Clinton Books

Bill Clinton is the embodiment and epitome of American politics in the postmodern, mediated age. Clinton's able marshaling of images, which allowed him to retain popularity and position when faced with compelling obstacles, marks him as the preeminent figure in a fluid and fluctuating era of image-politics. The authors pay particular attention to the collection of disparate, sometimes connected, often random images that create a site of political meaning we know as "Bill Clinton, former president of the United States." Through analyses of unique image texts--including The Man from Hope, The War Room, Primary Colors, MTV's Biorhythms, and PBS' The American President--Constructing Clinton focuses on the image of Bill Clinton as it was defined by and trapped in the hyperreality so characteristic of contemporary presidential politics.

"Just when we thought that there was nothing more that could be said about Bill Clinton, Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles provide a fresh perspective and new insight on this very complicated former president. Locating their analysis at the convergence of the mediated and the material Clinton, these authors offer a readable and engaging account of hyperreality in the American presidency. Their analysis casts new light on the presidency as an institution embedded in a postmodern mediated political culture. They combine theories from a variety of fields, wielding scholarship from communication, history, and political science with verve and accuracy. The result is a rich, textured, and important contribution for anyone with interests in media, culture, and/or the American presidency."
--Mary E. Stuckey, Georgia State University

"Parry-Giles' hyperreal take on the Clinton presidency is engaging. Bringing together sophisticated theorizing with close visual and textual analysis, it presents Clinton--and, by extension, the modern presidency--as a mass mediated rhetorical construction. Students and not just scholars should find this book most useful."
--Herbert W. Simons, Temple University

"A Coup Attempt in Washington?" fills in many of the gaps left by media coverage in this country. eed, it appears that the European journalists were frequently more diligent in their investigative reporting than their American counterparts.

Information that was readily available to reporters and news commentators was not revealed, including the little-known fact that what the Founding Fathers had written in the original draft of the Constitution was crimes and misdemeanors against the State. The Founding Fathers would certainly have been aghast at the public flaying of a U.S. president for private sexual acts or the lies involving them.

The point the Europeans made was that not only did the punishment not fit the crime but that, in the process, we were throwing the baby out with the bath water. That the Constitution itself was in peril. And that there had been a wholesale violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution.

The author conveys with extraordinary clarity and passion what we already know and bears repeating: that democracy is so valuable, so precious, and it so defines us, that we must be its true guardians.

The Courtroom Explained Through the Trials of the Century uses the major cases of the last decadeinvolving President Clinton and O.J. Simpson to show how the courtroom works. The book examines the courtroom principles underlying these questions: Didn't Monica Lewinsky first admit to a sexual relationship with President Clinton in tapes surreptitiously recorded, later deny it in an affidavit, then admit the relationship before the grand jury and Senate? Weren't O.J. Simpson and President Clinton both the subject of DNA testing? By summarizing these important cases and explaining the principles of evidence, The Courtroom Explained is a great reference book for undergraduates and law students.

One can only hope that the closest humans will ever get to nuclear war took place in 1962. American spy planes took photographs of Soviet missiles with nuclear warheads being installed in Cuba. This was a dramatic escalation of the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and any outbreak of war would most likely have resulted in a nuclear exchange.
American President Kennedy was under great pressure to launch massive air strikes against the missile sites, but to his everlasting credit, he chose not to. Despite his tendency to bluster, Soviet Premier Khrushchev must also be credited with demonstrating sound judgment and leadership. Ironically, Khrushchev's actions in Cuba were one of the main reasons he was ousted from power a few years later.
There were many crises and confrontations between the two superpowers during the cold war, the resolution of this one is a case study in how crises can be managed so that they do not spiral out of control. It is an event that should be studied and restudied, and that examination should begin early in the life of every citizen of the world. It was a very dangerous time, yet the danger was averted. This book describes that event using language and terminology that the late elementary school child can understand. It should be required reading as no one can ever know when one of the readers of the book may grow up to be a leader facing such a crisis.

I actually had Jeff Ferrell as a professor at Northern Arizona University, which is the main reason why I read the book. He is extremely knowledgeable about the subject, and reading it was a very eye-opening experience. I would definately recommend this to anyone! Of course, you'll never be able to watch the news or read TV again without thinking of this book... :)

Clinton Gardner has participated in many of the most important events of the past century seeking to bring peace to our world. This autobiography details his participation in the D-Day invasion on Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, the Berlin airlift, and the establishment of his Bridges for Peace organization.
He presents a cogent overview of the philosophy of his Dartmouth Professor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, linking this with the Russian philosophers he has studied over his lifetime. As he presents his interest in Russian philosophy he gives an excellent overview of this often overlooked school of philosophy in the U. S.
The book is well written, informative, and persuasive. It should be required reading in general history and philosophy courses at the university level.

Anyone who has studied the history of slavery in the US must recognize that the issue of sex and race is a critical sub-text. Clinton and Glillespie's collection of essays provides a variety of well-thought-out perspectives on the issue. Scholars will find the work thought-provoking and a valuable addition to readings for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.

"'The only marvel I have had all my life has been that the Lord ever chose me for anything, especially as an apostle and as President.' This statement by President Wilford Woodruff typifies his modest and humble demeanor, the fruit of a life lived close to the Spirit.

This book contains a selection by G. Homer Durham of expressions from the addresses of this great man and prophet. For background, its preliminary pages give a chronological listing of the highlights in his life, plus an informative foreword by Elder John A. Widtsoe. In the selections too are interesting glimpses of the man himself by way of his life experiences told in the first person- his conversion to the gospel; his baptizing of six hundred people in one community in England; his experiences with Church leaders from the early 1830s on; his first meeting and other experiences with Joseph Smith; and so on.

Here is a firm testimony to the Prophet Joseph Smith's calling, from one who knew him intimately. Elder Woodruff speaks too on a wide range of gospel subjects- agency, salvation, revelation, priesthood, temple work, constitutional liberty, the Second Coming. The prayer he offered in dedicating the Salt Lake Temple is also included. All this and much more is found in this collection of choice extracts from the addresses of the fourth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War is a collection of essays pertaining to the crisis in gender relations that accompanied the Civil War in America. As a collection, the essays present a narrative that chronicles the various impacts on gender that affected men and women, the North and the South, as well as slaves and non-slaves. What emerges is a cohesive body of text that is informative, illuminating, and instructive. The themes most explored in this volume are those of empowerment through abolitionism. In The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender Relations by Leann Whites, the two groups most perceptive of the gender crisis were Northern feminists and black abolitionists. During the Civil War, the public status of motherhood increased. This leads to another theme that will later be explored in following essays, that of the State as family. In this first essay, Leann Whites argues that the Civil War created circumstances for gender equality, both diminishing white Southern male masculinity and increasing black manhood. Ideas of manhood during the Civil War are further investigated in Part II and in Reid Mitchell's Soldiering, Manhood, and Coming of Age: A Northern Volunteer. The journey from civilian to soldier was mirrored in the transition from boyhood to manhood, and the constitution of manhood evolved as a delicate balance of masculinity and manly restraint. During the Civil War, the body politic as well as the army assumed familial ties to facilitate solidarity. Despite the changes in notions of manhood, for the black male population the "empowerment" was not always beneficial. Jim Cullen's Gender and African-American Men details how conceptions of black manhood changed during the Civil War, with the mastery over one's own body leading to mastery in warfare. Despite being placed on some of the most dangerous fronts, black soldiers endured low pay and high disease in exchange for their mastery over their bodies. In Part III of Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, the themes move from issues of manhood to those relating to women. In Arranging a Doll's House: Refined Women as Union Nurses author Kristie Ross writes about female volunteers on hospital transports, and she draws from the familial theme by presenting the hospital transport as the rearrangement of a doll's house to appear domestic. Ross also reveals a sense of agency for women volunteers, claiming that many felt "...an eagerness to seize an occasion to escape the routine pattern of their lives and a familiarity with genteel standards of household organization." (101) Lyde Cullen Sizer's Acting Her Part: Narratives of Union Women Spies also deals with the issue of female agency during the Civil War, but Sizer further examines the repercussions women felt depending on whether they were white or black. For white women spies, their efforts were more dramatic than substantial, whereas for black abolitionists like Harriet Tubman the cause and consequences of being a spy were much more realistic. Sizer's essay is also an attempt to place female spy narratives in a literary context from which they have been excluded. Of all the essays in Divided Houses, none is more colorful and titillating than Michael Fellman's Women and Guerrilla Warfare. Through his dramatic prose, Fellman explores how peacetime morality was subverted through guerrilla warfare, with male guerrilla fighters attacking traditional values while physically attacking women. Fellman, doubtless, is presenting a form of psychological history by claiming "there was also an additional element here of bad boys acting out against a nagging, smothering mother." (151) For many Kansas guerrilla regiments during the Civil War, the "freeing" of slaves was an act of defiance rather than a moralistic pursuit. Guerrilla warfare finally reinforced the need for love, security, and family. The fourth part of Divided Houses closely examines dynamics on the Southern homefront. Peter Bardaglio's The Children of Jubilee: African-American Childhood in Wartime explains how prior to the Civil War, slave children were age-segregated but not gender-segregated. With freedom as a concept first emerging for many slaves during the Civil War, play activities among children became more gendered. Martha Hodes's Wartime Dialogues on Illicit Sex: White Women and Black Men further draws on the theme of black male power as a political issue emerging during the Civil War, which consequently led to sexuality itself becoming a political issue. With most yeoman farmers at war, the homefront became a location for "illicit" sex as well as the performative stage for class discord. The Southern states were not the only ones to feel the impact on gender relations that the Civil War created: Part V examines gender issues on the Northern homefront with Patricia R. Hill's Writing Out the War: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Averted Gaze. In Part VI, essays examine how the politics of Reconstruction became gendered, with Northern women beginning to campaign for the vote and new labor opportunities for African-American men and women. In spite of these advances, however, the ruling classes in the South still attempted to exert authority and black women were still subjected to southern white male violence, as evidenced in Catherine Clinton's concluding essay, Reconstructing Freedwomen. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War is a combination of various historiographical methodologies; cultural, social, psychological, intellectual and political, which simultaneously present a coherent and evocative study of wartime's affect on gender relations. In addition to mapping themes in gender relations during war, narratives of women's undertaking of professional and managerial duties while men were fighting in the Civil War provides a historical anchoring of the themes of female labor that were to arise again during the First, and especially Second, World War.

Jason Trent is seventeen and travels back in time from 2097 to 1863 Virginia to find his twin sister Jaynie was accidentally transported there in her father's time machine. This is a time of Civil War and runaway slaves. Jason teams up with former slave Daniel Williams who witnessed Jaynie's abduction by traveling minstrels. Together the two boys track the abductors and during a three-week odyssey visit wartime Washington, are captured as spies, encounter the Underground Railroad, and stop a conspiracy that could have otherwise changed the course of history. Vincent Sescoe is a master storyteller whose young readers will enjoy this novel of high adventure while they also learn fascinating, true life details of the Civil War. Highly recommended for school and community library collections, the text of Double Time is occasionally enhanced with black and white illustrations by Clinton Helms.