Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty

Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty Review

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Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty Feature

Since the Civil War more than 39 million men and women have answered the call to serve. Of those, 3,440 served with such uncommon valor and and extraordinary courage that they were presented with the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award. Each of their heroic actionsis as unique as the person who performed it, and here more than one hundred of of America's living Medal of Honor recipients are honored and their bravery recounted by best-selling author Peter Collier and presented in duotone portraits by award-winning photographer Nick Del Calzo.

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Beyond the Edge: New York's New Waterfront

Beyond the Edge: New York's New Waterfront Review

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Beyond the Edge: New York's New Waterfront Feature

Before September 11, 2001, New York City was in the process of transforming its waterfront after decades of neglect. The tragic events of that day brought into sharper focus the issue surrounding the development of the water's edge, along with a host of more complicated issues involving monuments and icons, public space and public safety, reconstruction and renewal. Will New York's future waterfront development be ruled only by issues of economic necessity, infrastructure, and politics, or can it embrace innovative design as well? Raymond W. Gastil, director of the Van Alen Institute, an organization dedicated to improving the design of the public realm, makes a case for the importance of inspired design in the redevelopment of Manhattan's waterfront. Gastil's detailed analysis of current design proposals is set against the backdrop of the city's history, its public process, and its ecological priorities and is informed by interviews with project architects and other key players. Taking as points of reference the recent reinvigoration of London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Bilbao-all cities with high-profile waterfronts, where designers, landscape architects, and artists have been instrumental in creating memorable buildings, parks, and spaces-Gastil proposes an approach to the redevelopment of New York's waterfront that is as visionary as it is pragmatic.

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Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond

Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond Review

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Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond Feature

"After we had exchanged the requisite formalities over tea in his camp on the southern edge of Kabul's outer defense perimeter, the Afghan field commander told me that two of his bravest mujahideen were martyred because he did not have a pickup truck to take them to a Peshawar hospital. They had succumbed to their battle wounds. He asked me to tell his party's bureaucrats across the border that he needed such a vehicle desperately. I double-checked with my interpreter that he was indeed making this request. I wasn't puzzled because the request appeared unreasonable but because he was asking me, a twenty-year-old employee of a humanitarian organization, to intercede on his behalf with his own organization's bureaucracy. I understood on this dry summer day in Khurd Kabul that not all militant and political organizations are alike."--from Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond

While popular accounts of warfare, particularly of nontraditional conflicts such as guerrilla wars and insurgencies, favor the roles of leaders or ideology, social-scientific analyses of these wars focus on aggregate categories such as ethnic groups, religious affiliations, socioeconomic classes, or civilizations. Challenging these constructions, Abdulkader H. Sinno closely examines the fortunes of the various factions in Afghanistan, including the mujahideen and the Taliban, that have been fighting each other and foreign armies since the 1979 Soviet invasion. Focusing on the organization of the combatants, Sinno offers a new understanding of the course and outcome of such conflicts.

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Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White Review

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Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White Feature

Writing in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and others who confronted the "color line" of the twentieth century, journalist, scholar, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the twenty-first century. Wu examines affirmative action, globalization, immigration, and other controversial contemporary issues through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Mixing personal anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, Wu confronts damaging Asian-American stereotypes such as "the model minority" and "the perpetual foreigner." By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu's work dares us to make good on our great democratic experiment.

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