In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth “a billion dollars” that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly line labor. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around thirty billion. We have, it seems, entered the age of one-click America—and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, its sway will only intensify. Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.

Ranging across the country, MacGillis tells the stories of those who’ve thrived and struggled to thrive in this rapidly changing environment. In Seattle, high-paid workers in new office towers displace a historic black neighborhood. In suburban Virginia, homeowners try to protect their neighborhood from the environmental impact of a new data center. Meanwhile, in El Paso, small office supply firms seek to weather Amazon’s takeover of government procurement, and in Baltimore a warehouse supplants a fabled steel plant. Fulfillment also shows how Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos’s lavish Kalorama mansion. With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality—not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click. -- Publisher's website.

"Journey to the Land of the Zek and Back is a vivid, first-person account of life in the Soviet Gulag, a work that has never appeared in full before in English. It was one of the earliest published accounts of the Soviet camp system when it was published in France in 1949 and became an established classic in the Russian-speaking world, influencing the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs"-- Provided by publisher.

"Wiesner-Hanks ... accomplishes a near-impossible feat - a review of what is known about the construction of gender and the character of women's lives in all known cultures over the course of human history ... Theoretically sophisticated and doing justice to the historical and cross-cultural record, yet assimilable by students."Choice "Gender in History brilliantly explores the influence of gender constructs in political, social, economic, and cultural affairs. The remarkable cultural, geographical, and chronological range of Wiesner-Hanks' research is matched only by the sophistication, nuance, and clarity of her analysis. This book offers a rare and valuable global perspective on gender roles in human history." Jerry H. Bentley, University of Hawaii Over the past two decades, considerations of gender have revolutionized the study of history. Yet most books on the subject remain narrowly focused on a specific time period particular region of the world. Gender in History: Global Perspectives, Second Edition, continues to redress this inequity by providing a concise overview of the construction to gender in many world cultures over a period stretching from the Paleolithic era to modern times. Thoroughly updated to reflect current developments in the field, the new edition features entirely new sections which address primates, slavery, colonialism, masculinity, transgender issues, and other relevant topics. As in the well-received first edition, material is presented thematically to reveal the connections between gender and structures such as the family, economy, law, religion, sexuality, and the state. Wiesner-Hanks also investigates precisely what it meant to be a man or woman throughout history; how these roles were shaped by various institutions; and how they in turn were influenced by gender. The author presents material within each chapter chronologically to highlight the ways in which gender structures have varied over time. The new edition of Gender in History: Global Perspectives offers rich insights into all that is currently known about gender roles throughout world history. --Jacket.

This book details the evolution of Jewish humour, highlighting its long history from the period of the Bible to the present day, and includes a wide spectrum of styles that are expressed in various works and fields, including the Bible, the Talmud, poetry, literature, folklore, jokes, movies, and television series. It focuses upon three socio-geographic regions where the majority of Jewish people lived during the 18th to 21st centuries and where Jewish humor was created, developed and thrived: Eastern Europe, the United States and Israel. The text is a complicated mosaic based on three central components of Jewish life: historical experience, survival, and wisdom. It shows that one cannot understand Jewish humor without referring to the various factors which led the Jewish people to create their unusual sense of humor.-- Provided by publisher.

Why do people go to the movies? What does it mean to watch a movie? To what extent is the perceived fictional nature of movies different from our daily perception of the real world?We live in a time where the power of images has strongly invaded our everyday life, and we need new instruments and methods to better understand our relationship with the virtual worlds we inhabit every day. Taking cinema as the beginning of our relationship with the world of moving images, and cognitive neuroscience as a paradigm to understand how the images engage us, The Empathic Screen develops a new theory of film experience, exploring our brain-body interaction when engaging with andwatching a film. In this book, film theory and neuroscience meet to shed new light on cinema masterpieces, such as The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, and Toy Story, and explore the great directors from the classical period to the present.Taking a radical new approach to understanding the cinema, the book will be fascinating reading for cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, and film and media scholars.-- Provided by publisher.

 

People have long imagined themselves as rooted creatures, bound to the earth—and nations—from which they came. In Rootedness, Christy Wampole looks toward philosophy, ecology, literature, history, and politics to demonstrate how the metaphor of the root—surfacing often in an unexpected variety of places, from the family tree to folk etymology to the language of exile—developed in twentieth-century Europe. Wampole examines both the philosophical implications of this metaphor and its political evolution. From the root as home to the root as genealogical origin to the root as the past itself, rootedness has survived in part through its ability to subsume other compelling metaphors, such as the foundation, the source, and the seed. With a focus on this concept’s history in France and Germany, Wampole traces its influence in diverse areas such as the search for the mystical origins of words, land worship, and nationalist rhetoric, including the disturbing portrayal of the Jews as an unrooted, and thus unrighteous, people. Exploring the works of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Celan, and many more, Rootedness is a groundbreaking study of a figure of speech that has had wide-reaching—and at times dire—political and social consequences.-- Provided by publisher.​​

"This collection forges new ground in the discussion of aristocratic and royal women, their relationships with their objects, and medieval geography. It explores how women's geographic and familial networks spread well beyond the borders that defined men's sense of region and how the movement of their belongings can reveal essential information about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces. Beginning in early medieval Scandinavia, ranging from Byzantium to Rus', and multiple lands in Western Europe up to 1500, the essays span a great spatio-temporal range. Moreover, the types of objects extend from traditionally studied works like manuscripts and sculpture, to liturgical and secular ceremonial instruments, icons, and articles of personal adornment, such as textiles and jewelry, even including shoes"--Publisher's description.

Heading Home reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women's experience of continued injustice. It draws on in-depth interviews with highly educated London women who left paid employment to take care of their children, juxtaposed with media and policy depictions of women, work, and family.

"This book, however, comes to the term 'feminist art' from a different direction. As editors, we have approached 'art' as a dynamic set of material and theoretical practices in the realm of culture, and 'feminism' as an equally dynamic set of activist and theoretical practices in the realm of politics. Given that culture and politics constantly intersect and work upon each other, 'feminist art' for us is the space and place - the site - where feminist politics and the domain of art-making intersect"-- Provided by publisher.

Underpinned in the stream of thought named 'communitarianism', Reforming Education in Developing Countries argues that developing countries need educational reforms that are tightly entwined into their cultural, social, and organizational contexts. It questions the applicability of neoliberal reforms in developing societies, through an analysis of the main elements of neoliberalism in education. It highlights the critical role of the community and suggests new and alternative lines of thought for the practice of reform initiation and implementation in developing countries. The book criticizes major neoliberal ideas in education, illuminates the distinctions between current neoliberal reforms and the characteristics of traditional societies, analyzes major educational ideologies in the developed world, and emphasizes the key role of local communities in this world. It proposes a dynamic model of reforming education in these countries that includes three major phases and integrates both modern and traditional (indigenous) educational purposes and values. Evocative ponderings are outlined throughout the book to promote critical thinking and reframing of educators' views towards educational reform and change. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students in the fields of educational leadership, educational policy, educational change, comparative education, political science, and sociology. It will also appeal to educators, supervisors, and policymakers.

This self-contained textbook brings together many different branches of physics--e.g. nuclear physics, solid state physics, particle physics, hydrodynamics, relativity--to analyze compact objects. The latest astronomical data is assessed. Over 250 exercises.

Internet Democracy and Social Change examines the extent to which the democratic potential ascribed to the Internet is realized in practice and how civil society organizations take advantage of the Internet to reach their goals, focusing on the case of Israel, a highly conflicted and turbulent society.

This book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.

While abundant research has investigated time use, much less attention has been given to the cultural meanings attached to free time and what these may express with regard to conceptions of freedom and the self. In an attempt to fill this gap, Michelle Shir-Wise examines not only what people do in their free time, but also how they perceive, interpret and experience it, and in what way it relates to notions of happiness, freedom and the ideal self. Time, Freedom and the Self draws on contemporary theoretical debates concerning the relation between discourse, cultural repertoires, subjective meaning and agency, as well as literature around the sociology of leisure, to inform a unique interpretation of free time ("disciplined freedom"), developed in the light of in-depth questionnaires and interviews with middle-class, middle-aged participants in suburban Israel.

"Introduction to any complex international conflict is enriched when the voices of the adversaries are heard. The Israel/Palestine Reader is an innovative collection, focused on the human dimension of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. Its vivid and illuminating readings present the voices of the diverse parties through personal testimonies and analyses. Key leaders, literary figures, prominent analysts, and simply close observers of different phases of this protracted conflict are all represented--in their own words. From Mark Twain to Theodor Herzl, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, Ezer Weizman, Ehud Barak, Marwan Barghouti, Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, John Kerry, and dozens of others, the firsthand narratives brought together in this Reader bring the conflict to life as seen by those closest to it. Though structured to complement Alan Dowty's introductory text Israel/Palestine (4th edition, Polity 2017), this Reader also stands on its own as a survey of'voices'in the conflict. Each of the ten chapters is framed by an editorial introduction that sets the pieces in context. By juxtaposing contrasting viewpoints both between and within the opposed parties, these pieces underline the drama of the conflict, while final judgment is left to the reader. This lively volume will add color and texture to any study of Arab-Israeli issues or of the Middle East generally"--Publisher's description.

"The SAGE Handbook of School Organization provides a substantial review of the history, current status and future prospects of the field of school organization. Bringing together chapters exploring key issues, important debates and points of tension, the Handbook highlights school and system organisational structure, processes and dynamics coupled with insights into important theoretical foundations from diverse perspectives. This volume is designed to provide a much-needed, critically informed and coherent account of the field, against a backdrop of increasing complexity in which schooling as an institution and schools as organisations operate."--Publisher's description.

Mankekar offers a new understanding of the affective and temporal dimensions of how India and "Indianness," as objects of knowledge production and mediation, circulate through transnational public cultures.​