Sociology: death and dying Books

Book SynopsisOne of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016“A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book ReviewFrom the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places—and deep into the dark side of our history.Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes,” Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most f

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Book SynopsisThis study reassesses the criminal body from sentencing to execution and afterlife, using the nineteenth-century Red Barn murder as a case study. Positioned within the burgeoning field of medical humanities, it places culture and power at the centre of debates surrounding criminal justice and public punishment.Table of Contents1. The Murder in the Red Barn 2. The Criminal Body Dismembered 3. The Criminal Body Remembered Appendix 1: Crime, Trial, and Dismemberment Appendix 2: Representations and Afterlives

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Book SynopsisOur progressive philosophy calls for more freedom and more prosperity for more people. Yet author Kevin Galalae says you can''t always have more. Overpopulation is making us victims of our own triumphs over nature. Lacking a popular consensus to control population, the ruling elite have resorted to covert means. Their depopulation project has had considerable success, but at a terrible cost. "Strict secrecy and deception have been necessary to prevent the masses from discovering the bitter truth that for the past 68 years they have been the object of a silent and global offensive, a campaign of attrition that has turned the basic elements of life into weapons of mass infertility and selective death." "The birth of nearly two billion people has been prevented and the death of half a billion hurried. While these goals have been intentional, the architects of the Global Depopulation Policy have unintentionally undermined the genetic and intellectual endowment of the human species and have set back eons of natural selection." We are adding a billion people every 10 - 15 years, while consumption per person has skyrocketed -- placing unsustainable demands on resources like water and fuel. The only decent alternative is voluntary population control to reduce world population. Here are the methods actually being used. Contraception and abortion. Chemical sterilisation: Flouridation, BPA-contaminated plastic and metal food packaging. Drawbacks: increase in chronic illnesses and lowering of IQ will lead to massive degeneracy in a couple generations. The coercive one child policy -- overall a success story for China; surgical sterilisation in India. Biological: synthetic HIV virus in Africa, flu viruses, GMO crops. Lowering human fertility, while weakening the immune system to increase mortality. Psychosocial: weakening the family, forcing women to work, high divorce rates, youth unemployment, countercultures, drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, incarceration, accelerated urbanisation. Successful in Europe where population has started to shrink. Political drawbacks: a secret state conducting genocide against its own people; sham democracy; a culture of deception. Endangering the gene pool and the ecosystem. Even so, it is more humane than the alternative of another world war to reduce numbers. Social costs: economic decline, collapse of social safety nets. Sustainable development policies don''t mention the risks of covert sterilisation that underpin them. "Population control as a substitute to war is the progeny of the bipolar world order that followed World War II ... they agreed to wage a demographic war on their own people, and on those within their spheres of influence, rather than risk their mutually assured destruction in a nuclear confrontation." The way forward: broad popular understanding of the issues. Yet politicians don''t want to open up to a policy based on popular consensus, because that would undermine their power, which is based on manipulation. Aside from his writings, the author''s efforts to awaken the world have included hunger strikes, imprisonment and legal battles.

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