Books about Service from Amazon.com

.
Price: $8.92 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Trixie, Daddy, and Knuffle Bunny take a trip to the neighborhood Laundromat. But the exciting adventure takes a dramatic turn when Trixie realizes somebunny was left behind . . .

This 2005 Caldecott Honor book uses a combination of muted black-and-white photographs and expressive illustrations and tells a brilliantly true-to-life tale about what happens when Daddy’s in charge and things go terribly, hilariously wrong..
Price: $8.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This special Fifth Anniversary Edition of the acclaimed film reference guide is packed with virtually everything movie lovers need to know about the films they simply must see. Stephen Jay Schneider and his team of writers have brought the book up to date by including the most memorable movies released during the past five years. Among their new additions are The Queen, The Lives of Others, Brokeback Mountain, and several more recent movies that have attracted worldwide attention. Covering more than a century of filmmaking and dating back to silent-era sensations such as Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, this book describes musicals, dramas, screwball comedies, experimental “New Wave” films from 1950s and ’60s Italy and France, major films noir, classic westerns, action and adventure films, and even memorable documentaries. It lists each film’s director and cast, presents a plot summary and production notes, and cites interesting, often little-known facts relating to the film’s cast, storyline, and production. For students of cinema, discerning film buffs, DVD collectors, and readers who enjoy thumbing through and reminiscing over cherished screen moments, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die is the place to start reading. Filled with 800 movie still shots and actors’ photos.

.
Price: $23.10 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The U.S. government is in crisis.

With America’s attention fixated on who will step into the Oval Office in 2009, no one has noticed where the real power has shifted—to a vast network of unelected officials whose authority has grown wildly out of control. In his latest blockbuster book, acclaimed defense and national security reporter Bill Gertz exposes these astonishingly powerful leaders and their enablers in the political class—and their devastating impact on America's national security.

Gertz shows how entrenched liberal activists have become dominant even under an ostensibly conservative administration. And he names names of those who actively subvert official U.S. policy—including not only liberal Democrats but also a number of so-called Republicans who have joined this insidious “Blame America First” crowd.

The Failure Factory reveals:

• The shocking, previously untold story of the partisan bureaucrats who completely undercut the U.S. position on Iran’s radical Islamist regime
• Barack Obama’s disastrous national security policies—and his stable of advisers who have already put America at risk
• The recent showdown in the Pentagon that laid bare the U.S. government’s ongoing failures to tackle the threat of Islamist extremism
• Flagrant cases of sabotage by top State Department officials that have emboldened dangerous states like Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Communist China
• Stunning new intelligence failures—including one that may have allowed a terrorist group to penetrate the FBI and CIA
• How even the Bush White House was overrun with Democrats and liberal Republicans
• The legions of “Clinton generals”—top military brass whose careers blossomed during the Clinton administration—who make the United States more vulnerable
• How Democrats are exploiting the antiwar movement for political gain, with little regard for the potentially devastating consequences
• How the defense secretary’s public defiance of official U.S. policy could have gotten him fired—but instead went unchallenged

Based on scores of exclusive interviews and displaying the groundbreaking reporting that has made Bill Gertz’s previous books smash bestsellers, The Failure Factory offers a chilling look at the threats to our national security that exist within our own government..
Price: $16.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]

James Bamford exposed the existence of the top-secret National Security Agency in the bestselling The Puzzle Palace and continued to probe into its workings in his follow-up bestseller, Body of Secrets. Now Bamford discloses inside, often shocking information about the transformation of the NSA in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001.

In THE SHADOW FACTORY, Bamford shows how the NSA’s failure to detect the presence of two of the 9/11 hijackers inside the United States led the NSA to abandon its long-held policy of spying only on enemies outside the country. Instead, after 9/11 it turned its almost limitless ability to listen in on friend and foe alike over to the Bush Administration to use as a weapon in the war on terror. With unrivaled access to sources and documents, Bamford details how the agency has conducted domestic surveillance without court approval, and he frames it in the context of the NSA’s ongoing hunt for information about today’s elusive enemies.

THE SHADOW FACTORY is a riveting read for anyone concerned about civil liberties and America’s security in the post-9/11 world.

.
Price: $13.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Book Description
What would it take?

That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children--not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives--their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.

Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

About the Author
Paul Tough is an editor at the New York Times Magazine and one of America's foremost writers on poverty, education, and the achievement gap. His reporting on Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone originally appeared as a Times Magazine cover story. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Questions for Paul Tough

Amazon.com: What makes Geoffrey Canada's approach to educating poor city kids different than the many reforms that have come before?

Tough: Geoff is taking a much more comprehensive approach than earlier reformers. His premise is that kids in neighborhoods like Harlem face so many disadvantages--poorly run schools, poorly educated parents, dangerous streets--that it doesn't make sense to tackle just one or two of those problems and ignore the rest. And so he has created, in the Harlem Children’s Zone, an integrated set of programs that support the neighborhood's children from cradle to college, in school and out of school.

Amazon.com: This is a short book about a long story. How did you find a way to tell the story of such a complicated, long-term transformation?

Tough: When I set out to write this book, my main goal was to tell an engaging story, to find characters and moments and conflicts that would reflect the changes that were going on in Harlem. I wanted to present Geoff Canada more as a protagonist in a drama than as a static subject of a biography. And in that respect, I got lucky in my choice of subject, because during the years I spent reporting on his work, Geoff was in the middle of some major transformations, both personal and organizational. I was also lucky to find a variety of other characters in Harlem, from teachers and administrators to students and parents, who really opened up to me, speaking candidly and eloquently about their own hopes and fears for their children and their futures. With their help, I think I was able to make the book not just an account of some important new ideas in poverty and education, but a human story as well.

Amazon.com: You've spent much of the past five years reporting in Harlem. Beyond the school successes, do you see differences between the parts of the city within the Children's Zone and nearby neighborhoods where the program hasn't expanded yet?

Tough: Harlem as a whole has improved a great deal over the last decade--a process that Geoffrey Canada can take some credit for, though there were plenty of other people and forces that played a role. On a block-by-block level, though, it's not always possible to see the difference between a street that is in the zone and one that's outside of it. The most important changes in the zone are going on out of view, inside schools and apartments and housing projects, where children are, for the first time, learning the skills they need to succeed.

Amazon.com: Barack Obama has said that he would replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 other cities. Have any other organizations begun to follow Canada's model in other places, or are they waiting to see how it goes (or waiting for Obama to be elected)?

Tough: There is a tremendous amount of interest right now in Geoffrey Canada's work among people working in education and philanthropy and social-service non-profits. And there are fledgling zone projects in a handful of cities, all drawing upon the Harlem Children’s Zone to some degree. But there's nothing yet happening on the scale that Obama has proposed. I do think people are waiting to see what Obama does. Will he take the steps necessary to put his replication plan into effect?

Amazon.com: How much of its effectiveness depends on Canada himself? Can you model him, as well as his program?

Tough: He's a unique guy. His personal story--born in poverty in the South Bronx, growing up around drugs and violence, then making it out of the ghetto and winding up at Harvard--was what gave him the passion and the commitment to create the Harlem Children's Zone in the face of numerous obstacles and widespread skepticism. So it's probably true that no one else could have built the first zone. But I think this next stage, the process of expanding the zone model around the country, will require leaders of a different type--people who are passionate about the mission of improving the lives of poor children, of course, but more importantly people who are very focused on results and how to achieve them. Those people may be rare, but they're out there.

Amazon.com: Finally, how are Victor and Cheryl [a young couple who went through the Zone's Baby College in the book] doing?

Tough: They're doing pretty well! They're still struggling with all the issues that most young adults in Harlem struggle with, like finding affordable housing and a decent job. But they're committed to their son, Victor Jr., and to the new parenting techniques they learned in Baby College. They're determined to do whatever it takes to give Victor Jr. a shot at a very different kind of future than they were able to imagine for themselves, growing up.

Questions for Geoffrey Canada

Amazon.com: How do you change the culture of a neighborhood while keeping its local values?

Canada: We are not changing Harlem's culture--we are working to provide an alternative to the toxic popular culture and street culture that glorify violence and anti-social behavior. When you are a scared kid, all this tough-guy stuff is very seductive. We are working with people from the community to provide safe, enriching, and engaging environments for children so they can develop just like their middle-class peers. By encompassing an entire neighborhood, we hope to reach a tipping point where the dominant culture is one that explicitly and implicitly moves children toward success.

Amazon.com: You say in the book, "It is my fundamental belief that the folk who care about public education the most, who really want to see it work, are destroying it." Can you explain what you mean by that? Have you been able to change any of those minds through your work?

Canada: First, let me say that I believe school staff--particularly teachers--perform one of the most important jobs in our country, and many of them are the most dedicated, hard-working professionals I know. I believe it is absolutely scandalous that they are not paid more and given more respect as professionals. That said, I believe our country's education bureaucracy has become calcified and resistant to change--and we are in dire need of change. When education self-interest groups defend practices that get in the way of improving schools for the sake of children, then I am absolutely opposed to them.

I believe that the successes we are having in Harlem are beginning to turn some heads in this country, and making people realize that things are not hopeless--that we adults can improve student achievement at a much-larger scale than we have been doing. It's obvious that the system that got us here is not the one that is going to get us out. So everyone is going to have to re-evaluate their roles, their assumptions and their positions. I think that has begun, but we are not there yet as a country.

Amazon.com: The story in the book ends in the summer of 2007. What has happened in your work, especially at Promise Academy, in the past year?

Canada: This past academic year was very encouraging and it really seemed like the school began to coalesce. The most obvious sign of that were the scores on the citywide math exam at our middle school, which had been the school with the most challenges. This past spring, 97 percent of the eighth graders were at or above grade level. For an area like Harlem, that is incredible, particularly since these were kids that were randomly picked by lottery from the neighborhood, were massively behind, and were with us for just three years. So we are very optimistic about the future of our kids.

.
Price: $16.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

-- How would you spend an extra $4,000 a year for the next twenty-five years?

-- How much more secure would your retirement be with an extra $100,000 or more?

-- How much more time could you spend at your family dinner table if you could work an hour less each day?

-- What would you do in retirement if you could retire three years earlier?

Your 401(k) plan is probably one of your most important future sources of financial security. This book makes it easy for you to take the five steps needed to add more than $100,000 to your retirement nest egg without taking more risk or saving more money. This can allow you to improve your lifestyle, increase your benefits, identify the hidden costs and also improve your standing within your company by proactively helping your employer to take needed action..
Price: $4.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]