts of rage, and her engulfing loneliness.
About this product: A guide to the bizarre and controversial features more than five hundred reviews providing the inside scoop on sex, drugs, conspiracies, censorship, religious and cultural extremism, illegal activities, and other "out there" topics along with subversive art and fiction. Original. 50,000 first printing.
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