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Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 164177410X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
This searing account of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine reveals that, contrary to popular media narratives, Western hawks are culpable in triggering a war that has cost many thousands of innocent Ukrainian lives. In 1991, the Cold War ended in a bloodless victory for NATO. After 45 years of a grueling, nuclear-tinged Cold War, communism was dead, Eastern Europe was free, Russia looked to the West for how to build a better, freer future for itself, and liberal democracy and capitalism reigned supreme. But in the ruins of the last war lie the seeds for the next great conflict. Floating just beneath the surface of post-Cold War international relations was the question of what was to become of NATO with the loss of the Soviet Union as a threat. Western leaders believed expansion into the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe was the natural next step. But the Russians opposed this. For 30 years, a succession of Russian leaders—from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin—warned the West that NATO’s expansion into territories bordering Russia, notably into Ukraine, would trigger a violent response from Moscow. Yet, the West did not listen. Contrary to the popular narrative in the West, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine will show readers how Westerners created our current crisis with Russia and why innocent Ukrainians are being made to pay with their lives for the arrogance (and ignorance) of Western leaders in the post-Cold War era. Thanks to their hubris, the world now teeters on the brink of a potential nuclear world war over the status of Ukraine.
Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 164177410X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Get Book Here
Book Description
This searing account of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine reveals that, contrary to popular media narratives, Western hawks are culpable in triggering a war that has cost many thousands of innocent Ukrainian lives. In 1991, the Cold War ended in a bloodless victory for NATO. After 45 years of a grueling, nuclear-tinged Cold War, communism was dead, Eastern Europe was free, Russia looked to the West for how to build a better, freer future for itself, and liberal democracy and capitalism reigned supreme. But in the ruins of the last war lie the seeds for the next great conflict. Floating just beneath the surface of post-Cold War international relations was the question of what was to become of NATO with the loss of the Soviet Union as a threat. Western leaders believed expansion into the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe was the natural next step. But the Russians opposed this. For 30 years, a succession of Russian leaders—from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin—warned the West that NATO’s expansion into territories bordering Russia, notably into Ukraine, would trigger a violent response from Moscow. Yet, the West did not listen. Contrary to the popular narrative in the West, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine will show readers how Westerners created our current crisis with Russia and why innocent Ukrainians are being made to pay with their lives for the arrogance (and ignorance) of Western leaders in the post-Cold War era. Thanks to their hubris, the world now teeters on the brink of a potential nuclear world war over the status of Ukraine.
Author: William R. Freudenburg
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 9781610911634
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
When houses are flattened, towns submerged, and people stranded without electricity or even food, we attribute the suffering to “natural disasters” or “acts of God.” But what if they’re neither? What if we, as a society, are bringing these catastrophes on ourselves? That’s the provocative theory of Catastrophe in the Making, the first book to recognize Hurricane Katrina not as a “perfect storm,” but a tragedy of our own making—and one that could become commonplace. The authors, one a longtime New Orleans resident, argue that breached levees and sloppy emergency response are just the most obvious examples of government failure. The true problem is more deeply rooted and insidious, and stretches far beyond the Gulf Coast. Based on the false promise of widespread prosperity, communities across the U.S. have embraced all brands of “economic development” at all costs. In Louisiana, that meant development interests turning wetlands into shipping lanes. By replacing a natural buffer against storm surges with a 75-mile long, obsolete canal that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they guided the hurricane into the heart of New Orleans and adjacent communities. The authors reveal why, despite their geographic differences, California and Missouri are building—quite literally—toward similar destruction. Too often, the U.S. “growth machine” generates wealth for a few and misery for many. Drawing lessons from the most expensive “natural” disaster in American history, Catastrophe in the Making shows why thoughtless development comes at a price we can ill afford.
Author: Gerard Passannante
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661235X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.
Author: Dana Schwartz
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1478970383
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
A"hilarious and heartbreaking" (Jo Piazza) and unflinchingly honest memoir about one young woman's terrible and life-changing decisions while hoping--and sometimes failing--to find herself, in the style of Never Have I Ever and Adulting. Join Dana Schwartz on a journey revisiting all of the awful choices she made in her early twenties through the internet's favorite method of self-knowledge: the quiz. Part-memoir, part-VERY long personality test, Choose Your Own Disaster is a manifesto about the millennial experience and modern feminism and how the easy advice of "you can be anything you want!" is actually pretty fucking difficult when there are so many possible versions of yourself it seems like you could be. Dana has no idea who she is, but at least she knows she's a Carrie, a Ravenclaw, a Raphael, a Belle, a former emo kid, a Twitter addict, and a millennial just trying her best. This long-form personality quiz manages to combine humor with unflinching honesty as one young woman tries to find herself amid the many, many choices that your twenties have to offer.
Author: Richard Neely
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252020384
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Several states are virtually bankrupt, including California and New York, with others fast approaching that status. In Tragedies of Our Own Making, West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely distills the insights of a lifetime spent dealing with our nation's worst social problems. "Twenty years as a judge, " he writes, "has convinced me that state government fiscal crises, deteriorating schools, declining living standards among the old blue-collar class, and our rising crime rate are all strangely interrelated." His overriding conclusion? Problems including colossal Medicaid costs, savagery in the streets, and the falling relative wage rate of half our workforce all relate to a disintegrating family structure. All public agencies - welfare, the courts, public health, education - "are crumbling under the burden of acting as a surrogate family." In presenting a brilliant fiscal analysis of social insurance predicated on personal responsibility, Neely argues that "we are going broke because we are allowing excessive losses to be triggered through carelessness. Millions of children are being born to school-age girls and to parents who will needlessly divorce, making those children uncared for and insecure. Illegitimacy and divorce are to social insurance what leaving a pot of oil on a burning stove is to fire insurance." Neely paints a vivid picture of the "actuarial limits" of our ability to rescue people from the consequences of their own actions. He offers a two-part solution to the core problems of divorce and illegitimacy. First, Neely calls for a massive, government-financed media campaign aimed at educating the public on the financial and psychological costs of divorce toadults and children. He also presents a comprehensive and politically acceptable approach to improved birth control.
Author: Sir David Attenborough
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538720000
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
*Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Best Science & Technology Book of the Year* In this scientifically informed account of the changes occurring in the world over the last century, award-winning broadcaster and natural historian shares a lifetime of wisdom and a hopeful vision for the future. See the world. Then make it better. I am 93. I've had an extraordinary life. It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary. As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day -- the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity. I have been witness to this decline. A Life on Our Planet is my witness statement, and my vision for the future. It is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake -- and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right. We have one final chance to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited. All we need is the will to do so.
Author: Ilan Kelman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192578286
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
An earthquake shatters Haiti and a hurricane slices through Texas. We hear that nature runs rampant, seeking to destroy us through these 'natural disasters'. Science recounts a different story, however: disasters are not the consequence of natural causes; they are the consequence of human choices and decisions. we put ourselves in harm's way; we fail to take measures which we know would prevent disasters, no matter what the environment does. This can be both hard to accept, and hard to unravel. A complex of factors shape disasters. They arise from the political processes dictating where and what we build, and from social circumstances which create and perpetuate poverty and discrimination. They develop from the social preference to blame nature for the damage wrought, when in fact events such as earthquakes and storms are entirely commonplace environmental processes We feel the need to fight natural forces, to reclaim what we assume is ours, and to protect ourselves from what we perceive to be wrath from outside our communities. This attitude distracts us from the real causes of disasters: humanity's decisions, as societies and as individuals. It stops us accepting the real solutions to disasters: making better decisions. This book explores stories of some of our worst disasters to show how we can and should act to stop people dying when nature unleashes its energies. The disaster is not the tornado, the volcanic eruption, or climate change, but the deaths and injuries, the loss of irreplaceable property, and the lack and even denial of support to affected people, so that a short-term interruption becomes a long-term recovery nightmare. But we can combat this, as Kelman shows, describing inspiring examples of effective human action that limits damage, such as managing flooding in Toronto and villages in Bangladesh, or wildfire in Colorado. Throughout, his message is clear: there is no such thing as a natural disaster. The disaster lies in our inability to deal with the environment and with ourselves.
Author: Kathleen Tierney
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804791406
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
“This book about risk and disaster—and how they get amplified—is fascinating and hugely important as we face an ever-more-turbulent world.” —Rebecca Solnit, award-winning author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a remarkable number of large-scale disasters. Earthquakes in Haiti and Sumatra underscored the serious economic consequences that catastrophic events can have on developing countries, while 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina showed that first world nations remain vulnerable. The Social Roots of Risk argues against the widespread notion that cataclysmic occurrences are singular events, driven by forces beyond our control. Instead, Kathleen Tierney contends that disasters of all types—be they natural, technological, or economic—are rooted in common social and institutional sources. Put another way, risks and disasters are produced by the social order itself—by governing bodies, organizations, and groups that push for economic growth, oppose risk-reducing regulation, and escape responsibility for tremendous losses when they occur. Considering a wide range of historical and looming events—from a potential mega-earthquake in Tokyo that would cause devastation far greater than what we saw in 2011, to BP’s accident history prior to the 2010 blowout—Tierney illustrates trends in our behavior, connecting what seem like one-off events to illuminate historical patterns. Like risk, human resilience also emerges from the social order, and this book makes a powerful case that we already have a significant capacity to reduce the losses that disasters produce. A provocative rethinking of the way that we approach and remedy disasters, The Social Roots of Risk leaves readers with a better understanding of how our own actions make us vulnerable to the next big crisis—and what we can do to prevent it. “Brilliant . . . Drawing on a trove of timely case studies, Tierney analyses how factors such as speculative finance and rampant development allow natural and economic blips to tip more easily into catastrophe.” —Nature
Author: Greg Sestero
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476730407
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
"In 2003, an independent film called The room ... made its disastrous debut in Los Angeles. Described by one reviewer as 'like getting stabbed in the head,' the six-million-dollar film earned a grand total of $1800 at the box office and closed after two weeks. Ten years later, The room is an international cult phenomenon ... In [this book], actor Greg Sestero, Tommy's costar and longtime best friend, recounts the film's long, strange journey to infamy, unraveling mysteries for fans ... as well as the question that plagues the uninitiated: how the hell did a movie this awful ever get made?"--
Author: William C. Davis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439105855
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1092
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Book Description
For four crucial months in 1861, delegates from all over the South met in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new nation. Davis (Jefferson Davis: The Man and the Hour, LJ 11/15/91) tells their story in this new work, another example of Davis's fine storytelling skill and an indispensable guide to understanding the formation of the Confederate government. Among the issues Davis examines are revising the Constitution to meet Southern needs, banning the importation of slaves, and determining whether the convention could be considered a congress. Also revealed are the many participating personalities, their ambitions and egos, politicking and lobbying for the presidency of the new nation, and the nature of the city of Montgomery itself.
