Spinglish—the devious dialect of English used by professional spin doctors—is all around us. And the fact is, until you’ve mastered it, politicians and corporations (not to mention your colleagues and friends) will continue putting things over on you, and generally getting the better of you, every minute of every day—without your even knowing it.However, once you perfect the art of terminological inexactitude, you’ll be the one manipulating and one-upping everyone else! And...

“I’ve got the name for our publishing operation. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.” So recounts Bennett Cerf in this wonderfully amusing memoir of the making of a great publishing house. An incomparable raconteur, possessed of an irrepressible wit and an abiding love of books and authors, Cerf brilliantly evokes the heady days of Random House’s first decades.Part of the vanguard of young New York publishers who revo...

IGNORE THIS BOOK AT YOUR PERIL!Did you know that carrots cause blindness and bananas are radioactive? That too many candlelight dinners can cause cancer? And not only is bottled water a veritable petri dish of biohazards (so is tap water, by the way) but riding a bicycle might destroy your sex life?In Encyclopedia Paranoiaca, master satirists Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf have assembled an authoritative, disturbingly comprehensi...

Despite the torrent of coverage devoted to war with Iraq, woefully little attention has been paid to the history of the region, the policies that led to the conflict, and the daunting challenges that will confront America and the Middle East once the immediate crisis has ended. In this collection, Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, coeditors of the acclaimed Gulf War Reader, have assembled essays and documents that present an eminently readable, up-to-the-moment guide -- from ev...

A playful easy reader in the tradition of Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop that teaches the basics of word construction.From award-winning humorist Christopher Cerf comes a super-simple, delightfully silly Beginner Book in which the rhymed text and the position of the words on the page teach the basics of word construction. Written in the style of Dr. Seuss's classic Hop on Pop with rhyming words placed directly above each other to show their shared constru...

Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq is the definitive collection -- systematically categorized, indexed, and footnoted for your convenience -- of authoritative misinformation, disinformation, misunderstanding, miscalculation, egregious prognostication, boo-boos, and just plain lies, about the Iraq War."Never before has such a large and diverse group of experts been so unanimously in favor of a particular national policy as they were in the case of the U.S. ...

From the minds that brought you The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, comes a wickedly funny send-up of the most dangerous trend ever to strike love, romance, and relationships— sexual correctness. In the be-sensitive-or- else era, everyone needs a guide to the essential don'ts and don'ts of sexual behavior and courtship. If a man compliments his date on her dress, should she go to the police? If a businesswoman licks her lips during a meeting, should ...

Osama bin Laden was the most wanted man in American history—an enemy who brought the United States what President George W. Bush called “a day of fire,” and ushered in a new era of terrorism. It took a decade of blood and sacrifice, of determination and frustration, but finally, in a nighttime raid at the end of a dirt road in Pakistan, the hunt for Bin Laden ended with a gunshot. It was a dramatic climax to a long and painful chapter.But now what? The terrorist threat that has def...

In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen?Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Mu...

An End to Evil charts the agenda for what’s next in the war on terrorism, as articulated by David Frum, former presidential speechwriter and bestselling author of The Right Man, and Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense and one of the most influential foreign-policy leaders in Washington.This world is an unsafe place for Americans—and the U.S. government remains unready to defend its people. In An End to Evil, David Frum and Richard Perle s...

Richard Haass, a member of the National Security Council staff in the George H. W. Bush administration and the State Department director of policy planning for George W. Bush, reviews the causes and strategies of the first and second Iraq wars while providing a thoughtful examination of the means and ends of U.S. foreign policy.War of Necessity, War of Choice—part history, part memoir—provides invaluable insight into some of the most important recent event...

In the autumn of 2002, Atlantic Monthly national correspondent James Fallows wrote an article predicting many of the problems America would face if it invaded Iraq. After events confirmed many of his predictions, Fallows went on to write some of the most acclaimed, award-winning journalism on the planning and execution of the war, much of which has been assigned as required reading within the U.S. military.In Blind Into Baghdad, Fallows takes us from the planning ...