|
|
|
The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left
Weve all been taught that this sentence--"Driving in from the airport, the flags flapped furiously"--is wrong, wrong, wrong. But is it, asks David Crystal Everyone knows what this sentence means. No one actually thinks that the flags were driving the car. Is this sentence really incorrect. In The Fight for English, Crystal offers a stimulating account of the struggle between various schools of grammar to control how we write and speak. Ranging back a thousand years, to the anguished concerns of Aelfric the Grammarian, and illuminating the contributions of Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and many others, the book sheds light on ten centuries of warfare over spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, and much more. The author takes to task such take-no-prisoners grammarians as the well-known Lynn Truss (whose Eats, Shoots, and Leaves was a giant bestseller), arguing that we should say no to zero-tolerance prescriptive rules. Indeed, as one of the world's leading authorities on the English language, Crystal offers an original and authoritative counter-argument to the prescriptive agenda. He shows for instance that context is very important, that the dangling participle "driving in from the airport" is not wrong because the context makes the meaning clear. Moreover, even the hope for a standard system of spelling is in vain, since approximately 25 per cent of the words in a standard dictionary have more than one spelling (such as dark room and dark-room and darkroom). Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "fascinating and insightful, often funny," The Fight for English is a welcome breath of fresh air in the often stultifying debate over English usage..
Price: $6.72
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
War Made Easy cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key "perception management" techniques that have played huge roles in the promotion of American wars in recent decades This guide to disinformation analyzes American military adventures past and present to reveal striking similarities in the efforts of various administrations to justify, and retain, public support for war. War Made Easy is essential reading. It documents a long series of deliberate misdeeds at the highest levels of power and lays out important guidelines to help readers distinguish a propaganda campaign from actual news reporting. With War Made Easy, every reader can become a savvy media critic and, perhaps, help the nation avoid costly and unnecessary wars..
Price: $4.38
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq
In early 2003, Greg Mitchell was one of the few mainstream journalists to seriously question the stated reasons for invading Iraq. In the years since, he has repeatedly challenged the media to probe the conduct of the war and its toll on our troops. Now, after five years of war, he traces the conflict -- from the "runup" to the "surge" -- and the media's coverage of it, in this important collection of commentaries with significant new additions: an original introduction and dozens of pages of fresh material that unify the essays. If a free press is the watchdog of democracy, then Greg Mitchell must be the watchdog of the watchdogs, tracking the performance of the media at Editor & Publisher, the influential magazine of the newspaper industry. Over the past five years, in his widely read column, "Pressing Issues," he has repeatedly been ahead of the curve in intensely scrutinizing both the president and the press--and the controversies swirling around Donald Rumsfeld, Pat Tillman, "Scooter" Libby, Ann Coulter and numerous other figures. His book is a unique history of the entire war--and as topical as today's headlines. Whether writing early warnings that anticipated a long and bloody war, analyzing Stephen Colbert's in-his-face mockery of George W. Bush, or imagining the president confessing his sins to Oprah Winfrey, Greg Mitchell explores how we got into the war in Iraq--and why we just can't seem to get out. With tens of thousands of American troops still in Iraq, debate over the war continues to rage on TV news and across editorial pages. Against this backdrop of controversy, Greg Mitchell is the rare journalist who has seen it all with clear eyes. In So Wrong for So Long, he can finally tell the whole story..
Price: $7.44
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
The No-Spin Zone: Confrontations with the Powerful and Famous in America
On the heels of his runaway New York Times bestseller, The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly delivers another strong dose of no-holds-barred advice and the unvarnished truth for America Bill O’Reilly is even madder today than when he wrote his last book The O’Reilly Factor–and his fans love him even more. He’s mad because things have gone from bad to worse, in politics, in Hollywood, in every social stratum of the nation. True to its title, The No-Spin Zone cuts through all the rhetoric that some of O’Reilly’s most infamous guests have spewed to expose what’s really on their minds, while sharing plenty of his own emphatic counterpoints along the way. Shining a searing spotlight on public figures from President George W. Bush and Senator Hillary Clinton to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and his former CBS News colleague Dan Rather, The No-Spin Zone is laced with the kind of straight-shooting commentary that has made O’Reilly the voice of middle America’s disenfranchised. Examining sex and violence in the media and the tarnished legacy of the Clintons with the same feistiness as the death penalty (which he opposes) and timid national news organizations that roll over for the powerful, Bill O’Reilly delivers not only his opinions, but the documented attitudes of the country’s movers and shakers as well. It demonstrates just why O’Reilly has become the most successful, the most controversial, the most beloved (by some), and the most disliked (by others) figure in television news today_and a culture hero to tens of millions of everyday Americans. And that’s fact, not spin..
Price: $0.31
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
How To Be a Value Investor
"From the bare basics to tips for the self-made sophisticate, Lisa Holton captures both the art and science of contrarian investing in her book HOW TO BE A VALUE INVESTOR, arming investors with the necessary tools and information they need to make informed investment decisions. Holton not only emphasizes the age-old values of investing—patience, due diligence, and conviction—but also brings a contemporary angle to her approach, making a convincing case for value investing as a wise and lucrative choice." - Eric McKissack, CFA, Vice chairman and co-chief investment officer, Ariel Mutual Funds. HOW TO BE A VALUE INVESTOR is designed to help you master—within hours!—the art and science of value investing. Built on the rock-solid value investing tenets that guided Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, and others, this concise but comprehensive wealth-building blueprint gives you practical, hands-on techniques so you can squeeze the most profit from today's volatile markets. Look for these other user-friendly books in The McGraw-Hill Mastering the Market Series:
How to Be a Growth Investor;
How to Be a Sector Investor;
How to Be a Small-Cap Investor..
Price: $9.85
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Spying for the Raj: The Pundits and the Mapping of the Himalaya
From the early nineteenth century, Imperial Russian expansion threatened the increasing British dominance of India. In the 1860s, Captain Thomas Montgomerie hit on the idea of training natives from Indian border states to be surveyors, and have them explore the region covertly. Disguised as traders of Buddhist monks, the Pundits taught themselves to count their own paces and to walk at exactly 2,000 paces to the mile, whether uphill, downhill or on level ground. They were taught the use of sextant and compass, to navigate by the stars and to calculate altitudes by observing the boiling point of water. These loyal servants of the Raj, for personal prestige, the opportunity of employment or the sheer love of adventure displayed an extraordinary dedication to their British employers. Despite their precautions and tricks, some of them were sent back, imprisoned or tortured. Even so, they managed to map the Himalaya, Tibet and surrounding areas with remarkable precision, thereby helping the British to consolidate their rule in the Indian subcontinent. .
Price: $14.74
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Anything Goes! : What I've Learned from Pundits, Politicians, and Presidents
As host of Larry King Liveone of the most popular daily forums for political news and commentaryLarry King has asked probing questions of North Americas movers and shakers: the major world leaders, politicians, pundits, spin doctors, and reporters who are directly involved with the North American scene. Now, in Anything Goes!, King takes an in-depth look at how North Americathrough the prism of the electronic and print mediahas gotten to the point where it is today. Bipartisan politics, bimbo eruptions, grandstanding in Congress, backstabbing tactics, and more are covered in this fascinating and revealing memoir of the last decade. Its Larry King at his bestincluding inside political stories and anecdotes never before reported anywhere. Since its 1985 debut, Larry King Live has consistently been CNNs highest-rated program. Viewers in more than 170 million households from 210 countries and territories worldwide tune in regularly. Larry King has been named Broadcaster of the Year by the International Radio and Television Society and has won numerous Cable Ace Awards. His coverage of the 1992 presidential elections won him the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. Timed to coincide with the presidential elections of 2000, Anything Goes! should receive considerable attention from both the media and public.`.
Price: $0.01
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (California Series in Public Anthropology, 13)
In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits. This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world. Available: November 2004 Pub Date: January 2005.
Price: $17.99
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Pundit's Folly
In this spectacle of words, the world is a sea of glass: a pageant of fond delight, a theatre of vanity, a labyrinth of error, a gulf of grief, a sty of filthiness, a vale of misery, a spectacle of woe, a river of tears, a stage of deceit, a cage full of devils, a den of scorpions..
Price: $2.26
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|
