Uncommon Americans

This first joint biography of the Hoovers will reshape Herbert Hoover's image as a man who did little more than sit in the White House while the country suffered. Both Hoovers were dynamic, uncommon Americans who made enormous contributions to mankind, before, during, and after the presidency. Walch, Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, brings together contributions from leading scholars who have conducted extensive research into the lives of this extraordinary couple, placing them in a national and international context. He hopes to entice more historians to delve into the intricacies of their lives.

The central claim developed in this book is that disciplinary International Relations (IR) is identifiable as both an advanced colonial practice and a postcolonial subject. The starting problematic here issues from disciplinary IR's relative dearth of attention to indigenous peoples, their knowledges, and the distinctive ways of knowing that underwrite them. The book begins by exploring how IR has internalized many of the enabling narratives of colonialism in the Americas, evinced most tellingly in its failure to take notice of indigenous peoples. More fundamentally, IR is read as a conduit for what the author terms the 'hegemonologue' of the dominating society: a knowing hegemonic Western voice that, owing to its universalist pretensions, speaks its knowledge to the exclusion of all others.

"Revolution" is a chronicle of a remarkable contest fought between the largest, most powerful army on earth and a motley collection of men and boys, extremely ill equipped and inexperienced in the arts of warfare. It reveals how the radical revolutionaries, revered today as the nation's founding fathers, sometimes barely succeed and more often miserably fail to keep a healthy Continental army and a pusillanimous Continental Congress together. Written in the present tense, as newspaper articles and interviews, "Revolution" is also the story of a civil conflict fought in a divided country where the words "liberty" and "independence" are equally cheered, cursed and ignored.

A dazzling, heartbreaking page-turner destined for breakout status: a novel that gives voice to millions of Americans as it tells the story of the love between a Panamanian boy and a Mexican girl: teenagers living in an apartment block of immigrant families like their own. After their daughter Maribel suffers a near-fatal accident, the Riveras leave Mexico and come to America. But upon settling at Redwood Apartments, a two-storey cinderblock complex just off a highway in Delaware, they discover that Maribel's recovery--the piece of the American Dream on which they've pinned all their hopes--will not be easy. Every task seems to confront them with language, racial and cultural obstacles. At Redwood also lives Mayor Toro, a high school sophomore whose family arrived from Panama fifteen years ago. Mayor sees in Maribel something others do not: that beyond her lovely face, and beneath the damage she's sustained, is a gentle, funny and wise spirit. But as the two grow closer, violence casts a shadow over all their futures in America. Peopled with deeply sympathetic characters, the novel unfolds during a single transformative year, telling a riveting and poignant story of unflinching honesty and humanity and an unforgettable, wholly unsentimental tale of young love; and offering a new, resonant definition of what it means to be an American. An instant classic is born.