United Kingdom Books

This historical survey of the Queen Mother of Great Britain is intended as a tribute to her life as much as a biographical coverage, and covers her various challenges and contributions as the queen. Many full-page color photos accompany this survey of her life, making for a fine coffee table edition or as an anglophile keepsake.

Part of the propaganda effort conducted by virtually every government at war is to picture the enemy soldiers as blood thirsty heathens raping and pillaging their way through the countries they've invaded. In England during World War I, this worked entirely too well. The people of England decided that they were likely to be invaded and insisted on protection.

The Government knew that any invasion would have to be huge and that the Royal Navy and regular forces would be adequate to resist it. But the public wasn't convinced and the Volunteer Force was created.

At a time when the regular army was being greatly expanded, official equipment was in very short supply, the 'Dad's Army' had to make do with whatever was available. Transportation was often by bicycle. Motorcycle units were formed when the soldiers brought their own motorcycles - a spare parts disaster. Those were just part of the problems.

This carefully researched book tells the story of these 'forces.' It's the story of an army that never fought.

As World War II slowly fades into history, old veterans are now giving their tales a final telling. Memoirs, books and final recollections fill the bookstores looking back on that great event that so marked and divided the world.

In the midst of such a plethora of material on World War II, there is little talk on its aftermath. Indeed it might be argued that what happened immediately after the surrender of the Axis powers shaped world history almost as much as the dramatic event itself.

Covering this fascinating time, Prof. Gregory W. Sand provides insight and historic perspective. As part of the Contributions to the Study of World History series, the book thrusts the reader into an end-of-the-war scenario in much the same way as President Truman was driven upon Roosevelt's death.

It becomes clear that the conflict's aftermath was not just the end of a war but the beginning of another one. With extensive headnotes, Prof. Sand traces the major concerns of the two victorious powers as they headed toward a series of crises that eventually gave rise to the Cold War.

Poland, Italy's Venezia Guilia, and the Austrian occupation were all matters that immediately threatened world peace. In the power vacuum that followed the Allied victory, the letters document the perfidious actions of Stalin who shamelessly exploited postwar chaos to build an "Iron Curtain" right down the middle of Europe.
Prof. Sand weaves together the threads of the two leaders' lives as he follows their postwar careers. Their friendship was especially cemented by their meeting at Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill would deliver his famed "Iron Curtain" speech introduced by President Truman. With Churchill's second premiership, their official correspondence resumed and with it all the problems raised by the Cold War.
While the book is excellent historical resource, the personal aspect cannot be divorced from the letters. More than just a political alliance, the book records an evolving friendship. What began as official dispatches with few personal references soon became formal correspondence addressed to "Mr. President" and "Mr. Prime Minister." This would later become the more intimate "My dear Sir Winston," and "My dear Harry." In a similar way, both men in the later years would send their best regards to the other's spouse and children and extend thoughtful courtesies.

Prof. Sand, Adjunct Professor of History at the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy, has provided this first full scholarly edition of the Churchill-Truman correspondence which will be an excellent chronicle of the aftermath of the war and will aid students in understanding this important period of world history. In documenting Stalin's brash post-war politics, it is a lesson in perfidy. By describing the eventual Anglo-American response, it is a confirmation that weakness has its terrible consequence and real peace can only bought through strength.

By the time he was 30 years of age, George Q. Cannon had been a printer's devil, a religious refugee, an 1847 Utah pioneer, a member of the great Mormon trek of 1849 across the southern Great Basin to California, a gold miner, a Mormon missionary to the Hawaiian Islands, and finally, the editor and publisher of the San Francisco "Western Standard". Compiled and edited by Roger Robin Ekins (Professor of English and Chair of the Honors Program at Butte College, Oroville, California), Defending Zion: George Q. Cannon And The California Mormon Newspaper Wars of 1856-1857 is the latest and fifth volume in The Arthur H. Clark Company's outstanding "Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier" series and which details the published journalistic defenses of Mormonism in the 19th Century by a capable and articulate defender in a time when the newspaper was the most potent and powerful means of mass communication and persuasion for social, political, and religious causes. Defending Zion is a welcome and invaluable contribution to Western American History Studies in general, and The Utah War episode which saw President James Buchanan launching a military expedition to Utah so costly that it almost bankrupted the United States federal government on the eve of the Civil War.

If you are interested in the empirical implications of the philosophical literature on deliberative politics, then this book is worth buying. Why? Well, it is simply the first attempt to use Habermas' discourse ethics as a research framework to study parliamentary deliberation. This was done over several years in a cross-national basis (US, UK, Germany and Switzerland) by a team led by Prof. Jürg Steiner. Neatly organized, clear, and very convincing, this book should also be read as a source of inspiration for future research (see pp. 166-169), specially in the informal arenas of the public sphere that Habermas so highly praises.

This book, originally published in 1972, is a real pleasure. Its focus is on English fictions created about India during the Raj but it predates todays postcolonial theory and is therefore free of the latters penchant for rarefied jargon. Parry in her introduction to the new edition examines current trends in postcolonial theory and she finds them to have strayed away from the plain facts of history and become lost in a hybrid analysis of texts which places too much emphasis on discursive ambiguity and not enough on the plain fact of the economic exploitation which informs all colonizer/colonized encounters. You will only get this new essay if you get the new revised Verso edition(published 1997)which also includes an introductory essay by the always on the mark Michael Sprinker so beware the old editions on sale.
The lengthy first chapter offers a detailed account of the evolving nature of the colonizer/colonized relationship from initial conquest to independence struggle with many excellently chosen quotes from numerous diaries/travel logs/ memoirs/literary sources etc...Unlike Saids Orientalism which came later and owes a great debt to this book as do all of the postcolonial practitioners, Parry spends considerable time supporting her carefully stated views. She was writing at a time when the Raj revival was just about to reach its zenith and so this book was one assumes written at least in part as a counter to all the sentimental and fond accounts of the English for their empire. Parry gives the best account I have yet read of what the actual Anglo-Indian rulers were like in India though there are other valuable accounts including Indian accounts which I would also highly recommend(Indian Tales of the Raj). Parry deals with familiar names like Kipling and Forster but also with some unfamiliar names including female novelists and travel writers. Her views on Kipling broke new ground and have yet to be bettered though many have tried(Moore-Gilbert, Suleri).
I've read many related books including Suleri's Rhetoric of English India, & Moore-Gilberts Writing India & can easily say this is the best book of its kind. Amazingly insightful for 1972 or for 2002 and a real breath of common sense fresh air to the school of thinkers that came along in the 1987-1997 era and were so dominated by the influence of Derrida and Foucault and offered an ever diminishing amount of insight and an ever increasing amount of arcane verbiage. The re-publication of this frimly grounded work will perhaps assist in re-focusing postcolonial studies, one can only hope.
It is very interesting that in her introduction Parry mentions Said several times but quotes only from Culture and Imperialism, a book with a much firmer and more plainly spoken grasp of the relationship between empire and literature than its predecessor, the infinitely more famous Orientalism. Said in turn pays homage to Parry on the back cover acknowledging her influence and rightly so. Delusions and Discoveries really deserves to be the book given the credit for initiating the modern phase of postcolonial studies.

Jack and Adam Lively have managed to put together a throughly interesting and at the same time enjoyable reader on Democracy in Britian. The most notable feature is the range of texts included: there are texts by philiosophers (Hobbes, Locke...), Politicians (Disrael, Thatcher...) and from debates in parliament as well as Shakespeare, Auden and even Rushdi. Because the authors have NOT only included specialised texts by experts on the constitutions they manage to convey the picture of a living democracy whith all its problems, issues and controversies. I would argue that many of the questions that are dealt with are also important in other countries. In this sense, the book transgresses its original purpose.

Democracy's Privileged Few is a careful, well-documented, and important study of an underappreciated topic in constitutional law. The legislative privileges protected by our Constitution are rarely discussed in courts, but they represent some of the most fundamental requirements of democratic self-government. Spanning from modern bribery scandals to freedom of speech, the power of Congress to imprison ordinary citizens, and medieval conflicts between the King and Parliament, Democracy's Privileged Few is an excellently written account of how legislative privilege emerged in the British Constitution and survived (or evolved) in the U.S. Constitution. Anyone with an interest in the foundations of American government would do well to read this book.

In this excellent work we can better understand the problem of innovating the practice of politics and democracy. Using an eclectic approach readers will find models that will help them evaluate and classify what they are doing.

IN A NUTSHELL: VERY CONCISE & YET COMPREHENSIVE

At the end of World War 2, the 'Director of Naval Construction' had the teams involved with the design and development of England's wartime navy create a detailed chronicle of their wartime activities [1939-1945]. That chronicle has been drafted into this 3 volume text, with editorial footnotes, insights, and some line drawings from David Brown, a retired Deputy Chief Naval Architect. The result is this second of a 3 volume series which altogether equals a kind-of concise anatomy of the British Navy during World War 2.