Book picks similar to
Gendering the Field: Towards Sustainable Livelihoods for Mining Communities by Kuntala Lahiri-dutt
global
environment-ecology-energy
gender
geography
Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China
Rebiya Kadeer - 2007
Their culture is filled with music, dance, family, and love of tradition passed down by storytelling through the ages.For millennia, they have survived clashes in the shadow of China, Russia, and Central Asia. Rebiya Kadeer’s courage, intellect, morality, and sacrifice give hope to the nearly eleven million Uyghurs worldwide on whose behalf she speaks as an indomitable world leader for the freedom of her people and the sovereignty of her nation.Her life story is one of legends: as a refugee child, as a poor housewife, as a multimillionaire, as a high official in China’s National People’s Congress, as a political prisoner in solitary confinement for two of nearly six years in jail, and now as a political dissident living in Washington, DC, exiled from her own land.
Children Just Like Me
Barnabas Kindersley - 1995
. . each of these children has hopes and fears, dreams and beliefs. Their cultures are different, yet in many ways their daily lives are very similar, as are their hopes for the future and their ways of looking at the world.Over the past two years, a photographer and a teacher have traveled to more than 30 countries, meeting and interviewing children. Each child's story is recorded in this remarkable book, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Extraordinary photographs bring to life the children's families and homes, their clothes and food, their friends and favorite games, and other aspects of their daily lives.The children live in places as diverse as New York, Mongolia, and the Amazon Basin. These are children from both industrialized and developing nations, children from busy cities and remote rural communities, and children from tribal cultures. Their environments include mountains, deserts, rain forests, plains, and polar regions. Most live in families, but Suchart, a novice monk, lives in a monastery, and Tadesse, an Ethiopian boy, lives in an orphanage. Children everywhere will enjoy reading about the lives of these children who share their world.Those who want to make friends with children around the world can join the Children Just Like Me Penpal Club, details of which are included in this book. Part of the Penpal Club membership fee goes to support UNICEF, helping children all over the world.
The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet's Surprising Future
Fred Pearce - 2010
It underlies many of the issues that shake the world, from war and economics to immigration. No wonder, then, that fears of overpopulation flared regularly over the last century, a century that saw the world's population quadruple. Even today, baby booms are blamed for genocide and terrorism, and overpopulation is regularly cited as the primary factor driving global warming and other environmental issues.Yet, surprisingly, it appears that the explosion is past its peak. Around the world, in developing countries as well as in rich ones, today's women are having on average 2.6 children, half the number their mothers had. Within a generation, world fertility will likely follow Europe's to below replacement levels—and by 2040, the world's population will be declining for the first time since the Black Death, almost seven hundred years ago.In The Coming Population Crash, veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce reveals the dynamics behind this dramatic shift. Charting the demographic path of our species over two hundred years, he begins by chronicling the troubling history of authoritarian efforts to contain the twentieth century's population explosion, as well as the worldwide trend toward the empowerment of women that led to lower birthrates. And then, with vivid reporting from around the globe, he dives into the environmental, social, and economic effects of our surprising demographic future.Now is probably the last time in history that our world will hold more young people than elders. Most fear that an aging world population will put a serious drain on national resources, as a shrinking working population supports a growing number of retirees. But is this necessarily so? Might an older world population have an upside? Pearce also shows us why our demographic future holds increased migration rates, and reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the developed world: the simple fact is that countries with lower birthrates need workers and countries with higher birthrates need work. And he tackles the truism that population density always leads to environmental degradation, taking us from some of the world's most densely packed urban slums to rural Africa to argue that underpopulation can sometimes be the cause of environmental woes, while cities could hold the key to sustainable living.Pearce's provocative book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what demographics tell us about our global future, and for all those who believe in learning from the mistakes of the past.
We All Went on Safari: A Counting Journey Through Tanzania
Laurie Krebs - 2003
Along the way, the children encounter all sorts of animals including elephants, lions and monkeys, while counting from one to ten in both English and Swahili. The lively, rhyming text is accompanied by an illustrated guide to counting in Swahili, a map, notes about each of the animals, and interesting facts about Tanzania and the Maasai people. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each book will be donated to the African Wildlife Foundation, to aid their wildlife conservation and community building efforts in Tanzania. (Softcover) 32pp;10.25 x 10 inches
Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation
Thomas W. Laqueur - 2003
Masturbation may be the last taboo. But this is not a holdover from a more benighted age. The ancient world cared little about the subject; it was a backwater of Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, solitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722. Masturbation is a creation of the Enlightenment, of some of its most important figures, and of the most profound changes it unleashed. It is modern. It worried at first not conservatives, but progressives. It was the first truly democratic sexuality that could be of ethical interest for women as much as for men, for boys and girls as much as for their elders.The book's range is vast. It begins with the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible and ends with third-wave feminism, conceptual artists, and the Web. It explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin -- or the perfect instance -- of the great virtues of modern humanity and commercial society: individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire.
Black Prophetic Fire
Cornel West - 2014
In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines. West, in these illuminating conversations with the German scholar and thinker Christa Buschendorf, describes Douglass as a complex man who is both “the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century” and a product of his time who lost sight of the fight for civil rights after the emancipation. He calls Du Bois “undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century” and explores the more radical aspects of his thinking in order to understand his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has been omitted from the American collective memory. West argues that our selective memory has sanitized and even “Santaclausified” Martin Luther King Jr., rendering him less radical, and has marginalized Ella Baker, who embodies the grassroots organizing of the civil rights movement. The controversial Malcolm X, who is often seen as a proponent of reverse racism, hatred, and violence, has been demonized in a false opposition with King, while the appeal of his rhetoric and sincerity to students has been sidelined. Ida B. Wells, West argues, shares Malcolm X’s radical spirit and fearless speech, but has “often become the victim of public amnesia.” By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, in the engrossing dialogue with Buschendorf, and in his insightful introduction and powerful closing essay, Cornel West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire so essential in the age of Obama.
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
Elaine Tyler May - 1988
Yet in Homeward Bound May demonstrates that there was also a domestic version of containment where the ”sphere of influence” was the home. Within its walls, potentially dangerous social forces might be tamed, securing the fulfilling life to which postwar women and men aspired. Homeward Bound tells the story of domestic containment - how it emerged, how it affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it unraveled in the wake of the Vietnam era's assault on Cold War culture, when unwed mothers, feminists, and ”secular humanists” became the new ”enemy.” This revised and updated edition includes the latest information on race, the culture wars, and current cultural and political controversies of the post-Cold War era.
Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization
Nayan Chanda - 2007
In this entertaining book, Nayan Chanda follows the exploits of traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors throughout history as they have shaped and reshaped the world. For Chanda, globalization is a process of ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began thousands of years ago and continues to this day with increasing speed and ease.In the end, globalization—from the lone adventurer carving out a new trade route to the expanding ambitions of great empires—is the product of myriad aspirations and apprehensions that define just about every aspect of our lives: what we eat, wear, ride, or possess is the product of thousands of years of human endeavor and suffering across the globe. Chanda reviews and illustrates the economic and technological forces at play in globalization today and concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of how we can and should embrace an inevitably global world.
The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity
George L. Mosse - 1996
Mosse provides the first historical account of the masculine stereotype in modern Western culture, tracing the evolution of the idea of manliness to reveal how it came to embody physical beauty, courage, moral restraint, and a strong will. This stereotype, he finds, originated in the tumultuous changes of the eighteenth century, as Europe's dominant aristocrats grudgingly yielded to the rise of the professional, bureaucratic, and commercial middle classes. Mosse reveals how the new bourgeoisie, faced with a bewildering, rapidly industrialized world, latched onto the knightly ideal of chivalry. He also shows how the rise of universal conscription created a soldierly man as an ideal type. In bringing his examination up to the present, Mosse studies the key historical roles of the so-called fairer sex (women) and unmanly men (Jews and homosexuals) in defining and maintaining the male stereotype, and considers the possible erosion of that stereotype in our own time.
Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro
Janice Perlman - 2009
Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she hadfirst met in 1969--as well as their children and grandchildren--Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life.Perlman discovers that while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel more marginalized than ever. The greatest change is the explosion of drug and arms trade and the high incidence of fatal violence that hasresulted. Yet the greatest challenge of all is job creation--decent work for decent pay. If unemployment and under-paid employment are not addressed, she argues, all other efforts will fail to resolve the fundamental issues. Foreign Affairs praises Perlman for writing with compassion, artistry, and intelligence, using stirring personal stories to illustrate larger points substantiated with statistical analysis.
Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction
Mark Maslin - 2004
It draws on material from the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a huge collaborative study drawing together current thinking on the subject from experts in a range of disciplines, and presents the findings of the panel for a general readership for the first time. The book also discusses the politics of global warming and what we can do now to adapt to climate change and mitigate its worst effects.
Residential Landscape Architecture: Design Process for the Private Residence
Norman K. Booth - 1991
The text provides a thorough, how-to explanation of each of the steps of the design process--from initial contact with the client to a completed master plan. The text's numerous illustrations and useful case study examples offer a rich learning experience for students. Whether you are just starting your design career or are a current practitioner, this valuable resource is sure to enhance your skills and knowledge.
Mastering ArcGIS
Maribeth H. Price - 2003
The author's step-by-step approach helps students negotiate the challenging tasks involved in learning sophisticated GIS software. The fifth edition is updated to follow the new software release of ArcGIS 10. An innovative and unique feature of "Mastering ArcGIS" is its accompanying CD-ROM with narrated video clips that show students exactly how to perform chapter tutorials before attempting an exercise on their own.
Fire Race: A Karuk Coyote Tale of How Fire Came to the People
Jonathan London - 1993
Inspired by a legend of the Karuk people, the story of how Coyote captures fire and how Eagle, Cougar, Fox, Bear and others work together to help is a dramatic tale of bravery and cooperation.
One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
Ali Abunimah - 2006
All efforts at resolving the conflict have come down to haggling over who gets what: Will Israel hand over 90 percent of the West Bank or only 60 percent? Will a Palestinian state include any part of Jerusalem?Clear-eyed, sharply reasoned, and compassionate, One Country proposes a radical alternative: to revive the neglected idea of one state shared by two peoples. Ali Abunimah shows how the two are by now so intertwined--geographically and economically--that separation cannot lead to the security Israelis need or the rights Palestinians must have. Taking on the objections and taboos that stand in the way of a binational solution, he demonstrates that sharing the territory will bring benefits for all.The absence of other workable options has only led to ever- greater extremism. It is time, Abunimah argues, for Palestinians and Israelis to imagine a different future and a different relationship.