Books 4 Peace   

Review: Your new book is an absolute jewel. The commentaries on everything from Haiti to Falluja are outstanding, and I found the interviews valuable. Also the book has been beautifully produced. I hope it has a big impact.
It would be wonderful if our country would today think of your Common Sense as a proper sequel to Tom Paine's original.
Congratulations!

Chalmers Johnson, Author of The Sorrows of Empire, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2003

Blase Bonpane has lived and worked with the realities of liberation theology for more than a quarter of a century. In Guerrillas of Peace, Bonpane takes the reader from the high country of Huehuetenango in Guatemala to intensive grass roots organizing in the United States. He shows that we cannot renew the face of the earth and coexist with the torturing, murdering governments of Guatemala and El Salvador, and their accomplices in Washington. We cannot say the Lord's Prayer and fail to do the will of God on earth.

Reviewer: A reader
Bonpane's radio commentaries and peace reports are no less solid and relevant in print. This is a good fireside read; put your feet up, thank your higher power of choice that you have a place to put your feet up, and soak up a detailed chronicle of peace activities and criticisms of abuses of power. From the Mexican government to the U.S. government, no one is safe from Bonpane's discerning eye and inspiring critique. Although the book predates 9-11 and its contents predate Bush II, Bonpane's calls to humane foreign policy are made even more relevant by recent events, such as the outing/attempted silencing of CIA agent and WMD operative Valerie Plame.

From Publishers Weekly
While holding out hope for a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, this lively polemic carries on the fierce war of words over the conflict. Harvard Law professor Dershowitz, author of The Case For Israel, feels that, with Arafat's death and a new Palestinian leadership, prospects for peace have brightened. He endorses the "obvious" two-state solution suggested by Ehud Barak's ill-fated 2000 proposals and the recent non-governmental Geneva accords, involving Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and most of the West Bank (except for some large Jewish settlements), divided sovereignty over Jerusalem and some "recognition" of Palestinian refugees by Israel without an absolute "right of return."

From Publishers Weekly
Ranging freely from the founding of Rome to 17th-century North America, this provocative essay in "cliodynamics" ("the study of processes that change with time") searches for scientific regularities that underlie history. Ecologist and mathematician Turchin grounds his theory of preindustrial empires in the Arabic concept of asabiya, meaning a society's capacity for collective action. Empires germinate, he contends, along "meta-ethnic frontiers" where conflict between starkly alien peoples—Roman farmers vs. Celtic tribesmen in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., say—fosters the social solidarity and discipline that empire building requires.

Edited by one of the most renowned experts in the field, this collection helps readers understand the causes of wars and examines the question: can we make war obsolete? With new readings on terrorism and unconventional warfare, this volume introduces readers to the types of political violence that have come back with such horrifying force in the beginning of the 21st Century. DOES WAR HAVE A FUTURE?; ANARCHY AND POWER; INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND COOPERATION; PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE; ECONOMIC INTERESTS AND INTERDEPENDENCE; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND IDENTITY; MILITARY TECHNOLOGY; TERRORISM AND UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE. Anyone interested in understanding why political violence—terrorism, warfare, unconventional warfare—happens and if it can be stopped. 

Reviews:
"Wonderful...No book published in recent years has more lasting relevance to our understanding of the Middle East."-Jack Miles, Los Angeles Book Review

"Extraordinarily ambitious, provocative and vividly written...Fromkin unfolds a gripping tale of diplomatic double-dealing, military incompetence and political upheaval."-Reid Beddow, Washington Post Book World

"Ambitious and splendid...An epic tale of ruin and disillusion...of great men, their large deeds and even larger follies."-Fouad Ajami, The Wall Street Journal

This concise and comprehensive text presents balanced, impartial, and well-illustrated coverage of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The authors identify and examine the issues and themes that have characterized and defined the conflict over the past century as well as examining the latest developments in the Middle East, including the most up-to-date assessment of the course of the peace process, as well as its unraveling. A new Epilogue covers the most recent events, including analysis of the Israeli Security Fence.

From Publishers Weekly
This is the ultimate insider's account of the roller-coaster ride of the Middle East peace process from 1988 to the breakdown of talks in 2001. More than anything else, Ross, the chief U.S. negotiator for Presidents Bush 41 and Clinton, has written an epic diplomat's handbook. We see the moves and countermoves on both sides, the preparation that goes into any statement or gesture, the backroom wheeling and dealing and the dance of language and meaning. Ross lays out, in painstaking detail, the "one step forward, two steps back" approach that finally led to such breakthroughs as the handshake on the White House lawn. 

From Library Journal
If you want your political theory served up in big slabs of detail, analysis, and interpretation, then Doyle's latest work is for you. Doyle, who teaches politics and international affairs at Princeton, has published a number of significant books (e.g., UN Peacekeeping in Cambodia, Lynne Rienner, 1995). His latest is not easy reading?in fact, it's one of the densest books this reviewer has encountered in a while?but that is not completely Doyle's fault. He is grappling with presenting a sophisticated explication of complex thought on how states organize and manage themselves within the international community.

The end of the Cold War was a "big bang" reminiscent of earlier moments after major wars, such as the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the end of the World Wars in 1919 and 1945. Here John Ikenberry asks the question, what do states that win wars do with their newfound power and how do they use it to build order? In examining the postwar settlements in modern history, he argues that powerful countries do seek to build stable and cooperative relations, but the type of order that emerges hinges on their ability to make commitments and restrain power.

Journal of Politics
Majestic work that combines many familiar but seemingly unrelated themes into one elegant package of exceptional theoretical and empirical sweep.

Specialists from every European country analyze peace treaty practice from the late fifteenth century to the 1919 Peace of Versailles in this collection. Emphasizing the doctrinal debate about peace treaties and the influence of older, Roman and medieval, concepts on modern practices, the book recalls the reader to before the epochal Peace Treaties of Westphalia of 1648. Its broader perspective allows for a reassessment of the role of the sovereign state in the modern international legal order.

About the Author
Randall Lesaffer is Professor of Legal History, Tilburg University. 

Introduction -- The problem of hunger -- Basic rights : political origins -- Basic rights in international society : the right to food -- International trade and the options for eradicating hunger -- Can international society eliminate hunger? -- Conclusion : assessment of Vincent's basic rights project.

The Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman is the first book in English on women's participation in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) and the Mexican women's rights movement during this thirty-year period. The work is based on extensive research at libraries in Mexico and the United States and on the author's personal interviews with some of the few women alive today who participated in the revolution and with family members and friends of those who are deceased.

This report’s analysis is centered on the economic and political reforms of the 1990s. If most of these reforms did not directly address gender equality, they nevertheless received considerable scrutiny from a gender perspective. And whatever their intentions, they had significant and mixed implications for gender relations and women’s well-being. As its title alludes, achieving gender equality and gender justice will be very difficult in a world that is increasingly unequal. The report presents strong arguments for why gender equality must be placed at the core of efforts to reorient the development agenda.

The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.

Review
In this astonishingly versatile work of synthesis and analysis, Evelyn Nakano Glenn situates local knowledges on a national stage to explain how citizenship was differently achieved for different Americans. Unequal Freedom uncovers complex intersecting patterns of racial and gender stratification and labor hierarchies and reveals how they are reinforced by the men and women who live them. This is a powerful and provocative book: a sparkling achievement.

The second volume in the New Directions in Political Behavior series, Women and Politics brings two perspectives on equality for women to the forefront: the legal doctrine, emphasizing gender neutrality; and the fairness doctrine, recognizing the differences between men and women. In-depth analysis combined with a clear presentation of theory and history motivates students to think critically about the challenges faced by women, past and present.

Review
The Pursuit of Equality: Women's Enduring Political Challenge is simply the best text I have encountered for use in an undergraduate course on Women and Politics. I cannot wait to introduce this text in my classroom!

The first authoritative reference to make Supreme Court cases and issues involving women's rights understandable and accessible to a wide audience.
From the Romantic Paternalism of the 19th century to Roe v. Wade and the panoply of hot-button women's issues before the Supreme Court in our age, the new Supreme Court Decisions and Women's Rights limns the cases, the ideas, and the people who have blazed the trail to equality.
Co-published by CQ Press and the Supreme Court Historical Society, Supreme Court Decisions and Women's Rights is the first authoritative, illustrated guide to make Supreme Court cases and issues involving women's rights and gender understandable and accessible to a wide audience. High school students will find a lively, easy-to-read account that makes complex legal and constitutional issues comprehensible. Academics and interested readers in a host of disciplines will find the book a perfect introduction to the topic, and a valuable tool for directing further research.