365 Ways To Change the World: How to Make a Difference One Day at a Time
Author: Michael Norton
You want to make a difference in the world, but don't know where to begin. Now you can. Here is just the guide to lots of exciting ways that are more personal and fun than merely writing a check. For every day of the year, 365 Ways to Change the World is packed with information and ideas that don't take a lot of special skills to put into action, but will achieve something positive:
- Observe a "Buy Nothing Day"
- Plant a "peace pole"
- Sew a panel for an AIDS memorial quilt
- Collect rainwater to water your plants
The suggestions cover twelve important areas in which you can influence change, including in your local community, as a consumer, making a cultural contribution, and addressing problems such as the environment, health, and human rights. You can go through the book day by day or use the index to flip to the issues that concern you most; to help you take action, a complementary website links straight to many of the sources listed in the book. Great to give as well as to keep, this is an inspiring, practical resource for making the world a better place -- one day at a time.
Read also Cooking with the Uglesiches or Complete Idiots Guide to Fondues and Hot Dips
Woodrow Wilson (The American Presidents Series)
Author: Arthur M Schlesinger
A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of one of the major shapers of American foreign policyOn the eve of his inauguration as President, Woodrow Wilson commented, “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.” As America was drawn into the Great War in Europe, Wilson used his scholarship, his principles, and the political savvy of his advisers to overcome his ignorance of world affairs and lead the country out of isolationism. The product of his efforts—his vision of the United States as a nation uniquely suited for moral leadership by virtue of its democratic tradition—is a view of foreign policy that is still in place today.Acclaimed historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands offers a clear, well-informed, and timely account of Wilson’s unusual route to the White House, his campaign against corporate interests, his struggles with rivals at home and allies abroad, and his decline in popularity and health following the rejection by Congress of his League of Nations. Wilson emerges as a fascinating man of great oratorical power, depth of thought, and purity of intention.
Publishers Weekly
At a time when U.S. foreign policy and the country's role in the world are very much at issue, what could be more appropriate than to revisit the president who set U.S. foreign policy on its course in the 20th century? Brands, best-selling author and Pulitzer finalist for The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, gives a sober portrait of a president dedicated to peace yet compelled to enter a brutal war. Yet more than his actions, Brands says, it is Wilson's words that remain with us: "The world must be made safe for democracy." Brands writes elegiacally of Wilson's "beautiful words, soaring words, words moved a nation and enthralled a world, words that for a wonderful moment were more powerful than armies." Though recent events cast doubt on Brands's statement that Wilson's views ("idealism is sometimes the highest form of realism") have triumphed and that the U.S. concedes the U.N.'s "role at the center of world affairs," his contribution to the American Presidents series, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, is a stirring reminder of the ideals that underlie American policy. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
This short and sympathetic biography is best in detailing Wilson's path to World War I, and its greatest failure is its refusal to engage Wilson on race. Like most post-Civil War Southern whites, Wilson embraced the Democratic Party with its unbending support of white supremacy, segregation, and lynch law. The first Southern president since the Civil War, Wilson not only gave the pro-Klan Birth of a Nation a White House screening, he imposed Jim Crow policy in the District of Columbia and blocked a Japanese effort to include a declaration on racial equality in the League of Nations charter. To investigate this side of Wilson's career and relate it to the universal principles by which he defined his political mission isn't to give him a politically correct posthumous spanking; it is to examine some of the essential political and psychological issues that shaped this remarkable man. Brands has only one paragraph for all this and thus has produced what could be the last Wilson biography written as if the color line played no role in early-twentieth-century American politics.
Library Journal
It is often difficult in a one-volume biography to capture the full measure of the subject while giving readers a sense of the period in which he or she lived. But Brands (distinguished professor of history, Texas A&M; The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin) succeeds at both tasks. In this balanced, well-written treatment, Brands presents Wilson as a moralistic, idealistic intellectual who came to the presidency well versed in domestic policy but sadly lacking in knowledge and experience of international affairs, a leader who ultimately sacrificed his health and his presidential legacy in a doomed battle with Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge to have the League of Nations ratified. The book explores Wilson's relationships with his wives and with Colonel House, but not in great depth, though the discussion of the last 17 months of his presidency following his serious stroke is informative. In light of the Bush administration's recent efforts to circumvent the UN, Wilson's vision for a world where collective security would be guaranteed through an international agency seems even more utopian but makes reading this book all the more worthwhile. A larger work of reappraisal may still be needed, but Brands's brief, skillful life of the President is recommended for all public libraries.-Thomas J. Baldino, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Latest in the American Presidents series, profiling a respected but now overlooked chief executive. "Woodrow Wilson lived too long and then died too soon," writes Brands (History/Texas A&M; The Strange Death of American Liberalism, 2001, etc.). Born before the Civil War, Wilson lived into the mid-1920s, long enough to see the emasculation of his pet project, the League of Nations. By this account, Wilson was an accidental politician, roped into running for New Jersey office after he lost a long battle as president of Princeton over where to locate the new graduate school. Elected by a commanding margin after wowing listeners with his fine oratory, Wilson earned good marks as governor, though his handlers weren't pleased when he demolished former patron Boss Smith's political machine. He was recruited to run as a Democratic candidate for president in the 1912 election, the first, Brands writes, "in which party primaries played an important role." Lifting a page from Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson pledged not just to rein in the trusts but to destroy them, a sentiment that played well to Progressive audiences. But Brands suggests that Wilson was not particularly popular once in office, especially after he went back on his pledge to keep America neutral in WWI. Neither was he an effective lawmaker, perhaps because he was severely depressed following his wife's death in 1914. When Wilson suffered a massive stroke in 1919, second wife Edith and confidantes in the White House "conspired to shield the public from full knowledge of the president's disability." Brands argues that Wilson might have been better served had he died as a result of that stroke, "a martyr to the cause of world peace," ratherthan living to see that cause jeopardized by the Versailles Treaty and the economic ruin it wreaked on Germany, opened the way for WWII. A worthy overview that acknowledges Wilson's considerable strengths and his many limitations.
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