Society and culture: general Books

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Book SynopsisCoping in Broken Britain is for all open-minded adults. It is especially useful for those in early adulthood whose life opportunities have yet to be fully denied.

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Book SynopsisThe Metaverse Dilemma explores a balanced viewpoint of the metaverse from both a theoretical and practical mindset, examining the challenges and opportunities faced when adopting and implementing the metaverse in business and everyday scenarios.

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Book SynopsisWorking and Living in Saudi Arabia provides valuable cultural and practical business information necessary for all professionals working and travelling to Saudi Arabia, including those who may be working and living in other Middle East countries. It also addresses the many changes and opportunities of particular interest to businesswomen and for men who will be working with women, both Saudi and expatriate. Essential reading for all business executives working in Saudi Arabia.

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Book SynopsisIn this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.Written by co-hosts of the hit "Death Panel" podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as "surplus," regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the "unfit" to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this "surplus" population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one's willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy.Capital, it turns out, only fears health.Trade ReviewThis book changed the way I think about health, power, state capacity, extraction, social welfare, and resistance. It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. Readable and filled with concise histories and clear examples to illustrate nuanced analysis, it will no doubt become required reading among those struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism. -- Dean Spade, author of Mutual AidBeatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely animates itself through our host bodies. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick.' Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength. -- Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender ChildBeatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant have been a lifeline for many during the COVID-19 pandemic through their Death Panel podcast, deconstructing the failed American response with a knife that cuts like truth. Here, they do something even more remarkable: imagine a better future. Health Communism doesn't tinker around the edges. It makes a direct assault on the idea that health can survive under capitalism, where the sick are simply disposable, while the system making a killing along the way. No one talks like Adler-Bolton and Vierkant do - those in public health and medicine are too deeply embedded in the status quo to even acknowledge the searing logic of their words. They stake out the far edge of what is possible and remind us that only the journey towards that horizon will make us free. -- Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law SchoolHealth against health! I can't remember the last time I learned so much in under 200 pages. Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come. This exquisitely researched 'surplus manifesto' made me cry tears of rage, but demonstrated powerfully to me that our collective illness can be 'turned into a weapon.' In my view, everyone new to disability liberation should read this text. Everyone who wants to stop the destruction of their bodies by capitalism should join the Death Panel community. If we let them, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant will teach the left how to really understand capitalism, at the cellular and somatic levels. So, if you are holding this book, congratulations. Here is deep wisdom to arm a struggle towards forms of human embodiment as yet undreamed-of; inspiration for a million insurgencies of communist health. -- Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the FamilyI could not help but cheer as I read Health Communism. The most analytically sharp analysis of the relations between capitalism and disability since the pioneering work of Marta Russell, this powerfully explicative work is a rousing manifesto for the sick and becoming-surplus to unite. -- Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to MaimHealth Communism illustrates how people are viewed as fuel from which to extract profits through the medicalization and financialization of health outputs...[it] serves as a wake-up call for the dehumanization of healthcare delivery. -- Roberta E. Winter * The New York Journal of Books *In Health Communism, [Adler-Bolton and Vierkant] show how members of the 'unproductive' surplus class are cast as burdens even as health capitalism sets up entire cottage industries (e.g. for-profit nursing homes, prisons) to extract value from this very population. -- Charlie Markbreiter * Bookforum *This seamless book fills an urgent void in leftist theories of illness...the achievement of such a concise yet cogent framework (aided by the fact that the past years have only confirmed its conclusion) is a marvel. -- Selen Ozturk * PopMatters *Surveying a century of sickness under an increasingly privatized system, in Health Communism Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that we have to demand much more than Medicare for All in order to fix health care. -- Spencer Green * The New Republic *This is a book you should read before you die, because the ideas synthesized by Adler-Bolton and Vierkant could save our collective lives. Health Communism diagnoses our shared social sickness correctly. Rooted in the contemporary reality of mass death and disability, it reworks our familiar, commonsense concepts of sickness and health, care and cure, labor and waste to show how capitalist biomedicine wrings every last drop of productive labor from us before discarding us into the trash heap of 'surplus population' to carelessly be picked over and plundered until our death...Indeed, we are all ill under capitalism. Read this book. Care for your neighbors. Smash capitalism. Malingerers of the world unite. -- Jon Shaffer * Peste Magazine *Health Communism is itself a blueprint, in the (roughly translated) words of SPK, for turning illness into a weapon. -- Jess McAllen * The Baffler *[Health Communism] is a new way to find the universal in the particular, which is the kind of thinking tool we are in desperate need of at the moment. Turning those ideas into practice is a greater challenge. Where to start? Health communists begin with a compelling vision of society not as divided between abled and disabled or sick and well but as a vast web of people, all of whom have both abilities to contribute and needs to meet. -- Malcolm Harris * New York Magazine *Heath Communism is not "well-behaved": It is not interested in sober consideration, dry pontifications. It thrives through a sense of optimism. There is a joy to a manifesto that sits alongside its anger. If it is birthed from complaint and fury, these emotions are funneled through a hope that things could be otherwise-most of all, an optimism for a new collective. -- Jon Venn * Full Stop *Best Books of 2022 -- Joshua Frank * Counterpunch *If you have ever gone to work sick because you need the job to treat the sickness, you know the basic argument of Health Communism to be true: health under capitalism is an impossibility. -- Natalie Adler * LUX Magazine *Health Communism is, most fundamentally, a call for a new and expansive concept of health as a commons, a collective experience, and a collective commitment to human flourishing, freed from the ideological and financial strictures of market discipline. -- Abby Cartus * The New Republic *This creative, wide-ranging book would be important under any circumstances since it helps readers understand widespread social processes that are genuinely violent in their operations yet often curiously bloodless in their ideological depictions. The book is especially urgent in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Health Communism helps make clear both the fundamental social patterns that gave rise to the pandemic, and stresses that any real solutions to those patterns will require far-reaching social change. -- Nate Holdren * Theory & Event *An exciting contribution to materialist disability studies * Critical Inquiry *

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Book SynopsisThe Lilliput Press is proud to be reissuing Mary Carbery’s classic, The Farm by Lough Gur. First published in London in 1937, it was quickly reprinted. Though very well received in England and a best-seller in Dublin, some questioned its quiet recall of an elysian rural Ireland before the Land War, its image of a contented Victorian world in the rich lands of east Limerick that rather jarred with the rhetoric of De Valera’s Ireland. Its woodcut images seemed English not Irish, and its ambiguous authorship gave ammunition to the doubters – was this really the voice of old Mary Fogarty, née O’Brien, or the heavily edited text produced by an Anglo-Irish friend and littérateur, Mary Lady Carbery? The text was indeed crafted by Mary Carbery, a sharp observer and accomplished essayist, but the strength of the book rests on Mary Fogarty’s contribution: the draft notes and papers that she sent over to Mary Carbery, fleshed out by information supplied by other members of the O’Brien clan. Her memories provide what remains an entirely convincing account of the lost world of the strong-farm family in post-famine Munster, one far more secure in its social status than that of other Catholic writers such as Charles Kickham or Canon Sheehan. Eighty years later, there are still few histories and even fewer fictional accounts of that rural Catholic middle class like the O’Briens, who confidently expected to be the inheritors of the earth in a HomeRule Ireland. Their world has rarely been evoked so sensitively as in this beguiling and most engaging narrativeTrade ReviewReview of The Farm by Lough Gur by Mary Carbery Thomas MacGreevy Original Source: Ireland To-Day. Dublin. November 1937. pp.85-86. This text is available only for the purpose of academic teaching and research provided that this header is included in its entirety with any copy distributed. Fiction Peace Is Growth The Farm by Lough Gur. By Mary Carbery. (Longmans. 10s 6d). Machiavelli's axiom that a wise statesman must never go to war if he can attain his ends by peaceful methods applies not only in politics but in literature. The literature of anathema is usually less agreeable to read than the literature produced by temperate minds, and it is always more ephemeral in its effect. It arises from anger which, no matter how righteous it claims to be, is the lowest form of self-indulgence. And though it may be true that human nature is instinctively selfish, it would seem that the great mass of human beings dislike angry writing. They may read it for as long as it remains topical, but cherish it they will not. The literature that remains is the courageous literature that rises above the undeniable wretchednesses of life as it is ordered. Always it is the Virgils who are cherished, not the Juvenals. There has been an immense amount of angry Irish writing in the hundred years since we learned to write out of our own language. Swift had begun it, and our position as an underdog people made it inevitable that the tradition should be continued. Tom Moore might withdraw to where he could write peacefully and in peace, but much of our writing at home had to be partisan writing, and it is all but impossible for partisan writing not to degenerate into angry writing. Now, however, writers living in Ireland seem to be realising that, like militarists in action, angry writers merely augment the troubles they imagine themselves to be putting right. I cannot pretend to an exhaustive knowledge of contemporary Irish literature, and yet in the past eighteen months I have come across several quite realistic Irish books which were remarkable for the temperateness with which they were written. There was Mr. O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound, there was Miss Geraldine Cummins' novel, Fires of Beltaine. And now Lady Carbery has joined forces with her friend, Mrs. Mary Fogarty of County Limerick, in this memoir of home life in the rural Ireland of seventy years ago, a book in which, though facts are faced - it includes tales of the Famine and of Fenianism, of bigamy, of seduction and of imbecility - there are no harsh words. Mrs. Fogarty was brought up in an atmosphere of unsentimental loving-kindness. This was not only because her parents were comfortably off. It was also because they had character. Her father, John O'Brien, and her uncle, Father Richard MacNamara, were nationalist, but cherished the decencies and steered clear of the squalid intrigues of party politics. Her mother, a [p.86] woman of natural distinction, loved the only good literature that came her way, "classical" English literature. A sister, Bessie, listened to stories outside, read Byron surreptitiously at home, and developed into a lovably fiery Irish "patriot," first as a young girl at home and later in France, where she went to school, in Poland, where she went governessing, and in Serbia, where she married. Mrs. Fogarty, herself, went to school to the "F.C.Js." in Bruff, but though she occasionally considered the idea of becoming a nun, she rejected it, went home to Lough Gurand then returned to Bruffas the wife of Richard Fogarty. There were two younger sisters and a brother, a medical student cousin, other relatives and, not less important, a host of farm hands, maids, retainers, neighbours, "ascendency" and "people," and tramps. All these give scope for the authors' quite remarkable gifts as literary portrait painters. The book is like a symphony in terms of portraiture, for the characters are vividly depicted, not only as individuals, but as influencing each others' lives, like so many themes and orchestrations. And it is impossible to say whether the themes or the orchestrations are more admirable, the unassertive integrity of John O'Brien and of Father MacNamara the unassuming dignity of Mrs. O'Brien, the youthful eagerness of Bessie O'Brien, or the pathetic comedy of the "innocent" Dinny-bawn, the simple heroism of Mary Deasyon her wretched deathbed (hoping she would live the couple of hours necessary to finish making her own shroud), the pitiful irony of the return from Americaof a doting mother's disappointing son, the airiness of maids repeating and acting upon pishogues in kitchen and dairy ... Mrs. Fogarty, herself, standing apart from them all and observing them all with her unerring instinct for the humanly significant, has, under Lady Carbery's well-nigh perfect editing, put them and herself on the literary map of Ireland as clearly as Pushkin put the characters in his stories on the literary map of old Russia. The valley of the Lower Shannon was one of the least spoiled parts of Ireland. Now it has electricity works and aerodromes and it must, in the nature of things, become industrialised and hideous. It is very well that a Mrs. Fogarty and a Lady Carbery should have arisen to record its old lovable ways of life while there was yet time. Thomas McGreevy

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Book SynopsisHate crime has become an increasingly familiar term in recent times as problems of bigotry and prejudice continue to pose complex challenges for societies across the world. Although greater recognition is now afforded to hate crimes and their associated harms, the problem is still widespread and many key questions remain unanswered. Are we doing enough to protect vulnerable members of society? Are we doing enough to address the offending behaviour of hate crime perpetrators? Are there better ways of understanding and responding to hate crime?This book brings together contributions from leading experts in the field to address these and other contested issues in this fascinating and often controversial subject area. Drawing upon innovative work being undertaken nationally and internationally, the book offers fresh ideas on hate crime scholarship and policy and in so doing enables readers to re-evaluate the concept of hate crime in the light of fresh research, theory and policy.It provides much-needed ways of taking the ‘hate debate’ forward as well as offering practical suggestions for developing both scholarship and policy in a more progressive manner.Trade Review'This well-organised and well-written collection of essays is a useful contribution that achieves its purpose of advancing hate crime scholarship and policy.The collection engages with many issues on hate crime that are underexplored by researchers and policy makers. It also paves the way for new areas of investigation.' - Jordan Blair Woods, PhD Student, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge in The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, July 2011Table of ContentsFuture Developments for Hate Crime Thinking: Who, What and Why? Part 1: Developing More Nuanced Understandings of Hate Crime 1. The More Things Change − Post 9/11 Trends in Hate Crime Scholarship 2. The Victimisation of Goths and the Boundaries of Hate Crime 3. Future Challenges for Hate Crime Policy: Lessons from the Past 4. Homophobic Hate Crime in Northern Ireland 5. Verbal and Textual Hostility in Context 6. Hate Crime Offenders Part 2: Developing More Nuanced Responses to Hate Crime 7. Law Enforcement and Hate Crime: Theoretical Perspectives on the Complexities of Policing 'Hatred' 8. From Hate to Prevent: Community Safety and Counter-terrorism 9. Hate Crime Victims and Hate Crime Reporting: Some Impertinent Questions 10. Racial Aggravation or Aggravating Racism: Overcoming the Disjunction Between Legal and Subjective Realities 11. Healing Harms and Engendering Tolerance: The Promise of Restorative Justice for Hate Crime

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Book SynopsisWhile much attention has been paid to the making of Paris in the work of writers and artists, little is known about the city as defined and created by the fashion media. Filling this gap in studies of the French capital, this original and illuminating book focuses on how the French fashion press - with its rich conjunction of words and images - has been able to construct Paris as a leading world fashion city.Based in an original analysis of fashion writing and images in contemporary French fashion magazines and newspapers, the book shows how the fashion media have been central to the consecration of the city of Paris on the fashion map, as well as its celebration in the collective imaginary. Agnes Rocamora explores, for example, the figures of 'la Parisienne' and 'la passante' (the female passer by), and the presence of the Eiffel tower in fashion visuals. She gives attention to the continuum between the French journalistic discourse and that of cultural forms such as films, paintings and literature, thus revealing the persistence across texts and time of visions of Paris and shedding light on the production and reproduction of the Paris myth.Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgements Introduction Part I Chapter 1: Paris, France Chapter 2: Paris, Fashion City Chapter 3: Fashion Discourse Part II Chapter 4: Paris, 'Capital de la Mode' Chapter 5: 'La Parisienne' in 'Vogue' Chapter 6: 'Passante de Mode' Chapter 7: The Eiffel Tower in Fashion Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisEmotions are a loaded topic. From love and hate to grief, fear and envy, emotions are increasingly understood as driving forces in social life. The Emotions: A Cultural Reader applies a cross-cultural perspective on emotions. It examines the fact that emotions are socially and culturally constructed, while highlighting problems of comparison and translation of local terms and emotional experiences. Are emotions cultural or universal? To what extent are there culturally distinct emotions? The Emotions closes the traditional Western gap where emotions are separated from rationality and thought: the heart versus mind debate. By presenting both classic essays and new cutting-edge chapters from anthropology, sociology and psychology with important contributions from philosophy and neuroscience, the volume connects a rich range of cross-cultural studies to form a thriving interdisciplinary debate on emotions.Trade Review"I believe that several essays in this book will make readers feel very differently about emotions. It is recommended for anyone who would like to have their cultural beliefs vigorously shaken up. - Media/Culture Reviews online Anthropologist Wulff has assembled the most comprehensive collection of theoretically rich and empirically diverse articles on emotions to date. Highly recommended. - T. L. Loos, CHOICE Magazine In sum, The Emotions: A Cultural Reader is a special, multidisciplinary book that would fit advanced undergraduates in psychology, cross-cultural theory, ethnology and social sciences in general. - The British Psychological Society - Yves Laberge, PhD"Table of ContentsIntroduction: Into the Mood, Helena WulffI. Exploring EmotionsPreface, Helena Wulff1. Emotion Talk Across Cultures, Paul Heelas 2. Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category, Catherine Lutz3. Emotions, Feelings and Hedonics in the Human Brain, Morten L. Kringelbach4. Emotion (or Life, the Universe, Everything), Kay Milton5. Can Happiness be Taught?, Martin E. P. Seligman6. Exploring the Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild7. ´Catholics, Protestants and Office Workers from the Town´: The Experience and Negotiation of Fear in Northern Ireland, Karen D. Lysaght8. Emotions in Academia, Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren9. The Cartesian Divide of the Nation-State: Emotion and Bureaucratic Logic, Don HandelmanII. Love and HatePreface, Helena Wulff10. Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry, Lila Abu-Lughod 11. Perilous Passions: Romantic Love and Love Magic in Russia, Galina Lindquist12. Relations with the Imagined Child: The Emotionality of Becoming an Adoptive Parent in Norway, Signe Howell 13. Knowledge and the Practice of Love and Hate Among the Enxet of Paraguay, Stephen W. KiddIII. Anger, Shame and Grief Preface, Helena Wulff14. Getting Angry: The Jamesian Theory of Emotion in Anthropology, Robert C. Solomon15. The Shame of Headhunters and the Autonomy of Self, Michelle Z. Rosaldo16. Grief and a Headhunter's Rage: On the Cultural Force of Emotions, Renato Rosaldo17. Moving Corpses: Emotions and Subject-Object Ambiguity, Maruska SvasekIV. Desire and Expectations Preface, Helena Wulff 18. ´Cool Play': Emotionality in Dance as a Resource in Senegalese Urban Women's Associations, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach19. The Emotional Life of Gay Men: Observations from New York, Moshe Shokeid20. From Rational Calculation to Sensual Experience: The Marketing of Emotions in Advertising, Timothy D. Malefyt21. Emotional Baggage: The Meaning/Feeling Debate Amongst Tourists, Jonathan SkinnerV. The Emotional Self and Identity Preface, Helena Wulff22. Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali, Clifford Geertz23. Emotions and the Self: A Theory of Personhood and Political Order Among Pintupi Aborigines, Fred R. Myers24. Rachel's Emotional Life: Movement and Identity, Nigel RapportAfterword, Robert A. LeVine

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Book SynopsisIn a series of fourteen letters, written in 1722 as he journeyed through Scotland, John Macky set out to show that the 'kingdom will not appear so despicable as some parts of the world imagine'. Deliberately challenging the many negative accounts of the country in circulation at the time - by disgruntled English travellers and others who had never actually visited - this expatriate Scot published a lively and controversial guide to his native land. It proved to be a popular and influential work. This new edition is introduced and richly annotated by Anne M. McKim, with a full index of people and places.

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Book SynopsisEric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the co-author of the bestseller Modern Romance and author of Palaces for the People, Going Solo, Heat Wave and Fighting for Air. He has contributed to the Guardian, New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Rolling Stone and Wired. He lives in New York City.

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Book Synopsis''This is an important and powerful book because of the rigour of the analysis, the good sense of the innovative strategies for action by government, business and civil society, and the concern throughout for social justice.'' - John Langmore, Director, UN Division for Social Policy and DevelopmentOne in six Australian kids live below the poverty line. Among the twenty-five leading industrialised countries, Australia has the fifth highest child poverty rate. This is a useful, if stark, indicator of the extent of long-term disadvantage in this country.Creating Unequal Futures? brings together eight of Australia''s leading social scientists to introduce the reader to the processes which create and sustain persistent patterns of poverty and disadvantage. Although the contributors use different approaches, their research leads to a united call for a rethinking away from the prevailing ''gloom and doom'' presentations of Australian material life. They signal pathways out of the dilemmas that bind people to poverty and disadvantage. If followed, those pathways will guide us to a future characterised by less inequality. If ignored, we may further entrench patterns of disadvantage and risk creating unequal futures for all Australians.

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Book SynopsisA deeply honest, searching examination of psychotherapy based on the experiences of a young sceptical trainee meeting his first patients. "Why is psychotherapy different from talking to a friend?" Hazanov asks. "Because generations of self-interested therapists told us so?" In the spirit of Mikhail Bulgakov's A Young Doctor's Notebook and Sandeep Jauhar's Intern, this sparkling collection of ten linked short stories, set in New York city, follows Hazanov as he navigates the maze of psychological theories he's been taught, facing the alarming dissonance between them and the tragic reality of his patients' lives. "How does psychotherapy work? And why do people not get any better?" Frustrated by fancy jargon and unrealistic depictions, Hazanov is on a quest to dispel the myths of psychotherapy and discover its essence. In The Fear of Doing Nothing Hazonov illuminates the intimacy, vulnerability and messiness of the therapeutic encounter, providing his answer to the question of what psychotherapy is. Table of ContentsAUTHOR’S NOTE The fear of doing nothing The rock that ties down the balloon What is breakfast? Snowflakes One day Good mourning men The dreamer and the realist Gloom and Maserati Many a time My first private patient ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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