Showing titles in Sociology

Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death.

We've all seen it before: the ambitious leader who enjoys great success and then, inexplicably, crashes and burns. Perhaps this leader has been you. Leaders can't sustain effectiveness if they can't sustain themselves. Resonant Leadership offers inspiration, dozens of exercises, and other tools to help listeners become and remain successful leaders in their work and in their lives.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain's 20th-century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat. In the immortal words of former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 'Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.' But the funny thing was, Britain had already found a role. It even had the costume. The leaders of the world just hadn't noticed it yet. Butler to the World reveals how the UK took up its position at the elbow of the worst people on Earth: the oligarchs, kleptocrats and gangsters.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Evicted by Matthew Desmond, read by Dion Graham. Arleen spends nearly all her money on rent but is kicked out with her kids in Milwaukee's coldest winter for years. Doreen's home is so filthy her family call it 'the rat hole'. Lamar, a wheelchair-bound ex-soldier, tries to work his way out of debt for his boys. Scott, a nurse turned addict, lives in a gutted-out trailer.

To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to socio-politically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.

He runs his own business and coaches Little League. She drives a minivan, and she'd be lost without her trusty BlackBerry. They go on date nights. Their kids attend public schools, play sports, and take music lessons. They live in a roomy house in the 'burbs. They're about as mainstream as families come. They're also polygamists. The Dargers move the conversation away from child brides, Warren Jeffs, and the FLDS to more mainstream polygamists who willingly enter into plural relationships as adults.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, Jenn Ashworth emerged from lockdown with a compulsive need to walk—and to walk away. Armed with little more than the knowledge imparted by a two-day orienteering course and a set of maps, she embarked on the most epic of English walks: Wainwright's Coast to Coast. Guided not just by Wainwright's writing but also by daily letters from her friend Clive—facing an epic journey of his own—Jenn's pilgrimage soon becomes more than just walking: a chance to reconnect and excavate, to re-engage with the act of caring for others and for oneself.

There is currently an epidemic of 'affluenza' throughout the world - an obsessive, envious, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses - that has resulted in huge increases in depression and anxiety among millions. Over a nine-month period, bestselling author Oliver James travelled around the world to try and find out why. He discovered how, despite very different cultures and levels of wealth, affluenza is spreading.

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilisations and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste.

Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest. In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live.

The first book that explains how to open to the immensity of living with death—and how participating fully in life is the perfect preparation for whatever may come next. In Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, the Levines provide calm compassion rather than the frightening melodrama of death. A meaningful insight how to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next, be it sorrow or joy, loss or gain, death or a new wonderment at life.

The crisis of the progressive movement is so evident that nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of its basic assumptions is required. Today's progressives now work for professional organizations more comfortable with the inside game in Washington, DC (and capitols throughout the West), where they are outmatched and outspent by corporate interests. In No Shortcuts, Jane McAlevey argues that progressives can win, but lack the organized power to enact significant change, to outlast their bosses in labor fights, and to hold elected leaders accountable.

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

The Housekeeper's Tale reveals the personal sacrifices, bitter disputes and driving ambition that shaped these women's careers. Using secret diaries, unpublished letters, and the neglected service archives of our stately homes, Tessa Boase tells the extraordinary stories of five working women who ran some of Britain's most prominent households.

Orwell's graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in his later works and novels and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.

The raw and powerful sequel to Once Were Warriors. It is six years since Jake's daughter Grace hanged herself. Jake's wife, Beth, has left him, his son Nig was killed in a gangland fight - his only consolations are drink and his memories. His daughter, Polly, is determined to escape the violence that is destroying the Maoris. But can Jake, too, redeem himself?

Throughout history, people have sought to reduce suffering, eliminate disease and enhance desirable qualities in their children. In the Victorian era eugenics, a full-blooded attempt to impose control over unruly biology, began to grow among the powerful and quickly spread to dozens of countries around the world. But these ideas are not merely historical: today, with new gene editing techniques, conversations are happening about tinkering with the DNA of our unborn children to make them smarter, fitter, stronger.

With the appearance of Grunch of Giants, R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory - his long-gestated myth-of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity.

From ventilators to brain implants, medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid description of modern neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is not the loss of breath, but of personal identity – that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recent discoveries now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds for future revival. Whether they discovered cures or fought for justice, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world.

For too long, under the influence of corporate giants and tech enthusiasts, we’ve accepted the idea that change always means better. But rapidly developing technology isn’t neutral – it’s ambivalent, and capable of enormous harm. To improve our well-being, help future generations flourish and recover our shared humanity, we must become more critical, mindful users of technology, and more discerning of how it uses us.