Ineptitude, Conformity, and Obfuscation


Book Description

This book tells the story of teacher evaluation from the perspective of a high school principal, one who has been an active participant in the process. Teacher evaluation is a fraud and this book explains why and how it can be fixed. This book begins with a historical perspective, followed by a description of what is wrong with the currently applied process. It ends with suggestions for making the process workable and productive.




Burtons Legal Thesaurus 5th Edition: Over 10,000 Synonyms, Terms, and Expressions Specifically Related to the Legal Profession


Book Description

This reference contains over 10,000 synonyms, terms, and expressions specifically related to the legal profession. This fifth edition has been comletely updated with 1,000 essential new terms, from "Super PAC" to "same sex marriage".




Burton's Legal Thesaurus, Fourth Edition


Book Description

BURTON'S IS GUILTY...OF BEING THE BEST LEGAL THESAURUS ON THE MARKET! 8,000 legal terms, synonyms, definitions, and parts of speech - now fully updated and revised "Prepared by lawyers, comprehensive, up-to-date, easy to use." -American Bar Association Journal After twenty-five years as the standard-bearer of legal terminology, Burton's Legal Thesaurus continues to be an essential reference tool. In law, precision and accuracy is vital. This fourth edition contains more entries than ever before, including cutting-edge terms unique to today's legal profession. This new edition is an indispensable reference source for: Partners, Associates, Attorneys and judges, who will appreciate the timeliness of the 1,000-plus new entries Law school students seeking to use a more specific word or recall a word forgotten Journalists and scholars looking for the right word to fit the thought PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS EDITIONS "A tool to strengthen the lawyer's vocabulary and improve the precision of legal writing." -Maryland Bar Journal "Given the popularity of plain language laws, the Legal Thesaurus could be just the book to own." -United States Law Week "The legal profession should find this volume valuable in using the exact word to convey the meaning intended." -New York State Bar Journal "It is through the use of such a tool as the Legal Thesaurus that one may find the precise term to fit the nuances of a particular situation." -William O. Douglas Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, 1939-1975




Clueless in Academe


Book Description

Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify. In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives.




Laboratory Life


Book Description

This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.




Gag Rule


Book Description

From one of America’s most important voices of protest, an urgent polemic about the strangling of meaningful dissent—the lifeblood of our democracy—at the hands of a government and media increasingly beholden to the wealthy few. Dissent is democracy. Democracy is in trouble. Never before, Lewis Lapham argues, had voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties, and by an ever more concentrated and profit-driven media in which the safe and the selling sweep all uncomfortable truths from view. In the midst of the “war on terror”—which made the hunt for communists in the 1950s look, in its clarity of aim and purpose, like the Normandy landings on D-Day—we faced a crisis of democracy as serious as any in our history. The Bush administration made no secret of its contempt for a cowed and largely silenced electorate, and without bothering to conceal its purpose the government coordinates, “not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy, but the protection of the American oligarchy from the American democracy.” Gag Rule is a rousing and necessary call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties, the right to raise our voices in dissent and have those voices heard.







Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain


Book Description

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.




These Wilds Beyond Our Fences


Book Description

Tackling some of the world’s most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhood, Bayo Akomolafe embarks on a journey of discovery as he maps the contours of the spaces between himself and his three-year-old daughter, Alethea. In a narrative that manages to be both intricate and unguarded, he discovers that something as commonplace as becoming a father is a cosmic event of unprecedented proportions. Using this realization as a touchstone, he is led to consider the strangeness of his own soul, contemplate the myths and rituals of modernity, ask questions about food and justice, ponder what it means to be human, evaluate what we can do about climate change, and wonder what our collective yearnings for a better world tell us about ourselves. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences is a passionate attempt to make sense of our disconnection in a world where it is easy to feel untethered and lost. It is a father’s search for meaning, for a place of belonging, and for reassurance that the world will embrace and support our children once we are gone.




Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America


Book Description

The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated. Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.