The Works of Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex and The Ethics Of Ambiguity - 2 Books in One Volume with Biography

He had been given a break from work detail and was just finishing his smoke when he heard a loud explosion from third platoon’s area. As he ran up to see what was going on, several marines were already there standing around looking at a downed marine. Holiday rushed up to the scene and was stopped short in his tracks. There before him lay a man almost blown in half. He could see the man’s spine and little else. He looked into the man’s face, a young kid no older than he was himself. He saw the man look straight at him and then look away.

Holiday watched the life leave the young man’s eyes. He knew the exact instant the man had died. It left him cold and numb—in shock. But Holiday found it fascinating to see life one second and then nothing the next. Holiday kept staring at the dead marine, pondering what he had just witnessed, vaguely aware of being given orders to remove the body. But Holiday was frozen—unable to move to obey that order.

How did marriage, considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, become a venue for personal fulfillment in contemporary America? How did the notion of romantic love, a novelty in the Middle Ages, become a prerequisite for marriage today? And, if the original purpose of marriage was procreation, what exactly is the purpose of marriage for women now?

Combining "a scholar's rigor and a storyteller's craft"(San Jose Mercury News), distinguished cultural historian Marilyn Yalom charts the evolution of marriage in the Judeo Christian world through the centuries and shows how radically our ideas about marriage have changed.

For any woman who is, has been, or ever will be married, this intellectually vigorous and gripping historical analysis of marriage sheds new light on an institution most people take for granted, and that may, in fact, be experiencing its most convulsive upheaval since the Reformation.

This is a question that still bluntly assaults every reporter and cameraman covering war anywhere in the world. When to stop? Where to stop? Ever to stop? We lived with that challenge all during the war, yet so many of us felt invulnerable—was it innocence, arrogance, the intoxication of war? We were objective reporters, weren’t we, not combat soldiers. We gave ourselves exemptions from death. We armored ourselves with naiveté.

Dr. Taylor presents an original theory of the dynamics of confusion in governments and in the lives of ordinary citizens. His model postulates a vicious cycle in which the causes of confusion evoke coping tactics which often worsen those causes. One of the most destructive coping tactics, “Find-an-Enemy-and-Lose-Your-Confusion” spawns conflict and increases the lies and other information pathology already circulating. “Exports” from this vicious cycle include environmental depredation, political oppression, war and death.

Using his model, he illuminates the binds entrapping Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson as they expanded the Vietnam War in 1965. He then extends the theory using fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs), and submits the model to the ultimate test: forecasting in “real time” certain events in the 1999 NATO-Serbia War and its aftermath. He published these predictions on his web site during and after that war.

This project represents the first use of FCMs to forecast political-military events in real time.

The concluding chapters test whether a knowledge of confusion dynamics will increase empathy between opponents, and whether the model is useful for planning humanitarian efforts by betterment organizations.