Search results for ""Author "Demi"""
Duke University Press Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform
Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform reveals the human drama behind the radical agrarian reform that unfolded in Peru during the final three decades of the twentieth century. That process began in 1969, when the left-leaning military government implemented a drastic program of land expropriation. Seized lands were turned into worker-managed cooperatives. After those cooperatives began to falter and the country returned to civilian rule in the 1980s, members distributed the land among themselves. In 1995–96, as the agrarian reform process was winding down and neoliberal policies were undoing leftist reforms, the Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer traveled throughout the country, interviewing people who had lived through the most tumultuous years of agrarian reform, recording their memories and their stories. While agrarian reform caused enormous upheaval, controversy, and disappointment, it did succeed in breaking up the unjust and oppressive hacienda system. Mayer contends that the demise of that system is as important as the liberation of slaves in the Americas.Mayer interviewed ex-landlords, land expropriators, politicians, government bureaucrats, intellectuals, peasant leaders, activists, ranchers, members of farming families, and others. Weaving their impassioned recollections with his own commentary, he offers a series of dramatic narratives, each one centered around a specific instance of land expropriation, collective enterprise, and disillusion. Although the reform began with high hopes, it was quickly complicated by difficulties including corruption, rural and urban unrest, fights over land, and delays in modernization. As he provides insight into how important historical events are remembered, Mayer re-evaluates Peru’s military government (1969–79), its audacious agrarian reform program, and what that reform meant to Peruvians from all walks of life.
£24.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Third World Politics: A Concise Introduction
Purposefully written for those coming to politics for the first time, this textbook provides an exploration and analysis of the most important political issues affecting the developing world. Offering a different perspective from standard texts in this field, Politics in the Developing World encourages an understanding of the breadth and nature of a range of pressing – and previously understated – issues: the striving for democracy; the political consequences of economic growth and development; the struggle of religious and ethnic minorities; human rights, particularly women's rights ; the impact of globalization; and the politics of the natural environment. In doing so, the interaction of domestic and global factors affecting many of the developing world countries is highlighted and a new, qualitatively different set of concerns is identified. Some have resulted from recent international changes following the demise of the Soviet bloc, including the shift to democracy in South Africa, and the ramifications of the late 1990s Southeast Asian financial crisis. To illustrate the importance of these themes and issues, five developing world regions are examined in detail: Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, East and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. While based on Haynes's previous publication, Third World Politics: A Concise Introduction (1996), this is a new book, completely rewritten, with updated regional analyses and data throughout. It concentrates on changes in the developing world in the last decade, with an increased focus on its international relations, complementing those chapters concerned with domestic issues. An ideal introduction as well as an invitation to further study, this text is essential reading for introductory students studying a range of courses including development studies, global politics, world politics, developing world politics, comparative politics, and international relations.
£44.95
Pen & Sword Books Ltd The City Dairy: A Social and Family History
The early nineteenth century witnessed the mass movement of people from Britain's countryside into its burgeoning towns and cities; people came to the city in search of work. This prompted many dairy farmers to follow suit and move themselves, their family and their cows into the country's growing metropolises, where they opened the first generation of city dairies. In the 1830s, transportation in Britain was revolutionised by the coming of the railways, enabling foodstuffs, including milk, to be transported in bulk from countryside to city. Large dairy companies took advantage of this opportunity, opening a new generation of retail dairies. The demand for milk was so great that some cities boasted a dairy at the end of every street. For the next hundred years the cowkeepers fought a rear-guard action against the mighty corporate dairies and their attempts to monopolise the liquid milk market. The cowkeepers continued to produce their own milk, selling it - 'fresh from the cow' - over the dairy counter and out on the milk round. These dairies were kept in the family, handed down through successive generations. Despite surviving two World Wars, the rapid technological, social and economic changes that followed, brought about the demise of the traditional cowkeeper. But the city dairy continued as a family business, working as part of a national distribution network, overseen by the Milk Marketing Board. Out on the round, the family dairyman was almost indistinguishable from the corporate milkman. The sixties and seventies saw the arrival of the Supermarket, a game-changer in retailing. To survive, the city dairy had to change once more. It expanded its offer and seamlessly joined the ranks of those other most British of institutions: the Corner Shop and the Convenience Store.
£14.99
Johns Hopkins University Press The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War
Winner of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American GeographersOriginally published in 1998. "The plantation," writes Charles Aiken, "is among the most misunderstood institutions of American history. The demise of the plantation has been pronounced many times, but the large industrial farms survive as significant parts of, not just the South's, but the nation's agriculture."In this sweeping historical and geographical account, Aiken traces the development of the Southern cotton plantation since the Civil War—from the emergence of tenancy after 1865, through its decline during the Depression, to the post-World War Two development of the large industrial farm.Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors.Aiken also describes the evolving relationship of African-Americans to the cotton plantation during the thirteen decades of economic, social, and political changes from Reconstruction through the War on Poverty—including the impact of alterations in plantation agriculture and the mass migration of Southern blacks to the urban North during the twentieth century.Richly illustrated with more than 130 maps and photographs (many original and many from FSA photographers), The Cotton Plantation South is a vivid and colorful account of landscape, geography, race, politics, and civil rights as they relate to one of America's most enduring and familiar institutions.
£43.00
Princeton University Press The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer combines extensive field research with historical inquiry to produce a dramatic study of a minority people in Russia, the Khanty (Ostiak) of Northwest Siberia. Although First Nations, indigenous peoples, have often been victims of expansionist state-building, Balzer shows that processes of acquiring ethnic identity can involve transcending victimhood. She brings Khanty views of their history and current life into focus, revealing multiple levels of cultural activism. She argues that anthropological theory and practice can derive from indigenous insights, and should help indigenous peoples. Balzer brings to life the saga of the Khanty over several centuries. She analyzes trends in Siberian ethnic interaction that strongly affected minority lives: colonization, Christianization, revitalization, Sovietization, and regionalization. These processes incorporate suprastate and state politics, including recent devastations stemming from the energy industry's land thefts. Balzer documents changes that might seem to foreshadow the demise of indigenous ethnicity. Yet the final chapters reveal ways some Khanty have preserved cultural values and dignity in crisis. Khanty identity has varied with the politics of individuals, groups, and generations. It has been shaped by recent grass-roots mobilization, ecological activism, and religious revival, as well as older historical memory, language-based solidarity, and loyalty to a homeland. The Tenacity of Ethnicity demonstrates how at each historical turn, Siberian experiences shed new light on old debates concerning colonialism, conversion, revitalization, ethnicity, and nationalism. This volume will be important for political scientists, historians, and regional specialists, as well as anthropologists and sociologists.
£40.50
The University of Chicago Press Bombs Away: Militarization, Conservation, and Ecological Restoration
When viewed from space, the Korean Peninsula is crossed by a thin green ribbon. On the ground, its mix of dense vegetation and cleared borderlands serves as home to dozens of species that are extinct or endangered elsewhere on the peninsula. This is Korea’s demilitarized zone—one of the most dangerous places on earth for humans, and paradoxically one of the safest for wildlife. Although this zone was not intentionally created for conservation, across the globe hundreds of millions of acres of former military zones and bases are being converted to restoration areas, refuges, and conservation lands. David G. Havlick has traveled the world visiting these spaces of military-to-wildlife transition, and in Bombs Away he explores both the challenges—physical, historical, and cultural—and fascinating ecological possibilities of military site conversions. Looking at particular international sites of transition—from Indiana’s Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge to Cold War remnants along the former Iron Curtain—Havlick argues that these new frontiers of conservation must accomplish seemingly antithetical aims: rebuilding and protecting ecosystems, or restoring life, while also commemorating the historical and cultural legacies of warfare and militarization. Developing these ideas further, he shows that despite the ecological devastation often wrought by military testing and training, these activities need not be inconsistent with environmental goals, and in some cases can even complement them—a concept he calls ecological militarization. A profound, clear explication of landscapes both fraught and fecund, marked by death but also reservoirs of life, Bombs Away shows us how “military activities, conservation goals, and ecological restoration efforts are made to work together to create new kinds of places and new conceptions of place.”
£31.00
Running Press,U.S. The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers
For well over a century, those who create motion pictures have touched our hearts and souls; they have transported and transformed our minds, intoxicated and entranced our senses. One artist's vision is the single most prominent force behind the scenes: the director. The Essential Directors illuminates the unseen forces behind some of the most notable screen triumphs from the aesthetic peak of silent cinema through the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Considering each artist's influence on the medium, cultural impact, and degree of achievement, Turner Classic Movies presents a compendium of Hollywood's most influential filmmakers, with profiles offering history and insight on the filmmaker's narrative style, unique touches, contributions to the medium, key films, and distinctive movie moments to watch for. The work of these game-changing artists is illustrated throughout by more than 200 full-color and black-and-white photographs.In The Essential Directors you'll read how Cecil B. DeMille revamped religion to define an era, and how Oscar Micheaux broke barriers to become the most influential Black filmmaker of the 1920s. You'll marvel at the efficient artistry of "One-Take Woody" Van Dyke and fall in love again with the sophisticated studio-era classicsof George Cukor. You'll gain insight into how women like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino built thriving careers in an industry ruled by men and discover what drove Mike Nichols to mix comedy with tragedy, becoming the highest-paid director of his day in the the process. The Essential Directors presents the work of these game-changing artists and dozens more in this stunning volume.
£20.25
University of Nebraska Press Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years
Finalist for the 2023 CASEY AwardBaseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures—among them Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Hank Greenberg, Ford Frick, and several others—whose stories figure prominently in baseball’s past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness. Combining narrative and analysis, Gietschier tells the game’s history across more than three decades while simultaneously exploring its politics and economics, including, for example, how the game confronted and barely survived the United States’ entry into World War II; how owners controlled their labor supply—the players; and how the business of baseball interacted with the federal government. He reveals how baseball handled the return to peacetime and the defining postwar decade, including the integration of the game, the demise of the Negro Leagues, the emergence of television, and the first efforts to move franchises and expand into new markets. Gietschier considers much of the work done by biographers, scholars, and baseball researchers to inform a new and current history of baseball in one of its more important and transformational periods.
£36.00
Peeters Publishers Mythologie des Pygmees Baka I
Ici, se trouvent presentees la mythologie et les croyances des Baka. L'auteur a recueilli, au cours de longues annees de sejour parmi eux, l'expression de leurs traditions dans ce domaine d'acces difficile. La mythologie (vol. 1) est developpee dans un ordre relativement chronologique, du moins pour la presentation des entites qui la composent, d'apres les entretiens avec des anciens dont les paroles sont fidelement rapportees. Son intemporalite apparait des le premier abord. Les demiurges primordiaux, Komba et son neveu uterin Waito, ne sont pas des createurs, mais des organisateurs d'une creation fondamentale preexistante. Komba faconne, a partir d'une prehumanite, l'ensemble des etres vivants, animaux et vegetaux. Detenteur de tous les biens vitaux, comme l'eau, le feu ...et des connaissances, c'est Waito, heros civilisateur et pere des humains, qui les lui derobe pour en faire profiter les hommes. Les contes (vol. 1 et 2) sont en fait des mythes d'origine et des contes explicatifs, rationalisant les mysteres de la nature et projetant dans l'imaginaire collectif l'organisation traditionnelle de la societe. Ils vehiculent les grands principes moraux qui regissent l'univers social des Baka et constituent le livre oral de la Loi que se transmettent les generations. Ils sont egalement un reservoir des connaissances acquises au cours des temps, sans exclure l'apport du monde actuel. Le vol. 2 presente aussi un recueil d'etymologies populaires des noms, surtout de ceux des animaux, egalement explicatives et en rapport avec le contenu des mythes et des contes. Ce trait de recherche du sens des termes est particulier aux Baka. Cette particularite est liee a l'usage de la langue oubanguienne, tres monosyllabique et permettant le decoupage des termes plurisyllabiques en syntagmes, voire en enonces. Avec aquarelles de Rita Hissel.
£95.93
Collective Ink Flying Springbok, The: A history of South African Airways since its inception to the post-apartheid era
An artistic rendering of the African antelope, the Springbok, was depicted with stylized wings to serve as the logo of South African Airways (SAA) for well over 60 years. It was replaced by a new corporate identity when the airline was rebranded after the demise of apartheid, the release of Nelson Mandela from political incarceration, and the introduction of a non-racist democratic society in South Africa in the mid-nineties. As a state-owned entity, many people once saw SAA as the 'apartheid airline.' For a time, travel on board its aircraft was restricted to whites only, but this was later changed to include members of all the country's diverse racial groups. SAA pioneered flight throughout Africa during the colonial era, long before airports, supply services, radio and weather forecasting capabilities even existed. Its staff and equipment served with the Allies in Europe and North Africa during WWII and it met the enormous challenge of having to circumvent African airspace when flying to destinations abroad after most African nations closed their skies to it in protest against the country's racist policies in the early sixties. Over the years the airline grew into one of the world's major domestic, regional, and international carriers. Its long history was eventually terminated and replaced by a new entity in 2020 with the the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. In its original incarnation it could proudly boast of being one of the world's oldest and longest-surviving international carriers. It is still seen by many around the world as the airline with that much revered and fondly remembered emblem, the Flying Springbok.
£23.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Lost Spirit of Capitalism: Disbelief and Discredit, Volume 3
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.
£15.17
Princeton University Press Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution
A bloody episode that epitomised the political dilemmas of the eighteenth centuryIn 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Geneva Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire.Richard Whatmore brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights and the public good. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans shows how the massacre at Geneva Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets—in many respects the end of enlightenment itself.
£25.20
Harvard University Press Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan
The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan.In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home.The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state.Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives—including memoirs and survivor interviews—to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.
£35.06
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet
In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financialises attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising - the beating heart of the internet - is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself - much like subprime mortgages - is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet - and its free services - will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it. Deeply researched, convincing, and alarming, Subprime Attention Crisis will change the way you look at the internet, and its precarious future. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today
£12.04
Little, Brown Book Group A Mansion for Murder: Book 13 in the Kate Shackleton mysteries
The brand new novel featuring Private Investigator Kate Shackleton!1930, Yorkshire. Intrigued by a mysterious letter from a stranger offering important information, Private Investigator Kate Shackleton arrives in the mill village of Saltaire. At nearby Milner Field mansion, overshadowed by its reputation for misfortune and untimely deaths, she expects to meet the letter writer, Ronnie Creswell.Kate soon hears the shocking news that Ronnie has been killed. At first his death appears to be a tragic accident at the mill, but soon it becomes clear that Ronnie's demise was no mishap. Kate is enlisted to help investigate the murder.Kate moves into the tower rooms at Milner Field, as she tries to uncover resentments, industrial espionage, and old secrets in the close-knit village. Although she doesn't believe in curses, she wonders what sinister truth lies behind this latest in the litany of deaths connected to the infamous Milner Field.Then just when things couldn't get any worse, a young girl in the village goes missing, and Kate must use all her strength and skill to unravel the mystery around the mansion once and for all . . .Whether you've read the whole series, or are discovering the Kate Shackleton mysteries for the first time, this is the perfect page-turner for fans of Agatha Christie, Ann Granger and Jacqueline Winspear.'Frances Brody has made it to the top rank of crime writers' Daily Mail'Brody's writing is like her central character Kate Shackleton: witty, acerbic and very, very perceptive' Ann Cleeves'Kate Shackleton is a splendid heroine' Ann Granger'Delightful' People's Friend
£9.04
Moonstone Press Fatality in Fleet Street
“Three hundred years ago, Lord Carpenter, I’d have had your head on a spike on Tower Hill..” It is 1938 and newspaper chief Lord Carpenter is about to publish a front-page story that will guarantee war with Russia. But before the paper can go to print, he is found stabbed in his office, and circumstances suggest the killer is one of his staff. Everyone from the editor-in-chief to the staff librarian had the opportunity. But was the motivation for the murder political or personal? Crime reporter Charles Venables finds himself both suspect and sleuth as he tries to disentangle the clues and determine which of his colleagues is the guilty party. Red herrings abound, but it soon becomes apparent that more than one person had a reason to want Carpenter dead…. Fatality in Fleet Street displays the author’s trademark wit and a plot with plenty of twists and ingenuity to please the reader. Equally interesting are the political overtones and the militaristic pretensions of the deceased newspaper baron. The novel is set in 1938 – five years later than its real publication date – and presents a Russia whose economy is growing, which makes the country ‘a real menace to the established order of things’ in Carpenter’s worldview. Although the imperious newspaper baron meets his demise early on, his outsized personality and ambition are the bedrock that propels the story. Sprigg makes his satire clear; there is more than a passing resemblance between the fictional Lord Carpenter and the real world Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Evening Standard and Daily Express. Sprigg started his career as a cub reporter and the book’s setting of a busy newspaper is well realised. Fatality also takes a sardonic view of socialist activity in Britain. When Venables goes to investigate a local chapter of the Communist Party, the situation is alternately threatening and farcical, with members parading their revolutionary credentials and loudly denouncing the ‘bourgeois’. Sprigg later became an active member of the Communist Party and published Marxist literary criticism, but his gently mocking tone in Fatality suggests this conversion was some way off in 1933.
£11.24
Pennsylvania State University Press Poetic Astronomy in the Ancient Near East: The Reflexes of Celestial Science in Ancient Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and Israelite Narrative
Modern science historians have typically treated the sciences of the ancient Near East as separate from historical and cultural considerations. At the same time, biblical scholars, dominated by theological concerns, have historically understood the Israelite god as separate from the natural world. Cooley’s study, bringing to bear contemporary models of science history on the one hand and biblical studies on the other hand, seeks to bridge a gap created by 20th-century scholarship in our understanding of ancient Near Eastern cultures by investigating the ways in which ancient authors incorporated their cultures’ celestial speculation in narrative.In the literature of ancient Iraq, celestial divination is displayed quite prominently in important works such as Enuma Eliš and Erra and Išum. In ancient Ugarit as well, the sky was observed for devotional reasons, and astral deities play important roles in stories such as the Baal Cycle and Shahar and Shalim. Even though the veneration of astral deities was rejected by biblical authors, in the literature of ancient Israel the Sun, Moon, and stars are often depicted as active, conscious agents. In texts such as Genesis 1, Joshua 10, Judges 5, and Job 38, these celestial characters, these “sons of God,” are living, dynamic members of Yahweh’s royal entourage, willfully performing courtly, martial, and calendrical roles for their sovereign.The synthesis offered by this book, the first of its kind since the demise of the pan-Babylonianist school more than a century ago, is about ancient science in ancient Near Eastern literature.
£46.76
University of Texas Press Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics
Honorable Mention, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters, 2019Jim Wright made his mark on virtually every major public policy issue in the later twentieth century—energy, education, taxes, transportation, environmental protection, civil rights, criminal justice, and foreign relations, among them. He played a significant role in peace initiatives in Central America and in the Camp David Accords, and he was the first American politician to speak live on Soviet television. A Democrat representing Texas’s twelfth district (Fort Worth), Wright served in the US House of Representatives from the Eisenhower administration to the presidency of George H. W. Bush, including twelve years (1977–1989) as majority leader and speaker. His long congressional ascension and sudden fall in a highly partisan ethics scandal spearheaded by Newt Gingrich mirrored the evolution of Congress as an institution.Speaker Jim Wright traces the congressman’s long life and career in a highly readable narrative grounded in extensive interviews with Wright and access to his personal diaries. A skilled connector who bridged the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic party while forging alliances with Republicans to pass legislation, Wright ultimately fell victim to a new era of political infighting, as well as to his own hubris and mistakes. J. Brooks Flippen shows how Wright’s career shaped the political culture of Congress, from its internal rules and power structure to its growing partisanship, even as those new dynamics eventually contributed to his political demise. To understand Jim Wright in all his complexity is to understand the story of modern American politics.
£26.99
University of Minnesota Press The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood
How Black women’s reproduction became integral to white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy—and remains key to their dismantling In the United States, slavery relied on the reproduction and other labors of unfree Black women. Nearly four centuries later, Black reproductivity remains a vital technology for the creation, negotiation, and transformation of sexualized and gendered racial categories. Yet even as Black reproduction has been deployed to resolve the conflicting demands of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that it also holds the potential to destabilize the oppressive systems it is supposed to maintain.The Black Reproductive convenes Black literary and cultural studies with feminist and queer theory to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and images alongside their pre-emancipation counterparts. These provocative, unexpected couplings include how Toni Morrison’s depiction of infanticide regenders Orlando Patterson’s theory of social death, and how Mary Prince’s eighteenth-century fugitive slave narrative is resignified through the representational paradoxes of Gayl Jones’s blues novel Corregidora. Throughout, Kaplan offers new perspectives on Black motherhood and gendered labor, from debates over the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, to the demise of racist icon Aunt Jemima, to discussions of Black reproductive freedom and abortion. The Black Reproductive gives vital insight into the historic and ongoing conditions of Black unfreedom, and points to the possibilities for a Black feminist practice of individual and collective freedom.
£22.99
Harvard University Press Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive
Being among bees is a full-body experience, Mark Winston writes—from the low hum of tens of thousands of insects and the pungent smell of honey and beeswax, to the sight of workers flying back and forth between flowers and the hive. The experience of an apiary slows our sense of time, heightens our awareness, and inspires awe. Bee Time presents Winston’s reflections on three decades spent studying these creatures, and on the lessons they can teach about how humans might better interact with one another and the natural world.Like us, honeybees represent a pinnacle of animal sociality. How they submerge individual needs into the colony collective provides a lens through which to ponder human societies. Winston explains how bees process information, structure work, and communicate, and examines how corporate boardrooms are using bee societies as a model to improve collaboration. He investigates how bees have altered our understanding of agricultural ecosystems and how urban planners are looking to bees in designing more nature-friendly cities.The relationship between bees and people has not always been benign. Bee populations are diminishing due to human impact, and we cannot afford to ignore what the demise of bees tells us about our own tenuous affiliation with nature. Toxic interactions between pesticides and bee diseases have been particularly harmful, foreshadowing similar effects of pesticides on human health. There is much to learn from bees in how they respond to these challenges. In sustaining their societies, bees teach us ways to sustain our own.
£19.95
Harvard University Press Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan
Winner of the John Phillip Reed Book Award, American Society for Legal HistoryA legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries.Following victory in WWII, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes.In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions.Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened US credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan.In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.
£48.56
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Actresses of the Restoration Period: Mrs Elizabeth Barry and Mrs Anne Bracegirdle
The Restoration represents an exhilarating period of English history. With Charles II, the Merry Monarch' restored to the throne, the country saw artistic and literary talent flourish. Charles was an enthusiastic patron of the theatre and helped breathe new life into British drama, reopening the playhouses after the grey years of closure under Puritanical rule. One of the most significant innovations in Restoration theatre was the introduction of actresses on the English stage. This exciting new history is dedicated to the life and times of two of the Restoration's most celebrated actresses: Mrs Elizabeth Barry and Mrs Anne Bracegirdle. It details their family roots, the beginnings and progression of their London stage careers, their retirement from the limelight, and their eventual demise. Their lives and work are set against the lively and often dangerous atmosphere that epitomised seventeenth-century London and its theatres, and the places where Mrs Barry and Mrs Bracegirdle lived and worked alongside their fellow players, dramatists and others of their times. There are references to the actresses' admirers and lovers within and without the world of theatre. Along with more favourable critical appraisals, there are explicit and derogatory lines, satirically written, regarding their supposed reputations. This insightful biography places Elizabeth and Anne back in the limelight, and includes transcriptions taken from contemporary works, letters, poems and wills, all adding depth and colour to this fascinating subject.
£19.80
Simon & Schuster Dahlia Black: A Novel
For fans of World War Z and the Southern Reach Trilogy, a suspenseful oral history commemorating the five-year anniversary of the Pulse—the alien code that hacked the DNA of Earth’s population—and the response team who faced the world-changing phenomenon. Voyager 1 was a message in a bottle. Our way of letting the galaxy know we existed. That we were out here if anyone wanted to find us. Over the next forty years, the probe flew past Jupiter and Saturn before it drifted into the void, swallowed up by a silent universe. Or so we thought… Truth is, our message didn’t go unheard. Discovered by Dr. Dahlia Black, the mysterious Pulse was sent by a highly intelligent intergalactic species that called themselves the Ascendants. It soon becomes clear this alien race isn’t just interested in communication—they are capable of rewriting human DNA, in an astonishing process they call the Elevation. Five years after the Pulse, acclaimed journalist Keith Thomas sets out to make sense of the event that altered the world. Thomas travels across the country to interview members of the task force who grappled to decode the Pulse and later disseminated its exact nature to worried citizens. He interviews the astronomers who initially doubted Black’s discovery of the Pulse—an error that critics say led to the world’s quick demise. Thomas also hears from witnesses of the Elevation and people whose loved ones vanished in the Finality, an event that, to this day, continues to puzzle Pulse researchers, even though theories abound about the Ascendants’ motivation. Including never-before-published transcripts from task force meetings, diary entries from Black, and candid interviews with Ballard, Thomas also shows in Dahlia Black how a select few led their country in its darkest hours, toward a new level of humanity.
£21.12
Seagull Books London Ltd Armed Response: Plays from South Africa
As a phenomenon of history with social, political, cultural implications, the entire 'negotiated' experience makes the South African situation unique in both the African and global context. As this phenomenon unfolds, many fascinating new artistic influences are being explored to capture the diverse cultural depths and questions of identity unleashed by the demise of apartheid. This collection of plays reflects certain key trends in both subject matter and aesthetics prevalent in South Africa at this crucial moment in history. An introductory essay for the anthology will provide the reader with the artistic, cultural, and political background to the plays. Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and Presley Chweneyagae's "Relativity: Township Stories" is about a serial killer on the loose and has been widely performed in South Africa and the UK. Martin Koboekae's "The Bush Tale" exposes the mistrust between two people from extremely different cultural backgrounds who meet through circumstance.Yael Farber's "Molora" explores the rage and pain of generations shattered by the Apartheid [A world tour of Molora will begin at the Barbican Theatre, London in April 2008]. Norman Mxosolisa's "Hallelujah!" is about the murderous, random violence engulfing the country. David Peimer's "Armed Response" is about a young German photographer who arrives to do her first assignment in Johannesburg. Presley Chweneyagae achieved international recognition for his title role in the Oscar-winning film "Tsotsi" and Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom received the National Standard Bank 'Young Artist Award' for theatre in 2005. Martin Koboekae is an award-winning playwright, novelist and director.Yael Farber is an acclaimed writer and director. Norman Mxosolisa is a playwright, composer, TV writer and director and teaches at Wits University, Johannesburg and won the Schreiner South African Young Artist Award in 2002 for "Hallelujah!". David Peimer is an award-winning playwright and director and a Professor of Theatre at New York University (Prague Division).
£20.61
Princeton University Press Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik
This book is a profoundly moving and analytically incisive attempt to shift the terms of discussion in American politics. It speaks to the intellectual and political weaknesses within the liberal tradition that have put the United States at the mercy of libertarian, authoritarian populist, nakedly racist, and traditionalist elitist versions of the right-wing; and it seeks to identify resources that can move the left away from the stunned intellectual incoherence with which it has met the death of Bolshevism. In Ira Katznelson's view, Americans are squandering a tremendous ethical and political opportunity to redefine and reorient the liberal tradition. In an opening essay and two remarkable letters addressed to Adam Michnik, who is arguably East Europe's emblematic democratic intellectual, Katznelson seeks to recover this possibility. By examining issues that once occupied Michnik's fellow dissidents in the Warsaw group known as the Crooked Circle, Katznelson brings a fresh realism to old ideals and posits a liberalism that "stares hard" at cruelty, suffering, coercion, and tyrannical abuses of state power. Like the members of Michnik's club, he recognizes that the circumference of liberalism's circle never runs smooth and that tolerance requires extremely difficult judgments. Katznelson's first letter explores how the virtues of socialism, including its moral stand on social justice, can be related to liberalism while overcoming debilitating aspects of the socialist inheritance. The second asks whether liberalism can recognize, appreciate, and manage human difference. Situated in the lineage of efforts by Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and Lionel Trilling to "thicken" liberalism, these letters also draw on personal experience in the radical politics of the 1960s and in the dissident culture of East and Central Europe in the years immediately preceding communism's demise. Liberalism's Crooked Circle could help foster a substantive debate in the American elections of 1996 and determine the contents of that desperately needed discussion.
£34.20
ACC Art Books Incomparable Couples
Rose Hartman is a legend. An omnipresent force on the New York City social scene, Rose stands as one of the most prolific photographers of our age. As a woman photographer, Rose has jumped over every hurdle in a male-dominated world to create a huge body of work, documenting the demimonde of fame and glamour in the centre of world culture. If you are famous, she has most likely photographed you, whether you know her well or not at all. Her groundbreaking photography straddles the boundaries between street photography, portraiture and documentary photography. The images included in this book are prime selections of couples - artists and muses; designers and muses; family; mothers and children; pets; friendships; models and friends; lovers; marriages - photographed by Rose over the years, and yet they are far more than pictures of two people. In each and every photograph, Rose is the third and most critical component. She is the director of the final cut. Thanks to her impeccable timing and placement, Rose opts to trip the shutter at just the right moment, capturing a critical instant in a conversation - a pose, a gesture - so as to present a story about two people from the world of popular culture. Couples featured include: Jerry Hall and Annie Leibovitz, Bob Mackie and Cher, Claudia Schiffer and Valentino, Jean Paul Gautier and Lauren Bacall, Donatella Versace and Naomi Campbell, Peter and Jane Fonda, Bianca and Jade Jagger, Lily and Kate Moss, Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono, Liz Taylor and her dog, Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley, Robert Wolders and Audrey Hepburn, Iman and David Bowie, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, Kelly and Calvin Klein, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown.
£31.50
Thames & Hudson Ltd The Enemies of Rome: From Hannibal to Attila the Hun
The gripping stories of the most colourful and formidable characters to challenge the might of Rome. Until recently, it was assumed that Rome carried the torch of civilization into the barbarian darkness, bringing law, architecture, and literature to conquered peoples. The alternative view now suggests that many of Rome's enemies - the Celts, Hebrews, and Phoenicians, for example - were developing civilizations in their own right before obliteration at the Roman sword. Indeed, as Philip Matyszak argues, had Rome not crushed rivals so completely, the drop into the Dark Ages might not have occurred; at Rome's collapse, no other powerful civilizations remained to absorb the impact. This engrossing book looks at the growth and eventual demise of Rome from the viewpoint of those vanquished by Rome. They varied from the highly cultivated Greeks and Egyptians to wild and rebellious Britons and Germans, to the Asiatic empires of the Persians and Parthians. Their leaders were driven by ambition, vindictive hatred, fear, political calculation, or naked greed. Some fought to preserve their heritage, some for personal survival, and others from a warrior's love of battle. Defying the might of Rome was a dangerous business, and few of the men and women described here died in their beds. Some, like Vercingetorix and Jugurtha, were captured, exhibited in triumph, and then, while their conquerors sat down to a festive dinner, killed in the dungeons below. Rather than face such an end, some of Rome's greatest adversaries, including Hannibal, Boudicca, and Cleopatra, killed themselves. Here is the reality behind legends such as Spartacus the gladiator, and the stories of Shapur the conqueror and Mithridates the connoisseur of poisons. Some enemies of Rome were noble heroes, others were murdering villains, but each has a unique and fascinating story.
£14.99
Oxford University Press The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived
Just 28,000 years ago, the blink of an eye in geological time, the last of Neanderthals died out in their last outpost, in caves near Gibraltar. Thanks to cartoons and folk accounts we have a distorted view of these other humans - for that is what they were. We think of them as crude and clumsy and not very bright, easily driven to extinction by the lithe, smart modern humans that came out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. But was it really as simple as that? Clive Finlayson reminds us that the Neanderthals were another kind of human, and their culture was not so very different from that of our own ancestors. In this book, he presents a wider view of the events that led to the migration of the moderns into Europe, what might have happened during the contact of the two populations, and what finally drove the Neanderthals to extinction. It is a view that considers climate, ecology, and migrations of populations, as well as culture and interaction. His conclusion is that the destiny of the Neanderthals and the Moderns was sealed by ecological factors and contingencies. It was a matter of luck that we survived and spread while the Neanderthals dwindled and perished. Had the climate not changed in our favour some 50 million years ago, things would have been very different. There is much current research interest in Neanderthals, much of it driven by attempts to map some of their DNA. But it's not just a question of studying the DNA. The rise and fall of populations is profoundly moulded by the larger scale forces of climate and ecology. And it is only by taking this wider view that we can fully understand the course of events that led to our survival and their demise. The fact that Neanderthals survived until virtually yesterday makes our relationship with them and their tragedy even more poignant. They almost made it, after all.
£11.99
Oxford University Press Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan
A new global history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - an invasion whose consequences are still felt in Afghanistan and across the wider world. On 24 December 1979, Soviet armed forces entered Afghanistan, beginning an occupation that would last almost a decade and creating a political crisis that shook the world. To many observers, the Soviet invasion showed the lengths to which one of the world's superpowers would go to vie for supremacy in the global Cold War. The Soviet war, and parallel covert American aid to Afghan resistance fighters, would come to be a defining event of international politics in the final years of the Cold War, lingering far beyond the Soviet Union's own demise. Yet Cold War competition is only a small part of the story. Soviet troops entered a country already at war with itself. A century of debates within Afghanistan over the nature of modern nationhood culminated in a 1978 coup in which self-described Afghan communists pledged to fundamentally reshape Afghanistan. Instead what broke out was a civil war in which Afghans asserted competing models of Afghan statehood. Afghan socialists and Islamists came to the fore of this conflict in the 1980s, thanks in part to Soviet and American involvement, but they represented a broader movement for local articulations of social and political modernity that did not derive from foreign models. Afghans, in conversation with foreigners, set many of the parameters of the conflict. This sweeping history moves between centres of state in Kabul, Moscow, Islamabad, and Washington, the halls of global governance in Geneva and New York, resistance hubs in Peshawar and Panjshir, and refugee camps scattered across Pakistan's borderlands to tell a story that is much more expansive than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - a global history of a moment of crisis not just for Afghanistan or the Cold War but international relations and the postcolonial state.
£27.00
Octopus Publishing Group The Lost Album of The Beatles: What if the Beatles hadn't split up?
'Daniel Rachel imagines what the next Beatles album might have been like, with painstaking detail and great stories' - David Hepworth, The Guardian'A fantastical journey through what might have been... Exciting and compelling.' - Chris Hawkins, BBC 6 Music'Daniel Rachel's forensic investigation makes a strong case for looking afresh at the evidence... a fascinating detailed read' - Mojo'In this meticulously crafted book, Rachel offers an extraordinary peek behind the curtain of one of the most celebrated music groups in history...a must-read for any music aficionado' - Music Devotee'A detailed researcher and writer... Ingenious.' - Record Collector'Full of enthralling details about the highs and lows of the band's last year... it's like the DNA in a crime scene.' - David Hepworth, Word in Your Ear'A book that is religiously detailed and yet manages to create tantalising glimpses of what might have been' - Louder Than War***This is the story of the great lost Beatles album.The end of the Beatles wasn't inevitable. It came through miscommunication, misunderstandings and missed opportunities to reconcile.But what if it didn't end? What if just one of those chances was taken, and the Beatles carried on? What if they made one last, great album?In The Lost Album of The Beatles, Daniel Rachel - winner of the prestigious Penderyn Music Book Prize - looks at what could have been. Drawing on impeccable research, Rachel examines the the Fab Four's untimely demise - and from the ashes compiles a track list for an imagined final album, pulling together unfinished demos, forgotten B-sides, hit solo songs, and arguing that together they form the basis of a lost Beatles masterpiece.Compelling and convincing, The Lost Album of The Beatles is a daring re-write of the group's history, and a tantalising glimpse of what might have been.
£10.99
Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc The Pollinator Victory Garden: Win the War on Pollinator Decline with Ecological Gardening; Attract and Support Bees, Beetles, Butterflies, Bats, and Other Pollinators
Give pollinators a fighting chance! Transform your landscape into a breathtaking pollinator paradise with the practical solutions in this New York Times–featured guide. The passion and urgency that inspired WWI and WWII Victory Gardens is needed today to meet another threat to our food supply and our environment—the steep decline of pollinators. In The Pollinator Victory Garden, environmental horticulturalist, landscape designer, and New York Botanical Garden and Brooklyn Botanic Garden teacher Kim Eierman offers accessible, actionable information and tips for winning the war against the demise of these essential animals. Pollinators are critical to our food supply and responsible for the pollination of the vast majority of all flowering plants on our planet. Pollinators include not just bees, but many different types of animals, including insects and mammals. Beetles, bats, birds, butterflies, moths, flies, and wasps can be pollinators. But, many pollinators are in trouble, and the reality is that most of our landscapes have little to offer them. Our residential and commercial landscapes are filled with vast green pollinator deserts, better known as lawns. These monotonous green expanses are ecological wastelands for bees and other pollinators. With The Pollinator Victory Garden, learn how to transition your landscape into a pollinator haven by creating a habitat that includes pollinator nutrition, larval host plants for butterflies and moths, and areas for egg laying, nesting, sheltering, overwintering, resting, and warming. Perfect for beginner to intermediate gardeners, this guide offers a wealth of information to support pollinators while improving the environment around you: The importance of pollinators and the specific threats to their survival How to provide food for pollinators using native perennials, trees, and shrubs that bloom in succession Detailed profiles of the major pollinator types and how to attract and support each one Tips for creating and growing a Pollinator Victory Garden, including site assessment, planning, and planting goals Project ideas like pollinator islands, enriched landscape edges, revamped foundation plantings, meadowscapes, and other pollinator-friendly lawn alternatives A Pollinator Victory Garden checklist to help you plan and implement the steps needed to have a thriving pollinator garden Plant lists of native tree and shrub species organized by pollinator type and bloom time The time is right for a new gardening movement. Every yard, community garden, rooftop, porch, patio, commercial, and municipal landscape can help to win the war against pollinator decline with The Pollinator Victory Garden.
£17.09
The University of Chicago Press Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science
"Legend is overdue for replacement, and an adequate replacement must attend to the process of science as carefully as Hull has done. I share his vision of a serious account of the social and intellectual dynamics of science that will avoid both the rosy blur of Legend and the facile charms of relativism. . . . Because of [Hull's] deep concern with the ways in which research is actually done, Science as a Process begins an important project in the study of science. It is one of a distinguished series of books, which Hull himself edits."—Philip Kitcher, Nature "In Science as a Process, [David Hull] argues that the tension between cooperation and competition is exactly what makes science so successful. . . . Hull takes an unusual approach to his subject. He applies the rules of evolution in nature to the evolution of science, arguing that the same kinds of forces responsible for shaping the rise and demise of species also act on the development of scientific ideas."—Natalie Angier, New York Times Book Review"By far the most professional and thorough case in favour of an evolutionary philosophy of science ever to have been made. It contains excellent short histories of evolutionary biology and of systematics (the science of classifying living things); an important and original account of modern systematic controversy; a counter-attack against the philosophical critics of evolutionary philosophy; social-psychological evidence, collected by Hull himself, to show that science does have the character demanded by his philosophy; and a philosophical analysis of evolution which is general enough to apply to both biological and historical change."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement"Hull is primarily interested in how social interactions within the scientific community can help or hinder the process by which new theories and techniques get accepted. . . . The claim that science is a process for selecting out the best new ideas is not a new one, but Hull tells us exactly how scientists go about it, and he is prepared to accept that at least to some extent, the social activities of the scientists promoting a new idea can affect its chances of being accepted."—Peter J. Bowler, Archives of Natural History "I have been doing philosophy of science now for twenty-five years, and whilst I would never have claimed that I knew everything, I felt that I had a really good handle on the nature of science, Again and again, Hull was able to show me just how incomplete my understanding was. . . . Moreover, [Science as a Process] is one of the most compulsively readable books that I have ever encountered."—Michael Ruse, Biology and Philosophy
£37.84
Casemate Publishers General Jan Smuts and His First World War in Africa, 1914-1917
World War I ushered in a renewed scramble for Africa. At its helm, Jan Smuts grabbed the opportunity to realise his ambition of a Greater South Africa. He set his sights upon the vast German colonies of South-West Africa and East Africa - the demise of which would end the Kaiser's grandiose schemes for Mittelafrika. As part of his strategy to shift South Africa's borders inexorably northward, Smuts even cast an eye toward Portuguese and Belgian African possessions.Smuts, his abilities as a general much denigrated by both his contemporary and then later modern historians, was no armchair soldier. This cabinet minister and statesman donned a uniform and led his men into battle. He learned his soldiery craft under General Koos De la Rey's tutelage, and another soldier-statesman, General Louis Botha during the South African War 1899-1902. He emerged from that war, immersed in the Boer manoeuvre doctrine he devastatingly waged in the guerrilla phase of that conflict. His daring and epic invasion of the Cape at the head of his commando remains legendary. The first phase of the German South West African campaign and the Afrikaner Rebellion in 1914 placed his abilities as a sound strategic thinker and a bold operational planner on display. Champing at the bit, he finally had the opportunity to command the Southern Forces in the second phase of the German South West African campaign.Placed in command of the Allied forces in East Africa in 1916, he led a mixed bag of South Africans and Imperial troops against the legendary Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his Shutztruppe. Using his penchant for Boer manoeuvre warfare together with mounted infantry led and manned by Boer Republican veterans, he proceeded to free the vast German territory from Lettow-Vorbeck's grip. Often leading from the front, his operational concepts were an enigma to the British under his command, remaining so to modern-day historians. Although unable to bring the elusive and wily Lettow-Vorbeck to a final decisive battle, Smuts conquered most of the territory by the end of his tenure in February 1917.General Jan Smuts and his Great War in Africa makes use of multiple archival sources and the official accounts of all the participants to provide a long-overdue reassessment of Smuts's generalship and his role in furthering the strategic aims of South Africa and the British Empire in Africa during World War I.
£27.00
Liverpool University Press Alejandro Lerroux and the Failure of Spanish Republican Democracy: A Political Biography (1864-1949)
Alejandro Lerroux (18641949) was one of the most polemical figures of early twentieth century Spanish politics. As leader of the Radical Republican Party and six-time prime minister between 1933 and 1935, his admirers saw him as a patriot determined to create a Republic for all citizens, while his critics denounced him as an opportunistic demagogue willing to sacrifice the Republic to its enemies. Like his French republican contemporary Georges Clemenceau, Lerrouxs long political journey took him from the fiery radical leftism of his youth to centrist consensual politics. Thus while Lerroux was the most significant advocate of a revolutionary break with Spains monarchical and authoritarian past before 1931, after the proclamation of the Second Republic he wished to build an inclusive and tolerant democracy. This book is the first scholarly biography in any language of this titan of modern Spanish politics. Nigel Townsons The Crisis of Democracy in Spain (2000) is the only book in English to discuss Lerrouxs career in any detail, but his study is restricted to the Second Republic. Utilising neglected primary material, Villa Garcia argues that Lerroux embodies the transition from the elitist liberal politics of the nineteenth century to the modern mass politics of the twentieth. Like the Second Republic itself, Lerrouxs political career ended in failure. The work is a timely reminder to students of modern Spain that the demise of Republican democracy was not inevitable. Nevertheless, after the abrupt end to Lerrouxs effort to sustain a broadly based moderate and democratic government, Spain would never again achieve stable and constitutional rule until 1977. The political defeat of Lerroux was a major turning point in the countrys history, a fateful step in the failure of democracy and the coming of civil war.
£32.50
Plough Publishing House When Spring Comes to the DMZ
Batchelder Honor Winner, 2020 ALA Youth Media AwardsHonorable Mention, 2019 Freeman Awards (National Consortium for Teaching about Asia)Korea’s demilitarized zone (DMZ) has become an amazing accidental nature preserve that gives hope for a brighter future for a divided land.This unique picture book invites young readers into the natural beauty of the DMZ, where salmon, spotted seals, and mountain goats freely follow the seasons and raise their families in this 2.5-mile-wide, 150-mile-long corridor where no human may tread. But the vivid seasonal flora and fauna are framed by ever-present rusty razor wire, warning signs, and locked gates—and regularly interrupted by military exercises that continue decades after a 1953 ceasefire in the Korean War established the DMZ.Creator Uk-Bae Lee’s lively paintings juxtapose these realities, planting in children the dream of a peaceful world without war and barriers, where separated families meet again and live together happily in harmony with their environment. Lee shows the DMZ through the eyes of a grandfather who returns each year to look out over his beloved former lands, waiting for the day when he can return. In a surprise foldout panorama at the end of the book the grandfather, tired of waiting, dreams of taking his grandson by the hand, flinging back the locked gates, and walking again on the land he loves to find his long-lost friends.When Spring Comes to the DMZ helps introduce children to the unfinished history of the Korean Peninsula playing out on the nightly news, and may well spark discussions about other walls, from Texas to Gaza.
£12.99
Simon & Schuster Ltd Crucible: The Year that Forged Our World
The Times Book of the YearBBC History Magazine Book of the YearDaily Telegraph Book of the Year BOOK OF THE WEEK - The Times ‘The strength of this book lies in the cold realities it delivers. “The thirteen months of 1947-48,” writes Fenby, “provide trenchant examples of how realpolitik can serve a wider purpose if those in power know how to use it.” Crucible captures perfectly the urgency of the time…Read this book for the light it shines on a turbulent time; cherish it for the lessons it provides’ - Gerard DeGroot 'Looking back 70 years Jonathan Fenby argues convincingly that the period from 1947 to 1948 “really did change the world”. His book is an assured gallop across the terrain of contemporary history in this fateful year. The global devastation of the second world war had smashed longstanding institutions and bankrupted empires, leaving behind the kind of power vacuums that were major openings for change and chaos. Crucible swings from one region to the next in a fast-moving account of how local actors filled those vacuums, often with violence.’Mary Sarote, Financial TimesOne year shaped the world we know today. This is the page-turning story of the pivotal changes which were forged in the space of thirteen months of 1947-48 Two years after the end of the second conflict to engulf the world in twenty years, and the defeat of the Axis forces of Germany, Italy and Japan, this momentous time saw the unrolling of the Cold War between Joseph Stalin's Soviet Russia and the Western powers under the untried leadership of Harry Truman as America came to play a global role for the first time.The British Empire began its demise with the birth of the Indian and Pakistan republics with the flight of millions and wholesale slaughter as Vietnam, Indonesia and other colonies around the globe vied for freedom. 1948 also marked the creation of the state of Israel, the refugee flight of Palestinians and the first Arab-Israeli war as well as the victories of Communist armies that led to their final triumph in China, the coming of apartheid to South Africa, the division of Korea, major technological change and the rolling out of the welfare state against a backdrop of events that ensured the global order would never be the same again. This dynamic narrative spans the planet with overlapping epic episodes featuring such historic figures as Truman and Marshall, Stalin and Molotov, Attlee and Bevin, De Gaulle and Adenauer, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, Nehru and Jinnah, Ben Gurion and the Arab leaders. Between them, they forged the path to our modern world.
£13.49
Fordham University Press Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy
WINNER, HELEN AND HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE IN ITALIAN HISTORY Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy’s transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country’s break with Mussolini’s regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.
£26.99
Fordham University Press Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy
WINNER, HELEN AND HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE IN ITALIAN HISTORY Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy’s transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country’s break with Mussolini’s regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.
£100.80
Princeton University Press No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922
Among the various kinds of occultism popular during the Russian Silver Age (1890-1914), modern Theosophy was by far the most intellectually significant. This contemporary gnostic gospel was invented and disseminated by Helena Blavatsky, an expatriate Russian with an enthusiasm for Buddhist thought and a genius for self-promotion. What distinguished Theosophy from the other kinds of "mysticism"--the spiritualism, table turning, fortune-telling, and magic--that fascinated the Russian intelligentsia of the period? In answering this question, Maria Carlson offers the first scholarly study of a controversial but important movement in its Russian context. Carlson's is the only work on this topic written by an intellectual historian not ideologically committed to Theosophy. Placing Mme Blavatsky and her "secret doctrine" in a Russian setting, the book also discusses independent Russian Theosophical circles and the impact of the Theosophical-Anthroposophical schism in Russia. It surveys the vigorous polemics of the Theosophists and their critics, demonstrates Theosophy's role in the philosophical dialogues of the Russian creative intelligentsia, and chronicles the demise of the movement after 1917. By exploring this long neglected aspect of the Silver Age, Carlson greatly enriches our knowledge of fin-de-sicle Russian culture. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
£42.00
Princeton University Press Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures
A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Destruction brings not stale suppositions but an economist's eye to bear on an age-old question: Are market exchange and aesthetic quality friends or foes? On the whole, argues Cowen in clear and vigorous prose, they are friends. Cultural "destruction" breeds not artistic demise but diversity. Through an array of colorful examples from the areas where globalization's critics have been most vocal, Cowen asks what happens when cultures collide through trade, whether technology destroys native arts, why (and whether) Hollywood movies rule the world, whether "globalized" culture is dumbing down societies everywhere, and if national cultures matter at all. Scrutinizing such manifestations of "indigenous" culture as the steel band ensembles of Trinidad, Indian handweaving, and music from Zaire, Cowen finds that they are more vibrant than ever--thanks largely to cross-cultural trade. For all the pressures that market forces exert on individual cultures, diversity typically increases within society, even when cultures become more like each other. Trade enhances the range of individual choice, yielding forms of expression within cultures that flower as never before. While some see cultural decline as a half-empty glass, Cowen sees it as a glass half-full with the stirrings of cultural brilliance. Not all readers will agree, but all will want a say in the debate this exceptional book will stir.
£30.00
Penguin Random House Children's UK Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief - Film Tie-in (Book 1 of Percy Jackson)
The Lightning Thief: the first book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series.Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. I never asked to be the son of a Greek god. I was just a normal kid, going to school, playing basketball, skateboarding. The usual. Until I accidentally vaporized my maths teacher. That's when things started really going wrong. Now I spend my time fighting with swords, battling monsters with my friends and generally trying to stay alive. This is the one where Zeus, God of the Sky, thinks I've stolen his lightning bolt - and making Zeus angry is a very bad idea . . .Rick Riordan has now sold an incredible 55 million copies of his books worldwidePraise for the Percy Jackson series:'Witty and inspired. Gripping, touching and deliciously satirical...This is most likely to succeed Rowling. Puffin is on to a winner' - Amanda Craig, The Times'Puns, jokes and subtle wit, alongside a gripping storyline' - Telegraph'Perfectly paced, with electrifying moments chasing each other like heartbeats' - New York TimesRick Riordan is an award-winning mystery writer. For the past fifteen years he has taught at middle schools in the San Francisco Bay area and in Texas. Rick lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife and two sons. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, the overall winner of the Red House Children's Book Award, was Rick's first novel featuring the heroic young demigod.The Percy Jackson series:The Lightning Thief; The Sea of Monsters; The Battle of the Labyrinth; The Titan's Curse; The Last Olympian Heroes of Olympus:The Lost Hero; The Son of Neptune; The Mark of AthenaThe Kane Chronicles:The Red Pyramid; The Throne of Fire; The Serpent's Shadow
£8.99
Abrams Most Dope
The first biography of rapper Mac Miller, the Pittsburgh cult favorite–turned–rap superstar who touched the lives of millions before tragically passing away at the age of 26—now in paperbackMalcolm James McCormick was born on January 19, 1992. He began making music at a young age and by 15 was already releasing mixtapes. One of the first true viral superstars, his early records earned him a rabid legion of die-hard fans—as well as a few noteworthy detractors. But despite his undeniable success, Miller was plagued by struggles with substance abuse and depression, both of which fueled his raw and genre-defying music, yet ultimately led to his demise. Through detailed reporting and interviews with dozens of Miller’s confidants, Paul Cantor brings you to leafy Pittsburgh, seductive Los Angeles, and frenzied New York, where you will meet Miller’s collaborators, producers, business partners, best friends, and even his roommates. Traveling deep into Miller’s inner circle, behind the curtain, the velvet ropes, and studio doors, Most Dope tells the story of a passionate, gifted young man who achieved his life’s ambition, only to be undone by his personal demons.Most Dope is part love letter, part cautionary tale, never shying away from the raw, visceral way Mac Miller lived his life. Praise for Most Dope"A tender, studious remembrance." —The New York Times"An insightful exploration of his life . . . painstakingly reported by Cantor, who interviewed more than 100 people during a three-year process." —USA Today "An inside look at Miller's life through the eyes of his friends and industry peers, tracking the musician's life journey as he quickly ascended the ranks." —Daily Beast
£12.99
The Mercier Press Ltd West Cork Railways: Birth, Beauty and Betrayal
This wonderful publication provides a unique visual and historical record of the West Cork Railway as rail enthusiast and historian Chris Larkin warmly remembers the lifetime of the rail system in a travelogue which allows readers to hop onto a West Cork train and savour the journey of a bygone era. Highly illustrated with 188 images, while on board, you might even meet a celebrity! Fully illustrated throughout, material from Irish Railway Records is complemented by unique and rare images from private collections and the London Illustrated News. Photographs, vintage posters, postcards, colour slides, tickets, advertisements and images of railway paraphernalia fill the pages. West Cork Railways takes the reader time travelling from the famine right through to the rocking 1960s. Sit on a seat and be whisked from your West Cork home to villages and towns carrying along the dreams, needs and aspirations of bygone travellers. Observe railway life and the harmonious existence of dogs, cats, hens, ducks and geese at the level crossings. Railway enthusiasts will savour detailed accounts of railway stations, length of lines together with steam locomotives and wagons, while those interested in social history will enjoy accounts of halt-keeper’s houses and lists of people including those that worked on the Cork - Beara line. The railway brought much prosperity to the region; however, decades have passed since its 1961 demise and the rapid physical decay of the line. West Cork life continued, albeit in a different way. While today connectivity is measured in speed, this railway is fondly remembered for linking its people. Heartbreakingly, if it had held its ground for a further 12 years until EEC entry (1973), the railway right of way for future generations would have been preserved.
£21.60
Paizo Publishing, LLC Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide Pocket Edition (P2)
Ready to go beyond the basics? Expand the limits of what’s possible with the Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide Pocket Edition! This 272-page Pathfinder Second Edition rulebook contains exciting new rules options for player characters, adding even more depth of choice to your Pathfinder game! Inside you will find brand new ancestries, heritages, and four new classes: the shrewd investigator, the mysterious oracle, the daring swashbuckler, and the hex-slinging witch! The must-have Advanced Player’s Guide also includes exciting new options for all your favorite Core Rulebook classes and tons of new backgrounds, general feats, spells, items, and 40 flexible archetypes to customize your play experience even further! The Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide includes: • Four new classes: the investigator, oracle, swashbuckler, and witch! • Five new ancestries and five heritages for any ancestry: celestial aasimars, curious catfolk, hagspawned changelings, vampiric dhampirs, fate-touched duskwalkers, scaled kobolds, fierce orcs, fiendish tieflings, industrious ratfolk, and feathered tengu! • 40 new archetypes including multiclass archetypes for the four new classes, Pathfinder favorites like the cavalier, dragon disciple, shadowdancer, and vigilante, and brand-new archetypes like the familiar master and the shield-bearing iron wall! • New class options for all twelve classes from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook including champions of evil, genie and shadow sorcerers, zen archer monks, rogue masterminds, spellcasting rangers, and more! • Even more exciting new rules, from rare and unique backgrounds to investigative skill feats, from spells and rituals like reincarnate and create demiplane to new items including special wands with unusual effects and exciting potions worthy of a witch’s cauldron.
£20.69
University of California Press Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking--the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style--she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handwork. Her absorbing, superbly detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world. Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance their grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear. This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice--the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures. Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before. Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imaginations. A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum
£27.90
Paizo Publishing, LLC Pathfinder RPG: Advanced Player’s Guide (Special Edition) (P2)
Ready to go beyond the basics? Expand the limits of what’s possible with the Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide! This 272-page Pathfinder Second Edition rulebook contains exciting new rules options for player characters, adding even more depth of choice to your Pathfinder game! Inside you will find brand new ancestries, heritages, and four new classes: the shrewd investigator, the mysterious oracle, the daring swashbuckler, and the hex-slinging witch! The must-have Advanced Player’s Guide also includes exciting new options for all your favorite Core Rulebook classes and tons of new backgrounds, general feats, spells, items, and 40 flexible archetypes to customize your play experience even further! This deluxe special edition is bound in faux leather with metallic deboss cover elements and a bound-in ribbon bookmark. The perfect way to commemorate Pathfinder's new edition! (Cover color and design subject to change.) The Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide includes: • Four new classes: the investigator, oracle, swashbuckler, and witch! • Five new ancestries and five heritages for any ancestry: celestial aasimars, curious catfolk, hagspawned changelings, vampiric dhampirs, fate-touched duskwalkers, scaled kobolds, fierce orcs, fiendish tieflings, industrious ratfolk, and feathered tengu! • 40 new archetypes including multiclass archetypes for the four new classes, Pathfinder favorites like the cavalier, dragon disciple, shadowdancer, and vigilante, and brand-new archetypes like the familiar master and the shield-bearing iron wall! • New class options for all twelve classes from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook including champions of evil, genie and shadow sorcerers, zen archer monks, rogue masterminds, spellcasting rangers, and more! • Even more exciting new rules, from rare and unique backgrounds to investigative skill feats, from spells and rituals like reincarnate and create demiplane to new items including special wands with unusual effects and exciting potions worthy of a witch’s cauldron.
£56.69
Hodder & Stoughton Identity, Ignorance, Innovation: Why the old politics is useless - and what to do about it
'D'Ancona makes his case well... The book is well written and thoughtful' -- The Times'A heartfelt attempt to renew liberal ideals for the coming decades... How sorely our public debate needs others to express themselves similarly.' -- Henry Mance, Financial Times'An urgent and exhilarating account of how populism, prejudice & polarisation have corrupted objective truth and public discourse. D'Ancona's sparkling prose provides an explanation of how we got here and, crucially, how we might get out.' -- James O'Brien'A book so rich in thought, wisdom and persuasion I find myself sharing the ideas within it with everyone I meet... In the much-mourned absence of Christopher Hitchens, d'Ancona is fast becoming the voice of enlightenment for our bewildered age.' -- Emily Maitlis'A tonic for our times that blows open any complacency following Trump's defeat that the demise of populism and nativism is inevitable. In beautifully written prose, D'Ancona puts forward hopeful ideas and timely inspiration for a progressive politics to replace it.' -- David Lammy'A brilliant, lucid, fearless tract, just what the historical moment ordered.' -- Andrew O'Hagan'D'Ancona's regular practical suggestions help to take it beyond mere theory and into the real world... Decision-makers would do well to read it.' -- Charlotte Henry, TLS***This is a call to arms. The old tools of political analysis are obsolete - they have rusted and are no longer fit for purpose. We've grown lazy, wedded to the assumption that, after ruptures such as Brexit, the pandemic, and the rise of the populist Right, things will eventually go 'back to normal'.Award-winning political writer Matthew d'Ancona invites you to think afresh: to seek new ways of challenging political extremism, bombastic populism and democratic torpor on both Left and Right. In this ground-breaking book, he proposes a new way of understanding our era and plots a way forward. With rigorous analysis, he argues that we need to understand the world in a new way, with a framework built from the three I's: Identity, Ignorance and Innovation.
£10.99
Equinox Publishing Ltd Spectres of John Ball: The Peasants' Revolt in English Political History, 1381-2020
For centuries, the priest John Ball was one of the most infamous or famous figures in the history of English rebels, best known for his saying 'When Adam delved and Eve Span, Who was then the gentleman'. But over the past hundred years his memory has faded dramatically. Along with Wat Tyler, Ball was one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, a historically remarkable event in that leading figures of the realm were beheaded by the rebels. For a few days in June 1381, the rebels dominated London but soon met their demise, with Ball executed. Ball provided the theological justification for the uprising which he saw in apocalyptic terms. After the revolt, he was soon vilified and received an overwhelmingly hostile press for 400 years as an archetypal enemy of the state and a religious zealot. His reputation was rescued from the end of the eighteenth century onward and for over one hundred years he rivalled Robin Hood and Wat Tyler as a great English folk (and even abolitionist) hero. But his 640-year reception involves much more, of course, and is tied up with the story of what England is or could be. Overall, the book explains how we get from an apocalyptic priest who promoted a theocracy favouring the lower orders and the decapitation of the leading church and secular authorities to someone who promoted democracy and vague notions about love and tolerance. The book also explains why he has gone out of fashion and whether he can make another comeback.
£26.95