On the same day that America declares war on England and Canada, young apple farmer Simon Smithtrovich recruits his four best friends and creates the Seventy-Sixth Pennsylvania, an elite crack company of grenadiers intent on stopping at nothing to ensure America retains its freedom. Some two years later as Major Smithtrovich and his friends, Celestia and Daisy Rose, Timmy Miller, and Brittany Benson bravely march forward into the Battle of Chippewa, their first major fight of the war, they have no idea that they are all about to be tested in ways they never imagined. As their friendships are challenged both physically and mentally in some of the war’s terrible battles that include Lundy’s Lane, Bladensburg, and New Orleans, the men and women of the Seventy-Sixth Pennsylvania transform into extraordinary soldiers of their time who are determined to uphold the same principles their families fought for in the Revolutionary War. In this historical novel, a young American apple farmer and his four best friends are forced to fight against the British and Canadian armies during America’s second war of independence.

Explaining how the price of aggression is low enough that governments do not avoid conflicts, this book uses examples drawn from recent conflicts in the Persian Gulf to examine many dimensions of costs incurred by warfare and proposes a private sector solution to warfare's low cost.

The inspiration for the Major Motion Picture O, Canada directed by Paul Schrader and starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, and Michael Imperioli. A searing novel about memory, abandonment, and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks "During a career stretching almost half a century, Russell Banks has published an extraordinary collection of brave, morally imperative novels. . . . In this complex and powerful novel, we come face to face with the excruciating allure of redemption." —Washington Post At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession. Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"—an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures. Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history. Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities. Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

The true cost of the Iraq War is $3 trillion—and counting—rather than the $50 billion projected by the White House. Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans—for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.

Presents the first attempt to model the relationship among the distribution of power, international trade and war