While the president is the commander in chief, the US Congress plays a critical and underappreciated role in civil-military relations - the relationship between the armed forces and the civilian leadership that commands it. This unique book edited by Colton C. Campbell and David P. Auerswald will help readers better understand the role of Congress in military affairs and national and international security policy. Contributors include the most experienced scholars in the field as well as practitioners and innovative new voices, all delving into the ways Congress attempts to direct the military. This book explores four tools in particular that play a key role in congressional action: the selection of military officers, delegation of authority to the military, oversight of the military branches, and the establishment of incentives - both positive and negative - to encourage appropriate military behavior. The contributors explore the obstacles and pressures faced by legislators including the necessity of balancing national concerns and local interests, partisan and intraparty differences, budgetary constraints, the military's traditional resistance to change, and an ongoing lack of foreign policy consensus at the national level. Yet, despite the considerable barriers, Congress influences policy on everything from closing bases to drone warfare to acquisitions. A groundbreaking study, Congress and Civil-Military Relations points the way forward in analyzing an overlooked yet fundamental government relationship.

In "Thinking beyond Boundaries"--written under the direction of West Point social sciences faculty for its Student Conference on US Affairs, or SCUSA--contributors introduce undergraduates to aspects of transnational conflict that extend beyond traditional political and intellectual boundaries, providing context to a variety of contemporary issues, including immigration, terrorism, and environmental security. This volume aims to challenge students by asking them to behave not as passive observers, but as decision makers who engage in policy-level debate and formulate specific policy recommendations. Well acquainted with the demands of classroom discussion, the contributors know how to make world politics and foreign policy accessible to students, and they provide recommended readings and resources at the end of each chapter.

The book asks students to consider how the United States promotes or even determines an effective and appropriate policy response to boundary-spanning problems. Since future political and military leaders, as well as policymakers, will face the challenge of collective action within the confines of an uncoordinated international system, the book urges them to consider what role domestic and foreign factors should play in their decision-making processes. "Thinking beyond Boundaries"'s three-part organization--which considers the blurred line between domestic and foreign policy; the cross-border implications of foreign policy; and the challenges and opportunities that extend beyond the boundaries separating the world's regions--coupled with recommended reading lists will help students develop a foundation with which to approach the substantial topic of "foreign policy."

Touching on a number of concerns--including civil-military relations and the global challenges involved with hacking, foreign aid, weapons proliferation, international trade, and climate change--this book draws thoughtful conclusions about the proper role of the United States around the world.

****Updated and expanded including many illustrations by George Almond. Plus clearer translations of foreign terms. Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond Stories officially approved by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd (formerly Glidrose), with a Preface by Andrew Lycett and Forewords by Zoe Watkins, Publishing Manager, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd.; Raymond Benson, author of The James Bond Bedside Companion, six original 007 novels, and numerous non-Bond novels. This book is the result of analysis of each of Fleming's James Bond novels. Within are glossaries of applicable terminology and references with detailed chronologies of events including annotations. Detailed chronologies of events are represented at a day-of-week, month, day, year, and time-of-day level. Glossaries contain translations of foreign terms, annotations, and other information of interest such as detailed information on the origin of Saramanga's name (The Man with the Golden Gun). Maps have been created for many of the novels along with in-depth information concerning specific topics such as, the Moonraker bridge game and the Goldfinger golf game. In many instances, monetary amounts have been converted to their 2001 purchasing power equivalent. Differences found between published versions and the original Fleming manuscripts archived at Indiana University's Lilly Library have been noted.

At age fifty, when many hope to slow down and what's left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is "clear profit," John Griswold was starting over-again-in a position he had worked decades to achieve. His family moved down the Mississippi Valley, expecting to create a good life with new friends. What they found instead was a society "organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name," which in its corruption, laissez-faire corporatism, gun love, and environmental degradation foretold the heightened problems of the United States in an era of deepening political division. Taking his cue from classical Asian poets such as Basho-, Griswold begins to journey, to gain perspective, and to find his own narrow road. He travels around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico and to writers' homes in Russia and New Mexico; attends the protests at Standing Rock; walks the Basho- Trail in Japan; and reports on the wholesale slaughter of a Texas rattlesnake roundup and the cruel weirdness of the Angola Prison Rodeo. Over eight years, Griswold bears witness to, pays homage to, and finds he is able to define and speak with gratitude about what is most important to him: his children, wholeheartedness, and the act of trying. In the gap between complexity and a little peace and quiet, there is a way to profit anew.

For nearly ten years John Griswold has been publishing his essays in "Inside Higher Ed," "McSweeney's Internet Tendency," "Brevity," "Ninth Letter," and "Adjunct Advocate," many under the pen name Oronte Churm. Churm's topics have ranged widely, exploring themes such as the writing life and the utility of creative-writing classes, race issues in a university town, and the beautiful, protective crocodiles that lie patiently waiting in the minds of fathers.

Though Griswold recently entered the tenure stream, much of his experience, at a Big Ten university, has been as an adjunct lecturer--that tenuous and uncertain position so many now occupy in higher education. In "Pirates You Don't Know," Griswold writes poignantly and hilariously about the contingent nature of this life, tying it to his birth in the last American enclave in Saigon during the Vietnam War, his upbringing in a coal town in southern Illinois, and his experience as an army deep-sea diver and frogman. He investigates class in America through four generations of his family and portrays the continuing joys and challenges of fatherhood while making a living, becoming literate, and staying open to the world. But Griswold's central concerns apply to everyone: What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to think, feel, create, and be whole? What is the point of this particular journey?

"Pirates You Don't Know" is Griswold's vital attempt at making sense of his life as a writer and now professor. The answers for him are both comic and profound: "Picture Long John Silver at the end of the movie, his dory filled with stolen gold, rowing and sinking; rowing, sinking, and gloating."

Pandora's Garden profiles invasive or unwanted species in the natural world and examines how our treatment of these creatures sometimes parallels in surprising ways how we treat each other. Part essay, part nature writing, part narrative nonfiction, the chapters in Pandora's Garden are like the biospheres of the globe; as the successive chapters unfold, they blend together like ecotones, creating a microcosm of the world in which we sustain nonhuman lives but also contain them. There are many reasons particular flora and fauna may be unwanted, from the physical to the psychological. Sometimes they may possess inherent qualities that when revealed help us to interrogate human perception and our relationship to an unwanted other. Pandora's Garden is primarily about creatures that humans don't get along with, such as rattlesnakes and sharks, but the chapters also take on a range of other subjects, including stolen children in Australia, the treatment of illegal immigrants in Texas, and the disgust function of the human limbic system. Peters interweaves these diverse subjects into a whole that mirrors the evolving and interrelated world whose surprises and oddities he delights in revealing.

In haunting prose that will follow you for days to come, Made Holy tells the story of the American family. Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection. Emily Arnason Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing. The lakes of her childhood in Minnesota form the interior landscape of this book, a kind of watery nostalgia for something just beyond her reach. "I know this feeling," she writes. "We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place." Casey's willingness to honestly examine the past and present with contemplative lyricism offers fresh perspective and new understanding. In electric moments that are utterly relatable, she weaves a tale of love and commitment to the truth of her experience despite the incredible desire to keep alive a legacy of secrets. Like the mullein plant she invokes in the final essay, these essays form a kind of "guardian to the lost."

Brian Doyle himself explains it best: ""A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin's golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?"" ""Why don't you write one?' said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase."" And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.

In Exploded View "graphic" essays play with the conventions of telling a life story and with how illustration and text work together in print. As with a graphic novel, the story is not only in the text but also in how that text interacts with the images that accompany it. Diagrams were an important part of Dustin Parsons's childhood. Parsons's father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he was also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic, a welder, and an artist. His shop had countless manuals with "exploded view" parts directories that the young Parsons flipped through constantly. Whether rebuilding a transmission, putting together a diesel engine, or assembling a baby cradle, his father had a visual guide to help him. In these essays, Parsons uses the same approach to understanding his father as he navigates the world of raising two young biracial boys. This memoir distinguishes itselffrom others in its "graphic" elements-the appropriated diagrams, instructions,and "exploded view" inventory images-that Parsons has used. They help guide thereader's understanding of the piece, giving them a visual anchor for the story,and add a technical aspect to the lyric essays that they hold. This mixture ofthe machine-like and the lyrical helps the reader understand the author's worldmore fully-a world where art comes in the form of a welding torch, where creativity involves finding new ways to use old machines, and where delineating between right-brain and left-brain thinking isn't so easy.

In February 2010, with the help of a friend who works as a photographer with a National Geographic-sponsored cruise line, Justin Gardiner boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gardiner used his experiences on this voyage as the narrative backdrop for Beneath the Shadow, a compelling firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, and Captain Roald Amundsen. Beneath the Shadow is centered on journal excerpts by eight famous explorers, which Gardiner uses as touchstones for modern-day experiences of harsh seas, chance encounters, rugged terrain, and unspeakable beauty. With equal parts levity and lyricism, Gardiner navigates the distance between the historical and the contemporary, the artistic and the scientific, the heroic and the mundane. The bold and tragic tales of Antarctic explorers have long held our collective imagination?almost as much as the mythically remote land such explorers ventured to?and this book makes those voices come to life as few ever have.