Hidden Agendas,Espionage,Wall Street,Dinosaur Controversy,Forbidden History (eBook Compilation)

material included:

1. Hidden Agendas - by John Pilger 1998

Pilger's book covers various different stories effectively, but the common theme is exploitation of people and global resources, firstly by European imperialism, then by it's American successor.
Some principal areas covered are: Burma and Indonesia - very useful for anyone considering an 'exotic' holiday in either location; the effects of sanctions on Iraq's civilian population; the British armaments industry and how during the past 20 years it has been the only manufacturing actively supported by government; the demise of journalism and the rise of 'infotainment'.
There are also precious few journalists willing to expose the lies beneath the veneer of Blair's so-called 'new' Britain. There are also some incisive insights into his native Australia. Pilger writes with compassion and dry wit. An essential book.

2. Espionage: A Reference Handbook - by Glenn Hastedt 2003

This is an exploration into the fascinating world of human and technological espionage, its contributions to national security and its vital role in global politics. James Bond 007: secret service agent, sex symbol and possibly the most successful action hero of all time. From the American Revolution and the Cold War, to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and modern day terrorism, spies have captivated and confounded people all over the world. Why is espionage so abhorrent, yet so universal? This handbook illuminates the murky world of espionage and counter-espionage efforts in the United States and around the world. Combining an academic treatment of the causes and forces that shape espionage with narrative accounts of how spying and spy catching are conducted, it covers Benedict Arnold, J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA, the KGB and Jay Pollard, among other topics. Though special attention is focused on the American experience, British, Soviet and Israeli cases are presented, along with recent world events of terrorism and ethnic conflict, providing a unique comparative perspective on the international forces behind spying.

3. Histories Of Sexuality: Antiquity To Sexual Revolution - by Stephen Garton 2004

This book surveys the ways sex and sexuality have been made the subjects of history. It critically analyses some of the key histories of the last forty years; from the early efforts of historians like Steven Marcus to work out a model for sexual history, through to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault. It explores the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism in the 1980s and early 1990s and the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history shaping the now vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. Histories of Sexuality also focuses on a number of key debates about the history of sex and sexuality in Britain, Europe and America. It explores such areas as pederasty and cultures of male passivity in ancient Greece and Rome, the impact of early Christianity and ideals of renunciation on the sexual cultures of late antiquity and the existence of homosexual cultures in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. It also examines some of the debates about the 'invention' of homosexuality and heterosexuality in eighteenth century Europe and America, shifting conceptions of the body and gender, and how cultures controlled sexuality and kept the birth rate steady until the industrial revolution. Histories of Sexuality explores the controversies about whether the 'Victorian era' was an age of sexual repression, how women challenged the sexual cultures of Victorian America and Europe, the ways sex shaped class, nationalism and imperialism, and the emergence of sexual sciences that attempted to define areas of sexual pathology. The book analyses the impact of reformers and scientists such as Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Stella Browne, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson on beliefs about sexual abnormality and concludes with an examination of the debates about the nature of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

4. Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror - by John Michael 2008

From Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls, justice has been at the center of America’s self-image and national creed. At the same time, for many of its peoples-from African slaves and European immigrants to women and the poor-the American experience has been defined by injustice: oppression, disenfranchisement, violence, and prejudice.
In Identity and the Failure of America, John Michael explores the contradictions between a mythic national identity promising justice to all and the realities of a divided, hierarchical, and frequently iniquitous history and social order. Through a series of insightful readings, Michael analyzes such cultural moments as the epic dramatization of the tension between individual ambition and communal complicity in Moby-Dick, attempts to effect social change through sympathy in the novels of Lydia Marie Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery activism and Frederick Douglass’s long fight for racial equity, and the divisive figures of John Brown and Nat Turner in American letters and memory.
Focusing on exemplary instances when the nature of the United States as an essentially conflicted nation turned to force, Michael ultimately posits the development of a more cosmopolitan American identity, one that is more fully and justly imagined in response to the nation’s ethical failings at home and abroad.
John Michael is professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values and Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World.

5. Wall Street: A History - by Charles R. Geisst 1997

Wall Street is the stuff of legend and a source of nightmares, a force so powerful in American society--and, indeed, in world economics and culture--that it has become an almost universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of commercial success and the basest impulses of greed and deception. How did such a small, concentrated pocket of lower Manhattan came to have such enormous influence in national and world affairs. In this wide-ranging volume, economic historian Charles Geisst answers this question as he provides the first history of Wall Street, ranging from the loose association of traders meeting on New York sidewalks and coffee houses in the late 18th century, to the modern billion-dollar computer-driven colossus of today.
Here is a fascinating chronicle of America's securities industry and of its role in our nation's economic development. Geisst's narrative ranges over two centuries, from just after the Revolutionary War, to the California Gold Rush and the economic boom (for the North) of the Civil War, to the great stock market crash of 1929, right up to the recent junk bond frenzy and the merger mania of the 1980s that culminated in the fall of Drexel Burnham. The book traces many themes--the move of industry and business westward in the early 19th century, the rise of the great Robber Barons, the influence of the securities market on incredible growth of industry, particularly in the innovative financing of the railroads and major steel companies and crucial investments in Bell's and Edison's technical innovations. Geisst also looks at the gradual increase in government involvement in Wall Street, revealing how regulation had been minimal at first and many investors had suffered from the abuses of corrupt firms. But with the beginning of the New Deal, the government stepped in to pass a series of laws--centered on the Securities Exchange Commission--that severely restricted the ways that Wall Street firms could operate. Here began a heated debate that still rages today between those who want unfettered license to operate as they please and those who want the government to regulate the market to curb corruption. Of course, "The Street" has always been a breeding ground for characters with brazen nerve, and no history of the stock market would be complete without a look at the most ruthless wheeler dealers. Geisst for instance details the manipulations by which Jay Gould and associates cornered the gold market, leading to the terrifying market crash on "Black Friday" in September 1869. Here too are battles of will between powerful personalities and the determined rise to power of such "self made men" as John Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt--as well as the connivings of lesser known deal makers like William Crapo "Billy" Durant, reputed to have made $50 million in three months shortly before the stock market crash in 1929.
Wall Street is at once a chronicle of the street itself, from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant, and in a broader sense it is an engaging economic history of the United States, a tale of profits and losses, endlessly enterprising spirits, and the role Wall Street played in helping America become the most powerful economy in the world.

6. The Great Dinosaur Controversy: A Guide to the Debates - by Keith Parsons 2003

A historical review of the most important scientific controversies that have shaped our knowledge of dinosaurs since their discovery in the 1820s. It explores the social, philosophical and ideological forces that contributed to the various disputes and presents narratives of dinosaur discoveries.

7. Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War - by Anthony Shadid 2005

Most of the accounts of the Iraq War so far have been, to use the term the war made famous, embedded in one way or another: many officially so with American troops, most others limited--by mobility, interest, or understanding--to the American experience of the conflict. In Night Draws Near, Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid writes about a side of the war that Americans have heard little about. His beat, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is the territory outside the barricaded, air-conditioned Green Zone: the Iraqi streets and, more often, the apartments and houses, darkened by blackouts and shaken by explosions, where most Iraqis wait out Saddam, the invasion, and three nearly unbroken decades of war.

Shadid is Lebanese American, born in Oklahoma, and he has a fluency in Arabic and an understanding of Arab culture that give him a rare access to and a great empathy for the people whose stories he tells. Beginning in the days leading up to the American invasion and closing with an epilogue on the January 2005 elections, he talks with Iraqis from a wide range of stations, from educated Baghdad professionals who look back on the country's golden days in the 1970s to a sullen, terrified group of Iraqi policemen in the Sunni Triangle, shunned as collaborators for taking jobs with the Americans to feed their families. (Perhaps his most telling and characteristic moment is when he trails behind an American patrol, recording the often hostile Iraqi comments that the soldiers themselves can't understand.) He takes the ground view and gives his witnesses the particularity they deserve, but the various voices share an exhaustion with a country that has seen nothing but war for 30 years and a frustration with a liberator that has not fulfilled its promises of prosperity and order. It's a despairing but eye-opening account, told with an understanding of the Iraqi people--hospitable, proud, and often desperate--that, were it more common, might have led to a different outcome than the one he describes.

8. The Universe Next Door - by Marcus Chown 2002

In his work as Cosmology Consultant for New Scientist magazine, Marcus Chown often comes across mind-blowing ideas and in The Universe Next Door he explores 12 of the most extraordinary. He delves into regions of space where time travels backwards, the possibility that the many worlds theorem implies that we can live forever and invisible mirror-matter interacting with ours only via gravity. As he points out in the foreword, such apparently crazy ideas are essential for pushing forward the frontiers of science and the concepts presented here are attempts to answer the big questions about reality, time and the origins of the universe. Why are the laws of physics so perfectly tuned that they allow atoms, stars and people to exist? Is there perhaps infinity of universes out there, all with different physical laws? Some theorists have suggested that our universe was deliberately created by vastly superior aliens, or that universes are born within the singularities of black holes and that those with physical laws like ours will reproduce themselves many times, while others will not.

It’s all well-written and thought-provoking, but there are few brand-new ideas here. If you read New Scientist or other popular cosmology books, you’ll have come across most of these concepts before, but if not, this is a good place to start. The universe is a very strange place and the more we learn about it, the stranger it becomes. Chown is a friendly guide through the weirdness. --Elizabeth Sourbut

9. Earths Forbidden History - by Maxwell Igan

The main goal of this book is to provide information to people, much of it that is sometimes
quite well hidden. It is my sincere hope that everyone who reads this work will be inspired to
question things; and to search out these, and other new truths and discoveries for themselves.
When I first started this book, it was my desire to cover a really huge variety of topics and put
a vast amount of ‘hard to get’ information all in one epic work. However, after several months of
work the word ‘epic’ began to take on a new meaning for me and the sheer volume and
intertwining nature of the text became far too cumbersome to be deemed in any way manageable
in a single book and, though the information herein is still quite vast, I was forced to remove
several chapters of work.
Due to the detailed nature of the topics I sacrificed in this ‘slicing process,’ it is more than
likely that each sliced chapter will now be further divided into smaller portions before then being
expanded upon into a number of separate volumes to be released at later dates.
The principle source of the Biblical quotations in this book is the original Hebrew version of
the Old Testament from the 1992 Jerusalem Bible. This is because when all is said and done, all
other version of the texts are simply the translations and interpretations of various individuals and
ultimately it is what is written in the original Hebrew version that really counts. All English
biblical quotes are taken from the King James Version. A full bibliography of other sources is
also provided at the close of the book.

I do not ask or expect anyone to blindly believe what is written within the pages of this book
without investigating all the evidence for themselves, and in fact I very much urge you to do so.
In the meantime however, I hope you find this book informative and enjoyable and I thank you
in advance for taking this time to read it.

Remember, the truth is always out there somewhere, and sometimes, right in front of us too, if
we would only notice.