This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the1960s and 1970s actually made matters worse for its supposed beneficiaries, the poor and minorities. Charles Murray startled readers by recommending that we abolish welfare reform, but his position launched a debate culminating in President Clinton's proposal “to end welfare as we know it.”

When Tina Björnström and her father arrive in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, she has no idea that the entire world is poised on the brink of disaster. And changes are in store for Tina as well. It's here, set against the backdrop of deepening crisis in Europe, that Tina first meets the mysterious journalist Tom Henderson. A spark of passion ignites, but Tina is engaged and Tom is burdened by his past. They part, seemingly forever, but meet again when Tom is assigned to cover the shocking Russian invasion of Finland known as the Winter War. Then Tina's fiancé enlists and heads for the front. The love triangle plays out as Finland struggles valiantly against one of the world's great powers.

Award-winning Michiel Heyns returns with a richly textured novel set in contemporary South Africa. The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades -- unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story. On checking into the Queen's Hotel he finds that things are not as straightforward as he imagined, and South Africa is not as he left it. His carefully ordered world is thrown into turmoil as his trip dredges up a long-abandoned past, forcing him to question the assumptions so easily held from the comfort of his London flat. He meets a mixture of locals, visitors, vagrants and migrants, but most momentously, Peter discovers that his bosom friend from school, Bennie Nienaber, is still in Alfredville -- and is in fact now, acting station commander at the local police station. Peter re-establishes an awkward friendship with his erstwhile friend and the two warily circle each other, sharing reminiscences that hint at a bond much deeper than nostalgia. As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée's story, he now starts to rewrite his own -- till events take an even more shocking turn. . . This book explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go.

Traces the history of the environmental movement from its beginnings as private clubs, to the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, to the corporate sellout of the 1990s. Unveils the stories behind American environmentalism's undeniable triumphs and its quite unnecessary failures.

Robert is alone in the middle of a thick jungle with no idea of how he arrived there - He last remembers being in an aeroplane.

This anthology chronicles the Plains Indians' struggle to maintain their traditional way of life in the changing world of the nineteenth century. Its rich variety of 34 primary sources -- including narratives, myths, speeches, and transcribed oral histories -- gives students the rare opportunity to view the transformation of the West from Native American perspective. Calloway's introduction offers information on western expansion, territorial struggles among Indian tribes, the slaughter of the buffalo, and forced assimilation through the reservation system. More than 30 pieces of Plains Indian art are included, along with maps, headnotes, questions for consideration, a bibliography, a chronology, and an index.

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.