Governments

This book chronicles the rich urban life of New Haven, CT, and the forces that brought about its decline in the postwar period. It dissects the misplaced theories underpinning the urban renewal movement and details the disastrous effects that these policies had on New Haven. While the book focuses on New Haven, the discussion is pertinent to urban renewal projects in dozens of US cities, and is of interest to anyone interested in the decline, and possible rebirth of urban life. One unique characteristic of this book is the quality of the writing: witty, insightful. Despite being a scholarly book, it reads like a novel. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in cities.

Rae spins a story like a novelist, but this book is really a tour de force, assembling an impressive amount of data to explain how well-intentioned urban planning policies failed, and how America lost its sense of what creates livable cities. It's a terrific read for anyone interested in the tale of American urban evolution in the twentieth century, and a must-read for those involved in urban planning, public policy and politics.

I found this to be an absorbing, detailed, and provocative political and social history of New Haven, with lessons and delightful insights for those interested in the future of our cities, suburbs, and communities. Only a well-respected Yale political scientist like Doug Rae, with the sophistication of someone who has experienced firsthand how policy and implementation collide, could have written as entertaining and perceptive a history. The book is an immense public service, and required reading for those interested in urban planning, redevelopment, and public policy. I enjoyed it thoroughly!

This is an overview of archæological and textual record of Britain during this poorly understood period. Its premise on the origins of the sub-Roman kingdoms of Britain is that prior to the official withdrawal of the Legions in 410, the primarily pagan secular elite of the British provinces were replaced by a Christian administration of low status origins. After the failure of Constantine III to gain the purple, this administration adopted native British power structures based on kingship. This theory can be used to successfully explain the decline of the villas, the rise of Christian ecclesiastics (based on Martinian militancy), and the introduction of pagan mercenaries who eventually created the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the East. The work is notable for its careful inclusion of Britain in the context of the wider remnants of the Western Empire. Better attested events and evidence from Gaul, Spain, Italy, and North Africa are used to explain what occurred in Britain. This is a great read and arguably a part of the basic body of current knowledge and synthesis regarding the Dark Ages in Britain.

In the forward to CIVITAS TO KINGDOM, N.P. Brooks of the University of Birmingham suggests that K.R. Dark's new book may give the phrase "The Dark Ages" a new meaning. Using information from historical, archeological, and other sources available in the early 1990s, Dark has constructed a new interpretation of Britain in the years between 410 A.D. when the Roman Empire sent an official letter stating it could no longer defend the Britannia, and the germanization of most of Britannia by the Anglo-Saxons in the 800s.

Dark's study covers the provinces not immediatly subdued by the Angle and Saxon mercenaries the Romans hired to "protect" Britannia before 400 A.D. Non-Anglo-Saxon Britain included the nothern and central areas of the island, plus Cornwall and Wales. Dark says the inhabitants of this area maintained an 'Antique Roman Society' which combined political, economic and other aspects of pre-Roman and Roman eras.

Dark has assembled an enormous amount of information gleaned from recent historical studies (text anayses) and archeological studies as well as other sources. He asks, "What is Roman". After he lists and defines the characteristics most scholars agree are "Roman" he shows how material evidence supports the notion that the Roman Britannia survived what has been described as a barbaric Celtic era. One the other hand, he says, "the polities of Britain, tribes, civitates, or kingdoms, remained stable from the Pre-Roman Iron-Age to the sub-Roman period....the general picture is of overall continuity but not a static system...the conventional picture of the fifth-to-seventh-century 'Celtic West' as a reversion to Iron-Age cultural and political organization is mistaken."

This is an excellent book, quite readable, and loaded with footnotes for those who wish to go further.

Most of us know, on some intellectual level, that change and continuity are both simultaneous processes. There is no period in all of history where one is entirely absent, though there are many times when one takes precedence over the other. Without a doubt, the post-Roman (often called, somewhat decievingly, the "sub-Roman") period was one such period for the British Isles. The dominant religion changed from pagan to Christian, Pictland became Scotland, Britain became England, and the Britons became Welsh or Breton or Cornish. The Roman Empire fell, and independent British kingdoms sprang up, only to be washed away in the tide of Anglo-Saxon invasion within a century or two. From 400 CE to 600 CE, in the space of a short 200 years, the makeup of the country changed almost completely.

With all this going on, it's easy to forget that there was a great deal of continuity here, as well. Kenneth Dark, in this excellent scholarly tour de force, reminds us of that little fact. He argues that the political structure of post-Roman Britain was made up of Roman civitates (cities--used as the basic unit of administration by the Roman Empire, almost like a state in the US) which, with the end of Roman authority, elevated themselves to the status of kingdoms. These civitates were themselves based on the Celtic tribes that the Romans had conquered centuries before--rather than take time and energy to create a new aristocracy (which would no doubt even further alienate the newly conquered Britons), they simply adopted the old tribal aristocracy as imperial apparatus, like so many other hegemonic empires. Kenneth Dark shows the survival of Roman traditions and culture through the "Dark Ages," and points out that many of the traits we think of as a "reversion to native Celtic customs" may, in fact, have been the natural trajectory of the way Roman culture was heading in Late Antiquity.

Though Kenneth Dark may overstate his case, it is a case that perhaps needs to be overstated. The study of post-Roman Britain, I think, has lost its equilibrium in the "Change versus Continuity" debate, making this book a valuable counter-weight. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in that murky historical gloss from the end of Roman rule, to the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Public school education in a town which has upper income, modest income, and basically immigrant income students, and how the school system must cater to the so-called elite students for fear of having the elites leave the system for Chappaqua....the thesis that the 'easy path' students must be pushed to the AP level is told cogently and is a must-read for parents with children in 'ability-grouped' school districts.'

"Class Struggle: What's Wrong (and Right) with America's Best Public Schools, by Jay Mathews" presents an accurate profile of The Mamaroneck School System he uses to explore "the nation's elite high schools." Mr. Mathews validates the problems associated with The Mamaroneck High School, and the elitest attitude of their community. The book acknowledges the two tier education available for students at MHS. As a parent living with a child at MHS, I can attest to the fact that Mr. Mathews has his finger on the pulse of the community. Those students at the top get a different educational experience, than the majority of students. If you are on the wrong part of the track, you get pushed through without any demands and little expected of you. Mr. Mathews describes the inequality of education. MHS has "gate keepers," not allowing all students to access their Advanced Placement Courses. Bravo to the young student who proved the school wrong! Mr. Mathews described this rejected students experience being locked out of the AP course, and how she worked on her own with the assistance of others providing the written materials to take the AP test. She passed the AP course, and proved the school to be narrow thinking. I found Mr. Mathews to be objective and presented an extremely accurate profile of The Mamaroneck High School and other elite schools. Mamaroneck, I am sure reflects the values of other elite schools nationally. It is up to the reader if they want their child to be exerpience this. For some will flourish, for others will be damaged. LET THE STUDENT BEWARE!

A must read for all Westchester County residents. Speaks about many schools mainly focusing on Mamaroneck High School. A very good open minded look at our public school system. What one thinks about our school may not be the truth.

This book offers a poignant rejoinders to those familiar cliches, which advocate more interventionism on the part of the state in economic and social affairs. Over a hundred cliches are answered from "We must abide by the majority... thats a democracy" to the all to familiar "Pass a law" cliche. No liberty-loving library should be without a copy of this book. Contributors include a wide spectrum of paleolibertarian, conservative and other thinkers.

This book is one of those gifts that come along at a time in life, right when you're ready to hear the message. This book is not just a libertarian manifesto. It is the basis of liberty presented in a highly digestible format of short essays that one can keep a copy of in the crapper. Good stuff in, bad stuff out. This book is a must read and must have for any citizen concerned with freedom, liberty, and a truly just society.

This book provides quick, but thorough, rebuttals to many of the most common cliches spouted by those who would involve government in every aspect of our lives. A must-read for anyone who thinks about politics.

I think this book is a real reference of Somalis existing problem, it tells how the problem was started and which ways it can be overcome and I believe the author is a very bright and intellegent man who is understanding the Somalis prolonged problems and I would like to thank him his outstanding views. Thank you very much indeed for your contribution.

Covering the whole subject about the Somali dilemma. A point which has been ignored for long time. Colonial impact is still the impact of the dilemma. What is happening is just an extention of the problem.

Rarely a book can cover everthing. This is truely a great work which took me three years to prepare. An indispensible material for Horn of Africa students and scholars.

I am the author if the Colonial Legacy in Somalia. I like you to know that the review written by an anonymous reader on January 19, 2000 titled "this book 's very understanding about the life communist" it is not about my book, but about some work on Communism and women. I do not understand why it appears with the Colonial Legacy in Somalia.

This book provides a convincing review of the history of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa in general and in Somalia in particular. Specific attention is then paid to the Fiduciary Administration of the 50s, the prelude to an independent Somalia. It provides an interesting insight of the challenges and difficulties that Italy shared in recent international operations and a cold look at recent responsibilities in the collapse of a state.Well written, informative, well documented. A pleasure to read.

As asomali living in Europe this book bringing the real history of world invaision to my country

I have a first printing of this book which I first read in 1982. I recently decided to reread it to better understand how Herman Kahn's pioneering work on scenario development had held up over time. Based on understanding where it had worked well, I wanted to get insights into how to repeat his process.

Well, was I in for a surprise!

When I first read the book, I was overwhelmed by its optimism . . . coming on the heels the "Stagflation" following the Oil Shock in the 1970s. At that time, the stock market was about to make a major bottom, having fallen well below the highs of both 1966 and 1973. Treasury bonds were yielding 15 percent. Inflation was romping, and the economy wasn't. President Reagan had just been elected and taxes had been cut, but it hadn't seemed to help yet.

Since then, we have enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity with only one brief recession in 18 years. Yes, Mr. Kahn got it right.

But what was astonishing was to read his specific predictions. For example, his description of future computer networks matches what we do on the Internet today very well. His descriptions of a worldwide plunge in adult female fertility in economically advanced countries were right on. His thoughts about government policy, how to fight inflation, and social adjustments that would help reduce inflation were all highly accurate.

How did he do this? Well, he used a combination of examining long-term trends (usually over centuries), determining the causes of these trends, and then considering scenarios for areas where individual action could make a difference. Most impressive.

For those who like Harry S. Dent, Jr.'s work (and I count myself among that group), Herman Kahn's book will be an important extension of that thinking.

Since Kahn used so many long-term causes in his thinking, the observations stand today. You just have to extend them a little more into the future on your own, now that Mr. Kahn is no longer with us.

I hope that his publishers will consider having someone do a new edition of this book that puts the track record beside the original, and thoughtfully extends the book into the next 20 years. It would be a most valuable resource.

Where else do we miss the big picture by looking at the ripples on the lake rather than the lake itself?

Identify and go with the irresistible forces!

I too read this book in 1982 and from time to time have thought about it over the years. Now in the year 2000 I find myself fairly stunned at how accurately Kahn predicted the future. Books about the future were common in the 70's and 80's, Future Shock, Club of Rome, Greening of America and so on, but none so clearly predicted the world we have today.

Mr. Kerwick has said it better than I can. If the book is out of print, try looking in zShops, there is a copy of it there now.

I first read this book in 1982 when its optimism seemed questionable, if not preposterous. Now, almost 20 years later, through good (then) and bad (now) administrations, Kahn's predictions proved astonishingly accurate. They contrast markedly and tellingly with the gloom and doom pronounced by a lot of people who are still around and still misstating the present and future (did you hear that Al?). Herman Kahn is said to have achieved the highest score ever on military standardized tests during his youth in the 1940's and he was undoubtedly one of the few American geniuses of my lifetime. The Hudson Institute lives on as his legacy, but it has never quite lived up to his own level of excellence. The great reason to look for a copy of this book long out of print is to consider the premises and rationale and compare them to the prognostications from the greens and others on the left. No one can tell the future and probably few if any even approach the intellectual prowress of a Herman Kahn, but a review of the methodology of genius (and that of the chicken littles) ought to go a long way in defining where to place our trust and where to assign our skepticism.

Fue necesario unir los campesinos y trabajadores -los víctimas del capitalismo- para llevar a cabo la revolución democrática en el país de Sudáfrica, en contra de los mismos capitalistas. Y no sólo fue una clase capitalista en su país, sino un imperialismo que extraía ganancias de muchos países del sur y centro de su continente.

Parece irónico, pero así es el dilema del capitalismo en su fase imperialista actual. Sudáfrica era uno de los últimos ejemplos de lo que Lenín explicaba a principios del siglo XX en relación de los países sometidos al capitalismo (Imperialismo: la fase superior del capitalismo). Habiendo consumido su período revolucionario con la Guerra Civil de los Estados Unidos, de 1865 en adelante la burguesía ya no es capaz de ofrecer el liderazgo para ninguna revolución democrática en ningún rincón del mundo. Únicamente los campesinos y trabajadores pueden instalar las leyes de igualdad, con la burguesía esperando impaciente de regresar del margen para tomar el poder una vez consumidas las necesidades democráticas.

Con Nelson Mandela de frente, el Congreso Nacional Africano impuso los mínimos de igualdad, y así acabó con un imperio pequeño pero tan brutal como el de Israel hoy en día. Sudáfrica sigue capitalista, pero ya no tiene segregación para extraer súper-ganancias.

The main article in this collection, "The Coming Revolution in South Africa," by Jack Barnes, came out in the mid-1980s. The analysis presented was important as a guide to action for all those involved in the struggle to rid the world of the hated apartheid system in South Africa.

Apartheid was a system that strangled normal capitalist development. A regime that resembled fascism, it treated the mass of the workers and farmers almost as slaves. Instead of a ruling capitalist class pitted against a working class (which is to be expected as a result of normal capitalist development), the apartheid system divided society into a white caste and a non-white caste, with Blacks, the majority of the population, stripped of nearly all democratic rights. The wealthy white elite fought to preserve apartheid because it secured their control over the Black majority, and thus magnified profit rates. But this form of control created explosive social pressures.

In order to advance toward socialism, the working people in South Africa first had to destroy the apartheid structure and allow the pressures of capitalist development to emerge into the open. With the chains of apartheid broken, the masses of working people could then come to grips with a real capitalist system as such.

The 1994 election which brought the African National Congress to power culminated a process of revolutionary change that was critical to all further development in South Africa and its neighboring countries. It opened the door to a new period of class struggle, preparing the workers in South Africa to participate, on an equal footing with workers in all countries, to build a new world free of capitalist war and depression.

Though published in 1985, nine years before the victory of the African National Congress against Apartheid, the main article in this book-length magazine Jack Barnes's "The Coming Revolution in South Africa," forecasts the way forward for the democratic revolution in South Africa and shows how the roots of a future socialist revolution in South Africa flow out of that struggle. Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, explains why the democratic tasks of national liberation and unification advanced by the ANC and its allies were the correct way forward for the peoples of South Africa. With examples from the policies of Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks and the Cuba and Nicaraguan revolutions, Barnes takes on sectarians who attacked the ANC because it did not have an explicitly anticapitalist program. Along with Barnes' speech, this issue contains "The Freedom Charter"--the political program the ANC advanced in the antiapartheid struggle -- "The Future Belongs to US" a Speech by ANC leader Oliver Tambo, a speech by Fidel Castro explaining why and how Cuba supported the freedom struggle in Angola, and a summary of the then latest stages in the South African struggle by Ernest Harsch.

How do you take state power and hold onto it? This book, which was originally an issue of New International, was written at a time when revolutions had recently taken power in Nicaragua, Grenada and Iran and this question was posed in a very direct way. In the first two cases, they were led by parties who were oriented to mobilizing the power of workers and farmers to move forward to socialism. And all of this happened in the shadow of the 1959 revolution in Cuba. The articles in this issue are by revolutionaries in Cuba, Nicaragua and the US, all taking stock of what had happened. The lead article by Mary Alice Waters does an especially good job of taking the long view and seeing how previous generations of revolutionaries, starting with Marx and Engels during the Paris Commune of 1871 and through the Bolsheviks in Russia, looked at this question and built the only type of government which could move forward at the head of such a revolution-a workers and farmers government. The article places Cuba and Nicaragua in this longterm perspective and shows what revolutionaries have learned both from their mistakes and their successes.

The lead article in this issue of New International # 3, summarizes the key lessons of revolutionary working class action covering over 150 years. From the 1848 failed capitalist revolution in Germany, the Paris Commune of 1871, to and beyond the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia, the Cuban socialist revolution in 1959, along with the 1979 Grenadians and Nicaraguan revolutions which brought to power a workers' and farmer government.The key lessons? : The necessity of the victorious oppressed classes to impose their will over the defeated oppressor classes. And in today's world, the form of the new government that arises from a victorious anti-capitalist revolution of the majority is a workers' and farmers' government which will either advance toward socialism or retreat and be overthrown back into capitalist disorder, misery and oppression of the majority.
The author, Mary Alice Waters, does a magnificent job basing herself on the lessons of Marx and Engels and Lenin and applying those principles to the class struggle since their times.

We live at a time when capitalism more and more shows its retrograde features. Surely there must be a better system to enable human beings to live together on this planet. But this brings up the question of political power. How can the world be remade without changing the form of political power?
This book, part of the New International series, explains the history of how working people have fought for political power and what the results of these struggles mean for us today. The prospect of fighting to change the world is nothing new. Why not review the historical record of how these fights have been waged in the past, and what the results have been? In this way we can base today's fight on the lessons of the past.
Mary-Alice Waters reviews the history of the battles for workers' and farmers' governments, from the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution, up through the Cuban, Grenadan and Nicaraguan revolutions. In spite of many setbacks, these revolutionary struggles show that workers and farmers can fight and win.
The perspective here is Marxist, the embattled workers are the ones we identify with, and their ultimate success is the goal. The whys and wherefores of these battles cannot be understood without a scientific knowledge of the workings of the capitalist system, a system which, by its very nature, produces its own gravediggers.
This volume also contains articles from Cuban Communist leader Manual Piniero and Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Tomas Borge, dealing with the fight for power with special focus on Latin America.

This is a clearly written introduction to how the legislature works, right down to how to get around the different Congressional buildings. OK, so it's not exactly a graduate poli-sci text but Silverberg is the Editor of The Hill, so he's certainly got the credentials to put this book out. Sure wish we'd had this book *before* we'd done our first legislative visit!!

This was a Dummies book that didn't look down on me. It had a lot of info on it that was pretty cool. It sure helped me on my AP Government test. Also considering I'm interested in Government, it had a lot of useful ideas to help me write bill proposals and other things to Congress.

I also liked the foreward. Senator Daschle, we ned a lot more people in office like you.

Buy this book. It has good things that help you.

If there was ever a book for congress that you had to buy, this is it. In fact, if this was the only book you had to buy, buy this book before any other. It is the Bible of budgets, the Torah of truth, and the Koran of Congress.

This book has it all. It has information for the experienced legislator as well as useful information for any layman. It helpes me every time I have proposed any idea for a bill to my congressman, and has told me who my congressman even was (Tom Wolfe, a very withdrawn, yet supposedly experienced man).

It gives information vital for everyone to know, as well as extrememly interesting facts (there has been two extremely brutal fights in congress). There is also information for which I never had any idea about but am interested about now, such as information, as well as the origin, of jerrymandering.

There is just one thing that has the capacity, the brevity, the sum of the copious amount of words I put in this summary...
BUY THIS BOOK!