Author: Karim Makdisi File Type: pdf Born in 1945, the United Nations came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This books claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume collects some of the finest scholars and practitioners writing about the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states. This is a landmark book--a close and informed study of the UN in the region that taught the organization how to do its many jobs--Provided by publisher.

Author: Leonard Sax File Type: mobi Are boys and girls really that different? Twenty years ago, doctors and researchers didnt think so. Back then, most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave are mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. Its hard to cling to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated. In Why Gender Matters, psychologist and family physician Dr. Leonard Sax leads parents through the mystifying world of gender differences by explaining the biologically different ways in which children think, feel, and act. He addresses a host of issues, including discipline, learning, risk taking, aggression, sex, and drugs, and shows how boys and girls react in predictable ways to different situations. For example, girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as kids grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacherespecially if the teacher is female. Likewise, negative emotions are seated in an ancient structure of the brain called the amygdala. Girls develop an early connection between this area and the cerebral cortex, enabling them to talk about their feelings. In boys these links develop later. So if you ask a troubled adolescent boy to tell you what his feelings are, he often literally cannot say.Dr. Sax offers fresh approaches to disciplining children, as well as gender-specific ways to help girls and boys avoid drugs and early sexual activity. He wants parents to understand and work with hardwired differences in children, but he also encourages them to push beyond gender-based stereotypes. A leading proponent of single-sex education, Dr. Sax points out specific instances where keeping boys and girls separate in the classroom has yielded striking educational, social, and interpersonal benefits. Despite the view of many educators and experts on child-rearing that sex differences should be ignored or overcome, parents and teachers would do better to recognize, understand, and make use of the biological differences that make a girl a girl, and a boy a boy.

Author: Howard Markel File Type: epub Acclaimed medical historian Howard Markel traces the careers of two brilliant young doctorsSigmund Freud, neurologist, and William Halsted, surgeonshowing how their powerful addictions to cocaine shaped their enormous contributions to psychology and medicine. When Freud and Halsted began their experiments with cocaine in the 1880s, neither they, nor their colleagues, had any idea of the drugs potential to dominate and endanger their lives. An Anatomy of Addiction tells the tragic and heroic story of each man, accidentally struck down in his prime by an insidious malady tragic because of the time, relationships, and health cocaine forced each to squander heroic in the intense battle each man waged to overcome his affliction. Markel writes of the physical and emotional damage caused by the then-heralded wonder drug, and how each man ultimately changed the world in spite of itor because of it. One became the father of psychoanalysis the other, of modern surgery. Here is the full story, long overlooked, told in its rich historical context. **Review Howard Markel eloquently tells the parallel stories of these two pathbreaking physicians and how their stories intersect in remarkable and sometimes tragic ways . . . Markels extraordinary achievement combines first-rate history of medicine and outstanding cultural history. Publishers Weekly (starred) From the dramatic opening scene on the first page to the epilogue, An Anatomy of Addiction is a hugely satisfying read. Howard Markel is physician, historian and wonderful storyteller, and since his tale involves two of the most compelling characters in medicine, I could not put it downaddictive is the word for this terrific book. Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone From the Hardcover edition. About the Author Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. His books includeQuarantine!,When Germs Travel,andAn Anatomy of Addiction.His articles have appeared inThe New York Times, The Journal of the American Medical Association,andThe New England Journal of Medicine, and he is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio. Markel is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Author: Sandro Mezzadra File Type: pdf Theorists have often returned to the work of Marx, to interpret and better understand global developments and current political and economic crisis. In the Marxian Workshops Producing Subjects combines an attempt to develop a specific reading of Marx with a set of interventions on high stakes topics in contemporary critical debates. Sandro Mezzadra offers a close reading of Marx on the production of subjectivity as a crucial test for assessment of some of the most important Marxian concepts and of their potential for grasping the present, from the point of view of radical transformation. **Review In this book, we find a displaced Marx at his own kitchen table. Displacement became a method Marx beyond Marxism, to be found today in a new world which he however foresaw. Marxs kitchen table which this beautiful text enables us to enter, is where proletarian bodies are in the making and the possibility of their becoming a revolutionary movement is ever present. (Veronica Gago, Professor of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires) It is not an exaggeration to say that it is an intellectual event to have Sandro Mezzadras theoretical work on Marx published in English. No one brings together the global struggles for liberation into a theoretical framework of contemporary capitalism more deftly than Mezzadra. Under his guidance we come to see that the battle against capitalism has now been joined by most of the planet expanding rather than erasing the old antagonism, and proliferating in the creative forms of life that refuse to submit. (Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education, Singapore Management University) New figures of labor and new machines for the extraction of surplus values Sandro Mezzadras Marxian research is located between these two poles. This is an open work, open in a double sense. Firstly from a genealogical point of view, since it sums up and further develops the best accomplishments of Marx studies in the last fifty years from the angle of a critical analysis of the formation of the proletariat into a class. In the Marxian Workshops is an open work, secondly, because it invites its readers to participate in the solution of this latter riddle this is what production of subjectivity means here, the revolutionary subjectivation that Marx continues to claim from anybody interested in his work. (Antonio Negri, Co-Author of Empire) Politics is being produced in the Marxian workshops. Sandro Mezzadra turns the discussion on Marx from the usual scholarly mode of textual certitudes to a provisional, tension-filled, dialectical exercise, which has the capacity to suggest new angles, possibilities, and new problems of articulating transformative politics. Such politics is never given. It is produced. Political ideas can only be workshops for such production. That perhaps is the way by which Marx can be drawn out of the sedate and satisfied chambers of western academic thinking to the violent storms blowing in the broader world. (Ranabir Samaddar, Director of the Calcutta Research Group) About the Author Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bologna.