And the title story suggests another of the book's recurring concerns: the collapse of a structure representative of imperial solidity, grandeur, leisure, prosperity.
"Obviously with the collapse of the supercommittee," Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican majority leader, said at a veterans commendation ceremony in Richmond, Va., on Tuesday, "we have got an opportunity to maintain the fiscal discipline and allow the cuts to stay in place.
In 1867 the ceiling in the chambers of the Indiana House of Representative collapsed.
But when judges select jurors as if they are there simply to deliver the Jewish vote or the African-American vote, the noble ideal of representative juries collapses into a vulgar invitation for jurors to be loyal to their own groups, and ultimately undermines all confidence in the jury system.
The very structure of American society seemed to be collapsing: it was the end of industrial capitalism, of representative democracy, and the start of something radically new.
The effects of representative bonding imperfections on both the collapse load and the related displacement of the honeycomb core under flatwise compression were evaluated.
This work presents a back-analysis of a sinkhole occurred in 2011 in the town of Marsala, caused by the collapse of an underground quarry, as a representative case study of these phenomena.
Mass escapes in the summer of 1989 via Hungary and mass demonstrations in Leipzig, Berlin, and elsewhere within the GDR in the autumn of 1989 brought about the collapse of communist rule just when the representatives of the GDR and their foreign allies had celebrated the 40th anniversary of East Germany.
Carlos Tevez still wants to leave Manchester City and is not "overly worried" by the collapse of his move to Corinthians, says his representative.
Courtesy of Representative Daniel Lipinski.
