Living History
Hillary Rodham Clinton is known to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Yet few beyond her close friends and family have ever heard her account of her extraordinary journey. She writes with candor, humor and passion about her upbringing in suburban, middle-class America in the 1950s and her transformation from Goldwater Girl to student activist to controversial First Lady.
Living History is her revealing memoir of life through the White House years. It is also her chronicle of living history with Bill Clinton, a thirty-year adventure in love and politics that survives personal betrayal, relentless partisan investigations and constant public scrutiny.
Hillary Rodham Clinton came of age during a time of tumultuous social and political change in America. Like many women of her generation, she grew up with choices and opportunities unknown to her mother or grandmother. She charted her own course through unexplored terrain -- responding to the changing times and her own internal compass -- and became an emblem for some and a lightning rod for others. Wife, mother, lawyer, advocate and international icon, she has lived through America's great political wars, from Watergate to Whitewater.
The only First Lady to play a major role in shaping domestic legislation, Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled tirelessly around the country to champi health care, expand economic and educational opportunity and promote the needs of children and families, and she crisscrossed the globe on behalf of women's rights, human rights and democracy. She redefined the position of First Lady and helped save the presidency from an unconstitutional, politically motivated impeachment. Intimate, powerful and inspiring,
Living History captures the essence of one of the most remarkable women of our time and the challenging process by which she came to define herself and find her own voice -- as a woman and as a formidable figure in American politics.
Bestselling author Bryson sets out to put his irrepressible stamp on all things under the sun. This is a book about life, the universe and everything, from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. "This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." What follows is a brick of a volume summarizing moments both great and curious in the history of science, covering already well-trod territory in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and so on.
Acts Of God - The Unnatural History Of Natural Disaster In America
The ten most costly catastrophes in U.S. history have all been
natural disasters--seven of them hurricanes--and all have occurred
since 1989, a period, ironically, that Congress has dubbed the Decade
for Natural Disaster Reduction. Ted Steinberg, professor of history
and law at Case Western Reserve University, looks at how much of
the death and destruction has been well within the realm of human
control. Surveying more than a century of losses from weather and
seismic extremes, he exposes the fallacy of seeing such calamities
as simply random events. Acts of God explores the unnatural history
of natural calamity, the decisions of business leaders and government
officials that have paved the way for the greater losses of life
and property, especially among those least able to withstand such
blows--America's poor, elderly and minorities. Seeing nature or
God as the primary culprit, Steinberg argues, has helped to obscure
the fact that, in truth, some Americans are better protected from
violence of nature than their counterparts lower down the socioeconomic
ladder. Donald Worster, the author of
Dust Bowl: The Southern
Plains in the 1930s, says, "This compelling book blows away
many obscuring clouds of misunderstanding and denial in our national
environmental memory."
Hillbilly A Cultural History Of An American Icon
Cultural historians have focused considerable attention in recent years
on the construction of whiteness as a key to ascribing social and
economic status in American society over time. Now Anthony Harkins
extends the discussion of the politics of racial identity to a
long-disparaged group within, but somehow not of, the dominant white
culture—the hillbilly. A mythic caricature representing backwardness
and degeneracy, the hillbilly image offered one of the most persistent
and pervasive representations of American otherness in the twentieth
century. Harkins traces the icon from its origins in the nineteenth
century to its recent manifestations in movies and television, but he
concentrates his analysis on the rise of hillbilly stereotypes in the
popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the
commercialization of country music and in graphic cartoon images such
as Snuffy Smith and Li'l Abner.
