Politiek

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH * "What was it really like to be Richard Nixon? Evan Thomas tackles this fascinating question by peeling back the layers of a man driven by a poignant mix of optimism and fear."--Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

Evan Thomas delivers the best single-volume biography of Richard Nixon to date, a radical, unique portrait of a complicated figure who was both determinedly optimistic and tragically flawed. The New York Times bestselling author of Ike's Bluff and Sea of Thunder, Thomas brings new life to one of American history's most infamous, paradoxical, and enigmatic politicians, dispensing with myths to achieve an intimate and nuanced look at the actual man.

What drove a painfully shy outcast in elite Washington society--a man so self-conscious he refused to make eye contact during meetings--to pursue power and public office? How did a president so attuned to the American political id that he won reelection in a historic landslide lack the self-awareness to recognize the gaping character flaws that would drive him from office and forever taint his legacy?

In Being Nixon, Evan Thomas peels away the layers of the complex, confounding figure who became America's thirty-seventh president. The son of devout Quakers, Richard Nixon (not unlike his rival John F. Kennedy) grew up in the shadow of an older, favored brother and thrived on conflict and opposition. Through high school and college, in the navy and in politics, he was constantly leading crusades and fighting off enemies real and imagined. As maudlin as he was Machiavellian, Nixon possessed the plainspoken eloquence to reduce American television audiences to tears with his career-saving "Checkers" speech; meanwhile, his darker half hatched schemes designed to take down his political foes, earning him the notorious nickname "Tricky Dick."

Drawing on a wide range of historical accounts, Thomas reveals the contradictions of a leader whose vision and foresight led him to achieve détente with the Soviet Union and reestablish relations with communist China, but whose underhanded political tactics tainted his reputation long before the Watergate scandal. One of the principal architects of the modern Republican Party and its "silent majority" of disaffected whites and conservative ex-Dixiecrats, Nixon was also deemed a liberal in some quarters for his efforts to desegregate Southern schools, create the Environmental Protection Agency, and end the draft.

A deeply insightful character study as well as a brilliant political biography, Being Nixon offers a surprising look at a man capable of great bravery and extraordinary deviousness--a balanced portrait of a president too often reduced to caricature.

Praise for Being Nixon

"A biography of eloquence and breadth . . . No single volume about Nixon's long and interesting life could be so comprehensive."--Chicago Tribune

"Terrifically engaging . . . a fair, insightful and highly entertaining portrait."--The Wall Street Journal

"Thomas has a fine eye for the telling quote and the funny vignette, and his style is eminently readable."--The New York Times Book Review

"Thomas proves an amiable and fair-minded tour guide."--The Boston Globe

"A measured, concise, and important American biography."--Michael Beschloss, author of Presidential Courage

De praktijk van het onderhandelen, met een overzicht van valkuilen, technieken en strategieën en aangevuld met oefeningen.

Semco is in Brazilië het meest geliefde bedrijf om voor te werken: zonder vaste werktijden en andere verplichtingen, zoals bedrijfskleding. Velen bepalen zelf hoeveel ze verdienen, werknemers kiezen en beoordelen zelf hun baas, financiële informatie is beschikbaar voor iedereen - en er wordt winst gemaakt, veel winst. Bij Semco werken ze in Semco-stijl: een nieuwe, menselijke, productieve, stimulerende en in alle opzichten lonende manier van werken. 'Semco-stijl' inspireert en daagt uit tot een nieuwe manier van werken. Ondernemer en bestsellerauteur Ricardo Semler lapt alle conventionele regels van organisaties aan zijn laars. En met succes. Hij is president-directeur van het succesvolle Semco S/A, wereldwijd beroemd om zijn ongebruikelijke werkomgeving.

Economische, politieke en militaire analyse van de landen rond de Indische Oceaan, die volgens de Amerikaanse journalist in de nabije toekomst de toonaangevende rol van de Verenigde Staten zullen overnemen.

Proefschrift Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht met achterin een samenvatting in het Engels. 

"Europa is niet weg te branden uit de actualiteit. De uitbreiding met tien nieuwe lidstaten staat voor de deur. Er zijn Europese verkiezingen. Er is een moeilijke discussie over de Europese grondwet. Wie nadenkt over de toekomst van de Europese eenwording stelt dikwijls de vraag: waar liggen de grenzen van Europa, zowel geografisch als beleidsmatig? In dit boek verwoordt Europees Commissaris Frits Bolkestein zijn scherpe visie op het huidige Europa. Wat kan Europa aan en waar ligt de grens? Kan de Europese Unie zich onbeperkt uitbreiden? Hoort Turkije bij de Europese Unie? Doet Europa te veel? Is een Europees leger nodig? Hoe wenselijk is een Europese belasting? Aan de hand van deze vragen voerde Bolkestein samen met zijn medewerker Derk-Jan Eppink indringende gesprekken met prominente leden van het Europees Parlement uit verschillende landen. Zij vertellen waarom ze zich inzetten voor de Europese eenwording, en hoe ze de toekomst van Europa zien." -- back cover.

Reconstructie van de affaire-Peper en het strafrechtelijk onderzoek daarnaar, naar aanleiding waarvan de voormalige Rotterdamse burgemeester Bram Peper aftrad als minister van Binnenlandse Zaken.

Overzicht van alle politieke stromingen en theorieën in Europa sedert de achttiende eeuw, met veel aandacht op de gevaarlijke uitwassen daarvan.

In 1911 Cora Wilson Stewart founded the Moonlight Schools in Rowan County, Kentucky, an innovative night program that taught illiterate adults to read. Hoping that 150 people would attend the first classes, Stewart was amazed that over 1,200 men and women enrolled. She quickly developed reading material for these men and women that appealed to them instead of the children's texts that most educators were using with adults. With the success of the Moonlight Schools, Stewart moved forward in her crusade against illiteracy; she quickly became the most prominent advocate for the cause on both the national and international scene.

Stewart took the fight against illiteracy at a time when it was an accepted part of American life. She shocked the nation when she pointed out that 25 percent of the men who signed up for the draft in 1917 could neither read nor write. From her beginnings in the mountains of Kentucky, she went on to chair the Illiteracy Section of the World Conference of Education Associations five times; she founded the National Illiteracy Crusade in 1926. She even received one vote for president at the 1920 Democratic convention. Her crusade came despite the fact she was a victim of domestic abuse who suffered through three failed marriages. Her life reflects the challenges faced by female reformers in the early part of the 20th century.

A landmark manifesto issuing a bold call for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
 
The reigning consensus in elite and academic circles is that the United States must seek to resolve the Palestinians' conflict with Israel by implementing the so-called two-state solution. Establishing a Palestinian state, so the thinking goes, would be a panacea for all the region’s ills. In a time of partisan gridlock, the two-state solution stands out for its ability to attract supporters from both sides of America's ideological divide. But the great irony is that it is one of the most irrational and failed policies the United States has ever adopted.

Between 1970 and 2013, the United States presented nine different peace plans for Israel and the Palestinians, and for the past twenty years, the two state solution has been the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy. But despite this laser focus, American efforts to implement a two-state peace deal have failed—and with each new attempt, the Middle East has become less stable, more violent, more radicalized, and more inimical to democratic values and interests. 

     In The Israeli Solution, Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor to the Jerusalem Post, examines the history and misconceptions behind the two-state policy, most notably:

- The huge errors made in counting the actual numbers of Jews and Arabs in the region. The 1997 Palestinian Census, upon which most two-state policy is based, wildly exaggerated the numbers of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

- Neglect of the long history of Palestinian anti-Semitism, refusal to negotiate in good faith, terrorism, and denial of Israel’s right to exist.

- Disregard for Israel’s stronger claims to territorial sovereignty under international law, as well as the long history of Jewish presence in the region.

- Indifference to polling data that shows the Palestinian people admire Israeli society and governance. Despite a half-century of domestic and international terrorism, anti-semitism, and military attacks from regional neighbors who reject its right to exist, Israel has thrived as the Middle East’s lone democracy.
 
After a century spent chasing a two-state policy that hasn’t brought the Israelis and Palestinians any closer to peace, The Israeli Solution offers an alternative path to stability in the Middle East based on Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

David Mamet has been a controversial, defining force in nearly every creative endeavor-now he turns his attention to politics.

In recent years, David Mamet realized that the so-called mainstream media outlets he relied on were irredeemably biased, peddling a hypocritical and deeply flawed worldview.

In 2008 Mamet wrote a hugely controversial op-ed for the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'", in which he methodically attacked liberal beliefs, eviscerating them as efficiently as he did Method acting in his bestselling book True and False.

Now Mamet employs his trademark intellectual force and vigor to take on all the key political issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global warming. The legendary playwright, author, director, and filmmaker pulls no punches in his art or in his politics. And as a former liberal who woke up, Mamet will win over an entirely new audience of others who have grown irate over America's current direction.

When Eve and the New Jerusalem was first published over thirty years ago, it was received as a political intervention as well as a landmark historical work. Barbara Taylor became the first woman to win the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, and the book went on to become a feminist classic. As women across the globe find themselves at the sharp end of neoliberal 'austerity' programmes, discriminatory social policies and fundamentalist misogyny, Eve and the New Jerusalem is as essential as it ever was. Book jacket.

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries?

In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.

In theory these efforts are intended to help the poor--and poor minorities in particular. In practice they become massive barriers to moving forward.

Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but in too many instances the current methods and approaches aren't working. Acknowledging this is an important first step.

The first fundamental truth about the "Arab Spring" is that there never was one. The salient fact of the Middle East, the only one, is Islam. The Islam that shapes the Middle East inculcates in Muslims the self-perception that they are members of a civilization implacably hostile to the West. The United States is a competitor to be overcome, not the herald of a culture to be embraced.

Is this self-perception based on objective truth? Does it reflect an accurate construction of Islam? It is over these questions that American officials and Western intellectuals obsess. Yet the questions are irrelevant. This is not a matter of right or wrong, of some posture or policy whose subtle tweaking or outright reversal would change the facts on the ground. This is simply, starkly, the way it is.

Every human heart does not yearn for freedom. In the Islam of the Middle East, "freedom" means something very nearly the opposite of what the concept connotes to Westerners – it is the freedom that lies in total submission to Allah and His law. That law, sharia, is diametrically opposed to core components of freedom as understood in the West – beginning with the very idea that man is free to make law for himself, irrespective of what Allah has ordained. It is thus delusional to believe, as the West's Arab Spring fable insists, that the region teems with Jamal al-Madisons holding aloft the lamp of liberty. Do such revolutionary reformers exist? Of course they do . . . but in numbers barely enough to weave a fictional cover story. When push came to shove – and worse – the reformers were overwhelmed, swept away by a tide of Islamic supremacism, the dynamic, consequential mass movement that beckons endless winter.

That is the real story of the Arab Spring – that, and the Pandora's Box that opens when an American administration aligns with that movement, whose stated goal is to destroy America.

Now with a new foreword by Patrick J. Deneen.

Jean Bethke Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and presents an Augustine who created a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty, love, and care, as well as a chastened form of civic virtue. The result is a controversial book about one of the world's greatest and most complex thinkers whose thought continues to haunt all of Western political philosophy. What is our business "within this common mortal life?" Augustine asks and bids us to ask ourselves. What can Augustine possibly have to say about the conditions that characterize our contemporary society and appear to put democracy in crisis? Who is Augustine for us now and what do his words have to do with political theory? These are the underlying questions that animate Jean Bethke Elshtain's fascinating engagement with the thought and work of Augustine, the ancient thinker who gave no political theory per se and refused to offer up a positive utopia. In exploring the questions, Why Augustine, why now?

Elshtain argues that Augustine's great works display a canny and scrupulous attunement to the here and now and the very real limits therein. She discusses other aspects of Augustine's thought as well, including his insistence that no human city can be modeled on the heavenly city, and further elaborates on Hannah Arendt's deep indebtedness to Augustine's understanding of evil. Elshtain also presents Augustine's arguments against the pridefulness of philosophy, thereby linking him to later currents in modern thought, including Wittgenstein and Freud.

Immigration is perhaps the most enduring and elemental leitmotif of America. This book is the most powerful study to date of the politics and policies it has inspired, from the founders' earliest efforts to shape American identity to today's revealing struggles over Third World immigration, noncitizen rights, and illegal aliens. Weaving a robust new theoretical approach into a sweeping history, Daniel Tichenor ties together previous studies' idiosyncratic explanations for particular, pivotal twists and turns of immigration policy. He tells the story of lively political battles between immigration defenders and doubters over time and of the transformative policy regimes they built.

Tichenor takes us from vibrant nineteenth-century politics that propelled expansive European admissions and Chinese exclusion to the draconian restrictions that had taken hold by the 1920s, including racist quotas that later hampered the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust. American global leadership and interest group politics in the decades after World War II, he argues, led to a surprising expansion of immigration opportunities. In the 1990s, a surge of restrictionist fervor spurred the political mobilization of recent immigrants. Richly documented, this pathbreaking work shows that a small number of interlocking temporal processes, not least changing institutional opportunities and constraints, underlie the turning tides of immigration sentiments and policy regimes. Complementing a dynamic narrative with a host of helpful tables and timelines, Dividing Lines is the definitive treatment of a phenomenon that has profoundly shaped the character of American nationhood.

Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015), one of the profoundest political thinkers of his time, is known most prominently for his pathbreaking work on Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa, who taught for 50 years at the Claremont Colleges and was a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute, sought to produce a revolution in political philosophy by applying Strauss’s controversial thinking about natural right, Scripture, and human greatness to American politics.

In these 10 essays, beginning in the 1980s, Jaffa rediscovered the moral and intellectual complexity of statesmanship, in particular that of Lincoln and the American founders. The essays reveal the profundity of the Declaration of Independence, in observations both theoretical (e.g., Aristotle and Aquinas) and practical (e.g., campus radicalism). Jaffa takes aim at the interpretations of America made by some of Leo Strauss’s students, chastising their imputation of radically liberal theorizing to the Declaration and their ignorance of the meaning of “all men are created equal.” The Declaration’s radicalism lies rather in its synthesis of ancient political philosophy and Scriptural authority on the good human life. Jaffa is particularly critical of Allan Bloom and, in previously unpublished essays, Irving Kristol and Harvey Mansfield for their errors about America. Jaffa’s essays recover political philosophy in its political and philosophic dimensions so that it can be a continuing guide for our politics today.

A controversial and devastatingly honest depiction of the demise of Europe.

The Strange Death of Europe is the internationally bestselling account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Douglas Murray takes a step back and explores the deeper issues behind the continent's possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks and a global refugee crisis to the steady erosion of our freedoms. He addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.

Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end. This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe--one hopeful, one pessimistic--which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: "civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die."

Analyse van het 'oorlogsritme' in Europa tussen 1480 en 1945, waaruit zou zijn af te leiden dat een volgende wereldoorlog onvermijdelijk is, tenzij we tijdig ingrijpen.

Te veel nationalisme kan doorslaan of ontaarden in imperialisme. Maar te weinig nationalisme is niet minder gevaarlijk. Recente ontwikkelingen - de aanslag in Noorwegen, de rellen in Engeland - laten zien wat er kan gebeuren als een samenleving desintegreert; en de patstelling in de Belgische politiek toont hoe een staat uiteindelijk onbestuurbaar kan worden als een gedeeld natiebesef ontbreekt. In dit boek gaat Baudet terug naar de oorsprong van de moderne staten in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw en volgt hij hun ontwikkeling tot aan het heden. Hij laat zien dat de democratische rechtsstaat voor zijn functioneren afhankelijk is van precies de soevereiniteit en de nationale identiteit die de West-Europese elites de afgelopen decennia juist hebben afgebroken. En hij betoogt dat waar in het verleden een teveel aan nationalisme het gevaar was, de grote bedreiging in de eenentwintigste eeuw interne sociale desintegratie is.

Journalistieke reportage over Edward Snowden (1983), de voormailge CIA-medewerker die als klokkenluider informatie naar buiten bracht over de wereldwijde Amerikaanse spionagepraktijken.

In dit boek betoogt Thierry Baudet dat het negentiende-eeuwse bestuursmodel dat we nog altijd in hoofdlijnen hebben, een structuurprobleem kent: kartelvorming. De politieke elites zien het niet, omdat ze er middenin zitten. Maar de kiezer haakt af. Referenda vormen een unieke en noodzakelijke aanvulling op het systeem - niet om de representatieve democratie af te schaffen, maar om haar te corrigeren waar zij niet representatief meer is.0.