In chapters on the penis (in all its incarnations), fifties Hollywood, male beauty standards, and sexual harassment, and in discussions of topics ranging from Marlon Brando and Boogie Nights to Philip Roth and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Bordo offers fresh and unexpected insights. Always--whether she is examining Michael Jordan or Humbert Humbert, the butch phallus or her own grade-school experiences--she rejects rigid categories in favor of an honest, nuanced version of men as flesh-and-blood human beings.

    So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.

    Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

    Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: A Short History of Nearly Everything, the Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a Walk in the Woods, Notes From a Small Island, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, Shakespeare: the World as Stage, the Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, the Mother Tongue, Notes From a Big Country, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, Down Under, Made in America, Bill Bryson's African Diary. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: A Short History of Nearly Everything (ISBN 0-7679-0817-1) is a general science book by Bill Bryson, which explains some areas of science, using a style of language more accessible to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was the bestselling popular science book of 2005 in the UK, selling over 300,000 copies. A Short History deviates from Bryson's popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology. Bryson tells the story of science through the stories of the people who made the discoveries, such as Edwin Hubble, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Bill Bryson wrote this book because he was dissatisfied with his scientific knowledge that was, not much at all. He writes that science was a distant, unexplained subject at school. Textbooks and teachers alike did not ignite the passion for knowledge in him, mainly because they never delved in the whys, hows, and whens. "It was as if wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable." Bryson, on the state of science books used within his school. It was in his later years that he realized with stunning shame ...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=101240

    These essays explore and illuminate the roots of Lorde's intellectual development and her deep-seated and longstanding concerns about ways of increasing empowerment among minority women writers and the absolute necessity to explicate the concept of difference—difference according to sex, race, and economic status. The title Sister Outsider finds its source in her poetry collection The Black Unicorn (1978). These poems and the essays in Sister Outsider stress Lorde's oft-stated theme of continuity, particularly of the geographical and intellectual link between Dahomey, Africa, and her emerging self.

    The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a total social phenomenon, since it involves legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. He sees the gift exchange as related to individuals and groups as much as to the objects themselves, and his analysis calls into question the social conventions and economic systems that had been taken for granted for so many years. In a modern translation, introduced by distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas, The Gift is essential reading for students of social anthropology and sociology.

    Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren't problems for us--not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In "How Propaganda Works," Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy--particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality--and how it has damaged democracies of the past.Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda's selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States."How Propaganda Works" shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere.

    The Los Angeles Times has listed it among the one hundred most influential books published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine has included it in a survey of books that changed our world, and it has been called the Book of Genesis for environmentalists. Now a fourth edition of this highly regarded work is available, with a new preface and epilogue in which Nash explores the future of wilderness and reflects on its ethical and biocentric relevance.

    In March 2008, graphic designer Kris Harzinski founded the Hand Drawn Map Association in order to collect just such drawings of the everyday. Fascinated by these accidental records of a moment in time, he soon amassed a wide variety of maps, ranging from simple directions to fictional maps, to maps of unusual places, including examples drawn by well-known historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, and Alexander Calder. From Here to There celebrates these ephemeral documentsusually forgotten or tossed aside after having served their purposegiving them their due as artifacts representing stories from people's lives around the world. There is the young woman suffering from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis who created maps of the Humira injections on her stomach and thighs to help her remember the sites, and give them time to heal. Or the young boy who imagined a whole country for ants and put it to paper. Lucas from Australia drew an obsessively detailed map of his local traffic island, and a teenage girl contributed a map of her high school locker. Two American tourists got lost in the Bulgarian mountains following the hand drawn map of a local, and Britanny from Denmark drew directions to an animal rights protest in Copenhagen. The maps featured in From Here to There are as varied and touching as the stories they tell.

    Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes brought the question of teaching evolution in schools to every dinner table, and it remains an essential topic in any course on American History, the History of Education, and Religious History. This volume’s lively interpretative introduction provides an analysis of the trial and its impact on the moral fiber of the country and the educational system, and examines the race and gender issues that shook out of the debate. The editor has excerpted the crucial exchanges from the trial transcript itself, and includes these along with reactions to the trial, taken from newspaper reports, letters, and magazine articles. Telling political cartoons and evocative photographs add a colorful dimension to this collection, while a chronology of events, questions for consideration, and a bibliography provide strong pedagogical support.

    Now he looks at the complex and surprising ways the weak can defeat the strong, the small can match up against the giant, and how our goals (often culturally determined) can make a huge difference in our ultimate sense of success. Drawing upon examples from the world of business, sports, culture, cutting-edge psychology, and an array of unforgettable characters around the world, David and Goliath is in many ways the most practical and provocative book Malcolm Gladwell has ever written.

    In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future.What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources--like the Internet--in common? How can Frantz Fanon's theories of anti colonial self-determination help us build digital world in which everyone can participate equally? Can debates over equal digital access be helped by American revolutionary Tom Paine's theories of democratic, economic redistribution? What can indigenous land struggles teach us about stewarding our digital climate? And, how is Elon Musk not a future visionary but a steampunk throwback to Victorian-era technological utopians?In engaging, sparkling prose, O'Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and how when we draw on the resources of the past, we can see the potential for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our technological present. Future Histories is for all of us--makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites--who find ourselves in a brave new world.

    Now with an extensive new preface, epilogue, and appendix by the author, reflecting on the changes that have taken place since the book's original publication, this updated second edition of Charles L. Bosk's classic study is as timely as ever.

    Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others, Rousseau argues instead for a pact, or ‘social contract’, that should exist between all the citizens of a state and that should be the source of sovereign power. From this fundamental premise, he goes on to consider issues of liberty and law, freedom and justice, arriving at a view of society that has seemed to some a blueprint for totalitarianism, to others a declaration of democratic principles.

    It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery.Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history – the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.