In this book, Robert Leeson and Charles Palm have assembled an amazing collection of Milton Friedman's best works on freedom. Even more amazing is that the selection represents only 1 percent of the 1,500 works by Friedman that Leeson and Palm have put online in a user-friendly format-and an even smaller percentage if you include their archive of Friedman's audio and television recordings, correspondence, and other writings. This book and the larger online collection are sorely needed and very welcome. Milton Friedman deserves to be read in the original by generation after generation. These days, many people channel Friedman to support their own views, which sometimes are quite contrary to his actual views. With so much of it now readily available, everyone will find it easier to remember and learn from what he actually wrote and said. Readers will find the book refreshing whether or not they are already familiar with Friedman's work.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817920340 20170530

"My Dear People is made up of three different alternating ingredients, each by a different author: a historical account of surrounding military events by Christopher McManus, Constance Crawford's commentary on her father's letters, and the letters themselves by Ned Crawford. These writings are interwoven chronologically here to make Private Ned Crawford's story comprehensible, entertaining, and moving. The letters Ned wrote to his best friend while serving as a soldier in World War I offer an intimate, quirky, and intelligent account of what it was like for a thirty-one-year-old man who abhorred war and any official interference with individual freedom to submit to a wartime draft and to perform his part in the enormous human drama that was the American Expeditionary Force."--Provided by publisher.

Program and schedule of events for the 50th annual Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco, California, 2017.

• Introduction
• The constitutional convention: The president's limited power
• George Washington: A culture of openness
• Woodrow Wilson: A foundation for secret government
• Harry Truman: Institutional secrecy
• Lyndon Johnson: Stealth attacks on openness
• Gerald Ford: A time of reckoning
• George W. Bush: A test of the limits
• Barack Obama: A twenty-first-century bargain?
• Conclusion.

How presidents use secrecy to protect the nation, foster diplomacy, and gain power Ever since the nation's most important secret meeting-the Constitutional Convention-presidents have struggled to balance open, accountable government with necessary secrecy in military affairs and negotiations. For the first one hundred and twenty years, a culture of open government persisted, but new threats and technology have long since shattered the old bargains. Today, presidents neither protect vital information nor provide the open debate Americans expect. Mary Graham tracks the rise in governmental secrecy that began with surveillance and loyalty programs during Woodrow Wilson's administration, explores how it developed during the Cold War, and analyzes efforts to reform the secrecy apparatus and restore oversight in the 1970s. Chronicling the expansion of presidential secrecy in the Bush years, Graham explains what presidents and the American people can learn from earlier crises, why the attempts of Congress to rein in stealth activities don't work, and why presidents cannot hide actions that affect citizens' rights and values.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780300223743 20170612

"In August 1966, a 14-year-old boy in Beijing is thrust into violence and chaos as Mao Ze-dong's Cultural Revolution begins to blaze across China. In this riveting memoir, Wei Yang Chao now tells his story--how rebels attacked and publicly humiliated his family, upended his education, and sent out of a country rendered unrecognizable by violence and radical ideology. At first he is swept up by the Red Guards but finds himself at the center of a bloody revolution. After mass rallies at Tiananmen Square, he witnesses attacks on teachers and professors, and the disintegration of his parents' lives as tolerance and freedom begin to crumble he finds himself cast into exile"--Amazon.com.

Today, American ""rugged individualism"" is in a fight for its life on two battlegrounds: in the policy realm and in the intellectual world of ideas that may lead to new policies. In this book, the authors look at the political context in which rugged individualism flourishes or declines and offer a balanced assessment of its future prospects. They outline its path from its founding-marked by the Declaration of Independence-to today, focusing on different periods in our history when rugged individualism was thriving or was under attack. The authors ultimately look with some optimism toward new frontiers of the twenty-first century that may nourish rugged individualism. They assert that we cannot tip the delicate balance between equality and liberty so heavily in favor of equality that there is no liberty left for individual Americans to enjoy. In considering reasons to be pessimistic as well as reasons to be optimistic about it, they also suggest where supporters of rugged individualism might focus greater encouragement and resources.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817920241 20180312

Since the end of the Great Recession in 2009 the central banks of the advanced countries have taken unprecedented actions to reflate and stimulate their economies. There have been significant differences in the timing and pace of these actions. These independent monetary policy actions have had significant spillover effects on the economies and monetary policy strategies of other advanced countries. In addition the monetary policy actions and interventions of the advanced countries have had a significant impact on the emerging market economies leading to the charge of 'currency wars.' The perceived negative consequences of spillovers from the actions of national central banks has led to calls for international monetary policy coordination. The arguments for coordination based on game theory are the same today as back in the 1980s, which led to accords which required that participant countries follow policies to improve global welfare at the expense of domestic fundamentals. This led to disastrous consequences. An alternative approach to the international spillovers of national monetary policy actions is to view them as deviations from rules based monetary policy. In this view a return to rules based monetary policy and a rolling back of the "" global great deviation"" by each country's central bank would lead to a beneficial policy outcome without the need for explicit policy coordination. In this book we report the results from a recent conference which brought together academics, market participants, and policy makers to focus on these issues. The consensus of much of the conference was on the need for a classic rules based reform of the international monetary system.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817920548 20190204

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Russia's Long Interaction with Islam
• 2. Muslims in the Russian Cultural Imagination
• 3. The Communist Offensive against Islam
• 4. The Soviet Quest Abroad for Muslim Allies
• 5. Perestroika and Its Complications
• 6. The Islamic Question in the Russian Federation
• 7. Dealing with the "Near Abroad"
• 8. The Recovery of Russian External Confidence
• 9. Russia's Internal Politics under Putin
• 10. The Assertion of Russian Power and Status
• 11.The Fateful Years:
• 2015 to the Present
• 12. Possible Futures
• Further Reading

Russia has long played an influential part in its world of Islam, and not all the dimensions are as widely understood as they ought to be. In Russia and Its Islamic World, Robert Service examines Russia's interactions with Islam at home and around the globe and pinpoints the tsarist and Soviet legacy, current complications, and future possibilities. The author details how the Russian encounter with Islam was close and problematic long before the twenty-first century and how Russia has recently chosen to interfere in Muslim states of the Middle East, building alliances and making enemies. Service reveals how some features of the present-day relationship continue past policies; others are starkly and perilously different, making the current moment in global affairs dangerous for both Russians and the rest of us. He describes how the Kremlin dominates Muslims in the Russian Federation, exerts a deep influence on the Muslim-inhabited states on Russia's southern frontiers, and has lunged militarily and politically into the Middle East. Foreign Muslims, he shows, do not value the leadership in Moscow except as a means to an end; Putin's pose as a friend of the Islamic world is no more than a pose-and a hypocritical one at that.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817920845 20170829