Is Blood Thicker Than Water? : Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World

From Pulitzer Prize-winner James M. McPherson comes a brilliant and passionate examination of nationalism in today's world, and its effects on the stability of the world's countries, big and small. Since the end of the Cold War, nationalism has re-emerged as one of the most powerful forces in the modern world. Students of nationalism have analyzed two principal categories of this phenomenon. Ethnic nationalism is more familiar and easier to define; it broke up Yugoslavia into four mutually hostile ethnic nations. It split Czechoslovakia into two nations. It threatens to do the same to Canada. In contrast, civic nationalism defines national identity not by presumed descent from an ancient bloodline with its own language, culture and genetic purity but by citizenship in a national state and loyalty to its political institutions. James M. McPherson focuses on the American Civil War and Quebec's bid for separation from Canada as case studies in the contest between these two strains of nationalism, and offers both implicit and explicit comparisons to modern counterparts. Is Blood Thicker Than Water' will finally give us the perspective to look at this phenomenon clearly and objectively. From the Trade Paperback edition Ron Chernow examines the forces that made dynasties like the Morgans, the Warburgs, and the Rothschilds the financial arbiters of the early twentieth century and then rendered them virtually obsolete by the century's end. As he traces the shifting balance of power among investors, borrowers, and bankers, Chernow evokes both the grand theater of capital and the personal dramas of its most fascinating protagonists. Here is Siegmund Warburg, who dropped a client in the heat of a takeover deal because the man wore monogrammed shirt cuffs, as well as the imperious J. P. Morgan, who, when faced with a federal antitrust suit, admonished Theodore Roosevelt to "send your man to my man and they can fix it up." And here are the men who usurped their power, from the go-getters of the 1920s to the masters of the universe of the 1980s. Glittering with perception and anecdote, The Death of the Banker is at once a panorama of twentieth-century finance and a guide to the new era of giant mutual funds on Wall Street. With The Same Erudition, Discernment, And Crisp Prose That Made His A History Of Warfare An International Bestseller, Keegan Surveys The Literature Of World War Ii, Identifying The Works He Finds Most Important And Illuminating While Examining The Sometimes Savage Controversies Raised By Two Generations Of The War's Historians. John Keegan. Includes Bibliographical References: P. [119]-128. America's foremost authority on Russian communism--the author of the definitive studies *The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime*--now addresses the enigmas of that country's 70-year enthrallment with communism. Succinct, lucidly argued, and lively in its detail, this book offers a brilliant summation of the life's work of a master historian.