At eighteen, fate would take his remaining family, sending him on the road with three hundred dollars and into the life of a Depression Era migrant worker, but his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--remained and became the basis for his insights on human nature. Filled with timeless aphorisms and entertaining stories, Truth Imagined tracks Hoffer's years on the road, which served as the breeding ground for his most fertile thoughts.

    Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides. The Dialectical Biologist explores this political nature of scientific inquiry, advancing its argument within the framework of Marxist dialectic. These essays stress the concepts of continual change and codetermination between organism and environment, part and whole, structure and process, science and politics. Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

    The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

    His skill as a reviewer is particularly notable: never content merely to assess the ideas of a writer and the theses of a book, Eagleton, in his inimitable and often wickedly funny style, always paints a vivid theoretical and political fresco as the background to his engagement with the texts.In this collection of more than a decade of such bracing criticism, Eagleton comes face to face with Stanley Fish, Gayatri Spivak, Slavoj Žižek, Edward Said, and even David Beckham. All are subjected to his pugnacious wit, scathing critical pen, and brilliant literary investigations.

    The false dichotomies that Lorde debunks persist in our cultural imagination: the separation of the erotuc from the spiritual and political. Now, Kore Press brings this essay into stand-alone focus, reprinting it in a fine, handbound pamphlet illustrated with photographs by Tucson photographer Camille Bonzani. Designed by book artist Nancy Solomon, the essay is offset and letterpress printed in an edition of 1000.

    Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a “world-ecology” of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature—rather than capitalism and nature—is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.

    The Seventh Edition also introduces the new theme of environmental history. Carefully integrated throughout, this theme adds illuminating perspectives on how Americans have shaped and been shaped by the natural world."

    But there is a better way—a middle way—where we might discover common ground for peace, both personally and universally. Lou Marinoff, professor of philosophy and author of Plato, not Prozac, reveals the ABCs of finding that spiritually rich path: Aristotle, Buddha, and Confucius. Each of these wise men knew that extremism destroys happiness, health and harmony, and shared the supremely important notion that the main purpose of our existence is to lead a good life, here and now. In three sections, Marinoff examines the contemporary world and shows how the “Middle Way” provides solutions to our most pressing problems. Part One looks at civilizational dynamics that drive both cooperation and conflict across borders, and introduces each of the ABCs. The second segment focuses on some notorious extremes—including political polarization, and simmering religious, tribal, gender, cultural, and economic divides—and how the ABCs can reconcile them. And the third, final section enlightens us on how we all can apply the ABCs to the betterment of our own lives and humanity as a whole. A short list of recommended readings accompanies each chapter, along with illustrations, maps, and eye-opening charts.

    Has anyone considered Jamie Smith? This whirling dervish of public philosophy generates enough intellectual energy to supply a middle-size city all by himself. - John Wilson (editor of Books & Culture)By now, Jamie Smith is not just a leading philosophical or postmodern or Reformed theologian: he is simply a leading theologian. This volume shows that he has not only ascended to that height but also descended to a depth that terrifies most academics journalism. He offers a theology as everyday as the neighborhood, the movies, partisan politics, the university, and the street corner and with a twinkle in his eye he shows us Jesus lordship in each place. I hope others will not just read Jamies book, but will go and do likewise. - Jason Byassee (Center for Theology, Writing & Media, Duke Divinity School)A notable young voice in the academy, James K. A. Smith has consistently spoken to the church as the most important public for his intellectual work. Bringing together essays both thoughtful and entertaining, The Devil Reads Derrida displays some of Smiths most significant forays into the public arena.In this engaging work Smith grapples with the Wild at Heart phenomenon and the challenges of secularization, deals with sex and consumerism, and comments on creative works from American Beauty and Harry Potter to A History of Violence and the poetry of Franz Wright. No matter what.

    The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.

    This thought-provoking and wide-ranging collection of essays examines the undiminished incandescence of Marilyn Monroe -- the impact she has had on our culture, the evolution of her legend since her death, and what she tells us now about our lives and times -- and includes previously unpublished work from some of America's best writers, such as: Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Elliot Dark, Albert Mobilo, Marge Piercy, Lore Segal, Lisa Shea, and many more. From her troubled family beginnings to the infamous $13 million auction held at Christie's in New York City, All the Available Light paints an unforgettable portrait of Marilyn as you've never seen her before. This extremely rare cover photo was taken c. 1954, on the set of The Seven Year Itch.

    From Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs. In this groundbreaking investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from “salt of the earth” to “scum of the earth.” Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, one based on the media’s inexhaustible obsession with an indigent white underclass, he portrays a far more complex reality. Moving through Westminster’s lobbies and working-class communities from Dagenham to Dewsbury Moor, Jones reveals the increasing poverty and desperation of communities made precarious by wrenching social and industrial change, and all but abandoned by the aspirational, society-fragmenting policies of Thatcherism and New Labour. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems, and to justify widening inequality. Based on a wealth of original research, and wide-ranging interviews with media figures, political opinion-formers and workers, Chavs is a damning indictment of the media and political establishment, and an illuminating, disturbing portrait of inequality and class hatred in modern Britain.

    

    Why then do we have creeping inequality in the land of the fair go? The answer lies in stagnant wage rises, gender pay inequity, insecure work and the lack of real opportunities for all while corporations are still consuming large profits and executives claim record bonuses. Sally McManus confronts these truths every day. In On Fairness, she explores the true cost of social injustice and argues for advancing Australia fair.

    Most people of the current generation lack a sense of the historical sweep of the intellectual side of the right-wing collectivist position. Jeffrey Tucker, in this collection written between 2015 and 2017, argues that this movement represents the revival of a tradition of interwar collectivist thought that might at first seem like a hybrid but was distinctly mainstream between the two world wars. It is anti-communist but not for the reasons that were conventional during the Cold War, that is, because communism opposed freedom in the liberal tradition.Right-collectivism also opposes traditional liberalism. It opposes free trade, freedom of association, free migration, and capitalism understood as a laissez-faire free market. It rallies around nation and state as the organizing principles of the social order—and trends in the direction of favoring one-man rule—but positions itself as opposed to leftism traditionally understood.We know about certain fascist leaders from the mid-20th century, but not the ideological orientation that led to them or the ideas they left on the table to be picked up generations later. For the most part, and until recently, it seemed to have dropped from history. Meanwhile, the prospects for social democratic ideology are fading, and something else is coming to fill that vacuum. What is it? Where does it come from? Where is it leading?This book seeks to fill the knowledge gap, to explain what this movement is about and why anyone who genuinely loves and longs for liberty classically understood needs to develop a nose and instinct for spotting the opposite when it comes in an unfamiliar form. We need to learn to recognize the language, the thinkers, the themes, the goals of a political ethos that is properly identified as fascist."Jeffrey Tucker in his brilliant book calls right-wing populism what it actually is, namely, fascism, or, in its German form national socialism, nazism. You need Tucker’s book. You need to worry. If you are a real liberal, you need to know where the new national socialism comes from, the better to call it out and shame it back into the shadows. Now."— Deirdre McCloskey