Search results for ""New Amsterdam Books""
New Amsterdam Books Elections and Voters: A Comparative Introduciton
The study of elections and voting patterns has been one of the fastest growing fields of political science in the past few decades. It has produced one of the most characteristic artifacts of Western political culture: the public-opinion poll. But what makes people vote the way they do—social class, race, and sex? Or more ephemeral factors, like ideology, party identifications, money and mass-media campaigns? The authors argue that it is futile to ask the question, 'What decides elections?' without first considering another: What do elections decide? Elections and Voters therefore examines competitive electoral systems: how they work, how they are manipulated, and how to interpret the results of elections held under their rules. Ideologies and images, sociological and economic influences, and the effects of the media, money, and opinion polls themselves are discussed, as are noncompetitive elections in four countries commonly omitted from such studies: the Soviet Union, Poland, Mexico, and Kenya. Completely free of jargon, Elections and Voters is indispensable not only to students of politics but also to its practitioners: journalists, politicians, pollsters—and voters themselves.
£14.99
New Amsterdam Books Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise
In the autumn of 1988 a group of Israeli women donned prayer shawls, took up the Torah, and gathered at the Wailing Wall to pray. The religious leaders of the State of Israel were appalled and proposed that the holy relics, so defiled, be burned. The Catholic Church has steadfastly refused to ordain women as priests. Examples of exclusionary practice abound in all the major religions. In the face of such attitudes and practices, how can women share fully in the spiritual wealth of which our religions are the expression? To what extent are patriarchy, androcentrism, and sexism inherent in all religious institutions? How is the women's movement linked to the age-old quest for spirituality, the search for meaning, for ultimate values, for liberation and transcendence? Ursula King believes that in recounting their own experience, women everywhere are expressing a new view of the world and a new spirituality for themselves and a response to the needs and opportunities of the age. In this book she explores the implicit and explicit demands of feminism, and discusses themes posed by women mystics, by goddess-worship in other cultures and in our own, by historical matriarchy, by feminist theology. Women and Spirituality is concerned with important issues of personal and social change, and the perspectives they open to non-violence, peace and the protection of the ecological matrix that supports our existence. It gives a wide-ranging account of women's relations with the world's religions and the spiritual dimension of human life.
£22.50
New Amsterdam Books Elizabethan Jacobean Drama: The Theatre in Its Time
The purpose of this absorbing collection is to illuminate the world of the theatre by setting it squarely in its historical context. To that end, Professor Evans draws on the whole spectrum of Elizabethan-Jacobean writing, from official documents to diaries and letters. Part I, The Theatre and the World, deals, through contemporary writings, with the drama itself, the audiences and their responses, theatrical companies, acting and actors, and buildings and technical matters. Part II, The Worlds and the Theatre, illustrates how the problems of everyday life, complicated as they were by moral, religious, social, political, and economic issues, provided an ever-fruitful source of materials to the dramatists who practiced their craft during this extraordinarily creative period.
£14.99