Tips & Traps for Remodeling Your Kitchen (Tips & Traps)

Designed as a child's first art series, Kids Can Draw will help any child learn the basics of drawing. It's as easy as drawing a triangle, circle, or square. By starting with these basic shapes, your child can create a kangaroo, panda, tiger, or any animal of the world.

The Kids Can Draw method provided a fun, effective way for your child to learn basic drawing skills and achieve amazing results.

Kids Can Draw Birds of the World (Kids Can Draw Series)

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Kids Can Draw Birds of the World (Kids Can Draw Series)

Manufacturer: Walter Foster Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Baby-3 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1560102772

Chicago’s reputation for corruption is the basis of local and national folklore and humor. Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago, 1833–2003 unfolds the city’s notorious history of corruption and the countervailing reform struggles that largely failed to clean it up. More than a regional history of crime in politics, this wide-ranging account of governmental malfeasances traces ongoing public corruption and reform to its nineteenth-century democratic roots. Former Chicago journalist James L. Merriner reveals the battles between corrupt politicos and ardent reformers to be expressions of conflicting class, ethnic, and religious values.

From Chicago’s earliest years in the 1830s, the city welcomed dollar-chasing businessmen and politicians, swiftly followed by reformers who strived to clean up the attendant corruption. Reformers in Chicago were called “goo goos,” a derisive epithet short for “good-government types.” Grafters and Goo Goos contends a certain synergy defined the relationship between corruption and reform. Politicians and reformers often behaved similarly, their separate ambitions merging into a conjoined politics of interdependency wherein the line between heroes and villains grew increasingly faint. The real story, asserts Merriner, has less to do with right against wrong than it does with the ways the cultural backgrounds of politicians and reformers steered their own agendas, animating and defining each other by their opposition.

Drawing on original and archival research, Merriner identifies constants in the struggle between corruption and reform amid a welter of changing social circumstances and customs—decades of alternating war and peace, hardships and prosperity. Three areas of reform and resistance are identified: structural reform of the political system to promote honesty and efficiency, social reform to provide justice to the lower classes, and moral reform to combat vice. “In the matter of corruption and reform, the constants might be stronger than the variables,” writes Merriner in the Preface. “The players, rules, and scorekeepers change, but not the essential game.”

Complemented by eighteen illustrations, Grafters and Goo Goos is rife with shocking and amusing anecdotes and peppered with the personalities of famous muckrakers, bootleggers, mayors, and mobsters. While other studies have profiled infamous Chicago corruption cases and figures such as Al Capone and Richard J. Daley, this is the first to provide an overview appropriate for historians and general readers alike. In examining Chicago’s notorious saga of corruption and reform against a backdrop of social history, Merriner calls attention to our constant problems of both civic and national corruption and contributes to larger discussions about the American experiment of democratic self-government.

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One of the only books you'll find with in depth info

Inside Belize (Inside Central America)
Tom Barry
Manufacturer: Interhemispheric Resource Center
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Americas | History | Subjects | Books

General | Travel | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0911213392

America's elite colleges and universities are the best in the world. They are also the most expensive, with tuition rising faster than the rate of inflation over the past thirty years and no indication that this trend will abate.

Ronald G. Ehrenberg explores the causes of this tuition inflation, drawing on his many years as a teacher and researcher of the economics of higher education and as a senior administrator at Cornell University. Using incidents and examples from his own experience, he discusses a wide range of topics, including endowment policies, admissions and financial aid policies, the funding of research, tenure and the end of mandatory retirement, information technology, libraries and distance learning, student housing, and intercollegiate athletics.

He shows that elite colleges and universities, having multiple, relatively independent constituencies, suffer from ineffective central control of their costs. And in a fascinating analysis of their response to the ratings published by magazines such as U.S. News & World Report, he shows how they engage in a dysfunctional competition for students.

In the short run, these colleges and universities have little need to worry about rising tuition, since the number of qualified students applying for entrance is rising even faster. But in the long run, it is not at all clear that the increases can be sustained.

While Ehrenberg rambles on about the minutia of college finances, he never really explains why colleges' expenses rise at a much faster rate than other sectors of the economy. Many businesses must pay for transportation, cooling, and everything else that colleges do, do not have skyrocketing prices.

Tuition Rising does not ever mention the possibility that government financial aid programs have given universities the green light to spend excessively, since many students can get loans or grants to cover the cost increases. College costs are no longer subject to free-market economics, which generally causes prices to be low. In fact, Ehrenberg thinks the problem of college affordability can be alleviate with more federal financial aid!

This book is at best a boring compilation of college expenditures. Worse yet, Tuition Rising makes high tuition increases seem unavoidable, or even justified.