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Diary of a Viagra Fiend
By Jayson Gallaway. 2004
Announcing a major new comic talent -- from dancing in S+M clubs to snorting Viagra, a brilliant, unflinching, and uproarious…
set of stories from the edge of sex. It all starts when "Lolita," Jayson Gallaway's nineteen-year-old girlfriend, delays their connubial bliss by deciding to alphabetize their CD collection. Little does she know, however, that Gallaway has recently ingested Viagra to see what happens. Well, the entire city of San Francisco can see what's happened -- for God's sake, it's hard to miss. But by the time the CDs have been arranged, the light of morning isn't the only thing that's soft. So Gallaway does what any self-respecting lover would do: He crushes the last little blue pill and snorts it. Though it "burns like nothing I've ever snorted in my life," the moment of madness leads to " a physical congress that is indeed the stuff of legend. "And so begins Jayson Gallaway's hilarious ride around his libido, a titillating, tumultuous, and downright funny trek with stops on the TV show 20/20, quality time with the San Francisco fire department and their metal cutter, at Burning Man, and in a slew of sex and S+M clubs. By the time we reach his attempt to donate sperm (for financial gain, you understand), we're almost expecting his mom to call. And then she does so, right in the mid-tug. "Be a good boy and God Bless," she says, before hanging up. With unmatched candor and an eye for side-splitting one-liners, Jayson Gallaway proves himself to be a sort of David Sedaris of the bedroom. Diary of a Viagra Fiend is a stupendously funny debut from a passionately outspoken humorist.Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine
By Thomas H. Lee. 2013
Since the 1950s, the death rate from heart attacks has plunged from 35 percent to about 5 percent--and fatalistic attitudes…
toward this disease and many others have faded into history. Much of the improved survival and change in attitudes can be traced to the work of Eugene Braunwald, MD. In the 1960s, he proved that myocardial infarction was not a "bolt from the blue" but a dynamic process that plays out over hours and thus could be altered by treatment. By redirecting cardiology from passive, risk-averse observation to active intervention, he helped transform not just his own field but the culture of American medicine. Braunwald's personal story demonstrates how the forces of history affected the generation of researchers responsible for so many medical advances in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1938 Nazi occupiers forced his family to flee Vienna for Brooklyn. Because of Jewish quotas in medical schools, he was the last person admitted to his class, but went on to graduate number one. When the Doctor Draft threatened to interrupt his medical training during the Korean War, he joined the National Institutes of Health instead of the Navy, and there he began the research that made him the most influential cardiologist of his time. In Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine, Thomas H. Lee offers insights that only authoritative firsthand interviews can provide, to bring us closer to this iconic figure in modern medicine.The Whole
By John Reed. 2005
From John Reed, author of the controversial Orwell parody,Snowball's Chance,comes a subversive satire of modern culture, the complete lack thereof,…
and a lost generation that no one even tried to look for. In the middle of America's heartland, a young boy digs a small hole in the ground. . . which grows into a big hole in the ground. . . which then proceeds to drag the boy, his parents, his dog, and most of their house into a deep void. Then, as abruptly as the hole started growing, it stops. So begins the first in a series of events that takes the beautiful-if-not-brainy Thing on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious Hole. Inspired by visions, signs, and an unlimited supply of pink cocktails served by an ever-lurking "Black Rabbit," Thing and her dogged production crew travel around America, encountering Satanists, an Extraterrestrial/Christian cult group, and a surprisingly helpful phone psychic. Their search for answers could very well decide the fate of the world as they know it. But the more Thing learns about the Hole, her shocking connection to it, and the mind-boggling destiny that awaits her, the more she realizes that human civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be -- and that it's just about time to start over.The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
By Suze Orman, Terry Ryan. 2001
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry,…
and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Stepping back into a time when fledgling advertising agencies were active partners with consumers, and everyday people saw possibility in every coupon, Terry Ryan tells how her mother kept the family afloat by writing jingles and contest entries. Mom's winning ways defied the Church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of housewives. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay when it came to securing a happy home for her six sons and four daughters. Evelyn, who would surely be a Madison Avenue executive if she were working today, composed her jingles not in the boardroom, but at the ironing board. By entering contests wherever she found them -- TV, radio, newspapers, direct-mail ads -- Evelyn Ryan was able to win every appliance her family ever owned, not to mention cars, television sets, bicycles, watches, a jukebox, and even trips to New York, Dallas, and Switzerland. But it wasn't just the winning that was miraculous; it was the timing. If a toaster died, one was sure to arrive in the mail from a forgotten contest. Days after the bank called in the second mortgage on the house, a call came from the Dr Pepper company: Evelyn was the grand-prize winner in its national contest -- and had won enough to pay the bank. Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. From her frenetic supermarket shopping spree -- worth $3,000 today -- to her clever entries worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, the story of this irrepressible woman whose talents reached far beyond her formidable verbal skills is told in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit will triumph over the poverty of circumstance.The Smart Money: How the World's Best Sports Bettors Beat the Bookies out of Millions
By Michael Konik. 2006
A riveting inside look at the lucrative world of professional high-stakes sports betting by a journalist who lived a secret…
life as a key operative in the world's most successful sports gambling ring. When journalist Michael Konik landed an interview with Rick "Big Daddy" Matthews, the largest bet he'd placed on a sporting event was $200. Konik, an expert blackjack and poker player, was no stranger to Vegas. But Matthews was in a different league: the man was rumored to be the world's smartest sports bettor, the mastermind behind "the Brain Trust," a shadowy group of gamblers known for their expertise in beating the Vegas line. Konik had heard the word on the street -- that Matthews was a snake, a conniver who would do anything to gain an edge. But he was also brilliant, cunning, and charming. And when he asked Konik if he'd like to "make a little money" during the football season, the writer found himself seduced . . . So began Michael Konik's wild ride as an operative of the elite Brain Trust. InThe Smart Money, Konik takes readers behind the veil of secrecy shrouding the most successful sports betting operation in America, bypassing the myths and the rumors, going all the way to its innermost sanctum. He reveals how they -- and he -- got rich by beating the Vegas lines and, ultimately, the multimillion-dollar offshore betting circuit. He details the excesses and the betrayals, the horse-trading and the paranoia, that are the perks and perils of a lifestyle in which staking inordinate sums of money on the outcome of a single event -- sometimes as much as $1 million on a football game -- is a normal part of doing business.Bad Boy
By Ronin Ro. 2001
This is a tale of friendship, greed, and betrayal in the music industry -- and a definitive history of America's…
biggest rap mogul. No one knows more about creating hits than Sean "Puffy" Combs. For years he virtually ran hip-hop. It seemed the perfect arrangement: "Puffy" provided the sounds and obsessive attention to detail while the Notorious B.I.G. promoted an image that kept rap fans happy. It should have lasted forever, but "Biggie" was murdered at the height of his career -- and "Puffy"'s ascension to superstardom ushered in an age of disloyalty and deception that exploded into one of the greatest debacles in the history of the music industry. Through interviews with label insiders, grand jury testimony, and other sources, America's preeminent rap journalist Ronin Ro reveals the true story of "Puffy" addresses the larger issues that shaped the man and the industry explains how Bad Boy both helped and destroyed hip-hop and R&B music details why some artists "Puffy" created ultimately left his Bad Boy family in disgust. At once an intimate history and a portrait of an era, Bad Boy shows readers exactly how Combs lost his strangle-hold over the multibillion-dollar rap music industry. The story of Bad Boy Entertainment is the story of the American Dream, an up-close and personal account of the people, the money, the creative process that made it all come true, and the young mogul who caused the dream to fall apart. In this hip-hop tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, readers finally learn the story that Sean "Puffy" Combs does not want them to know.The Wealth of My Mother's Wisdom
By Terrence Jenkins. 2013
"It's amazing how much my mom did on my behalf. As a seventeen-year-old single mom with relatively little support and…
all the chips stacked against her, she was able to provide an incredible amount of support for me. Her lessons enriched my spirit, my emotions, and my relationship with God. " When Lisa, a seventeen-year-old from Queens, New York, found out she was pregnant, she knew she only had one choice—to keep the child and give him the best life she could. That baby was Terrence Jenkins, better known to the world as Terrence J. From hosting gigs on BET's 106 and Park and E! News to roles in some of Hollywood's biggest movies, Terrence J is living a life he could have only imagined when he was a young boy. But it was the lessons he learned from his mother that helped make him a man—lessons about sacrifice, courage, loyalty, dreams, and perseverance. Through her words and her actions, Lisa showed Terrence the right path. From an early age Terrence's mother pushed him to succeed and led by example. Most important, she put her son first—even if it meant leaving behind the only life she had ever known in New York City in search of a safer environment for her son, having the drive to go back to school to learn a new skill, or having the courage to start her own business and build it from the ground up. Her drive eventually became Terrence's drive. Inspirational, funny, current, and down-to-earth, The Wealth of My Mother's Wisdom offers advice for a new generation. With stories, lessons, and advice from one of the top young names in Hollywood, along with input from some of his famous friends like Kevin Hart, Ludacris, T. I. , Trey Songz, and Laz Alonso, Terrence J offers a positive, powerful message: with a strong family bond, the possibilities are endless.NITPICKER'S GUIDE FOR DEEP SPACE (NEXT)
By Phil Farrand. 1996
Every episode of the first four seasons of equipment oddities, weird science, strange but true observations, and nutty technical difficulties…
for discriminating fans of Deep Space Nine.Commanders Log, DS9: Star Date 46379.1: Bajor below. The cosmos above. Bloopers Everywhere!How long is the wormhole? In "Emissary," it is 70,000 light years. Four episodes later Sisko says it is 90,000. Better check the odometer, Sisko!Does the Space Station rotate? Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't! Look at the stars in the windows...Now that NextGen is history, the time has come to take a leap through hyperspace and land on Deep Space Nine. It's unexplored territory for nitpicking, the ultimate challenge for discriminating fans. This guide brings you the scoop on Deep Space Nine--the good, the bad, and the Ferengi. Author Phil Farrand (with a little help from his Trekker friends) has had his VCR in warp drive and surveyed every DS9 episode of the first four seasons for the glitches, gaffs, and goofs that neither the station's engineers nor the show's writers have solved. Sit yourself down with this guide in one hand, your remote control in the other, and see for yourself what the wormhole has wrought.Noises in the Blood
By Carolyn Cooper. 1993
The language of Jamaican popular culture--its folklore, idioms, music, poetry, song--even when written is based on a tradition of sound,…
an orality that has often been denigrated as not worthy of serious study. In Noises in the Blood, Carolyn Cooper critically examines the dismissed discourse of Jamaica's vibrant popular culture and reclaims these cultural forms, both oral and textual, from an undeserved neglect. Cooper's exploration of Jamaican popular culture covers a wide range of topics, including Bob Marley's lyrics, the performance poetry of Louise Bennett, Mikey Smith, and Jean Binta Breeze, Michael Thelwell's novelization of The Harder They Come, the Sistren Theater Collective's Lionheart Gal, and the vitality of the Jamaican DJ culture. Her analysis of this cultural "noise" conveys the powerful and evocative content of these writers and performers and emphasizes their contribution to an undervalued Caribbean identity. Making the connection between this orality, the feminized Jamaican "mother tongue," and the characterization of this culture as low or coarse or vulgar, she incorporates issues of gender into her postcolonial perspective. Cooper powerfully argues that these contemporary vernacular forms must be recognized as genuine expressions of Jamaican culture and as expressions of resistance to marginalization, racism, and sexism. With its focus on the continuum of oral/textual performance in Jamaican culture, Noises in the Blood, vividly and stylishly written, offers a distinctive approach to Caribbean cultural studies.African American Firsts
By Joan Potter. 2009
Did you know that. . . Ralph Bunche was the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Tony…
Dungy was the first African American NFL coach to win a Super Bowl game. Eric Holder became the first African American to serve as United States Attorney General. Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie were the first African Americans to win Grammy awards. An African American doctor performed the first open-heart surgery. Excluded from history books, overlooked in classrooms, and neglected by media, African Americans have long been denied an accurate picture of their contributions to our nation, from colonial days to the present. But times have changed and the record will be set straight. From the inventor of the traffic light and the gas mask to winners of an Oscar and the Olympic gold, this authoritative resource reveals over 450 "firsts" by African Americans--wonderful accomplishments achieved often despite poverty, discrimination, and racism. Leaders in government, entertainment, education, science and medicine, the law, military, and in the business world, African Americans have made their mark. African American Firsts is a clear reflection of that prideful legacy, and a signpost to an even greater future. "African American Firsts works, works well, and works brilliantly. " --St. Louis Post-Dispatch "For browsing or serious queries on great achievements by blacks in America. " --Booklist "Fascinating. . . an excellent source for browsing and for locating facts that are hard to find elsewhere. " --School Library Journal "Reveals African American history as Potter had never been taught in predominantly white schools. " --Publishers Weekly "I recommend this book, a tool with innumerable possibilities which will help individuals understand. . . the contributions and inventions of African Americans. " --The late Dr. Betty Shabazz Over 75 Pages of Photographs Fully Revised and Updated Joan Potters nonfiction writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, which published more than fifty of her articles. She is the co-author of two books: The Book of Adirondack Firsts, and the childrens book, African Americans Who Were First. Her personal essays appear in the anthologies Rooted in Rock, Living North Country, and Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation, and in the Syracuse University literary journal, Stone Canoe. She has led writing workshops for Adirondack women and prison inmates, and has been teaching a memoir class since 1998 at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York.Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion
By Aniko Bodroghkozy. 2001
Critics often claim that prime-time television seemed immune--or even willfully blind--to the landmark upheavals rocking American society during the 1960s.…
Groove Tube is Aniko Bodroghkozy's rebuttal of this claim. Filled with entertaining and enlightening discussions of popular shows of the time--such as The Monkees, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Mod Squad--this book challenges the assumption that TV programming failed to consider or engage with the decade's youth-lead societal changes. Bodroghkozy argues that, in order to woo an increasingly lucrative baby boomer audience, television had to appeal to the social and political values of a generation of young people who were enmeshed in the hippie counterculture, the antiwar movement, campus protests, urban guerilla action--in general, a culture of rebellion. She takes a close look at the compromises and negotiations that were involved in determining TV content, as well as the ideological difficulties producers and networks faced in attempting to appeal to a youthful cohort so disaffected from dominant institutions. While programs that featured narratives about hippies, draft resisters, or revolutionaries are examined under this lens, Groove Tube doesn't stop there: it also examines how the nation's rebellious youth responded to these representations. Bodroghkozy explains how, as members of the first "TV generation," some made sense of their societal disaffection in part through their childhood experience with this powerful new medium. Groove Tube will interest sociologists, American historians, students and scholars of television and media studies, and others who want to know more about the 1960s.Detour
By Lizzie Simon. 2002
A finely wrought memoir of mental health, Detour takes a genre explored by Susanna Kaysen and Kay Redfield Jamison and…
propels it in a revelatory and rebellious new direction. Detour is the extraordinary first book by Lizzie Simon, a twenty-three-year-old woman with bipolar disorder. We meet her as she is set to abandon her successful career as a theatrical producer in New York City, with plans to hit the road and find other bipolars like herself -- young, ambitious, opinionated, and truth-seeking. Her goal: to speak with them candidly without judgment, fear, or the slightest trace of anything clinical or jargon-laden. She wants their stories in their words. But after falling in love with her first interviewee, a troubled millionaire, the truth and the path become increasingly difficult to find. She indeed finds inspiring bipolars. Marissa, a twenty-something African-American adoptee; Jan, a popular rock 'n' roll radio deejay and mother of two; Matt, a quiet college student from the South. Each is resilient, wise, healthy, and hopeful. Yet each harbors stories of mania and depression that defy the limits of human experience and survival. But if she's achieving what she set out to do, then why does she feel more alien and alone than ever? Part road trip, part love story, part mystery, Simon has created a heartbreaking narrative of her cross-country quest. With brave humor, Simon writes guilelessly about herself, her past, and her search for "a herd of her own." She explores that shifting gray area where illness and identity intersect and blur, with the eye of an insider and the heart and soul of a survivor. Accessible and unique, Detour not only opens an intimate window on the day-to-day condition of living with a mood disorder, it also speaks to our universally human struggle to become whole.American Cocktail
By George Hutchinson, Anita Reynolds, Howard M. Miller. 2014
This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place…
in the most interesting times. Of racially mixed heritage, Anita Reynolds was proudly African American but often passed for Indian, Mexican, or Creole. Actress, dancer, model, literary critic, psychologist, but above all free-spirited provocateur, she was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an "American cocktail. " One of the first black stars of the silent era, she appeared in Hollywood movies with Rudolph Valentino, attended Charlie Chaplin's anarchist meetings, and studied dance with Ruth St. Denis. She moved to New York in the 1920s and made a splash with both Harlem Renaissance elites and Greenwich Village bohemians. An emigre in Paris, she fell in with the Left Bank avant garde, " befriending Antonin Artaud, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso. Next, she took up residence as a journalist in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and witnessed firsthand the growing menace of fascism. In 1940, as the Nazi panzers closed in on Paris, Reynolds spent the final days before the French capitulation as a Red Cross nurse, afterward making a mad dash for Lisbon to escape on the last ship departing Europe. In prose that perfectly captures the globetrotting nonchalance of its author, American Cocktail" presents a stimulating, unforgettable self-portrait of a truly extraordinary woman.Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial
By Parama Roy. 2010
In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food…
are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged. Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi's vegetarianism, examines the "famine fictions" of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau
By Antoinette Burton. 2007
Santha Rama Rau was one of the best known South Asian writers in postwar America. Born into India's elite in…
1923, Rama Rau has lived in the United States since the 1940s. Although she is no longer well known, she was for several decades a popular expert on India. She provided an insider's view of Indian cultures, traditions, and history to an American public increasingly aware of the expanded role of the United States on the world stage. Between 1945 and 1970, Rama Rau published half a dozen books, including travelogues, novels, a memoir, and a Time-Life cookbook; she was a regular contributor to periodicals such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, McCall's, and Reader's Digest. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Rama Rau, historian Antoinette Burton opens Rama Rau's career into an examination of orientalism in the postwar United States, the changing idioms of cosmopolitanism in the postcolonial era, and the afterlife of British colonialism in the American public sphere. Burton describes how Rama Rau's career was shaped by gendered perceptions of India and "the East" as well as by the shifting relationships between the United States, India, Pakistan, and Great Britain during the Cold War. Exploring how Rama Rau positioned herself as an expert on both India and the British empire, Burton analyzes the correspondence between Rama Rau and her Time-Life editors over the contents of her book The Cooking of India (1969), and Rama Rau's theatrical adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, which played on Broadway in 1961 and was the basis for David Lean's 1985 film. Burton assesses the critical reception of Rama Rau's play as well as her correspondence with Forster and Lean.Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott
By Horace Tapscott. 2001
Songs of the Unsung is the autobiography of Los Angeles jazz musician and activist Horace Tapscott (1934-1999). A pianist who…
ardently believed in the power of music to connect people, Tapscott was a beloved and influential character who touched many yet has remained unknown to the majority of Americans. In addition to being "his" story, Songs of the Unsung is the story of Los Angeles's cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century, of the origins of many of the most important avant-garde musicians still on the scene today, and of a rich and varied body of music. Tapscott's narrative covers his early life in segregated Houston, his move to California in 1943, life as a player in the Air Force band in the early fifties, and his travels with the Lionel Hampton Band. He reflects on how the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (the "Ark"), an organization he founded in 1961 to preserve and spread African and African-American music, eventually became the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension--a group that not only performed musically but was active in the civil rights movement, youth education, and community programs. Songs of the Unsung also includes Tapscott's vivid descriptions of the Watts neighborhood insurrection of 1965 and the L. A. upheavals of 1992, interactions with both the Black Panthers and the L. A. P. D. , his involvement in Motown's West Coast scene, the growth of his musical reputation abroad, and stories about many of his musician-activist friends, including Billy Higgins, Don Cherry, Buddy Collette, Arthur Blythe, Lawrence and Wilber Morris, Linda Hill, Elaine Brown, Stanley Crouch, and Sun Ra. With a foreword by Steven Isoardi, a brief introduction by actor William Marshall, a full discography of Tapscott's recordings, and many fine photographs, Songs of the Unsung is the inspiring story of one of America's most unassuming twentieth-century heroes.Ever After
By William Wharton. 1995
"I've become convinced the physical life we must live out is but ephemeral. It gives me much comfort and has…
allowed for new experiences of a spiritual nature I've never had before. " -William Wharton, from the Epilogue In August of 1988, heavy black smoke engulfed an Oregon highway, causing a massive 23-car pileup that claimed the lives of novelist William Wharton's 36-year-old daughter, her husband, and their two infant daughters. They'd been victims of field burning, a routine agricultural practice, and were burned alive in their van. How could such a thing happen? And how could a father come to terms with such a loss? Ever After, Wharton's first memoir, is his search for answers to these questions, written with the inspired simplicity that won him great acclaim for his novels.Poor Man's Feast
By Elissa Altman. 2013
From James Beard Award-winning writer Elissa Altman comes a story that marries wit to warmth, and flavor to passion. Born…
and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn't turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.But love does strange things to people, and when Elissa met Susan -- a small-town Connecticut Yankee with parsimonious tendencies and a devotion to simple living -- it would change Elissa's relationship with food, and the people who taught her about it, forever. With tender and often hilarious honesty (and 27 delicious recipes), Poor Man's Feast is a universal tale of finding sustenance and peace in a world of excess and inauthenticity, and shows us how all our stories are inextricably bound up with what, and how, we feed ourselves and those we love.Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism
By Jonathan Bolton. 2012
"Worlds of Dissent" analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with…
a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents. " Their personal and political experiences-diverse, uncertain, nameless-have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Vaclav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West-including Ludvik Vaculik, whose 1980 diary "The Czech Dream Book" is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. "Worlds of Dissent" offers a rare opportunity to understand the texture of dissent in a closed society.Launching Science: Science Opportunities Provided by NASA's Constellation System
By National Research Council of the National Academies. 2009
In January 2004 NASA was given a new policy direction known as the Vision for Space Exploration. That plan, now…
renamed the United States Space Exploration Policy, called for sending human and robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. In 2005 NASA outlined how to conduct the first steps in implementing this policy and began the development of a new human-carrying spacecraft known as Orion, the lunar lander known as Altair, and the launch vehicles Ares I and Ares V. Collectively, these are called the Constellation System. In November 2007 NASA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to evaluate the potential for new science opportunities enabled by the Constellation System of rockets and spacecraft. The NRC committee evaluated a total of 17 mission concepts for future space science missions. Of those, the committee determined that 12 would benefit from the Constellation System and five would not. This book presents the committee's findings and recommendations, including cost estimates, a review of the technical feasibility of each mission, and identification of the missions most deserving of future study.