Sit in prison or join the military. The choice is yours. Convicted of a minor traffic violation, Rev Pelletier is conscripted into the Perseus Union Marine Corps . . . for up to a thirty-year term of service. Anxious to get back to his civilian life and job, Rev opts for a shorter term as a Marine Raider taking the fight to the enemy. But with extremely high mortality rates, can he and his friends survive until their term of service is over? Download Sentenced to War now to follow Rev through perilous battles as he fights to hold back the alien invasion. If you're a fan of Old Man's War, Starship Troopers, or Armor, you'll love this military scifi thrill ride.

The revealing story of Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and a political alliance that changed history, from a New York Times–bestselling author. When Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, he gained the support of Joseph Kennedy, a little-known businessman with Wall Street connections. Instrumental in Roosevelt’s victory, their partnership began a longstanding alliance between two of America’s most ambitious power brokers. Kennedy worked closely with FDR as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later as ambassador to Great Britain. But at the outbreak of World War II, sensing a threat to his family and fortune, Kennedy lobbied against American intervention—putting him in direct conflict with Roosevelt’s intentions. Though he retreated from the spotlight to focus on the political careers of his sons, Kennedy’s relationship with Roosevelt would eventually come full circle in 1960, when Franklin Roosevelt Jr. campaigned for John F. Kennedy’s presidential win. With unprecedented access to Kennedy’s private diaries as well as firsthand interviews with Roosevelt’s family and White House aides, New York Times–bestselling author Michael Beschloss—called “the nation’s leading presidential historian” by Newsweek—presents an insightful study in contrasts. Roosevelt, the scion of a political dynasty, had a genius for the machinery of government; Kennedy, who built his own fortune, was a political outsider determined to build a dynasty of his own. From the author of The Conquerors and Presidential Courage, this is a “fascinating account of the complex, ambiguous relationship of two shrewd, ruthless, power-hungry men” (The New York Times Book Review).

Paul Frymer argues provocatively that two-party competition in the United States leads to the marginalization of African Americans and the subversion of democracy. Scholars have long claimed that the need to win elections makes candidates, parties, and government responsive to any and all voters. Frymer shows, however, that party competition is centered around racially conservative white voters, and that this focus on white voters has dire consequences for African Americans. As both parties try to attract white swing voters by distancing themselves from blacks, black voters are often ignored and left with unappealing alternatives. African Americans are thus the leading example of a "captured minority." Frymer argues that our two-party system bears much of the blame for this state of affairs. Often overlooked in current discussions of racial politics, the party system represents a genuine form of institutional racism. Frymer shows that this is no accident, for the party system was set up in part to keep African American concerns off the political agenda. Today, the party system continues to restrict the political opportunities of African American voters, as was shown most recently when Bill Clinton took pains to distance himself from African Americans in order to capture conservative votes and win the presidency. Frymer compares the position of black voters with other social groups--gays and lesbians and the Christian right, for example--who have recently found themselves similarly "captured." Rigorously argued and researched, Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between black voters, political parties, and American democracy.

Uneasy Alliance illuminates the recent search in literary studies for a new interface between textual and contextual readings. Written in tribute to G.A.M. Janssens, the twenty-one essays in the volume exemplify a renewed awareness of the paradoxical nature of literary texts both as works of literary art and as documents embedded in and functioning within a writer’s life and culture. Together they offer fresh and often interdisciplinary perspectives on twentieth-century American writers of more or less established status (Henry James, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros) as well as on those who, for reasons of fashion, politics, ideology, or gender, have been unduly neglected (Booth Tarkington, Julia Peterkin, Robert Coates, Martha Gellhorn, Isabella Gardner, Karl Shapiro, the young Jewish-American writers, Julia Alvarez, and writers of popular crime and detective fiction). Exploring the fruitful interactions and uneasy alliance between literature and ethics, film, biography, gender studies, popular culture, avant-garde art, urban studies, anthropology and multicultural studies, together these essays testify to the ongoing pertinence of an approach to literature that is undogmatic, sensitive and sophisticated and that seeks to do justice to the complex interweavings of literature, culture and biography in twentieth-century American writing.

Psychobiography is often attacked by critics who feel that it trivializes complex adult personalities, "explaining the large deeds of great individuals," as George Will wrote, "by some slight the individual suffered at a tender age--say, 7, when his mother took away a lollipop." Worse yet, some writers have clearly abused psychobiography--for instance, to grind axes from the right (Nancy Clinch on the Kennedy family) or from the left (Fawn Brodie on Richard Nixon)--and others have offered woefully inept diagnoses (such as Albert Goldman's portrait of Elvis Presley as a "split personality" and a "delusional paranoid"). And yet, as Alan Elms argues in Uncovering Lives, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, psychobiography can rival the very best traditional biography in the insights it offers. Elms makes a strong case for the value of psychobiography, arguing in large part from example. Indeed, most of the book features Elms's own fascinating case studies of over a dozen prominent figures, among them Sigmund Freud (the father of psychobiography), B.F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, L. Frank Baum, Vladimir Nabokov, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Henry Kissinger. These profiles make intriguing reading. For example, Elms discusses the fiction of Isaac Asimov in light of the latter's acrophobia (fear of heights) and mild agoraphobia (fear of open spaces)--and Elms includes excerpts from a series of letters between himself and Asimov. He reveals an unintended subtext of The Wizard of Oz--that males are weak, females are strong (think of Scarecrow, Tin Man, the Lion, and the Wizard, versus the good and bad witches and Dorothy herself)--and traces this in part to Baum's childhood heart disease, which kept him from strenuous activity, and to his relationship with his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a distinguished advocate of women's rights. And in a fascinating chapter, he examines the abused childhood of Saddam Hussein, the privileged childhood of George Bush, and the radically different psychological paths that led these two men into the Persian Gulf War. Elms supports each study with extensive research, much of it never presented before--for instance, on how some of the most revealing portions of C.G. Jung's autobiography were deleted in spite of his protests before publication. Along the way, Elms provides much insight into how psychobiography is written. Finally, he proposes clear guidelines for judging high quality work, and offers practical tips for anyone interested in writing in this genre. Written with great clarity and wit, Uncovering Lives illuminates the contributions that psychology can make to biography. Elms's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious and will inspire would-be psychobiographers as well as win over the most hardened skeptics.

With the plight of escalating numbers of refugees around the world growing more desperate every year, the American religious organizations dedicated to helping them are faced with an increasingly complicated relationship with the U.S. government. In this groundbreaking new book, J. Bruce Nichols uncovers some disturbing facts and trends to demonstrate that the traditional separation of church and state in this country is not easily applied to the conduct of American foreign policy. Government has become increasingly dependent on the services of religious relief agencies for the implementation of refugee assistance. These agencies are for their part equally dependent on the government for funds, for strategic assistance, and for the freedom to function in many parts of the world. National security and foreign policy considerations often overwhelm humanitarian concerns. A number of hard questions emerge. Do certain religious groups receive preferential treatment for political reasons? Is the church/state relationship abroad compatible with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom? Have the refugees--and the religious groups helping them--become mere political pawns in the global power struggle? After reviewing the history of U.S. government relations with religious relief agencies, the author closely examines three politically explosive refugee situations: Honduras, Thailand, and the Sudan. As the Sanctuary trials in the United States have demonstrated, treatment of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees has been greatly complicated by the conflicting attitudes of liberal religious groups and the U.S. and Honduran governments. By contrast, an evangelical group working with Laotian refugees in Thailand found itself inadvertently embroiled in U.S. policy debates over Laos and Vietnam. While in the Sudan, Nichols discovers close ties between religious relief organizations and the U.S. government in the surreptitious and extra-legal manueverings to remove the Falashas (Ethiopian Jews) to Israel. Nichols concludes that increasing political and moral disagreement between the government and the religious community now threatens the American tradition of worldwide humanitarian assistance and at the same time mirrors the wider loss of consensus in American foreign policy. He ends on a note of cautious optimism with a proposal for guidelines for responsible future coexistence and cooperation between church and state abroad.

Political Culture (defined as the values, beliefs, and behavioral patterns underlying the political system) has long had an uneasy relationship with political science. Identity politics is the latest incarnation of this conflict. Everyone agrees that culture and identity are important, specifically political culture, is important in understanding other countries and global regions, but no one agrees how much or how precisely to measure it. In this important book, well known Comparativist, Howard J. Wiarda, traces the long and controversial history of culture studies, and the relations of political culture and identity politics to political science. Under attack from structuralists, institutionalists, Marxists, and dependency writers, Wiarda examines and assesses the reasons for these attacks and why political culture went into decline only to have a new and transcendent renaissance and revival in the writings of Inglehart, Fukuyama, Putnam, Huntington and many others. Today, political culture, now updated to include identity politics, stands as one of these great explanatory paradigms in political science, the others being structuralism and institutionalism. Rather than seeing them as diametrically exposed, Howard Wiarda shows how they may be made complementary and woven together in more complex, multicausal explanations. This book is brief, highly readable, provocative and certain to stimulate discussion. It will be of interest to general readers and as a text in courses in international relations, comparative politics, foreign policy, and Third World studies.

The quarterback sends his wide receiver deep. The crowd gasps as he launches the ball. And when he hits his man, the team's fans roar with approval-especially those with the deep pockets. Make no mistake; college football is big business, played with one eye on the score, the other on the bottom line. But was this always the case? Brian M. Ingrassia here offers the most incisive account to date of the origins of college football, tracing the sport's evolution from a gentlemen's pastime to a multi-million dollar enterprise that made athletics a permanent fixture on our nation's campuses and cemented college football's place in American culture. He takes readers back to the late 1800s to tell how schools embraced the sport as a way to get the public interested in higher learning-and then how football's immediate popularity overwhelmed campuses and helped create the beast we know today. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Ingrassia proves that the academy did not initially resist the inclusion of athletics; rather, progressive reformers and professors embraced football as a way to make the ivory tower less elitist. With its emphasis on disciplined teamwork and spectatorship, football was seen as a "middlebrow" way to make the university more accessible to the general public. What it really did was make athletics a permanent fixture on campus with its own set of professional experts, bureaucracies, and ostentatious cathedrals. Ingrassia examines the early football programs at universities like Michigan, Stanford, Ohio State, and others, then puts those histories in the context of Progressive Era culture, including insights from coaches like Georgia Tech's John Heisman and Notre Dame's Knute Rockne. He describes how reforms emerged out of incidents such as Teddy Roosevelt's son being injured on the field and a section of grandstands collapsing at the University of Chicago. He also touches on some of the problems facing current day college football and shows us that we haven't come far from those initial arguments more than a century ago. The Rise of Gridiron University shows us where and how it all began, highlighting college football's essential role in shaping the modern university-and by extension American intellectual culture. It should have wide appeal among students of American studies and sports history, as well as fans of college football curious to learn how their game became a cultural force in a matter of a few decades.