Hopes and Impediments


Book Description

One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing and lectures from the last twenty-three years. For Achebe, overcoming goes hand in hand with eradicating the destructive effects of racism and injustice in Western society. He reveals the impediments that still stand in the way of open, equal dialogue between Africans and Europeans, between blacks and whites, but also instills us with hope that they will soon be overcome.













The Little Book of Impediments


Book Description

It's day one of the most exciting project of your career. You and your team are going to build the next great social media website! The potential rewards you will reap are exceeded only by how daunting the deadlines are. The whole team is energized and gets right down to business. You're all slinging code day and night, heads-down and in the flow. During one of your rare free moments during the day you pause and take a look around you. Right then it hits you: this is one of the best teams you've ever worked with! You all rock! And then somebody mentions that IT won't give the team a place to build their code for another six weeks. And the security team wants to review all of your code, but they can't get around to it for another 2 months. And your lead developer? Your main man? The man with a plan? His dog just died. Suddenly, you are totally screwed. That's what impediments feel like. It doesn't feel very good does it? All of a sudden, the project that looked like a guaranteed "win" just became a lot more likely to fail. The impediments that teams deal with are perhaps one of the most under appreciated subjects in the project management world. When not uncovered and resolved, impediments can do harm to an otherwise well run project in ways that are often subtle and easy to miss. That's what this book is all about: how you find, track, and destroy impediments.




Prospects and Impediments of Feminist Monolithism


Book Description

This book reads mid-twentieth century poetry by British, American and Sub-Saharan women to postulate the desirability and possibility of feminist monolithism. It shows that there is a remarkable consistency in the themes and aesthetic preoccupations of poets widely separated from each other by both geographical space and historical epochs, which highlights that there are pertinent cross-cutting trends in women’s poetry which could be exploited as a basis for monolithism. The text identifies the main tenets of feminism as recognition of women’s oppression and a determined effort through concerted strategies to resist and thwart this oppression and to navigate women out of peripheral positions into positions of power. By showing that these tenets are uniformly present in the poetry of very different women, it posits this uniformity as a stable ground on which feminist monolithism could be constructed, without glossing over existent differences between and among women.




Overcoming Impediments to U.S.-Russian Cooperation on Nuclear Nonproliferation


Book Description

The U.S. National Academies and the Russian Academy of Sciences convened a joint workshop to identify methods of overcoming impediments to cooperation between the United States and Russia on nonproliferation. The workshop emphasized approaches and techniques that have already been shown to work in U.S.-Russian programs and that might be applied in other areas. The workshop was intended to facilitate frank discussion between individuals in the United States and Russia who have some responsibility for cooperative nonproliferation programs in the hope of identifying both the impediments to cooperation and potential methods of addressing them. This report summarizes the discussions at the workshop.