Clearance

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.

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.

In this new verse translation of one of the great works of French literature, Dorothy Gilbert captures the vivacity, wit, and grace of the first known Arthurian romance. "Erec and Enide" is the story of the quest and coming of age of a young knight, an illustrious member of Arthur's court, who must learn to balance the demands of a masculine public life--tests of courage, skill, adaptability, and mature judgment--with the equally urgent demands of the private world of love and marriage. We see his wife, Enide, develop as an exemplar of chivalry in the female, not as an Amazon, but as a brave, resolute, and wise woman. Composed ca. 1170, "Erec and Enide" masterfully combines elements of Celtic legend, classical and ecclesiastical learning, and French medieval culture and ideals.
In choosing to write in rhymed octosyllabic couplets-Chretien's prosodic pattern-Dorothy Gilbert has tried to reproduce what so often gets lost in prose or free verse translations: the precise and delicate meter; the rhyme, with its rich possibilities for emphasis, nuance, puns and jokes; and the "mantic power" implicit in proper names. The result will enable the scholar who cannot read Old French, the student of literature, and the general reader to gain a more sensitive and immediate understanding of the form and spirit of Chretien's poetry, and to appreciate the more Chretien's great contribution to European literature.

This trusted practitioner resource and text helps the busy clinician find the right psychiatric diagnosis and avoid the many pitfalls that lead to errors. Covering every disorder routinely encountered in clinical practice, Allen Frances provides the ICD-9-CM codes and (where feasible) ICD-10-CM codes required for billing, a useful screening question, a descriptive prototype, diagnostic tips, and other disorders that must be ruled out. Frances was instrumental in the development of past editions of DSM and provides helpful cautions on questionable aspects of DSM-5. An index of common presenting symptoms lists possible diagnoses that must be considered for each. The Appendix (which can also be accessed at the companion website) features a Crosswalk to ICD-10-CM codes.