This imaginative memoir portrays the young George W Bush. He was a spoiled rich brat. He was an adolescent drunk. He was a prankster frat boy at an Ivy League. His famous father got him out of the draft. He got elected to the highest office in the world. Impressive resume. Stranger than fiction! By the Maine reporter who "busted" W for drunk driving. The biography covers the juvenile career of George W. Bush, his rowdy teenage behaviour and drinking habits. His hijinks at Yale and Harvard. Dodging the draft with a little help from Congressman "Poppy" Bush. Inside the Bush Family; mano a mano over an affair his father is having. W's DUI arrest. Eligible bachelor W gets engaged to a nice girl -- so as to be more eligible for a run for Congress. He loses the race but marries Laura Welch anyway. W will be assisted again to rise to high office. Bush comes across as a devil-may-care, insolent youth, with a rude nickname for everyone, always ready to get into mischief, or into a case of liquor, to relieve his boredom. This amusing portrait of a lout's progress is hardly flattering, but is not as unsympathetic as much of his press. An ordinary kid born into a strange family, "Dubya" never was interested in politics. He had to play his part to pay his family dues. This may well explain why Bush as President just did not seem to care to keep up the pretences that the world expects from its leaders. Indeed, we see G W Bush here as an anti-hero rather than a leader. Yet the author does not dwell on such theories. This is a hilarious book rather than a serious one, in keeping with the lightweight personality of its subject. Author Ted Cohen is the Kennebunkport reporter who uncovered the story of Dubya's DUI conviction during the 2000 presidential campaign. That the press did not deem to pick up on it, may possibly have swung the election.

Ted Cohen was an original and captivating essayist known for his inquisitive intelligence, wit, charm, and a deeply humane feel for life. For Cohen, writing was a way of discovering, and also celebrating, the depth and complexity of things overlooked by most professional philosophers and aestheticians--but not by most people. Whether writing about the rules of baseball, of driving, or of Kant's Third Critique; about Hitchcock, ceramics, or jokes, Cohen proved that if you study the world with a bemused but honest attentiveness, you can find something to philosophize about more or less anywhere. This collection, edited and introduced by philosopher Daniel Herwitz, brings together some of Cohen's best work to capture the unique style that made Cohen one of the most beloved philosophers of his generation. Among the perceptive, engaging, and laugh-out-loud funny reflections on movies, sports, art, language, and life included here are Cohen's classic papers on metaphor and his Pushcart Prize-winning essay on baseball, as well as memoir, fiction, and even poetry. Full of free-spirited inventiveness, these Serious Larks would be equally at home outside Thoreau's cabin on the waters of Walden Pond as they are here, proving that intelligence, sensitivity, and good humor can be found in philosophical writing after all.

In "Thinking of Others," Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity--as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. To be able to see oneself as someone else, whether the someone else is a real person or a fictional character, is to exercise the ability to deal with metaphor and other figurative language. The underlying faculty, Cohen argues, is the same--simply the ability to think of one thing as another when it plainly is not.

In an engaging style, Cohen explores this idea by examining various occasions for identifying with others, including reading fiction, enjoying sports, making moral arguments, estimating one's future self, and imagining how one appears to others. Using many literary examples, Cohen argues that we can engage with fictional characters just as intensely as we do with real people, and he looks at some of the ways literature itself takes up the question of interpersonal identification and understanding.

An original meditation on the necessity of imagination to moral and aesthetic life, "Thinking of Others" is an important contribution to philosophy and literary theory.

Infectious Disease Epidemiology is a concise reference guide which provides trainees and practicing epidemiologists with the information that they need to understand the basic concepts necessary for working in this specialist area. Divided into two sections, part one comprehensively covers the basic principles and methods relevant to the study of infectious disease epidemiology. It is organised in order of increasing complexity, ranging from a general introduction to subjects such as mathematical modelling and sero-epidemiology. Part two examines key major infectious diseases that are of global significance. Grouped by their route of transmission for ease of reference, they include diseases that present a particular burden or a high potential for causing mortality. This practical guide will be essential reading for postgraduate students in infectious disease epidemiology, health protection trainees, and practicing epidemiologists.

Dubya still likes to call himself "The Decider." But a lot was decided for him. This imaginative memoir reveals the real Bush from his youth. He was a hard-drinking, good-natured lout -- and the last person who'd run for high office. Bush was a spoiled rich brat. From adolescent drunk he graduated to prankster frat boy at an Ivy League. His famous father got him out of the draft. He got elected to the highest office in the world. Impressive resume. Stranger than fiction! By the Maine reporter who "busted" W for drunk driving. The biography covers the juvenile career of Geo. W. Bush, his rowdy teenage behavior and drinking habits. His hijinks at Yale and Harvard. Dodging the draft with a little help from Congressman "Poppy" Bush. Inside the Bush Family; mano a mano over an affair his father is having. W's DUI arrest. Eligible bachelor W gets engaged to a nice girl -- so as to be more eligible for a run for Congress. He loses the race but marries Laura Welch anyway. W will be assisted again to rise to high office. Bush comes across as a devil-may-care, insolent youth, with a rude nickname for everyone, always ready to get into mischief, or into a case of liquor, to relieve his boredom. This amusing portrait of a oaf's progress is hardly flattering, but is not as unsympathetic as much of his press. An ordinary kid born into a strange family, "Dubya" never was interested in politics. He had to play his part to pay his family dues. This may well explain why Bush as President just did not seem to care to keep up the pretences that the world expects from its leaders. Indeed, we see G W Bush here as an anti-hero rather than a leader. Yet the author does not dwell on such theories. This is a hilarious book rather than a serious one, in keeping with the lightweight personality of its subject. Author Ted Cohen is the Kennebunkport reporter who uncovered the story of Dubya's DUI conviction during the 2000 presidential campaign. That the press did not deem to pick up on it may have swung that close election.

A book of jokes and a book about them. Ted Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humour. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes and their morality, all with plenty of examples that should make the reader either chuckle or wince.