Will America come to own the twenty-first century? Will its power and ideas dominate the globe? Or will the United States buckle underneath the pressure of new international challenges?

This groundbreaking book looks at changing patterns of American thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, a time in which the world's richest nation has never been more powerful or controversial. The volume brings together eminent North American and European thinkers to investigate the crucial issues and challenges facing the United States. From the subterranean political shifts of the electoral landscape to the latest biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality television, this collection explores the political, social, and cultural contours of contemporary American life. It also places the United States within a global narrative of commerce, cultural exchange, international diplomacy, ideological conflict, and war. These eighteen original essays address leadership, foreign policy, propaganda, religion, health, technology, immigration, 9/11, and digital media. Locating the roots of our contemporary concerns, contributors revisit the Clinton years and even earlier periods of twentieth-century American history, while also looking forward to the potential conflicts of a global future and to the soaring possibilities of American enterprise and imagination.

 

An important ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is a mysterious land to most Americans, who may know it only as the place where Islam originated and Islamic fundamentalism is a powerful force. In recent years, the relationship between the governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia has come under increasing pressure, and among the general public in the United States there is a need and desire for a greater understanding of this country. A language barrier and the closed nature of the Saudi Arabian society have done little to invite or ease open inquiry to all but trained academics and linguists.

Understanding consciousness is the major unsolved problem in biology. One increasingly important method of studying consciousness is to study disorders of consciousness, e.g. brain damage and disease states leading to vegetative states, coma, minimally conscious states, etc. Many of these studies are very much in the public eye because of their relationship to controversies about coma patients (e.g. Terry Schiavo case in the US recently), and the relationship to one of the major philosophical, sociological, political, and religious questions of humankind.