Clearance
Embattled Vote in America
The New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Impeachment shows that gerrymandering and voter suppression have a long history.
"Lichtman's important book...uses history to contextualize the fix we're in today. Each party gropes for advantage by fiddling with the franchise... Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change. With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame."--New York Times Book Review Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. Yet the world's oldest continuously operating democracy guarantees no one, not even its citizens, the right to elect its leaders. For most of U.S. history, suffrage has been a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Economic qualifications were finally eliminated in the nineteenth century, but the ideal of a white man's republic persisted long after that. Today, voter identification laws, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of American citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box. An award-winning historian who has testified in more than ninety voting rights cases, Allan Lichtman gives us the deep history behind today's headlines and shows that calls of voter fraud, political gerrymandering and outrageous attempts at voter suppression are nothing new. The players and the tactics have changed--we don't outright ban people from voting anymore--but the battle and the stakes remain just as high.End of Its Rope
It isn't enough to celebrate the death penalty's demise. We must learn from it.
When Henry McCollum was condemned to death in 1984 in rural North Carolina, death sentences were commonplace. In 2014, DNA tests set McCollum free. By then, death sentences were as rare as lethal lightning strikes. To most observers this national trend came as a surprise. What changed? Brandon Garrett hand-collected and analyzed national data, looking for causes and implications of this turnaround. End of Its Rope explains what he found, and why the story of who killed the death penalty, and how, can be the catalyst for criminal justice reform.
No single factor put the death penalty on the road to extinction, Garrett concludes. Death row exonerations fostered rising awareness of errors in death penalty cases, at the same time that a decline in murder rates eroded law-and-order arguments. Defense lawyers radically improved how they litigate death cases when given adequate resources. More troubling, many states replaced the death penalty with what amounts to a virtual death sentence--life without possibility of parole. Today, the death penalty hangs on in a few scattered counties where prosecutors cling to entrenched habits and patterns of racial bias.
The failed death penalty experiment teaches us how inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments undermine the pursuit of justice. Garrett makes a strong closing case for what a future criminal justice system might look like if these injustices were remedied.
ESSENTIALS OF PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS, REVISED EDITION
Ethically Impossible: STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948
Exploring Our Sun
EYES ON THE OUGHT TO BE (P)
Eyeshot
Scintillating new work from a celebrated contemporary poet.
Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2004)
Runner-up for the ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award (2003)
Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions--those of love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable.
The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the ever-unfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her "Fido, Jolted by Jove" reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: "the world itself is worried." Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: "a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it." This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity.
Forgive
Friction
FROM WATER TO WINE
From Water to Wine explores how Angola has changed since the end of its civil war in 2002. Its focus is on the middle class--defined as those with a house, a car, and an education--and their consumption, aspirations, and hopes for their families. It takes as its starting point what is working in Angola? rather than what is going wrong? and makes a deliberate, political choice to give attention to beauty and happiness in everyday life in a country that has had an unusually troubled history.
Each chapter focuses on one of the five senses, with the introduction and conclusion provoking reflection on proprioception (or kinesthesia) and curiosity. Various media are employed--poetry, recipes, photos, comics, and other textual experiments--to engage readers and their senses. Written for a broad audience, this text is an excellent addition to the study of Africa, the lusophone world, international development, sensory ethnography, and ethnographic writing.