The Kindergarten Wars

The Kindergarten Wars is the first narrative nonfiction book ever to take the reader inside all aspects of the private school application process. Eisenstock follows several families across the country from their first school tours until the moment they open their admissions letters. He interviews admissions directors, school heads, teachers, educational consultants, and kindergarten tutors, who coach both parents and kids. Did you know the most important line in your child's application is where you--the parent--went to college? Did you know that you can qualify for financial aid even if you make $192,000 a year? Eisenstock uncovers startling information, starting with how private school admissions directors decide who gets in. Does the child of a single woman of ethnic diversity on financial aid have a better chance of getting into an elite kindergarten than a child of a middle-class white couple? He will ask Ivy League students, their parents, and their admissions counselors the $500,000 question: Does where you go to kindergarten ultimately help you get into the most prestigious colleges? At its core, The Kindergarten Wars is a human drama. It's the story of a quest and the people who are vying for the prize--a space in private school kindergarten--at any cost. The book is honest, funny, suspenseful, and emotional.

Eisenstock details the insane lengths parents will go to to get their children into America's top kindergartens, and what readers need to know to compete.

The Gopher Wars is a trilogy that happens in the countryside far north of Toronto. It takes place in an open field, where a little gopher named Chuck lives. One day a businessman called Peter Crowe finds the open field and wants to build a country club over it. The problem is that if he does the gopher will lose its home. As a result the gopher is forced to go to war against the humans in order to prevent its home from being destroyed. Part two happens a few years later where the gopher Chuck is dead and his five offspring live in the open field. One day a Catholic elementary school is built over the front half of the field and is run by a bunch of really mean nuns. One day, a child is scaring one of the gophers and the gopher bites the student in order to defend itself. The nuns running the school are afraid that the gophers might have rabies or something. As a result they try to have the gophers killed off in order to protect their students. As a result the gopher family is forced to go to war with the humans again in order to prevent themselves from being destroyed. Part three happens a year later. Where the gopher family lives in peace in the open field. One day a family of evil gophers moves in and wants the open field for themselves. Which results in a power struggle between the two families for control of the open field.

• Articles by William T. Sherman, James A. Garfield, John Pope, Nelson A. Miles, Elizabeth Custer, and others • Topics include army life on the frontier, Indian scouts, women's experiences, and commanders and their campaigns This is the final installment of a series that seeks to tell the saga of the military struggle for the American West, using the words of the soldiers, noncombatants, and Native Americans who shaped it. To paint as broad and colorful a picture as possible, riveting firsthand materials have been carefully selected from contemporaneous newspapers, magazines, and unpublished manuscripts. A fitting conclusion to the series, this volume offers a more general perspective on the frontier army and its relationship with the Native American residents of the West.

Australia invoked the ANZUS Alliance following the Al Qaeda attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001. But unlike the calls to arms at the onset of the world wars, Australia decided to make only carefully calibrated force contributions in support of the US-led coalition campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why is this so? Niche Wars examines Australia’s experience on military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2014. These operations saw over 40 Australian soldiers killed and hundreds wounded. But the toll since has been greater. For Afghanistan and Iraq the costs are hard to measure. Why were these forces deployed? What role did Australia play in shaping the strategy and determining the outcome? How effective were they? Why is so little known about Australia’s involvement in these campaigns? What lessons can be learned from this experience? Niche Wars commences with a scene-setting overview of Australia’s military involvement in the Middle East over more than a century. It then draws on unique insights from many angles, across a spectrum of men and women, ranging from key Australian decision makers, practitioners and observers. The book includes a wide range of perspectives in chapters written by federal government ministers, departmental secretaries, service commanders, task force commanders, sailors, soldiers, airmen and women, international aid workers, diplomats, police, journalists, coalition observers and academics. Niche Wars makes for compelling reading but also stands as a reference work on how and why Australia became entangled in these conflicts that had devastating consequences. If lessons can be learned from history about how Australia uses its military forces, this book is where to find them.

The true story of one woman's struggle to save her sons from radicalization by Chechen partisans, as told by a seasoned war reporter. In All Lara's Wars, the great events of the last half-century--the realignment of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise in the Middle East of ISIS and its quest for a new Caliphate--converge in this account of a Chechen-Georgian family whose two sons become radicalized, and how their mother--Lara--travels to Syria by bus and at great risk, not to join them but to bring them home. By then, the older son is a high level commander and the younger son a respected soldier in ISIS's army. The story is told with a sense of wonder at the contemporary world and all the ways it resembles a primitive and violent land where all struggles are to the death, and there is an epic battle going on between forces of good and evil that cannot be understood other than as mythic and larger than life. Lara is a Kist--one of a tiny ethnicity that crossed the Caucasus mountains a century ago to settle in the remote Pankisi Gorge in northern Georgia, a peaceful and isolated paradise. She married a Chechen, moved to Grozny, and became the mother of two sons. When war came to Chechnya, she took her children home to the safe Georgian valley, and later sent them to Western Europe to live with their father--to protect them from the influence of the radical Islamic freedom fighters who had come to the Pankisi Gorge as refugees from the Chechnyan wars. As in all of Wojciech Jagielski's books, he tells here the story of any modern war, how the individual lives of civilians and combatants are obliterated in the sweep of the larger narrative--and how the humanity of these individual lives is revealed, and the price paid in human endurance and persistence and loss. Jagielski observes, listening to Lara and letting her story emerge through the filter of his literary skill. This unusual reportage tells us the facts of the Chechnyan wars and the reality of the Syrian war from the viewpoint of ISIS recruits, but it is also the true account of one ordinary family that became part of the larger tragedy that has claimed so many victims in recent years.

Teaching About the Wars breaks the curricular silence on the U.S. military engagement in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The articles and lessons in this volume explore "the realities of how we got here." Even though the United States has been at war continuously since just after 9/11, sometimes it seems that our schools have forgotten. This collection of articles and hands-on lessons shows how teachers prompt their students to think critically about big issues. Here is the best writing from Rethinking Schools magazine on war and peace in the 21st century.

Ask an American intelligence officer to tell you when the country started doing modern intelligence and you will probably hear something about the Office of Strategic Services in World War II or the National Security Act of 1947 and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. What you almost certainly will not hear is anything about World War I. In World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence, Mark Stout establishes that, in fact, World War I led to the realization that intelligence was indispensable in both wartime and peacetime. After a lengthy gestation that started in the late nineteenth century, modern American intelligence emerged during World War I, laying the foundations for the establishment of a self-conscious profession of intelligence. Virtually everything that followed was maturation, reorganization, reinvigoration, or reinvention. World War I ushered in a period of rapid changes. Never again would the War Department be without an intelligence component. Never again would a senior American commander lead a force to war without intelligence personnel on their staff. Never again would the United States government be without a signals intelligence agency or aerial reconnaissance capability. Stout examines the breadth of American intelligence in the war, not just in France, not just at home, but around the world and across the army, navy, and State Department, and demonstrates how these far-flung efforts endured after the Armistice in 1918. For the first time, there came to be a group of intelligence practitioners who viewed themselves as different from other soldiers, sailors, and diplomats. Upon entering World War II, the United States had a solid foundation from which to expand to meet the needs of another global hot war and the Cold War that followed.