Murder in the Executive Mansion

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Patrick McCarthy

The current governmental crisis in Italy is not a historical anomaly in that country, but rather just one more development in an evolving crisis of government that began with the close of World War II. As the Christian Democrats came to power, the hope of the Italian people was pinned on their promises for a renewed Italy. As time progressed, it became obvious that the trust of the people had been misplaced. In the first full English language account of the Clean Hands crisis, Patrick McCarthy finds the roots of Berlusconi's rise and fall in the practices of clientalism, the machinations of the Mafia, the corporate direction of Fiat, the edicts of the Vatican, and even the organization of the Italian soccer league. Showing how the tentacles of political corruption reached into every aspect of Italian life, Patrick McCarthy weaves a fascinating story that will be of great interest to any reader of current affairs.

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Amy J. Elias

"In Sublime Desire, Amy J. Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction written since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty. Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime - for awe, certainty, and belief."--BOOK JACKET.

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Sid Fleischman

One night The Great Freddie, a young ventriloquist, is possessed by a dybbuk.A what?A Jewish spirit. A scrappy demon who glows as if spray-painted by moonlight.The dybbuk is revealed to be the ghost of a twelve-year-old boy named Avrom Amos, a victim of the Nazis during World War II. In a plucky scheme to seek revenge, he commandeers The Great Freddie's stage act and entraps the entertainer in the postwar ashes of Germany. Behind the footlights, the dybbuk lights up the terrible fate of a million and a half Jewish children, including Avrom himself.What tricks does the dybbuk have up his ghostly sleeve? Prepare to be astonished. . . .

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Harry Turtledove

As World War II escalates, North America is faced with violence on all sides--Confederate attacks on northern cities, Canadian insurgents, and a Japanese assault on the Hawaiian islands--as, in the South, ex-slaves are forced to build their own concentration camps, and Vice President La Follette takes over from the dead president while Franklin Roosevelt builds his own power base.