Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Criminal Investigation or Where Have All the Soldiers Gone

Criminal Investigation

Author: Charles R Swanson

Criminal Investigation is recognized as being one of the most comprehesnive books available in the market. It is widely used in undergraduate courses in Criminal Investigation,and also by Police Departments who purchase it for their offices to study when preparing for promotional examinations.



New interesting textbook: How to Wow with Photoshop Elements 5 or MCTS Self Paced Training Kit

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe

Author: James J Sheehan

An eminent historian offers a sweeping look at Europe's tumultuous twentieth century, showing how the rejection of violence after World War II transformed a continent

In the last decade we've seen an ever-widening rift between the United States and Europe, most visibly over Iraq. But as James J. Sheehan reminds us in his timely book, it wasn't always thus. How did America and Europe come to take such different paths?

In Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? Stanford historian Sheehan charts what is perhaps the most radical shift in Europe's history. For centuries, nations defined themselves by their willingness and ability to wage war. But after World War II, Europe began to redefine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth. Sheehan reveals how and why this happened, and what it means for America as well as the rest of the world.

Succinct yet broad in scope, Sheehan's authoritative history provides much-needed context for understanding the fractured era in which we live.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

It's easy for us to turn up our noses at Europe's not infrequent outbursts of self-righteousness, especially from the intellectual left, but we do well to remind ourselves that Europe speaks from experience that we have not undergone and can only pray we never do. I am no pacifist, but it seems to me that Europe as Sheehan portrays it in this timely, first-rate book is headed on a sound, mature course. Europeans tend to see terrorism "as a persistent challenge to domestic order rather than an immediate international threat" and to attack it with "more effective policing, stricter laws, better surveillance" rather than with a "war." Maybe, just maybe, they know more than we do.

The New York Times - Geoffrey Wheatcroft

…[a] scintillating tour d'horizon—and de force…

Publishers Weekly

After two cataclysmic wars, argues Stanford historian Sheehan, Europe has been transformed from a place where the state was defined by its capacity to make war into a group of "civilian states" that have "lost all interest" in making war. Rather, they are marked by a focus on economic growth, prosperity and personal security. To explore this transformation, Sheehan examines the changes in modern warfare and in its infrastructure and the mobilization of national economies for war. Sheehan looks at the impact in the early 20th century of universal conscription, including its social consequences (such as bringing together different social classes), and its eventual decline; the peace movements marked by the 1899 and 1907 Hague conferences; the effects of the Cold War; the growth of the European Union; and the Euro-American split over the Iraq war. Sheehan's style is clear and fluid, and his work is just the right length. Perhaps his only failing is to scant Europe's "fitful and ineffective" interventions in the Balkans and more distant strife-torn countries, but this pales besides the information offered by this fine contribution to European studies. (Nov.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Europeans and Americans inhabit different planets-certainly, Sheehan (History/Stanford Univ.) writes, when it comes to attitudes toward war. Sheehan's solid book addresses an interesting phenomenon: How is it that Europe, breeding ground for catastrophic wars, has adopted the view that the military is a largely unnecessary evil? One factor, the author suggests, is the changing view of the nation-state. Whereas wars created and reinforced nations, and universal military service was once seen as a means for inculcating the ideals of the state, ever since 1945 supranational organizations, such as the UN and World Court, have assumed some of the state's old duties. Britain had already proved that it was possible to be an only modestly militaristic state and yet control a vast empire. Now, with the postwar loss of empires around the world, Europe's nations no longer needed great armies. (Besides-though Sheehan does not address it at any length-much of the postwar defense tab was being paid by the United States, eager to contain the Soviet Union via NATO, whose mission, a British diplomat remarked, was to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.") However Europe arrived at its new view of force, wars fought on the continent have been remarkably well-contained. As Sheehan observes, a war in the Balkans would once have touched off a conflagration across the continent, but the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were local and, once NATO got involved, easily suppressed. Any increase in militarism seems unlikely, given the widespread renunciation of America's invasion of Iraq, though the balance may be thrown off once militarized Turkey joins the European Union. Sheehan warns that itwill "not be an easy matter to absorb this kind of state into Europe's resolutely civilian politics and culture."Is Europe ripe for the plucking? Perhaps. Sheehan offers a worthy contribution to geopolitics.



Table of Contents:
Prologue: War and Peace in the Twentieth Century xiii

Part I : Living in Peace, Preparing for War, 1900–1914
1. "Without War, There Would Be No State" 3
2. Pacifism and Militarism 22
3. Europeans in a Violent World 42

Part II: A World Made by War, 1914–1945
4. War and Revolution 69
5. The Twenty-Year Truce 92
6. The Last European War 119

Part III : States Without War
7. The Foundations of the Postwar World 147
8. The Rise of the Civilian State 172
9. Why Europe Will Not Become a Superpower 198

Epilogue: The Future of the Civilian State 222 Notes 231 Bibliography 245 Index 261

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