Author: Claudia Rankine File Type: epub Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29,* and many more . . . * *A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankines long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Dont Let Me Be Lonely An American Lyric. Claudia Rankines bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a persons ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named post-race society. **
Author: Christophe Dejours
File Type: pdf
From John Maynard Keyness prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to present-day speculation about automation, we have not stopped forecasting the end of work. Critical theory and political philosophy have turned their attention away from the workplace to focus on other realms of domination and emancipation. But far from coming to an end, work continues to occupy a central place in our lives. This is not only because of the amount of time people spend on the job. Many of our deepest hopes and fears are bound up in our laborwhat jobs we perform, how we relate to others, how we might flourish. The Return of Work in Critical Theory presents a bold new account of the human significance of work and the human costs of contemporary forms of work organization. A collaboration among experts in philosophy, social theory, and clinical psychology, it brings together empirical research with incisive analysis of the political stakes of contemporary work. The Return of Work in Critical Theory begins by looking in detail at the ways in which work today fails to meet our expectations. It then sketches a phenomenological description of work and examines the normative premises that underlie the experience of work. Finally, it puts forward a novel conception of work that can renew critical theorys engagement with work and point toward possibilities for transformation. Inspired by Max Horkheimers vision of critical theory as empirically informed reflection on the sources of social suffering with emancipatory intent, The Return of Work in Critical Theory is a lucid diagnosis of the malaise and pathologies of contemporary work that proposes powerful remedies. **
Author: Boris Volodarsky
File Type: epub
In late November 2006 the world was shaken by the ruthless assassination in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Lt Col of the Russian security service (FSB). The murder was the most notorious crime committed by the Russian intelligence on foreign soil in over three decades. The author, Boris Volodarsky, who was consulted by the Metropolitan Police during the investigation and remains in close contact with Litvinenkos widow, is a former Russian military intelligence officer and an international expert in special operations. His narrative reveals that since 1917 beginning with Lenin and his Cheka the Russian security services have regularly carried out bespoke poisoning operations all over the world to eliminate the enemies of the Kremlin. The author proves that the Litvinenkos poisoning is just one episode in the chain of murders that continues until the present day. Some of these assassinations or attempted assassinations are already known, others are revealed here for the first time. Uniquely Volodarsky has had a personal involvement in almost every each of the 20 cases, from the radioactive thallium poisoning of the Soviet defector Nikolai Khokhlov in Frankfurt in September 1957 to the ricin umbrella murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978. Here, for the fan of murder thrillers and modern history alike, is a cracking good read. In brilliant light we see what lay for nearly a century behind the London polonium poisoning of British citizen Alexander Litvinenko, former Russian. It was just one recent hit by the worlds most prolific serial killer -- the Russian state. With original research guided by his insiders eye and scholarly care, Boris Volodarsky recounts scores of murders. Assassination emerges as state policy, as institutionalized bureacracy, as day-to-day routine, as laboratory science, as a branch of medicine researching ways not to stave off death but to deliver it in apparently innocent or accidental forms, and as engineering technology, devising ever-new devices to meet each new requirement, from umbrella tips and cigarette cases and rolled-up newspapers -- to Litvinenkos teacup. Tennent H. Bagley, former CIA chief of Soviet Bloc counterintelligence.
Author: Mark Lause
File Type: epub
When cowboys were workers and battled their bosses In the pantheon of American icons, the cowboy embodies the traits of rugged individualism, independent, solitary, and stoical. In reality, cowboys were grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal workers, who responded to the abuses of their employers in a series of militant strikes. Their resistance arose from the rise and demise of a beef bonanza that attracted international capital. Business interests approached the market with the expectation that it would have the same freedom to brutally impose its will as it had exercised on native peoples and the recently emancipated African Americans. These assumptions contributed to a series of bitter and violent range wars, which broke out from Texas to Montana and framed the appearance of labor conflicts in the region. These social tensions stirred a series of political insurgencies that became virtually endemic to the American West of the Gilded Age. Mark A. Lause explores the relationship between these neglected labor conflicts, the range wars, and the third-party movements. The Great Cowboy Strike subverts American mythology to reveal the class abuses and inequalities that have blinded a nation to its true history and nature **
Author: Irwin Krieger
File Type: mobi
Going through puberty and adolescence presents unwelcome changes for many transgender youth, and this book provides advice to parents of transgender teens to help them understand what their child is experiencing and feeling during this challenging time.Addressing common fears and concerns that parents of transgender teens share, the book guides them through steps they can take with their child, including advice on hormones and surgery and how to transition socially. It addresses the recent increase in teens presenting with non-binary identities, and reflects major legal, social and medical developments regarding transgender issues. The authors insights are gained from his professional experience of providing psychotherapy regarding gender identity. He provides resources and further reading to help parents expand their knowledge. Although aimed predominantly at parents, this book is useful for anyone working with teenagers and young adults as it provides many answers to common questions about adolescent gender identity. **
Author: Brett Calcott
File Type: pdf
In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary published theirinfluential book The Major Transitions in Evolution. The transitions that MaynardSmith and Szathmary chose to describe all constituted major changes in the kinds oforganisms that existed but, most important, these events also transformed theevolutionary process itself. The evolution of new levels of biological organization,such as chromosomes, cells, multicelled organisms, and complex social groupsradically changed the kinds of individuals natural selection could act upon. Many ofthese events also produced revolutionary changes in the process of inheritance, byexpanding the range and fidelity of transmission, establishing new inheritancechannels, and developing more open-ended sources of variation.Maynard Smith andSzathmary had planned a major revision of their work, but the death of Maynard Smithin 2004 prevented this. In this volume, prominent scholars (including Szathmaryhimself) reconsider and extend the earlier books themes in light of recentdevelopments in evolutionary biology. The contributors discuss different frameworksfor understanding macroevolution, prokaryote evolution (the study of which has beenaided by developments in molecular biology), and the complex evolution ofmulticellularity.ReviewCalcott and Sterelny deserve our thanks for bringing together a renowned group of philosophers and evolutionary biologists to revisit a recent classic with a fair yet critical tone that also treats readers to a glimpse of the cutting edge. This collection is a must read for anyone interested in the promise of theoretical unification in evolutionary biology. -- The Quarterly Review of BiologyAbout the AuthorBrett Calcott is a postdoctoral researcher at Australian National University and coeditor (with Kim Sterelny) of The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (MIT Press, 2011). Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. His books include Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt second edition, MIT Press).
Author: Owen Clayton
File Type: pdf
Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 looks at how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London, each of whom deals with the transition between photographic methodologies. The book argues that their writing can be analysed most fruitfully via a consideration of technological difference. Clayton examines how the transition between different methods affected the ways in which writers rethought photography. His central claim is that nineteenth-century authors were more aware of the particularities of different technologies than has previously been realised. Literature and Photography in Transition contributes to a better understanding of how nineteenth-century writers negotiated visual technologies. It provides a new means by which scholars can read the relationship between literature and early photography. **
Author: Erin Stewart Mauldin
File Type: pdf
How did the Civil War and the emancipation of four million slaves reconfigure the natural landscape in the South and the farming economy dependent upon it? An innovative reconsideration of the Civil Wars profound impact on southern history, Unredeemed Land traces the environmental constraints that shaped the rural Souths transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century. Dixies King Cotton required extensive land use techniques across large swaths of acreage, fresh soil, and slave-based agriculture in order to remain profitable. But wartime destruction and the rise of the contract labor system closed off those possibilities and necessitated increasingly intensive methods of cultivation that worked against the environment. The resulting disconnect between farmers use of the land and what the natural environment could support intensified the economic dislocation of freed people, poor farmers, and sharecroppers. Erin Stewart Mauldin demonstrates how the Civil War and emancipation accelerated ongoing ecological change in ways that hastened the postbellum collapse of the regions subsistence economy, encouraged the expansion of cotton production, and ultimately kept cotton farmers trapped in a cycle of debt and tenancy. The first environmental history to bridge the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods, Unredeemed Land powerfully examines the ways military conflict and emancipation left enduring ecological legacies.
Author: Ayelet Waldman
File Type: epub
The true story of how a renowned writers struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden microdoses of LSD. Her revealing, fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes. When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from Lewis Carroll, Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her moods have become intolerably severe she has tried nearly every medication possible her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month--bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity--she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is eye-opening, often hilarious, and utterly enthralling. **