Society and culture: general Books

Book SynopsisThis collection of eloquent essays that examine the relationship between the American landscape and the national character serves to remind us that despite our differences we all belong to the same land (Publishers Weekly).“How was it possible, I wondered, that all of this American land--in every direction--could be fastened together into a whole?”What does it mean when a nation accustomed to moving begins to settle down, when political discord threatens unity, and when technology disrupts traditional ways of building communities? Is a shared soil enough to reinvigorate a national spirit?From the embaattled newsrooms of small town newspapers to the pornography film sets of the Los Angeles basin, from the check-out lanes of Dollar General to the holy sites of Mormonism, from the nation’s highest peaks to the razed remains of a cherished home, like a latter-day Woody Guthrie, Tom Zoellner takes to the highways and byways of a vast land in search of the soul of its people.By turns nostalgic and probing, incisive and enraged, Zoellner’s reflections reveal a nation divided by faith, politics, and shifting economies, but--more importantly--one united by a shared sense of ownership in the common land.

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Book SynopsisQuiet Defiance: The Rhetoric of Silent Protest focuses on the rhetorical dimensions and power of silent protest. Bridging the gap between the study of protest and the study of rhetorical silence (strategic silence meant to communicate to and influence an audience), this book is the first of its kind to concentrate solely on the phenomenon and tradition of silent protest. The contributors to this volume hail from different cultures, disciplines, and fields. They examine past and present-day cases of silent protest with different research questions and paradigmatic perspectives in mind and methodological approaches at hand. Collectively, however, their original chapters offer a rich, multifaceted understanding of the potentialities, limits, nature, effects, risks and rewards of silent acts of protestindividual or otherwiseagainst oppressive, unjust regimes and systems of power.

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Book SynopsisCartographies of Postcolonial Vegetal Politics takes a deep dive into the stratified and rigidly segmented territorialities of Plant Humanities or Critical Plant Studies. It strikes up an epistemic departure from the arboreal structures of plant-thinking' and subsequently lays out plant-becoming' in terms of ontophytological thinking revised in alignment with rhizomatics so as to critically design the discursive edifices of postcolonial vegetal politicsdifferential grammatology of which stands wedded to the production of the new' and thus understood to be able to position vegetality as event-in-(dis)order. Abhisek Ghosal emphasizes the profound importance of Deleuzo-Guattarian grammatologies in pulling up plant-becoming' from being subjected to a set of rigidly structured models of vegetality. It is by working out aleatory eventualities of postcolonial haecceities that structures' of vegetality constituting the intellectual rigour of Critical Plant Studies are tenably discarded to foreground n-1' becomings of vegetalitymultiplicities of which can well be sensed by means of reckoning vegetality as deterritorial vector that can facilitate scholars to cartograph the eventual unfolding of postcolonial vegetal politics afresh.

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Book SynopsisHeather Shay is assistant professor of sociology at South Carolina State University.

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Book SynopsisDamien Lyons is Deputy Chair and Associate Professor in Literacy Education within the Department of Education at Swinburne University of Technology.Kanwarjeet Singh is Research Fellow in the Department of Education at Swinburne University of Technology.Jane Southcott is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash.

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Book SynopsisResearch Methodology for Social and Legal Studies seeks to harness insights from both social and legal methods to promote interdisciplinary research. This is important because of the increasingly close relationship between social and legal issues in contemporary times. Chapters include: "Research Design," "A Critical Analysis of Legal Research Methodology," "The Relevance of History in Social and Legal Research," "Methods of Data Collection in Social and Legal Research and Referencing Styles." The uniqueness of this book makes it beneficial for scholars and other researchers to acquire diverse skills for conducting interdisciplinary research. The editors and contributors offer invaluable experience in pedagogical and practical aspects of research methods.

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Book SynopsisCivilization, Beyond Our Fall explores the realities behind the rise and fall of historic civilizational ideals, especially on the fate of the Western vision. The book begins with the rise, durability, and fall of the historic civilizational profiles of humankind. It continues with the decline of the West, which from our perspective began with World War I and has continued at a faster pace in the 21st century. Itzkoff's prognosis for the next century or two is one of a dismal world of chaos, war, and deep pessimism throughout the world. The book concludes with a prediction of a world of scientific rationalism that will discard the ideologies, irrationalism, and selfishness that now characterize our elites. Here we leave dystopian realities for the perennial human hope of reason and for highly creative communities.

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Book SynopsisNick Buckley MBE explores the relationship between "givers" and "takers," and the damaging symbiotic relationship between them. He examines the motivation of disheveled individuals sitting on street corners holding out paper cups, as well as the intergenerational problem of poverty and welfare dependency. Different types of beggars are highlighted, such as politicians begging for votes, charities begging for donations, and even the woke begging for validation and attention. Buckley shows that begging is a complicated topic, part nature and part nurture, and that many engage in such behavior unknowingly. Unlike most authors on this topic, Buckley explores his own history of begging from being raised in a workless household on benefits, to claiming unemployment benefits as an adult, and the journey that eventually led him to found an award-winning charity. Buckley offers us an antidote to such unbecoming behavior: personal responsibility.

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Book SynopsisBy drawing on the opposing ideas of Carl Jung and Karl Marx, James Driscoll's develops fresh perspectives on urgent contemporary problems. Jung and Marx as thinkers, Driscoll contends, carry the projections of archetypal complexes that go back to the hostile Old Testament brothers Cain and Abel, whose enduring tensions shape our postmodern era. Because Marxism elevates the group over the individual, it is made to order for bureaucrats and bureaucracy's patron archetype, Leviathan. Jungian individuation offers a corrective rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic's affirmation of the ultimate value of free individuals. Although Marxism's promise of justice gives it demagogic appeal, the party betrays that promise through opportunism and a primitive ethic of retribution. Marxism's supplanting the Judeo-Christian ethic with bureaucracy's "only following orders," Driscoll maintains, has created the moral paralysis of our time. As Jung and writers like Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elias Canetti have warned us, the influence of our ever-expanding bureaucracies is a grave threat to the survival of civilized humanity.The primary issues Driscoll addresses include the natures of justice and the soul, individuation and freedom, and mankind's responsibilities within the planetary ecology. Religion, ethics, economics, science, class divisions, immigration, financial fraud, abortion, and affirmative action are also explored in his analysis of the powerful archetypes moving behind Jung and Marx.

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Book SynopsisIn 2020, Steven Greer, an internationally-renowned human rights scholar, was falsely and publicly accused of Islamophobia by the University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC). In July 2021, he was officially exonerated without equivocation or reservation from all BRISOC's allegations. Nevertheless, the University of Bristol, cancelled the Islam, China and the Far East module of his human rights course just as BRISOC demanded. In an almost unbelievable twist of fate, in January 2022 Professor Greer was appointed the first Visiting Research Fellow, and later Research Director, at the Oxford Institute for British Islam, a newly established progressive Muslim think tank and research academy.In this book, Greer documents his struggle to avoid physical harm, resist dismissal, salvage his reputation and career, maintain his livelihood, regain the trust and respect of his colleagues, and counter betrayal by the very institutions he had every right to expect would leap to his defense. His inspirational story will encourage many others to take a similar stand for free inquiry and debate in an age of cruel, shameless, unaccountable, and groundless censorship, vilification, and victimization.Trade ReviewIn this excellent book, Steven Greer documents and discusses the wider implications of his struggle against shockingly un-Islamic vilification by the University of Bristol Islamic Society and the University's shameful 'Islamophobia-phobic' response. It deserves a wide readership, particularly amongst Muslims." - Taj Hargey, Provost, Oxford Institute for British Islam."Professor Greer's horrifying ordeal is yet another salutary reminder of the fragility of academic freedom in the contemporary UK. His account of his own case, together with authoritative reflections on the rise of cancel culture and its implications in academia, sound an alarm bell which nobody who cares about the maintenance of liberal democratic societies should ignore." - Karolien Celie, Legal Officer, The Free Speech Union.

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Book SynopsisDebunking Scholarly Nonsense is a diatribe against the foolish claptrap that serious and respected scholars sometimes foist upon their peers and the public. The material discussed here does not usually derive from extreme political notions, conspiracy theories, or the ruminations of those who accept astrological control, I Ching divination, crystal healing, or chariots of the gods. Rather, the progenitors are physicists, astronomers, psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, and philosophers. The topics under discussion include Holocaust denial, string theory, multiple universes, alien abductions, extraterrestrials, a simulated or non-existent world, non-sentience or poly-sentience, harmful therapies, denials of climate change and Covid vaccination efficacy, among other possibilities. The authors of these articles, essays, papers, and books are not merely ruminating in a void. Their words and ideas influence others and may have detrimental effects in a world already charged with extreme misery.

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