Lunch Wars

There's a battle going on in school lunchrooms around the country...and it's a battle our children can't afford for us to lose. The average kid will eat 4,000 school lunches between kindergarten and twelfth grade. But what exactly are kids eating in school lunchrooms around the country? Many parents don't quite know what their children are eating-or where it came from. As award-winning filmmaker and nutritionist Amy Kalafa discovered in researching her documentary film Two Angry Moms: Fighting for the Health of America's Children, these days it's pretty rare to find a piece of fresh fruit in your average school lunchroom amid all the chips, french fries, Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets, and soda that's being served. But what, if anything, can parents do about it? Written in response to the onslaught of requests she received from parents who saw her film and asked, "If I want to attempt to change the food culture in my kid's school, how on earth should I get started?!" this empowering book arms parents with the specific information and tools they need to get unhealthy-even dangerous-food out of their children's school cafeteria and to hold their schools and local and national governments accountable for ensuring that their growing children are served healthy meals at school. In Lunch Wars, Kalafa explains all the complicated issues surrounding school food; how to work with your school's "Wellness Policy"; the basics of self- operated vs. outsourced cafeterias; how to get funding for a school garden, and much more. Lunch Wars also features the inspiring stories of parents around the country who have fought for better school food and have won, as well as details Amy's quest to spark a revolution in her own school district. For the future health and well-being of our children, the time has come for a school food revolution.

Katie's Two Wars is a story about the Second World War as seen through the eyes of a child and the effect that war and all the subsequent wars has on her in her adult life when she struggles to come to terms with the Christian beliefs in a loving God who created the human race.

Whether kids love or hate the food served there, the American school lunchroom is the stage for one of the most popular yet flawed social welfare programs in our nation's history. School Lunch Politics covers this complex and fascinating part of American culture, from its origins in early twentieth-century nutrition science, through the establishment of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, to the transformation of school meals into a poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. Susan Levine investigates the politics and culture of food; most specifically, who decides what American children should be eating, what policies develop from those decisions, and how these policies might be better implemented. Even now, the school lunch program remains problematic, a juggling act between modern beliefs about food, nutrition science, and public welfare. Levine points to the program menus' dependence on agricultural surplus commodities more than on children's nutritional needs, and she discusses the political policy barriers that have limited the number of children receiving meals and which children were served. But she also shows why the school lunch program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative. In the midst of privatization, federal budget cuts, and suspect nutritional guidelines where even ketchup might be categorized as a vegetable, the program remains popular and feeds children who would otherwise go hungry. As politicians and the media talk about a national obesity epidemic, School Lunch Politics is a timely arrival to the food policy debates shaping American health, welfare, and equality.

The effects of the Great Depression, pressed between two World Wars, made me, D. J., as well as my family, reflect upon feelings toward men's conflicts and leadership of world nations. I detested wars and all things causing them. On a garden plot one hot summer morning in 1948, while weeding around tender sprouts, my father told me, his eleven-year-old son, about his friend, a victim of war who had joined the US Army in 1917. He wanted to fight the kaiser and help bring peace to the world. This friend died struggling for his life, slowly losing his ability to breathe due to the effects of gas poisoning in the trenches of France. I remembered that story. On December 7, 1942, the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, destroying aircraft, ships, and many navy men. I was six years old and failed to understand the impact of this deed, but I saw the effects it left on my parents and siblings and wanted to know why. My two older brothers explained that the United States was at war, that the Japanese had declared war on us. This gave me great alarm and left me in fear. When planes flew overhead, I crawled under my bed and covered my head. I believed the Japanese had returned to kill all of us. War affects people, especially young children that way. As the war progressed, my family established a ritual at the morning breakfast table. We checked the weekly list of soldiers and sailors in the newspaper that had been killed or missing in action. We cringed and cried when a familiar name was listed with the initials of KIA or MIA. We found a name we all knew, a cousin, my aunt's only son. The Second World War came with angry images and impressions that followed me through my life and still flash forth at random times. Movietone News screened a clip near the end of the war in 1945 that I can't forget. It was of a toddler covered in dirt and ashes, sitting in the middle of a road scattered with debris, a child, all alone, with his fist in his mouth, crying for his mother who lay dead beside him. This scene is forever imprinted in my mind. Memories of Home and Distant Wars contains recollections of stories from my memory based on true events from the late 1930s into the 1960s, collected from an era of hardships and sacrifice. These memories were shared with family and friends who encouraged me to have them published.

The question why Vietnam? dominated American and Vietnamese political life for much of length of the Vietnam wars and has continued to be asked in the three decades since they ended. These essays examine the conceptual and methodological shifts that mark the contested terrain of Vietnam war scholarship.

Henry Stimson’s life story parallels America’s rise to international power in the 20th century. Godfrey Hodgson shows how this remarkable statesman helped define and carry out his country’s new responsibilities as America became the most powerful nation on earth. After Yale and Harvard Law School in the 1880s, Stimson helped found a law firm that is still a major force on Wall Street. He served as US Attorney for New York, and ran for governor of the state on the Republican ticket. After World War I and renewed legal work, Stimson rejoined public life as special emissary to Nicaragua for Calvin Coolidge, and then as Governor General of the Philippines. He served as William Howard Taft’s Secretary of War, and as Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State. At age 72, Stimson accepted to become FDR’s Secretary of War, and he organized American victory in World War II and oversaw the birth of American military and political hegemony in the nuclear age. Stimson’s career spanned Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialist expansionism to the world of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. He dealt with the role of corporations and how to control them, civil war in Central America (Stimson negotiated the first truce between Somoza and Sandino in Nicaragua in 1927), the US position in the Philippines, the rise of Japan (which he dealt with before World War I), America’s commitment to helping Europe achieve stability, the terrors of the nuclear age (Stimson chaired the meetings that decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and shortly before his death, wrote the earliest and most profound reassessment and repudiation of nuclear weaponry). In his many positions, Stimson mentored some of the best and brightest in American public service — Acheson, Lovett, Harriman, Bundy, and Marshall. “Henry L. Stimson was Secretary of War under Taft, Governor-General of the Philippines under Coolidge, Secretary of State under Hoover, and Secretary of War under FDR. The atom bombs were built and dropped under Stimson’s supervision and authority... The public figure as well as the private man are richly delineated in this elegant, learned biography, which offers deep insight into the process by which the U.S. emerged from the periphery of world events to the center of global power.” — Publishers Weekly “After Dean Acheson, in many ways [Stimson’s] spiritual heir, Stimson was the most impressive statesman in the American century. To understand [him] is to understand how the United States was able to establish a Pax Americana over much of the globe. This lucid and penetrating biography of ‘Colonel Stimson’... is written with deft clarity... Hodgson... has shown himself to be one of the keenest observers of American politics.” — James Chace, The New York Times “Hodgson raises troubling questions about Stimson’s understanding of what we now call the third world, discusses Stimson’s racial and ethnic prejudices... and pays particular attention to [his] central role in the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan. What most clearly distinguishes this book... is Hodgson’s continuing interest in the idea of the American establishment and his effort to define its values.” — Alan Brinkley, The New York Review of Books “Hodgson’s first-rate biography of the old statesman and warrior, who died 40 years ago, has a particular relevance to the events gripping the world today. It is as good a guide as any to understanding what George Bush is up to in the Middle East... [Hodgson’s] concluding chapter... is the best essay I have ever read in a genre that could be loosely termed ‘establishment studies.’ [He] writes with a sure hand and lively touch about the private man as well as the public one.” — Evan Thomas, Washington Post “Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Godfrey Hodgson’s biography of Henry L. Stimson breathes life into one of America’s most formidable public figures. In the process, Hodgson provides fresh information and insights into the management of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.” — Stanley Karnow “A lucid and meticulous account that measures up to its monumental subject and will hasten Henry Stimson’s passage into legend.” — John Newhouse

This exceptional memoir by one of Britain's most distinguished living soldiers describes a life lived against the backdrop of the most significant military events of the last century. David Fraser was raised in a military family deep in the shadow of the First World War. He absconded from school to enlist at the earliest possible moment after the Second was declared. He was intimately involved afterwards in crises in Suez, Cyprus and Malaya, and eventually became Vice Chief of the General Staff. Wars and Shadows is one of the last notable memoirs of the great conflict in the middle of the last century. It evokes the lives and characters of many of those who fought - and, often, lost their lives - vividly and tenderly. Like the very best memoirs, as well as entertaining us, it also allows us to reflect on how we might have reacted in similar circumstances to those the author faced, and whether eventually we might be able to give an account even half so satisfying as this of our own lives and times.

A captivating adventure and a spectacular journey... Rule one: don’t trust the centaur. Sixteen-year-old Dee knew something was imprisoned beneath the old motel, but she never expected this. The centaur is shackled. He’s injured. He’s furious at being captured by humans. And he’s exactly what she’s spent her whole life searching for. Rule two: don’t talk to the centaur. Dee needs answers. Her family has a dark history and she has to know why. She’s grown up beside a forest with mutated creatures that modern science can’t explain: flying newts. Winged snakes. However, a centaur is far beyond anything she’s spotted in the trees. Rule three: don’t free the centaur. If he wasn’t chained he’d have killed her already. But Dee strikes a bargain with the human-hating centaur: in exchange for his freedom, he’ll give her answers. His herd is murderous. Even worse foes lay beyond the haunted forest. But the epic voyage Dee embarks on leads to far more than the source of winged snakes, as she uncovers the greatest secret ever hidden from humankind… if she can survive it. A rollicking modern fantasy, perfect for those craving action, pet sea serpents, and plenty of witty banter.