Atheism 101: Answers, Explanations and Rebuttals


Grigory Lukin - 2011
    What is the meaning of life? What was Hitler's religion? What's the deal with the Flying Spaghetti Monster? And what was Mother Teresa's dark secret? This book is highly recommended for everyone curious about America's most misunderstood minority, as well as for those who wish to better understand their atheist friends, neighbors or coworkers.

Tell It to the World: International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo


Eliott Behar - 2014
    When they pulled it to shore and opened the cargo hold they found it filled with human bodies. The truck, and the bodies, then disappeared.The full picture would only emerge years later, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia investigated and prosecuted the chief architects of the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. It exposed a stunning secret campaign to murder Kosovo Albanians and systematically hide the evidence by transporting their bodies hundreds of kilometres away.Eliott Behar, a former war crimes prosecutor at the Tribunal, tells the true story of what unfolded through the eyewitnesses, victims, and perpetrators who testified in The Hague. Tell It to the World takes you inside the international criminal justice system, attesting to the strength and resilience of the human spirit and the darkness into which we can descend.

Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform


Derrick A. Bell - 2004
    Board of Education was handed down in 1954, many civil rights advocates believed that the decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, would become the Holy Grail of racial justice. Fifty years later, despite its legal irrelevance and the racially separate and educationally ineffective state of public schooling for most black children, Brown is still viewed by many as the perfect precedent. Here, Derrick Bell shatters the shining image of this celebrated ruling. He notes that, despite the onerous burdens of segregation, many black schools functioned well and racial bigotry had not rendered blacks a damaged race. He maintains that, given what we now know about the pervasive nature of racism, the Court should have determined instead to rigorously enforce the "equal" component of the "separate but equal" standard. Racial policy, Bell maintains, is made through silent covenants--unspoken convergences of interest and involuntary sacrifices of rights--that ensure that policies conform to priorities set by policy-makers. Blacks and whites are the fortuitous winners or losers in these unspoken agreements. The experience with Brown, Bell urges, should teach us that meaningful progress in the quest for racial justice requires more than the assertion of harms. Strategies must recognize and utilize the interest-convergence factors that strongly influence racial policy decisions. In Silent Covenants, Bell condenses more than four decades of thought and action into a powerful and eye-opening book.

Linguistic Anthropology


Alessandro Duranti - 1993
    The theories and methods of linguistic anthropology are introduced through a discussion of linguistic diversity, grammar in use, the role of speaking in social interaction, the organization and meaning of conversational structures, and the notion of participation as a unit of analysis. Linguistic Anthropology will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students.

The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language


Mark Turner - 1996
    Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, forexample, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom iswrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thoughtmakes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking.In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination inparable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the roleof parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind.Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers toclassic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention.

Second Language Acquisition


Rod Ellis - 1997
    This book makes the essentials of this rapidly expanding area of study accessible to readers encountering it for the first time.

The World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds


Charlotte Greig - 2007
    Some kill out of boredom, others because they’ve developed a taste for death. The motives that drive people to perpetrate the most terrible acts are many and various, and so are the crimes they commit. From the Acid Bath Murders and the Birmingham Church Bombing to the Voodoo Killings and the Woman in a Box, every category of crime is covered as our intrepid author sifts through the evidence to present a grisly but compelling history of the worst crimes ever.

The Numa Files Collection: Serpent & Blue Gold


Clive Cussler - 2002
    THE NUMA FILES COLLECTION SERPENT When Kurt Austin, the leader of a courageous National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA) exploration team, rescues beautiful marine archaeologist Nina Kirov off the coast of Morocco, he becomes the next target of Texas industrialist Don Halcon. A madman bent on carving a new nation out of the southwestern United States and Mexico, Halcon's scheme hinges on Nina's recent discovery involving Christopher Columbus, and a priceless pre-Columbian antiquity buried in the battered remains of the sunken Italian luxury liner "Andrea Doria."BLUE GOLDAn investigation into the sudden deaths of gray whales leads NUMA crew leader Kurt Austin to the Mexican coast, where someone tries to put him and his mini-sub permanently out of commission. Meanwhile, in South America's lush hills, a specially assigned NUMA team discovers a mysterious tribe, a mythical white goddess, and a murderous cadre of bio-pirates intent on stealing medicinal secrets worth millions. Soon, Austin and his crew realize they're working opposite ends of the same grand scheme. But every step toward salvation takes them deeper into a dense jungle of treachery, blackmail, and death.8 Audio CDs / 9 Hours (Approx)~

Drugs, Behavior and Modern Society


Charles F. Levinthal - 1995
    Drugs, Behavior, and Modern Society, 6/e, examines the impact of drug-taking behavior on our society and our daily lives.  The use and abuse of a wide range of licit and illicit drugs are discussed from historical, biological, psychological, and sociological perspectives.  The use of Drugs in our lives and drug-taking behavior, legally restricted drugs in our society, legal drugs in our society, medicinal drugs, treatment, prevention, and education.  Forstudents, or people working with drug related topics in the fields of psychology and health.

Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights


Will Kymlicka - 1995
    This book presents a new conception of the rights and status of minority cultures. It arguesthat certain collective rights of minority cultures are consistent with liberal democratic principles, and that standard liberal objections to such rights can be answered. However, the author emphasizes that no single formula can be applied to all groups, and that the needs and aspirations ofimmigrants are very different from those of indigenous peoples and national minorities. He looks at issues such as language rights, group representation, religious education, federalism, and secession--issues central to an understanding of multicultural politics, but which have been neglected incontemporary liberal theory. Scholars of political theory and philosophy, as well as the general reader, will find this work to be the most comprehensive analysis to date of this crucial political issue.

Gender & Nation


Nira Yuval-Davis - 1997
    In Gender and Nation Yuval-Davis argues that the construction of nationhood involves specific notions of both `manhood′ and `womanhood′. She examines the contribution of gender relations to key dimensions of nationalist projects - the nation′s reproduction, its culture and citizenship - as well as to national conflicts and wars, exploring the contesting relations between feminism and nationalism.Gender and Nation is an important contribution to the debates on citizenship, gender and nation

The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History


Samuel Moyn - 2010
    Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal's troubled present and uncertain future.For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post-World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity's moral history, "The Last Utopia" shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront.It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Belonging: One Woman's Search for Truth and Justice for the Tuam Babies


Catherine Corless - 2021
    The lecturer encouraged the class to 'see history all around you', to 'dig deeper and ask why'.It was from these humble beginnings that Catherine began researching the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in County Galway, which she had passed every day as a child on her way to school. Slowly, she began to uncover a dark secret that had been kept for many years: the bodies of 796 babies had been buried in what she believed to be a sewage tank on the grounds. But who were these children, how did they get there and who had been responsible for looking after them?Determined to ask why, Catherine doggedly set about investigating further. Her quest for justice for the Tuam babies and those who went through that home would span over a decade as, often against fierce resistance, she brought to light a terrible truth that shocked the world, impacted the Vatican, and led to a Commission of Investigation in Ireland.Part memoir, part detective story, Belonging is both Catherine's account, and that of those 796 children for whom she came to care so deeply: one of the tender love of a mother and her child; of pain and trauma; of the unforgettable screams which echoed through the corridors as children were taken from their mothers; and of a mystery which continues to this very day, as so many are still left without answers, still searching to know where, and to whom they belong.

Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education


Matthew Sanders - 2012
    As a result, many students talk about college in ways that cause them to overlook some of their most important learning opportunities. Becoming a Learner asks students to carefully reconsider conventional common sense about college and learning, and invites them to consider a new conversation about college and learning that focuses on who they are becoming and their ability to learn.

A Student's Introduction to English Grammar


Rodney Huddleston - 2005
    The text is intended for students in colleges or universities who have little or no previous background in grammar, and presupposes no linguistics. It contains exercises, and will provide a basis for introductions to grammar and courses on the structure of English, not only in linguistics departments but also in English language and literature departments and schools of education.