Newt!

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Sybil Downing and Robert E. Smith

Thomas McDonald Patterson, described by contemporaries as the most prominent figure in Colorado history, achieved a degree of political influence, professional fame, and financial success that makes his relative obscurity a mystery. As the acknowledged leader of the Democratic party from 1876 to 1892, he raised the party's respectability. By engineering a fusion of silver Democrats and populists to challenge Republican dominance, he brought about an effective two-party system. In Patterson's lengthy career he was instrumental in Colorado's quest for statehood, served as territorial delegate to Congress, was the first Democratic U.S. congressman, and later a U.S. senator. As owner and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Times, Patterson supported many unpopular causes, among them organized labor. In defending freedom of the press, he survived serious boycotts by large advertisers and a contempt citation by the Colorado Supreme Court. Infuriated by election swindles, Patterson worked with other progressive reformers to curtail corruption in municipal and state government, including the Democratic machine of mayor Robert Speer.

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Michael Heseltine

"Michael Heseltine has enjoyed one of the most colourful and creative careers of modern British politics. By bestowing two successive nicknames - first 'Tarzan' and then 'Hezza' - the public displayed its instinctive rapport with him. For thirty years, from his days as Minister of Aerospace in the early 1970s to his appointments as Deputy Prime Minister in the mid-1990s, he has consistently ranked as one of the best-known and most admired of public figures." "In this autobiography he tells the story not just of his political life but of his business career as well - of his earliest commercial days running first a boarding-house and then a hotel in Bayswater; of how in 1962, as a property developer, he was almost forced into bankruptcy; of the way, after a disastrous start, he patiently built up his magazine empire to the point where it is today, one of the largest private companies in the land." "The book offers a number of personal glimpses. He tells of how he nearly died of meningitis at the age of five, of his sensitivity to his relative failure at his public school, of his feeling of vindication in being elected President of the Oxford Union in 1954 and of the subsequent ordeal of being trained as a national serviceman with the Brigade Squad at Caterham. He also writes movingly of his pride and joy, the arboretum at his country estate in Oxfordshire that he began planting twenty years ago."--Jacket.

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Deaglán De Bréadún

This is the first comprehensive analysis of how Sinn Féin has transformed itself from political wing of the Republican movement to a mainstream force in Irish politics. In this book by one of Ireland's leading political journalists, Deaglán de Bréadún provides an incisive account of how the party has arrived at a position, in the space of one generation, where it is in power north of the border and knocking on the door of government in the south.

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Jeffrey Haus

"Historians have typically characterized nineteenth-century French Jewry as largely eager to assimilate, or at the very least passively accommodating to assimilation, with only the most traditional Jews rejecting the trappings of French culture. Through the lens of Jewish primary and rabbinical education, author Jeffrey Haus shows that even integrated French Jews sought to set limits on assimilation and struggled to preserve a sense of Jewish distinctiveness in France. Challenges of Equality argues that Jewish leaders couched their views in terms that the government could understand and accept, portraying a Judaism consistent with the goal of cultural and political unification of the French nation. At the same time, their educational activities asserted the existence of distinctively Jewish cultural space." "Haus shows how French government officials repeatedly used political and financial pressure to advance their own vision of an integrated French Judaism. In response, Jewish leaders focused on the concepts of "utility" and "equality" to erect and manage the boundaries between their institutions and the state, as these were key elements of governmental policy toward religious and educational establishments. Haus examines these issues by comparing the financial and curricular histories of Jewish primary schools run by the Consistory and the central French rabbinical school. Utilizing a variety of sources - including school curricula, rabbinical ordination examinations, government documents and correspondence, state jurisprudential decisions, and the French Jewish press - Challenges of Equality paints a picture of a resilient and persistent French Judaism that adapted and integrated but nevertheless survived." "Scholars of Jewish history, French history, European history, and the history of education will appreciate the detailed look at Jewish integration in France that Haus provides."--BOOK JACKET.