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The mix, Mr. Petersen argues, may become a disastrous witch's brew with catastrophic results both for the domestic economy and the continued well-being of the American people. He saves his most strident criticism for the style of morally questionable leadership currently in vogue, a reckless world view that seems to shamelessly trade immediate and permanent tax cuts for the very wealthy for a mounting tidal wave of debt for our children and their heirs. In detailing his grievances with current policies, Petersen cites a series of common partisan myths, including the notion that the majority of the elderly are poor, that more elderly than children are poor, that Americans are over-taxed, that providing tax cuts for the rich can successfully shrink government, and that imposing so-called 'means-testing' for federal benefits will be catastrophic for the needy.

The author places the majority of the blame for our current set of problems upon the shoulders of a variety of forces within contemporary society, from interest groups and their lobbies to an almost pathological concern with short-term results, to the cult of individualism we all seem to suffer from, and, of course, to generational change. He views a number of strategies as potentially helpful in abating the negative set of circumstances we are ensconced in; indexing social security benefits to prices rather than wages, extending health care to all using the plan offered to federal employees as a model, and forcing Congress to include unfunded retirement obligations in the balance sheet (thus ending the thirty five year old sham of never mentioning to the American people the reason we have such a serious shortfall in social security funds in the out-years is because the federal government has consistently and quite deliberately violated the provisions of the Social Security law by spending the extra funds collected every year rather than investing them in accordance with federal law and allowing the investment income to grow). "

From Publishers Weekly on Amazon.com In this sometimes simplistic and misguided book, Harris calls for the end of religious faith in the modern world. Not only does such faith lack a rational base, he argues, but even the urge for religious toleration allows a too-easy acceptance of the motives of religious fundamentalists. Religious faith, according to Harris, requires its adherents to cling irrationally to mythic stories of ideal paradisiacal worlds (heaven and hell) that provide alternatives to their own everyday worlds. Moreover, innumerable acts of violence, he argues, can be attributed to a religious faith that clings uncritically to one set of dogmas or another. Very simply, religion is a form of terrorism for Harris. Predictably, he argues that a rational and scientific view?one that relies on the power of empirical evidence to support knowledge and understanding?should replace religious faith. We no longer need gods to make laws for us when we can sensibly make them for ourselves. But Harris overstates his case by misunderstanding religious faith, as when he makes the audaciously naïve statement that "mysticism is a rational enterprise; religion is not." As William James ably demonstrated, mysticism is far from a rational enterprise, while religion might often require rationality in order to function properly. On balance, Harris's book generalizes so much about both religion and reason that it is ineffectual.

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Product Description: An impassioned plea for reason in a world divided by faith.
This important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes heinous crimes. He asserts that in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another. Most controversially, he argues that we cannot afford moderate lip service to religion?an accommodation that only blinds us to the real perils of fundamentalism. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris also draws on new evidence from neuroscience and insights from philosophy to explore spirituality as a biological, brain-based need. He calls on us to invoke that need in taking a secular humanistic approach to solving the problems of this world

From Publishers Weekly While 'old Europe' is most often portrayed as more bark than bite in its differences with the current U.S. administration, NPR commentator and former Washington Post European bureau chief Reid finds the E.U. as a whole 'determined to change a world that has been dominated by Americans.' The opening chapters quickly summarize everyday Europeans' love-hate relationship with the States, the legacies of the 20th-century wars, and the creation of the Euro. The center chapters present GE as a case study in transatlantic trade gone wrong ('Welch's Waterloo') as well as other snafus that show Europe attempting to dominate market share of everything from cell phones to pharmaceuticals. A chapter detailing what's left of Europe's welfare states is followed by a relatively bleak assessment of Europe's armies, and the spin that the E.U. is betting on economic 'soft power' for eventual global dominance. The concluding chapters warn that the U.S. ignores Europe's new 25-nation strong union at its economic and political peril, but also draw attention to Europe as a huge, tariff-free market and potential sharer of global burdens. There's little surprising here, but Reid's primer on recent U.S. European relations genially summarizes an evolving, if often reluctant, partnership

From www.fpa.org, the Foreign Policy Association website: " The Great Decisions briefing book is an invaluable resource for scholars, diplomats and government officials, and serves as an excellent starting point for students and those who simply want to learn more about the world. Topics include U.S. Intelligence, Russia, Outsourcing, China, Sudan, Global Poverty Gap, Middle East, and Global Water Issues".

Product Description: Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize
Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Between January and July 1919, after _the war to end all wars, men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices! of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created_Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel_whose troubles haunt us still. "

No one has more authority to call the shots the way they really are than Paul Krugman, whose provocative New York Times columns are keenly followed by millions. One of the world's most respected economists, Krugman has been named America's most important columnist by the Washington Monthly and columnist of the year by Editor and Publisher magazine.

In this long-awaited work containing Krugman's most influential columns along with new commentary, he chronicles how the boom economy unraveled: how exuberance gave way to pessimism, how the age of corporate heroes gave way to corporate scandals, how fiscal responsibility collapsed. From his account of the secret history of the California energy crisis to his devastating dissections of dishonesty in the Bush administration, Krugman tells the uncomfortable truth about how the United States lost its way. And he gives us the road map we will need to follow if we are to get the country back on track. From Publishers Weekly This selection of three years of New York Times op-eds by economist and Princeton professor Krugman document his opposition to the governance of George W. Bush and his "bad economics wrapped in the flag." In his introduction, Krugman asserts that Bush is a radical and that America's right wing is "a revolutionary power... a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system." The core of the book's 100-plus columns is dedicated to eviscerating Bush's fiscal policies, uncovering the administration's hidden agendas, as well as castigating the media for letting him get away with it. A handful of articles advocate the globalization of free trade. Much of the material will be familiar to Times readers, but reading the items together reveals Krugman's growing anger at the hubris he sees exhibited by the extreme right wing and its seeming defiance of logic. At first, Krugman is a numbers man, methodically parsing the data (demonstrating, for example, how the heartland is not, statistically, more committed to family than people on the coasts), but over time he arrives at the conclusion that "Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy" and "it works a lot like a special-interest lobby." Krugman is one of the few commentators able to sound both appalled and reasonable at the same time as he provides an alternate history of the last three years to that penned by conservative pundits. Many readers will find Krugman very persuasive as to how our present government has done us wrong.