York Times Bestseller Research Articles

Join Us in Indy for AADE’s 39th Annual Meeting and Exhibition

DOI: 10.1177/0145721712452842 T his year’s Annual Meeting and Exhibition will take place in Indianapolis, Indiana, from August 1 through August 4, 2012. The theme, Power of Partnership, is sure to provide diabetes educators with information to expand their roles and create new dimensions for diabetes education. As Sandi Burke stated in the President’s Message, many sessions at this year’s annual meeting will highlight the collaborations that occur every day in our workplaces. Whether we interact with fellow educators, local physicians, community health workers, or health care consultants, we all need to work together to better serve patients. Partnerships mean different things to different people. AADE12 calls for partnerships that include not only educators, clinicians, researchers, but also individuals with diabetes. Successful partnerships reflect the collaboration as a whole among members of the health team, realizing one can do more than any of its individual parts (partners). This year’s General Sessions will be each morning, Wednesday (August 1) through Saturday (August 4). On Friday, August 3, the keynote speaker is Dr Brian Wansink. His talk, “From Mindless Eating to Healthy Eating,” is based on his research and years as Executive Director of the US Dietary Guidelines. Dr Wansink will discuss the myths of mindless eating, illustrated with compelling videos, and speak of small consistent changes in eating each of us can make. On Saturday, August 4, the keynote speaker is Jane Pauley. Her talk, “Your Life Calling,” speaks to how people have reinvented the way they work and live. As a respected journalist for more than 30 years, Jane Pauley (a native of Indianapolis) is a member of the Board of Directors of the Children’s Health Fund and The Mind Trust. She is likewise the author of the New York Times bestseller, Skywriting: A Life Out Of the Blue. This year the American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) is excited about offering a new series of educational workshops. Each session provides 2 continuing education credits (CEs) and includes education topics through various learning formats (interactive, panel discussion), including worksite wellness initiatives, national standards for diabetes self-management education, diabetes and minority populations, health information technology, mobile health technology, and migrant/transitional care. Concurrent breakout sessions are 90-minute presentations on selected topics being offered Wednesday morning through Saturday afternoon. Culinary demonstrations will demonstrate healthy cooking options and share healthy recipe secrets. Product theatre sessions will present research findings on products, offer demonstrations, and highlight new products. All sessions are solely informational to gather more industry knowledge. As always, the Annual Meeting promises to be an exciting opportunity to expand your knowledge, update your knowledge of products and technologies, network and share ideas with colleagues, and renew old friendships and make new ones. Advancing our knowledge means building on foundations of the past and partnering with others to build the future. See you in Indy.

Margaret Sanger: a life of passion

Margaret Sanger became one of the most vocal advocates for birth control at a time when the mere mention of such things was considered not only taboo but also a felony. She pioneered the first family-planning clinic - the forerunner to Planned Parenthood - and became a lightning rod for the cause. In recent years, though, Sanger has been largely cast aside by the movement she spawned. In this lively new biography, the historian Jean H. Baker argues convincingly that Sanger deserves the vaunted place in feminist history she once held. o take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: O.K. For the next year - a year that ended up being Vonnegut's last - Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing - the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut's concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut's works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined

Selected by New York Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year The author of New York Times bestseller Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence. Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened? This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.

Muslim Representations in Two Post-September 2001 American Novels

Several novels have appeared after the September 11 attacks which deal directly or indirectly with the effect of the event on individuals, both inside and outside the United States. Though, the novels often claim to deal with the posttraumatic aftermath of the incident, the writers regularly use Orientalist stereotyping, and it seems that after September 11 these attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs have hardened and even strengthened the old Orientalist discourse. This paper shall focus on Don Delillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist because both novels were New York Times bestsellers and both novelists are prominent figures in American literature. It attempts to examine the way in which the novelists have responded to the September 11, 2001 attacks and how Muslims and their ideologies are represented. The significant point is that though these novels have been written in the twenty-first century, where there has been an increase in contacts and information about Muslims, the writers often use the same cliches and stereotypes about Muslims that have existed since the Middle Ages.

Muslim Representations in Two Post-September 2001 American Novels

Several novels have appeared after the September 11 attacks which deal directly or indirectly with the effect of the event on individuals, both inside and outside the United States. Though, the novels often claim to deal with the posttraumatic aftermath of the incident, the writers regularly use Orientalist stereotyping, and it seems that after September 11 these attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs have hardened and even strengthened the old Orientalist discourse. This paper shall focus on Don Delillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist because both novels were New York Times bestsellers and both novelists are prominent figures in American literature. It attempts to examine the way in which the novelists have responded to the September 11, 2001 attacks and how Muslims and their ideologies are represented. The significant point is that though these novels have been written in the twenty-first century, where there has been an increase in contacts and information about Muslims, the writers often use the same cliches and stereotypes about Muslims that have existed since the Middle Ages.

Testing the Tastemakers: Children’s Literature, Bestseller Lists, and the “Harry Potter Effect”

The bestseller list makes hidden assumptions about genres and taste cultures. The editorial pre-selection of the New York Times bestseller list affects the reception and circulation of various types of books, specifically children’s literature. This essay discusses the power of the bestseller list to determine what will sell well and be accepted as mainstream culture and how its tastemaking capacity has affected the field of children’s literature.

Incognito: the secret lives of the brain

*Why does your foot hit the brake pedal before you are conscious of danger ahead? *Why do you hear your name is mentioned in a conversation that you didn't think you were listening to? *Why is a person whose name begins with J more likely to marry another person whose name begins with J? *Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? *And how is it possible to get angry at yourself: who, exactly, is mad at whom? A thrilling subsurface exploration of the mind and all its contradictions. A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The Organic Food Method and Movement: An Interdisciplinary Reference Review

From popular movies to New York Times bestsellers, organic food is widely acknowledged to be of growing importance. Many community college students are asking: How is organic food different from everything else in the grocery store? What impact does farming have on the environment? How safe is our food? A survey of reference works introduces organic food as a method of producing food and a social movement that values sustainable food, higher levels of nutrition and food safety, and environmentally responsible agriculture. The organic food movement incorporates a variety of subjects and exemplifies the need for interdisciplinary reference work.

A Mean Read

Adolescents' exposure to violence in the media has been associated with increases in aggressive thoughts and behaviors. While violent content has been studied extensively in other media, aggression portrayed in literature has not been assessed in detail. Given the continued popularity of reading among adolescents and the potential impact of content on cognitions and behaviors, this study aims to increase knowledge in this understudied area. Aggressive behavior was coded in forty bestselling adolescent novels on The New York Times Best-Sellers List (time span June–July 2008). Results revealed that adolescents are exposed to a significant number of aggressive acts while reading novels. Relational and verbal forms of aggression were more frequent than physical forms. Most aggression was portrayed as having no consequences. Thus, books represent one potentially overlooked source of exposure to aggressive content. Content guides on books are discussed.

The elements of graphic design: space, unity, page architecture, and type

This very popular design book has been wholly revised and expanded to feature a new dimension of inspiring and counterintuitive ideas to thinking about graphic design relationships.The Elements of Graphic Design, Second Editionis now in full color in a larger, 8 x 10-inch trim size, and contains 40 percent more content and over 750 images to enhance and better clarify the concepts in this thought-provoking resource. The second edition also includes a new section on Web design; new discussions of modularity, framing, motion and time, rules of randomness, and numerous quotes supported by images and biographies. This pioneering work provides designers, art directors, and students--regardless of experience--with a unique approach to successful design. Veteran designer and educator Alex. W. White has assembled a wealth of information and examples in his exploration of what makes visual design stunning and easy to read. Readers will discover White's four elements of graphic design, including how to: define and reveal dominant images, words, and concepts; use scale, color, and position to guide the viewer through levels of importance; employ white space as a significant component of design and not merely as background; and use display and text type for maximum comprehension and value to the reader. Offering a new way to think about and use the four design elements, this book is certain to inspire better design. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

Preface to Jack London Special Section

Christopher McCandless died alone in the Alaskan bush in 1992 at the age of twenty-four. He was a high-achieving student and recent graduate of Emory University who came from a prosperous upper-middle-class family, and his Hiker-Starves-in-the-Wilds-of-Alaska story made ready copy for news outlets across the country. Shortly thereafter an article on McCandless by Jon Krakauer appeared in Outside magazine. The volume of reader response to the article was immense. Many readers condemned him as foolhardy, selfish, or deluded. Other readers praised him as a hero, an adventurer, or a renegade. Kraukauer wrote a book-length account of the McCandless saga, published in 1996 as Into the Wild. It spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list. What, after all, could make better reading for huffily maturing Generation Xers who found themselves, for better or worse, increasingly entangled in the expanding corporate economies of the late 1990s? Didn’t they, too, think seriously about doing the same thing when they were twentytwo? But McCandless did it. Forget the vagaries of postmodernism. This was a flesh and blood journey straight into the heart of adventure. Once inside Krakauer’s narrative one soon discovers that McCandless was a serious reader, and the influences of London, Twain, Melville, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Jeffers, and others played significant roles in shaping his beliefs. Although by birthright he was more of a Tom Sawyer, pirate books and all, McCandless daringly pulled off a Huck Finn and lit out for the territory. Declassing himself, he abandoned the comforts, camaraderie, and materiality of the yuppie meritocracy and commited to what was, for the most part, a re-primitivized, unmediated existence. His quest, no doubt, had levels of intensity that the rest of us “on the grid” are never likely to replicate.

Typological Realism in Contemporary Evangelical Fiction: Tragedy, Eternity, and The Shack

Typological Realism in Contemporary Evangelical Fiction:Tragedy, Eternity, and The Shack Kenneth Paradis (bio) The modern author who writes a novel based typologically on themes from the Bible ... is literally incapacitated by history and his own consciousness from writing out of the faith that was accessible even to the most sophisticated medieval authors. (Conversely,... any modern work that used typology seriously and naively would remain, almost by definition, sub-literary, like most Sunday-school readers.) Theodor Ziolkowsky Every human society requires a "theodicy," an interpretation of the suffering and injustice endemic to the human condition. It is the absence of secular society to provide such, after the retreat of Enlightenment thought, the facile substitutions of consumerist hedonism, and the machinery of the secular therapeutic, that opens the door for a return to the evangelical theodicies. Peter Berger William Paul Young's homiletic novel The Shack is an originally self-published text that, as of September 2010, had over ten million copies in print and had been at number one on the New York Times bestseller list for seventy weeks.1 The Shack's story of self-help and healing through an experiential encounter with Christian doctrine instantiates a mode [End Page 107] of representation (typological realism) that is prominent in evangelical homiletic narrative and fiction and that plays a key role in articulating a contemporary countersecular evangelical perspective or "worldview." Mack, The Shack's protagonist, is a regular guy from the Pacific Northwest who goes on a camping trip with his kids during which his five-year-old-daughter Missy is kidnapped, abused, and eventually murdered by a serial killer at an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Three years later, the profoundly disillusioned Mack receives an enigmatic note in his mailbox signed by "Papa" (his wife's name for God), inviting Mack to "get together" with him at the shack. Confused, and suspecting the killer's involvement, Mack travels to the shack but finds there only bleak reminders of his daughter's brutal murder. Turning to leave while fighting suicidal despair, Mack sees the shack and its environs transform into a paradisal landscape. Inside the now-idyllic cottage, Mack finds God the Father in the form of a motherly African-American woman calling herself "Papa" or "Elousia"; the Holy Spirit as a beautiful, ethereal East Asian woman named "Sarayu"; and, of course, a wise, friendly Jewish carpenter named Jesus. Over the next three days, Mack eats, drinks, works, plays, laughs, cries, and converses with the Three-who-are-One, while also sharing experiences of a more divine nature: watching his dead daughter playing in the heavenly garden that is her true home, walking on water with Jesus, and seeing the spiritual essences of the world laid out before him in blazes of psychedelic colour in a moment when he is given the ability to see some of what God sees. Mack's experiences at the shack—culminating in Papa's taking him into the surrounding mountains to recover Missy's missing remains—help him overcome the trauma of losing his child as well as helping him forgive and be forgiven by his abusive dead father (who God allows him to meet). While returning home after waking up in the once-again disenchanted shack, Mack is badly injured in a car accident. On his recovery, however, he is able to retrace his hike with Papa and finds Missy's remains exactly where he had found them on his enchanted weekend. Finally at peace, Mack asks his friend Willie to write down his story. It is Willie who arranges the novel, and it is his commentary, in the preface and epilogue, that frames Mack's narrative. The Shack is an homiletic novel. Its primary job is to inspire in its reader a transformation toward a more Christian way of life.2 The forms of representation it employs serve that end. As its author explains in "The [End Page 108] Story Behind The Shack," the book emerged from a desire to pass on the theological insights gleaned from years of personal struggle in order to give a true understanding of God's love "to a world that longs, in the deepest...

Librarian as fair witness : a comparison of Heinlein’s futuristic occupation and today’s evolving information professional

There has been a continuing discussion in library literature on the library as place and on the image of librarians in popular media, but there is little information on the librarian as person. The discussion on librarianship as a profession tends to focus on technology and not so much the people, other than the people skills needed in reference or teaching skills needed for instruction. The worth of the individual librarian tends to get lost in the shuffle. Before we disappear into the machine, it is useful to look at other future scenarios and similar occupations, either reality based or fiction. In this particular case, it is interesting to compare librarians to those in an occupation created by a renowned science fiction author. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, his most famous and most controversial novel, is a science fiction classic. The science fiction community recognized it with a Hugo Award, and the book was the first science fiction title to be on the New York Times bestseller list (Stover, 1987, p. 45). Heinlein outlined the novel in 1949 and finished the first draft in 1955 but on the advice of his wife set it aside. It was not published until 1961. The manuscript was edited heavily and an uncut version was published in 1991. Heinlein scholar Russell Blackford has written that the uncut version does not offer anything that dramatically changes the story, though more background is offered in a few places. This author found that to be an accurate statement. References to the novel in this article are to the standard edition; information contained only in the 1991 uncut edition is so marked. While the book takes place in the future, Robert Plank noted that the plot would have progressed without the futuristic gadgetry, and theorized the same about the social and political innovations in the book. However, he did point out the Witness profession as noteworthy (Heinlein, 1961, p. 83). Patterson and Thornton referred to Witnesses as of the most strange and fraught of all Heinlein's creations (Heinlein, 1961, p. 137). According to the online Heinlein Concordance a Witness is a Person rigorously trained to observe, remember, and report without prejudice, distortion, lapses in memory, or personal involvement (Cowan, 2007, Fair p-.X page numbers for all quotes). The quintessential description of what a Witness does or is can be found on p. 100 of the standard Stranger edition: Anne was on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, That house on the hilltop - can you see what color they've painted it? Anne looked, then answered. It's white on this side. Jubal went on to Jill, You see? It doesn't occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King's horses couldn't force her to commit herself ... unless she went there and looked - and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed white after she left. Another example is given on p. 114: Hell's bells, you wouldn't testify that the sun had risen if the day was cloudy. How could I? Somebody might be supplying artificial light above the cloud layer. Witnesses work on a strictly empirical basis resolutely refusing to make assumptions or to allow their thoughts to fill in the blanks in reasoning or visual images. They strive to see what is there without the filters of expectation or social convention. Witnesses appear in only one of Heinlein's works, the aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land, and there is no information on the origin of the profession in published works on Heinlein or in his letters. Witnesses are not examined in the literary criticism of the novel. In fact, in a review of several standard academic databases, such as the MLA International Bibliography, Library Literature, and the Humanities Index, the only article found on the characters is Transversality and the Role of the Library as Witness, by Ross Atkinson, published in the 2005 Library Quarterly. …

Review: Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan and Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders, by William R. Drennan

These days it is difficult to think of Frank Lloyd Wright as other than a star architect and commercial box-office hit. The Guggenheim museum broke some of its own attendance records with its recent exhibition, and an endless supply of books cater to the public's interest in pictures of his work and sensational accounts of his life. Two recent books that focus on a tragic moment in Wright's life are manifestations of this phenomenon.In Loving Frank Nancy Horan, a journalist from Oak Park, Illinois, recounted the love affair between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright that began around 1907 and culminated in her murder in 1914 when Julian Carlton, a servant working for Wright and Mamah, murdered her and six others at their home, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Using the work of scholars, but altering historical fact and inventing dialogue as well as letters, Horan created a romance novel that became a New York Times bestseller. Critics, particularly newspaper journalists, have widely praised the book, and it has sold thousands of copies. So what is wrong with historical fiction that takes liberties to produce a popular novel?Before answering that question I should disclose that I am one of the scholars whose work Horan has purloined. She acknowledged my book, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years as

An edible history of humanity

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol.10, no.2, pp.93–94, issn 1529-3262. © 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press’s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.2.93. Still, gradually, and proving the adaptability of humans, our early relatives became farmers. And so, note both authors, while today there is a huge disconnect between urban and rural worlds, the first “cities” grew from agricultural establishments, successfully undertaking the job of feeding inhabitants until massive growth, population increases (largely the result of a reliable supply of sustenance), and industrialization lessened the priority given to farming and pushed the work of growing food further and further outside the boundaries of the city limits, eventually transforming city dwellers into pure consumers. This is where the similarities between the two books end. Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity is a linear cataloging of pure fact, written mainly for social historians and others fascinated by dates, figures, and hardcore details. Tom Standage is business affairs editor at The Economist, where he oversees the magazine’s business, finance, science, and technology coverage, and the author of five history books, including A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), a New York Times bestseller. He holds a degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford University—which shows in his writing style: slightly dry, somewhat academic, with very little subjective commentary beyond what, when, where, and why something was relevant to what would come next. This is an observation, not a criticism. An Edible History of Humanity is all-encompassing, moving fluidly from one civilization to another, imparting the author’s considerable knowledge to portray significant links between the growing and supplying of food and the world’s major economic, social, and political events. Despite the dryness of Standage’s style, there are wonderful epiphanies within An Edible History of Humanity. The author’s work on the evolution of the potato is fascinating, from the uphill fight to get nearly starving Europeans to eat this unsightly tuber, originally thought to be poisonous, to the potato’s role in saving the Irish from starvation. Standage notes how the failure of the potato crop and subsequent famine triggered waves of immigration and the Blame It on the Grain review essay | joy parks

The healing of America: a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care

A New York Times Bestseller, with an updated explanation of the 2010 Health Reform Bill Bringing to bear his talent for explaining complex issues in a clear, engaging way, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid visits industrialized democracies around the world--France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and beyond--to provide a revelatory tour of successful, affordable universal health care systems. Now updated with new statistics and a plain-English explanation of the 2010 health care reform bill, The Healing of America is required reading for all those hoping to understand the state of health care in our country, and around the world. T. R. Reid's latest book, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System, is also available from Penguin Press.

<i>Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century John R. Pfeiffer P. W. Singer . Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Penguin, 2009. vi + 499 pp. Cloth, $17.00, ISBN: 9781594201981. Paperback, ISBN: 9780143116844. In one Clausewitzian sense war is a technique and policy of governance, and it follows that discussion of war can address utopian theorizing. There is an occasional fume of Clausewitz (invoked four or five times) in P. W. Singer's Wired for War, but Singer puts something in this book for everybody. The effects are of timeliness, disunity, shallowness, and disarming gravitas. The book describes a representative inventory of the new technologies for war and the dilemmas that use of such technology will precipitate. It is also part recruiting poster, part a manipulation of the popular perception of how tax dollars are being spent to enable the continued prosecution of war, and part elegy. Its cover proclaims " New York Times bestseller" (although my back-check couldn't verify this), and it is reviewed in about sixty forums. Wired is timely. Singer's agenda is associated with the Army-sponsored report in late 2009 on neuroscience research on pharmaceutical "fatigue countermeasures" to speed up the physiological repair accomplished in normal human sleep spans, to shorten the spans, "for a payoff in battle [that] would be enormous" (William Saletan, "You: The Updated Owner's Manual," New York Times Book Review, 2 August 2009, 23). It is also related to Mary Favret's War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, 2009). Wired is also, by the way, far better than Charles E. Gannon's Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Settings in American and British Speculative Fiction (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003; reviewed in Utopian Studies 17, no. 3 [June 2006]: 551-53), which Singer does not mention. Serendipitously, Daniel Mendelsohn's analysis of James Cameron's 2010 film Avatar (New York Review, 25 March 2010, 10-12) helps us [End Page 375] understand Wired. Mendelsohn believes that Avatar 's alien "Na'vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of [Cameron's] career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. . . . [The Na'vi are] both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized" (12). In short, the Na'vi are what cyborgs would be if they were organic. Wired is shallow. It covers a lot: "It will cover everything from [part 1—nine chapters] the resulting shifts in how wars are fought [by digitalized mechanisms] and who [still humans] is fighting them to [part 2—thirteen chapters] important questions that our new machine creations are starting to raise in politics, law, and ethics. War just won't be the same" (41). Part 1, "The Change We Are Creating," has chapter titles such as "Introduction: Scenes from a Robot War," "Robotics for Dummies," "To Infinity and Beyond: The Power of Exponential Trends," "Coming Soon to a Battlefield Near You: The Next Wave of Warbots," and "What Inspires Them: Science Fiction's Impact on Science Reality." Part 2, "What Change Is Creating for Us," has chapters titled "'Advanced' Warfare: How We Might Fight with Robots," "Open-Source Warfare: College Kids, Terrorists, and Other New Uses of Robots at War," "The Psychology of Warbots," "Changing the Experience of War and the Warrior," "Digitizing the Laws of War and Other Issues of (Un)Human Rights," "A Robot Revolt? Talking About Robot Ethics," and " Conclusion: The Duality of Robots and Humans." Wired could be an outline for a scholarly conference. There are a number of reservations we can have about the book. Its premise is not seriously original. It is a survey of current and theoretical digital technology designed for military actions by the United States and a summary of the highly predictable social, political, and legal problems that will result from this in the next half century. It repeats the facile claim that science fiction is an important predictor of and source of inspiration for future technological developments. Science fiction does not do this...

False economy: a surprising economic history of the world

*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* Why do some countries succeed while others fail? What causes boom or bust? The World Trade Editor of the FT explains how the world really works. 'A thorough examination of economies from the age of empire to the age of the IMF' The Washington Post Why do oil and diamonds lead to economic disaster more often than boom? Why doesn't Africa grow cocaine? Why might believing in God be good for your balance-sheet? Botswana and Sierra Leone are both blessed with abundant diamonds. Why did Botswana became the world's fastest-growing economy while Sierra Leone suffered a decade of brutal civil war? For the past two hundred years Argentina had enjoyed a vista of economic opportunity almost identical to that of the USA but in 2001 Argentina's government bankrupted itself. Why did the USA succeed while Argentina stalled? Time and again, world leaders have failed to learn the lessons of economic history, and their mistakes continue to have surprising and catastrophic consequences. The path to prosperity is rarely obvious and the sources of success are often unexpected. In False Economy, Alan Beattie uses extraordinary stories of economic triumph and disaster to explain how some countries went wrong while others went right, and why it's so difficult to change course once you're on the path to ruin.

Atheistic Science: The Only Option?

ONE PROFOUND REALITY confronting the contemporary Church is the revolution in science and technology that has occurred over the past several centuries. Scientific and technological advances have transformed the natural world in ways hitherto unimagined. They have also penetrated the very fabric of human culture and challenged our faith. progress of this transformation is not unfolding without conflict, especially between science and religion. In the past several years there has been a new burst of atheistic literature that invokes the authority of science deny the existence of God. (1) Proponents of this viewpoint are becoming increasingly aggressive in their scientistic zeal. authors take methodological naturalism an extreme, adopting it as a metaphysical stance. Recently on the Internet there was a brash advertisement for Amazon's Unholy Trinity, a trio of antireligion books published in 2006 including God Delusion by scientist and avowed atheist Richard Dawkins, Atheist Universe: Why God Didn't Have a Thing Do With It by atheist author David Mills, and Letter a Christian Nation by atheist author Sam Harris (who also wrote End of Faith). (2) express goals of the authors are counter religious forces that they believe are undermining genuine thinking and show God be a delusion; (3) point the way past religion; (4) and to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms. (5) Dawkins goes so far as argue that having faith precludes integrity. In a 2006 article in Time, he states bluntly: Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. (6) pro-atheism campaign of these men is no small effort, and their books are receiving wide readership. Dawkins's book, released in October 2006, was number 4 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller List by December. (7) Harris's book, released in September 2006, was number 7 on the New York Times Bestseller List by October. (8) How is the Church respond these brash claims of atheism and authority? aggressiveness of their claims is in part a reaction against Christian fundamentalism, which in its extreme forms asserts the literal truth of the Bible and denies the validity of certain findings in science, including evolution. In response Christian fundamentalism, Dawkins and others adhere their own kind of atheistic fundamentalism. In his recently published book on evolution and faith, Archbishop Josef Zycinski calls their line of thinking ontological naturalism. (9) Roman Catholic physicist Stephen Barr calls it scientific materialism. (10) Leon Kass, medical doctor, biochemist, and bioethicist, refers it as scientism, meaning a distorted approach the enterprise in which empirical science is embraced as the sole method for understanding the totality of reality. (11) In the face of the polarizing scientism advocated by Dawkins and others, is it possible envision and defend a science that is compatible with faith? Or must the two be at odds? It seems that an integral Christian response should seek clarify the proper place of science and preserve what is good in the enterprise while at the same time countering its excesses. Throughout his pontificate, Pope John Paul II asserted that there is an integral place for science in the Church and that a dialogue between science and theology is essential bridge the divide between them. In an address the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1988, he stated: The unprecedented opportunity we have today is for a common interactive relationship in which each discipline [religion and science] retains its integrity and yet is radically open the discoveries and insights of the other. (12) In union with this approach, this article seeks counter alarming trends in atheism and argue that science is not necessarily a recipe for atheism. …

Panic: the story of modern financial insanity

When it comes to markets, the first deadly sin is greed. In this New York Times bestseller, Michael Lewis is our jungle guide through five of the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history. With his trademark humor and brilliant anecdotes, Lewis paints the mood and market factors leading up to each event, weaves contemporary accounts to show what people thought was happening at the time, and, with the luxury of hindsight, analyzes what actually happened and what we should have learned from experience.