Facts are Subversive

Facts are Subversive
Author: Timothy Garton Ash
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300161352

Timothy Garton Ash is well known as an astute and penetrating observer of a dazzling array of subjects, not least through his many contributions to the New York Review of Books. This collection of his essays from the last decade reveals his knack for ferreting out exceptional insights into a troubled world, often on the basis of firsthand experience. Whether he is writing about how “liberalism” has become a dirty word in American political discourse, the problems of Muslim assimilation in Europe, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Günter Grass’s membership in the Waffen-SS, or the angry youth of Iran, Garton Ash combines a gimlet eye for detail with deep knowledge of the history of his chosen subjects. Running through this book is the author’s insistence that, whatever some postmodernists might claim, there are indeed facts—and we have both a political and a moral duty to establish them. By practicing what it preaches, Facts Are Subversive shows why Timothy Garton Ash is one of the world’s leading political writers. “The best and most perceptive political writer of our time . . . This book shines the clearest of lights on an entire decade.”—John Simpson “One of the most reliable and acute observers of the past present, able to report on events as a witness and, simultaneously, assess them with a coolness of judgment that almost always holds up over time.”—George Packer, New York Times Book Review “One of the most enjoyable political books you’ll read this year.”—GQ

Disinformation Book of Lists

Disinformation Book of Lists
Author: Russ Kick
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2004-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1609258894

Can you name five military leaders who were transgendered? Twelve cases of involuntary human experimentation by the U.S. government? How about the four porn novels written by famous authors, 11 books left out of the Bible and over 50 side effects of NutraSweet that have been reported to the FDA? In 1977, David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace published The Book of Lists, causing an immediate sensation. Not only did it lead to three direct sequels (in 1980, 1983 and 1993), it also created a new genre. Soon, shelves were lined with The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists (1978), The Book of Sports Lists (1979) and Meredith’s Book of Bible Lists (1980), among many others. Using this popular, enduring format, Russ Kick’s Disinformation Book of Lists delves into the murkier aspects of politics, current events, business, history, science, art and literature, sex, drugs, death and more. Despite such unusual subject matter, this book presents hard, substantiated facts with full references. Among the lists presented: Innocent People Freed from Prison Members of the Skull & Bones Secret Society at Yale Drugs Pulled Off the Market After They Killed Too Many People Legal Substances that Will Get You High Scenes that Were Cut from Movies Raunchy Songs that Were Never Released Military Officers, Government Officials, Astronauts, and Airline Personnel Who Say UFOs Are Real Words and Phrases No Longer Allowed in Textbooks

The Gentle Subversive

The Gentle Subversive
Author: Mark Hamilton Lytle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2007-07-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0198038534

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring antagonized some of the most powerful interests in the nation--including the farm block and the agricultural chemical industry--and helped launch the modern environmental movement. In The Gentle Subversive, Mark Hamilton Lytle offers a compact biography of Carson, illuminating the road that led to this vastly influential book. Lytle explores the evolution of Carson's ideas about nature, her love for the sea, her career as a biologist, and above all her emergence as a writer of extraordinary moral and ecological vision. We follow Carson from her childhood on a farm outside Pittsburgh, where she first developed her love of nature (and where, at age eleven, she published her first piece in a children's magazine), to her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and her career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Lytle describes the genesis of her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, the incredible success of The Sea Around Us (a New York Times bestseller for over a year), and her determination to risk her fame in order to write her "poison book": Silent Spring. The author contends that despite Carson's demure, lady-like demeanor, she was subversive in her thinking and aggressive in her campaign against pesticides. Carson became the spokeswoman for a network of conservationists, scientists, women, and other concerned citizens who had come to fear the mounting dangers of the human assault on nature. What makes this story particularly compelling is that Carson took up this cause at the very moment when she herself faced a losing battle with cancer. Succinct and engaging, The Gentle Subversive is a story of success, celebrity, controversy, and vindication. It will inspire anyone interested in protecting the natural world or in women's struggle to find a voice in society.

50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know

50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know
Author: Russ Kick
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2004-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1609259416

Ever feel like you’re being kept in the dark? Do you feel like the facts and history you rely on might not be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Russ Kick delivers a second round of stunning information, forgotten facts and hidden history—all thoroughly researched and documented. Sized for quick reference, filled with facts, illustrations, and graphic evidence of lies and misrepresentations, 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know—Volume 2 presents the vital, often omitted details on human health hazards, government lies, and secret history and warfare excised from your schoolbooks and nightly news reports. Russ Kick and The Disinformation Company have published five successful books together since 2001. Each one has become a bestseller, establishing Russ as the leader in gathering and disseminating the hidden history, forgotten facts, secret stories and covert cover-ups that “they” don’t want you to know!

Facts and Fears

Facts and Fears
Author: James R. Clapper
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525558667

The former Director of National Intelligence speaks out in this New York Times bestseller When he stepped down in January 2017 as the fourth United States Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper had been President Obama's senior intelligence advisor for six and a half years, longer than his three predecessors combined. He led the US Intelligence Community through a period that included the raid on Osama bin Laden, the Benghazi attack, the leaks of Edward Snowden, and Russia's influence operation on the 2016 U.S election. In Facts and Fears, Clapper traces his career through the growing threat of cyberattacks, his relationships with Presidents and Congress, and the truth about Russia's role in the presidential election. He describes, in the wake of Snowden and WikiLeaks, his efforts to make intelligence more transparent and to push back against the suspicion that Americans' private lives are subject to surveillance. Finally, it was living through Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and seeing how the foundations of American democracy were--and continue to be--undermined by a foreign power that led him to break with his instincts grown through more than five decades in the intelligence profession, to share his inside experience. Clapper considers such controversial questions as, is intelligence ethical? Is it moral to intercept communications or to photograph closed societies from orbit? What are the limits of what we should be allowed to do? What protections should we give to the private citizens of the world, not to mention our fellow Americans? Is there a time that intelligence officers can lose credibility as unbiased reporters of hard truths by asserting themselves into policy decisions? Facts and Fears offers a privileged look inside the United States intelligence community and addresses with the frankness and professionalism for which James Clapper is known some of the most difficult challenges in our nation's history.

The Subversive Copy Editor

The Subversive Copy Editor
Author: Carol Fisher Saller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0226734102

Each year writers and editors submit over three thousand grammar and style questions to the Q&A page at The Chicago Manual of Style Online. Some are arcane, some simply hilarious—and one editor, Carol Fisher Saller, reads every single one of them. All too often she notes a classic author-editor standoff, wherein both parties refuse to compromise on the "rights" and "wrongs" of prose styling: "This author is giving me a fit." "I wish that I could just DEMAND the use of the serial comma at all times." "My author wants his preface to come at the end of the book. This just seems ridiculous to me. I mean, it’s not a post-face." In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller casts aside this adversarial view and suggests new strategies for keeping the peace. Emphasizing habits of carefulness, transparency, and flexibility, she shows copy editors how to build an environment of trust and cooperation. One chapter takes on the difficult author; another speaks to writers themselves. Throughout, the focus is on serving the reader, even if it means breaking "rules" along the way. Saller’s own foibles and misadventures provide ample material: "I mess up all the time," she confesses. "It’s how I know things." Writers, Saller acknowledges, are only half the challenge, as copy editors can also make trouble for themselves. (Does any other book have an index entry that says "terrorists. See copy editors"?) The book includes helpful sections on e-mail etiquette, work-flow management, prioritizing, and organizing computer files. One chapter even addresses the special concerns of freelance editors. Saller’s emphasis on negotiation and flexibility will surprise many copy editors who have absorbed, along with the dos and don’ts of their stylebooks, an attitude that their way is the right way. In encouraging copy editors to banish their ignorance and disorganization, insecurities and compulsions, the Chicago Q&A presents itself as a kind of alter ego to the comparatively staid Manual of Style. In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller continues her mission with audacity and good humor.

Word by Word

Word by Word
Author: Kory Stamper
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-03-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 110197026X

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka
Author: Michael Lowy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2016-08-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0472053094

An erudite analysis of the critical and subversive dimensions of Kafka's writings

Teaching As a Subversive Activity

Teaching As a Subversive Activity
Author: Neil Postman
Publisher: Delta
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2009-11-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0307491706

A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods—with dramatic and practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today's world. Praise for Teaching As a Subversive Activity “A healthy dose of Postman and Weingartner is a good thing: if they make even a dent in the pious . . . American classroom, the book will be worthwhile.”—New York Times Book Review “Teaching and knowledge are subversive in that they necessarily substitute awareness for guesswork, and knowledge for experience. Experience is no use in the world of Apollo 8. It is simply necessary to know. However, it is also necessary to know the effect of Apollo 8 in creating a new Global Theatre in which student and teacher alike are looking for roles. Postman and Weingartner make excellent theatrical producers in the new Global Theatre.”—Marshall McLuhan “It will take courage to read this book . . . but those who are asking honest questions—what’s wrong with the worlds in which we live, how do we build communication bridges cross the Generation Gap, what do they want from us?—these people will squirm in the discovery that the answers are really within themselves.”—Saturday Review “Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner go beyond the now-familiar indictments of American education to propose basic ways of liberating both teachers and students from becoming personnel rather than people . . . the authors have created what may become a primer of ‘the new education’ Their book is intended for anyone, teacher or not, who is concerned with sanity and survival in a world of precipitously rapid change, and it’s worth your reading.”—Playboy “This challenging, liberating book can unlock not only teachers but anyone for whom language and learning are not dead.”—Nat Hentoff

100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know

100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know
Author: Kick, Russ
Publisher: Disinformation Books
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2014-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1938875087

This book sheds light on those things that people in power—government, religious leaders, corporations, the rich and well connected—would just as soon wish you didn't know. To them secrets are power. And they'll do whatever it takes to keep them that way—suppressing the truth and covering up facts that might make the rest of us angry enough to challenge the powerful or at least to have a good laugh at their expense. Using careful research and impeccable sources, Kick uncovers the hidden truth. For example, self-appointed censors warn constantly about the dangers of pornography, but the fact is that pornography has existed since the first cave people carved dirty pictures on the walls. It's also true that two atomic bombs were dropped on North Carolina—although we managed to avoid nuking Greenland, Texas, Canada, Britain and Spain; George Washington embezzled government funds; 1 of 10 people is not fathered by the man they believe is dad; Barbie is based on a German sex doll; The American colonists practiced cannibalism, and much more. This is a combined edition of 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know, volumes 1 and 2 first published in 2003 and 2004.