Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason.  In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions.  Is evil really a kind of nothingness?  Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive?  Why does goodness seem so boring?  Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?

    Based on 10 years of gang research, this book chronicles the rise of the Hell’s Angels and other bike gangs in the 1960s, the growth of the Mongrel Mob and Black Power in the 1970s, and organized crime during the last decade. With descriptions of such events as the Devil’s Henchmen throwing Molotov cocktails at the Epitaph Riders in Christchurch’s first gang war and Black Power members surrounding Prime Minister Rob Muldoon at Wellington’s Royal Tiger Tavern, it also discusses the significance of colors and class. With accounts from gang members, police, and politicians, this violent and sometimes horrifying book transports its readers to a tough yet revealing part of New Zealand life.

    

    The masterly essay on Tolstoy's view of history, in which Sir Isaiah underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

    How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

    His ‘natural supernaturalism’, personal mythology and vision can leave readers dazzled by the intensity and passion of his verse. In this outstanding work, Chesterton goes right to the heart of the matter and addresses the question of whether Blake’s genius was tainted by madness or whether his peculiar outlook on the world was the key to his success. With a detailed exposition of Blake’s life, and by weaving lucid explanations of his philosophy and religion into a discourse on his poetry, Chesterton has produced a remarkable and sensitive biography.

    From politics to the media, from education to the arts, liberals seem to be completely in control. It's no wonder, then, that so many prominent conservative traditionalists are hopelessly pessimistic about the future of Western Civilization. But what if this is just one side of the equation? What if it turns out that brewing beneath the surface, a renewed Christian age is rising? In this thought-provoking book, Dr. Steve Turley argues that there is in fact two revolutions concurrently taking place: a demographic revolution and a political revolution, both of which suggest a significant conservative Christian resurgence. HERE’S A PREVIEW OF WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ………. Why scholars believe that the fertility discrepancy between conservative Christians and secularists means a far more conservative future How Europe is already reversing its demographic decline with a nationalist baby boom How conservative Christianity is on the rise in the US Why scholars believe there is a resurgence of Christianity in Europe How these demographic and religious trends are already reshaping much of European society And much, much more! Drawing from scholarly studies and current events, Dr. Turley's study will inspire you to reject the naysayers predicting the twilight of the West, and instead embrace a hopeful vision of cultural renewal and the coming Christian majority. Get your copy today!

    There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book—one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them.Our age is a triumph of codification. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We pick and choose. We think we are free. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. They are the fabrications of consumer society. They express myths of success, well-being, and happiness. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked.What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic, and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11. This new edition of Mythologies, complete and beautifully rendered by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, is a consecration of Barthes's classic—a lesson in clairvoyance that is more relevant now than ever.

    Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors.Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance now to destroy Bo and what he stands for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation.Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political.

    In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous.Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one."

    Born in 1926 in France, over the course of his life he dabbled in drugs, politics, and the Paris SM scene, all whilst striving to understand the deep concepts of identity, knowledge, and power.From aesthetics to the penal system; from madness and civilisation to avant-garde literature, Foucault was happy to reject old models of thinking and replace them with versions that are still widely debated today. A major influence on Queer Theory and gender studies (he was openly gay and died of an AIDS-related illness in 1984), he also wrote on architecture, history, law, medicine, literature, politics and of course philosophy, and even managed a best-seller in France on a book dedicated to the history of systems of thought.Because of the complexity of his arguments, people trying to come to terms with his work have desperately sought introductory material that makes his theories clear and accessible for the beginner. Ideally suited for the Very Short Introductions series, Gary Gutting presents a comprehensive but non-systematic treatment of some highlights of Foucault's life and thought. Beginning with a brief biography to set the social and political stage, he then tackles Foucault's thoughts on literature, in particular the avant-garde scene; his philosophical and historical work; his treatment of knowledge and power in modern society; and his thoughts on sexuality.

    . . all of whom just so happened to play professional basketball. The 2019-20 Nets were the team of tomorrow—a player-first franchise, in a star-first city, at a nation-first moment—and anything was possible. As soon as the mega-stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving arrived, the Nets were destined to become a dynasty for the ages.Then came the wildest year in modern NBA—and world—history.Can't Knock the Hustle is the definitive chronicle of the season when basketball's status as a force for progress in society was put to the ultimate test, and Matt Sullivan had a courtside seat: Deal-making with Kyrie and Jay-Z. Rehabbing with KD at the Nets' world-class health facility. International intrigue between LeBron James and the Chinese government. The final days of Kobe Bryant, front-row at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The first days of Covid-19, when the Nets found themselves at the epicenter of a virus—and integral to a comeback of the very culture they had come to define.Hundreds of interviews—with NBA Hall-of-Famers, All-Stars, coaches, owners and power-brokers from across the globe—provide a lasting portrait of an unforgettable time, as sports brought people back together again, like never before.

    Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

    The electrifying behind-the-scenes account of a year that brought Ireland to the brink and back - the inside story of Ireland’s struggle to contain Covid-19.Based on a wealth of original research and over a hundred interviews with cabinet members, public health officials, frontline workers, and ordinary people on whom the crisis exacted a personal toll, A State of Emergency is the incendiary untold story of Ireland’s response to the biggest public health emergency of the past century.Ranging from the halls of Government Buildings, where conflict between the new Cabinet and its public health advisors threatened to derail the official response, to the frontlines of the containment effort itself, where doctors, nurses, and the communities they served found themselves pushed to breaking point, A State of Emergency is a landmark work of journalism and a riveting insider account of the struggle to bring Ireland back from the brink.