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In 2009, the United States was hit broadside by Somali pirates who attempted to capture the U.S. flag ship Maersk Alabama. Suddenly, the pirates were no longer a distant menace. They had thrust themselves onto the American stage. Are the Somali pirates a legion of desperate fisherman attacking cargo ships and ocean cruisers to reclaim their waters? Or is piracy connected to crime networks and the madness that grips Somalia? What threats do pirates pose to international security? To answer these questions, Peter Eichstaedt crisscrosses East Africa, meeting with pirates both in and out of prisons, talking with them about their lives, tactics, and motives. Ultimately, he comes face-to-face with...
"The untold story of the Native Americans who were the patriotic but unwitting victims of America's quest for nuclear superiority during the Cold War." Stewart L. Udall, former Secretary of the Interior (from the back cover).
Describes the "conflict minerals" mined in the Congo amidst armed conflict and human rights abuses including gold, diamonds, coltan, tin, and tungsten used in cell phones, computers, and other electronics. Explores the slave labor, violence, and disease killing millions of Congolese mining these resources, and offers ways one can help.
&“Richard Opio has neither the look of a cold-blooded killer nor the heart of one. Yet as his mother and father lay on the ground with their hands tied, Richard used the blunt end of an ax to crush their skulls. He was ordered to do this by a unit commander of the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group that has terrorized northern Uganda for twenty years. The memory racks Richard's slender body as he wipes away tears.&” For more than twenty years, beginning in the mid-1980s, the Lord's Resistance Army has ravaged northern Uganda. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered, and thousands more mutilated and traumatized. At least 1.5 million people have been driven from a pastoral existence int...
A journalist shares this cross-country conversations with the Afghan populace including emotional and critical commentary from a former warlord, a Taliban judge, poppy growers, women parliamentarians, would-be suicide bombers, a besieged video store owner and more in a book that also looks at what the future may hold for the embattled country.
This sweeping and groundbreaking work presents the shocking and violent history of ethnic cleansing against Chinese Americans from the Gold Rush era to the turn of the century.
Tells the story of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation and its legacy of sickness and government neglect, documenting one of the darker chapters in 20th century American history. --From publisher description.
The American prison system has grown tenfold in thirty years, while crime rates have been relatively flat: 2 million people are behind bars on any given day, more prisoners than in any other country in the world — half a million more than in Communist China, and the largest prison expansion the world has ever known. In Going Up The River, Joseph Hallinan gets to the heart of America’s biggest growth industry, a self-perpetuating prison-industrial complex that has become entrenched without public awareness, much less voter consent. He answers, in an extraordinary way, the essential question: What, in human terms, is the price we pay? He has looked for answers to that question in every corner of the “prison nation,” a world far off the media grid — the America of struggling towns and cities left behind by the information age and desperate for jobs and money. Hallinan shows why the more prisons we build, the more prisoners we create, placating everyone at the expense of the voiceless prisoners, who together make up one of the largest migrations in our nation’s history.
The Energy Reader presents a series of readings that examine the energy problem from an anthropological perspective and look at energy holistically, including social and cultural components and long term implications for global and social environmental change. Brings a unique critical approach to the problem of energy and its complexity Presents the topic as both a human and a technological problem, differentiating long-term perspectives from short term fixes Includes coverage of the politics of energy, the protection of future generations, the avoidance of dangerous waste products, efficiency, resilience, and democratic relevance Features selections drawn from the work of physicists, economists, business experts, engineers, journalists, historians, and entrepreneurs
This volume addresses ten issues pertaining to energy and the environment, such as climate change, fossil fuels, endangered species, and renewable energy, and examines how these issues are affecting countries around the world. In the industrial age, first powered by coal and then more often by oil, environmental degradation nearly inevitably followed resource exploitation and energy production. This book examines environmental issues in specific countries around the world as well as solutions some of these countries have discovered in order to help save the environment. This volume includes 10 chapters, each addressing a specific issue relating to energy and the environment as it pertains to a variety of countries, including toxic chemicals, pollution, deforestation, and climate change. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the issue. Following the chapter introduction, each chapter highlights that issue in eight countries and provides historic perspective. This work provides an overview for high school students and college students at the undergraduate level on 10 important topics that address matters relating to energy and the environment in the 21st century.