New Release Books by Jeffrey Frank

Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, returns with the “beguiling” (The New York Times) first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly thirty years, recounting how a seemingly ordinary man met the extraordinary challenge of leading America through the pivotal years of the mid-20th century. The nearly eight years of Harry Truman’s presidency—among the most turbulent in American history—were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan; the first use of an atomic bomb and the development of far deadlier weapons; the start of the Cold War and the creation of the NATO alliance; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit troops to fight a costly “limited war” in Korea. Historians have tended to portray Truman as stolid and decisive, with a homespun manner, but the man who emerges in The Trials of Harry S. Truman is complex and surprising. He believed that the point of public service was to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens and fought for a national health insurance plan. While he was disturbed by the brutal treatment of African Americans and came to support stronger civil rights laws, he never relinquished the deep-rooted outlook of someone with Confederate ancestry reared in rural Missouri. He was often carried along by the rush of events and guided by men who succeeded in refining his fixed and facile view of the postwar world. And while he prided himself on his Midwestern rationality, he could act out of instinct and combativeness, as when he asserted a president’s untested power to seize the nation’s steel mills. The Truman who emerges in these pages is a man with generous impulses, loyal to friends and family, and blessed with keen political instincts, but insecure, quick to anger, and prone to hasty decisions. Archival discoveries, and research that led from Missouri to Washington, Berlin and Korea, have contributed to an indelible and “intimate” (The Washington Post) portrait of a man, born in the 19th century, who set the nation on a course that reverberates in the 21st century, a leader who never lost a schoolboy’s love for his country and its Constitution.

Years of backstabbing and betrayal start to catch up with one of Washington’s elite opinion writers, “a character that deserves to jump outside the Beltway and enter the language like ‘Uncle Tom,’ ‘Peter Pan,’ or ‘Scrooge.’” (Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor). During a cocktail party, George H. W. Bush encourages Brandon Sladder, the prominent Washington columnist, to write his memoirs. Sladder has, after all, known just about everyone of importance. From talking on intimate terms with world leaders, being a witness to enormous change, and expressing his weighty opinions on matters of state, he believes that his own story could add so much more than a footnote to our age. But what is meant to be a look back at his life and our times turns out to be far more revealing. The Columnist is Sladder’s attempt to burnish his image for posterity. What emerges is something else: the misadventures of an irresistibly loathsome man—self-important, social climbing, dangerously oblivious, “an unforgettable character who is lovably hateable” (Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book) and one of the most memorable rogues in contemporary fiction. The Columnist is a dead-on, elegantly written portrait of the media and politics of the second half of the twentieth century—“It’s Balzac as word-processed by Philip Roth, only, for my two cents…funnier…[A] great American novel” (Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking).

An account of the unconventional relationship between Eisenhower and Nixon explores their contrasting beliefs and temperaments as well as the collaborative efforts that shaped the nation''s political ideology, foreign policy, and domestic goals.

On the eve of the 2000 election, the charmed life of Washington hostess Trudy Hopedale is quietly falling apart. Her daytime talk show is about to be hijacked by a younger, prettier assistant, and then there is the horrifying novel that her husband has written in secret, which contains some rather troubling implications for a former Foreign Service colleague. And what is her mother-in-law telling everyone? Trudy''s dear friend Donald Frizzé has benefited greatly from their friendship. A widely recognized expert on the U.S. vice presidency and a frequent guest on Trudy''s program, Donald''s latest scholarly pursuit is a highly anticipated biography of Garrett Augustus Hobart, McKinley''s VP. Exactly who anticipates this book is hard to say, and soon Donald finds himself dodging the awkward questions of plagiarism and his sexuality, frequently during the same conversation. Amid tides of intrigue and shifting allegiances, this little town''s extraordinary inhabitants swim helplessly, and alarmingly, toward their remarkable fates. With a bewitching sense of nostalgia, Jeffrey Frank has written an exquisitely funny, tender, and deeply perceptive novel that vividly invokes the simpler world of only yesterday.

One of a series of environmental education (EE) units "for workshop leaders who want to help educators explore the urban environment with their students." The unit investigates "educational resources that convey urban EE to both city teachers unfamiliar with the topic, and educators outside the city who want to reach the urban audience."

In the twilight of the Reagan era, as prospects appear brighter than ever for a Democratic restoration, the lawyers, lobbyists, advisers and socialites of Washington are looking ahead -- but over their shoulders, too. With good reason. Charlie Dingleman, a former congressman, has gotten a tantalizing job offer that could rescue him from the drudgery of lawyering. But he''s being shadowed by an increasingly unsavory rumor started by Judith Grust, a young associate at Charlie''s firm. Judith has a few dark secrets of her own, like one she shares with Hank Morriday, a lazy, shiftless welfare policy expert. That helps to drive Hank into the orbit of Candy Romulade, a P.R. executive paralyzed by a dwindling client list. Then Candy signs up a veteran local anchorman, who has a very peculiar view of the world. As these men and women collide in a lusty, mad scramble, their savage ambitions and reversals of fortune test the idea that there''s no such thing as bad publicity. The result, Bad Publicity, is a pitch-perfect, often poignant novel in the classic Swiftian mold.

This report presents results from the "Survey of 1995 Graduates who moved to the United States". Both the survey and this report were conducted in partnership between Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) and Statistics Canada. The survey covered post-secondary graduates from the class of ''95 who moved to the U.S. between graduation and the summer of 1997. These graduates were surveyed to obtain information on their characteristics, reasons for relocating to the U.S., education and work experiences, and plans for the future.

This study advances two interrelated hypotheses. First, it attempts to demonstrate that "redescription" underscored the ironic and satiric elements of much of Poe''s and Melville''s experimental work, and secondly, it argues for the idea of "embedded irony," an irony born from the incongruity between the way a character interprets a text or embedded narrative, and the way a character eventually changes based on that interpretation. I suggest that a type of situational irony (an incongruity between result and expectation) manifests itself when characters in these fictional works attempt to replicate or counter (in their own fictional worlds) a plot or characterization from another narrative. This study relies upon concepts of irony developed by scholars such as Richard Rorty, Wayne Booth, Douglas Muecke, and Claire Colebrook, as well as insights into narrative theory from authors such as Gérard Genette and Gregory Currie. Arguments regarding the evolving nature of language in the nineteenth century in the work of Emerson and Thoreau, and discussions about symbolic writing and cryptography by J.T. Irwin and Shawn Rosenheim also provide conceptual foundations. Focusing primarily on Melville''s Moby-Dick and Pierre , as well as Poe''s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and selected short stories, this study aims to expand the conceptual scope of irony while highlighting the comedic aspects of some of the more influential works of the nineteenth century. The study concludes with a discussion of how elements of embedded irony in the work of Poe and Melville may also inform studies of twentieth century postmodern literature.

Ce rapport fournit de l''information sur les diplômés de 1995 qui ont déménagé aux États-Unis quant à leur mouvement, leurs caractéristiques, leurs raisons et leurs expériences d''études et de travail.