David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

protesters being hit by Connor’s water cannons. The people in the photographs, he says, were spectators like Gadsden, not demons ...

they had been saying, ‘Turn the water hose on. Turn the water hose on.’ And Bull Connor, then somebody threw a brick, and he sta ...

good humor and good spirit. Not any vitriolic response on the part of even the Negro spectators, which to me, again, was an exam ...

Part Three ...

The Limits of Power I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither ...

Chapter Seven ...

Rosemary Lawlor “I wasn’t born that way. This was forced upon me.” ...

1. When the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, Rosemary Lawlor was a newlywed. She and her husband had just bought a house in B ...

in Northern Ireland. Every day, they grew more frightened. “I’d come home at night,” Lawlor said, “and there would be writing on ...

days before mobiles. We walked out. The fear was in me. I put my son in his pram. I gathered up best we could pieces of clothes ...

all-Catholic neighborhood of Ballymurphy, in West Belfast, where Lawlor’s parents lived. But they had no car, and with Belfast i ...

going any further.” The Lawlors gathered up their baby and their worldly possessions and ran for their lives. At the beginning o ...

Catholic church near the docks. For five hours, the two sides fought, locked in deadly gun battle. Hundreds of fires burned acro ...

coming around with two lids of pots, and she was banging them together and she was shouting, ‘Come on, come out, come out. The p ...

knew as many people in the Lower Falls as she did in Ballymurphy. The British Army had put the entire neighborhood under curfew ...

locked in their houses, and there’s children. You have to remember, some houses then had twelve, fifteen kids in them. D’you kno ...

protect us. They’ll turn on us—you wait and see.’ And he was one hundred percent right. They turned on us. And the curfew was th ...

2. The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists— Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.— wrote a report ...

unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple: Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption t ...

they are calculated. In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem. If there are riots in the str ...