Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body


Susan Bordo - 1993
    From an immensely knowledgeable feminist perspective, in engaging, jargonless (!) prose, Bordo analyzes a whole range of issues connected to the body—weight and weight loss, exercise, media images, movies, advertising, anorexia and bulimia, and much more—in a way that makes sense of our current social landscape—finally! This is a great book for anyone who wonders why women's magazines are always describing delicious food as 'sinful' and why there is a cake called Death by Chocolate. Loved it!"—Katha Pollitt, Nation columnist and author of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001)

Love is War


Milly Taiden - 2021
    During the induction ritual, she's ambushed and forced across enemy lines into werewolf territory where she will undoubtedly be attacked and killed. When one of them comes to her aid, it's time to question who the real enemy is.Caleb Conri is on patrol when he finds himself saving the life of the most beautiful vampire he's ever seen. His wolf immediately claims her as his mate and that alone brings on the biggest migraine of his life. But Adria is so unlike anyone he expected. She's sweet, kind, loving and he can't wait to get her out of her clothes. The problem is everyone wants her dead.When war breaks out between the two factions, Adria must choose between her own people and her mate. How long can she sit by and watch those she loves on both sides kill each other because of her? The only way to end the war is for her to turn herself over to those who want her dead. But Caleb will die before he let's that happen.

The Savage Mind


Claude Lévi-Strauss - 1962
    An examination of the structure of the thought of primitive' peoples, and has contributed significantly to our understanding of the way the human mind works.

Al Capone: A Biography


Luciano J. Iorizzo - 2003
    As America's most infamous criminal, he has intrigued, attracted, and repulsed the general public with his legendary criminal deeds. This concise biography separates the myth from the man. Beginning with a historical look at corruption in American society--along with a clarification of the terms Black Hand, Mafia, and Organized Crime--Capone is presented in his own time and place. A timeline summarizes the events of his life and career. A thorough bibliography of print and electronic sources will assist students and general readers interested in further research, making it perfect for anyone interested in Capone's life, organized crime, the prohibition era, and the struggle of lower-class Americans to rise in society.The son of poor Italian immigrants struggling for a better life in early 20th-century New York, Capone chose a life of crime as a means of advancing his place in the world. His success brought him fabulous wealth and fame. His criminal deeds made him many enemies among law enforcement officers, politicians, and fellow criminals. Yet ultimately, Capone's downfall was his own misdeeds. Following a lengthy prison term, he died at age 48 from complications of syphilis. In his short life, Capone had become America's most feared criminal, and after his death, his legend cast an even greater shadow.

Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality


Jonathan M. Metzl - 2010
    You see the smokers, the overeaters, the bottle-feeders, and affirm your own health in the process. In these and countless other instances, the perception of your own health depends in part on your value judgments about others, and appealing to health allows for a set of moral assumptions to fly stealthily under the radar.Against Health argues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good. And, that disparities in the incidence and prevalence of disease are closely linked to disparities in income and social support. To be clear, the book's stand against health is not a stand against the authenticity of people's attempts to ward off suffering. Against Health instead claims that individual strivings for health are, in some instances, rendered more difficult by the ways in which health is culturally configured and socially sustained.The book intervenes into current political debates about health in two ways. First, Against Health compellingly unpacks the divergent cultural meanings of health and explores the ideologies involved in its construction. Second, the authors present strategies for moving forward. They ask, what new possibilities and alliances arise? What new forms of activism or coalition can we create? What are our prospects for well-being? In short, what have we got if we ain't got health? Against Health ultimately argues that the conversations doctors, patients, politicians, activists, consumers, and policymakers have about health are enriched by recognizing that, when talking about health, they are not all talking about the same thing. And, that articulating the disparate valences of "health" can lead to deeper, more productive, and indeed more healthy interactions about our bodies.

Strange Company


Nick Cole - 2021
    Best to steer clear of the freaks in Voodoo, kid.”Surrounded and outgunned, a group of private military contractors known as “Strange Company” find themselves on a remote planet at the edge of known space, and on the losing end of a bad contract. Orbital D-beam strikes, dropships bristling with auto-guns, missiles, and troops - even Monarch space marines in state-of-the-art advanced battle rattle - will try to prevent the company from reaching the exfil LZ and getting off-world.For Strange, that means it’s time to hang tough and get it on with as much hyper-kinetic violence as they can muster to get clear of the whole mess. And what the Strange can’t get done by violent assault and crazy firefights, they’ll get done by the freaks of Voodoo Platoon - operators who have been changed by the Dark Labs into powerful and unnervingly unnatural asymmetrical weapons.This is the Strange Company. Because in the Strange, it’s always really Strange. Join them - and get ready for full auto combat at the furthest limits of human exploration.

The New Social Story Book: Over 150 Social Stories that Teach Everyday Social Skills to Children with Autism or Asperger's Syndrome, and Their Peers


Carol Gray - 1997
    This 10th Anniversary edition of her best-selling book offers the ready-to-use stories that parents and educators have depended on for years, but now features over 25 additional Social Stories, groundbreaking new strategies for creating custom stories, and a modern design complete with full-color photos. Developed through years of experience, these strategically written stories explain social situations in a way children with autism understand, while teaching the social skills children need to be successful at home, at school, and in the community.

The Usurper King: The Fall of Richard II and the Rise of Henry of Bolingbroke, 1366-99


Marie Louise Bruce - 1986
    

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship


George M. Marsden - 1997
    This "unscientific postscript" helped spark a heated debate that spilled out of the pages of academic journals and The Chronicle of Higher Education into mainstream media such as The New York Times, and marked Marsden as one of the leading participants in the debates concerning religion and public life. Marsden now gives his proposal a fuller treatment in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, a thoughtful and thought-provoking book on the relationship of religious faith and intellectual scholarship.More than a response to Marsden's critics, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship takes the next step towards demonstrating what the ancient relationship of faith and learning might mean for the academy today. Marsden argues forcefully that mainstream American higher education needs to be more open to explicit expressions of faith and to accept what faith means in an intellectual context. While other defining elements of a scholar's identity, such as race or gender, are routinely taken into consideration and welcomed as providing new perspectives, Marsden points out, the perspective of the believing Christian is dismissed as irrelevant or, worse, antithetical to the scholarly enterprise.Marsden begins by examining why Christian perspectives are not welcome in the academy. He rebuts the various arguments commonly given for excluding religious viewpoints, such as the argument that faith is insufficiently empirical for scholarly pursuits (although the idea of complete scientific objectivity is considered naive in most fields today), the fear that traditional Christianity will reassert its historical role as oppressor of divergent views, and the received dogma of the separation of church and state, which stretches far beyond the actual law in the popular imagination. Marsden insists that scholars have both a religious and an intellectual obligation not to leave their deeply held religious beliefs at the gate of the academy. Such beliefs, he contends, can make a significant difference in scholarship, in campus life, and in countless other ways. Perhaps most importantly, Christian scholars have both the responsibility and the intellectual ammunition to argue against some of the prevailing ideologies held uncritically by many in the academy, such as naturalistic reductionism or unthinking moral relativism.Contemporary university culture is hollow at its core, Marsden writes. Not only does it lack a spiritual center, but it is without any real alternative. He argues that a religiously diverse culture will be an intellectually richer one, and it is time that scholars and institutions who take the intellectual dimensions of their faith seriously become active participants in the highest level of academic discourse. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with this conclusion, Marsden's thoughtful, well-argued book is necessary reading for all sides of the debate on religion's role in education and culture.

Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames


Ian Bogost - 2007
    In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.

Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century


Marjorie Perloff - 2010
    Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and 90s. Perloff traces this poetics of "unoriginal genius" from its paradigmatic work, Benjamin’s encyclopedic Arcades Project, a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, both movements now understood as precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein’s opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howe’s documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Perloff also finds that the new syncretism extends to language: for example, to the French-Norwegian Caroline Bergvall writing in English and the Japanese Yoko Tawada, in German. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptualist book Traffic—a seemingly "pure’" radio transcript of one holiday weekend’s worth of traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff shows us "poetry by other means" of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.

Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism


Elizabeth Grosz - 1993
    I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." — Alphonso Lingis"This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." — Judith ButlerVolatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems.Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women — menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists.

Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination


Julie Cruikshank - 2005
    By following such stories across three centuries, this book explores local knowledge, colonial encounters, and environmental change.Do Glaciers Listen? examines conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and social histories are entangled. During late stages of the Little Ice Age, significant geophysical changes coincided with dramatic social upheaval in the Saint Elias Mountains. European visitors brought conceptions of Nature as sublime, as spiritual, or as a resource for human progress. They saw glaciers as inanimate, subject to empirical investigation and measurement. Aboriginal responses were strikingly different. From their perspectives, glaciers were sentient, animate, and quick to respond to human behaviour. In each case, experiences and ideas surrounding glaciers were incorporated into interpretations of social relations.Focusing on these contrasting views, Julie Cruikshank demonstrates how local knowledge is produced, rather than "discovered," through such encounters, and how oral histories conjoin social and biophysical processes. She traces how divergent views continue to weave through contemporary debates about protected areas, parks and the new World Heritage site that encompasses the area where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet. Students and scholars of Native studies and anthropology as well as readers interested in northern studies and colonial encounters will find Do Glaciers Listen? a fascinating read and a rich addition to circumpolar literature.Winner of the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, 2006

Radiant Apples


Joe R. Lansdale - 2021
    From son of a former slave, to buffalo soldier, to gun hand, to Marshal for Hanging Judge Parker. Now, entering old age, he's a train porter. A job he's happy to have, but not exactly the cream of his life. And then an unlikely train robbery and a moment of bravery gives him an opportunity to relive his past and perhaps redeem his wayward son. He's still got the skills, but he's also older and stiffer, and a little less certain. He'll need his old pal, Choctaw, to help him track down the murderous Radiant Apple Gang, so named for the odd, glowing cheeks of the two brothers who lead it. They're not exactly the James Gang, but then again, Nat and Choctaw aren't exactly in their prime, even if they do have an automobile and an expense account. From the train tracks and cotton fields of East Texas, to the Oklahoma hills and a corrupt town, they'll end up in a desperate struggle for survival that includes gun play, an outlaw, who though dreadfully wounded, doesn't seem capable of dying, to a man gagging on dirty underpants. They'll need the right hat, the right guns, and plenty of rest. The biggest question is can Nat and his companion, Chocktaw, survive bullets and lumbago, and come out on top.

Driver: Grit : The Badass Geek (Badass Security Council (BSC) Book 12)


L. Ann Marie - 2021