Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process.Focusing on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of definition and interpretation, Lerner explores such fascinating questions as: What can account for women's exclusion from the historical process? What could explain the long delay--more than 3,500 years--in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position? She goes back to the cultures of the earliest known civilizations--those of the ancient Near East--to discover the origins of the major gender metaphors of Western civilization. Using historical, literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence, she then traces the development of these ideas, symbols, and metaphors and their incorporation into Western civilization as the basis of patriarchal gender relations.

    Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, "politically correct" theory is repeatedly confronted with facts -- and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites. These elites -- the anointed -- often consider themselves "thinking people," but much of what they call thinking turns out, on examination, to be rhetorical assertion, followed by evasions of mounting evidence against those assertions.

    Intimate and thought-provoking, The Internet is My Religion is an exploration of life, a narrative of personal turmoil, and a testament to the power of a connected humanity. www.internetismyreligion.com

    The book explains why such a highly criticized system persists. Katz explores the relationship between welfare and municipal reform; the role of welfare capitalism, eugenics, and social insurance in the reorganization of the labor market; the critical connection between poverty and politics in the rise of the New Deal welfare state; and how the War on Poverty of the ’60s became the war on welfare of the ’80s.

    From the logistics revolution to the unprecedented concentration of business and wealth in the hands a shrinking few, Moody examines the impact of this new economic terrain on potential working class resistance movements.

    In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how the media first ignore new political developments, then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities. He then demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities and estranged them from their movement base; how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted "moderate" alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. Finally, Gitlin draws together a theory of news coverage as a form of anti-democratic social management--which he sees at work also in media treatment of the anti-nuclear and other later movements.Updated for 2003 with a new preface, The Whole World Is Watching is a subtle and sensitive book, true to the passions and ironic reversals of its subject, and filled with provocative insights that apply to the media's relationship with all activist movements.

    A deluxe paperback edition: Thomas Cleary's brilliant translation of the sayings of Confucius presented in the order of the 64 classic I Ching hexagrams.

    Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer.Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-led process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents.Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.

    At c1.5 billion, Midnight’s Descendants (the offspring of those affected by ‘the midnight hour’ Partition) already outnumber Europeans and Chinese; and they are growing faster than either. They comprise all the peoples of what is now called ‘South Asia’ (the preferred term for the partitioned subcontinent of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus Nepal and Sri Lanka).‘Midnight’s Descendants’ is the first history of the region as a whole. Correlating and contrasting the fortunes of all the constituent nations over the last six decades affords unique insights into what is hailed as one of the world’s most dynamic regions.John Keay is an expert on the region and the book will be the first account to incorporate the rich story of South Asia’s transnational, or ‘diasporic’, peoples – from the overlooked narratives of the subcontinent to the rise of India as a global force, ‘Midnight’s Descendants’ will be expansive and tumultuous in the great tradition of India’s narrative epics.

    His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

    The Conservatives had won their first Commons majority for twenty-three years and the Prime Minister had achieved the seemingly impossible: increasing his popularity while in government, winning more seats than in 2010 and confounding almost every pundit and opinion poll in the process. Within hours, his defeated rivals Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage had all resigned, stunned and devastated by the brutality of their losses. Political journalist Tim Ross reveals the inside story of the election that shocked Britain. Based on interviews with key figures at the top of the Conservative Party, and with private access to Cabinet ministers, party leaders and their closest aides, this gripping account of the 2015 campaign uncovers the secret tactics the Tories used to such devastating effect.

    It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought.Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.”Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

    more than anything, Disassembly Required is about a kind of common sense that’s become hard to escape—a common sense of privatization, austerity, and financialization that has invaded virtually every aspect of our lives and communities. 2008 gave many of us a remarkable window toward something different, Mann says, but we don’t need to wait for another market crash to find a way out of capitalism."—Sam Ross-Brown, Utne“An essential handbook for understanding ‘actually existing’ capitalism, and thus the world as it really is—rather than as it is theorized and justified by the dissembling high priests of mainstream academia, policy, and politics.”—Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos“A brilliantly lucid book. Mann illuminates the basic principles of modern capitalism, their expressions in contemporary economies and states, and their devastating socio-ecological consequences for working people everywhere. This is a must-read if we are to envision ways of organizing our common planetary existence that are not based upon the illusory promises of market fundamentalism and the suicidal ideology of endless economic growth.”—Neil Brenner, New State Spaces"Geoff Mann is a new breed of monkey-wrencher. He knows that contemporary capitalism has a perverse habit of dismantling itself and gives us a toolkit to build a new, more socially just edifice."—Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism"Insightful and incisive, thoughtful and thorough, filled with new avenues for thinking about resistence. Pass this one by at your own peril."—Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid CityTo imagine how we might change capitalism, we first need to understand it. To succeed in actually changing it, we need to be able to explain how it works and convince others that change is both possible and necessary. Disassembly Required is an attempt to meet those challenges, and to offer clear, accessible alternatives to the status quo of everyday capitalism.Originally crafted as a comprehensive overview for younger readers, Geoff Mann's explanation of the fundamental features of contemporary capitalism is illustrated with real-world examples?an ideal introduction for anyone wanting to learn more about what capitalism is and where it falls short. What emerges is an anti-capitalist critique that fully understands the complex, dynamic, robust organizational machine of modern economic life, digging deep into the details of capitalist institutions and the relations that justify them to unearth the politically indefensible and ecologically unsustainable premises that underlie them.Geoff Mann teaches political economy and economic geography at Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Centre for Global Political Economy. He is the author of Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers and the Political Economy of the American West (2007) and a frequent contributor to Historical Materialism and New Left Review.

    Loury has become one of our most prominent black intellectuals—and, because of his challenges to the orthodoxies of both left and right, one of the most controversial. A major statement of a position developed over the past decade, this book both epitomizes and explains Loury’s understanding of the depressed conditions of so much of black society today—and the origins, consequences, and implications for the future of these conditions.Using an economist’s approach, Loury describes a vicious cycle of tainted social information that has resulted in a self-replicating pattern of racial stereotypes that rationalize and sustain discrimination. His analysis shows how the restrictions placed on black development by stereotypical and stigmatizing racial thinking deny a whole segment of the population the possibility of self-actualization that American society reveres—something that many contend would be undermined by remedies such as affirmative action. On the contrary, this book persuasively argues that the promise of fairness and individual freedom and dignity will remain unfulfilled without some forms of intervention based on race.Brilliant in its account of how racial classifications are created and perpetuated, and how they resonate through the social, psychological, spiritual, and economic life of the nation, this compelling and passionate book gives us a new way of seeing—and, perhaps, seeing beyond—the damning categorization of race in America.

    The term stuck, and soon began its long and consequential history.In this sweeping account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present day. We meet pioneering black thinkers such as Horace Cayton, a graduate student whose work on the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and black poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked the slum conditions in Harlem with black powerlessness in the civil rights era, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson refocused the debate on urban America as the country retreated from racially specific remedies, and how the education reformer Geoffrey Canada sought to transform the lives of inner-city children in the ghetto.By expertly resurrecting the history of the ghetto from Venice to the present, Duneier’s Ghetto provides a remarkable new understanding of an age-old concept. He concludes that if we are to understand today’s ghettos, the Jewish and black ghettos of the past should not be forgotten.