Childbirth in the Global Village
Author: Dawn Hillier
In this new book, Dawn Hillier compares the experiences of mothers and midwives in America and England with those in Africa and Malaysia. Through vivid descriptions of actual births and careful examination of the local, national and international contexts in which they take place, she explores the roles of culture, policy and the academy in the promotion of political ideals about how human beings should come into this world. Childbirth in the Global Village will resonate with the experiences of midwives everywhere and makes a strong case for redesigning the midwifery curriculum to reflect the interconnectedness of childbirth, midwifery education and practice around the globe.
Book about: Low Salt Cooking or Hypnosis for a Joyful Pregnancy and Pain Free Labor and Delivery
Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East
Author: Martin Indyk
Making peace in the long-troubled Middle East is likely to be one of the top priorities of the next American president. He will need to take account of the important lessons from past attempts, which are described and analyzed here in a gripping book by a renowned expert who served twice as U.S. ambassador to Israel and as Middle East adviser to President Clinton.
Martin Indyk draws on his many years of intense involvement in the region to provide the inside story of the last time the United States employed sustained diplomacy to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and change the behavior of rogue regimes in Iraq and Iran.
Innocent Abroad is an insightful history and a poignant memoir. Indyk provides a fascinating examination of the ironic consequences when American naïveté meets Middle Eastern cynicism in the region's political bazaars. He dissects the very different strategies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to explain why they both faced such difficulties remaking the Middle East in their images of a more peaceful or democratic place. He provides new details of the breakdown of the Arab-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, of the CIA's failure to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and of Clinton's attempts to negotiate with Iran's president.
Indyk takes us inside the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the palaces of Arab potentates, and the offices of Israeli prime ministers. He draws intimate portraits of the American, Israeli, and Arab leaders he worked with, including Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon; the PLO's Yasser Arafat; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak; and Syria's Hafez al-Asad. He describes in vivid detail high-level meetings, demonstrating howdifficult it is for American presidents to understand the motives and intentions of Middle Eastern leaders and how easy it is for them to miss those rare moments when these leaders are willing to act in ways that can produce breakthroughs to peace.
Innocent Abroad is an extraordinarily candid and enthralling account, crucially important in grasping the obstacles that have confounded the efforts of recent presidents. As a new administration takes power, this experienced diplomat distills the lessons of past failures to chart a new way forward that will be required reading.
Publishers Weekly
Missteps and missed opportunities proliferate in this gripping insider history of Middle Eastern diplomacy during the Clinton administration. Indyk, former ambassador to Israel, examines the contradictions inherent in Clinton's Iraq policy with a remarkable level of self-criticism and brings a nuanced perspective to his analysis of Iraq's alleged WMD programs and the reasons for and against war. The book emphasizes Clinton's initial strategic focus on Syrian-Israeli relations, and the author's discussion of Syria runs parallel to his central narrative about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which traces the tumultuous eight years from the hopeful handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993 through the beginning of the second intifada. The author achieves an impressive balance of scale, packing a tremendous amount of anecdotal information throughout, creating a portrait of diplomacy that reveals the influence of countless small details, from ceremonial gifts to friendly kisses, on world affairs. At the same time, the book surveys the enduring challenges that plagued the Clinton team's efforts to bring peace to the region, making insightful connections between the history in which the author participated and the present state of the region. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
A vivid insider's account of the Clinton administration's Middle East statecraft. Where Patrick Tyler's excellent A World of Trouble (2008) spreads over six decades, Indyk drills down, focusing on a single administration's Middle East diplomacy. From his positions as National Security Council member and two-time ambassador to Israel, Indyk closely observed the personalities and myriad political considerations that drove Middle East policymaking from 1992 to 2000. His in-the-room recollections of major players like Syria's Asad, Jordan's King Hussein, Egypt's Mubarak and PLO Chairman Arafat, as well as Israeli leaders Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon add color and dimension to his meticulous reconstruction of the intricacies of high-level diplomacy. Clinton set out to leave well enough alone in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to enforce a "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran and to broker an Arab-Israeli peace, first by achieving a breakthrough with Syria. Though he enjoyed some successes (an unexpected peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, for example) the strategy for the most part unraveled. Indyk hints at Clinton's lack of unwavering principle and political discipline, but he attributes the diplomatic failure largely to the resistance of Arab leaders to change, Israeli political rivalries, Palestinian dysfunctionalism and periodic outbursts of violence and terror that sabotaged any chance for peace. Nevertheless, the author also squarely blames American ignorance, naivete and idealism, examples of which abound here, all comically summarized by a botched instance of presidential gift-giving to Jordan's king and queen. Sympathetic to the earnest efforts of his foreign-policycolleagues-Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, Dennis Ross and Strobe Talbott-Indyk reserves his scorn for the succeeding Bush administration's abandonment of the excruciatingly difficult peace process he so memorably describes. An important cautionary tale-required reading for the next president. Agent: Gloria Loomis/Watkins Loomis
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