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By Peter Gries, University of California Press, January 2004

Three American missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and what Americans view as an appalling and tragic mistake, many Chinese see as a "barbaric" and intentional "criminal act," the latest in a long series of Western aggressions against China. In this book, Peter Hays Gries explores the roles of perception and sentiment in the growth of popular nationalism in China. At a time when the direction of China's foreign and domestic policies have profound ramifications worldwide, Gries offers a rare, in-depth look at the nature of China's new nationalism, particularly as it involves Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations--two bilateral relations that carry extraordinary implications for peace and stability in the twenty-first century.

Through recent Chinese books and magazines, movies, television shows, posters, and cartoons, Gries traces the emergence of this new nationalism. Anti-Western sentiment, once created and encouraged by China's ruling PRC, has been taken up independently by a new generation of Chinese. Deeply rooted in narratives about past "humiliations" at the hands of the West and impassioned notions of Chinese identity, popular nationalism is now undermining the Communist Party's monopoly on political discourse, threatening the regime's stability. As readable as it is closely researched and reasoned, this timely book analyzes the impact that popular nationalism will have on twenty-first century China and the world.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), 2000

What is economics and what can you expect to learn from studying it? In this study guide, Paul Heyne, for many years one of America's most respected free-market economists, asks this question as his starting point. The story of the progress of economic thought—as embodied in the methods and theories of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek, James Buchanan, and other influential scholars—provides Heyne with the material for an effective demonstration of the power and promise of the economic way of thinking.

Paul Heyne (1931-2000) was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington, where he had worked since 1976. Revered as an outstanding teacher, in his writing he specialized in ethical criticisms of economic systems and the history of economic thought. His best-known work is The Economic Way of Thinking, an important and popular introductory economics textbook now in its ninth edition.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), 2003

Bruce Thornton's crisp and informative A Student's Guide to Classics provides readers with an overview of each of the major poets, dramatists, philosophers, and historians of ancient Greece and Rome. Including short bios of major figures and a list of suggested readings, Thornton's study guide is unparalleled as a brief introduction to the literature of the classical world.

Bruce S. Thornton's books include Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, and Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age. He is Professor of Classics and Humanities in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at California State University, Fresno.

By Michael Barzelay, University of California Press, February 2001

How policymakers should guide, manage, and oversee public bureaucracies is a question that lies at the heart of contemporary debates about government and public administration. In their search for better systems of public management, reformers have looked in particular at the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries are exemplars of the New Public Management, a term used to describe distinctive new themes, styles, and patterns of public service management.

Calling for public management to become a vibrant field of public policy, this valuable book consolidates recent work on the New Public Management and provides a basis for improving research and policy debate on managing public bureaucracies.

By Jing Wang, University of California Press, October 1996

Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.

In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought--Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School--that came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy. In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s.

This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.

By Stanton A. Glantz, Edith D. Balbach, University of California Press, March 2000

"Tobacco War, a detailed chronology of 20 years of tobacco control in California, illustrates several key lessons for public health advocates. . . . Glantz and Balbach offer rich detail on the politics of the tobacco control movement in California, highlighting the David and Goliath nature of this story. The most important message of their book is that the fight will never be over. . . . Tobacco War provides an important wake-up call to the nation for an issue that demands every American's attention."--Journal of the American Medical Association

"Impeccably researched."--British Medical Journal

"Thoroughly documented. Glantz and Balbach's account details the challenges of manipulation within the political system of the state of California."--Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco 

By Maggie Mahar, HarperCollins, May 2006

Mahar, a financial journalist whose previous book (Bull!) tracked the history of the stock market from 1982 to 1999, here applies her keen analytic talents and economic savvy to America's complicated and increasingly dysfunctional health-care system. Mahar's diagnosis: our privately managed yet mainly publicly funded system produces the worst of both worlds—high costs, rampant inefficiencies and intense competition among providers that doesn't benefit patients. She traces how today's market-driven medical system emerged over the past century thanks to trends that gradually stripped power from doctors and gave it to corporations, turning patients into profit centers.

No one is spared in Mahar's thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned study: she criticizes frustrated (and increasingly money-minded) physicians, self-serving insurance companies, for-profit hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies driven by inflated Wall Street expectations. Mahar uncovers isolated pockets of good news, including the VA hospital system, which provides excellent care at modest cost thanks largely to its exemption from the pressures of competition. But her goal is not to offer any programmatic solution. Instead, she wants to show why the most common economic assumptions about health care—especially those that extol the magic power of free markets—are false and stand in the way of real reform. (From Publishers Weekly)

By Diane Mott Davidson, William Morrow (April 2006)

Goldy Schulz has a lucrative new gig, preparing breakfasts and conference-room snacks for a local law firm. It's time-consuming, but Goldy is enjoying it -- until the night she arrives to find Dusty, the firm's paralegal, dead.

The poor young woman also happened to be Goldy's friend and neighbor, and now Dusty's grieving mother begs Goldy to find out who murdered her daughter. Just because the police are on the case doesn't mean Goldy can't do a little snooping herself.

While catering a party at the home of one of the firm's lawyers, she manages to overhear an incriminating conversation and ends up discovering a few clues in the kitchen.

Before long, Goldy is knee-deep in suspects, one of whom is incredibly dangerous and very liable to cook Goldy's goose.

By Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Media (May 14, 2002)

This long-awaited work from one of the world's most respected scientists presents a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public. Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments---illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics---Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe.

Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science: from the origin of the Second Law of thermodynamics, to the development of complexity in biology, the computational limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, and the interplay between free will and determinism.