Stories--whether chronicles of truth or fancies of fiction--pervade our world and shape our understanding of it.  They inform our basic impressions of reality and impose structure on our lives.  Yet so intrinsic is our grasp of narrative--we all tell stories and like to hear them--that we find it hard to question its purpose or explain its effects.

In Making Stories, the eminent psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner inquires into this elusive yet fundamental aspect of human nature and asks how we use it to make sense of our lives.  He proposes challenging new ways to think about narrative:  to understand how we tell our stories, to see how we use them to create a senses of self and interpret other people's lives, to learn how literature alters the very idea of what a story is and how law teaches us about our expectations of narrative.  The result is a masterful, provocative synthesis of anthropology, psychology, literature, law and philosophy.  

Many of the major wars of the twentieth century emerged from the ruins of previous peace settlements.  French hostility to the Treaty of Frankfurt of 1871 contributed to the tense political climate that culminated in the First World War;  German resentment of the Treaty of Versailles helped to create the conditions necessary for Hitler's attempt to reshape Europe by force in the Second World War.  Likewise, the Cold War had its roots in the outcome of the titanic Russ-German struggles of 1914-17 and 1941-5 -- the former created the Bolshevik regime which signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the latter brought the Soviet leadership to the negotiating table at Yalta and Potsdam

Beyond Europe, post-1945 wars in Korea, China, the Middle East and Indochina all had their origins in failed peace settlements.  Why did peace so often collapse in this period?  What was the causality that led from peace to war?  Drawing on a series of case studies, Matthew Hughes and Matthew S. Seligmann provide a comprehensive and cohesive study that answers the question of why peace has so often failed in the modern era.  The searching analysis of the key themes of peace and war has implications for conflict resolution across the globe.

The miners' strike against Pittston Coal in 198901990 which spread throughout southwestern Virginia, southern West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky, was one of the most important strikes in the history of American labor, and, as Richard Brisbin observes, "one of the longest and largest incidents of civil disorder and civil disobedience in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century."  The company aggressively sought to break the strike, and workers and their families used a variety of tactics--lawful and unlawful--to resist Pittston's efforts as the situation quickly turned ugly.   

In A Strike Like No Other Strike, Richard Brisbin offers a compelling study of the exercise of political power.  In considering the legal significance of the strike, Brisbin asks the larger question of whether even extreme transgression or resistance can fracture the "imagined coherence of the law."  He shows how each party in the strike invoked the law to justify its actions while attacking those of the other side as unlawful.  In the end, both sides lost;  although the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the union, most of the strikers faced elimination of their jobs and an ongoing struggle for pensions and health benefits. 

Destructive Messages argues that hate speech is dangerous not only when it poses an immediate threat of harm.  It is also dangerous when it is systematically developed over time, becoming part of a culturally acceptable dialogue which can foster the persecution of minorities.

Tsesis traces a causal link between racist and biased rhetoric and injustices like genocide and slavery.  He shoes that hate speech and propaganda, when left unregulated, can weave animosity into the social fabric to such a great extent that it can cultivate an environment supportive of the commission of hate crimes.  Tsesis uses historical examples to illuminate the central role racist speech played in encouraging attitudes that led to human rights violations against German Jews, Native American, and African Americans, and also discusses the dangers posed by hate speech spread on the Internet today.  He also offers an examination of the psychology of scapegoating.

Destructive Messages argues that when hate speech is systematically developed over time it poses an even greater threat than when it creates an immediate clear and present danger.  Tsesis offers concrete suggestions concerning how to reform current law in order to protect the rights of all citizens.

When it passed Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972, Congress was doing something laudable and also long overdue--prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in America's schools.  But thirty years later, hijacked by activist bureaucrats and feminist legal interpretation, a law originally designed to guarantee equal opportunity for women has become the most explicit, government-enforced quota regime in America.  Today the most visible result of Title IX is not more female athletes, but the elimination of some of the most prestigious men's sports programs in the country in the name of "gender equity."  The championship Providence College baseball team, Princeton's wrestling squad, Boston University's football team and the Olympic powerhouse UCLA men's swimming and diving program are among the hundreds of men's sports teams have found been eliminated. 

What is at stake in the ever-expanding power of Title IX, Gavora shows, is how women are to be seen in our society.  On the one side stand traditional "gender" feminists who believe -- despite the fact that women now outperform, outscore and out-graduate men -- that they are still victims of a male conspiracy in schools.  On the other side is a new generation of feminists such as Gavora herself, who stand for women's rights but do not believe that women and men are identical in their interests and abilities -- and refuse to penalize men for this fact of life. 

This new history of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the "Great Constitutional War" is a critical, revisionist portrayal of FDR's personal role in initiating, on the advice of his attorney general, Homer S. Cummings, a "reorganization of the federal judiciary,"  or what in fact constituted a bald-faced attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court in 1937.  

Unlike other studies of this episode, this well-researched history, encompassing the years 1933 to 1938, shows that FDR's court plan was unprecedented and unduly provocative, and was contrived throughout its gestation period in darkest secrecy until its announcement on February 5, 1937, to a stunned Congress and public.  Roosevelt attempted to do what no other American president before or since would dream of doing, and in the process demonstrated that he had a limited knowledge of the law and U.S. history, and an imperfect understanding of what is meant by an independent judiciary.  The claim made by the Roosevelt administration that the court bill was 100 percent constitutional is demolished by the evidence the author puts forward in this comprehensive study.  The bill is revealed as a raw exercise in revenge against an eminent tribunal because it had defied his will by invalidating important elements of his New Deal.

The importance of the book's subject, the thorough documentation, its reasoned and reasonable criticism, all set forth in a lively but lucid writing style, should give this book a popular readership that reaches well beyond academia.