Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
Amazing Grace is Jonathan Kozol’s classic book on life and death in the South Bronx—the poorest urban neighborhood of the United States. He brings us into overcrowded schools, dysfunctional hospitals, and rat-infested homes where families have been ravaged by depression and anxiety, drug-related violence, and the spread of AIDS.
Once on the margins of European empires, notably those of France, England and Spain, then a focus of international rivalries and wars during the 18th century, Canada is now a nation that is front and center in the world's affairs. Canada's emergence as a modern industrial nation and a key player in the resource, commodities, and financial institutions that make up today's world shows many aspects of what ex-colonial powers have gone through—except that compromise and reform rather than revolution and revolt have been the cardinal historical features.
“Zakaria . . . may have more intellectual range and insights than any other public thinker in the West.” —Boston Sunday Globe
“This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” So begins Fareed Zakaria’s blockbusting bestseller on the United States in the twenty-first century. How can Americans understand this rapidly changing international climate, and how might the nation continue to thrive in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.
In 1851 Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, it was the high water mark of English achievement - the nation at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, at the heart of a burgeoning Empire, with a queen who would reign for another 50 years. In the following 150 years, the fate of the nation has faced turmoil and transformation. But it is too simple to talk of decline? Has Great Britain sacrificed its identity in order to stay part of the present world order. Leading historian, Jeremy Black, completes the landmark four volume Brief History of Britain series with a brilliant, insightful examination of how present day Britain was formed.