Dragon America

Dragon V2 is a futuristic vehicle that not only provides a means for NASA to transport its astronauts to the orbiting outpost but also advances SpaceX’s core objective of reusability. A direct descendant of Dragon, Dragon V2 can be retrieved, refurbished and re-launched. It is a spacecraft with the potential to completely revolutionize the economics of an industry where equipment costing hundreds of millions of dollars is routinely discarded after a single use. It was presented by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in May 2014 as the spaceship that will carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station as soon as 2016. SpaceX’s Dragon – America’s Next Generation Spacecraft describes the extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement that have placed this revolutionary spacecraft at the forefront of the launch industry and positioned it as the precursor for ultimately transporting humans to Mars. It describes the design and development of Dragon, provides mission highlights of the first six Commercial Resupply Missions, and explains how Musk hopes to eventually colonize Mars.

The British are coming, and the dragons are waiting for them! Set in an alternative colonial America where dragons rule the landscape, the revolution is taking its bloody toll and General Washington will need all the help he can get to free the American colonies from their overseas rulers. Dragon America is an alternative history in the Orson Scott Card and Harry Turtledove modes, from a master of the genre.

A Dragon Child: Reflections of a Daughter of Annam in America is the story of a Vietnamese Catholic raised within the structure of the French colonial system. Her upbringing was somewhat privileged as the daughter of a provincial administrator in the central highlands of Vietnam. As a child, and later as a young woman, she embraced French culture and aspired to French ideals. She was educated at a French boarding school for the children of the elite. Subsequently she received a degree in French teaching from the University of Saigon and became a lycee teacher and administrator. In 1975, she left on one of the last military planes accompanied by her four children and entered a new life as a refugee in the U.S. She ultimately resettled in Western Massachusetts. She then went back to school and obtained her Ph.D. in Francophone literature. After seeing to her children's education she began her academic career and started to teach French in the Five College academic community. She has fulfilled the "American dream" as have her children. In the process she has rediscovered her cultural roots and has helped others to negotiate the same path.

In the early 1920s there were about 250,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. Their principal organizer, and the man who profited most from their membership fees, was D.C. Stephenson, a mysterious drifter with a shady background who arrived in Indiana in 1920 with political experience and an acute sense of the showmanship required for political success, but no beliefs. He used his skills to move to the forefront of the Klan boom. But Stephenson's 1925 murder conviction, stemming from a bizarre and inebriated episode of abduction and rape, ended support for the Klan in Indiana, and discredited many of the state's political leaders. These two books, written for a general audience, tell the story of the rise and fall of the Indiana Klan and Stephenson. Tucker's book ventures more theoretical speculation about the Klan in the North, though he doesn't advance any sustained argument other than to stress, correctly, the Klan's anti-Catholicism. But Tucker exaggerates the Klan's hegemony and gives neither a real sense of the climate and the struggles of the time nor a convincing portrait of Stephenson, who remains a shadowy figure. Lutholtz's thorough book, though it has a sharper focus on Stephenson and Indiana, portrays the political struggles more completely. What is most pertinent is the picture that emerges of the quiet force of bigotry rather than overt Klan power. But Lutholtz resists all theory, so any conclusions about the broader relevance of the strange and fascinating story of Stephenson and the Indiana Klan in the 1920s will have to be drawn by the reader. Lutholtz's book is for larger public library collections.

Former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey and former Romanian acting spy chief Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who was granted political asylum in the U.S. in 1978, describe why Russia remains an extremely dangerous force in the world, and they finally and definitively put to rest the question of who killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. All evidence points to the fact that the assassination—carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald—was ordered by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, acting through what was essentially the Russian leader’s personal army, the KGB (now known as the FSB). This evidence, which is codified as most things in foreign intelligence are, has never before been jointly decoded by a top U.S. foreign intelligence leader and a former Soviet Bloc spy chief familiar with KGB patterns and codes. Meanwhile, dozens of conspiracy theorists have written books about the JFK assassination during the past fifty-six years. Most of these theories blame America and were largely triggered by the KGB disinformation campaign implemented in the intense effort to remove Russia’s own fingerprints that blamed in turn Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, secretive groups of American oilmen, Howard Hughes, Fidel Castro, and the Mafia. Russian propaganda sowed hatred and contempt for the U.S. quite effectively, and its operations have morphed into many forms, including the recruitment of global terror groups and the backing of enemy nation- states. Yet it was the JFK assassination, with its explosive aftermath of false conspiracy theories, that set the model for blaming America first.

"This is the remarkable story of America's personal and instituional responses to alcoholism and other addictions. It is the story of mutual aid societies: the Washingtonians, the Blue Ribbon Reform Clubs, the Ollapod Club, the United Order of Ex-Boozers, the Jacoby Club, Alcoholics Anonymous and Women for Sobriety. It is a story of addiction treatment institutions from the inebriate asylums and Keeley Institutes to Hazelden and Parkside. It is the story of evolving treatment interventions that range from water cures and mandatory sterilization to aversion therapies and methadone maintenance. William White has provided a sweeping and engaging history of one of America's most enduring problems and the profession that was birthed to respond to it" -- BACK COVER.

In recent years, popular wisdom has held that opening American markets to Chinese goods was the best way to promote democracy in Beijing---that the Communist Party's grip would quickly weaken as increasingly affluent Chinese citizens embraced American values. That popular wisdom was wrong. As Eamonn Fingleton shows in this devastating book, instead of America changing China, China is changing America. Although this process of reverse convergence has been swept largely under the carpet by knee-jerk globalists in the American press, Americans will soon be hearing much more about it. Nowhere is the pattern more obvious than in business. Many top American corporations---Boeing, AT&T, the Detroit automobile companies, among them-openly collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party. In a stunning rejection of Western values, Yahoo! even provided the Chinese secret police with vital evidence that resulted in a ten-year jail sentence for one of its Chinese subscribers, a brave young dissident, under draconian censorship laws. Selling the American national interest short, countless other corporations abjectly do Beijing's lobbying in Congress. This book---the culmination of twenty years of study---also breaks new ground by revealing the secret behind China's phenomenal savings rate. Top leaders literally force the Chinese people to save through a highly counterintuitive---and, to ordinary citizens, virtually invisible---policy called suppressed consumption. This practice, which is to economics roughly what steroids are to sport, is fundamentally incompatible with Western ideas of fair global competition. It is reinforced by an Orwellian system of political control that, as Fingleton reveals, utilizes an ancient bureaucratic tool called selective enforcement---a form of blackmail that instills a silent reign of terror throughout Chinese society. Most worryingly, selective enforcement can readily be unleashed on any American corporation with interests in China---which is to say just about every member of the Fortune 500. While the Chinese people's rising affluence is, of course, an occasion for wholehearted rejoicing, Uncle Sam should give the Chinese power system a wide berth---lest he catch his coattails in the jaws of a dragon.