To the Edge of the World is an adventure in travel--full of extraordinary personalities, more than a century of explosive political, economic, and cultural events, and almost inconceivable feats of engineering. Christian Wolmar passionately recounts the improbable origins of the Trans-Siberian railroad, the vital artery for Russian expansion that spans almost 6,000 miles and seven time zones from Moscow to Vladivostok. The world's longest train route took a decade to build--in the face of punishing climates, rampant disease, scarcity of funds and materials, and widespread corruption. The line sprawls over a treacherous landmass that was previously populated only by disparate tribes and convicts serving out their terms in labor camps--where men were regularly starved, tortured, or mutilated for minor offenses. Once built, it led to the establishment of new cities and transformed the region's history. Exceeding all expectations, it became, according to Wolmar, "the best thing that ever happened to Siberia." It was not all good news, however. The railroad was the cause of the 1904--1905 Russo-Japanese War, and played a vital--and at times bloody--role in the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War. More positively, the Russians were able to resist the Nazi invasion during the Second World War as new routes enabled whole industries to be sent east. Siberia, previously a lost and distant region, became an inextricable part of Russia's cultural identity. And what began as one meandering, single-track line is now, arguably, the world's most important railroad.

NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad - the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other labourers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks. The US government pitted two companies - the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads - against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West, or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.

The Conquest of Labor offers the first biography of Daniel Pratt (1799-1873), a New Hampshire native who became one of the South's most important industrialists. After moving to Alabama in 1833, Pratt started a cotton gin factory near Montgomery that by the eve of the Civil War had become the largest in the world. Pratt became a household name in cotton-growing states, and Prattville-the site of his operations-one of the antebellum South's most celebrated manufacturing towns. Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis J. Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his ""Yankee"" town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that, contrary to current popular thought, the South was not so markedly different from the North.

British Tank Production and the War Economy, 1934-1945 explores the under-researched experiences of the British tank industry in the context of the pressures of war. Benjamin Coombs explores the various demands placed on British industry during the Second World War, looking at the political, military and strategy pressures involved. By comparing the British tank programme with the Canadian, American, Russian and Australian equivalents, this study offers an international perspective on this aspect of the war economy. Topics covered include the premature contraction of the tank programme and dependence on American armour, the supply of the Valentine tank to the Russian authorities and the ongoing employment of the tank in the postwar peacetime markets.

Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition, professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. Carolyn M. Goldstein charts the development of the profession from its origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual disappearance by the 1970s. Working for both business and government, home economists walked a fine line between educating and representing consumers while they shaped cultural expectations about consumer goods as well as the goods themselves. Goldstein looks beyond 1970s feminist scholarship that dismissed home economics for its emphasis on domesticity to reveal the movement's complexities, including the extent of its public impact and debates about home economists' relationship to the commercial marketplace.

An examination of how the technical choices, social hierarchies, economic structures, and political dynamics shaped the Soviet nuclear industry leading up to Chernobyl. The Chernobyl disaster has been variously ascribed to human error, reactor design flaws, and industry mismanagement. Six former Chernobyl employees were convicted of criminal negligence; they defended themselves by pointing to reactor design issues. Other observers blamed the Soviet style of ideologically driven economic and industrial management. In Producing Power, Sonja Schmid draws on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry and extensive research in Russian archives as she examines these alternate accounts. Rather than pursue one "definitive" explanation, she investigates how each of these narratives makes sense in its own way and demonstrates that each implies adherence to a particular set of ideas-about high-risk technologies, human-machine interactions, organizational methods for ensuring safety and productivity, and even about the legitimacy of the Soviet state. She also shows how these attitudes shaped, and were shaped by, the Soviet nuclear industry from its very beginnings. Schmid explains that Soviet experts established nuclear power as a driving force of social, not just technical, progress. She examines the Soviet nuclear industry's dual origins in weapons and electrification programs, and she traces the emergence of nuclear power experts as a professional community. Schmid also fundamentally reassesses the design choices for nuclear power reactors in the shadow of the Cold War's arms race. Schmid's account helps us understand how and why a complex sociotechnical system broke down. Chernobyl, while unique and specific to the Soviet experience, can also provide valuable lessons for contemporary nuclear projects.

Prepared to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the establishment of Nova Scotia's Supreme Court, this important new volume provides a comprehensive history of the institution, Canada's oldest common law court. The thirteen essays include an account of the first meeting in 1754 of the court in Michaelmas Term, surveys of jurisprudence (the court's early federalism cases; its use of American law; attitudes to the administrative state), and chapters on the courts of Westminster Hall, on which the Supreme Court was modelled, and the various courthouses it has occupied. Anchoring the volume are two longer chapters, one on the pre-confederation period and one on the modern period.

Editors Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, and Barry Cahill have put together the first complete history of any Canadian provincial superior court. All of the essays are original, and many offer new interpretations of familiar themes in Canadian legal history. They take the reader through the establishment of the one-judge court to the present day ? a unique contribution to our understanding of superior courts.

Prior to 1914, Germany dominated the worldwide production of synthetic organic dyes and pharmaceuticals like aspirin. When World War I disrupted the supply of German chemicals to the United States, American entrepreneurs responded to the shortages and high prices by trying to manufacture chemicals domestically. Learning the complex science and industry, however, posed a serious challenge. This book explains how the United States built a synthetic organic chemicals industry in World War I and the 1920s. Kathryn Steen argues that Americans' intense anti-German sentiment in World War I helped to forge a concentrated effort among firms, the federal government, and universities to make the United States independent of "foreign chemicals."
Besides mobilization efforts to make high explosives and war gases, federal policies included protective tariffs, gathering and publishing market information, and, most dramatically, confiscation of German-owned chemical subsidiaries and patents. Meanwhile, firms and universities worked hard to develop scientific and manufacturing expertise. Against a backdrop of hostilities and intrigue, Steen shows how chemicals were deeply entwined with national and international politics and policy during the war and subsequent isolationism of the turbulent early twentieth century.

This is the first work on British textile exports to South America during the nineteenth century. During this period, textiles ranked among the most important manufactures traded in the world market and Britain was the foremost producer. Thanks to new data, this book demonstrates that British exports to South America were transacted at very high rates during the first decades after independence. This development was due to improvements in the packing of textiles; decreasing costs of production and introduction of free trade in Britain; falling ocean freight rates, marine insurance and import duties in South America; dramatic improvements in communications; and the introduction of better port facilities. Manuel Llorca-Jana explores the marketing chain of textile exports to South America and sheds light on South Americans' consumer behaviour. This book contains the most comprehensive database on Anglo-South American trade during the nineteenth century and fills an important gap in the historiography.

Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their ""property,"" or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property. In Working Knowledge, Catherine Fisk chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial independence and ultimately, Fisk argues, economic democracy. By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual property-producing companies--including DuPont, Rand McNally, and the American Tobacco Company--Fisk makes a highly technical area of law accessible to general readers while also addressing scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.

Europe's critical infrastructure is a key concern to policymakers, NGOs, companies, and citizens today. A 2006 power line failure in northern Germany closed lights in Portugal in a matter of seconds. Several Russian-Ukrainian gas crises shocked politicians, entrepreneurs, and citizens thousands of kilometers away in Germany, France, and Italy. This book argues that present-day infrastructure vulnerabilities resulted from choices of infrastructure builders in the past. It inquires which, and whose, vulnerabilities they perceived, negotiated, prioritized, and inscribed in Europe's critical infrastructure. It does not take 'Europe' for granted, but actively investigates which countries and peoples were historically connected in joint interdependency, and why. In short, this collection unravels the simultaneous historical shaping of infrastructure, common vulnerabilities, and Europe.

The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier. The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business of bookselling. The histories of government publishing, law and policy, the periodical press, literary criticism, and reading--in settings such as schools, libraries, book clubs, self-help programs, and collectors' societies--receive imaginative scrutiny as well. The Enduring Book demonstrates that the corporate consolidations of the last half-century have left space for the independent publisher, that multiplicity continues to define American print culture, and that even in the digital age, the book endures. Contributors: David Abrahamson, Northwestern University James L. Baughman, University of Wisconsin-Madison Kenneth Cmiel (d. 2006) James Danky, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert DeMaria Jr., Vassar College Donald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert W. Frase (d. 2003) Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School John B. Hench, American Antiquarian Society Patrick Henry, New York City College of Technology Dan Lacy (d. 2001) Marshall Leaffer, Indiana University Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University Elizabeth Long, Rice University Beth Luey, Arizona State University Tom McCarthy, Beirut, Lebanon Laura J. Miller, Brandeis University Priscilla Coit Murphy, Chapel Hill, N.C. David Paul Nord, Indiana University Carol Polsgrove, Indiana University David Reinking, Clemson University Jane Rhodes, Macalester College John V. Richardson Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University Linda Scott, University of Oxford Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press Ilan Stavans, Amherst College Harvey M. Teres, Syracuse University John B. Thompson, University of Cambridge Trysh Travis, University of Florida Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University

On Memorial Day 1937, thousands of steelworkers, middle-class supporters, and working-class activists gathered at Sam's Place on the Southeast Side of Chicago to protest Republic Steel's virulent opposition to union recognition and collective bargaining. By the end of the day, ten marchers had been mortally wounded and more than one hundred badly injured, victims of a terrifying police riot. Sam's Place, the headquarters for the steelworkers, was transformed into a bloody and frantic triage unit for treating heads split open by police batons, flesh torn by bullets, and limbs mangled badly enough to require amputation.

While no one doubts the importance of the Memorial Day Massacre, Michael Dennis identifies it as a focal point in the larger effort to revitalize American equality during the New Deal. In "Blood on Steel," Dennis shows how the incident--captured on film by Paramount newsreels--validated the claims of labor activists and catalyzed public opinion in their favor.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Senate hearings laid bare patterns of anti-union aggression among management, ranging from blacklists to harassment and vigilante violence. Companies were determined to subvert the right to form a union, which Congress had finally recognized in 1935. Only in the following year would Congress pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and a maximum work week, outlawed child labor, and regulated hazardous work. Like the Wagner Act that protected collective bargaining, this law aimed to protect workers who had suffered the worst of what the Great Depression had inflicted.

Dennis's wide-angle perspective reveals the Memorial Day Massacre as not simply another bloody incident in the long story of labor-management tension in American history but as an illustration of the broad-based movement for social democracy which developed in the New Deal era.

With the redevelopment of the former car park adjacent to Baskerville House as part of the Library of Birmingham project, the opportunity arose to examine some of the most complete remains of the 19th-century industrialisation in Birmingham. Birmingham Archaeology of the University of Birmingham, in association with Carillion and the Birmingham City Council, undertook an archaeological excavation, before the construction of the new Library of Birmingham, in an area between Cambridge Street and Centenary Square, Broad Street in the city centre. The excavation identified six phases of activity pre-dating, during and after the completion of the brass metal works.

Tracing the evolution of the Ashland Oil & Refining Company whose growth was phenomenal even in a rapidly expanding industry, author Joseph L. Massie attributes the success of the company to the flexible management policies of Paul G. Blazer.

Volume Two of A History of the Book in America documents the development of a distinctive culture of print in the new American republic. Between 1790 and 1840 printing and publishing expanded, and literate publics provided a ready market for novels, almanacs, newspapers, tracts, and periodicals. Government, business, and reform drove the dissemination of print. Through laws and subsidies, state and federal authorities promoted an informed citizenry. Entrepreneurs responded to rising demand by investing in new technologies and altering the conduct of publishing. Voluntary societies launched libraries, lyceums, and schools, and relied on print to spread religion, redeem morals, and advance benevolent goals. Out of all this ferment emerged new and diverse communities of citizens linked together in a decentralized print culture where citizenship meant literacy and print meant power. Yet in a diverse and far-flung nation, regional differences persisted, and older forms of oral and handwritten communication offered alternatives to print. The early republic was a world of mixed media. Contributors: Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary Georgia B. Barnhill, American Antiquarian Society John L. Brooke, The Ohio State University Dona Brown, University of Vermont Richard D. Brown, University of Connecticut Kenneth E. Carpenter, Harvard University Libraries Scott E. Casper, University of Nevada, Reno Mary Kupiec Cayton, Miami University Joanne Dobson, Brewster, New York James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia Dean Grodzins, Massachusetts Historical Society Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut Grey Gundaker, College of William and Mary Leon Jackson, University of South Carolina Richard R. John, Columbia University Mary Kelley, University of Michigan Jack Larkin, Clark University David Leverenz, University of Florida Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers University Charles Monaghan, Charlottesville, Virginia E. Jennifer Monaghan, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York Gerald F. Moran, University of Michigan-Dearborn Karen Nipps, Harvard University David Paul Nord, Indiana University Barry O'Connell, Amherst College Jeffrey L. Pasley, University of Missouri-Columbia William S. Pretzer, Central Michigan University A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University David S. Shields, University of South Carolina Andie Tucher, Columbia University Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michigan Sandra A. Zagarell, Oberlin College

Volume 3 of A History of the Book in America narrates the emergence of a national book trade in the nineteenth century, as changes in manufacturing, distribution, and publishing conditioned, and were conditioned by, the evolving practices of authors and readers. Chapters trace the ascent of the ""industrial book""--a manufactured product arising from the gradual adoption of new printing, binding, and illustration technologies and encompassing the profusion of nineteenth-century printed materials--which relied on nationwide networks of financing, transportation, and communication. In tandem with increasing educational opportunities and rising literacy rates, the industrial book encouraged new sites of reading; gave voice to diverse communities of interest through periodicals, broadsides, pamphlets, and other printed forms; and played a vital role in the development of American culture. Contributors: Susan Belasco, University of Nebraska Candy Gunther Brown, Indiana University Kenneth E. Carpenter, Newton Center, Massachusetts Scott E. Casper, University of Nevada, Reno Jeannine Marie DeLombard, University of Toronto Ann Fabian, Rutgers University Jeffrey D. Groves, Harvey Mudd College Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School David M. Henkin, University of California, Berkeley Bruce Laurie, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Eric Lupfer, Humanities Texas Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers University John Nerone, University of Illinois Stephen W. Nissenbaum, University of Massachusetts Lloyd Pratt, Michigan State University Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College Louise Stevenson, Franklin & Marshall College Amy M. Thomas, Montana State University Tamara Plakins Thornton, State University of New York, Buffalo Susan S. Williams, Ohio State University Michael Winship, University of Texas at Austin

Focusing on five Los Angeles environmental policy debates between 1920 and 1950, Sarah Elkind investigates how practices in American municipal government gave business groups political legitimacy at the local level as well as unanticipated influence over federal politics. Los Angeles's struggles with oil drilling, air pollution, flooding, and water and power supplies expose the clout business has had over government. Revealing the huge disparities between big business groups and individual community members in power, influence, and the ability to participate in policy debates, Elkind shows that business groups secured their political power by providing Los Angeles authorities with much-needed services, including studying emerging problems and framing public debates. As a result, government officials came to view business interests as the public interest. When federal agencies looked to local powerbrokers for project ideas and political support, local business interests influenced federal policy, too. Los Angeles, with its many environmental problems and its dependence upon the federal government, provides a distillation of national urban trends, Elkind argues, and is thus an ideal jumping-off point for understanding environmental politics and the power of business in the middle of the twentieth century.

In a period characterized by expanding markets, national consolidation, and social upheaval, print culture picked up momentum as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Books, magazines, and newspapers were produced more quickly and more cheaply, reaching ever-increasing numbers of readers. Volume 4 of A History of the Book in America traces the complex, even contradictory consequences of these changes in the production, circulation, and use of print. Contributors to this volume explain that although mass production encouraged consolidation and standardization, readers increasingly adapted print to serve their own purposes, allowing for increased diversity in the midst of concentration and integration. Considering the book in larger social and cultural networks, essays address the rise of consumer culture, the extension of literacy and reading through schooling, the expansion of secondary and postsecondary education and the growth of the textbook industry, the growing influence of the professions and their dependence on print culture, and the history of relevant technology. As the essays here attest, the expansion of print culture between 1880 and 1940 enabled it to become part of Americans' everyday business, social, political, and religious lives. Contributors: Megan Benton, Pacific Lutheran University Paul S. Boyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison Una M. Cadegan, University of Dayton Phyllis Dain, Columbia University James P. Danky, University of Wisconsin-Madison Ellen Gruber Garvey, New Jersey City University Peter Jaszi, American University Carl F. Kaestle, Brown University Nicolas Kanellos, University of Houston Richard L. Kaplan, ABC-Clio Publishing Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Long, Rice University Elizabeth McHenry, New York University Sally M. Miller, University of the Pacific Richard Ohmann, Wesleyan University Janice A. Radway, Duke University Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University Charles A. Seavey, University of Missouri, Columbia Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego William Vance Trollinger Jr., University of Dayton Richard L. Venezky (1938-2004) James L. W. West III, Pennsylvania State University Wayne A. Wiegand, Florida State University Michael Winship, University of Texas at Austin Martha Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve University

This book contains classic material dating back to the 1900s and before. The content has been carefully selected for its interest and relevance to a modern audience. Carefully selecting the best articles from our collection we have compiled a series of historical and informative publications on the subject of Welsh history. The titles in this range include "A History of Religion in Wales" "The Romans in Wales" "A Guide to the Welsh Language" and many more. Each publication has been professionally curated and includes all details on the original source material. This particular instalment, "A History of Welsh Industry" contains information on mining, shipping, manufacturing and much more. Intended to illustrate the main aspects of Welsh industry it is a comprehensive guide for anyone wishing to obtain a general knowledge of the subject and to understand the field in its historical context. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The largest enterprise in the capitalist world between 1920 and 1945, the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway) was at the center of events in a period of great turmoil in Germany. In this, the second volume of his comprehensive history of the Reichsbahn, Alfred Mierzejewski offers the first complete account of the national railway under Hitler's regime. Mierzejewski uses sources that include Nazi Party membership records and Reichsbahn internal memoranda to explore the railway's operations, finances, and political and social roles from 1933 to 1945. He examines the Reichsbahn's role in German rearmament, its own lack of preparations for war, and its participation in Germany's military operations. He shows that despite successfully resisting Nazi efforts to politicize its internal functions, the Reichsbahn cooperated with the government's anti-Semitic policies. Indeed, the railway played a crucial role in the Holocaust by supporting the construction and operation of the Nazi death camps and by transporting Jews and other victims to them.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrialization both dramatically altered everyday experiences and shaped debates about the effects of immigration, empire, and urbanization. In American Abyss, Daniel E. Bender examines an array of sources eugenics theories, scientific studies of climate, socialist theory, and even popular novels about cavemen to show how intellectuals and activists came to understand industrialization in racial and gendered terms as the product of evolution and as the highest expression of civilization.

Their discussions, he notes, are echoed today by the use of such terms as the "developed" and "developing" worlds. American industry was contrasted with the supposed savagery and primitivism discovered in tropical colonies, but observers who made those claims worried that industrialization, by encouraging immigration, child and women's labor, and large families, was reversing natural selection. Factories appeared to favor the most unfit. There was a disturbing tendency for such expressions of fear to favor eugenicist "remedies."

Bender delves deeply into the culture and politics of the age of industry. Linking urban slum tourism and imperial science with immigrant better-baby contests and hoboes, American Abyss uncovers the complex interactions of turn-of-the-century ideas about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, at a time when immigration again lies at the center of American economy and society, this book offers an alarming and pointed historical perspective on contemporary fears of immigrant laborers."

A unique history of Cuba, captured in the life and times of the famous rum dynasty
The Bacardis of Cuba, builders of a rum distillery and a worldwide brand, came of age with their nation and helped define what it meant to be Cuban. Across five generations, the Bacardi family has held fast to its Cuban identity, even in exile from the country for whose freedom they once fought. Now National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten tells the dramatic story of one family, its business, and its nation, a 150-year tale with the sweep and power of an epic.
The Bacardi clan--patriots and "bon vivants," entrepreneurs and intellectuals--provided an example of business and civic leadership in its homeland for nearly a century. From the fight for Cuban independence from Spain in the 1860s to the rise of Fidel Castro and beyond, there is no chapter in Cuban history in which the Bacardis have not played a role. In chronicling the saga of this remarkable family and the company that bears its name, Tom Gjelten describes the intersection of business and power, family and politics, community and exile.

The Filth of Progress explores the untold side of a well-known American story. For more than a century, accounts of progress in the West foregrounded the technological feats performed while canals and railroads were built and lionized the capitalists who financed the projects. This book salvages stories often omitted from the triumphant narrative of progress by focusing on the suffering and survival of the workers who were treated as outsiders. Ryan Dearinger examines the moving frontiers of canal and railroad construction workers in the tumultuous years of American expansion, from the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 to the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in 1869. He tells the story of the immigrants and Americans-the Irish, Chinese, Mormons, and native-born citizens-whose labor created the West's infrastructure and turned the nation's dreams of a continental empire into a reality. Dearinger reveals that canals and railroads were not static monuments to progress but moving spaces of conflict and contestation.

Based on a first-hand account of a worker involved in campaigning for better rights and conditions for himself and his co-workers, this book reveals how one individual working in the mining industry in the UK in the second half of the 20th century managed to effect real change. His words and actions are truly inspirational and serve as a timely reminder of how far we've come, as well as how influential one person can really be - whatever his current economic or political standing. Peppered with primary source documents, photographs and contributions from members of the original author's family, the book makes interesting reading for anyone who cares about justice, equality and dignity. Most importantly, it puts our current economic and political challenges in perspective... Do we really have so much to complain about? Dangerously, or fortunately perhaps (since it's clear we all stand to benefit), this book is likely to spur any would-be campaigner to take up arms and fight.