A Bloody Business or Immigrant Acts

A Bloody Business: America's War Zone Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq

Author: Gerald Schumacher

As the U.S. Army shrinks, a private army steps into the breach. A Bloody Business offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes and into the ranks of this mercenary force (numbering as many as 15,000 today) who guard supply convoys, train foreign soldiers, provide security for foreign leaders and dignitaries—and whose workplaces are the most dangerous hot spots on the planet. With its insights into who these men are, what drives them, where they come from, how they prepare, and what they do, this book provides a uniquely close-up and complete picture of the private army behind America’s military muscle.

The author interviewed security contractors and their families, high-ranking coalition officials, and was in Iraq, where he witnessed how private soldiers fought ambushes, trained Iraqi forces, escorted high-level officials in dangerous conditions, and saw the contractor side of the Iraq war. Includes action on the supply lines and front lines of this unique conflict, and the stories of the contractors who live it every day.

Publishers Weekly

Retired army colonel Schumacher polishes the public image of private wartime contractors in this informative if relentlessly glowing account of these "unrecognized and unappreciated patriots" in Iraq and Kuwait. Schumacher gained access to employees from contracting firms MPRI and Crescent Security, and his perspective is one of deep affection and respect-for people who put themselves in harm's way to provide security for diplomats, to move convoys of precious materials and to rebuild the broken infrastructure of war-torn countries. Describing the day-to-day operations of the trucking, training and security contractors he interviewed in Kuwait and Iraq, Schumacher argues that they don't work for the money (MPRI workers' pay comes to under $20 an hour) but out of a sense of adventure, patriotism and expertise. The author's voice is unpretentious but swaggering, tough but sentimental; he's as critical of the Bush administration for its ill-conceived strategies as of the media for what he considers prejudice. There's not much in the way of subtle policy debate or comprehensive analysis ("Department of Defense outsourcing to civilian contractors is an efficient, short-term solution"), but Schumacher writes with a keen sense of justice and empathy as he recounts the harrowing tales of these contractors-for-hire. B&w photos. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

New interesting book: Technology and Strategy or Business Data Communications

Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

Author: Lisa Low

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.

Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant-at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation-displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders.

In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Women's Review of Books

...[Examines] the outsider status of Asians...in twentieth-century America....also [looks] to culture as a source for the creation of alternative notions of identity, community and politics.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
1	Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique	1
2	Canon, Institutionalization, Identity: Asian American Studies	37
3	Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences	60
4	Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism	84
5	Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Writing and the Question of History	97
6	Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictee	128
7	Work, Immigration, Gender: Asian "American" Women	154
	Epilogue	174
	Notes	177
	Bibliography	223
	Index	241