Blunder

For anyone whose best-laid plans have been foiled by faulty thinking, Blunder reveals how understanding seven simple traps-Exposure Anxiety, Causefusion, Flat View, Cure-Allism, Infomania, Mirror Imaging, Static Cling-can make us all less apt to err in our daily lives.

For the second time this decade, the U.S. economy id sinking into a recession due to the collapse of a financial bubble. The most recent calamity will lead to a downturn deeper and longer than the stock market crash of 2001. Dean Baker's Plunder and Blunder chronicles the growth and collapse of the stock and housing bubbles and explains how policy blunders and greed led to the catastrophic --but completely predictable --market meltdowns. An expert guide to recent economic history, Baker offers policy prescriptions to help prevent similar financial disasters.

With unrivalled political savvy and a keen sense of irony, distinguished political scientists Anthony King and Ivor Crewe open our eyes to the worst government horror stories and explain why the British political system is quite so prone to appalling mistakes.

"Drawing on the lives of five great scientists -- Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein -- scientist/author Mario Livio shows how even the greatest scientists made major mistakes and how science built on these errors to achieve breakthroughs, especially into the evolution of life and the universe"--

Engaging with a critical analysis of the base and superstructure thesis, regarding which a surprising number of reputed Marxist thinkers betray a perpetual ambivalence – by frequently deploying it in a variety of contexts, but simultaneously airing various reservations about it – this book proposes a radical departure from the presently predominant understanding of it. The popular view of the base as comprising economics, and superstructure as encompassing almost all other spheres of social life, is criticised as “panoramic”, or “panoptic”, or the “extended” version, to which Marx’s rigorously defined base of production relations and superstructure of politico-legal spheres is juxtaposed. Revisiting Marx’s formulations in his famous 1859 Preface, described here as his purloined letters, the study rehabilitates his restricted version, and upholds its conceptual superiority over its extended avatar that is currently ubiquitous. The substitution of Marx’s restricted version with the widely believed extended version of the thesis is characterised here as a blunder, and this book traces the biography of this blunder, through the intricate and tortuous theoretical developments that traverse a transnational and multidisciplinary territory, constituting the history of Marxism. The last chapter argues for a paradigm shift, in favour of the mode of production thesis, in order to redeem the holistic vision of Marx. This shift is necessitated by the extenuation of the status of the base and superstructure thesis that results from the restoration of Marx’s restricted version. This chapter grapples with the issues involved in preparing the ground for that shift. It also contends that, although these theoretical shifts are never formulated in a conscious and conclusive manner – as is done here – the best practices in Marxist analyses are always inspired by the methodological implications of the mode of production thesis, and, for this reason, the thesis is claimed to be the “conceptual unconscious of Marxism”.

From a bold voice in African fiction comes a satirical and unputdownable reimagining of an overlooked episode in Cameroon's colonial past. Cameroon, 1929. As colonial powers fight for influence in Africa, French military surgeon Eugène Jamot is dispatched to Cameroon to lead the fight against sleeping sickness there. But despite his humanitarian intentions, the worst comes to pass: seven hundred local villagers are left blind as a result of medical malpractice by a doctor under Jamot's watch. Damienne Bourdin, a young white woman, ventures to Cameroon to assist in the treatment effort. Reeling from the loss of her child, she's desperate to redeem herself and save her reputation. But the tides of rebellion are churning in Cameroon, and soon after Damienne's arrival, she is enlisted in a wild plot to staunch the damage caused by the blunder and forestall tribal warfare. Together with Ndongo, a Pygmy guide, she must cross the country on foot in search of Edoa, a Cameroonian princess and nurse who has gone missing since the medical blunder was discovered. As Damienne races through the Cameroonian forest on a farcical adventure that unsettles her sense of France's "civilizing mission," she begins to question her initial sense of who needed saving and who would save the day.

Nicholas is the coolest of the cool--at least in his own eyes. But his friends see things differently.