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Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness
by Dr Thomas Cowan Sally Fallon MorellOne Doctor’s Surprising Answer to the Epidemic of Autoimmunity and Chronic Disease Over the past fifty years, rates of autoimmunity and chronic disease have exploded: currently 1 in 2.5 American children has an allergy, 1 in 11 has asthma, 1 in 13 has severe food allergies, and 1 in 36 has autism. While some attribute this rise to increased awareness and diagnosis, Thomas Cowan, MD, argues for a direct causal relationship to a corresponding increase in the number of vaccines American children typically receive—approximately 70 vaccine doses by age eighteen. The goal of these vaccines is precisely what we’re now seeing in such abundance among our chronically ill children: the provocation of immune response. Dr. Cowan looks at emerging evidence that certain childhood illnesses are actually protective of disease later in life; examines the role of fever, the gut, and cellular fluid in immune health; argues that vaccination is an ineffective (and harmful) attempt to shortcut a complex immune response; and asserts that the medical establishment has engaged in an authoritarian argument that robs parents of informed consent. His ultimate question, from the point of view of a doctor who has decades of experience treating countless children is: What are we really doing to children when we vaccinate them?
Global Psychologies: Mental Health and the Global South
by Suman Fernando Roy MoodleyThis book critiques our reliance on Eurocentric knowledge in the education and training of psychology and psychiatry. Chapters explore the diversity of ‘constructions of the self’ in non-Western cultures, examining traditional psychologies from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and Pre-Columbian America. The authors discuss liberation psychologies and contemporary movements in healing and psychological therapy that draw on both Western and non-Western sources of knowledge. A central theme confronted is the importance, in a rapidly shrinking world, for knowledge systems derived from diverse cultures to be explored and disseminated equally. The authors contend that for this to happen, academia as a whole must lead in promoting cross-national and cross-cultural understanding that is free of colonial misconceptions and prejudices. This unique collection will be of value to all levels of study and practice across psychology and psychiatry and to anyone interested in looking beyond Western definitions and understandings.
Global Psychologies: Mental Health and the Global South
by Suman Fernando Roy MoodleyThis book critiques our reliance on Eurocentric knowledge in the education and training of psychology and psychiatry. Chapters explore the diversity of ‘constructions of the self’ in non-Western cultures, examining traditional psychologies from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and Pre-Columbian America. The authors discuss liberation psychologies and contemporary movements in healing and psychological therapy that draw on both Western and non-Western sources of knowledge. A central theme confronted is the importance, in a rapidly shrinking world, for knowledge systems derived from diverse cultures to be explored and disseminated equally. The authors contend that for this to happen, academia as a whole must lead in promoting cross-national and cross-cultural understanding that is free of colonial misconceptions and prejudices. This unique collection will be of value to all levels of study and practice across psychology and psychiatry and to anyone interested in looking beyond Western definitions and understandings.
Comrade Rockstar
by Reggie NadelsonDean Reed was an American and the biggest rock star in the history of the Soviet Union. He was so famous his icons were sold alongside those of Josef Stalin. Reggie Nadelson first saw him in 1986 on a TV chat show. Few people in the West had ever heard of him. Six weeks later Reed was found dead in a lake in East Berlin. Was he murdered by the CIA? The KGB? A jealous husband? Nobody knew. Commissioned to write a film about him, she chased the mystery of his life and death across America and Eastern Europe, her own journey mirroring his. For a quarter of a century, from 1961 to 1986, Dean Reed, his guitar on his back, took the music with him. He played 32 countries: his albums went gold from Bulgaria to Berlin. The Russians gave him a Lenin Prize. He was their American. Comrade Rockstar is not just the story of Dean Reed's progress from Hollywood starlet to Cold War Cowboy, but an account of the search that took Reggie Nadelson from Denver to Berlin, and from Hawaii to Moscow. As she travelled, the Berlin Wall was breached and Dean Reed became an increasingly alluring figure, his life an unrepeatable tale from the Cold War. Encountering the characters who peopled Dean Reed's world, she was caught in the seedy, sometimes moving, often hilarious subculture, of sex, politics and rock 'n' roll.
Deep Jungle: Journey To The Heart Of The Rainforest
by Fred PearceDEEP JUNGLE is an exploration of the most alien and feared habitat on Earth. Starting with man's earliest recorded adventures, Fred Pearce journeys high into the canopy - home to two-thirds of all the creatures on our planet, many of whom never come down to earth. During his travels he encounters all manner of fantastic flora and fauna, including a frog that can glide from tree to tree, a spider that can drag live chickens into its burrow and a flower that smells of decaying flesh.It is in the jungle that Pearce discovers secrets about how evolution works, the intricate links that connect us all, and maybe even clues to where humans came from - here is the key to our future foods and medicines, our climate and our understanding of how life works. At the start of a new millennium Pearce asks why we continue to waste precious time - and billions of dollars - looking for signs of life elsewhere in our universe when the greatest range of life-forms that have ever existed lies right here on our doorstep. Today environmentalists say we are on the verge of destroying the last rainforests, and with them the planet's evolutionary crucible, and maybe even its ability to maintain life on Earth. But nature has a way of getting its own back. The Mayans and the people of Angkor went too far in manipulating nature and paid the ultimate price. Their civilisations died and the jungle returned. Nature reclaimed it's own and it may do so again ...
The Atlantic Sound (Vintage International Series)
by Caryl PhillipsIn The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex notion of what constitutes 'home'. Seen through the historical prism of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan history engenders in the soul of an individual.Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat, repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He then visits three pivotal cities: Liverpool, developed on the back of the slave trade, Elmina, on the west coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the American South, celebrated as the city where the Civil War began - not for being the city where fully one-third of African-Americans were landed and sold into bondage. Finally, Phillips journeys to Israel where he encounters a community of two thousand African-Americans, whose thirty-year sojourn in the Negev desert leaves him once again contemplating the modern condition of diasporan displacement.
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Oberon Modern Plays Ser.)
by Simon Schama CbeRough Crossings is the astonishing story of the struggle to freedom by thousands of African-American slaves who fled the plantations to fight behind British lines in the American War of Independence. With gripping, powerfully vivid story-telling, Simon Schama follows the escaped blacks into the fires of the war, and into freezing, inhospitable Nova Scotia where many who had served the Crown were betrayed in their promises to receive land at the war's end. Their fate became entwined with British abolitionists: inspirational figures such as Granville Sharp, the flute-playing father-figure of slave freedom, and John Clarkson, the 'Moses' of this great exodus, who accompanied the blacks on their final rough crossing to Africa, where they hoped that freedom would finally greet them.
Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari‘a Law
by Sadakat KadriThis book is important because it is:Unique. Heaven on Earth offers a critique of extremism that is human rights-based and entertaining – combining the comparative approach of Karen Armstrong and the immediacy of Ed Husain (The Islamist) with storytelling. Timely. At a time of veil bans, Qur’an burnings and English Defence League protests, Kadri voices a liberal view of Islamic history and shows Muslims working against repression. This book explains up-to-the-minute brutalities.Epic. Interviews, anecdotes, personal reflection and analysis are set against a narrative that sweeps from seventh-century Mecca to the war in Afghanistan. Civilisations are evoked via the vivid lives of caliphs, mystics, and travellers. Legal changes are described through the feuds, courtroom dramas, conquests and cataclysms that have left their mark on modern Islamic law. First-hand. On the road for five months, Kadri travelled through Iran just before the June 2009 election protests, and took part in a human rights conference there with ayatollahs and academics. Eye-opening. This book goes beyond the explosive headline issues (criminal justice, women, jihad, religious freedom) to reveal the stranger ones: genie exorcisms; the legal consequences of premature ejaculation; online fatwa advice; the sharia approach to Facebook and Qur’anic mobile phone ringtones, etc.Bold. Heaven on Earth primarily targets religious extremism, but also cuts anti-Muslim panic down to size.
No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock
by Marina WarnerOgres and giants, bogeymen and bugaboos embody some of our deepest fears, dominating popular fiction, from tales such as 'Jack the Giant Killer' to the cannibal monster Hannibal Lecter, from the Titans of Greek mythology to the dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK, from Frankenstein TO MEN IN BLACK. Following her brilliant study of fairy tales, FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE, Marina Warner's rich, enthralling new book explores the ever increasing presence of such figures of male terror, and the strategems we invent to allay the monsters we conjure up -from horror stories to lullabies and jokes. Travelling from ogres to cradle songs, from bananas to cannibals, Warner traces the roots of our commonest anxieties, unravelling with vigorous intelligence, creative originality and relish, the myths and fears which define our sensibilites. Illustrated with a wealth of images - from the beautiful and the bizarre to the downright scary -this is a tour de force of scholarship and imagination.
Things Can Only Get Better
by John O'FarrellLike bubonic plague and stone cladding, no-one took Margaret Thatcher seriously until it was too late. Her first act as leader was to appear before the cameras and do a V for Victory sign the wrong way round. She was smiling and telling the British people to f*** off at the same time. It was something we would have to get used to.'Things Can Only Get Better is the personal account of a Labour supporter who survived eighteen miserable years of Conservative government. It is the heartbreaking and hilarious confessions of someone who has been actively involved in helping the Labour party lose elections at every level: school candidate: door-to-door canvasser: working for a Labour MP in the House of Commons; standing as a council candidate; and eventually writing jokes for a shadow cabinet minister.Along the way he slowly came to realise that Michael Foot would never be Prime Minister, that vegetable quiche was not as tasty as chicken tikki masala and that the nuclear arms race was never going to be stopped by face painting alone.
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, And The Search For Peace Of Mind
by Scott StosselTHE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2015 As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish it produces, but also the countless psychotherapies, medications and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll – its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyse – while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.
The Black Book of Modern Myths: True Stories of the Unexplained
by Alasdair WickhamTHE SUPERNATURAL IS EVERYWHEREIn your home, on the street, in the countryside, around the world:In Denmark, the ghost of the White Lady, who freezes her quarry with an intense chill.In Germany, a succubus, who seduces and devours its prey.In New Zealand, the ghost of a murdered girl, who scrabbles and scratches at a cubicle wall.In Japan, the sea-dwelling Kappa, who drags young children into the icy depths.In Chile, the Chupacabra, a supernatural creature who kills in our world, before leaving for another.In the UK, Satanic cults inhabit the Cornish countryside, awaiting their next unsuspecting victim.No longer can we ignore the signs. Enter the Black Book if you dare to believe.
Capital Crimes: Seven Centuries of London Life and Murder
by Max DecharneOver seven centuries London has changed dramatically - from walled medieval settlement to bustling modern metropolis. But throughout its history there has been one inescapable constant: murder. It winds through the heart of the capital as surely as the River Thames. Capital Crimes tells the story of crime and punishment in the city, from the killing of infamous 'questmonger' Roger Legett during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 through to the hanging of Styllou Christofi in 1954. Along the way we encounter such shocking characters as railway murderer Franz Muller, the ‘baby farmers’ of Finchley and the notorious political assassin John Bellingham. Some are well known, some obscure; the lives and fates of all, however, have much to tell us, providing a glimpse into the workings of London’s mysterious underworld and reminding us that dark deeds are not so far removed from everyday life as we would perhaps like to believe.
Forensic Casebook: The Science of Crime Scene Investigation
by N E GengeFilled with intriguing true stories, and packed with black-and-white illustrations and photographs, The Forensic Casebook draws on interviews with police personnel and forensic scientists - including animal examiners, botanists, zoologists, firearms specialists, and autopsists - to uncover the vast and detailed under workings of criminal investigation. Encyclopaedic in scope, this riveting, authoritative book leaves no aspect of forensic science untouched, covering such fascinating topics as securing a crime scene, identifying blood splatter patterns, collecting fingerprints, and feet, lip and ear prints and career paths in criminal science. Lucidly written and spiked with real crime stories, The Forensic Casebook exposes the nitty-gritty that other books only touch upon.
For Honour and Fame: Chivalry in England, 1066-1500
by Dr Nigel SaulThe world of medieval chivalry is at once glamorous and violent, alluring yet alien. Our popular views of the period are largely inherited from the nineteenth-century romantics, for whom chivalry evoked images of knights in shining armour, competing for the attention of fair ladies - with pennons and streamers fluttering from castle battlements.But what is the reality? Were the rituals and romance of chivalry designed to provide an escape from the brutal facts of almost continuous warfare? Or did they instead help regulate the conduct of war and moderate its violent excesses?Nigel Saul charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion and architecture. He shows us a world of kings and barons, castles and cathedrals - a world shaped by Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, by Magna Carta and the rule of law, by battles like Bannockburn and Crecy, by the Black Death and by tournaments, round tables and the cult of Arthurianism.
Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England
by Sarah WiseSHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZEGaslight tales of rooftop escapes, men and women snatched in broad daylight, patients shut in coffins, a fanatical cult known as the Abode of Love… The nineteenth century saw repeated panics about sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums. With the rise of the ‘mad-doctor’ profession, English liberty seemed to be threatened by a new generation of medical men willing to incarcerate difficult family members in return for the high fees paid by an unscrupulous spouse or friend. Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes – their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence – and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the ‘inconvenient person’.
Managing Monsters: Six Myths Of Our Time - The 1994 Reith Lectures
by Marina WarnerIn early 1994 Marina Warner delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of six lectures, she takes areas of contemporary concern and relates them to stories from mythology and fairy tale which continue to grip the modern imagination.She analyses the fury about single mothers and the anxiety about masculinity in the light of ideals about male heroism and control; the current despair about children and the loss of childhood innocence; the changing attitude of myths about wild men and beasts and the undertow of racism which is expressed in myths about savages and cannibals. The last lecture, on home, brings the themes together to examine ideas about who we are and where we belong, with reference to the British nation and its way of telling its own history.Using a range of examples from video games to Turner's paintings, from popular films to Keats, Marina Warner interweaves her critique of fantasy, dream and prejudice.
Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture
by Marina WarnerSince the early 1970s, Marina Warner has been one of the most challenging, subtle and profound commentators on the culture of past and present, unravelling our webs of images, ideas and beliefs, and making new and provocative connections. This resonant collection draws together essays written over twenty-five years, offering a wide-ranging retrospective of her developing ideas. Whether writing on Vietnam, Mrs Thatcher, the dollar sign and the twin towers, Queen Elizabeth I and incest, weeping Madonnas, zombies or fairytales, Marian Warner displays a rare gift for blending historical and anthropological insights with deft and perceptive readings on individual works.
Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigalWe are living in a world full of games.More than 31 million people in the UK are gamers. The average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the age of twenty-one. The future belongs to those who play games.In this ground-breaking book, visionary game designer Jane McGonigaI challenges conventional thinking and shows that games - far from being simply escapist entertainment - have the potential not only to radically improve our own lives but to change the world.
Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan
by Zarghuna KargarDear Zari gives voice to the secret lives of women across Afghanistan and allows them to tell their stories in their own words: from the child bride given as payment to end a family feud; to a life spent in a dark, dusty room weaving carpets; to a young girl brought up as a boy; to life as a widow shunned by society. Compelling and enlightening, Dear Zari uncovers the reality of life in Afghanistan in stories that are by turn heart-breaking and uplifting.
Monuments And Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Picador Bks.)
by Marina Warner'Why should Truth be a woman? Or Nature? Or Justice? Or Liberty? Not, certainly, because women have been more free, just, truthful, nor even (though this one has a double edge) more natural. Marina Warner sets out to breathe some life into the army of petrified personages that litters western cityscapes... As her book shows, these stony ladies can be persuaded to yield surprisingly interesting answers' - Lorna Sage, ObserverAn entertaining and enlightening book about the relationship between allegory and female form from one of the great feminists and cultural historians of our time, Marina Warner.
Visions of England: Or Why We Still Dream of a Place in the Country
by Sir Roy StrongWhy do we still get misty-eyed about England's green and pleasant land?What explains our obsession with country houses - from the National Trust to Downton Abbey?Why do we still dream of a place in the country?In this delightul book Roy Strong explores the definition of Englishness. Celebrating our literature, music, art, gardening and drama, Strong identifies those icons and traditions that still speak to us - it is a vision of England that is inclusive and relevant for everybody living in the country today.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World
by Sara WheelerShortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book AwardAfter reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as Terra Incognita and The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of six women who fled various sorts of trouble in nineteenth-century England and went to the United States to reinvent themselves.Her travel companions include Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and author of the biting Domestic Manners of the Americans; the actress Fanny Kemble, who shocked the nation with her passionate first-hand indictment of slavery; the prolifically pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, who had never been more than twelve miles from her Yorkshire village before she sailed to the New World; the traveller Isabella Bird, whose many ailments remained in check as long as she was scaling the Rockies; and the novelist Catherine Hubback, niece of Jane Austen, who deposited her husband in a madhouse and rode the brand-new rails to San Francisco.Tough-minded outsiders, these women’s truest qualities emerged in a country as incomplete and tentative as their native land was staid and settled. And they discovered second acts for themselves at a time when the world expected them to disappear politely. From the swampy heat of Georgia’s Sea Islands to the icy purity of the Cascades, Sara Wheeler finds their path, and her own.
Working Lives
by David HallIn the early 1950s Britain was still the most urbanized and industrialized nation in the world, a global power in shipbuilding and the leading European producer of coal, steel, cars and textiles. For the many millions of men and women hard at work during that time, an infernal landscape of smoke-blackened factories, towering slag heaps and fiery furnaces dominated their lives. From the deep docks and towering cranes of the Tyneside shipyards to the mills and chimneys of Lancashire and beyond, Working Lives takes us right to the heart of those industrial centres through the words of those who were there. Drawn together from hundreds of hours of first-hand interviews, Working Lives is a unique collection of oral testimonies from workers whose stories might not otherwise have been told: mill girls who risked life and limb in dusty, noisy weaving sheds; steel workers who wrestled sheets of white-hot metal in the blistering heat of the foundries; and miners who hewed coal by hand on filthy, cramped, claustrophobic coalfaces.Local industries shaped these workers’ entire lives but also gave them a sense of pride, identity and belonging. As they look back on the dangers and hardships of their jobs, and the place of industry in their close-knit communities, these fascinating voices paint a vivid and moving portrait of working life in Britain not to be forgotten.
The People’s Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records
by Stuart MaconieThese are the songs that we have listened to, laughed to, loved to and laboured to, as well as downed tools and danced to. Covering the last seven decades, Stuart Maconie looks at the songs that have sound tracked our changing times, and – just sometimes – changed the way we feel. Beginning with Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song that reassured a nation parted from their loved ones by the turmoil of war, and culminating with the manic energy of ‘Bonkers’, Dizzee Rascal’s anthem for the push and rush of the 21st century inner city, The People’s Songs takes a tour of our island’s pop music, and asks what it means to us. This is not a rock critique about the 50 greatest tracks ever recorded. Rather, it is a celebration of songs that tell us something about a changing Britain during the dramatic and kaleidoscopic period from the Second World War to the present day. Here are songs about work, war, class, leisure, race, family, drugs, sex, patriotism and more, recorded in times of prosperity or poverty. This is the music that inspired haircuts and dance crazes, but also protest and social change. The companion to Stuart Maconie’s landmark Radio 2 series, The People’s Songs shows us the power of ‘cheap’ pop music, one of Britain’s greatest exports. These are the songs we worked to and partied to, and grown up and grown old to – from ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ to ‘Rehab', ‘She Loves You’ to ‘Star Man’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ to ‘Radio Ga Ga’.