History : Germany

Perhaps no medical breakthrough in the twentieth century is more spectacular, more hope-giving, or more fraught with ethical questions than organ transplantation. Each year some 25,000 Americans are pulled back from the brink of death by receiving vital new organs. Another 5,000 die while waiting for them. And what distinguishes these two groups has become the source of one of our thorniest ethical questions. In Raising the Dead, Ronald Munson offers a vivid, often wrenchingly dramatic account of how transplants are performed, how we decide who receives them, and how we engage the entire range of tough issues that arise because of them. Each chapter begins with a detailed account of a specific case--Mickey Mantle's controversial liver transplant, for example--followed by careful analysis of its surrounding ethical questions (the charges that Mantle received special treatment because he was a celebrity, the larger problems involving how organs are allocated, and whether alcoholics should have an equal claim on donor livers). In approaching transplant ethics through specific cases, Munson reminds us of the complex personal and emotional dimension that underlies such issues. The book also ranges beyond our present capabilities to explore the future possibilities in xenotransplantation (transplanting animal organs into humans) and stem cell technology that would allow doctors to grow new organs from the patient's own cells. Based on extensive scientific research, but written with a novelist's eye for the human condition, Raising the Dead shows readers the reality of organ transplantation now, the possibility of what it may become, and how we might respond to the ethical challenges it forces us to confront.  more...

Price: $55.00

This volume analyses French and German diplomacy during the Intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) on economic and monetary union (EMU) and political union and the subsequent national treaty ratification process in each country. more...

Price: $44.95

This book traces the logic and the peculiarities of German economic development through the Weimar Republic, Third Reich and the Federal Republic. more...

Price: $190.00

German History from the Margins offers new ways of thinking about ethnic and religious minorities and other outsiders in modern German history. Many established paradigms of German history are challenged by the contributors' new and often provocative findings, including evidence of the striking cosmopolitanism of Germany's 19th-century eastern border communities; German Jewry's sophisticated appropriation of the discourse of tribe and race; the unexpected absence of antisemitism in Weimar's campaign against smut; the Nazi's embrace of purportedly "Jewish" sexual behavior; and post-war Germany's struggles with ethnic and racial minorities despite its avowed liberalism. more...

Price: $39.95

A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the GDR, and the end of the Cold War, Germany has begun to cope with the political, economic, social, and nationalistic challenges unification has posed to its institutions and way of life in both the western and eastern part of the once divided nation. The books' 11 authors, all experts in their field, analyze the way united Germany has tackled the many unforeseen problems and highlighted the gradually emerging short and long-term patterns in Germany's slow adjustment to the new realities. more...

Price: $125.00