The gifts of the Jews

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Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries

Emanating from a colloquium held at Louisiana State University entitled "Intertextuality and Civilization in the Americas," this volume features some of the best minds now writing in comparative and interdisciplinary fields. Through lively discussions of topics ranging from Sigmund Freud to Zora Neale Hurston, from Christopher Columbus to the Holocaust, and including latter-day cultural icons such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the contributors create a stimulating dialogue on the crucial role of the poetic imagination in shaping the identity of civilizations. Together, the essays offer a full consideration of cultural identity and bring to the fore the difficult question of the larger responsibilities that identity entails. As Bainard Cowan illustrates in his perceptive introduction, in both the past and the future of the Americas, in moments of foundation as well as of conflict and dispersal, there has been or will be present the recurrent need for mythic and poetic understanding. An unusually timely work, Poetics of the Americas skillfully addresses the crises that the world faces in the confrontations of cultures, traditions, and peoples.

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Stephen M. Younger

From his years at Los Alamos and the Nevada test site to his meetings with nuclear arms experts in Moscow, former weapons designer Stephen M. Younger has witnessed firsthand the making of nuclear policy. With a deep understanding of both the technology and the politics behind nuclear weapons, he guides us from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War and into the present day, illuminating how nuclear weapons fit into our globalized, war-plagued world. Does the Unites States genuinely need a massive stockpile in an era of precision bombs and missile defense? Under what circumstances might we need nuclear weapons in the future? How does the proliferation of weapons in the hands of other nations affect our own nuclear policy?--From publisher description.

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Philip Collins

Camels, Luckies, Pall Malls, Chesterfields - these cigarette brands were once as familiar as the movie stars and sports heroes (and future presidents) who endorsed them. In the decade following World War I, smoking bespoke sophistication, elegance, and glamour. It was a style statement as emphatic as clothes and cars. Accordingly, the smoker needed accessories that elevated this simple act to new status and importance. Manufacturers were only too happy to supply the necessary products and, with their advertisers, to create new needs. Now, in Smokerama, nostalgia buffs, collectors, and designers will find superb samples of these fashionable and sometimes humorous objects. The inventiveness is beguiling - engraved Zippo lighters, ashtrays emblazoned with tobacco company logos, trick cigarette lighters that send a spark arcing between the horns of a devil, and books of matches with their bland or bizarre messages - each played their part in the art of smoking. Accompanied by brief, informative captions, the intriguing pieces arrayed in this splendid photographic collection convey exactly the importance that smoking once had for millions of Americans and provide a visual documentation of America's former favorite pastime.

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Williamson Murray, Robert H. Scales, Jr

An in-depth analysis of the coalition invasion of Iraq, up to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. Drawing on their extensive expertise as military historians, the authors assess the opposing aims of the Coalition forces and the Iraqi regime and explain the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of infantry and air command, as British and American troops moved into Basra and Baghdad. They simultaneously step back to examine long-running debates within the U.S. Defense Department about the proper uses of military power and probe the strategic implications of those debates for America's buildup to this war. Surveying the immense changes that have occurred in America's armed forces between the Gulf conflicts of 1991 and 2003 -- changes in doctrine as well as weapons -- this volume reveals critical meanings and lessons about the new "American way of war" as it has unfolded in Iraq.