Showing titles in Sociology

Best-selling author Mark Sloan is the creator of the popular blog Endalldisease, which delivers evidence-based health information and has helped tens of thousands of people get healthy. After losing his mother to cancer at age 12, Mark has committed his life to finding safer and more effective therapies for diseases of all kinds. Methylene Blue is your ultimate guide for understanding what disease is, what disease isn’t, and how to use methylene blue to dramatically enhance your health and quality of life.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.

Living a Committed Life demonstrates the power of dedication that goes beyond the self and teaches how to live a committed life that enables you to draw on resources and capacities from your most authentic self. In five parts, Lynne Twist shows how to make and keep commitments, engage in individual and collective action, and discover ways to connect and collaborate to make a difference.

The Politics of Trauma offers somatics with a social analysis. This book is for therapists and social activists who understand that trauma healing is not just for individuals - and that social change is not just for movement builders. Just as health practitioners need to consider the societal factors underlying trauma, so too must activists understand the physical and mental impacts of trauma on their own lives and the lives of the communities with whom they organize. Trauma healing and social change are, at their best, interdependent.

Eamonn McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in a Northern Irish ghetto - first published in 1974 - quickly became a classic account of the feelings generated by British rule. The author was at the center of events in Derry which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state. This book describes the people involved in the war and gives an account of the springs of the "Catholic" opposition.

Coleen Nolan – singer, TV host and agony aunt is known for her warmth, straight-talking and compassion. But her empathy and warmth have been earned the hard way – formed by her own deeply-felt experiences of loss and grief. Written with accessibility, heart and fellow-feeling, this is not a guidebook but a companion, a friendly word in the darkest times, packed with advice, understanding and hope – a book to say you’re not alone.

Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others.

The adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and President Bill Clinton proves that small is big by identifying 75 hidden-in-plain-sight trends that are moving America, revealing that the nation is no longer a melting pot but a collection of communities with many individual tastes and lifestyles. In 2000, The Tipping Point entered the lexicon. Now, in Microtrends, one of the most respected and sought-after analysts in the world articulates a new way of understanding how we live.

R. Andrew Chesnut offers a fascinating portrayal of Santa Muerte, a skeleton saint whose cult has attracted millions of devotees over the past decade. Although condemned by mainstream churches, this folk saint's supernatural powers appeal to millions of Latin Americans and immigrants in the US. Devotees believe the Bony Lady (as she is affectionately called) to be the fastest and most effective miracle worker, and as such, her statuettes and paraphernalia outsell those of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Saint Jude, two other giants of Mexican religiosity.

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years - to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes.

In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious "histories" offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheists’s misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of Western history.

In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again. This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.

Polls show that if you ask the average person even the most basic question – ‘Does racism still exist?’ – half the population will say that it does, while the other half will say that it doesn’t. Despite increasingly vocal and polarized opinions on both traditional and social media platforms, as a society we have no more clarity about racism than we did a generation ago. In the ground-breaking The Science of Racism Professor Keon West cuts through the divisive anecdotes and rhetoric with decades’ worth of clear, factual, rigorous, quantitative science, to reveal truths about racism.

No two days were ever the same for bobby-on-the-beat Martyn Johnson. Come rain or come shine, he patrolled his patch with a sharp eye for troublemakers and a kind word for those in need of a friend. Whether he was pursuing unlikely coal thieves, tracking down peacocks gone AWOL or investigating mysterious flying saucers over Sheffield, PC Johnson faced every new challenge with a smile and a healthy dose of his copper's common sense. In his charming and funny memoir, Martyn Johnson recalls his life on the beat.

Spontaneous remission, the placebo effect, and energy healing — these phenomena have baffled the medical community for decades. What do all these marvels tell us? “Our current models of medicine fall short of understanding the depths of our human healing potential,” says Dr. Shamini Jain. “We are on the cusp of finally becoming awake to our human healing potential. A growing number of scientists are exploring a new path — a true expansion of science joined with understandings from ancient concepts of spirituality.”

Simon Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama recreates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators.

In “You Just Need to Lose Weight,” Aubrey Gordon equips listeners with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people. Bringing her dozen years of community organizing and training to bear, Gordon shares the rhetorical approaches she and other organizers employ to not only counter these pernicious myths, but to dismantle the anti-fat bias that so often underpin them.

Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that’s easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick.

For two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

We may be excluded from the majority of our land, no less than 92 per cent in England, but best-selling nature writer and trespasser Nick Hayes shows how we can reclaim our lost connection. By engaging with the land through craft and learning and by caring for it, our relationship with the countryside will be better for us, and better for nature. Interwoven are testimonials from expert contributors—farmers and land workers, activists and authors—each with deeply personal stories of what a connection to nature means for them.