Robert Kennedy : His Life

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In the nation's varied memory, Robert Kennedy is a contradictory figure, a hard-bullying McCarthyite obsessed with Hoffa and Castro but also a gentle, poetry-reading herald of a new age bent on stopping the Vietnam War and lifting up the poor. As Evan Thomas (The Wise Men and Man to See) writes, both liberals and conservatives have their own spin on his legacy, with predictably different visions of what he would have done if he had lived to be our 37th president. As it turns out, none of the Good Bobby/Bad Bobby projections are right, and none are completely wrong either. In sorting through the myths and the truths, Thomas provides a detailed portrait of a man centrally engaged in most of the important issues of the postwar era, and concludes that the best way to understand him is "fear":

He was brave because he was afraid. His monsters were too large and close at hand to simply flee. He had to turn and fight them.... He became a one-man underground, honeycombed with hidden passages, speaking in code, trusting no one completely, ready to face the firing squad--but also knowing when to slip away to fight again another day. Although he affected simplicity and directness, he became an extraordinarily complicated and subtle man. His shaking hands and reedy voice, his groping for words as well as meaning, his occasional resort to subterfuge, do not diminish his daring. Precisely because he was fearful and self-doubting, his story is an epic of courage.

RFK was born after the chosen siblings had been established in the Kennedy clan. He originally had low standing in the family hierarchy. Thomas describes how the "runt" of the family, the one not born and raised for power and whose only ambition was to please the father who ignored him, turned into the essential son, the defender of the family and mediator between Joe Sr. and JFK. He fleshes out Bobby's role in JFK's campaigns, his testy relations with Martin Luther King, his middle-ground stance on integration, his performance during the Cuban missile crisis, and his genuine concern for the poor. He reveals the truth behind such events as the vice-presidential appointment of Lyndon Johnson as well as the famous calls from the Kennedy brothers, which got Martin Luther King out of jail. He also tries to untangle the webs obscuring the Kennedys' involvement in Castro assassination plots, their relations with Marilyn Monroe, and RFK's guilt over his brother's death. And finally, he, too, speculates on what kind of president one of history's great what-ifs might have made. The picture he paints--of a sensitive, courageous, and determined man on the verge of achieving greatness--is more complex and human than any we've had before, and reminds us again of the tragedy of RFK's death. --Lesley Reed

Book Description

Robert Kennedy has been viewed as hero and villain -- as the "Good Bobby" who, as his brother Ted eulogized him, "saw wrong and tried to right it,...saw suffering and tried to heal it" -- or as the "Bad Bobby" of countless conspiracy theories, the ruthless and manipulative bully who plotted with the Mafia to kill Castro and lusted after Marilyn Monroe. Evan Thomas's achievement is to realize RFK as a human being, to bring to life an extraordinarily complex man who was at once kind and cruel, devious and honest, fearful and brave.

Thomas had unusual access to his subject's life. He is the first biographer since Arthur Schlesinger to see RFK's private papers, and he interviewed all of Kennedy's closest aides and advisers, many of whom were forthcoming in ways that they had not been before.

The portrait that emerges is unvarnished but sympathetic, fair-minded and always readable. It is packed with new detail about Kennedy's early life and his behind-the-scenes machinations: his involvement in a cheating incident in prep school; his first attempt at romance; and his many back-channel political operations -- with new revelations about the 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his long struggles with J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom were subtly and not-so-subtly trying to blackmail the Kennedys.

In a clear and fast-paced narrative, Thomas cuts through the mythology to reveal a character who, though he died young just as he was reaching for ultimate power, remains one of the century's most fascinating men.

Customer Reviews:

a politician to be passionate about.......2007-01-20

Although I was only 7 years old when he died I have talked to many people about the passion they felt for Bobby. Boy, could we use someone like that now. Although the book does not shy away from his sometime machiavellian tactics, it shows a person who was so affected by tragedy that he really cared. I see film clips of when he visited Buffalo, and the entire Niagara Square was packed with tens of thousands of people. I cannot think of anyone, short of the Bills after a super bowl win, that would garner that much enthusiasm. Evan Thomas captures that and draws the reader in. I actually felt empty when finishing the book and sad that I could think of no one today that could fill that void. Thomas also through thorough research seems to dispel the popular myth of Bobby as a womanizer. He was actually a devoted family man haunted by his brothers death but loyal to wife and children. Not so with Jack. When Bobby was in Indianapolis about to speak before a black audience it was announced that Martin Luther King had just been killed. He discarded his planned speech and relayed his own feelings of how he felt when his brother Jack was killed. It was totally ad-libbed and from the heart. Indianapolis was one of the few major cities not to erupt in violence. I wonder how different this country might be had he the opportunity to serve us.

Good Bobby Primer, but Nothing New.......2006-11-16

Evan offers much insight into an unfinished life. He meets the mark of a good biographer; as a history this is a well-balanced read. But he fails to give us what we crave: perpective into how the world might have been different had Bobby survived.

Bobby once famously said: "Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies". Mr. Thomas has done a commendable job of tracking that change, speaking to the better known facets of Bobby's personal as well as political evolution. Evan's book captures the antecedents: his awkwardness as a young Kennedy; the shadow, and then death of, his brother Jack; the opportunities to question the rigidity of his Catholic faith; his decision to align himself with McCarthy (Joe not Gene). These alternately help set the foundation for the evolution of Bobby from FDR politician to modern-day progressive. These help explain what caused a 1950's era government attorney concerned about Comintern penetration of the State Department to become a proponent of the United Farmworkers in its most radical years. Or those changes that caused the one-time skeptic of Martin Luther King to become one of his most ardent political champions.

Evans provides the rationale for the enmity shared by various mobsters, LBJ, and even Roy Cohn. His rationale is this: Bobby cared. Evans touches us when he describes Bobby as a man who strived to live lives as others did. The description of Bobby's pain witnessing the utter poverty of rural blacks in the 1960's Mississippi delta is palpable and authentic. But Bobby was also a shrewd strategist, adapting to a time when the solid south was no longer the dependable, conservative counterweight of the Democratic Party fulcrum, and the campus was no longer the only forum in America for frank discussion of problems in America. Bobby was not an opportunist, but he was a political realist, and in the days leading up to the '68 convention Bobby reflected not simply the changes occurring within the antiwar movement or the modern-day Democratic Party, but also those changes occurring all across America at that time.

Would Bobby have turned around a country that was heading down a path of "secret plans" to end the Vietnam War, Watergate, "Trickle Down" economics and South American puppeteering? Evan Thomas to his credit wrote a book about an unfinished life, and a good one at that. But for those interested in what might have been, we'll have to continue to wonder.

Muddled and unfocused.......2006-09-11

The life and times of Robert Kennedy beg for a coherent and in depth book .... unfortunately this is not it. Living in the shadow of his presidential brother, the shadow of his oldest brother killed in WWII and the all encompassing shadow of his father, RFK was able to chisel out an identity of his own in US history before his tragic death. Hoping to gain some understanding/insight of/into this man's character and evolution from a sullen child to presidential candidate and everything in between, and a chonology of such things as his involvement in the US civil rights movement, McCarthyism, Cuba (Bay of Pigs and The Missle Crisis) and his relationship in the White House with his brother JFK... I was greatly disappointed. A glaring hole in this book is any serious treatment of RFK and Vietnam. What the book does contain are snippets, quotes and anecdotes, some mildly interesting, (i.e. RFK's role in the release of Martin Luther King from prison), without any cohesiveness and very little context. And although many of the conclusions reached in this volume are valid they are simply not borne out here. The book's attempt to cover significant parallel events is at best confusing and there is also an alarming amount of armchair psychology. I hate to be so hard nosed but the subject deserves much better than this book.

A good reporter does a good job with a fantastic subject.......2006-06-15

Evan Thomas writes like who he is: a good reporter who realizes that what he's writing is history. He adds little sentimentality because he doesn't have to. He has framed his subject in an interesting way (Bobby's alienated childhood left him with empathy for underdogs and outsiders, as well as an outsized loyalty to the family's whose acceptance he craved) that just giving us the facts, just telling us the story, packs an emotional punch.

Knowing how this story ends makes everything about it more powerful. Again, Thomas isn't maudlin because he doesn't have to be. When the Kennedy Brothers are dealing with Dr. King, all three of them making compromises because they are confident that they have time to accomplish their individual agendas, you shake your head because of what was lost. As Bobby moves to the head of the family, finally getting the respect he craved his whole life, you are overwhelmed with sadness and dread.

Most of all, as you watch RFK change, learn and grow as a man and a politician and statesman, you ache for what we lost as a country. Today it seems that being completely intractable is viewed as a positive thing in our leaders. Bobby proved we have the capacity to evolve, to take our experiences and better ourselves. Imagine what a President like that could have accomplished!

A glimpse of RFK.......2005-12-01

This was a good read but it left me wanting to know more. Bobby Kennedy was an enigma but the book could have told me more about him. This book is definitely worth reading but it should only be the beginning of getting to know RFK.

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EXCELLENT! I WISH I'D HAD THIS IN ELEMENTARY & MIDDLE SCHOOL

Robert Kennedy: His Life
Judie Mills
Manufacturer: Millbrook Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

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Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy
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ASIN: 1562942506

Customer Reviews:

EXCELLENT! I WISH I'D HAD THIS IN ELEMENTARY & MIDDLE SCHOOL.......2000-09-27

Judie Mills does an extraordinary job of presenting Robert Kennedy, his life and the issues he faced as a politician to a young audience. She gives an excellent, in-depth accounting of the man's early life, the experiences that shaped his character as a man. We see young Bobby, at age 4, hurling himself into the ocean, determined to teach himself how to swim. That experience follows him throughout his life and it is that single determined approach he appears to take on most stands. As an undergraduate, he doggedly pursues a place on the football field and as an adult, he doggedly pursues Teamsters and Mafiosi. In reading of his interrogation of the men he regarded as "foes," one can almost imagine a little Bobby superimposed on the face of the future Attorney General, flinging himself headlong into the ocean determined to swim. And swim he does in the face of the Rackets Committee (aka "Get [Jimmy]Hoffa Squad.")

In 1965, Robert Kennedy, then a Senator undertakes another grueling challenge. A self admitted acrophobe, he along with Mt. Everestt climbers Barry Prather and Jim Whittaker scale Mt. Kennedy, a previously unscaled Canadian Mountain. One tracks his progress as he makes his way up that mountain, only to emerge victorious on March 27, 1965. The boy who taught himself to swim was revisited in the man who climbed that mountain.

Robert Kennedy was my very first hero as a child and this is a book I would have LOVED! (I STILL have my 1968 copies of "Life" in re the assassination). His work with civil rights issues, Farmworkers, minorities and other disenfranchised persons certainly makes for interesting reading. This book does him a big service by portraying him in a very sympathetic light. Readers do come away with the feeling that the man was sincere in his efforts and the question is always left hanging -- what would the outcome of this world today be had this man lived to be elected president in 1968?

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Captain James Cook's three epic 18th-century explorations of the Pacific Ocean were the last of their kind, literally completing the map of the world. Yet despite his monumental discoveries, principally in the South Pacific, Cook the man has remained an enigma. In retracing key legs of the circumnavigator's journey, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz chronicles the cultural and environmental havoc wrought by the captain's opening of the unspoiled Pacific to the West, as well as the alternately indifferent and passionate reactions Cook's name evokes during the writer's journeys through Polynesia, Australia, the Aleutians, and the explorer's native England. Horwitz skillfully weaves a biography and travel narrative with warm humor that is natural and human-scale, and his restless inquisitiveness quickly infects the reader. While striking dichotomies abound throughout that journey--Maori toughs who adopt Nazi imagery to symbolize their own fight against white domination, millennia-old Polynesian sexual mores that would shame the Reeperbahn, a sense that Christianity decimated native cultures at least as effectively as Western venereal diseases did--few are more poignant than the ones that abound in Cook's own life. This fine work is an adventurous reminder that answers to historical riddles are elusive at best--and seldom as compelling as the myriad new questions they pose. --Jerry McCulley

Book Description

Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone BeforeTwo centuries after James Cook's epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain's adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today's Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic, works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.

Customer Reviews:

Captain Cook For A Day.......2007-09-28

Well, I'm not ashamed to admit my hand just went right out and chose this book for title alone, on the strength of another travelogue I have in my library with "Blue" in the title (William Least Heat Moon's excellent Blue Highways). The boat on the cover helped; I'm a sucker for seagoing stories.

There is no denying Tony Horwitz has a gift for getting you to read; I was absorbed immediately. He makes history vastly more interesting than my Western Civ professor did in college, and presents a credible reasoning for what lead up to the death of Captain James T. Cook (that's right, sportsfans, the captain of the starship Enterprise is named after the 18th-century explorer).

Because of a lifelong passion for the sea and, apparently, Captain Cook, Horwitz embarked upon the novel notion of retracing the great man's voyages, 21st-century style. I thought this a bit of a cheat throughout the book; he VISITED the same sites, but couldn't have been said to truly get the flavour of any of the journeys. He started out promisingly, signing onto a trip for not quite a week aboard a replica of Cook's ship Endeavour by blatantly lying his way through the application, checking "yes" to questions he probably should have, in retrospect, reconsidered. A more-or-less total greenhorn, he schlepps his way through days of screwups with safety gear on that Cook's hapless sailors never enjoyed, along with far better food, no threat of corporal punishment and far less crowded conditions. Predictably, his first destination after getting off for the last time is a tavern - at least there he follows the pattern of sailors of old.

Thereafter his retracings take the form of flying to each port of call and investigating Cook's explorations on foot and by far safer land transportation (usually). The book is an excellent insight into the South Pacific of today; it seems to have no resemblance whatsoever to the South Pacific of Cook's time, which is probably the point. I have harboured a passion to visit Rarotonga all my life. After reading what the islands are like now, I think I will live with my fantasies. Things seem very shabby and dirty from Horwitz's perspective; not a paradise anymore. The one place which seems close, an island nation called Niue, is a curious mix of Christianized, very proper islanders and dubious offshore money-laundering concerns, and here Horwitz succeeds in making an unwelcome nuisance of himself by pestering the locals to show him a plant which causes them noticeable embarrassment. He doesn't take the hint when he gets the cold shoulder from almost everybody he asks about it but gets off the island, seemingly, just prior to being invited to leave.

"Blue Latitudes", as a whole, probably wouldn't supplant a recognized treatise about Captain Cook - although he does present the man's failings, it's clear he slants in favour of the explorer - but does effectively touch on almost every aspect of Cook's life and career, with intriguing insights into his dealings with native peoples, his prowess as a cartographer (some of Cook's charts were in use until the mid-1990s), and his expertise as a commander and seaman. He made three transoceanic voyages with minimal loss of life or property before possible burnout brought him to a set of unfortunate circumstances which culminated in his death at the hands of an infuriated mob of natives at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, on February 14, 1779.

Horwitz is enthusiastic in his efforts to get information, points of view, previously-unknown sidebars, and support from a huge cast of characters, accompanied almost throughout by a droll fellow named Roger who appears to be as amenable to foregoing any investigation that doesnt involve a rum bottle as he does in giving Horwitz moral support in the out-of-the-way places they visit. Overall, this was a highly entertaining book. I know far more now about Cook and the South Pacific - both former and present day - than I did before I read it, and was left, also, with a curious sense of loss at the end. I quite enjoyed circumnavigating the globe with Horwitz and his merry crew.

Good Read, a little long near the end..........2007-06-08

I am big fan of Tony Horwitz, and this was a very good book and a lot of great information on Captain Cook. My only complaint was that the book gets a little long near the end. Roger, Tony's accomplice throughout the journey is a real character and was enjoyable throughout.

A wondrous journey!.......2007-03-09

I had little idea of Captain Cook's comings and goings until a friend recommended this book to me. Coincidentally, I began reading it while on a trip that included Hawai'i -- and found myself on Big Island on the anniversary of the great captain's death (which I celebrated with a bird's eye view of the monument in his honor and a toast). The book makes fascinating and constantly entertaining and informative reading, and I liked Horwitz's idea of retracing Cook's steps, trying to balance what he came across with how things have changed (usually for the worse) in the past 230+ years. Cook's views on scurvy -- way beyond his years --, his normally open and respectful attitude towards native peoples, his huge talent for navigating and mapping what he encountered and his courage in the face of great peril and adversity have made me admire him a lot. It is interesting to note that most native peoples regard Cook as a bane, the man who brought so-called civilization to their previously untouched existences. I really do think Cook was the smaller of evils...

Cook and the New World.......2007-01-23

This is a book that could start the curious reader on a search of their own for the elusive Captain Cook. What is so good about this book is that Horwitz has been honest about his successes and failures in following in the footsteps of the great explorer. There are plenty of laugh out loud passages as Roger, his fellow traveller, and he confront the realities of travelling in places both isolated and altered since the days of Cook. Yet the book is far more than a merely amusing travelogue.
Horwitz manages to twine together his own travels and those of Cook in a manner that makes the reader realise how the world, and its people, have changed since the latter half of the eighteenth century. He clearly admires Cook, and most of his fellow sailors, whilst at the same time drawing attention to how their missions of exploration on behalf of what would become the British Empire altered the world for ever. One of the best aspects of the book is that he does not bludgeon the past into a politically correct framework but instead offers the reader insights into a past that many readers will find fascinating. The fact that Horwitz allows the reader to compare his abilities to cope with disappointments and difficulties to those of Cook makes the book more enjoyable.
A lengthy read but well worth the time.

Hit and miss.......2006-12-19

I really enjoyed Horwitz's CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC, so I thought I'd try his Captain Cook travelogue, BLUE LATITUDES. My reaction was mixed. I loved the stuff about Captain Cook, but was less enthusiastic about Horwitz's attempt to follow Cook's explorations.

Cook set out on three explorations, essentially looking for the Southern Continent. As a result Horwitz starts with the South Pacific islands, New Zealand, and Australia. The most interesting segment of this account for me was Cook's contact with the Australian aborigines who wanted nothing to do with Cook and told him, in their own language, to "Go Away." Later on Cook discovered the Great Barrier Reef and came close to being shipwrecked.

In my mind Horwitz spends too much time on trivial matters. For instance, when Cook tried to land in modern Niue (Savage Island) the natives chased him away. He mistook them for cannibals since they had painted their teeth with red banana juice. Horwitz spends an inordinate amount of time looking for red bananas. In another instance, he travels the globe looking for an arrow supposedly made out of Cook's shin bone.

In some ways BLUE LATITUDES is inspirational. For one thing, Cook was born of poor parents in Yorkshire, England. He worked his way up from clerk, to sailor on a coal barge, to captain in the Royal Navy in a much more hierarchal society. He also went where "no man had been before." If that sounds familiar it's no accident. James T. Kirk was modeled after Captain Cook.

Captain Cook himself was a rather dour sort of person, but some of his shipmates had eccentric personalities. Joseph Banks, the botanist on board The Endeavor, was a nobleman who sailed with Cook rather than go on a grand tour. His journal entries can be poetic at times. David Samwell, surgeon's mate on board the Resolution, spent most of his time "admiring `Fair Damsels' and `nymphs' and calculating how to bed them." Cook, himself, comes alive when he philosophizes about the harm he may be doing to native cultures. Although he was ready with the musket when natives crossed him, he showed his human side when he tried not to expose the Hawaiians to venereal disease.

On the modern side, we visit Cooktown in northern Australia, where Horwitz and his pal Roger Williamson spend most of their time drinking, and the Aleutian Islands where Horwitz and his buddy Roger board a ferry that endures hurricane force winds resulting in almost terminal seasickness. Roger grates on your nerves after a while; he seems to have a one-track mind; he never goes anywhere without a ready supply of alcohol.

Whenever the book rotates back to the Cook biography, interest picks up. The most riveting part of the book is when Cook lands in Kealakekua Bay, for the second time, and you know that this is where he met his death. Horwitz also spends some time analyzing Cook's mental pathology. He seemed to suffering from "burn-out" on his third exploration. He flogged his crewman more than he ever had before, he forced them to eat walrus meat, he gave in to his temper, and he treated the natives inconsistently, which ultimately led to his death.

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

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Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz
Manufacturer: Henry Holt and Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0965047393

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Blue Latitudes - Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz
Manufacturer: Henry Holt and Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K1KXZQ

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Blue Latitudes : Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Company, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000R557S8

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Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz
Manufacturer: Henry Holt and Co.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MC14U6

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Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OTMGPE

Blue Latitudes CD: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before

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Blue Latitudes CD: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before
Tony; Daniel, Gerroll Horwitz
Manufacturer: HarperAudio
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OA7RQ6

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GLOBAL STUDIES is a unique series designed to provide comprehensive background information and selected world press articles on the regions and countries of the world. Each GLOBAL STUDIES volume includes an annotated listing of World Wide Web sites. Visit our website for more information: www.dushkin.com/global studies/

Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Radical Perspectives)

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Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Radical Perspectives)
Mrinalini Sinha , and Mrinalini Sinha
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Mother India: Selections from the Controversial 1927 Text, Edited and with an Introduction by Mrinalini Sinha
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Book Description

Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents.

Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook (Global Studies)

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An essential pick for any comprehensive reference library.

Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook (Global Studies)
Yasmeen Mohiuddin
Manufacturer: ABC-CLIO
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1851098011
Release Date: 2006-11-27

Customer Reviews:

An essential pick for any comprehensive reference library........2007-04-10

Any high school or college-level library serious about world study references should have Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook in their collection. It surveys the history, culture, politics and social issues of the country offering a basic reference of the people, places and events which are essential to know, and a series of articles which reinforces facts about the nation's peoples. PAKISTAN considers the foundations and institutions of the country: it provides the specifics missing from more general regional titles and thus is an essential pick for any comprehensive reference library.

India: A Global Studies Handbook (Global Studies)

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India: A Global Studies Handbook (Global Studies)
Fritz Blackwell
Manufacturer: ABC-CLIO
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Release Date: 2004-06-10

Global Studies: India and South Asia, 6th Edition (Global Studies)

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Global Studies: India and South Asia, 6th Edition (Global Studies)
James K Norton , and James Norton
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin
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Book Description

The Global Studies series is designed to provide comprehensive background informatin and selected world press articles on the regions and countries of the world. This edition features an overview of South Asia and country reports for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. An annotated list of World Wide Web sites guides students to additional resources.

Going to School in South Asia (The Global School Room)

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Going to School in South Asia (The Global School Room)

Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Afghanistan is one of many South Asian countries appearing in daily headlines, as it attempts to rebuild its society, including its educational system, after decades of war. Sri Lanka, devastated by the tsunami of 2004, and parts of Pakistan and Northern India, coping with the aftereffects of a major earthquake, are also also struggling for teachers, classrooms, supplies, and a sense of normalcy for their students. This volume, part of the Schooling Around the World series, provides readers with a history and survey of education in eight of the region's countries. It examines the Primary, Secondary, and Postsecondary levels of education, identifying the types of education available (public, private, tutoring, etc), any race, gender or social class issues that impact education, and major reforms taking place. Readers will find discussions of curriculum and teaching methods most helpful, as well as a special "day in the life" feature, which gives a personal look at what it's like for students attending school in that country today. -Afghanistan -Bangladesh -Bhutan -India -Maldives -Nepal -Pakistan -Sri Lanka

Gender, Religion, and the Heathen Lands: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s-1940s (Gender, Culture, and Global Politics)

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Gender, Religion, and the Heathen Lands: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s-1940s (Gender, Culture, and Global Politics)
Maina Cha Singh
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Women in History | World | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0815328249

Book Description

Seeking to extend existing scholarship on gender and colonialism and on women and American religion, this cross-cultural study examines the work of American missionary women in South Asia at several levels. A primary concern of the study is to historicize the interventions of these women and situate them within the dual contexts of the sending society and the receiving culture. It focuses on missionaries Isabella Thoburn and Ida Scudder, who founded some of the premier women's colleges and hospitals in British colonial India. The book also draws upon the narratives and reminiscences of South Asian women, now in their seventies, who attended such institutions in the 1940s, and whose voices texture our understanding of American women's missionary work in "Other" cultures.

The Global World of Indian Merchants, 17501947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society)

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An excellent historical account of a fantastic people.
Review by Lakshmi Subramanian

The Global World of Indian Merchants, 17501947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society)
Claude Markovits
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521622859

Book Description

Claude Markovits' book charts the development of two merchant communities in the province of Sind from the precolonial period, through colonial conquest and up to indepedence. Based on previously neglected archival sources, it describes how the communities came to control trading networks throughout the world, throwing light on the nature of these diasporas from South Asia in their interaction with the global economy. This is a sophisticated and accessible book that will appeal to students of South Asia, as well as to colonial historians and economic historians.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent historical account of a fantastic people........2000-12-26

The author deserves great praise for a very well written account on a subject often ignored by historians. The people of Sindh have been excellent traders for a few thousand years and the author has done well to describe the development of 2 Sindhi networks developed in the past couple hundred years.

I'd highly recommend this book (and not only because it covers the history of my ancestors).

Review by Lakshmi Subramanian.......2000-10-18

BY LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

The Global World of the Indian Merchant 1750-1947: Traders of sind from bukhara to panama

By Claude Markovits, Cambridge, Price not mentioned

This is a book many of us have been waiting for. Periodic pronouncements have been made about the resilience and prescience of the Asian trader operating within and against the writ of the colonial economy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Along with these, the long debate on the world economy has sustained a level of interest and enquiry about the dynamics of non-European commercial activity in widely dispersed areas of the globe. Serious gaps and doubts have, however, remained and we are often left wondering, "Whose world economy was it anyway?" Was Asian enterprise a tedious aggregate of small, but countless, transactions indulged in by the colonial state with its own calculations and compulsions.

On the other hand, the visibility and movement of Indian merchant groups in the emerging global economy since the 19th century have invested the Asian experience with a certain significance, which, in turn, warrants a closer examination of the process, its antecedents and its projections. Claude Markovits's study attempts precisely to do all this and more, with the result that we have a narrative that is rich in detail, sensitive to the play of historical configurations and supported by a theoretical framework that is balanced and not overly ambitious. He focuses on two communities - the Shikarpuris and the Sindworkis, and through them proceeds to weave a story of dispersal and circulation, rather than that of a unitary diaspora with overarching Indian connotations.

Markovits argues that south Asian merchant movements were essentially temporary migrations and that the settlements, when these did occur, were largely involuntary. Nor did these correspond to any unitary category of caste, territory or religion and were in every sense the outgrowths of regional compulsions and local realities. The experience of the two communities chosen by Markovits, the Shikarpuris and Sindworkis, illustrates the juxtaposition of local processes with that of the global economy, where the activities of merchant groups took on a fuller meaning.

Obviously, such an approach is admissible when dealing with the operation of a colonial economy and not that of a national one, and it is no coincidence that the study should stop at 1947. Within this framework of local and global history, Markovits teases out a fascinating story of the merchant networks of Sind region, that has suffered an overdose of orientalizing descriptions. He also traces their emergence in the context of 18th century transition politics and their expansion in the high noon of British imperialism and Russian centralization. There is also the story of their spatial advance from Bukhara to Panama. The relocation of the south Asian merchant networks in the world economy in the 18th century is a well-established fact, even if its implications are not so well drawn out. The 18th century, in particular, is seen to have constituted a turning point in the positioning of the Asian merchants who suffered major reverses and in the process facilitated the marginalization of Asia in the newly emerging world economy centred firmly in Europe. The process of relocation was not coeval with that of decline and dislocation, and according to Markovits, it was marked by sharp regional and sub-regional variations.

Additionally, the establishment and workings of the colonial economy reared a sub-stratum of commercial functions and operations that were deftly handled and taken over by enterprising indigenous groups. It is within this context that Markovits positions his communities. He argues that far from operating in a residual space left open by the colonial dispensation, these merchant networks adapted successfully to a trading world dominated by European capital through a complex process of collaboration and conflict. The Shikarpuri and Sindworki networks developed under very different circumstances. The surge in Indo-Central Asian trade from the 1840s enabled the Shikarpuris to rework an existing network of caravan commerce and credit transactions under the dispensation of the Uzbeg khanates of central Asia. Meanwhile, the Sindworkis regrouped under the British dispensation and took advantage of the extension of the colonial economy from Bombay into Sind to operate a trade of truly global proportions. The Shikarpuri network was forced out of its base in Sind by changes that followed in the wake of colonial subjugation and changing configurations of commercial exchange. They exploited their old connections with central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan to emerge as principal moneylenders and traders, especially in the khanate of Bukhara. The details of the network have been deduced from a mass of legal material that the Russian authorities felt compelled to share with the British government in the eventuality of any death-related succession dispute involving a British Indian subject. One of the most striking features of the network to emerge from this legal discourse is the working of Shikarpuri panchayats in most localities of central Asia. The Sindworkis, on the other hand, were very much part of the colonial economy and began as modest peddlers of native crafts to a European clientele. This venture expanded substantially to include, in subsequent years, a wide range of curios that found their way into the European markets. Their initiative and intrepidity were quite remarkable. Consider the trader who protested against Australian immigration restrictions and flashed his credentials as a trader of repute who bought and sold exotic goods besides carving the occasional tortoise shell or setting a piece in jade. Curios became doubly important as the tourist traffic caught the fancy of European visitors, enabling a massive expansion of Sindhi enterprise on both sides of the Suez that soon turned to trade in textiles and financial speculation.

In all, this is a fascinating story of commercial dynamism. What makes the story even more fascinating is the exploration of the proclivity to spatial and social mobility among the networks. Caste did not play a central role in forging solidarities. The affinity seemed very much to lie with the region and with the ability to travel extensively and, in the process, ensure a circulation of skills and entrepreneurial labour.

Circulation however, remained confined to males, very rarely did wives accompany their partners. The absence of female company did not, however, deflect the passion for riches as merchants alternated between celibacy and permissiveness to balance the sexual economy of circulation.

The Grolier Global Studies Library, Set (Global Studies)
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The Grolier Global Studies Library, Set (Global Studies)
James Norten
Manufacturer: Grolier Educational Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

India | Asia | History | Subjects | Books | Ancient
ASIN: 0717273229

India and South Asia: India and South Asia (Global Studies)
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India and South Asia: India and South Asia (Global Studies)
James K., Dr. Norton
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Companies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

India | Asia | History | Subjects | Books | Ancient
ASIN: 156134379X

Book Description

Previously announced as " Excellence in Environmental Management". Almost every significant business decision today has an environmental dimension, and managers have to be aware of their responsibilities to customers, regulators, staff and wider society. The environmental challenge is a challenge of change management and offers businesses opportunities to gain real competitive advantage.

The authors explain how they can take these opportunities. Drawing on their extensive experience, and with examples from leading firms around the world, they set out the strategies and tools that have been shown to work.

Clearly written, with full understanding of the concerns and objectives of business and senior managers, this book provides an invaluable guide to a changing business environment.

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