Private Lives/Public Consequences

Private Lives/Public Consequences PDF Author: William Henry Chafe
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029321
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
A political leader's decisions can determine the fate of a nation, but what determines how and why that leader makes certain choices? William H. Chafe, a distinguished historian of twentieth century America, examines eight of the most significant political leaders of the modern era in order to explore the relationship between their personal patterns of behavior and their political decision-making process. The result is a fascinating look at how personal lives and political fortunes have intersected to shape America over the past fifty years. One might expect our leaders to be healthy, wealthy, genteel, and happy. In fact, most of these individuals--from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Martin Luther King, Jr., from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton--came from dysfunctional families, including three children of alcoholics; half grew up in poor or only marginally secure homes; most experienced discord in their marriages; and at least two displayed signs of mental instability. What links this extraordinarily diverse group is an intense ambition to succeed, and the drive to overcome adversity. Indeed, adversity offered a vehicle to develop the personal attributes that would define their careers and shape the way they exercised power. Chafe probes the influences that forged these men's lives, and profiles the distinctive personalities that molded their exercise of power in times of danger and strife. The history of the United States from the Depression into the new century cannot be understood without exploring the dynamic and critical relationship between personal history and political leadership that these eight life stories so poignantly reveal.

Private Lives/Public Consequences

Private Lives/Public Consequences PDF Author: William Henry Chafe
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029321
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Get Book Here

Book Description
A political leader's decisions can determine the fate of a nation, but what determines how and why that leader makes certain choices? William H. Chafe, a distinguished historian of twentieth century America, examines eight of the most significant political leaders of the modern era in order to explore the relationship between their personal patterns of behavior and their political decision-making process. The result is a fascinating look at how personal lives and political fortunes have intersected to shape America over the past fifty years. One might expect our leaders to be healthy, wealthy, genteel, and happy. In fact, most of these individuals--from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Martin Luther King, Jr., from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton--came from dysfunctional families, including three children of alcoholics; half grew up in poor or only marginally secure homes; most experienced discord in their marriages; and at least two displayed signs of mental instability. What links this extraordinarily diverse group is an intense ambition to succeed, and the drive to overcome adversity. Indeed, adversity offered a vehicle to develop the personal attributes that would define their careers and shape the way they exercised power. Chafe probes the influences that forged these men's lives, and profiles the distinctive personalities that molded their exercise of power in times of danger and strife. The history of the United States from the Depression into the new century cannot be understood without exploring the dynamic and critical relationship between personal history and political leadership that these eight life stories so poignantly reveal.

PRIVATE LIVES/PUBLIC CONSEQUENCES

PRIVATE LIVES/PUBLIC CONSEQUENCES PDF Author: William Henry Chafe
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674018778
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
A political leader's decisions can determine the fate of a nation, but what determines how and why that leader makes certain choices? William H. Chafe, a distinguished historian of twentieth century America, examines eight of the most significant political leaders of the modern era in order to explore the relationship between their personal patterns of behavior and their political decision-making process. The result is a fascinating look at how personal lives and political fortunes have intersected to shape America over the past fifty years. One might expect our leaders to be healthy, wealthy, genteel, and happy. In fact, most of these individuals--from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Martin Luther King, Jr., from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton--came from dysfunctional families, including three children of alcoholics; half grew up in poor or only marginally secure homes; most experienced discord in their marriages; and at least two displayed signs of mental instability. What links this extraordinarily diverse group is an intense ambition to succeed, and the drive to overcome adversity. Indeed, adversity offered a vehicle to develop the personal attributes that would define their careers and shape the way they exercised power. Chafe probes the influences that forged these men's lives, and profiles the distinctive personalities that molded their exercise of power in times of danger and strife. The history of the United States from the Depression into the new century cannot be understood without exploring the dynamic and critical relationship between personal history and political leadership that these eight life stories so poignantly reveal.

Private Truths, Public Lies

Private Truths, Public Lies PDF Author: Timur Kuran
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248139
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change. In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency. Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India's caste system.

Private Choices, Public Consequences

Private Choices, Public Consequences PDF Author: Lynda Beck Fenwick
Publisher: Dutton Adult
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
"Private Choices, Public Consequences will open your eyes to both the amazing reproductive choices some people are making today and the far-reaching public consequences of their decisions."--BOOK JACKET.

Private Lives, Public Conflicts

Private Lives, Public Conflicts PDF Author: James W. Button
Publisher: CQ-Roll Call Group Books
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book explores the grass-roots movement for legal protection on the basis of sexual orientation. After discussing the social and political background of the gay and lesbian rights movement, the authors examine the conditions that enabled or blocked passage of local legislation in various communities; the scope, implementation, and impact of such laws; the effect of the movement on public schools; and the nature of the political opposition.

Bill and Hillary

Bill and Hillary PDF Author: William H. Chafe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429955546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
In Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal, the distinguished historian William H. Chafe boldly argues that the trajectory of the Clintons' political lives can be understood only through the prism of their personal relationship. Each experienced a difficult childhood. Bill had an abusive stepfather, and his mother was in denial about the family's pathology. He believed that his success as a public servant would redeem the family. Hillary grew up with an autocratic father and a self-sacrificing mother whose most important lesson for her daughter was the necessity of family togetherness. As an adolescent, Hillary's encounter with her youth minister helped set her moral compass on issues of race and social justice. From the day they first met at Yale Law School, Bill and Hillary were inseparable, even though their relationship was inherently volatile. The personal dynamic between them would go on to determine their political fates. Hillary was instrumental in Bill's triumphs as Arkansas's governor and saved his presidential candidacy in 1992 by standing with him during the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal. He responded by delegating to her powers that no other First Lady had ever exercised. Always tempestuous, their relationship had as many lows as it did highs, from near divorce to stunning electoral and political successes. Chafe's many insights—into subjects such as health care, Kenneth Starr, welfare reform, and the extent to which the Lewinsky scandal finally freed Hillary to become a politician in her own right and return to the consensus reformer she had been in college and law school—add texture and depth to our understanding of the Clintons' experience together. The latest book from one of our preeminent historians, Bill and Hillary is the definitive account of the Clintons' relationship and its far-reaching impact on American political life.

Private Acts, Social Consequences

Private Acts, Social Consequences PDF Author: Ronald Bayer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In this timely, penetrating analysis, Bayer examines the legal and political implications of creating and implementing an effective and rational nationwide health policy that balances public safety with private freedom.

Public Vision, Private Lives

Public Vision, Private Lives PDF Author: Mark Sydney Cladis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231139694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Mark S. Cladis pinpoints the origins of contemporary notions of the public and private and their relationship to religion in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His thesis cuts across many fields and issues-philosophy of religion, women's studies, democratic theory, modern European history, American culture, social justice, privacy laws, and notions of solitude and community-and wholly reconsiders the political, cultural, and legal nature of modernity in relation to religion. Turning to Rousseau's Garden, its inhabitants, the Solitaires, and the question of restoration and redemption that preoccupied much of Rousseau's thought, Cladis examines how Rousseau addressed the tension between the joys and moral obligations of social engagement and the desire for solitude. He was caught between two possibilities: active involvement in the creation of an enlightened and humane society or extrication from social entanglements in favor of cultivating a spiritual interior life. Yet Rousseau did not view this conflict as a desperate division. Rather, for him it was a moral struggle to be endured by those who had fallen from the Garden. For this edition Cladis has added a substantive introduction that discusses the role of religion in contemporary democratic societies, particularly in American public life. Cladis proposes four models of thinking about religion in public and champions what he calls spiritual democracy-a dynamic, culturally specific, and progressive democracy. Cladis argues that spiritual democracy refers not only to a society's legal codes and principles but also to its democratic culture and symbols and its daily practices and institutions. It encompasses the nation's character, diverse identities, and a distinctivel exchange between the nation's public vision and citizens' complex, private lives.

Off Camera

Off Camera PDF Author: Ted Koppel
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375727086
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
One of America's most admired TV anchors gives us an intimate chronicle of the final year of the twentieth century. In this engrossing narrative, a national bestseller, are all the most significant matters of that year--from Bill Clinton’s impeachment to Columbine, from the war in Kosovo to Y2K and the mass-marketing of Viagra. Here are the people who made the news--from Slobodan Milosevic to Hillary Rodham Clinton to Michael Jordan to John F. Kennedy Jr. The events of 1999 anticipate so many of the on-going challenges America faces today that Koppel’s account feels entirely prescient. Koppel's book moves on yet another level as events trigger memories of his own past, providing a more personal resonance to his telling of the history we all share. He takes us back to the England in which he lived until he was thirteen. He revisits his powerful experiences as an interviewer investigating prison abuses and probing the violence in our schools. He discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the media; he talks about racial intolerance, about brutality toward gay people, about the absence of political leadership. He also examines such cultural phenomena as our obsession with celebrity and the impact of great theater and overhyped movies. Here is the voice we knew so well from Nightline--intelligent, curious, opinionated, witty, concerned--reminding us in entertaining and thought-provoking ways that even the most public events reverberate in our private lives.

A Private and Public Faith

A Private and Public Faith PDF Author: William Stringfellow
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725206501
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
'A Private and Public Faith' is a heartfelt protest against the self-serving religiosity that characterizes so much of religion in contemporary American society, and which affects to such a large degree the life of the churches of American Protestantism. Stringfellow's protest is motivated by a passionate concern that the authentic life of the Word of God should operate freely in the church and in the world. His exposition of this life for individual, church, and society is profound yet simple. An excerpt on discerning God's presence: In other words, the most notorious, plain, and victorious truth of God is that God participates in our history -- even yours and mine. Our history -- all our anxieties -- have become the scene of His presence and the matter of His care. We are safe. We are free. Wherever we turn we shall discover that God is already there. Therefore, wherever it be, fear not, be thankful, rejoice, and boast of God."