From Berlin To Berkeley

From Berlin to Berkeley is an intellectual portrait of one of America's leading social scientists, Reinhard Bendix, and his father, Ludwig Bendix. It is a story of cultural identity and assimilation, of survivors from a course of events that destroyed millions of lives. Reinhard Bendix offers a profound and moving account of his father's life as a lawyer and critic of the German judicial system, his break with Judaism and identification with German culture, and his emigration to Palestine during Hitler's regime. Bendix then examines the relationship with his father and details his youth in Germany, his emigration to America, and his early career as a scholar.

In November 1960, bolstered by anti-Communist ideologies, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev brandished nuclear diplomacy in an attempt to force the United States to abandon Berlin, setting the stage for a major nuclear confrontation over the fate of West Berlin. From Berkeley to Berlin explores how the United States had the wherewithal to stand up to Khrushchev's attempts to expand Soviet influence around the globe. The story begins when a South Dakotan, Ernest Lawrence, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, created a laboratory on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The "Rad Lab" attracted some of the finest talent in America to pursue careers in nuclear physics. When it was discovered that Nazi Germany had the means to build an atomic bomb, Lawrence threw all his energy into waking up the American government to act. Ten years later, when Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union became a nuclear power, Lawrence drove his students to take on the challenge to deter a Communist despot's military ambitions. Their journey was not easy: they had to overcome ridicule over three successive failures, which led to calls to see them, and their laboratory, shut down. At the Nobska Conference in 1956, the Rad Lab physicists took up the daunting challenge to provide the Navy with a warhead for Polaris. The success of the Polaris missile, which could be carried by submarines, was a critical step in establishing nuclear deterrent capability and helped Kennedy stare down Khrushchev during the Berlin Crisis of 1961. Six months after the height of the Berlin Crisis, Kennedy thought about how close the country had come to destruction, and he flew out to Berkeley to meet and thank a small group of Rad Lab physicists for helping the country avert a nuclear war.

This book sets out to identify the nature and implications of a proper understanding of pluralism in a original and illuminating way. Isaiah Berlin believed that a recognition of pluralism is vital to a free, decent and civilised society. By looking below at the often neglected foundations of Berlin’s celebrated account of moral pluralism, Lyons reveals the more philosophically profound aspects of his undogmatic and humanistic liberal vision. He achieves this by comparing Berlin’s core ideas with those of several of his most distinguished philosophical contemporaries, an exercise which yields not only a deeper grasp of Berlin and several major twentieth-century thinkers, principally A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Bernard Williams and Quentin Skinner, but, more broadly, a keener appreciation of the power of history and philosophy to help us make sense of our predicament.

This book is an auto-biography of Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic architect, planner, theoretician and a professor of planning at the University of Iceland. It gives a personal account of what shaped planning and design in the world and in Iceland as he experienced it in his lifetime. Valsson e.g. tells about his personal encounter with Ian McHarg, Buckminster Fuller and Christopher Alexander. Early TV started working on a future plan for Iceland, consisting, for example, of roads connecting Iceland´s settlements, across the Central Highlands. He also started an overlay mapping project, mapping both the hazard- and resource areas of the country, which created a basis for his Iceland-Plan proposals. Work on this he continued at Berkeley and at the University of Iceland as he started teaching there in 1988. Many of his articles and books deal with this subject. In 1980 Valsson started his PhD studies in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, California. In the philosophical section of his dissertation he presented his argument that the Western, mechanistic worldview was the underlying cause for today´s alienation, and that more holistic and integrative schemes were inherent in Eastern worldviews. TV´s dissertation is called A Theory of Integration for Design and Planning – Based on the Concept of Complementarity (1987). In 1988 – a year after Valsson returned to Iceland – he got an associate professor position in planning at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Iceland, and later a tenured professor position. The last part of this book describes Valsson’s 27 years at the University. The title of this present book: Shaping the Future – Ideas – Planning – Design, reflects how wide Valsson´s field of his operation has been.

As demographic changes reduce the number of domestic students in Europe attracting the right students and scholars will become more important for administrators and faculty at higher education institutions in Germany. Especially the US is an important potential source of students for study abroad an degree programs in Germany, particularly those taught in English. As US universities begin to deploy more aggressive marketing tactics in international recruitment, it is important to understand both US recruitment practices and Germany's differential advantages. The book is written in English. The ordering process on this website is in German. English-speakers should write [email protected] Durch die demografische Entwicklung wird die Zahl der einheimischen Studenten in Europa sinken. Gleichzeitig wird die Zahl der amerikanischen Studenten in den nächsten Jahren noch zunehmen. Um so wichtiger ist es für die Verwaltung deutscher Hochschulen, amerikanische Studenten für ein Studium in Deutschland zu gewinnen. Viele Kurse in Master-Studiengängen werden zudem in englischer Sprache angeboten. Der Band analysiert das US-amerikanische Universitätssystem, zeigt die Anwerbepraxis amerikanischer Hochschulen und informiert über die Möglichkeit der Zusammenarbeit deutscher und US-amerikanischer Hochschulen. Das Buch ist in Englisch geschreiben.