Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia

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Product Description

During a peace accord with the Colombian government in the early 1980's, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's largest guerrilla group, established the Patriotic Union party (UP). The party, created after decades of civil war, was intended to be a means through which the FARC rebels could ingratiate themselves into the nation's political mainstream. However, the UP, like the peace process, would be short-lived. Acting out of fear and vengeance, right-wing paramilitary groups working closely with government officials and personnel assassinated thousands of UP members, decimating the party and extinguishing nascent efforts toward national harmony.

In Walking Ghosts Steven Dudley, a journalist who lived in Colombia for five years, expertly chronicles the life and death of the UP through stories of the politicians, drug kingpins, revolutionaries, and mercenaries who play key roles in Colombia's civil strife. Dudley maps out the complicated and murderous absurdity that is present-day Colombia, where daily life has devastating consequences: 30,000 murders per year; seventy-five political assassinations per week; ten kidnappings a day. As the conflict gets bloodier, international pressure and influence mounts: Worried about the FARC's strength and its role in the drug trade, the United States has recently sent close to two billion dollars in aid to help the Colombian government fight FARC.

Steven Dudley seeks to make sense of this conflict by focusing on the stories of key actors in the struggle, from the earliest days to the present. He has seen the civil war up close: dead bodies; paramilitaries; guerrillas; victims; and survivors. He has witnessed political parties grappling for power by any means necessary, and he's spoken to all sides and asked the difficult questions. Fast-paced and informative, Walking Ghosts presents a window into a conflict likely to shape the politics of this hemisphere for years to come. Also inlcludes maps.

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Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia Review

Excellent! This is hardearned and very readable reportage and history. Mr.Dudley is to be commended for physically braving the treacherous terrain of Colombian politics and the guerrilla conflict there. If life is as expendable in Colombia as it appears to be, the author must have had more than a few frightening experiences. The Colombian propensity for violence is exceeded only by the fatalism necessary to endure it and, perhaps, he made use of its dubious benefits.'Walking Ghosts' is very informative: it gives an objective history of the 'elimination' of the 'Union Patriotica' reform party by government supported paramilitary death squads as well as providing a knowledgeable background and perspective on the corrupt enterprises that are the present FARC, AUC, and Colombian government and military. Mr. Dudley weaves personal histories into larger themes, in particular following some doomed and shortlived careers of UP members while not neglecting some of the tough customers of their deadly opposition. The UP was unfortunately caught in the maw of Colombia's ongoing 'violencia' as the cocaine trade expanded and forced its dynamic on Colombian politics. The FARC is portrayed as less than honorable and only marginally less married to 'violencia' in the scheme of things. One is left with few illusions and, sadly, little hope for the future of Colombia; reconciliation and forgiveness would seem hard to come by after such viciousness. Perhaps the 'fatalismo' of the Colombians could serve them in eventually effecting a peace. Again, a very well written and engaging history of a misunderstood conflict that could well involve the US military (you! your son or daughter!) in the years ahead.

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Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (Understanding Feminist Philosophy)

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Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. Gender and Aesthetics is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within art and aesthetics from a philosophical perspective, carefully introducing and examining the role that gender plays in forming ideas about art. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time.

Organized thematically, the book introduces in clear language the most important topics within feminist aesthetics:

• Why were there so few women painters?


• Art, pleasure and beauty


• Music, literature and painting


• The role of gender in taste and food


• What is art and who is an artist?


• Disgust and the sublime.

Each chapter discusses important topics and thinkers within art and examines the role gender plays in our understanding of them. These topics include creativity, genius and the appreciation of art, and thinkers from Plato, Kant, and Hume to Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Also included in the book are illustrations from Gaugin and Hogarth to Cindy Sherman and Nancy Spero to clarify and help introduce often difficult concepts. Each chapter concludes with a summary and further reading and there is an extensive annotated bibliography.

Carolyn Korsmeyer's style is refreshing and accessible, making the book suitable for students of philosophy, gender studies, visual studies and art theory, as well as anyone interested in the impact of gender on theories of art.

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Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (Understanding Feminist Philosophy) Review

I had to get this book for philosophy of art 3700. It is written in plain language and really easy for me to understand. I like the examples given also. They are clear and direct to what she is arguing.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Merleau-Ponty was a pivotal figure in twentieth century French philosophy. He was responsible for bringing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers - Husserl and Heidegger - to France and instigated a new wave of interest in this approach. His influence extended well beyond the boundaries of philosophy and can be seen in theories of politics, psychology, art and language.
This is the first volume to bring together a comprehensive selection of Merleau-Ponty's writing.
Sections from the following are included:
The Primacy of Perception
The Structure of Behaviour
The Phenomenology of Perception
The Prose of the World
The Visible and the Invisible
Sense and Non-Sense
The Adventures of the Dialectic
In a substantial critical introduction Thomas Baldwin provides a critical discussion of the main themes of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, connecting it to subsequent philosophical debates and setting it in the context of the ideas of Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. Each text is also prefaced with an explanation which sets it in its context in Merleau-Ponty's work; and there are extensive suggestions for further reading to enable students to pursue the issues raised by Merleau-Ponty. Thus the book provides the ideal materials for students studying Merleau-Ponty for the first time.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Review

Excellent anthology - good selections, editor's and section intros, and a clear translation. Great for a beginning introduction, by giving the prefaces and a good selections of chapters it seems to cover the main ideas.

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Information Literacy and Information Skills Instruction: Applying Research to Practice in the 21st Century School Library

You looking to find the "Information Literacy and Information Skills Instruction: Applying Research to Practice in the 21st Century School Library" Good news! You can purchase Information Literacy and Information Skills Instruction: Applying Research to Practice in the 21st Century School Library with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

   

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As with earlier editions, this latest revision of Information Literacy and Information Skills Instruction: Applying Research to Practice in the 21st Century School Library brings together the research literature on information skills instruction with particular reference to models related to information seeking and the information search process. It presents relevant findings on what research has deemed "best practice" and what is known about how children learn, enabling school librarians to base information skills programs on substantiated data.

The sources reviewed for this book include doctoral dissertations, research reports, academic and professional journal articles in library information service and related fields, and publications by scholars and practitioners relevant to information skills curricula. A preface, newly prepared for the third edition, explains the revision process, while the epilogue examines the importance of communication between research scholars and school library practitioners.

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Information Literacy and Information Skills Instruction: Applying Research to Practice in the 21st Century School Library Review

The authors credit the historic contributions of predecessors instead of the status quo knee-jerk dismissal of everything that preceded the current environment. The text is clearly written and the content is informative.

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Reflections on Higher Education

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Reflections on Higher Education Review

There is nothing in this book that I could disagree with, which instantly marks it as iconoclastic rather than traditional or elitist. This long-serving president spent close to three decades managing two universities, the longest The George Washington University which can legitimately lay claim to being intended by Founding Father George Washington to be a "national" university.

Prior books against which I compare this one include

The Uses of the University: Fifth Edition (Godkin Lectures on the Essentials of Free Government and the)
Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education

The book consists of three parts that meld 11 speeches and 2 articles from the 1998-2001 timeframe. This particular book was distributed by the GW Board of Trustees to parents of the incoming GW Class of 2006.

QUOTE (19): "The entire planet is in the process of turning itself into an educational institution, the faculty of which consists of the entire human species."

QUOTE (21): "The problem boils down to this: How do you get the *universe* of all things into the classroom?"

NOTE: Amazon's Insert a Product Link is broken. If and when they fix it, I will come back and insert links.

Recurring themes from across the entire book:

1) Extreme complexity and time-intensity of a university president's job, made all the harder by the fact that a university is one of the few communities where everyone is an expert at something, and consequently very reluctant--"resistant to anything that looks or feels like management." (p. 60).

2) Daunting speed and breadth of change, with the digital world rushing in, both in terms of Internet competition (not just good information, but really bad information as well as distracting video experiences the university cannot match yet); and in terms of media attention including disasters waiting to happen on the campus (with every cell phone today enhancing the likelihood any mishap with any student will make it to television).

3) Disconnect between the great humanist tradition including ethics as taught for centuries by word of mouth and the written word, and the new new world of visual and auditory enchantment often at odds with the goals of education. The author takes great care to distinguish with the WHAT one can learn from the Internet and the HOW of social interaction and ethics that can only be learned in consort with classmates, faculty, and other humans.

4) In the author's time, the pervasiveness of higher education, ultimately reaching a vast majority of adult Americans who if not graduates of college, have at least attended a community college or traditional university for at least a few courses--in the author's time, the symbiotic integration of higher education and America and how America saw itself. Today of course we have findings that suggest that many college graduates know what a 1950's high school graduate knew upon graduating from high school, and we have many articles and commentaries on the "college bubble" that is about to follow the housing bubble and the very high unemployment reality down the drain.

From my own perspective, the author held at the time an almost idealic perception of American higher education and the status of American education within America, no doubt justified by his many opportunities to observe non-American higher education, but today at odds with these four books:

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

There are a number of points in the book where I have to pause to take notes, and below are some of the gems that I consider well worth the time and money invested in this book.

+ We've grown away from the great tradition in learning, to the point that we seem to have a separation between European humanism and US mechanism. I completely agree, and would point to three other books that have shaped my own rejection of mechanism, substituting technology for thinking as Washington so loves to do.

The Knowledge Executive
The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
Radical Man

The author addresses the struggle of universities to cope with the Internet in several ways.

01 Abolish the classroom (not literally, just triage between home learning, group learning, and field learning)

02 Admit that the digital literati are visual creatures and get with the program to include learning how to do idea visualization, citation analytics, and true cost forensics.

03 Redesign all courses so they have the feel and aura of a quiz show (a pedant would say drop the didactic I speak you listen and migrate quickly to the facilitated nurtured team learning model).

I see a struggle throughout the book for the soul of the university, but I come pre-disposed to look for that. Certainly the author comes back on several occasions to address the complexity of the human mind and the human heart, and the need to develop very strong ethical standards that can shape technology and other external influences rather than letting them shape us.

At multiple points, despite the very positive tone of the book, there are clear acknowledgements that high school is not producing individuals ready for a college experience, which I certainly agree. In the context, the author proposes an overdue revision of the scholastic approach to include raising the standards for entry into college by calling for a pre-collegiate thesis; an integration of the "root" knowledge of the great traditions with the magic wizardry of the Internet (YouTube certainly seems to be advancing story-telling and show and tell).

In addressing the entrepreneurial university the author suggests that it can, should, and must make money; students are customers; faculty and administrative staff can and should blend; the university should have a living contract with its external community and the external world at large; and the status of the university has grown.

The media appears throughout this book, as does the Internet, both mixed blessings. The author's bottom line is that no president can underestimate the importance of "incidental image" and no president can stop thinking about media.

The second half of the book carries on (there is no repetition from one chapter to the next, each is an original work on its own) with the struggles of a university president generally, but The George Washington University president specifically, to embody the original vision of Founding Father George Washington, who sought to create a national university; and the struggle to define, price, and deliver education in multiple forms from the Internet to classroom s ances to field trips.

This book is superior to the others I have read at communicating the complexity of the university president's job, with a never-ending stream of constantly changing issues, constituencies, and circumstances.

QUOTE (74): "To put it plainly, we teach facts *and* we teach how to deal with facts. We teach techniques *and* how to use techniques. We teach great thoughts *and* how to think. We teach the *how* because education does not end with a degree in hand. The facts, techniques, and thoughts may change or be disproven or discarded but how to deal with facts, how to use techniques, and how to think are constant."

Harlan Cleveland would say this is the essence of what should be *higher* about higher education. For myself I find most universities today abysmally parochial, insular, and totally oblivious to the urgency of teaching strategic analytic model, the inter-connectedness of all knowledge, or the raw fact that nothing the USA does is going to alter the future UNLESS we can create something that is culturally compelling to Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards such as South Africa and Turkey.

Just four books in this vein:

- Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson
- Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin by Larry Beinhart
- Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries by James McEnteer
- Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Affairs by John Mearsheimer

The author makes one concern crystal clear: elementary schools and high schools are not communicating the value of higher education in relation to complexity and risk.

The author then addresses the dichotomy of US universities being deeply admired overseas, while increasingly dismissed or even despised at home. He comes to five conclusions on this point:

1. Many Americans are not aware of how US history impacted on the Anglophilia of the Ivy League.

2. The Ivy League was snobbish to the point of not taking seriously the other 99% of the higher education institutions in the USA.

3. Higher education leaders are largely ignorant of both the American economy, and the role of the university as an economic engine (this is distinct from Derek Bok's concern over the commercialization--even the prostitution--of universities seeking corporate grants).

4. The anti-academic rebellion of the 1960's (which I might add including the Berkeley Open University that my most respected colleague Jim Warren had something to do with) scarred higher education leaders toward a conformity with "tradition" that rejects "innovative," "unprecedented," and "revolutionary."

5. Americans do not see that the US higher education system has become the model for how one serves the needs of a modern industrial state and a modern liberal democracy.

On the latter point, the author emphasizes the decentralization of higher education across America, not the sins of a neo-fascist corporate state in which Wall Street and a two-party monopoly have managed to screw 99% of the public back into the 1960's.

In the closing chapters two points stay with me.

First, the external culture can have a very negative impact on the brain (and I would add the ethics) of the individual.

Second, the isolation of town and gown from one another must end and a new relationship developed (some call this Service Learning) in which the students and the faculty are more actively engaged in helping immigrants to learn English, high schoolers to "get it," local communities to address their challenges.

This book is still relevant today. Among more recently published books that can contribute to the author's stated path, I would especially recommend:

- The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education by Curtis Bonk
- Reflexive Practice: Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World by Kent Myers
- Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff
- Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine Borgman

Here are a few books that I would recommend for where universities need to go in the next decade. I am quite certain no sitting university president wants to hear this, but as the higher education bubble bursts and many colleges are threatened with shut-down, perhaps a few will venture into what I believe to be terra firma for the future.

- Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
- Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems, and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change
- New World New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution by Robert Omstein and Paul Ehrlich
- Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution by Steve McIntosh

I have reviewed all cited books here at Amazon, but it is more fun to use Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where my 1700+ reviews can be navigated across 98 categories, and where I have posted two book review lists, one positive (our future) and one negative (our present).

One final comment: this book is important to me because I have come to the conclusion the US education, US intelligence (the secret very expensive largely worthless kind), and US research are in severe decline. I believe that US intelligence, done right, is remedial education for policy-makers suffering from severe ideological constipation and persistent hubris, and the we need to enact a Smart Nation Act such as I wrote about in Government Information Quarterly in 1995. Of the $80 billion now being wasted on secret intelligence, I would recommend to a future President of the USA that one third be chopped completely, one third redirected under the direction of a new Deputy Vice President for Education, Intelligence, and Research, and one third be refocused on human and open source intelligence as well as multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making (M4IS2).

The George Washington University is not the only university capable of moving in these new directions, but for various reasons it is well-positioned to be the first. Later this week I will review the author's other book that I have ordered, Big Man on Campus.

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