Title: Of one blood: abolitionism and the origins of racial equality
Author: Goodman, Paul 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United States History | American  Studies
Publisher's Description: The abolition movement is perhaps the most salient example of the struggle the United States has faced in its long and complex confrontation with the issue of race. In his final book, historian Paul Goodman, who died in 1995, presents a new and important interpretation of abolitionism. Goodman pays particular attention to the role that blacks played in the movement. In the half-century following the American Revolution, a sizable free black population emerged, the result of state-sponsored emancipation in the North and individual manumission in the slave states. At the same time, a white movement took shape, in the form of the American Colonization Society, that proposed to solve the slavery question by sending the emancipated blacks to Africa and making Liberia an American "colony." The resistance of northern free blacks was instrumental in exposing the racist ideology underlying colonization and inspiring early white abolitionists to attack slavery straight on. In a society suffused with racism, says Goodman, abolitionism stood apart by its embrace of racial equality as a Christian imperative.Goodman demonstrates that the abolitionist movement had a far broader social basis than was previously thought. Drawing on census and town records, his portraits of abolitionists reveal the many contributions of ordinary citizens, especially laborers and women long overshadowed by famous movement leaders. Paul Goodman's humane spirit informs these pages. His book is a scholarly legacy that will enrich the history of antebellum race and reform movements for years to come."[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." - Acts 17:26   [brief]
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Title: Just interpretations: law between ethics and politics 
Author: Rosenfeld, Michel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: American  Studies | Social and Political Thought | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: In pluralistic societies that lack common ethical, social, and political values, legal interpretation is constantly under siege. Just interpretations - that is, interpretations that reflect a shared vision of justice - may become just interpretations in the sense of mere interpretations, rooted in the orientations and interests of different groups. Confronting this crisis in legal interpretation, Just Interpretations offers a critical appraisal of the principal theoretical trends in contemporary American and European jurisprudence and proposes an alternative approach.Michel Rosenfeld's critique focuses on neoformalism, pragmatism, discourse theory, and legal autopoiesis, and includes discussions of such authors as Habermas, Rorty, Posner, Luhmann, Dworkin, Fish, and Weinrib. To overcome the drawbacks of these theories, Rosenfeld elaborates a theory of "comprehensive pluralism," based on a substantive vision of pluralism. This approach, building on the insights of deconstruction, turns the fact of pluralism into a guiding normative imperative. Just Interpretations will attract the attention of constitutional scholars, political scientists, and critical theorists, and will also address an interdisciplinary audience interested in texts, interpretations, and postmodern concerns with justice.   [brief]
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Title: Smallpox: the fight to eradicate a global scourge
Author: Koplow, David A 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Politics | American  Studies | Public Policy | Disease
Publisher's Description: Though smallpox was eradicated from the planet two decades ago, recent terrorist acts have raised the horrific possibility that rogue states, laboratories, or terrorist groups are in possession of secret stockpiles of the virus that causes the disease, and may be preparing to unleash it on target populations. Because it is a far deadlier killer than other biological warfare agents such as anthrax, and because the universal vaccination against smallpox was halted decades ago, a smallpox attack today would be nothing short of catastrophic. This clear, authoritative study looks at the long and fascinating history of the virus, with an informative overview of the political, biological, environmental, medical, and legal issues surrounding the question of whether or not the virus should be exterminated. The only two known samples of the virus are currently stored in Atlanta and Russia. The World Health Organization has repeatedly scheduled their destruction - an action that would rid the planet of all publicly acknowledged smallpox strains forever. Opponents of this plan argue that by destroying these last samples we are denying the possibility that this unique virus could be turned to beneficial purposes in basic scientific research. Others see the stockpile as part of a deterrent against future germ attacks. Proponents of prompt eradication argue that scientists have already learned all they can from this particular virus, and that by destroying the stockpile we are preventing it from ever falling into the wrong hands. As a thirty-year veteran of arms control issues, David Koplow is uniquely suited to provide readers with an informed and well-considered understanding of the complexities involved in the handling of this deadly virus.   [brief]
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Title: Christian America?: what evangelicals really want
Author: Smith, Christian (Christian Stephen) 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | American  Studies | United States History | Sociology | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In recent decades Protestant evangelicalism has become a conspicuous and--to many Americans, worrisome--part of this country's cultural and political landscape. But just how unified is the supposed constituency of the Christian Coalition? And who exactly are the people the Christian Right claims to represent? In the most extensive study of American evangelicals ever conducted, Christian Smith explores the beliefs, values, commitments, and goals of the ordinary men and women who make up this often misunderstood religious group. The result is a much-needed contribution to the discussion of issues surrounding fundamental American freedoms and the basic identity of the United States as a pluralistic nation. Based on data from a three-year national study, including more than 200 in-depth interviews of evangelicals around the country, Christian America? assesses the common stereotype of evangelicals as intolerant, right-wing, religious zealots seeking to impose a Christian moral order through political force. What Smith finds instead are people vastly more diverse and ambivalent than this stereotype suggests. On issues such as religion in education, "family values," Christian political activism, and tolerance of other religions and moralities, evangelicals are highly disparate and conflicted. As the voices of interviewees make clear, the labels "conservative" and "liberal" are too simplistic for understanding their approaches to public life and political action.   [brief]
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Title: Their sisters' keepers: prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870 
Author: Hill, Marilynn Wood
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | United States History | Women's Studies | American  Studies
Publisher's Description: This intimate study of prostitutes in New York City during the mid-nineteenth century reveals these women in an entirely new light. Unlike traditional studies, Marilynn Wood Hill's account of prostitution's positive attractions, as well as its negative aspects, gives a fresh perspective to this much-discussed occupation.Using a wealth of primary source material, from tax and court records to brothel guidebooks and personal correspondence, Hill shows the common concerns prostitutes shared with women outside the "profession." As mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives, trapped by circumstances, they sought a way to create a life and work culture for themselves and those they cared about.By the 1830s prostitution in New York was no longer hidden. Though officially outside the law, it was well integrated into the city's urban life. Hill documents the discrimination and legal harassment prostitutes suffered, and shows how they asserted their rights to protect themselves and their property. Although their occupation was frequently degrading and dangerous, it offered economic and social opportunities for many of its practitioners. Women controlled the prostitution business until about 1870, and during this period female employers and their employees often achieved economic goals not generally available to other working women.While examining aspects of prostitution that benefited women, Hill's vivid portrayal also makes evident the hardships that prostitutes endured. What emerges is a fully rounded study that will be welcomed by many readers.   [brief]
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Title: Small property versus big government: social origins of the property tax revolt 
Author: Lo, Clarence Y. H
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | American  Studies | Public Policy | Law | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Tax reformers, take note. Clarence Lo's investigation of California's Proposition 13 and other tax reduction bills is both a tribute and a warning to people who get "mad as hell" and try to do something about being pushed around by government. Homeowners in California, faced with impossible property tax bills in the 1970s, got mad and pushed back, starting an avalanche that swept tax limitation measures into state after state. What we learn is that, although the property tax was slashed, two-thirds of the benefits went to business owners rather than homeowners.How did a crusade launched by homeowning consumers seeking tax relief end up as a pro-business, supply-side political program? To trace the transformation, Lo uses the firsthand recollections of 120 activists in the movement, going back to the 1950s. He shows how their protests were ignored, until a suburban alliance of upper-middle-class property owners and business owners took charge. It was the program of that latter group, not the plight of the moderate-income homeowner, which inspired tax revolts across the nation and shaped the economic policies of the Reagan administration.   [brief]
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Title: Wising up the marks: the modern William Burroughs 
Author: Murphy, Timothy S 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | American  Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: William S. Burroughs is one of the twentieth century's most visible, controversial, and baffling literary figures. In the first comprehensive study of the writer, Timothy S. Murphy places Burroughs in the company of the most significant intellectual minds of our time. In doing so, he gives us an immensely readable and convincing account of a man whose achievements continue to have a major influence on American art and culture. Murphy draws on the work of such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also investigates the historical contexts from which Burroughs's writings arose.From the paranoid isolationism of the Cold War through the countercultural activism of the sixties to the resurgence of corporate and state control in the eighties, Burroughs's novels, films, and music hold a mirror to the American psyche. Murphy coins the term "amodernism" as a way to describe Burroughs's contested relationship to the canon while acknowledging the writer's explicit desire for a destruction of such systems of classification. Despite the popular mythology that surrounds Burroughs, his work has been largely excluded from the academy of American letters. Finally here is a book that presents a solid portrait of a major artistic innovator, a writer who combines aesthetics and politics and who can perform as anthropologist, social goad, or media icon, all with consummate skill.   [brief]
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Title: Myths in stone: religious dimensions of Washington, D.C
Author: Meyer, Jeffrey F
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | American  Studies | Christianity | United States History
Publisher's Description: Washington, D.C., is a city of powerful symbols - from the dominance of the Capitol dome and Washington Monument to the authority of the Smithsonian. This book takes us on a fascinating and informative tour of the nation's capital as Jeffrey F. Meyer unravels the complex symbolism of the city and explores its meaning for our national consciousness. Meyer finds that mythic and religious themes pervade the capital - in its original planning, in its monumental architecture, and in the ritualized events that have taken place over the 200 years the city has been the repository for the symbolism of the nation. As Meyer tours the city's famous axial layout, he discusses many historical figures and events, compares Washington to other great cities of the world such as Beijing and Berlin, and discusses the meaning and history of its architecture and many works of art. Treating Washington, D.C., as a complex religious center, Meyer finds that the city functions as a unifying element in American consciousness. This book will change the way we look at Washington, D.C., and provide a provocative new look at the meaning of religion in America today. It will also be a valuable companion for those traveling to this city that was envisioned from its inception as the center of the world.   [brief]
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Title: Kitchens: the culture of restaurant work
Author: Fine, Gary Alan
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Sociology | American  Studies | Popular Culture | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Kitchens takes us into the robust, overheated, backstage world of the contemporary restaurant. In this rich, often surprising portrait of the real lives of kitchen workers, Gary Alan Fine brings their experiences, challenges, and satisfactions to colorful life. He provides a riveting exploration of how restaurants actually work, both individually and as part of a larger culinary culture. Working conditions, time constraints, market forces, and aesthetic goals all figure into the food served to customers - who often don't know quite what they're getting.The kitchen is a place of constant compromise, of quirks, approximations, dirty tricks, surprises, and short cuts, as Fine demonstrates in his deft, readable narrative. He brings to life the complicated relationships among kitchen workers - servers, dishwashers, pantry workers, managers, restaurant critics, and customers - and reveals the effects of organizational structure on individual relations.   [brief]
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Title: Standing ground: Yurok Indian spirituality, 1850-1990
Author: Buckley, Thomas C. T
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American  Studies | Anthropology | Native American Ethnicity
Publisher's Description: This colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis. Thomas Buckley's foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian spirituality as "a significant field in which individual and society meet in dialogue - cooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways. 'Culture,' here, is not a thing but a process, an emergence through time."   [brief]
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Title: The deficit and the public interest: the search for responsible budgeting in the 1980s 
Author: White, Joseph 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | American  Studies
Publisher's Description: Political time is counted, not in years, but in issues - the depression defined the political era of the 1930s just as the cold war did the 1950s and civil rights the 1960s. Today the federal budget looms as the dominant issue by which all others are considered and has become a concern which catalyzes debate again and again in our nation's capital. In this definitive new work, Joseph White and Aaron Wildavsky describe and analyze the struggles over taxing and spending from Carter's last year through the Reagan administration.The battle of the budget is largely about how we define the role of the government and its relationship to the people. It is a story of congressional horsetrading, partisan posturing, and technical tricks that affect billions of dollars. It is also a story of politicians operating within constraints set by both public opinion and political interpretation of economic reality. Though budgeting has always been important, its impact on the national agenda has grown dramatically in the last decades.Based on extensive interviews with participants and thorough use of documentary sources, this book both explains how budgeting works so the reader can see what is at stake in seemingly arcane disputes and locates budgeting within larger ideological trends in American society. It also explains the relationship of the budget to media, party and policy activists and explores the ways in which the deficit represents a crisis of self-confidence in the ability of our institutions, preeminently Congress and the presidency. Along the way, it provides a uniquely comprehensive account of the entire budget problem, exploring Gramm-Rudman, tax reform, and the continuing stalemate around this issue. The Deficit and the Public Interest offers a wide-ranging "solution" to the deficit that encompasses several ideas: the authors demonstrate that institutions have performed better than their members and critics believe, and they contend that extreme solutions would likely be much worse than the original problems. Further, they redefine the problem as one of reducing interest costs so the deficit becomes manageable, and they proffer political advice on how to make this approach politically acceptable, both at home and abroad.This meticulously researched work provides an invaluable journey through the last decade of American politics. In its theoretical depth and incisive new approach to policymaking, The Deficit and the Public Interest lends a fundamentally new understanding of the place of the federal government in American society.   [brief]
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Title: The most beautiful girl in the world: beauty pageants and national identity
Author: Banet-Weiser, Sarah 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | American  Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political arena deserving of serious study.Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.   [brief]
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Title: To the Right: the transformation of American conservatism 
Author: Himmelstein, Jerome L
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Politics | Public Policy | American  Studies
Publisher's Description: In this timely book, Jerome Himmelstein offers a new interpretation of the growth of conservatism in American politics. Tracing the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s back to the Old Right of the 1950s, Himmelstein provides an interpretive map of the political landscape over the past decades, showing . . . [more]
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Title: Power and illness: the failure and future of American health policy 
Author: Fox, Daniel M
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Medicine | History | American  Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: During most of this century, American health policy has emphasized caring for acute conditions rather than preventing and managing chronic illness - even though chronic illness has caused most sickness and death since the 1920s. In this provocative and wide-ranging book, Daniel Fox explains why this has been so and offers a forceful argument for fundamental change in national health care priorities.Fox discusses how ideas about illness and health care, as well as the power of special interest groups, have shaped the ways in which Americans have treated illness. Those who make health policy decisions have increased support for hospitals, physicians, and medical research, believing that people then would become healthier. This position, implemented at considerable cost, has not adequately taken into account the growing burden of chronic disabling illness. While decision makers may have defined chronic disease as a high priority in research, they have not given it such a priority in the financing of health services.The increasing burden of chronic illness is critical. Fox suggests ways to solve this problem without increasing the already high cost of health care - but he does not underestimate the difficulties in such a strategy. Advocating the redistribution of resources within hospital and medical services, he targets those that are redundant or marginally effective.There could be no more timely subject today than American health care. And Daniel Fox is uniquely able to address its problems. A historian of medicine, with knowledge of how hospitals and physicians behave and how health policy is made at government levels, he has extensively researched published and unpublished documents on health care. What he proposes could profoundly affect all Americans.   [brief]
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Title: It did happen here: recollections of political repression in America
Author: Schultz, Ruth
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | American  Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this moving book, two skilled oral historians collect the words of Americans who have been victims of political repression in their own country. Disturbing and provocative, It Did Happen Here is must-reading for everyone who cares about protecting the rights and liberties upon which this country . . . [more]
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Title: Claims to fame: celebrity in contemporary America
Author: Gamson, Joshua 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: American  Studies | Sociology | Popular Culture | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of celebrity's transparency and commercialism.Gamson examines the contemporary "dream machine" that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars.Gamson also looks at the "celebritization" of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity.   [brief]
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Title: Engaged surrender: African American women and Islam
Author: Rouse, Carolyn Moxley 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | American  Studies | Religion | African American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Commonly portrayed in the media as holding women in strict subordination and deference to men, Islam is nonetheless attracting numerous converts among African American women. Are these women "reproducing their oppression," as it might seem? Or does their adherence to the religion suggest unsuspected subtleties and complexities in the relation of women, especially black women, to Islam? Carolyn Rouse sought answers to these questions among the women of Sunni Muslim mosques in Los Angeles. Her richly textured study provides rare insight into the meaning of Islam for African American women; in particular, Rouse shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligations. In Engaged Surrender, Islam becomes a unique prism for clarifying the role of faith in contemporary black women's experience. Through these women's stories, Rouse reveals how commitment to Islam refracts complex processes - urbanization, political and social radicalization, and deindustrialization - that shape black lives generally, and black women's lives in particular. Rather than focusing on traditional (and deeply male) ideas of autonomy and supremacy, the book - and the community of women it depicts - emphasizes more holistic notions of collective obligation, personal humility, and commitment to overarching codes of conduct and belief. A much-needed corrective to media portraits of Islam and the misconceptions they engender, this engaged and engaging work offers an intimate, in-depth look into the vexed and interlocking issues of Islam, gender, and race.   [brief]
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Title: Making sweatshops: the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry
Author: Rosen, Ellen Israel
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American  Studies | Sociology | Anthropology | Politics | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: The only comprehensive historical analysis of the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry, this book focuses on the reemergence of sweatshops in the United States and the growth of new ones abroad. Ellen Israel Rosen, who has spent more than a decade investigating the problems of America's domestic apparel workers, now probes the shifts in trade policy and global economics that have spawned momentous changes in the international apparel and textile trade. Making Sweatshops asks whether the process of globalization can be promoted in ways that blend industrialization and economic development in both poor and rich countries with concerns for social and economic justice - especially for the women who toil in the industry's low-wage sites around the world. Rosen looks closely at the role trade policy has played in globalization in this industry. She traces the history of current policies toward the textile and apparel trade to cold war politics and the reconstruction of the Pacific Rim economies after World War II. Her narrative takes us through the rise of protectionism and the subsequent dismantling of trade protection during the Reagan era to the passage of NAFTA and the continued push for trade accords through the WTO. Going beyond purely economic factors, this valuable study elaborates the full historical and political context in which the globalization of textiles and apparel has taken place. Rosen takes a critical look at the promises of prosperity, both in the U.S. and in developing countries, made by advocates for the global expansion of these industries. She offers evidence to suggest that this process may inevitably create new and more extreme forms of poverty.   [brief]
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Title: The lustre of our country: the American experience of religious freedom
Author: Noonan, John Thomas 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Law | United States History | Religion | American  Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: A New York Times Notable Book This remarkable work offers a fresh approach to a freedom that is often taken for granted in the United States, yet is one of the strongest and proudest elements of American culture: religious freedom. In this compellingly written, distinctively personal book, Judge John T. Noonan asserts that freedom of religion, as James Madison conceived it, is an American invention previously unknown to any nation on earth. The Lustre of Our Country demonstrates how the idea of religious liberty is central to the American experience and to American influence around the world.Noonan's original book is a history of the idea of religious liberty and its relationship with the law. He begins with an intellectual autobiography, describing his own religious and legal training. After setting the stage with autobiography, Noonan turns to history, with each chapter written in a new voice. One chapter takes the form of a catechism (questions and answers), presenting the history of the idea of religious freedom in Christianity and the American colonies. Another chapter on James Madison argues that Madison's support of religious freedom was not purely secular but rather the outcome of his own religious beliefs. A fictional sister of Alexis de Toqueville writes, contrary to her brother's work, that the U.S. government is very closely tied to religion. Other chapters offer straightforward considerations of constitutional law.Throughout the book, Noonan shows how the free exercise of religion led to profound changes in American law - he discusses abolition, temperance, and civil rights - and how the legal notion of religious liberty influenced revolutionary France, Japan, and Russia, as well as the Catholic Church during Vatican II. The Lustre of Our Country is a celebration of religious freedom - a personal and profound statement on what the author considers America's greatest moral contribution to the world.   [brief]
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Title: Planting nature: trees and the manipulation of environmental stewardship in America
Author: Cohen, Shaul Ephraim 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Conservation | Geography | Environmental Studies | American  Studies
Publisher's Description: Trees hold a powerful place in American constructions of what is good in nature and the environment. As we attempt to cope with environmental crises, trees are increasingly enlisted with great fervor as agents of our stewardship over nature. In this innovative and impassioned book, Shaul E. Cohen exposes the way that environmental stewardship is undermined through the manipulation of trees and the people who plant them by a partnership of big business, the government, and tree-planting groups. He reveals how positive associations and symbols that have been invested in trees are exploited by an interlocking network of government agencies, private timber companies, and nongovernmental organizations to subvert the power of people who think that they are building a better world. Planting Nature details the history of tree planting in the United States and the rise of popular sentiment around trees, including the development of the Arbor Day holiday and tree-planting groups such as the National Arbor Day Foundation and American Forests. Drawing from internal papers, government publications, advertisements, and archival documents, Cohen illustrates how organizations promote tree planting as a way of shifting attention away from the causes of environmental problems to their symptoms, masking business-as-usual agendas. Ultimately, Planting Nature challenges the relationships between a "green" public, the organizations that promote their causes, and the "powers that be," providing a cautionary tale of cooperation and deception that cuts across the political spectrum.   [brief]
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