Paperback. Pub Date: 2007 Pages: 320 Publisher: Penguin The United States asserts is the right to use Military force against 'failed states' around the globe But as Noam Chomsky Argues in this devastating analysis America shares features with many of the regimes it insists are failing and constitute a danger to their neighbours. Offering a comprehensive and radical examination of America past and present. Chomsky shows how this lone superpower - which topples foreign governments. invades states that threaten its interests and imposes sanctions on regimes it opposes - has stretched its own democratic institutions to eaking point. and how an America in crisis places the world ever closer to the ink of nuclear and environmental disaster.

From the funding of repressive regimes to the current 'war on terror', the toppling of governments counter to its beliefs to the invasion of Iraq, America pursues its global strategy no matter what the cost. With the rigour and insight that have made him our most important 'unraveller of accredited lies', Noam Chomsky reveals the truth and the true motives behind America's quest for dominance - and seeks also to show us how the world may yet step back from the brink.

Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [2006]

Anita Desai, through her short stories and novels, two of which, Clear Light of Day and In Custody, have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is one of the most accomplished and admired chroniclers of middle-class India. In this, her latest novel, she tells the story of plain and lumpish Uma and the cherished, late-born Arun, daughter and son of strict and conventional parents—"MamaPapa" in Uma's mind, so united are they in their unyielding views and dictums. Desai perfectly matches form and content: details are few, the focus narrow, emotions and needs given no place. Uma, as daughter and woman, expects nothing; Arun, as son and male, is lost under the weight of expectation.

Now in her forties, Uma is at home. Attempts at arranged marriages having ended in humiliation and disaster, she is at the beck and call of MamaPapa, with only her collection of bangles and old Christmas cards for consolation.

Arun, at university in Massachusetts, is having to spend the summer with the Patton family in the suburbs: their fridge and freezer full of meat that no one eats, and Mrs Patton desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what Arun most wants is to be ignored, invisible.

The novel's counterpointing of India and America is a little forced, whereas Desai's focus on the daily round, whether in the Gangetic plain or suburban America, finely delineates the unspoken dramas in both cultures. And her characters, emblematic in their suffering. but capable of their own small rebellions, give Fasting, Feasting its sharp bite. —Ruth Petrie

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Containing fascinating facts and figures about the world we live in, this title comes with: rankings on more than 200 topics; data on more than 180 countries; detailed profiles of more than 65 of the world's major economies; and special profiles on the Euro area and the World.