The poems in What We Did While We Made More Guns investigate the place where economic failure meets a widening acculturation of violence—a kind of Great Acceleration of soul extinction set in this spectacularly uneasy moment in American history. Cutting, comic, sorrowful, at times terrified, at times resolute, the poems tilt along the high cliff’s edge of identity anxiety and American moral uncertainty, where each of us plays our part in the business of dispossession or resistance. Building themselves out of jazzed-up verbal velocities and wounded (in)sincerity, the poems counsel resilience against all forms of battery, mortal, spiritual, financial. They are pattern-makers in the dark. They talk back to God. They take into themselves what cannot be taken back: the news that forty-six million Americans have “slipped” below the poverty line; that guns discharge monstrously banal virility; that a black woman pulled over for a routine traffic violation dies by strangulation in her jail cell; that we buy and sell the myth of the American Dream as though our lives depended on it.

“A must-read for every American who longs to bring sanity to our nation’s gun laws,” this book debunks the lethal logic behind the myths that have framed the gun control debate (Ariana Huffington, co-founder of HuffingtonPost) The gun lobby’s remarkable success in using engaging slogans to frame the gun control debate has allowed it to block lifesaving gun legislation for decades. But is there any truth to this bumper-sticker logic? Dennis Henigan exposes the mythology and misguided thinking at the core of these pro-gun catchphrases, which continue to have an outsized influence on public attitudes toward guns and gun control. He counters the gun lobby’s messages by weaving together the most compelling current research and insights drawn from the grim reality of deadly gunfire in our homes and communities. Henigan charts a new path toward ending the American nightmare of gun violence. Pro-Gun Myths Include: “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” “An armed society is a polite society.” “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” “Gun control doesn’t work because criminals don’t follow the law.” “Gun manufacturers shouldn’t be responsible for gun crime, any more than Budweiser is responsible for drunk driving.” “We don’t need new gun laws. We just need to enforce the ones we have.” “Gun control is a slippery slope to complete gun bans.”

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend's Montgomery, Alabama home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to selfprotection -- yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing -- and, when necessary, using -- firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement's success. Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.

Nebraska Book Award, Poetry Honor Unholy Heart includes generous selections from each of Grace Bauer's previous books of poetry, plus a sampling of new poems. Bauer has long been known for the wide range of both her subject matter and poetic styles, from the biblical persona poems of The Women at the Well, to the explorations of visual art in Beholding Eye, to the intersections of personal history and pop culture in Retreats and Recognitions and Nowhere All At Once, and to the postmodern fragmentations in MEAN/TIME. Along with these selections, Bauer incorporates her most elegiac work yet.

As violence in the media and media-linked toys increases, parents and teachers are also seeing an increase in children's war play. The authors have revised this popular text to provide more practical guidance for working with children to promote creative play, and for positively influencing the lessons about violence children are learning. Using a developmental and sociopolitical viewpoint, the authors examine five possible strategies for resolving the war play dilemma and show which best satisfy both points of view: banning war play; taking a laissez-faire approach; allowing war play with specified limits; actively facilitating war play; and limiting war play while providing alternative ways to work on the issues. New for the Second Edition are: more anecdotal material about adults'' and children's experiences with war play, including examples from both home and school settings; greater emphasis on the impact of media and commercialization on children's war play, including recent trends in media, programming, marketing, and war toys; expanded discussion about the importance of the distinction between imitative and creative war play; and summary boxes of key points directed at teachers or parents. * New information about violent video games, media cross feeding, and gender development and sex-role stereotyping.

The opening battles on the Western Front marked a watershed in military history. A dramatic, almost Napoleonic war of movement quickly gave way to static, attritional warfare in which modern weaponry had forced the combatants to take to the earth. Some of the last cavalry charges took place in the same theatre in which armoured cars, motorcycles and aeroplanes were beginning to make their presence felt.??These dramatic developments were recorded in graphic detail by soldiers who were eyewitnesses to them. There is a freshness and immediacy to their accounts which Matthew Richardson exploits in this thoroughgoing reassessment of the 1914 campaign. ??His vivid narrative emphasises the perspective of the private soldiers and the junior officers of the British Army, the men at the sharp end of the fighting.??This title has full colour plates containing over 100 illustrations.??Britain At War Magazine Book of the Month February 2014