From science fiction legend Cixin Liu, theNew York Times bestselling and award-winning author ofThe Three-Body Problem, comes a vision of the future that reads "like Ursula K Le Guin rewritingThe Lord of the Flies for the quantum age." (NPR). In those days, Earth was a planet in space. In those days, Beijing was a city on Earth. On this night, history as known to humanity came to an end. Eight light years away, a star has died, creating a supernova event that showers Earth in deadly levels of radiation. Within a year, everyone over the age of thirteen will die. And so the countdown begins. Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge needed to keep the world running. But when the world is theirs, the last generation may not want to continue the legacy left to them. And in shaping the future however they want, will the children usher in an era of bright beginnings or final mistakes? "This audacious and ultimately optimistic early work will give Liu's English-reading fans a glimpse at his evolution as a writer and give any speculative fiction reader food for deep thought." --Shelf Awareness
"Sometimes ideas change the world. This astonishing, miraculous, shattering, inspiring book captures the origins and the arc of the movement for sex equality. It's a book whose time has come--always, but perhaps now more than ever." --Cass Sunstein, coauthor of Nudge Under certain conditions, small simple actions can produce large and complex "butterfly effects." Butterfly Politics shows how Catharine A. MacKinnon turned discrimination law into an effective tool against sexual abuse--grounding and predicting the worldwide #MeToo movement--and proposes concrete steps that could have further butterfly effects on women's rights. Thirty years after she won the U.S. Supreme Court case establishing sexual harassment as illegal, this timely collection of her previously unpublished interventions on consent, rape, and the politics of gender equality captures in action the creative and transformative activism of an icon. "MacKinnon adapts a concept from chaos theory in which the tiny motion of a butterfly's wings can trigger a tornado half a world away. Under the right conditions, she posits, small actions can produce major social transformations." --New York Times "MacKinnon [is] radical, passionate, incorruptible and a beautiful literary stylist... Butterfly Politics is a devastating salvo fired in the gender wars... This book has a single overriding aim: to effect global change in the pursuit of equality." --The Australian "Sexual Harassment of Working Women was a revelation. It showed how this anti-discrimination law--Title VII--could be used as a tool... It was the beginning of a field that didn't exist until then." --U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity. Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.
Sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on? In his powerful new novel, Charles Frazier returns to the time and place of Cold Mountain, vividly bringing to life the chaos and devastation of the Civil War Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history--culpable regardless of her intentions. The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives with "bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit." Intimate in its detailed observations of one woman's tragic life and epic in its scope and power, Varina is a novel of an American war and its aftermath. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences.
This study probes the American religious press between 1943 and 1945 to determine what was reported about Nazi death camps. Catholic and Protestant periodicals between 1945 and 1949 are also examined to evaluate the impact that the Holocaust had on the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. - How much did American Catholics and Protestants know about Nazi persecution of Jews? - When did the American Christian press begin to report on the existence of death camps? - If Protestant and Catholic periodicals described the killing of Jews by the Nazis, was any pressure put on the United States government to stop the murders? (bomb rail lines leading to Auschwitz) - Did the religious press portray problems of survivors of the Holocaust? - Did the press carry any editorials or articles in support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine for Holocaust refugees? William Camp earned a Doctor of Arts degree from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Camp served as Vice President and Provost of Luzerne County Community College in Pennsylvania before returning to a position as professor of History and Sociology. After receiving a summer Fulbright Scholarship to the Netherlands, he led college students on tours of historical sites in Western Europe on numerous occasions. Since retiring, Bill and his wife Ann spend time in Naples, Florida reading, writing, playing tennis and enjoying time with their four grandchildren.
A "powerful and indispensable" (Gerald Markowitz) look at the devastating consequences of environmental racism -- and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities. Did you know... Middle-class African American households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than those of very poor white households with incomes below $10,000. When swallowed, a lead-paint chip no larger than a fingernail can send a toddler into a coma -- one-tenth of that amount will lower his IQ. Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American. From injuries caused by lead poisoning to the devastating effects of atmospheric pollution, infectious disease, and industrial waste, Americans of color are harmed by environmental hazards in staggeringly disproportionate numbers. This systemic onslaught of toxic exposure and institutional negligence causes irreparable physical harm to millions of people across the country-cutting lives tragically short and needlessly burdening our health care system. But these deadly environments create another insidious and often overlooked consequence: robbing communities of color, and America as a whole, of intellectual power. The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. She takes apart the spurious notion of intelligence as an inherited trait, using copious data that instead point to a different cause of the reported African American-white IQ gap: environmental racism - a confluence of racism and other institutional factors that relegate marginalized communities to living and working near sites of toxic waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as chief agents influencing intelligence to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected -- and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.
Early results on election night suggested that Democrats had failed to make significant gains in the 2018 midterms. After all the votes were counted, a blue wave crashed on American electoral politics as Democrats won the House the Representatives and made significant gains at the state and local levels. In this book, Larry Sabato and Kyle Kondik bring together respected journalists and academics from across the political spectrum to examine every facet of the 2018 election, and what its outcome portends for our national politics and the coming 2020 presidential election. In frank, accessible prose, each author offers insight that goes beyond the headlines, and dives into the underlying forces and shifts that drove the election from its earliest developments to its eventual conclusion, long after the polls closed. Contributions by Alan I. Abramowitz, Matt Barreto, David Byler, Rhodes Cook, James Hohmann, Theodore Johnson, Kyle Kondik, Albert Morales, Diana Owen, Madelaine Pisani, Joshua T. Putnam, Larry Sabato, Gary Segura, Emily C. Singer, Sean Trende, Michael Toner, and Karen Trainer.
The following bibliographies are an alphabetical listing by author of all Wilkes University graduate theses dissertations, separated by degree, cataloged by the E.S. Farley Library, and held in University Archives. Contact a librarian at the Reference Desk on the first floor to gain access to these titles. New theses and dissertations are automatically added to this list as they are received and cataloged by the Library.