A Nation Gone Blind


Book Description

America's citizens seem plagued by despair and frustration, much deeper today than the "malaise" President Jimmy Carter noted twenty years ago. Our political and social cultures are driven by issues morally complex and yet presented with simple–minded hostility. What's the matter with Kansas? What has happened to the once proud leader of the free world? How secure is our future? Does the republic stand or have we lost it already? Born in 1941, novelist, critic, and teacher Eric Larsen sees his own lifetime as paralleling the arc of a national dissolution, and in three penetrating essays he describes an increasingly desperate situation. A blindness has set in, he argues, producing writers no longer able to write, professors more harmful than helpful, a replacement virtually nation–wide of thinking with feeling while the population seems unable to grasp even the remotest outlines of such dangerous, radical change. In the tradition of George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Paul Goodman, and Christopher Lasch, Larsen offers an impassioned critique of where we once were, where we are, and where we're very soon going if we don't watch out.




A Nation Gone Blind


Book Description

Three essays by the author of An American Memory and I Am Zo Handke trace the social, cultural, and political changes that have occurred throughout America since World War II, charging that the nation has departed from its values about moral and social progress and has become increasingly dysfunctional. Original.




America Robbed Blind


Book Description

Just months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American investors came under attack. Two of the nation's biggest corporations, Enron and WorldCom, admitted that they had overstated their earnings by billions of dollars. As those two titans collapsed into bankruptcy, shareholders were stuck with almost $200 billion in losses.Accounting scams were also exposed at Adelphia and HealthSouth. Tyco's board of directors eventually realized that its earnings needed to be restated, even as its top two executives were charged with larceny.The people and organizations responsible for protecting investors?Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the big Wall Street banks that lent billions to these fraudulent enterprises?fell down on their jobs. Worse, Congress actually wrote laws that provided incentives for executives to cheat their own investors.Throughout the 1990s Congress systematically starved the SEC to the point where the securities cops could barely do their jobs.America Robbed Blind exposes the root causes of the accounting scandals that wiped out $500 billion worth of investments in U.S. stocks. It explains how a series of seemingly minor Congressional actions--from a law penalizing corporations for paying salaries in excess of $1 million to a Senate vote to scuttle a rule calling for the expensing of stock options--created the conditions that led to the accounting abuses that eroded investor confidence among the 95 million Americans who own stocks.One of the reasons that ethically challenged corporations were able to fool investors for so long is that most Americans don't have the time to sift through mountains of corporate filings or detailed financial reports laden with accounting jargon and legalese. In simple, explanatory prose, America Robbed Blind makes it easy to understand the fraud that occurred in recent years and proposes several reforms to ensure that these abuses never occur again.202 pagesHardcover




Waking Up Blind


Book Description

Includes bibliographical references (p. 228-230).




Planet of the Blind


Book Description

"The world is a surreal pageant," writes Stephen Kuusisto. "Ahead of me the shapes and colors suggest the sails of Tristan's ship or an elephant's ear floating in air, though in reality it is a middle-aged man in a London Fog rain coat which billows behind him in the April wind." So begins Kuusisto's memoir, Planet of the Blind, a journey through the kaleidoscope geography of the partially-sighted, where everyday encounters become revelations, struggles, or simple triumphs. Not fully blind, not fully sighted, the author lives in what he describes as "the customs-house of the blind", a midway point between vision and blindness that makes possible his unique perception of the world. In this singular memoir, Kuusisto charts the years of a childhood spent behind bottle-lens glasses trying to pass as a normal boy, the depression that brought him from obesity to anorexia, the struggle through high school, college, first love, and sex. Ridiculed by his classmates, his parents in denial, here is the story of a man caught in a perilous world with no one to trust--until a devastating accident forces him to accept his own disability and place his confidence in the one relationship that can reconnect him to the world--the relationship with his guide dog, a golden Labrador retriever named Corky. With Corky at his side, Kuusisto is again awakened to his abilities, his voice as a writer and his own particular place in the world around him. Written with all the emotional precision of poetry, Kuusisto's evocative memoir explores the painful irony of a visually sensitive individual--in love with reading, painting, and the everyday images of the natural world--faced with his gradual descent into blindness. Folded into his own experience is the rich folklore the phenomenon of blindness has inspired throughout history and legend.




Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening


Book Description

By the author of the acclaimed "Planet of the Blind" comes a memoir of blindness and listening rendered with a poet's delight. Blind since birth, Kuusisto explains the art of eavesdropping and recounts the poetic surprise that comes when we actively listen to our surroundings.




Kingdom of the Blind


Book Description

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A December 2018 Indie Next Pick One of Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2018 Picks BookPage Best of the Year 2018 A LibraryReads Pick for November 2018 A LibraryReads Hall of Fame Winner Washington Post's 10 Books to Read This November One of PopSugar’s Best Fall Books to Curl Up With “A captivating, wintry whodunit.” —PEOPLE "A constantly surprising series that deepens and darkens as it evolves." —Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review Kingdom of the Blind, the new Chief Inspector Gamache novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author. When a peculiar letter arrives inviting Armand Gamache to an abandoned farmhouse, the former head of the Sûreté du Québec discovers that a complete stranger has named him one of the executors of her will. Still on suspension, and frankly curious, Gamache accepts and soon learns that the other two executors are Myrna Landers, the bookseller from Three Pines, and a young builder. None of them had ever met the elderly woman. The will is so odd and includes bequests that are so wildly unlikely that Gamache and the others suspect the woman must have been delusional. But what if, Gamache begins to ask himself, she was perfectly sane? When a body is found, the terms of the bizarre will suddenly seem less peculiar and far more menacing. But it isn’t the only menace Gamache is facing. The investigation into what happened six months ago—the events that led to his suspension—has dragged on, into the dead of winter. And while most of the opioids he allowed to slip through his hands, in order to bring down the cartels, have been retrieved, there is one devastating exception. Enough narcotic to kill thousands has disappeared into inner city Montreal. With the deadly drug about to hit the streets, Gamache races for answers. As he uses increasingly audacious, even desperate, measures to retrieve the drug, Armand Gamache begins to see his own blind spots. And the terrible things hiding there.




Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin


Book Description

This explosive, up-close view of Sarah Palin comes from an inner-circle confidant who shares surprising information about how Sarah dealt with staff and perceived “enemies,” and the discrepancy between what she said and what she did.




Country Of The Blind


Book Description

The second book in the Jack Parlabane series, from author Christopher Brookmyre. The murder of a media moghul in his country mansion appears to be the result of him disturbing a gang of would-be thieves. The robbers are swiftly caught, but when they are unexpectedly moved to a different prison they escape. Back in Edinburgh, a young solicitor reveals to the press that one of the subjects had left a letter with her some time before the break-in which proves his innocence. Jack Parlabane, journo-extraordinaire, is intrigued, but when he approaches the lawyer he discovers someone else is trying to get near her - someone with evil intent, political connections of the highest order and a corrupt agenda. Fast-moving, blackly humorous and intriguingly credible.




The Blind Man's Garden


Book Description

‘Love is not consolation, it is light’ From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil comes a novel set in the months after 9/11, when Western armies invaded Afghanistan—a story of love, hope and grief, of uncorrupted faith and of what it means to be alive. Jeo and his foster-brother Mikal leave their home in Pakistan to help care for wounded Afghans. Within hours of entering the wide-horizoned Afghan landscape, Mikal and Jeo are separated and, emerging from the carnage, Mikal begins his search for Jeo. But his deepest wish is to return home—to the young woman he loves and who loves him, Jeo’s wife. The Blind Man’s Garden maps a place both phantasmally beautiful and chilling. Taking us on a journey from Al Qaeda’s hideouts in Waziristan and American-built military prisons to a family left behind—Mikal’s and Jeo’s blind, regretful father, Jeo’s resolute wife and her superstitious mother—it unflinchingly examines war and brotherhood, devastation, separation and remorse, while celebrating the redemptive power of nature, art and literature.