The authors explore the transformation of democracy and especially the opportunities for participation that new information and communication technologies might afford the American public. They present their analysis through the lens of Kuhnian philosophy of science, arguing for the arrival of a paradigm shift in the way politics and science can be connected to shape a more democratic system of government.

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Ted Becker, Christa D. Slaton - The Future of Tele democracy (2000).pdf

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Stephen J. McNamee - The Meritocracy Myth (2009).jpg

The Meritocracy Myth challenges the widely held American belief in meritocracy_that people get out of the system what they put into it based on individual merit. Fully revised and updated throughout, the second edition includes compelling new case studies, such as the impact of social and cultural capital in the cases of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and new material on current topics such as the impact of the financial and credit crisis, intergenerational mobility, and the impact of racism and sexism.

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Stephen J. McNamee - The Meritocracy Myth (2009).pdf

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Bill O'Reilly - Pinheads and Patriots, Where You S tand in the Age of Obama (2010).jpg

When Bill O'Reilly interviewed then-Senator Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential elections, the two had a lively debate about the nation's future.

Since that time, America has changed rapidly—some would even say seismically. And many believe these shifts are doing more than just rocking the political and social climate; they're rocking the American core.

What are these changes? Who, in addition to President Obama, have been the biggest forces behind them? What exactly do they mean for you, the everyday American citizen? How are they affecting your money, health, safety, freedom, and standing in this nation? Which are Pinheaded moves and which are truly Patriotic? In his latest spirited book, O'Reilly prompts further debate with the President and the American people on the current state of the union.

After five consecutive, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is megabestsellers, you can count on Bill to offer blunt and constructive political commentary. And as he did in his popular memoir, he offers some introspection too, looking back at his own actions and those of past Pinheads and Patriots who have inspired a code of conduct for such taxing times.

As always, O'Reilly is fair, balanced, and uncompromisingly tough when guarding the American way. Only Pinheads would fail to fight for what they love most about this country or to embrace some measure of change to make it better. The rest of us Patriots will read this book to discover the difference between the two.

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Dan Rattiner - In the Hamptons Too, Further Encoun ters With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaire s, and Celebrities (2010).jpg

USA Books1 - Dan Rattiner - In the Hamptons Too, Further Encounter...ishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities 2010.jpg

As the editor and publisher of Dan's Papers, the area's popular free newspaper, Dan Rattiner has been living in and covering the Hamptons for over fifty years, and has watched it change from a sleepy backwater of fishing villages and potato farms to a playground for the rich and famous. In this follow-up to his popular book In the Hamptons, Rattiner continues to regale us with tales of the people who live, work, and play in one of America's best-known summer colonies, ranging from colorful locals like former East Hampton Town Supervisor Richard T. Gilmartin and marine patrol policeman Ralph George, to more well-known figures like Kurt Vonnegut, Betty Friedan, Alger Hiss, and Martha Stewart. Sometimes amused, sometimes appalled, but always observant, Rattiner tells these stories of the Hamptons as only he can tell them: with dry wit, unassuming language, and as keen an awareness of his own quirks and foibles as he is of those of his fellow human beings.
"If you pick up the East Hampton Star, you'll learn the who, what, and where. The why and how are more likely found in the pages of Dan's Papers ... If you want to understand the crazy quilt of art, sand, money, farmland, literature, golf clubs, divorces, sea spray, and the area's remarkable blend of ego, generosity, and dedication to historic preservation, read Dan's book, In the Hamptons, and its sequel, In the Hamptons Too, which you hold in your hands." -- from the Foreword by Alec Baldwin
"Nothing and no one escapes the roving eye of Dan. Here they all are: the old guard with their stately homes; the Bonackers, locals whose farms, shops, and small country roads are disappearing with each passing season; and the successive wave of newcomers, the artists, writers, and weary city folk yearning for the sea. And of course here are the seekers of the Scene, the newly rich and restless, demented with the mania of owning things. Not a particle of this passing parade is less than fascinating to Dan, who serves it up in prose that is simple and direct, yet subtly inflected with his signature combination of whimsy, wryness, and delight. A wonderful read."

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Jennifer C. Hunt - Seven Shots, An NYPD Raid on a Terrorist Cell and Its Aftermath (2010).jpg

On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Service team from the NYPD raided a terrorist cell in Brooklyn and narrowly prevented a suicide bombing of the New York subway that would have cost hundreds, possibly thousands of lives.

Seven Shots tells the dramatic story of that raid, the painstaking police work involved, and its paradoxical aftermath, which drew the officers into a conflict with other rank-and-file police and publicity-hungry top brass. Jennifer C. Hunt draws on her personal knowledge of the NYPD and a network of police contacts extending from cop to four-star chief, to trace the experience of three officers on the Emergency Service entry team and the two bomb squad detectives who dismantled the live device. She follows their lives for five years, from that near-fatal day in 1997, through their encounters inside the brutal world of departmental politics, and on to 9/11, when they once again put their lives at risk in the fight against terrorism, racing inside the burning towers and sorting through the ash, debris, and body parts. Throughout this fast paced narrative, Hunt maintains a strikingly fine-grained, street-level view, allowing us to understand the cops on their own terms—and often in their own words. The result is a compelling insider’s picture of the human beings who work in two elite units in the NYPD and the moral and physical danger and courage involved.

As gripping as an Ed McBain novel—and just as steeped in New York cop culture and personalities—Seven Shots takes readers on an unforgettable journey behind the shield and into the hearts of New York City police.

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Betsy Powell - Bad Seeds, The True Story of Toront o's Galloway Boys Street Gang (2010).jpg

This book tells the story of the Galloway Boys, who as young teens banded together in an urban-blighted area of Toronto's east end to sell drugs and run guns. They were led by Tyshan Riley, born into one of the toughest neighborhoods in Canada and raised by an often absent and erratic mother. He learned his lessons on the streets-how to sell drugs, how to steal--and used violence to get the money, sex and respect that he lived for.
The area known as Galloway is home to 186 hectares of public housing. Crossing bridges is the only route into the area. It created a sense of isolation and for those who lived there a sense of mistrust of anyone from the outside. The area was a fertile ground for the growth of gangs--and as well for the drug dealers, prostitutes and crackheads who survived along a major east-west thoroughfare leading in and out of Toronto's downtown core. And while the Galloway Boys lay claim to their turf, farther to the north the Malvern Crew was laying claim to theirs. The war was inevitable and it would claim ten casualties, including the innocent.
For three Galloway Boys - Tyshan Riley, Philip Atkins and Jason Wisdom - their days in the street were numbered. With the cold-blooded murder of Brenton Charlton and the near fatal shooting of his friend Leonard Bell at a busy Toronto intersection on March 3, 2004, the police investigation would lead to the arrest of Riley, Atkins and Wisdom, and with the testimony of a former Galloway Boys gang member, Roland Ellis, the three would be convicted of the first-degree murder of a man who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Through the testimony of Ellis and that of other witnesses, the wiretap evidence, Crown attorney and defense arguments, a portrait of a gang emerges, one that lives on our streets yet is hidden to our eyes. Bad Seeds compels us to take our blinders off and face a reality of modern urban life that no one professes to care about very much. There is peril in willing blindness.

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Betsy Powell - Bad Seeds, The True Story of Toront o's Galloway Boys Street Gang (2010).pdf

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Mike Dash - The First Family, Terror, Extortion, R evenge, Murder and The Birth of the American Mafia (2010).jpeg

USA Books1 - Mike Dash - The First Family, Terror, Extortion, Reven...nge, Murder and The Birth of the American Mafia 2010.jpeg

Before the notorious Five Families dominated U.S. organized crime, there was the one-fingered criminal genius Giuseppe Morello and his lethal coterie. Combining first-rate scholarship and pulse-quickening action, Mike Dash brings to life this little-known story, following the rise of the Mafia in America from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the villages of Sicily to the streets of Little Italy. Using an array of primary sources—hitherto untapped Secret Service archives, prison records, and interviews with surviving family members—Dash has written a groundbreaking account of the crucial period when the criminal underworld exploded with fury across the nation.

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Robert Cowley - What Ifs of American History, Emin ent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2001).jpg

The 18 contributors to this latest installment of the What If? series are indeed eminent: they include David McCullough, Tom Fleming and Robert Dallek (though series editor Cowley might have found more than one woman for his roster). For historians whose works are bound by facts, there must have been pleasure in letting their imaginations engage instead in speculation, though the "shadow universe" presented here is still rooted in the historical record and reflects back on it. In "Might the Mayflower not have sailed?", for example, Theodore K. Rabb enumerates a series of "strokes of luck" that enabled the Pilgrims to come to America, including Sir Edwin Sandys's propitious takeover of the Virginia Company. And in "What if Watergate Was Still Just an Upscale Address?", Lawrence Malkin and John Stacks wonder what would have happened Nixon hadn't been forced to resign the presidency. Americans would be less cynical, they speculate, and, more surprisingly, the U.S. might have had a national health insurance plan. Other essays ask fascinating questions about the the Civil War and the Cuban missile crisis. A pleasure for history buffs longing to engage in some footloose imagination, this book drives home the fact that even momentous political events can hinge on a few uncontrollable events. Maps and b&w photos.

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Ronald C. White Jr. - A. Lincoln, A Biography (201 0).jpg

Everyone wants to define the man who signed his name “A. Lincoln.” In his lifetime and ever since, friend and foe have taken it upon themselves to characterize Lincoln according to their own label or libel. In this magnificent book, Ronald C. White, Jr., offers a fresh and compelling definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity–what today’s commentators would call “authenticity”–whose moral compass holds the key to understanding his life.
Through meticulous research of the newly completed Lincoln Legal Papers, as well as of recently discovered letters and photographs, White provides a portrait of Lincoln’s personal, political, and moral evolution. White shows us Lincoln as a man who would leave a trail of thoughts in his wake, jotting ideas on scraps of paper and filing them in his top hat or the bottom drawer of his desk; a country lawyer who asked questions in order to figure out his own thinking on an issue, as much as to argue the case; a hands-on commander in chief who, as soldiers and sailors watched in amazement, commandeered a boat and ordered an attack on Confederate shore batteries at the tip of the Virginia peninsula; a man who struggled with the immorality of slavery and as president acted publicly and privately to outlaw it forever; and finally, a president involved in a religious odyssey who wrote, for his own eyes only, a profound meditation on “the will of God” in the Civil War that would become the basis of his finest address.
Most enlightening, the Abraham Lincoln who comes into focus in this stellar narrative is a person of intellectual curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity, unafraid to “think anew and act anew.”
A transcendent, sweeping, passionately written biography that greatly expands our knowledge and understanding of its subject, A. Lincoln will engage a whole new generation of Americans. It is poised to shed a profound light on our greatest president just as America commemorates the bicentennial of his birth.

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Werner Sollors - Interracialism , Black-White Inte rmarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (2000).jpg

USA Books1 - Werner Sollors - Interracialism , Black-White Interma...arriage in American History, Literature, and Law 2000.jpg

Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided our nation since its earliest history. This collection explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in our racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies as well as for general readers interested in race relations. By bringing together a selection of historically significant documents and of the best essays and scholarship on the subject of "miscegenation," Interracialism demonstrates that notions of race can be fruitfully approached from the vantage point of the denial of interracialism that typically informs racial ideologies.

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Werner Sollors - Interracialism , Black-White Inte rmarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (2000).pdf

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Marcus Hearn - The Cinema of George Lucas (2005).jpg

Marcus Hearn is a writer, editor, and publisher specializing in film and popular culture. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals.
Marcus Hearn analyzes Lucas's journey as a director over four decades whose groundbreaking technical achievements and creation of enduring modern mythologies have forever changed both film and science fiction. as well as his many other accomplishments in the film industry, including the formation of Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, and LucasArts. The book is lavishly illustrated with many images that have never or rarely been seen, such as stills from Lucas's student films, material from the director's cut of his early science-fiction film, production shots from, among others, the first Star Wars film, American Graffiti and the Indiana Jones Adventures. and behind-the-scenes photos from his films. With its wealth of new information and compelling illustrations, The Cinema of George Lucas is an essential volume for every fan and film enthusiast.

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Marcus Hearn - The Cinema of George Lucas (2005).pdf

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Donald E. Chipman - Spanish Texas, 1519-1821 (2010 ).jpg

Modern Texas, like Mexico, traces its beginning to sixteenth-century encounters between Europeans and Indians who contested control over a vast land. Unlike Mexico, however, Texas eventually received the stamp of Anglo-American culture, so that Spanish contributions to present-day Texas tend to be obscured or even unknown. The first edition of Spanish Texas, 1519-1821 (1992) sought to emphasize the significance of the Spanish period in Texas history. Beginning with information on the land and its inhabitants before the arrival of Europeans, the original volume covered major people and events from early exploration to the end of the colonial era. This new edition of Spanish Texas has been extensively revised and expanded to include a wealth of discoveries about Texas history since 1990. The opening chapter on Texas Indians reveals their high degree of independence from European influence and extended control over their own lives. Other chapters incorporate new information on La Salle's Garcitas Creek colony and French influences in Texas, the destruction of the San Sabá mission and the Spanish punitive expedition to the Red River in the late 1750s, and eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms in the Americas. Drawing on their own and others' research, the authors also provide more inclusive coverage of the role of women of various ethnicities in Spanish Texas and of the legal rights of women on the Texas frontier, demonstrating that whether European or Indian, elite or commoner, slave owner or slave, women enjoyed legal protections not heretofore fully appreciated.

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Donald E. Chipman - Spanish Texas, 1519-1821 (2010 ).pdf

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Glenn A. Chambers - Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940 (2010).jpg

At the turn of the twentieth century, Honduras witnessed the expansion of its banana industry and the development of the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit into multinational corporations with significant political and economic influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. These companies relied heavily on an imported labor force, thousands of West Indian workers, whose arrival in Honduras immediately sparked anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the country. Glenn A. Chambers examines the West Indian immigrant community in Honduras through the development of the country's fruit industry, revealing that West Indians fought to maintain their identities as workers, Protestants, blacks, and English speakers in the midst of popular Latin American nationalistic notions of mestizaje, or mixed-race identity.
West Indians lived as outsiders in Honduran society owing to the many racially motivated initiatives of the Honduran government that defined acceptable immigration as "white only." As Chambers shows, one unintended, though perhaps predictable, consequence of this political stance was the emergence of a clearly defined and separate West Indian enclave that proved to be antagonistic toward native Hondurans. This conflict ultimately led to animosity between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Hondurans, as well as between West Indians and non-West Indian peoples of African descent. An all-inclusive Afro-Honduran identity never emerged in Honduras, Chambers reveals. Rather, black identity developed through West Indians' culture, language, and history.
Chambers moves beyond treatments of West Indian labor as an accessory to U.S. capitalist interests to explore the ethnic and racial dynamic of the interactions of the West Indian community with locals. In Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940, Chambers demonstrates the importance of racial identity in Honduran society as a whole and reveals the roles that culture, language, ethnicity, and history played in the establishment of regional identities within the broader African diaspora.

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Glenn A. Chambers - Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940 (2010).pdf

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Peter B. Lane - Warriors and Scholars, A Modern Wa r Reader (2005).jpg

Originating from the University of North Texas' annual Military History Seminar, these papers present the viewpoints of senior, eminent military historians on topics of their specialty, along with veteran accounts of the war under discussion. Lane and Marcello, both history professors from the University of North Texas, add contextual and commentary footnotes for student readers. The papers are arranged chronologically from World War II to the present day.

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Peter B. Lane - Warriors and Scholars, A Modern Wa r Reader (2005).pdf

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Lynn M. LoPucki - Courting Failure, How Competitio n for Big Cases Is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Court s (2006).jpg

USA Books1 - Lynn M. LoPucki - Courting Failure, How Competition fo...or Big Cases Is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Courts 2006.jpg

LoPucki's provocative critique of Chapter 11 is required reading for everyone who cares about bankruptcy reform. This empirical account of large Chapter 11 cases will trigger intense debate both inside the academy and on the floor of Congress. Confronting LoPucki's controversial thesis-that competition between bankruptcy judges is corrupting them-is the most pressing challenge now facing any defender of the status quo."
-Douglas Baird, University of Chicago Law School

"This book is smart, shocking and funny. This story has everything-professional greed, wrecked companies, and embarrassed judges. Insiders are already buzzing."
-Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

"LoPucki provides a scathing attack on reorganization practice. Courting Failure recounts how lawyers, managers and judges have transformed Chapter 11. It uses empirical data to explore how the interests of the various participants have combined to create a system markedly different from the one envisioned by Congress. LoPucki not only questions the wisdom of these changes but also the free market ideology that supports much of the general regulation of the corporate sector."
-Robert Rasmussen, University of Chicago Law School

A sobering chronicle of our broken bankruptcy-court system, Courting Failure exposes yet another American institution corrupted by greed, avarice, and the thirst for power.

Lynn LoPucki's eye-opening account of the widespread and systematic decay of America's bankruptcy courts is a blockbuster story that has yet to be reported in the media. LoPucki reveals the profound corruption in the U.S. bankruptcy system and how this breakdown has directly led to the major corporate failures of the last decade, including Enron, MCI, WorldCom, and Global Crossing.

LoPucki, one of the nation's leading experts on bankruptcy law, offers a clear and compelling picture of the destructive power of "forum shopping," in which corporations choose courts that offer the most favorable outcome for bankruptcy litigation. The courts, lured by big money and prestige, streamline their requirements and lower their standards to compete for these lucrative cases. The result has been a series of increasingly shoddy reorganizations of major American corporations, proposed by greedy corporate executives and authorized by case-hungry judges.

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Lynn M. LoPucki - Courting Failure, How Competitio n for Big Cases Is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Court s (2006).pdf

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Rawi Abdelal - Capital Rules, The Construction of Global Finance (2007).jpg

The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy.
In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s--trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies--had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier.
How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, "managed" globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today.

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Rawi Abdelal - Capital Rules, The Construction of Global Finance (2007).pdf

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Newt Gingrich - To Save America, Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (2010).jpg

In his blockbuster new book, To Save America, former Speaker of the House and bestselling author Newt Gingrich issues a dire warning for America. By spending more than we can afford, sacrificing conservative values for the sake of easy answers, and electing the most liberal president ever, America is at risk for its very survival. Thanks to President Obama and his cohorts in Congress, we have become a country defined by massive government takeovers, rising debt, and failing national security systems. “This is not the nation our Founding Fathers envisioned,” Gingrich says, “America needs saving, and it’s up to us to do it.” In To Save America, Gingrich lays out a bold plan to put the United States back on track. Gingrich shows how Republicans can make a comeback in the 2010 mid-term elections, win the 2012 presidential election, and reveals how readers can help restore our nation to its fundamental values. Gingrich also argues that the big-spending, big-government programs, and bureaucracies of the secular socialist Left are the greatest threat to our nation’s survival since the Civil War. “Our federal government is broken,” Gingrich states, “we must ‘replace, not reform’ our leaders and our policies, or America will no longer be the ‘shining city upon a hill.’” Fresh, inspiring, and resolute, To Save America is Gingrich’s most powerful book yet.

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Newt Gingrich - To Save America, Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (2010).epub

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Gerald N. Rosenberg - The Hollow Hope, Can Courts Bring About Social Change (1993).jpg

Liberals have acclaimed, and conservatives decried, reliance on courts as tools for changes. But while debate rages over whether the courts should be playing such a legislative role, Gerald N. Rosenberg poses a far more fundamental question--can courts produce political and social reform?
From Publishers Weekly
Efforts by civil rights, women's rights and pro-abortion activists to use the courts to produce progressive social change have largely been failures, maintains Rosenberg. Focusing on the historic 1954 Brown decision on school desegregation, on Roe v. Wade , upholding women's right to abortion, and on other Supreme Court cases, this University of Chicago political scientist argues that such decisions actually had little effect in generating positive change, partly because the judiciary has no powers of implementation. Rosenberg views the courts as "fly-paper for social reformers who succumb to 'the lure of litigation.' " and who, in so doing, siphon off crucial movement resources while mistaking symbolic victories for substantive ones. In a concluding section, the author finds that activists' judicial victories with regard to the environment, criminal rights and reapportionment of state legislatures have been equally hollow. His strained analysis runs counter to accepted wisdom and to scholarship.

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