Best of
Society

2003

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power


Joel Bakan - 2003
    Eminent Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that today's corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.In this revolutionary assessment of the history, character, and globalization of the modern business corporation, Bakan backs his premise with the following observations:-The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others. -The corporation’s unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal. -Governments have freed the corporation, despite its flawed character, from legal constraints through deregulation and granted it ever greater authority over society through privatization.But Bakan believes change is possible and he outlines a far-reaching program of achievable reforms through legal regulation and democratic control.Featuring in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and cultural critic Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is an extraordinary work that will educate and enlighten students, CEOs, whistle-blowers, power brokers, pawns, pundits, and politicians alike.

Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else


David Cay Johnston - 2003
    Tax policies and their enforcement have become a disaster, and thanks to discreet lobbying by a segment of the top 1 percent, Washington is reluctant or unable to fix them. The corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax have been largely ignored by the media. But the cumulative results are remarkable: today someone who earns a yearly salary of $60,000 pays a larger percentage of his income in taxes than the four hundred richest Americans.Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston exposes exactly how the middle class is being squeezed to create a widening wealth gap that threatens the stability of the country. By relating the compelling tales of real people across all areas of society, he reveals the truth behind:- Middle class tax cuts and exactly whom they benefit. - How workers are being cheated out of their retirement plans while disgraced CEOs walk away with millions. - How some corporations avoid paying any federal income tax. - How a law meant to prevent cheating by the top 2 percent of Americans no longer affects most of them, but has morphed into a stealth tax on single mothers making just $28,000. - Why the working poor are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS than everyone else. - How the IRS became so weak that even when it was handed complete banking records detailing massive cheating by 1,600 people, it prosecuted only 4 percent of them.Johnston has been breaking pieces of this story on the front page of The New York Times for seven years. With Perfectly Legal, he puts the whole shocking narrative together in a way that will stir up media attention and make readers angry about the state of our country.

Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp


Xianhui Yang - 2003
    These exiles men and women were subjected to horrific conditions, and by 1961 the camp was closed because of the stench of death: of the rougly three thousand inmates, only about five hundred survived.In 1997, Xianhui Yang traveled to Gansu and spent the next five years interviewing more than one hundred survivors of the camp. In Woman from Shanghai he presents thirteen of their stories, which have been crafted into fiction in order to evade Chinese censorship but which lose none of their fierce power. These are tales of ordinary people facing extraordinary tribulations, time and again securing their humanity against those who were intent on taking it away.Xianhui Yang gives us a remarkable synthesis of journalism and fiction—a timely, important and uncommonly moving book.

Red-Color News Soldier


Li Zhensheng - 2003
    Almost no visual documentation of the period exists and that which does is biased due to government control over media, arts and cultural institutions.Red-Color News Soldier is a controversial visual record of an infamous, misunderstood period of modern history that has been largely hidden from the public eye, both within China and abroad. Li Zhensheng (b.1940) - a photo journalist living in the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang - managed, at great personal risk, to hide and preserve for decades over 20,000 stills. As a party-approved photographer for The Heilongjiang Daily , he had been granted unusual access to capture events during the Cultural Revolution. This account has remained unseen until now, except for some eight photographs that were released for publication in 1987.Red-Color News Soldier includes over 400 photographs and a running diary of Li's experience. The images are powerful representations of the turbulent period, including photographs of unruly Red Guard rallies and relentless public denunciations and Mao's rural re-education centres, as well as portraits prominent participants in the Cultural Revolution.Jonathan Spence, Yale Professor and pre-eminient historian of modern China, presents a rigorous introduction. In it, he states: 'Li was tracking human tragedies and personal foibles with a precision that was to create an enduring legacy not only for his contemporaries but for the generations of his countrymen then unborn. As Westerners confront the multiplicity of his images, they too can come to understand something of the agonizing paradoxes that lay at the centre of this protracted human disaster.'This book excels as a volume of both compelling photography and riveting historical record. It is truly unique - in terms of both its artefactual value and its deconstruction - and indispensable for anyone interested in modern Chinese history or the powerful cultural role of photojournalism.

Slim Aarons: Once Upon A Time


Slim Aarons - 2003
    This volume shows Aarons influential photographs of the international elite in their exclusive playgrounds during the jet-set decades of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

War Talk


Arundhati Roy - 2003
    -Invited to lecture as part of the prestigious Lannan -Foundation series on the first anniversary of the unconscionable attacks of September 11, 2001, Roy challenged those who equate dissent with being "anti-American." Her previous essays on globalization and dissent have led many to see Roy as "India's most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence" (New York Times).War Talk collects new essays by this prolific writer. Her work highlights the global rise of religious and racial violence. From the horrific pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat, India, to U.S. demands for a war on Iraq, Roy confronts the call to militarism. Desperately working against the backdrop of the nuclear recklessness between her homeland and Pakistan, she calls into question the equation of nation and ethnicity. And throughout her essays, Roy interrogates her own roles as "writer" and "activist.""If [Roy] continues to upset the globalization applecart like a Tom Paine pamphleteer, she will either be greatly honored or thrown in jail," wrote Pawl Hawken in Wired Magazine. In fact she was jailed in March 2002, when -India's Supreme Court found Roy in contempt of the court after months of attempting to silence her criticism of the government.Fully annotated versions of all Roy's most recent -essays, including her acclaimed Lannan Foundation -lecture from September 2002, are included in War Talk. Arundhati Roy is the winner of the Lannan Foundation’s Prize for Cultural Freedom, 2002, and will be returning to the U.S. in association with the Lannan Foundation in 2003. Roy’s most recent collection of essays, Power Politics, now in its second edition, sold over 25,000 copies in its first 12 months.

The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun Control is Wrong


John R. Lott Jr. - 2003
    Slicing through the emotional--but factually wrong--arguments of gun control advocates this book busts a number of myths, demonstrating with hard statistical data and riveting anecdotes.

Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams


Alfred Lubrano - 2003
    Drawing on his own story as well as on dozens more from individuals who share his experience, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano sheds light on the predicament of some 13 million Americans: reconciling their blue-collar upbringing with the white-collar world they now inhabit.The profiles here show a remarkable consistency of emotion and experience across a diverse demographic that crosses all boundaries of sex, race, and religion. Opening a long-awaited dialogue, Limbo reflects the reality of a unique class struggling with an all-American brand of cultural isolation. There is something for everyone in these honest and eloquent stories of life in our modern meritocracy.

Princes of the Yen: Japan's Central Bankers and the Transformation of the Economy


Richard A. Werner - 2003
    It gives special emphasis to the 1980s and 1990s when Japan's economy experienced vast swings in activity. According to the author, the most recent upheaval in the Japanese economy is the result of the policies of a central bank less concerned with stimulating the economy that with its own turf battles and its ideological agenda to change Japan's economic structure. The book combines new historical research with an in-depth behind-the-scenes account of the bureaucratic competition between Japan's most important institutions: the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan. Drawing on new economic data and first-hand eyewitness accounts, it reveals little known monetary policy tools at the core of Japan's business cycle, identifies the key figures behind Japan's economy, and discusses their agenda. The book also highlights the implications for the rest of the world, and raises important questions about the concentration of power within central banks.

Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts


Zygmunt Bauman - 2003
    It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the 'developed countries'. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, 'redundant population' is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity's global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek - in vain, it seems - local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and the growing role played by diffuse 'security fears' on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with 'human waste' provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities


Diana Leafe Christian - 2003
    It deals in depth with structural, interpersonal and leadership issues, decision-making methods, vision statements, and the development of a legal structure, as well as profiling well-established model communities. This exhaustive guide includes excellent sample documents among its wealth of resources.Diana Leafe Christian is the editor of Communities magazine and has contributed to Body & Soul, Yoga Journal, and Shaman’s Drum, among others. She is a popular public speaker and workshop leader on forming intentional communities, and has been interviewed about the subject on NPR. She is a member of an intentional community in North Carolina.

Icarus Fallen: Search For Meaning In An Uncertain World


Chantal Delsol - 2003
    With style and lucidity, Delsol likens contemporary Western man to the mythical figure Icarus, fallen back to earth after trying to reach the sun, alive but badly shaken and confused. During the twentieth, century, Delsol argues, man flew too closely to the sun of utopian ideology. Having been burned, he is now groping for a way to orient himself. But the ideas he once held so dear--inevitable progress, the possibility of limitless social and self-transformation--are no longer believable, and he has, for the most part, long since rejected the religious tradition that might have provided an anchor. Delsol's portrait is engrossing. She explains how we have come simultaneously to embrace the good but reject the true; how we have sacralized rights and democracy; and how we have lost our sense of the tragic and embraced the idea of zero risk. Already a well-known political thinker in her native France, this is Delsol's first book to appear in English. Icarus Fallen should establish her as one of the most insightful social and cultural writers working on either side of the Atlantic.

The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land


Donna Rosenthal - 2003
    It looks like one country on CNN, a very different one on al-Jazeera. The BBC has their version, The New York Times theirs. But how does Israel look to Israelis? The answers are varied, and they have been brought together here in one of the most original books about Israel in decades. From battlefields to bedrooms to boardrooms, discover the colliding worlds in which an astounding mix of 7.2 million devoutly traditional and radically modern people live. You'll meet “Arab Jews” who fled Islamic countries, dreadlock-wearing Ethiopian immigrants who sing reggae in Hebrew, Christians in Nazareth who publish an Arabic-style Cosmo, young Israeli Muslims who know more about Judaism than most Jews of the Diaspora, ultra-Orthodox Jews on “Modesty Patrols,” and more. Interweaving hundreds of personal stories with intriguing new research, The Israelis is lively, irreverent, and always fascinating.

One Planet


Meaghan Amor - 2003
    This gift hardback edition of Lonely Planet's bestselling pictorial, 'One Planet', inspires the reader to explore their passion for travel.

Hindus and Hinduism: Manipulation of Meanings


Sita Ram Goel - 2003
    

Introduction to Art


Rosie Dickins - 2003
    The story of western painting - from ancient Egyptian tomb decoration to modern art - told clearly and simply, and illustrated with over 160 of the world's greatest works of art.Contains descriptions of web sites specially chosen to take you further into the subject.

The Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered India's Lost Religion


Charles Allen - 2003
    Yet, until the late eighteenth century when Sir William "Oriental" Jones broke the Brahmins' prohibition on learning the sacred language of Sanskrit, the Buddha's teachings were treasures unappreciated in the West. Uncovering clues about Buddhism's origins from inscriptions on pillars and rocks, Jones pioneered an enthusiastic band whose search for the Indian subcontinent's secret religion is chronicled in this book of high adventure and monumental historical detection. Acclaimed narrative historian Charles Allen brings to life extraordinary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century characters and travels to lost holy places across the Eastern world as he tells the story of how Westerners found the Buddha. Allen has recorded the Western birth of a religion whose influence in America has increased tenfold in the just the past forty years.

The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England


Peter Hitchens - 2003
    Clearly something needs to be done. But what? Peter Hitchens argues that the time has come to re-examine the criminal justice system root and branch - to cope with rising levels of violent crime, and to restore public faith in society's ability to defend itself. Whatever you think of the solutions Hitchens suggests to this problem, you can be sure that they will excite controversy.

Civil Rights Chronicle (The African-American Struggle for Freedom)


Clayborne Carson - 2003
    The dramatic personal and political stories behind the Civil Rights Movement as it happened across the North and the South with a key focus from 1950-1975.

Daughters of Hope: Stories of Witness Courage in the Face of Persecution


Kay Marshall Strom - 2003
    In Pakistan, Christian girls are systematically kidnapped, tortured and raped. In China, underground church leaders are sent to labor camps for hosting illegal home meetings. In Sudan, Christian women are captured and sold into slavery or mutilated and left to die. And in many Muslim countries, a woman can be killed by her husband or father for converting to Christianity. In this deeply moving book, Kay Marshall Strom and Michele Rickett tell the stories of persecuted Christian women from around the world. From Africa to the Middle East to Asia, they give voice to our sisters persevering under the yoke of oppression and injustice. Each section provides specific prayer points and practical action steps to equip us to respond to the issues at hand. Above all, these stories remind us that suffering is part of the call of followers of Jesus. The challenges do not mean that God has abandoned us. Rather, God is active and present with his suffering people. Do not be discouraged. Take heart from these daughters of hope.

Answering the Call: Saving Innocent Lives, One Woman at a Time


John Ensor - 2003
    A guidebook that describes a new kind of advocacy for the child in the womb.

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World


Bruce Schneier - 2003
    Security is near the top of government and corporate agendas around the globe. Security-related stories appear on the front page everyday. How well though, do any of us truly understand what achieving real security involves?In Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier invites us to take a critical look at not just the threats to our security, but the ways in which we're encouraged to think about security by law enforcement agencies, businesses of all shapes and sizes, and our national governments and militaries. Schneier believes we all can and should be better security consumers, and that the trade-offs we make in the name of security - in terms of cash outlays, taxes, inconvenience, and diminished freedoms - should be part of an ongoing negotiation in our personal, professional, and civic lives, and the subject of an open and informed national discussion.With a well-deserved reputation for original and sometimes iconoclastic thought, Schneier has a lot to say that is provocative, counter-intuitive, and just plain good sense. He explains in detail, for example, why we need to design security systems that don't just work well, but fail well, and why secrecy on the part of government often undermines security. He also believes, for instance, that national ID cards are an exceptionally bad idea: technically unsound, and even destructive of security. And, contrary to a lot of current nay-sayers, he thinks online shopping is fundamentally safe, and that many of the new airline security measure (though by no means all) are actually quite effective. A skeptic of much that's promised by highly touted technologies like biometrics, Schneier is also a refreshingly positive, problem-solving force in the often self-dramatizing and fear-mongering world of security pundits.Schneier helps the reader to understand the issues at stake, and how to best come to one's own conclusions, including the vast infrastructure we already have in place, and the vaster systems--some useful, others useless or worse--that we're being asked to submit to and pay for.Bruce Schneier is the author of seven books, including Applied Cryptography (which Wired called "the one book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published") and Secrets and Lies (described in Fortune as "startlingly lively...][a] jewel box of little surprises you can actually use."). He is also Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., and publishes Crypto-Gram, one of the most widely read newsletters in the field of online security.

Joe Hill: The IWW the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture


Franklin Rosemont - 2003
    Many aspects of the life and lore of Joe Hill receive their first and only discussion in IWW historian Franklin Rosemont’s opus. In great detail, the issues that Joe Hill raised and grappled with in his life: capitalism, white supremacy, gender, religion, wilderness, law, prison, and industrial unionism are shown in both the context of Hill’s life and for their enduring relevance in the century since his death. Collected too is Joe Hill’s art, plus scores of other images featuring Hill-inspired art by IWW illustrators. As Rosemont suggests in this remarkable book, Joe Hill never really died as he lives in the minds of rebels as long as his songs are sung, his ideas are circulated, and his political descendants keep fighting for a better day.

Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said


Edward W. Said - 2003
    Said discusses the centrality of popular resistance to his understanding of culture, history, and social change. He reveals his latest thoughts on the war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and lays out a compelling vision for a secular, democratic future in the Middle East—and globally.Edward W. Said, a renowned cultural and literary critic, was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and was educated there, in Egypt, and in the United States. His books include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, Culture and Imperialism, and The Politics of Dispossession. He has also published a memoir, Out of Place. Mr. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Lit-erature at Columbia University. In October 2001, he received the $200,000 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement.David Barsamian’s interview books feature conversations with luminaries such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Edward W. Said. A regular contributor to The Progressive and Z Magazine, Barsamian’s most recent interview books include Propaganda and the Public Mind and Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire, available from South End Press. He is also the author of The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting. Barsamian is the producer of the critically acclaimed program Alternative Radio.

Against the Flow: The Arts, Postmodern Culture and Education


Peter Abbs - 2003
    Peter Abbs argues that contemporary education ignores the aesthetic and ethical as a result of being in thrall to such forces as the market economy and managerial and functional dictates. He identifies the present education system as being inimical to creativity and authentic learning and instead, narrowly focused on the quantitative measuring of results. This absence of a creative and ethical dimension in education has implications for art making in wider society. Art is shown as emerging from, and appealing to, the ironic postmodernist sensibility and mass media-led culture, while being devoid of philosophical significance.This book opens up a fresh and timely debate about the vital power of creativity in modern education. Drawing on examples from modern poetry, literature and visual art, it is an eloquent and passionate argument for the need to develop ethical and aesthetic energies to confront the growing vacuity of contemporary culture.

Mansfield Park


Lin Coghlan - 2003
    But her life there is not as she might wish. Felicity Jones plays Fanny, whilst David Tennant is her cousin Tom and Benedict Cumberbatch his brother Edmund.

Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as If People Mattered


Lourdes Beneria - 2003
    This study highlights the ways in which feminist analysis has contributed to a richer understanding of international development and globalization. There is an underside (and a human side) to development and feminism has made inroads into the highly technical debates and frothy prophecies by examining what the future really holds for the people who will live it. Beneria presents an interdisciplinary and global perspective, including a view of development that relates to high and low income countries. This book combines theoretical, empirical and policy/action perspectives and discusses cutting-edge debates around gender and development, paid/unpaid work, gender and globalization, economic restructuring and feminist economics.

Winfield: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths


Monica Randall - 2003
    Millionaire F. W. Woolworth built Winfield, the grandest of its manors in the 1910s. On a clear day, you can see the New York City skyline from its balustraded roof, yet for nearly a century few have been allowed to enter its gates. In the 1960s Monica was living in one of the fabled mansions built by a Five-and-Dime heiress. While there, she began a career scouting locations for movie; she used many of the surrounding estates including Winfield. After a brief incarnation as a charm school, Winfield was closed and auctioned off. At the auction, Monica met a mysterious European businessman, who bought the house. After a whirlwind romance, they became engaged, and Monica moved in to Winfield, only to have her suspicions confirmed: Winfield is haunted. Amid magnificent gilded carvings and marble, a labyrinth of secret passageways, hidden chambers, and deserted tunnels help reveal the true nature of its eccentric builder. Through exhaustive research and countless interviews, Monica gradually uncovered stories of the Woolworths' sad past: the suicide of Edna Woolworth (Barbara Hutton's mother), Woolworth's obsession with Napoleon and the Egyptian occult, and the rumors surrounding the unsolved fire which burnt the first Winfield to the ground. This riveting memoir explores the culture and history of an era gone by, filled with enthralling stories of infamous scandals and breathtaking Gilded Age tales of New York society. Captivating and impossible to put down, this book will enchant readers everywhere. Throughout the last fifty years the Gold Coast mansions were regularly razed for subdevelopments; Winfield is the last of the marble palaces still standing.

The Secret of New York City Revealed: Being the Autobiographical Fragments of the Then Recently Married Thomas Howard Chronicling His Numerous Discoveries in the City of That Name


Thomas Howard - 2003
    He presents a sort of wide-eyed response on the part of a new, young husband to the great, twinkling kaleidoscope of New York, playing off the thousand diversions offered by that incredible city (opera, ballet, dining, sports, social life, etc.) against an increasingly strong awareness that the hidden mysteries of domestic fidelity, marriage, fatherhood, and routine duties, are at the "Center" around which New York life whirls.This is a timely book about the unique mixture of human and spiritual experiences that make up life in a great, complex city, confronting tensions that are timeless and ubiquitous. Illustrated.

Defending Science - within Reason: Between Scientism And Cynicism


Susan Haack - 2003
    Avoiding the twin pitfalls of scientism and cynicism, noted philosopher Susan Haack argues that, fallible and flawed as they are, the natural sciences have been among the most successful of human enterprises-valuable not only for the vast, interlocking body of knowledge they have discovered, and not only for the technological advances that have improved our lives, but as a manifestation of the human talent for inquiry at its imperfect but sometimes remarkable best.This wide-ranging, trenchant, and illuminating book explores the complexities of scientific evidence, and the multifarious ways in which the sciences have refined and amplified the methods of everyday empirical inquiry; articulates the ways in which the social sciences are like the natural sciences, and the ways in which they are different; disentangles the confusions of radical rhetoricians and cynical sociologists of science; exposes the evasions of apologists for religious resistance to scientific advances; weighs the benefits and the dangers of technology; tracks the efforts of the legal system to make the best use of scientific testimony; and tackles predictions of the eventual culmination, or annihilation, of the scientific enterprise.Writing with verve and wry humor, in a witty, direct, and accessible style, Haack takes readers beyond the "Science Wars" to a balanced understanding of the value, and the limitations, of the scientific enterprise.

The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages


Adam H. Becker - 2003
    Includes a new preface by the editors discussing scholarship since 2003.

Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition


Christopher Olaf Blum - 2003
    To understand adequately what Georges Bernanos called the spiritual drama of Europe, it is a tradition that must be grappled with. Critics of the Enlightenment makes available new translations of representative selections from some of the leading French conservative thinkers of the nineteenth century: Franois de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Frederic Le Play, Emile Keller, and Rene de La Tour du Pin. The selections span much of the nineteenth century, from Chateaubriand's 1814 pamphlet against Bonaparte to La Tour du Pin's 1883 essay on the theory of the corporate state. The volume, therefore, not only includes responses of the French conservatives to the French Revolutions of 1789 through 1815, but also testifies to the continuing elaboration of this critique against the background of the troubled nineteenth century. Blum's introduction sets these selections within the contexts of the events giving rise to them and the lives of their authors. The French political philosopher Philippe Beneton supplies the book's foreword. Blum's elegant translations of texts heretofore difficult or impossible to find in English allow Anglophone readers to profit from the counter-revolutionaries' insights about social and cultural matters of perennial importance, such as the necessary roles of religion, family, and local communities within any larger political society--matters of pressing concern to the counter-revolutionaries of our own time

Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English


Catherine Soanes - 2003
    It offers up-to-the-minute coverage of over 145,000 words, phrases, and definitions from everyday English, including up-to-the-minute words, and in-text notes giving guidance on spelling, grammar, and usage.

The How To Be British Collection


Martyn Ford - 2003
    Drawing on their many years' experience of teaching English as a Foreign Language the authors also offer the wider world a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to get around in English and at the same time make sense of our 'funny ways'. It's a gentle brand of satire, and although there's the occasional barbed arrow for bland food, fashion disasters or dubious standards of hygiene, the tone of The "How To Be British Collection" is more nostalgic than scornful, and the pet-loving, royal-watching, tea drinking characters that populate its pages are viewed with wry affection. Cartoons like "How to be Polite" and "How to Complain" have been reproduced in publications all over the world, perhaps because they put a finger on that peculiar tentativeness that foreigners find so puzzling (and so funny) about us. In order to be British, or at any rate to pass unnoticed in British society, the visitor must learn not to 'make a fuss'. A fuss is something that the true Brit cannot stand. It is nearly as bad as a 'scene', and in the same category as 'drawing attention to yourself'. In the first frame of How To Be Polite, a man -- presumably an uninitiated foreign visitor -- has fallen into a river. He's clearly in trouble and is shouting HELP! -- at the top of his voice, judging by the speech bubble. An English gentleman is walking his dog along the river bank. There's a lifebelt prominently displayed beside them, but the gent and his dog are walking away from the emergency with disapproving expressions. In the next frame, the man in the river has changed his strategy and is calling out: "Excuse me, Sir. I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you would mind helping me a moment, as long as it's no trouble, of course...". And this time, naturally, the English gent is rushing to his aid, throwing the lifebelt into the water. Even the dog is smiling. Much of the material in The "How to be British Collection" is about how cultural differences can prove a minefield for the unwary. To that extent its appeal - in an age where so many of us travel and even set up home overseas - is universal. Every visitor to Britain comes knowing that our favourite conversational gambit is the weather. But how many can successfully do it at 1) Elementary 2) Intermediate and 3) Advanced levels? The book's enduring popularity comes from the recognition factor -- how exposed we can be once we stray away from the comfort zone of our own native language. A hapless visitor, phrase book in hand, stops to ask an old lady in the street for directions. He looks pleased with himself for phrasing the question so nicely, but then is utterly at a loss to understand her long, rambling, minutely detailed reply. We've all been there. To help the poor innocent abroad around these cultural and linguistic booby-traps, the book includes on most pages collectible Expressions to learn and (of course) Expressions to avoid. Thus, under the entry for Real English, which negotiates the difficult area of colloquial speech including "idioms, slang and even the occasional taboo word, as used by flesh and blood native speakers" we find -- Expressions to learn:"'E nicked it off of a lorry and now the coppers 'ave done 'im for it." Expressions to avoid: "That's not correct English, Mrs. Jones -- it says so here in my grammar book".

Grace from the Garden: Changing the World One Garden at a Time


Debra Landwehr Engle - 2003
    . . ."In these pages, we travel the country with Debra Landwehr Engle as she visits 20 gardens and gardeners from California to Maine and Minnesota to Arkansas, showing us that grassroots campaigns actually can and do involve roots--and seeds and garden trowels. That any person with a steadfast resolve and an open patch of dirt can help bridge the gap between multinational refugees. That lush vegetation and running water and cool stones can help spark the fading memories of our elderly. And that our children can learn about where food comes from, labyrinths, wetlands systems, and healing from grief and loss just by digging in the earth with a caring adult hand to guide them.As the stories in this remarkable collection demonstrate, the simplest act of gardening can produce significant changes in the lives of people we might never even meet. Consider the man who sends seedlings and greenhouses halfway around the world to feed hospital patients, or the immigrant woman who began selling her own flowers as a way to raise money for overseas charities, or the couple who offers their land as a midday retreat for the residents of nearby nursing homes. These acts and others are not heroic--or even unusual--as Ms. Engle tells us. We see ourselves in these uplifting tales from the garden, as they inspire us to transform our own little parts of the world into places of greater peace, repose, play, and healing. For gardeners, community activists, and those who understand the spiritual value of putting a spade in the soil, these stories capture the promise renewed each time we plant a seed and give us fresh ideas for changing the world, one garden at a time.

Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry


Arthur De Vany - 2003
    The book uses powerful analytical models to uncover the wild uncertainty that shapes the industry. The centerpiece of the analysis is the unpredictable and often chaotic dynamic behaviour of motion picture audiences.This unique and important book will be of interest to students and researchers involved in the economics of movies, industrial economics and business studies. The book will also be a real eye-opener for film writers, movie executives, finance and risk management professionals as well as more general movie fans.

Wings and Rockets: The Story of Women in Air and Space


Jeannine Atkins - 2003
    Wilbur and Orville Wright, who pioneered powered flight in 1903, knew how much they owed to Katharine. "When the world speaks of the Wrights," said Orville, "they should not forget our sister." Although Katharine Wright was among the first women to ride in an airplane, Blanche Stuart Scott was the first to sit at the controls. To achieve her dream, Blanche overcame sexism and other obstacles. The same can be said of every woman whose piloting career is highlighted here - Bessie Coleman, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran, Ann Baumgartner Carl, Jerrie Cobb, Shannon Wells Lucid, and others. Their stories are sure to fire the imaginations of readers and encourage them to "follow their hearts into the sky" - or anywhere at all. This beautifully articulated history of American women who broke barriers to achieve an especially satisfying success is enhanced by clever, captivating halftone illustrations.

Urban Bonds


Talja Blokland - 2003
     Careful ethnographic study of the changing nature of social relationships and urban communities. Examines the role of the neighbourhood in our understanding of community and how this has changed over the last century. Interweaves a detailed study of the history and current social life of a poor neighbourhood in Rotterdam, with a reflection on the character of social ties in urban areas everywhere. Draws on American urban sociology and includes provocative discussions on the issues of community and ethnicity.

City: Urbanism and Its End


Douglas W. Rae - 2003
    Douglas Rae depicts the reasons for urban decline, explains why government spending has failed to restore urban vitality, and offers suggestions to enhance city life in the future.“A terrific read, moving seductively from the minutiae of neighborhood history to grand global forces.”—Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone“An extraordinarily detailed study of New Haven, tracing the city’s rise in the early part of the 20th century and its fall in the second half—an almost archetypal tale of the American city.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times“For anyone with the slightest interest in cities, this book is that rare combination: a must-read volume that you can’t put down.”—Planning Magazine“[Rae] has provided the blueprint for the next generation of thinkers and city dwellers who debate the future of urban America. . . . A tour de force of research.”—Paul Bass, New Haven Advocate

The Economist's Tale: A Consultant Encounters Hunger and the World Bank


Peter Griffiths - 2003
    Peter Griffiths was at the interface between government and the Bank.In this ruthlessly honest, day by day account of a mission he undertook in Sierra Leone, he uses his diary to tell the story of how the World Bank, obsessed with the free market, imposed a secret agreement on the government, banning all government food imports or subsidies. The collapsing economy meant that the private sector would not import. Famine loomed. No ministry, no state marketing organization, no aid organization could reverse the agreement. It had to be a top-level government decision, whether Sierra Leone could afford to annoy minor World Bank officials.This is a rare and important portrait of the aid world which insiders will recognize, but of which the general public seldom get a glimpse.

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works


Frank Bryan - 2003
    Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them.A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy.Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.

Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930


Di Wang - 2003
    This book examines street culture in Chengdu, an under-studied inland city, during the transformative decades between 1870 and 1930, in order to explore various topics: the relationship between urban commoners and public space; the role that community and neighborhood played in public life; how the reform movement and the Republican revolution changed everyday life; and how popular culture and local politics interacted. Drawing on a rich array of Chinese and Western sources—including archives, local newspapers, gazetteers, personal records, folk literature, and field investigation—the author argues that life in public spaces was radically transformed in Chengdu during these eventful years.

Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation


Margaret Scotford Archer - 2003
    On the basis of a series of in-depth interviews, Margaret Archer identifies the mediatory mechanism as internal conversations that are expressed in forms governing agents' responses to social conditioning, their individual patterns of social mobility, and whether or not they contribute to social stability or change.

A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear


Janna Malamud Smith - 2003
    With historical evidence, interviews, and personal experience, the psychotherapist Janna Malamud Smith brings a rich sensibility and rare intelligence to this subject. No mother will be a stranger to the guilt, fear, and worry surrounding the effort to keep her child safe. Smith centers her book on these rip-tide emotions and their manipulation by American society and media. Groundbreaking and thoroughly illuminating, A Potent Spell "should cast a beacon upon a history of prejudice and bad science" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Transcritique: On Kant and Marx


Kōjin Karatani - 2003
    In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital.Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore it to its proper place in the sphere of ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State.

The Emerging Framework of World Power


Noam Chomsky - 2003
    in a post-9-11 world—and finds nothing has changed. Ranging over American intervention in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America since WWII, Chomsky deftly sketches the logic behind our foreign policy, and its tragic results around the globe and at home. Whether it’s globalization, oil, or a monopoly on real terror, it’s business as usual, and we—not to mention the rest of the world—have to pay. Now more than ever, the venerable professor stands as the voice of reason in an apparently insane world.Noam Chomsky, living legend, has -authored over one hundred books, and a dozen CDs.

The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition


James A. Herrick - 2003
    Herrick offers an intellectual history of the New Religious Synthesis, examining the challenges it poses to Judeo-Christian tradition, demonstrating its sources and manifestations in contemporary culture, and questioning its acceptance in church and society. A massive shift in Western religious attitudes has taken place almost without our noticing it. The Judeo-Christian tradition of Western culture has slowly but steadily been eclipsed by a new way of viewing spirituality. This shift has been in the making for some three hundred years. James A. Herrick tells the story of how the old view has been dismantled and a new one created not primarily through academic or institutional channels but by means of popular religious media--books, speeches, magazines and pamphlets, as well as movies, plays, music, radio interviews, television programs and websites. Interest in spirituality increases while participation in institutional religion wanes. Many welcome this evolution of religion. However, few are familiar with its roots, and fewer still have critically examined its prospects. As we stand at a spiritual crossroad, Herrick questions whether we are wise to discard the Western religious tradition and adopt the new spirituality.