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Anticorruption reforms provide excellent political cover for public officials, but do they really reduce corruption? And do the benefits outweigh the costs? Maynard-Knox Professor of Government Frank Anechiarico and James B. Jacobs are authors of the book, The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity, How Corruption Conrol Makes Government Ineffective.

Hamilton College Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History Robert Paquette, in coordination with University of Rochester Professor of Economics Stanley L. Engerman offer this collection of essays which explore the Lesser Antilles from the time of Columbus to the abolition of slavery. Paquette and Engerman attempt to demonstrate how the Lesser Antilles emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as among the most densely populated and advanced economic areas in the world. They hope to show how the Lesser Antilles served as a stepping-stone for expansion of the slave trade and by extension for the plantation system in the Americas.

Hamilton College American Studies and Comparative Literature Professor Thomas Bass has written an anecdotal look at the sad stories of Amerasian children of the Vietnam war. In his book, Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home, Bass examines the stories of children born to American servicemen and Vietnamese women during the war in Vietnam. He focuses on the struggles of these Amerasian children, now adults, attempting to immigrate to the US. Searching for unidentifiable fathers, dealing with bureaucracy and surviving corruption, these young adults try to build themselves a life and finally find acceptance in a society which welcomes them no more than the land of their birth had. Bass tells the sad tales of these immigrants, already Americans by birth, struggling to make it to their new homeland.

Associate Professor of English Lucy Ferriss is the author of Against Gravity: A Novel. This novel tells the story of a young woman longing to escape her dreary Hudson River home whoes life changes when her best friend becomes pregnant and a local storekeeper is accused of child molestation.

In 1999 Terry Brooks '66 published his 17th best-selling novel Angel Fire East . This novel was the Seattle based author's third volume of an epic trilogy of good and evil. Brooks is touted by the Seattle Times as “one of a handful of fantasy writers whose work consistently meets the highest literary standards.”

The growth of global finance since 1960 constitutes one of the most important transformations in social relations during the twentieth century. Using historical, statistical, and graphical techniques, State Institutions, Private Incentives, and Global Capital examines three important aspects of this phenomenal shift in the international political economy. First, Andrew Sobel explores the reawakening of the international financial markets, mapping their extraordinary transformation since the early 1960s and discussing the role of politics in that metamorphosis. The author then offers a fresh understanding of the systematic differences in access for borrowers in this rapidly transforming and expanding global capital pool. He then demonstrates the influence of political factors in producing differential access to the global capital pool. Showing how the character and stability of a country's political system affects investors's decisions to invest in that country, Sobel breaks new ground in understanding the basis for the frequent admonitions by the World Bank and others that a stable political and legal system are essential for states to attract significant foreign investment.

After the fall of Mussolini, Ezra Pound was imprisoned at the American Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa, Italy for his pro-fascist broadcasts made over Rome Radio during WWII. It was during his incarceration that he composed the draft material for his famous Pisan Cantos. This volume contains 150 previously unpublished letters between Ezra and his wife Dorothy Pound that were written throughout his internment and subsequent transfer to Washington, D.C., where he was tried for treason and eventually deemed incompetent and placed in a mental ward. The correspondence will constitute one of the most imporatnt documents in literary modernism, and also one of the most dramatic tales of doomed literary genius in our times.

As American-led forces assemble in Saudi Arabia for the largest military operation since Normandy, computer designer Todd Griffith discovers a secret function burried within the Kali chip. That night he is shot. Five years later, burnt-out Silicon Valley software engineer Nick Aubrey boards a "red-eye" flight to Boston and winds up seated next to a very disturbed man who claims to know the secret of Gulf War Syndrome.

Peter Weltner '64 is the author of How the Body Prays (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Pr., 1999). An "exquisitely written" work, the chronicle of a family, its courage, cowardice, and pride, as distinctively viewed by its diverse members from generation to generation. "A family saga of unusual complexity," lyrical in quality, by an award-winning fiction writer who teaches at San Francisco State University.

Philadelphia: A New Urban Direction poses the question: What must city government do to make the City of Philadelphia a preferred place to live, work, and play into the next century? Philadelphia City Controller Jonathan Saidel and his associates in the City Controller's Office treat the reader to an extraordinary insider's account of the inner workings of city government, utilize sophisticated modeling techniques to present a vision of Philadelphia's future, and present a plethora of novel ideas for improving the city for the 21st-century. It presents the fullest assessment to date of the overall economic, governmental, and social dynamics shaping Philadelphia and the region; serves as a primer to understanding city government and public policy for citizens, policy professionals, and elected leaders alike; and convincingly demonstrates the interconnectedness of the city and its suburbs.