Search results for ""author rath"

Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success of this mission has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Critics have often characterized Russian Futurism as an expression of utopian daydreaming by young artists who were unrealistic in their visions of Soviet society and naïve in their comprehension of the Bolshevik political agenda. By tracing the political and ideological evolution of Russian Futurism between 1905 and 1930, Iva Glisic challenges this view, demonstrating that Futurism took a calculated and systematic approach to its contemporary socio-political reality. This approach ultimately allowed Russia's Futurists to devise a unique artistic practice that would later become an integral element of the distinctly Soviet cultural paradigm. Drawing upon a unique combination of archival materials and employing a theoretical framework inspired by the works of philosophers such as Lewis Mumford, Karl Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, Fred Polak, and Slavoj Žižek, The Futurist Files presents Futurists not as blinded idealists, but rather as active and judicious participants in the larger project of building a modern Soviet consciousness. This fascinating study ultimately stands as a reminder that while radical ideas are often dismissed as utopian, and impossible, they did—and can—have a critical role in driving social change. It will be of interest to art historians, cultural historians, and scholars and students of Russian history.

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Imagining Transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism. Embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender-variant people, the category quickly gained momentum in public health, social service, scholarly, and legislative contexts. Working as a safer-sex activist in Manhattan during the late 1990s, David Valentine conducted ethnographic research among mostly male-to-female transgender-identified people at drag balls, support groups, cross-dresser organizations, clinics, bars, and clubs. However, he found that many of those labeled “transgender” by activists did not know the term or resisted its use. Instead, they self-identified as “gay,” a category of sexual rather than gendered identity and one rejected in turn by the activists who claimed these subjects as transgender. Valentine analyzes the reasons for and potential consequences of this difference, and how social theory is implicated in it.Valentine argues that “transgender” has been adopted so rapidly in the contemporary United States because it clarifies a model of gender and sexuality that has been gaining traction within feminism, psychiatry, and mainstream gay and lesbian politics since the 1970s: a paradigm in which gender and sexuality are distinct arenas of human experience. This distinction and the identity categories based on it erase the experiences of some gender-variant people—particularly poor persons of color—who conceive of gender and sexuality in other terms. While recognizing the important advances transgender has facilitated, Valentine argues that a broad vision of social justice must include, simultaneously, an attentiveness to the politics of language and a recognition of how social theoretical models and broader political economies are embedded in the day-to-day politics of identity.

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Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid–nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912–33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country’s wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents.Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912–33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua’s most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs’ reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the “modern woman,” and other “vices of modernity” emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936–79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979–90.

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The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds is the first major historical study of the creation and development of the prison system in Peru. Carlos Aguirre examines the evolution of prisons for male criminals in Lima from the conception—in the early 1850s—of the initial plans to build penitentiaries through the early-twentieth-century prison reforms undertaken as part of President Augusto Leguia’s attempts to modernize and expand the Peruvian state. Aguirre reconstructs the social, cultural, and doctrinal influences that determined how lawbreakers were treated, how programs of prison reform fared, and how inmates experienced incarceration. He argues that the Peruvian prisons were primarily used not to combat crime or to rehabilitate allegedly deviant individuals, but rather to help reproduce and maintain an essentially unjust social order. In this sense, he finds that the prison system embodied the contradictory and exclusionary nature of modernization in Peru.Drawing on a large collection of prison and administrative records archived at Peru’s Ministry of Justice, Aguirre offers a detailed account of the daily lives of men incarcerated in Lima’s jails. In showing the extent to which the prisoners actively sought to influence prison life, he reveals the dynamic between prisoners and guards as a process of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance. He describes how police and the Peruvian state defined criminality and how their efforts to base a prison system on the latest scientific theories—imported from Europe and the United States—foundered on the shoals of financial constraints, administrative incompetence, corruption, and widespread public indifference. Locating his findings within the political and social mores of Lima society, Aguirre reflects on the connections between punishment, modernization, and authoritarian traditions in Peru.

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A timely examination of the attachments we form to objects and how they might be used to reduce waste Rampant consumerism has inundated our planet with pollution and waste. Yet attempts to create environmentally friendly forms of consumption are often co-opted by corporations looking to sell us more stuff. In Things Worth Keeping, Christine Harold investigates the attachments we form to the objects we buy, keep, and discard, and explores how these attachments might be marshaled to create less wasteful practices and balance our consumerist and ecological impulses. Although all economies produce waste, no system generates as much or has become so adept at hiding its excesses as today’s mode of global capitalism. This book suggests that managing the material excesses of our lives as consumers requires us to build on, rather than reject, our desire for and attraction to objects. Increasing environmental awareness on its own will be ineffective at reversing ecological devastation, Harold argues, unless it is coupled with a more thorough understanding of how and why we love the things that imbue our lives with pleasure, meaning, and utility. From Marie Kondo’s method for decluttering that asks whether the things in our lives “spark joy” to the advent of emotionally durable design, which seeks to reduce consumption and waste by increasing the meaningfulness of the relationship between user and product, Harold explores how consumer psychology and empathetic design can transform our perception of consumer products from disposable to interconnected. An urgent call for rethinking consumerism, Things Worth Keeping shows that by recognizing our responsibility for the things we produce, we can become better stewards of the planet.

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Mechanisms and standards exist to safeguard the health and welfare of the patient, but for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—used to treat depression and other mental illnesses—such approval methods have failed. Prescribed to thousands over the years, public relations as opposed to medical trials have paved the way for this popular yet dangerous and controversial treatment option. Doctors of Deception is a revealing history of ECT (or shock therapy) in the United States, told here for the first time. Through the examination of court records, medical data, FDA reports, industry claims, her own experience as a patient of shock therapy, and the stories of others, Andre exposes tactics used by the industry to promote ECT as a responsible treatment when all the scientific evidence suggested otherwise. As early as the 1940s, scientific literature began reporting incidences of human and animal brain damage resulting from ECT. Despite practitioner modifications, deleterious effects on memory and cognition persisted. Rather than discontinue use of ECT, the $5-billion-per-year shock industry crafted a public relations campaign to improve ECT’s image. During the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatry’s PR efforts misled the government, the public, and the media into believing that ECT had made a comeback and was safe. Andre carefully intertwines stories of ECT survivors and activists with legal, ethical, and scientific arguments to address issues of patient rights and psychiatric treatment. Echoing current debates about the use of psychopharmaceutical interventions shown to have debilitating side-effects, she candidly presents ECT as a problematic therapy demanding greater scrutiny, tighter control, and full disclosure about its long-term cognitive effects.

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Between 1900 and 1950, many internationalist U.S. women referred to themselves as "citizens of the world." This book argues that the phrase was not simply a rhetorical flourish; it represented a demand to participate in shaping the global polity and an expression of women's obligation to work for peace and equality. The nine women profiled here invoked world citizenship as they promoted world government—a permanent machinery to end war, whether in the form of the League of Nations, the United Nations, or a full-fledged world federation. These women agreed neither on the best form for such a government nor on the best means to achieve it, and they had different definitions of peace and different levels of commitment to genuine equality. But they all saw themselves as part of a global effort to end war that required their participation in the international body politic. Excluded from full national citizenship, they saw in the world polity opportunities for engagement and equality as well as for peace. Claiming world citizenship empowered them on the world stage. It gave them a language with which to advocate for international cooperation. Citizens of the World not only provides a more complete understanding of the kind of world these women envisioned and the ways in which they claimed membership in the global community. It also draws attention to the ways in which they were excluded from international institution-building and to the critiques many of them leveled at those institutions. Women's arguments for world government and their practices of world citizenship represented an alternative reaction to the crises of the first half of the twentieth century, one predicated on cooperation and equality rather than competition and force.

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When political theorists teach the history of political philosophy, they typically skip from the ancient Greeks and Cicero to Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and then on to the origins of modernity with Machiavelli and beyond. Paul Stern aims to change this settled narrative and makes a powerful case for treating Dante Alighieri, arguably the greatest poet of medieval Christendom, as a political philosopher of the first rank. In Dante's Philosophical Life, Stern argues that Purgatorio's depiction of the ascent to Earthly Paradise, that is, the summit of Mount Purgatory, was intended to give instruction on how to live the philosophic life, understood in its classical form as "love of wisdom." As an object of love, however, wisdom must be sought by the human soul, rather than possessed. But before the search can be undertaken, the soul needs to consider from where it begins: its nature and its good. In Stern's interpretation of Purgatorio, Dante's intense concern for political life follows from this need, for it is law that supplies the notions of good that shape the soul's understanding and it is law, especially its limits, that provides the most evident display of the soul's enduring hopes. According to Stern, Dante places inquiry regarding human nature and its good at the heart of philosophic investigation, thereby rehabilitating the highest form of reasoned judgment or prudence. Philosophy thus understood is neither a body of doctrines easily situated in a Christian framework nor a set of intellectual tools best used for predetermined theological ends, but a way of life. Stern's claim that Dante was arguing for prudence against dogmatisms of every kind addresses a question of contemporary concern: whether reason can guide a life.

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Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, "humanity" is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices— the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting— Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view.

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In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance made the Ohio River the dividing line between slavery and freedom in the West, yet in 1861, when the Civil War tore the nation apart, the region failed to split at this seam. In Slavery's Borderland, historian Matthew Salafia shows how the river was both a physical boundary and a unifying economic and cultural force that muddied the distinction between southern and northern forms of labor and politics. Countering the tendency to emphasize differences between slave and free states, Salafia argues that these systems of labor were not so much separated by a river as much as they evolved along a continuum shaped by life along a river. In this borderland region, where both free and enslaved residents regularly crossed the physical divide between Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, slavery and free labor shared as many similarities as differences. As the conflict between North and South intensified, regional commonality transcended political differences. Enslaved and free African Americans came to reject the legitimacy of the river border even as they were unable to escape its influence. In contrast, the majority of white residents on both sides remained firmly committed to maintaining the river border because they believed it best protected their freedom. Thus, when war broke out, Kentucky did not secede with the Confederacy; rather, the river became the seam that held the region together. By focusing on the Ohio River as an artery of commerce and movement, Salafia draws the northern and southern banks of the river into the same narrative and sheds light on constructions of labor, economy, and race on the eve of the Civil War.

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Taking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness. Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. She discusses rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources, and examines the cultural politics surrounding the movement—how the Neo-Pagan movement creates identity by contrasting itself against the dominant culture and how it can be understood in the context of early twenty-first-century identity politics. Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America.

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Assessments of the costs of war generally focus on the financial, political, military, and territorial risks associated with involvement in violent conflict. Often overlooked are the human costs of war, particularly their effects on population well-being. In War and the Health of Nations, Zaryab Iqbal explores these human costs by offering the first large-scale empirical study of the relationship between armed conflict and population health. Working within the influential "human security" paradigm—which emphasizes the security of populations rather than states as the central object of global security—Iqbal analyzes the direct and indirect mechanisms through which violent conflict degrades population health. In addition to battlefield casualties, these include war's detrimental economic effects, its role in the creation of refugees and forced migration, and the destruction of societies' infrastructure. In doing so, she provides a comprehensive picture of the processes through which war and violent conflict affect public health and the well-being of societies in a cross-national context. War and the Health of Nations provides a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the influence of violent interstate and intrastate conflict on the quality of life of populations and empirically analyzes the war-and-health relationship through statistical models using a universal sample of states. The analyses provide strong evidence for the direct as well as the indirect effects of war on public health and offer important insights into key socio-economic determinants of health achievement. The book thus demonstrates the significance of population health as an important consequence of armed conflict and highlights the role of societal vulnerabilities in studies of global security.

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In 2006, while travelling in Argentina, young entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie encountered children too poor to afford shoes, who developed injuries on their feet that often led to serious health problems. Blake knew he wanted to help, but rather than start a charity, he went against conventional wisdom and created a for profit business to help the children who he met. With the help of a local shoemaker, Blake struck out to merge activism and fashion in the form of a local canvas shoe worn by farmers and gauchos alike, called the alpargata. Blake called his creation TOMS Shoes (which stands for "Tomorrow's Shoes") and promised to give a pair of new shoes to a child in need for every pair that he sold. Starting with only two hundred pairs of handmade shoes, optimism, and entrepreneurial charisma, Blake successfully launched TOMS into the high fashion world. They can now be seen adorning the feet of celebrities such as Keira Knightley, Scarlett Johansson, and Tobey Maguire. Blake's mission is to prove that you can achieve financial success and make the world a better place at the same time. In this book, he shares the six counterintuitive principles that have guided the growth of TOMS for the past three years: Make business personal Be resourceful without resources Reverse retirement Keep it simple Stay humble Give more, advertise lessThe result is an inspiring account of a young man whose entrepreneurial spirit was able to affect change in the world, and a call to others to be inspired to do the same.As part of the One for One initiative, Random House will provide a new book to a child in need with every copy of Start Something That Matters purchased.

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Max Weber famously argued that the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe was premised on the emergence of a distinctive set of attitudes - including the pursuit of profit for its own sake - which he called ‘the spirit of capitalism’. Today, when capitalism has spread across the globe, the spirit of capitalism would appear to reign supreme. In this important book Bernard Stiegler takes a very different view: what we are witnessing today is not the triumph of the spirit of capitalism but rather its demise, as our contemporary ‘hyper-industrial’ societies become increasingly uncontrollable, profoundly irrational and incapable of inspiring hope. Disenchantment and despair have become the everyday lived experiences of countless individuals. Far from being a moment of liberation, May '68 was just the first symptom of our increasing disenchantment and 'spiritual misery'. The libidinal energy that originally underpinned capitalism has become an unbound force, unleashing drives that can no longer be contained. Is there an alternative? Stiegler argues that the development of alternatives must begin with a new industrial policy, designed to recognize that technologies are what Plato called pharmaka, meaning both poison and cure. Industrial society has a future only if we can create technologies that foster relations of care (otium) for people whose spirit has been exhausted by contemporary consumerism. We must develop an ecology not only to protect the planet but also to renew the exploited energies of human desire. This volume - the third in a trilogy that includes The Decadence of Industrial Democracies and Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals - will consolidate Stiegler's reputation as one of the most original philosophers and cultural theorists of our time.

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For anyone who has wonderedWhy does everyone else seem to be able to make romantic relationships work, and I can't?What's wrong with me?Why is love so hard?Psychologist and bestselling memoirist Kerry Cohen is all too familiar with the questions she often hears from her clients-and has asked herself. Even though sex and love are some of the most universal, sought-after experiences we have, many of us lack the tools and understanding to approach them in a healthy way. Without knowing it, many people struggling with sex and love actually fall somewhere on the spectrum of sex and love addiction (SLA).Sex and love addiction is still wildly misunderstood. It's shrouded in secrecy and shame, and many counselors lack the training to address it-leaving people who need help without resources. Yet SLA isn't a binary of you are or you aren't, rather, it's a spectrum. Kerry Cohen knows this all too well as both a therapist and someone who identifies on the SLA spectrum. Based on research and her own clinical experience, Crazy for You dives into SLA and provides an inclusive framework for understanding relationships, along with practical exercises and advice for self-assessment, discovery, and healing:Part one explains the sex and love addiction spectrum, helping you determine where you fall on it and how you got therePart two introduces strategies for breaking the spell of sex and love addiction, like behavior modifications and self-awareness techniquesPart three teaches you how to navigate healthy, safe, and fulfilling relationships

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Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them--and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything--a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.

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In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields--including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology--to provide a rigorous transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical framework--one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution, the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich possibilities of such transdisciplinary work. Everything distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our species because the rules do not change through inexorable macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules, and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies that lack laws, government, and jails. Throughout the book, Gintis shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.

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Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness. Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us. The Next Catastrophe is a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready? In a new preface to the paperback edition, Perrow examines the recent (and ongoing) catastrophes of the financial crisis, the BP oil spill, and global warming.

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The desegregation crisis in Little Rock is a landmark of American history: on September 4, 1957, after the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called up the National Guard to surround Little Rock Central High School, preventing black students from going in. On September 25, 1957, nine black students, escorted by federal troops, gained entrance. With grace and depth, Little Rock provides fresh perspectives on the individuals, especially the activists and policymakers, involved in these dramatic events. Looking at a wide variety of evidence and sources, Karen Anderson examines American racial politics in relation to changes in youth culture, sexuality, gender relations, and economics, and she locates the conflicts of Little Rock within the larger political and historical context. Anderson considers how white groups at the time, including middle class women and the working class, shaped American race and class relations. She documents white women's political mobilizations and, exploring political resentments, sexual fears, and religious affiliations, illuminates the reasons behind segregationists' missteps and blunders. Anderson explains how the business elite in Little Rock retained power in the face of opposition, and identifies the moral failures of business leaders and moderates who sought the appearance of federal compliance rather than actual racial justice, leaving behind a legacy of white flight, poor urban schools, and institutional racism. Probing the conflicts of school desegregation in the mid-century South, Little Rock casts new light on connections between social inequality and the culture wars of modern America.

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In this discerning book, Monteagle Stearns, a former career diplomat and ambassador, argues that U.S. foreign policymakers do not need a new doctrine, as some commentators have suggested, but rather a new attitude toward international affairs and, most especially, new ways of learning from the Foreign Service. True, the word strangers in his title refers to foreigners. However, it also refers to American foreign policymakers and American diplomats, whose failure to "speak each other's language" deprives American foreign policy of realism and coherence. In a world where regions have become more important than blocs, and ethnic and transnational problems more important than superpower rivalries, American foreign policy must be better informed if it is to be more effective. The insights required will come not from summit meetings or television specials but from the firsthand observations of trained Foreign Service officers. Stearns has not written an apologia for the American Foreign Service, however. Indeed, his criticism of many of its weaknesses is biting. Ranging from a description of Benjamin Franklin's mission to France to an analysis of the Gulf War and its aftermath, he offers a balanced critique of how American diplomacy developed in reaction to European models and how it needs to be changed to satisfy the demands of the twenty-first century. Full of examples drawn from Stearns's extensive experience, Talking to Strangers addresses the problems that arise not only from an overly politicized foreign policy process but also from excessive bureaucratization and lack of leadership in the Foreign Service itself. Anyone interested in our nation's future will benefit from reading Stearns's pull-no-punches analysis of why improving American diplomacy should be a matter of urgent concern to us all.

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An Economist Best Book of the YearHow India’s Constitution came into being and instituted democracy after independence from British rule.Britain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge.Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution—the longest in the world—came into effect.More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.

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A Foreign Affairs Book of the YearA Spectator Book of the Year“Insightful…a deft, textured work of intellectual history.”—Foreign Affairs“A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.”—Peter Frankopan, The SpectatorFor most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home.Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China’s role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world.“A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership’s strategy has evolved across eras…At its most interesting when probing Beijing’s motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.”—Wall Street Journal“The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is…original.”—The Economist

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A thousand miles east of Mirgorod, the great capital city of the Vlast, deep in the ancient forest, lies the most recent fallen angel, its vast stone form half-buried and fused into the rock by the violence of impact. As its dark energy leeches into the crash site, so a circle of death expands around it, slowly - inexorably - killing everything it touches. Alone in the wilderness, it reaches out with its mind.The endless forest and its antique folk lore are no concern to Inspector Vissarion Lom, summoned to the capital in order to catch a terrorist - and ordered to report directly to the head of the secret police. A totalitarian state, worn down by an endless war, must be seen to crush home-grown terrorism with an iron fist. But Lom discovers Mirgorod to be more corrupted than he imagined: a murky world of secret police and revolutionaries, cabaret clubs and doomed artists. Lom has been chosen because he is an outsider, not involved in the struggle for power within the party. And because of the sliver of angel stone implanted in his head at the children's home. Lom's investigation reveals a conspiracy that extends to the top echelons of the party. When he exposes who - or rather what - is the controlling intelligence behind this, it is time for the detective to change sides. Pursued by rogue police agents and their man-crushing mudjhik, Lom must protect Kantor's step-daughter Maroussia, who has discovered what is hidden beneath police headquarters: a secret so ancient that only the forest remembers. As they try to escape the capital and flee down river, elemental forces are gathering. The earth itself is on the move.

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Companies, communities, and individuals fall for many reasons, but one of the most common—and easily avoidable—is the failure to reinvent. When people and organizations rest on prior successes rather than driving purposeful transformation, they discover too late that they have lost their market position altogether to competitors and external forces. The most successful companies, brands, and individuals make reinvention a regular part of their business strategies. Transformation demands an ongoing process of discovery and imagination, and The Road to Reinvention lays out a systematic approach for continually challenging and reinventing yourself and your business. Venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur Josh Linkner identifies six elements in any business that are ripe for reinvention and shares examples, methods, and step-by-step techniques for creating deliberate, productive disruption. Throughout The Road to Reinvention, Linkner also explores the history—the great rise, unprecedented fall, and now rebirth—of his beloved hometown, Detroit. First rising to greatness as the result of breathtaking innovation, Detroit had generations of booming growth before succumbing to apathy, atrophy, and finally bankruptcy. Now, the city is rising from the ashes and driving sustainable success through an intense focus on reinvention. Linkner brings an insider's view of this incredible story of grit, determination, and creativity, sharing his perspective on Detroit's successes and setbacks as a profound example of large-scale organizational and personal transformation. Change is inevitable. You need to decide: Will you drive that change, or be driven away by it? Will you disrupt or be disrupted? By choosing to deliberately reimagine your own status quo, you can secure a strong future for both your company and your career.

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With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion that would claim Taiwan and Korea, among others. Assimilation policies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea’s liberation, Korean was labeled the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these texts were also excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders.In Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s and then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia.A Center for Korean Research Book

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Copyright law is important to every stage of media production and reception. It helps determine filmmakers' artistic decisions, Hollywood's corporate structure, and the varieties of media consumption. The rise of digital media and the internet has only expanded copyright's reach. Everyone from producers and sceenwriters to amateur video makers, file sharers, and internet entrepreneurs has a stake in the history and future of piracy, copy protection, and the public domain. Beginning with Thomas Edison's aggressive copyright disputes and concluding with recent lawsuits against YouTube, Hollywood's Copyright Wars follows the struggle of the film, television, and digital media industries to influence and adapt to copyright law. Many of Hollywood's most valued treasures, from Modern Times (1936) to Star Wars (1977), cannot be fully understood without appreciating their legal controversies. Peter Decherney shows that the history of intellectual property in Hollywood has not always mirrored the evolution of the law. Many landmark decisions have barely changed the industry's behavior, while some quieter policies have had revolutionary effects. His most remarkable contributions uncover Hollywood's reliance on self-regulation. Rather than involve congress, judges, or juries in settling copyright disputes, studio heads and filmmakers have often kept such arguments "in house," turning to talent guilds and other groups for solutions. Whether the issue has been battling piracy in the 1900s, controlling the threat of home video, or managing modern amateur and noncommercial uses of protected content, much of Hollywood's engagement with the law has occurred offstage, in the larger theater of copyright. Decherney's unique history recounts these extralegal solutions and their impact on American media and culture.

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Abraham Lincoln has long dominated the pantheon of American presidents. From his lavish memorial in Washington and immortalization on Mount Rushmore, one might assume he was a national hero rather than a controversial president who came close to losing his 1864 bid for reelection. Drawing on a wide array of materials - painting and sculpture, popular magazines and school textbooks, newspaper accounts and oratory - Barry Schwartz aims at this sort of contradiction in his study of the role Lincoln's reputation and memory has played in American life. Schwartz explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln's reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions and how his reputation, over the next four decades, diminished and grew. Schwartz links the vagaries of Lincoln's image to broad transformations of the nation, arguing that Lincoln's life symbolized America's development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and articulated the roles of economic and political reform, military power and nationalism in the country's self-conception. Lincoln's memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp", acting as a reflection of the nation's concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political and regional communities. The first part of the study that will continue through the present, "Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory" is the story of how America has shaped its past selectivey and imaginatively, but around a real person whose character and achievements symbolized his country's ideals.

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'Have we come to misunderstand children? Have we forgotten that children's consciousness, their minds, are intrinsically different from ours? And is that why we are trying to train them to become 'adult', rather than realizing we need to relearn our way of thinking in order to understand children?' Given the fast pace of modern life, traditional qualities associated with childhood - imagination, play, wonder...fun! - are in danger of being left behind. Surrounded by technology and pressured into early learning, the modern child is often bounced between the 'entertainment' of television and computer games and the premature intellectualization of early reading and school tests. Sally Schweizer calls for a new evaluation of childhood and an awakening to the real needs of children. As a mother of four, and having spent more than three decades working in education (as a kindergarten teacher, teacher-trainer and advisor), she is well qualified to ask questions and offer solutions. "Well, I Wonder" is packed with practical advice, anecdotes, humour and delightful quotes from the children Schweizer has taught. Her approach is based on the study and practice of Rudolf Steiner's educational philosophy, but she writes from personal, first-hand knowledge gained from her long experience. Schweizer guides the reader through the stages of childhood development and explains children's need of daily rhythm, movement and play. She emphasizes the importance of guarding the quality of imagination, and indicates the significance of festivals and celebrations. She offers helpful tips and wise advice throughout this well-illustrated book, which also features an 8-page colour section on the evolution of children's drawings.

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Famously labelled the father, poet, and prophet of green architecture and a vocal proponent of the idea that any project in architecture or design must present new or better ways of living or be deemed immoral, Emilio Ambasz is an award-winning architect, industrial designer, and protean maker of forms. He has invented highly efficient engines, modular furniture, streetlamps, flexible pens, expandable suitcases, ergonomic door handles, wrist-computers, dental hygiene systems, and 3D posters. He created the Vertebra chair, the first ever automatic, ergonomic chair in the world, now part of the permanent collections at MoMA and The Met in New York. In architecture he has long been a pioneer, and has retained a belief in the environment, or rather the larger ecology, as fundamental in viewing the world: as Professor Bergdoll notes of Ambasz in his introduction, his philosophy of green over gray may often have fallen on deaf ears at the height of Postmodernism, but it today seems profoundly relevant. And it is in the context of today that the book considers the work of Emilio Ambasz and its three main areas of concentration architecture, industrial design, curating with an aim of shining a light on the interdisciplinary nature of the work as a whole. Featuring built and manufactured designs that have achieved iconic fame and challenged others to approach new ways of reconciling architecture and nature notably the Prefectural Hall at Fukuoka, Japan, and the conservatory buildings of the San Antonio Botanical Garden, in addition to his own unique house outside Seville in Spain the book also considers Ambasz s work as curator at MoMA and his ongoing influence and legacy.

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Pearl Lowe has been a singer in a hugely successful pop group, a fashion model and a friend to some of the most famous people in the country. In the nineties when Britpop was in full swing and London was officially the coolest place on the planet, Pearl really did have it all. She was a beautiful woman with a glamorous career and a rock and roll husband she adored, as well as a growing family of gorgeous kids. Except, actually, the parties and the homelife were in terrible tension because Pearl was drinking and taking drugs to such excess that she wasn't sure she would survive. Pearl was a junkie before she discovered party drugs like ecstasy and cocaine. She managed to look after her kids in between enormous binges, but she knew she had a choice to make: confront the demons, get clean and have her life back, or give up and slip away further into addiction, illness, death. Pearl made her choice. These days she lives with her husband and children in the countryside and she has left the London lifestyle behind. But she isn't the kind of person who could ever give up on glamour - it's just that these days she designs her own line of beautiful lace dresses rather than killing herself slowly with booze and drugs. She is happy. Pearl's story is a fascinating insight into a world that appears scintillating but is relentless in its destructiveness. It's also inspiring in its message that recovery is possible and sustainable, for everyone.

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I have aimed to find a good balance of verbal explanations without ignoring the hardcore variations you have to know. In case you find some of the analyses a bit too long, don’t be discouraged! They have been included mainly to illustrate the thematic ideas and show in which direction the game develops once the theoretical paths have been left. That’s why I have actually decided to cover 37 games in their entirety, rather than cutting off my analysis with an evaluation. I believe that model games help you to better understand an opening, but certainly also the ensuing middle- and endgames. Just as in the The Modernized Sveshnikov, also in this book I have made frequently use of correspondence and engine games. With a lack of over the board (elite) tournaments, most elite players made their switch to the world of online chess as well. These games with a shorter time control are often full of mistakes, but the opening stage is still relevant. Hence, I have decided to include these online games whenever I thought them to be a useful addition to our repertoire. With the completion of this work and The Modernized Sveshnikov, I think I have succeeded in offering the reader a complete, ambitious, and sound Black repertoire against 1.e4. I am incredibly satisfied with the result of this work, as I think the mix of new ideas, beautiful variations, model games, extensive analyses and explanation of key concepts will inspire many chess fans. I would like to wish you all an enjoyable read and hope that you will be able to apply some of my recommendations in your own games. You no longer have to fear any Anti-Sicilian! Robert Ris Amstelveen, The Netherlands September 2021

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As many parents know, decorating and furnishing a child’s room can be both a pleasure and a problem: you have somehow to find a balance between practicality, playfulness, comfort, safety, originality and making the most of the space available. Some of the world’s best-known designers and design companies have risen to the challenge of creating furniture and accessories specifically for children. Rather than being merely scaled-down adult designs, the best designs for children should respond to their express needs: as well as being durable, safe and easy to clean, they should nurture a child’s development and encourage creativity and the use of imagination. This stylish book presents some 250 designs for children, both iconic pieces of furniture, furnishings and toys and more recent creations based on the latest technological advances. From Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Aarnio and Nanna Ditzel through to Marcel Wanders and Javier Mariscal, and from Knoll and Artek to Alessi, MDF Italia and Magis, the biggest names in design have produced beds, tables, chairs, storage, rugs, cutlery and playthings that can be used from children’s earliest days through to the start of adolescence. With a fresh, appealing layout, the book is divided into three main sections – furniture, accessories and toys – within which the designs are further arranged into such categories as cribs and cots, bookcases, mirrors, mobiles and rocking horses. Throughout, concise descriptions are accompanied by colourful and lively illustrations. Whether you are a style-conscious parent seeking ideas for a functional yet fun nursery, bedroom, playroom or study, a design professional or simply a fan of contemporary design, this is an enchanting

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"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." We have heard and read this sentence all our lives. It is perfectly familiar. But if we pause long enough to ask ourselves why Jefferson wrote it in exactly this way, questions quickly arise. Jefferson chose to use rather special and very precise terms. He did not simply claim that we have these rights; he claimed they are unalienable. Why "unalienable"? Unalienable, of course, means not alienable. Why was the distinction between alienable and unalienable rights so important to the Founders that it made its way into the Declaration? For that matter, where did it come from? You might almost get the impression that the Founders' examination of our rights had focused on alienable versus unalienable rights--and you would be correct. In addition, the Declaration does not simply claim that these are truths; it claims they are self-evident truths. Why "self-evident"? The Declaration's special claim about its truths, it turns out, is the result of those same deliberations as a result of which, in the words of George Washington, "the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period." If a friendly visitor from another country sat you down and asked you with sincere interest why the Declaration highlights these very special terms, could you answer them clearly and accurately and with confidence? Would you like to be able to?

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Women and girls with disabilities find themselves constantly having to deal with multiple, intersectional discrimination due to both their gender and their disability, as well as social conditioning. Indeed, the intersection made up of factors such as race, ethnic origin, social background, cultural substrate, age, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender, disability, status as refugee or migrant and others besides, has a multiplying effect that increases discrimination yet further. Where conditions are equal, women with disabilities do not enjoy equal opportunities in terms of their participation in all aspects of society; rather, they are all too often excluded, amongst others from education, employment, access to poverty reduction programmes, from taking part in political and public lives and, moreover, some legislative deeds actually prevent them from making decisions regarding their own lives, also as regards sexual and reproductive rights. History, attitudes and prejudices of the societies to which we belong, including of families, have created and continue to feed into a negative stereotypical image of women and girls with disabilities, thereby helping further isolate and marginalise them yet more. Very often, they are also ignored by information media and, when they do gain media attention, the approach tends to considers them from the perspective of medical-assistance needs, silencing their abilities and valuable contribution to the society in which they live. The book seeks to pay the right attention to the condition of women with disabilities, offering points for reflection, also on the different, often invisible, cultural and social undertones that continue today to feed into prejudicial stereotypes.

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Interviews with people of faith including: Sara Maitland | Sister Wendy Beckett | Delia Smith | The Revd Richard Coles | Dermot O'Leary | Cherie Blair | Archbishop Desmond Tutu | Bronwen Astor | Amos Oz | Nick CavePeter Stanford has been interviewing people of faith during his thirty-five years as a journalist at national papers including the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and The Guardian, as well as for the church press. What fascinates him in such conversations is how creating a space to talk unguardedly about faith unlocks so much more: what shaped and continues to shape the public and private lives of high-profile names; how those values connect with the work they are best known for; and why they believe the search for faith makes them who they are. This collection of the best of his interviews - some with household names, others with those not so immediately familiar, but all people of achievement with a resonant story to tell - aims to lift the lid on a topic that has become increasingly marginalised in the public square of our increasingly secular and sceptical society, where to 'do God' can feel like breaking a taboo. Put together, the 44 subjects collectively demonstrate that, rather than being all about doctrine and dogma, there are as many ways of exploring faith as there are individuals currently doing it. These intriguing interviews with activists, writers and artists, politicians, rebels and those who have taken vows will appeal to committed believers, those on the fringes of faith, and those who look in from the outside with curiosity.

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Complete preparation for the revised New York City’s Specialized High School Admission TestIf you’re applying to get into one of New York City’s highly selective specialized high schools, you’ll get the competitive edge you need with McGraw Hill New York City SHSAT, Fourth Edition. This test is required for students applying to the Bronx High School of Science, the Brooklyn Latin School, Brooklyn Technical High School, High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, High School of American Studies at Lehman College, Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, Staten Island Technical School, and Stuyvesant High School.McGraw Hill New York City SHSAT, Fourth Edition offers the most comprehensive preparation available, with complete information about the revised SHSAT, an intensive review of all topics, and three full-length practice tests.Features: FULLY UPDATED for the latest exam requirements: all answer choices feature the updated four (rather than five) answer choices to match the latest test format 3 full-length practice tests Comprehensive review and practice for the new Revising/Editing in the English Language Arts section Grammar and Mechanics chapter with specific grammar rules typically covered by SHSAT Extensive practice for “grid-in” Math questions 300-question diagnostic test to help focus your preparation Review of all English Language Arts and Mathematics topics, including reading, arithmetic, algebra, probability, statistics, and geometry Special chapter focusing on math for 9th-grade test takers

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The Time Is Out of Joint handles the Shakespearean oeuvre from a philosophical perspective, finding that Shakespeare's historical dramas reflect on issues and reveal puzzles which were taken up by philosophy proper only in the centuries following them. Shakespeare's extraordinary handling of time and temporality, the difference between truth and fact, that of theory, and that of interpretation and revelatory truth are evaluated in terms of Shakespeare's own conjectural endeavors, and are compared with early modern, modern, and postmodern thought. Heller shows that modernity, which recognized itself in Shakespeare only from the time of Romanticism, found in Shakespeare's work a revelatory character which marked the end of both metaphysical system-building and a tragic reckoning with the inaccessibility of an absolute, timeless truth. Heller distinguishes the four stages found in constantly unique relation in Shakespeare's work (historical, personal, political, and existential) and probes their significance as time comes to fall 'out of joint' and may be again set aright. Rather than initially bestowing upon Shakespeare the dubious honorary title of philosopher, Heller probes the concretely situated reflections of characters who must face a blind and irrational fate either without taking responsibility for the discordance of time, or with a responsibility which may both transform history into politics, and set right the time which is out of joint. In the ruminations and undertakings of these characters, Shakespeare's dramas present a philosophy of history, a political philosophy, and a philosophy of (im)moral personality. Heller weighs each as distinctly modern confrontations with the possibility of truth and virtue within a human historical condition no less multifarious for its momentariness.

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Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer. “After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all. When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life. In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth Coincides with four solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Berlin. Includes interview with Alec Soth by Hanya Yanagihara.

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The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures - The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time.The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them.The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing your assumptions are all explained in this book.Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when to do it, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.If your organization is starting a new venture, and you're thinking how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development you need The Four Steps to the Epiphany.Essential reading for anyone starting something new. The Four Steps to the Epiphany was originally published by K&S Ranch Publishing Inc. and is now available from Wiley. The cover, design, and content are the same as the prior release and should not be considered a new or updated product.

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Don't be so hard on yourself – use compassion focused therapy as your guide It's often said that we're our own worst critics—and it's true. Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies offers straightforward and practical advice that helps you view yourself through a more sympathetic lens. This motivating text covers the key principles of compassion focused therapy, which guide you in caring for your wellbeing, becoming sensitive to your needs, recognising when you are distressed, and extending warmth and understanding to yourself. This transformative resource provides you with metrics that you can use to monitor your progress, including sensitivity, sympathy, empathy, and overall wellbeing. Initially developed to assist people experiencing high levels of shame and self-criticism, compassion focused therapy increases your awareness of the automatic reactions that you experience—and motivates you to combat negative reactions with kindness and affection. Used on its own or in combination with other therapeutic approaches, the value of compassion focused therapy is supported by strong neuropsychological evidence. Understand how to handle difficult emotions with greater ease—and less stress Transform difficult, potentially damaging relationships into positive aspects of your life Encourage and motivate yourself to continually meet your goals, rather than criticise yourself for perceived failures Stop being so hard on yourself, and appreciate yourself for who you are Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies is a wonderful resource if you are seeing—or thinking about seeing—a therapist who utilises compassion techniques, or if you would like to leverage the principles of compassion focused therapy to manage your own wellbeing.

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Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

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How nonstate military strategies overturn traditional perspectives on warfareSince September 11th, 2001, armed nonstate actors have received increased attention and discussion from scholars, policymakers, and the military. Underlying debates about nonstate warfare and how it should be countered is one crucial assumption: that state and nonstate actors fight very differently. In Nonstate Warfare, Stephen Biddle upturns this distinction, arguing that there is actually nothing intrinsic separating state or nonstate military behavior. Through an in-depth look at nonstate military conduct, Biddle shows that many nonstate armies now fight more "conventionally" than many state armies, and that the internal politics of nonstate actors—their institutional maturity and wartime stakes rather than their material weapons or equipment—determines tactics and strategies.Biddle frames nonstate and state methods along a continuum, spanning Fabian-style irregular warfare to Napoleonic-style warfare involving massed armies, and he presents a systematic theory to explain any given nonstate actor’s position on this spectrum. Showing that most warfare for at least a century has kept to the blended middle of the spectrum, Biddle argues that material and tribal culture explanations for nonstate warfare methods do not adequately explain observed patterns of warmaking. Investigating a range of historical examples from Lebanon and Iraq to Somalia, Croatia, and the Vietcong, Biddle demonstrates that viewing state and nonstate warfighting as mutually exclusive can lead to errors in policy and scholarship.A comprehensive account of combat methods and military rationale, Nonstate Warfare offers a new understanding for wartime military behavior.

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An engaging guide to the various ways in which war is now waged—and how to adapt to this new reality “This brisk everyman’s guide—straight-talking and free of jargon—is a useful tasting menu to a fast moving, constantly evolving set of problems. . . . A lively reminder that war adapts to technology, that civilians are part of modern conflict whether they like it or not.”—Roger Boyes, The Times “Galeotti’s field guide is an admirably clear overview (in his words, ‘quick and opinionated’) of a form of conflict which is vague and hard to grasp. Variously described as hybrid, sub-threshold or grey-zone warfare, this is the no man’s land between peaceful relations and formal combat.”—Helen Warrell, Financial Times Hybrid War, Grey Zone Warfare, Unrestricted War: today, traditional conflict—fought with guns, bombs, and drones—has become too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In an age when America threatens Europe with sanctions, and when China spends billions buying influence abroad, the world is heading for a new era of permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared, and unending. As conflict once again returns to Europe, transnational crime expert Mark Galeotti provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking survey of the new way of war. Ranging across the globe, Galeotti shows how today’s conflicts are fought with everything from disinformation and espionage to crime and subversion, leading to instability within countries and a legitimacy crisis across the globe. But rather than suggest that we hope for a return to a bygone era of “stable” warfare, Galeotti details ways of surviving, adapting, and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by this new reality.

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There was nothing quite like the Thames-Clyde Express. Covering well over 400 miles, its route stretched from the dreaming spires of London’s St Pancras via the Shires of England, the legendary Settle-Carlisle line, Walter Scott’s Border Country and finally into Glasgow – the Second City of Empire. It never offered the quickest journey between England and Scotland, but it was undoubtedly the most scenic. A former signalman on the tracks of the Thames-Clyde Express, David Pendleton has written what he terms ‘a love letter’ to this famous named train. Rather than a text ending on the sad day in 1975 when the last train reached its destination, he instead views its history and the route it traversed from a present-day perspective. Here is a rich mix of anecdotes and observations, including attractions and oddities either visible from today’s train services or within easy reach of principle stations Gavin Morrison, one of Britain’s most experienced railway photographers, has compiled more than 60 books and has gained the highest reputation for the quality of his work. He is able to capture the Thames-Clyde Express in its glory days and portray both steam and diesel locomotives on the complete route from London to Glasgow in its many moods. The result is a superb array of images taken during a lengthy period of well over 60 years between 1955 and 2022. Collectively this book is a journey in both words and pictures that is highly informative and richly illustrated. It is to be enjoyed as a record of recent times as well as evoking memories of years long past

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Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Irish-Published Book of the Year A TREASURE TROVE OF LETTERS TO AND FROM OUR NINE PRESIDENTS FROM 1938 TO THE PRESENT DAY With over 400 letters, memos, cards, telegrams, drawings, notes and photographs, The Presidents’ Letters reveals a personal and unexpected story of Ireland since the inauguration of our first president, Douglas Hyde. Most of these have never been published before and a handful have never been seen by the public. They are letters of congratulations, of resignation, of sympathy. A handwritten note from a president to a queen, a message sent to the moon, a fond farewell from a poet. There are letters of joy and loss, begging letters and threatening ones, sent from palaces, parliaments and prisons, from war zones, refugee camps and homeless shelters. Meticulously researched and hand-picked for this unique book, these correspondences bring to life our presidents, Áras an Uachtaráin and all those who have passed through its doors. The Presidents’ Letters is a beautiful homage to the art of the letter, exploring how each of our presidents defined their eras and how they strengthened the relationship between Ireland and all who identify as Irish. The book is divided into thematic sections, rather than separate chapters on the individual presidencies and featuring contributions in the form of one-page chapter introductions to contextualise the correspondence. Contributors include: David McCullagh | Rory Montgomery | Martina Devlin | Catriona Crowe | Samantha Barry | Joseph O’Connor | Harry McGee | Lise Hand | Justine McCarthy | Paul Rouse | Terri Kearney

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The "communication effect" is what happens when we saturate our classrooms with authentic communication, which occurs when students use language to build up ideas and do meaningful things. For starters, authentic communication deepens and increases language development, learning of content concepts and skills, rigor and engagement, empathy and understanding of others’ perspectives, agency and ownership of core ideas across disciplines, and social and emotional skills for building strong relationships. And these are just the starters. With The Communication Effect, Dr. Jeff Zwiers challenges teachers in Grades 3 and up to focus less on breadth and more on depth by grounding instruction and assessment in authentic (rather than pseudo-) communication. This book provides: Ideas for cultivating classroom cultures in which authentic communication thrives Clear descriptions and examples of the three features of authentic communication: 1. building up key ideas (claims and concepts); 2. clarifying terms and supporting ideas; and 3. creating and filling information gaps Over 175 suggestions for using the three features of authentic communication to enhance twenty commonly used instructional activities across disciplines Additional examples of not-so-commonly-used activities that embody the three features Suggestions for improving four different types of teacher creativity needed to design effective lessons, activities, and assessments that maximize authentic communication Our students deserve to get the most out of each minute of each lesson. Authentic communication can help. As you read The Communication Effect and apply its ideas, you will see how much better equipped and inspired your students are to grow into the amazing and gifted people that they were meant to become.

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'An indispensable manual for budding activists by one of the country's most effective campaigners.'Cathy Newman, Journalist and Presenter'Tired of complaining but don't know what to do? This beautifully written book will not only inspire you but give you a step-by-step guide to creating positive change.'Magid Magid, Politician and Activist'This is your mayday book. If you want to start your own resistance, buy Do Something.'Deborah Frances-White, Host of The Guilty Feminist podcastDo you find yourself staring helplessly at your news feed? Or all too often asking, 'why hasn't somebody done something about that?'. If the answer is yes, then DO SOMETHING is the book you need.Whether you simply want to challenge your local shop to reduce their plastic or go big and demand a new law to be passed, this book is the place to start.Full of lessons from the real world DO SOMETHING contains practical steps and a blueprint anyone can follow - from helping you to pinpoint the fundamentals of what you want to achieve to mobilising supporters and harnessing traditional and social media. Having worked as a campaigner for over a decade Kajal Odedra knows the tricks that have typically been held by people in circles of power and believes that everyone should know how to speak up and be heard. Revolution on every scale is happening all around the world - but rather than being led by governments, policy makers or political leaders, it is individuals, communities and collectives who are calling for action. People power works! So, stop banging your head against the wall, pick up this book, and start planning your resistance.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERLast Christmas I almost killed myself. Almost. I've had a lot of almosts. Never gone from almost to deed. Don't think I ever will. But it was a bad almost. Living Better is Alastair Campbell's honest, moving and life affirming account of his lifelong struggle with depression. It is an autobiographical, psychological and psychiatric study, which explores his own childhood, family and other relationships, and examines the impact of his professional and political life on himself and those around him. But it also lays bare his relentless quest to understand depression not just through his own life but through different treatments. Every bit as direct and driven, clever and candid as he is, this is a book filled with pain, but also hope -- he examines how his successes have been in part because of rather than despite his mental health problems -- and love. We all know someone with depression. There is barely a family untouched by it. We may be talking about it more than we did, back in the era of 'boys don't cry' - they did you know - and when a brave face or a stiff upper lip or a best foot forward was seen as the only way to go. But we still don't talk about it enough. There is still stigma, and shame, and taboo. There is still the feeling that admitting to being sad or anxious makes us weak. It took me years, decades even to get to this point, but I passionately believe that the reverse is true and that speaking honestly about our feelings and experiences (whether as a depressive or as the friend or relative of a depressive) is the first and best step on the road to recovery. So that is what I have tried to do here.

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