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When his teenaged son Christopher, brain-damaged in a car accident, developed a 106-degree fever following weeks of unconsciousness, John Campbell asked the attending physician for help. The doctor refused. Why bother? The boy's life was effectively over. Campbell refused to accept this verdict. He ...

When his teenaged son Christopher, brain-damaged in a car accident, developed a 106-degree fever following weeks of unconsciousness, John Campbell asked the attending physician for help. The doctor refused. Why bother? The boy's life was effectively over. Campbell refused to accept this verdict. He demanded treatment and threatened legal action. The doctor finally relented. With treatment, Christopher's temperature subsided almost immediately. Soon afterwards he regained consciousness and today he is learning to walk again. This story is one of many Wesley Smith recounts in this groundbreaking. Smith believes that American medicine "is changing from a system based on the sanctity of human life into a starkly utilitarian model in which the medically defenceless are seen as having not just a 'right' but a 'duty' to die." Going behind the current scenes of our health care system, he shows how doctors withdraw desired care based on Futile Care Theory rather than provide it as required by the Hippocratic Oath. And how 'bioethicists' influence policy by considering questions such as whether organs may be harvested from the terminally ill and disabled.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Atlanta was regarded as the gateway to the new, enlightened and racially progressive South. White business owners employed black workers and made their fortunes, while black leaders led congregations, edited periodicals, and taught classes. But in 1906, in ...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Atlanta was regarded as the gateway to the new, enlightened and racially progressive South. White business owners employed black workers and made their fortunes, while black leaders led congregations, edited periodicals, and taught classes. But in 1906, in a bitter gubernatorial contest, Georgia politicians played the race card and white supremacists trumpeted a 'Negro crime' scare. Seizing on rumours of black predation against white women, they launched a campaign based on fears of miscegenation and white subservience. Atlanta slipped into a climate of racial phobia and sexual hysteria that culminated in a bloody riot, which stymied race relations for fifty years. Drawing on new archival materials, Mark Bauerlein traces the origins, development and brutal climax of Atlanta's descent into hatred and violence in the fateful summer of 1906. This book is history at its best-a dramatic moment in time impeccably recreated in a suspenseful narrative, focusing on figures such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois; author Margaret Mitchell and future NAACP leader Walter White; and an assortment of black victims and white politicians who witnessed and participated in this American tragedy.

Fulton J. Sheen, the leading American Catholic of the twentieth century, became familiar to a generation of Americans as the radiant figure in full bishop's robes who held the nation spellbound during the 1950s on his television show, 'Life Is Worth Living'. The American Catholic Church's most ...

Fulton J. Sheen, the leading American Catholic of the twentieth century, became familiar to a generation of Americans as the radiant figure in full bishop's robes who held the nation spellbound during the 1950s on his television show, 'Life Is Worth Living'. The American Catholic Church's most charismatic presence over several decades, Sheen was also its chief evangelist. Among his thousands of converts were celebrities such as Clare Booth Luce and Henry Ford II, and former communists Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley. Reeves discusses these conversions and Sheen's close friendship with J. Edgar Hoover, and details for the first time the struggle between Sheen and his chief rival, Francis Cardinal Spellman, a battle of ecclesiastical titans that led all the way to the Pope and to Sheen's final humiliation and exile. The result of interviews with dozens of Sheen's friends, family members and church colleagues and the unearthing of important new material at the Sheen Archives in Rochester, New York, this is an in depth portrait of this flamboyant churchman and intellectual, and a social history of Catholicism in America during the twentieth century.

In the classics departments of today's universities, Bruce Thornton says, the Greeks are accused of stealing their achievements from black Egyptians, of oppressing their wives and daughters, and of hypocritically speculating about freedom while holding slaves. Most of all, classic Greek culture has ...

In the classics departments of today's universities, Bruce Thornton says, the Greeks are accused of stealing their achievements from black Egyptians, of oppressing their wives and daughters, and of hypocritically speculating about freedom while holding slaves. Most of all, classic Greek culture has come under attack precisely because its glorious achievement, extended into history, is what defines the West and makes it distinct. Thornton clears away these misconceptions. Writing with wit and erudition, he discusses in fascinating detail those areas of Greek life -- sexuality and sexual roles; slavery and war; thought and speculation -- that some modern critics have made into 'contested sites'. Perhaps more importantly, he also reclaims the importance of those core ideas the Greeks invented, ideas about human fate and purpose that shaped the modern world. Nearly seventy years ago, Edith Hamilton published 'The Greek Way', a book that educated two generations of readers about the debt we owe the handful of city-states that developed 'the spirit of the West' some 2500 years ago. 'Greek Ways' is for our time what Hamilton's book was for a prior era -- a classic inquiry that holds up a mirror to Greek culture where we can see ourselves.

When Al Gore took credit for helping invent the Internet, it was not the first story he told. There was also the claim that he and Tipper had inspired Love Story; the insistence after his sister's death of lung cancer that he would fight smoking 'until his last breath', when in fact he continued to ...

When Al Gore took credit for helping invent the Internet, it was not the first story he told. There was also the claim that he and Tipper had inspired Love Story; the insistence after his sister's death of lung cancer that he would fight smoking 'until his last breath', when in fact he continued to cash checks from family tobacco holdings; the 'no controlling legal authority' fiasco; and other tall tales. Nationally syndicated columnist Debra Saunders sees Gore's attempt to create a more exciting self as consistent with his attempts to prove himself as a 'cutting edge' diagnostician of our social ills. "Whether posing as the eco-guru battling 'consumptionism'," she writes, "or the social theorist with a 'Liveability Agenda' calling for federally sanctioned communities, attacking the automobile as the scourge of civilisation, and proposing universal pre-school, Al Gore is a unique figure on our political scene."