Author: Kim Moody File Type: pdf In this comprehensive study of current labor relations worldwide, Moody surveys both sides of the picket lines. He provides a measured assessment of multinational managements strategies to downsize, introduce flexible production and compel workers to accept less pay for more work. He emphasizes the need, in the face of these changes, for international coordination among national unions and provides examples of where and how this had been achieved. A bracing riposte to conventional wisdom concerning the irresistible power of globalization, Labor in a Lean World is a definite account of contemporary labour relations on an international scale.Review...an ambitious attempt to analyze the fast-changing economic and political conditions facing labor on a global scale. -- The Nation, Steve EarlyAbout the AuthorKim Moody works on the staff of Detroit-based Labor Notes and is one of the most respected labor journalists in North America. He is the author of An Injury to All (Verso).

Author: Umberto Eco File Type: pdf Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer who lives in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory-he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesnt recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries. And so Yambo relives the story of his generation Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and the life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image that of his first love.A fascinating, abundant new novel-wide-ranging, nostalgic, funny, full of heart-from the incomparable Eco.(20050601)Amazon.com ReviewThe premise of Umberto Ecos The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, may strike some readers as laughably unpromising, and others as breathtakingly rich. A sixty-ish Milanese antiquarian bookseller nicknamed Yambo suffers a stroke and loses his memory of everything but the words he has read poems, scenes from novels, miscellaneous quotations. His wife Paola fills in the bare essentials of his family history, but in order to trigger original memories, Yambo retreats alone to his ancestral home at Solara, a large country house with an improbably intact collection of family papers, books, gramophone records, and photographs. The house is a museum of Yambos childhood, conventiently empty of people, except of course for one old family servant with a long memory--an apt metaphor for the mind. Yambo submerges himself in these artifacts, rereading almost everything he read as a school boy, blazing a meandering, sometimes misguided, often enchanting trail of words. Flares of recognition do come, like mysterious flames, but these only signal that Yambo remembers something they do not return that memory to him. It is like being handed a wrapped package, the contents of which he can only guess.Within the limitations of Yambos handicap and quest, Eco creates wondrous variety, wringing surprise and delight from such shamelessly hackneyed plot twists as the discovery of a hidden room. Illustrated with the cartoons, sheet music covers, and book jackets that Yambo uncovers in his search, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana can be read as a love letter to literature, a layered excavation of an Italian boyhood of the 1940s, and a sly meditation on human consciousness. Both playful and reverent, it stands with The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before as among Ecos most successful novels. --Regina MarlerFrom Publishers WeeklyWhen aging Italian book-dealer Yambo, hero of this engaging if somewhat bloodless novel of ideas, regains consciousness after a mysterious coma, he suffers a peculiar form of amnesia. His public memory of languages, everyday routines, history and literature remains intact, but his autobiographical memory of personal experiencesof his family, lovers, childhood, even his nameis gone. He can spout literary and cultural allusions on any topic, citing everything from Moby-Dick to Star Trek, but complains, I dont have feelings, I only have memorable sayings. To recover his past, he repairs to his boyhood home to peruse a cache of memorabilia amassed in his youth during Mussolinis reign and WWII, consisting of comic books, schoolbooks, Fascist propaganda, popular music, romantic novels and his own poetry about an unattainable high school beauty. The setup allows semiotician and novelist Eco (The Name of the Rose, etc.) to indulge his passion for pulp materials by reproducing such objects as movie posters, song lyrics and a graphic novella rendering the Book of Revelation as a Flash Gordon melodrama, with intriguing asides on cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind thrown in. The result has a somewhat academic feel, but its an absorbing exploration of how that most fundamental master-narrative, our memory, is pieced together from a bricolage of pop culture. Illus. Author tour. (June) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Author: Janet R. Moyles File Type: pdf The existence in many countries of national curricula might be expected to ease part of the stress felt by teachers by prescribing what should be taught and, possibly, how it should be taught, thus removing from them the individual responsibility of ensuring a broad and balanced curriculum for each child. If, however, the content and methods suggested by a national curriculum seem to the teacher to be inappropriate or irrelevant to childrens needs, the teacher may be faced with a conflict likely to increase the levels of stress he or she suffers. The younger the children, the more their immediate needs and interests will appear to compete with remote long-term societal needs likely to be emphasised in a national curriculum. This book seeks to present a range of international pespectives on the interplay between childhood, curriculum and classroom practice. The first part of the book offers a framework for thinking about primary curricula, while the second part presents a range of international views on the primary curriculum from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, southeast Asia, Europe and the USA.

Author: Virginia Woolf File Type: epub A pioneering work of modernist fiction, using her unique stream-of-consciousness technique to explore the inner lives of her characters, Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse is widely regarded as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Stella McNichol, with an introduction and notes by Hermione Lee. To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode, the use of memory, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of artists and writers that exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of Ones Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed To the Lighthouse, you might like James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also available in Penguin Classics. Bears endless re-reading ... the sea encircles the story in a brilliant ebb and flow Rachel Billington **