The first paperback edition of the master educator's insights from four decades in the classroom. The Discipline of Hope chronicles veteran educator Herb Kohl's love affair with teaching since his first encounter forty years ago, chronicled in his now-classic 36 Children. Beginning with his years in New York public schools and continuing throughout his four decades of working with students from kindergarten through college across the country, Kohl has been an ardent advocate of the notion that every student can learn and every teacher must find creative ways to facilitate that learning. In The Discipline of Hope he distills the major lessons of an attentive lifetime in the classroom.

From the early days of his political career to his time as U.S. vice president, Al Gore has always been concerned with the environment. His work has won such prestigious honors as the Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award for his film An Inconvenient Truth. Gore's passion for activism continues today, as he speaks and writes about such issues as global warming and energy use.

Hope Dies Last is Studs Terkel's inspiring new oral history of social action in America. An alternative, more personal history of the ''American century,'' Hope Dies Last forms a legacy of the indefatigable spirit that Studs has always embodied, and an inheritance for those who, by taking a stand, are making concrete the dreams of today. For Terkel, these interviews represent a change that has taken place in the last few years of uncertainty in America. From a doctor who teaches his young students compassion, to the now-retired brigadier general who flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, these interviews tell us much about the power of the American dream and the force of individuals who hope for a better world. Terkel's subjects express with grace and warmth their secret hopes and dreams, combining to tell an inspiring story of optimism and persistence that resonates with the eloquence of conviction.

For more than thirty years, The Universe Next Door has set the standard for a clear, readable introduction to worldviews. In this new fifth edition James Sire offers additional student-friendly features to his concise, easily understood introductions to theism, deism, naturalism, Marxism, nihilism, existentialism, Eastern monism, New Age philosophy and postmodernism. Included in this expanded format are a new chapter on Islam and informative sidebars throughout.The book continues to build on Sire's refined definition of worldviews from the fourth edition and includes other updates as well, keeping this standard text fresh and useful. In a world of ever-increasing diversity, The Universe Next Door offers a unique resource for understanding the variety of worldviews that compete with Christianity for the allegiance of minds and hearts. The Universe Next Door has been translated into over a dozen languages and has been used as a text at over one hundred colleges and universities in courses ranging from apologetics and world religions to history and English literature. Sire's Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept provides a useful companion volume for those desiring a more in-depth discussion of the nature of a worldview.

Although there is widespread acknowledgment that the mainstream media is in crisis - a crisis underscored as much by declining authority as declining circulation and viewership - no one has explained its intellectual and moral causes. James Bowman' media critic for The New Criterion' provides a scintillating and fast - paced anatomy of the mainstream media self - generated demise. In Media Madness' Bowman looks behind the headlines to examine mainstream media's governing myths. Writing with acerbic wit' he shows how the mainstream media's embrace of a spurious notion of objectivity combined with its addiction to scandal' moral equivalence' and an unshakable conviction of its own moral superiority have done irreparable damage to the media's public authority and have helped precipitate a worldwide exodus to the blogosphere and other sources of news and comment.

Doing Environmental Ethics offers a way to face our ecological crisis that draws on environmental science, economic theory, international law, and religious teachings, as well as philosophical arguments. It engages students in constructing ethical presumptions based on our duty (to other persons and species and also to ecosystems), our character...

Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political results of these traumatizing experiences in the twentieth century.