Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have been drawn into exhaustive analyses of what went wrong in "the terrible 20th Century", as Winston Churchill dubbed it. In this book Scheingold adds political novels to those inquiries and argues that they make a distinctive and hitherto neglected contribution to the collective memory of the 20th Century. These fictional accounts are the work of some of the century's most celebrated novelists: Kafka, Heller, Boll, Grass, Vonnegut and others. As refracted through the literary imagination, the "terrible" 20th Century takes on new meaningGÇömeaning that tends to elude historians and social scientists. Novelists peer into the shattered lives, the moral dilemmas, and the emotional chaos of the centuryGÇöthus viewing a collective catastrophe through the everyday lives of victims, victimizers, temporizers, opportunists, true believers, and those who simply averted their eyes. In so doing, these novelists reveal, sometimes prophetically, the etiology of catastrophe, and both deepen our memory of the past and help us think more clearly about the future.

Product Description: Democracy and the rule of law are commonly represented as complementary and indispensable components of the modern democratic state. Whatever the truth of this formulation, it conceals the competing claims of electoral and legal accountability that are the subject of this volume...read more

Assesses the part played by activist attorneys and reform litigation in changing the course of public policy and the use of legal tactics for redistributing power and promoting social change

Product Description: This volume brings together contextually sensitive, cross-cultural, and comparative research that analyzes the ways in which cause lawyering is influencing, and being influenced by, the disaggregation of state power associated with democratization and globalization. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From the perspective of mainstream criminology, the essays collected in this volume may seem to be something of a collateral enterprise - or they may be seen as extending the reach of criminology to others areas of importance. Rather than focusing directly on crime and criminals - these essays seek to identify the forces that determine how, why and with what consequences societies choose to deal with crime and criminals as they do...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Americans find street crime terrifying and repellent. Yet we vicariously seek it out in virtually all of our media: books, newspapers, television, films, and the theatre. Stuart Scheingold confronts this cultural contradiction and asks why street crime is generally regarded in the trivializing and punitive images of cops and robbers that attribute crime to the willful acts of flawed individuals rather than to the structural shortcomings of a flawed society...read more