Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn Reviewed in Boston Globe

The birth of Middle East strife viewed through the conflict of two men
By Michael Kenney | July 31, 2007
Boston Globe

Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, By Ronald Florence, Viking, 512 pp., illustrated,, $27.95

T.E. Lawrence, the fabled Lawrence of Arabia, and Aaron Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jewish agronomist, met only a few times, meetings that were invariably brief and hostile -- "devoid of amenity," wrote Aaronsohn in his diary after one of those meetings.

But out of those encounters during the final years of World War I, Ronald Florence, an independent historian who lives in Providence, has created a revealing narrative about the territorial conflicts in the Middle East.

For more please click here.

Ian Shapiro's Containment featured in NYTBR!

Ian Shapiro’s “Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror” (Princeton University Press) is featured in a fascinating New York Times Book Review front page essay by Samantha Power of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government :

“Shapiro shows how aggressive action has played into the hands of terrorist recruiters… ‘The idea behind containment,’ Shapiro writes, ‘is to refuse to be bullied while at the same time declining to become a bully.’
“Shapiro is at his most persuasive when he argues against lumping Islamic radical threats together…. Had President Bush adopted Shapiro’s approach on Sept. 12, 2001, it is quite likely that he would have had more success in marginalizing adversaries….”

This thoughtful essay, appearing in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, is not to be missed.

Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and … John Kenneth Galbraith?

A title now represented by the Strothman Agency #1 on the NYT bestseller list -- forty years ago. John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State led the New York Times bestseller list in July 1967. And it's back in print, in a beautiful new edition published by Princeton. For more information, or to buy the book, please click here.

Jessie Gruman in Today's NYT Health Section

Advice on Dire Diagnoses From a Survivor
By JANE E. BRODY
From July 3, 2007, New York Times

Everyone knows lightning is not supposed to strike in the same place twice, let alone four times. Yet it did for Jessie Gruman, 53, the founder and president of the Center for the Advancement of Health, in Washington. She knows all too well what it’s like to be on the receiving end of bad health news: first at age 20 with a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease, 10 years later with cervical cancer, then five years ago with viral pericarditis (a potentially fatal infection of the heart’s lining) and just three years ago with colon cancer.

With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”

But following all four bouts with life-threatening illness, return to health she did, and the lessons she learned prompted her to write “AfterShock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You — or Someone You Love — a Devastating Diagnosis,” published this year by Walker & Company.

I consider this book so valuable I plan to keep it on my bedside table should I need it later on [Emphasis added]. Its recommendations are based not just on the author’s experiences with illness, but also on interviews with more than 250 others: patients, family members, nurses, doctors, health plan administrators, managers of busy practices and nonprofit leaders.

For more, click here.