Apologia

Sample

Richard J. Krickus

Showdown explores the revival of the Lithuanian independence movement, beginning in 1988 when the popular front movement, Sajudis, was founded and including its February 1990 victory in the first free elections in the Soviet Union. A month later, Lithuania declared its independence. But as American author and political scientist Richard J. Krickus explains, by 1990 Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had begun scaling back reforms and courting the neo-Stalinists. Lithuanian independence threatened to upset the Soviet Union's uneasy status quo. The Soviets' deadly response and the movement's ultimate success - with its far-reaching consequences - stunned the world. . Krickus was in Lithuania as an elections monitor during the momentous days leading to independence. His eyewitness account explains how this nation of fewer than four million set in motion the forces that broke apart the vast Soviet Union. Based on Dr. Krickus's personal knowledge of the dangerous events and the courageous Lithuanians involved, this dramatic account also shows how Americans aided this unforeseen catalyst to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Though the Lithuanians were victorious in their struggle against the Soviet Union, the country's independence and its democracy are tenuous. As Krickus warns, unless the West takes concrete steps to safeguard democracy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the freedom which was so hard won could be lost again.

Sample

William Langewiesche

In our imagination, the desert is a scorching flatland, a palm grove like a shimmering green line floating in the distance, an ocean of dunes. You can close your eyes to see it. When William Langewiesche set out to document the state of the Sahara desert he was determined to see just what came before his eyes: nothing more or less. The result is an unsentimentalized, often startling account of the desert. From the southernmost Mediterranean to the African Savannah and west to the Atlantic, Langewiesche's trek took him through the hyper-arid core of the desert, a terrain that taunts the imagination with its unalterable desolation. Here cadavers decompose like sun-dried dates, horizons are so barren that stones are mistaken for trucks, distances so empty that migrating birds have been observed seeking the company of humans. Langewiesche's descriptions of the physical desert are brilliantly matched by his explorations of its psychological landscape: the bitter colonial history, the stoicism of the nomads, the austerity of Islam. Despite the passing of the camel and the caravan, the Sahara remains without compromise. William Langewiesche blends history and reportage, anthropology and anecdote, into an unforgettable portrait of the unsubdued heart of the Sahara unveiled.

Sample

Michael D. Yates

Retiring from 32 years as a professor of economics, the author and his wife sell most of their possessions and travel the United States. This is an account of their adventures and an examination of work and inequality , race and class, alienation and environmental degradation in the small towns and big cities of the contemporary United States.

Sample

David Thomson

"At once examining and experiencing Nevada, Thomson finds its people, its landscape, and the unexpected questions it inspires equally provocative. He shows us the historical Nevada - a classic Wild West, attracting Spanish missionaries, Mormons, uprooted Native Americans, explorers, and silver miners - and the contemporary influx of cultists, druggies, survivalists, and fortune hunters whose quests lead directly to the gaming table."--BOOK JACKET. "We see Nevada as a place of no-holds-barred experimentation, both social (gambling, prostitution, easy divorce, no taxes) and scientific (nuclear testing and storage of nuclear waste). We see suburbanites rubbing shoulders with sybarites; the natural beauty of Lake Tahoe, shadowed by the financial edifice of tourism; criminals, entertainers, and hotel impresarios sharing dreams of glory (and the memory of Bugsy Siegel and Frank Sinatra)."--BOOK JACKET. "In Nevada is a revelation of the gambler's mix of hope and anxiety, of the isolation and closeness, the beauty and banality, the fact and fancy, at the heart of the state - and the state of mind - of Nevada."--BOOK JACKET.