How important is presidential personality and leadership style in foreign policy decisions? To answer this question, Thomas Preston takes readers inside the Bush administration's decision making process and use of intelligence to better understand how administration officials justified the Iraq War—and how they sought to avoid blame for the consequences of their actions. Based on extensive interviews with key Bush administration officials, Preston offers students of American foreign policy, presidential decision making, the dynamics of blame avoidance, and future practitioners with an in depth examination of how presidential personality and leadership style impacted Bush's central foreign policy failure. In addition, Preston looks critically at the oft-cited comparisons of Iraq to Lyndon Johnson's leadership during the Vietnam War, exploring where the analogy fits and a number of important differences. He shows how both presidents' styles exacerbated their managerial weaknesses in these cases and the limits of blame avoidance strategies. Importantly, the book provides a cautionary tale for future leaders to consider more carefully the long-term consequences of satisfying their short term policy desires by lifting the lid to any new Pandora's trap.

During Birminghams Civil Rights era, with racism and crime battling for prominence, pimp Blake McDaniel managed his business with brutal efficiency. Trapped in an endless downward cycle, McDaniels is confronted by the sins of his past sins that are visited on his son. Torn between two father figures and his mothers persistent dream, Tyson McDaniels struggles to make the right choices. His father is a drug addicted Vietnam veteran who transforms his racial anguish into living the life of a ruthless pimp. His stepfather, Vincent Big Vince Johnson, is a street-life late bloomer, a man who traded his assembly line job at Detroits General Motors for a roll of the street life dice. Lillian, his embittered mother, is caught between two vicious pimpsone she loves and one she hates. She is plunged into the very life she rejectedprostitution, drugs, and the need to escape a past of brutal racial hatred and a romantic disappointment too deep to forget. Trapped in Pandoras Last Box explodes with deadly consequencesthe inevitable clash between Blake and his bitter rivals, Big Dester and Death Wish, Blakes imminent encounter with death and destruction, and the implications of his actions for the future of his son.

The St. Lawrence Seaway was considered one of the world's greatest engineering achievements when it opened in 1959. The $1 billion project-a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St. Lawrence River-opened the Great Lakes to the global shipping industry. Linking ports on lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario to shipping hubs on the world's seven seas increased global trade in the Great Lakes region. But it came at an extraordinarily high price. Foreign species that immigrated into the lakes in ocean freighters' ballast water tanks unleashed a biological shift that reconfigured the world's largest freshwater ecosystems. Pandora's Locks is the story of politicians and engineers who, driven by hubris and handicapped by ignorance, demanded that the Seaway be built at any cost. It is the tragic tale of government agencies that could have prevented ocean freighters from laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, but failed to act until it was too late. Blending science with compelling personal accounts, this book is the first comprehensive account of how inviting transoceanic freighters into North America's freshwater seas transformed these wondrous lakes.

Ten thousand years ago, our species made a radical shift in its way of life: We became farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. Although this decision propelled us into the modern world, renowned geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells demonstrates that such a dramatic change in lifestyle had a downside that we’re only now beginning to recognize. Growing grain crops ultimately made humans more sedentary and unhealthy and made the planet more crowded. The expanding population and the need to apportion limited resources created hierarchies and inequalities. Freedom of movement was replaced by a pressure to work that is the forebear of the anxiety millions feel today. Spencer Wells offers a hopeful prescription for altering a life to which we were always ill-suited. Pandora’s Seed is an eye-opening book for anyone fascinated by the past and concerned about the future.

Enter into a world where supernaturals are the human races last hope. Hell has escaped its prison early and is devastating the world. The humans are useless to help themselves and all could be lost if the gates of Hell are not slammed shut. That's where my team comes in. I am Kira Gaetano and my team may be the world's last hope for survival. We fight the big bad nightmares and are racing against the clock to stop Hell from taking over the world. The only question I have is can we do it?......

What are the challenges facing social welfare in America? Theories of stakeholders, the policy process, electoral politics, the precariat, child welfare, online education, the devolution of the welfare state, and its sequel, the investment state, illuminate critical factors determining the future of social welfare as well as the professions. Beyond explaining social change, theories include applications for future research. After the turmoil of the 2016 election, Pandora's Dilemma is not only the first empirically-based theoretical explanation, but also a long-overdue illustration of the value of theory in social welfare. This book is essential reading for social welfare scholars trying to make sense of Brexit and the Trump presidency.

Author of the acclaimed work Iceberg Risk: An Adventure in Portfolio Theory, Kent Osband argues that uncertainty is central rather than marginal to finance. Markets don't trade mainly on changes in risk. They trade on changes in beliefs about risk, and in the process, markets unite, stretch, and occasionally defy beliefs. Recognizing this truth would make a world of difference in investing. Belittling uncertainty has created a rift between financial theory and practice and within finance theory itself, misguiding regulation and stoking huge financial imbalances. Sparking a revolution in the mindset of the investment professional, Osband recasts the market as a learning machine rather than a knowledge machine. The market continually errs, corrects itself, and makes new errors. Respecting that process, without idolizing it, will promote wiser investment, trading, and regulation. With uncertainty embedded at its core, Osband's rational approach points to a finance theory worthy of twenty-first-century investing.