Other books that might interest you

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  They Called Us River Rats - The...

  Macon Fry

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  They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. 
   
   
   
  Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana's most powerful politicians. 
   
   
   
  Today Fry is among the senior generation of "River Rats" living in a vestigial colony of twelve "camps" on New Orleans's river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

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  Cyborg - The MIT Press Essential...

  Laura Forlano, Danya Glabau

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  This introduction to cyborg theory provides a critical vantage point for analyzing the claims around emerging technologies like automation, robots, and AI. Cyborg analyzes and reframes popular and scholarly conversations about cyborgs from the perspective of feminist cyborg theory. Drawing on their combined decades of training, teaching, and research in the social sciences, design, and engineering education, Laura Forlano and Danya Glabau introduce an approach called critical cyborg literacy. Critical cyborg literacy foregrounds power dynamics and pays attention to the ways that social and cultural factors such as gender, race, and disability shape how technology is imagined, developed, used, and resisted. 
   
   
   
  Forlano and Glabau offer critical cyborg literacy as a way of thinking through questions about the relationship between humanity and technology. Cyborg examines whether modern technologies make us all cyborgs—if we consider, for instance, the fact that we use daily technologies at work, have technologies embedded into our bodies in health care applications, or use technology to critically explore possibilities as artists, designers, activists, and creators. Lastly, Cyborg offers perspectives from critical race, feminist, and disability thinkers to help chart a path forward for cyborg theory in the twenty-first century.

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  Beyond Neoliberalism and...

  Markus Gabriel, Anna Katsman,...

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  In many countries, the political backlash against neoliberalism has mainly been a retreat from democracy, with a decline in independence of the judiciary and the monetary authorities, increased control of the media, and manipulation of elections for purposes of authoritarian control. The economic dynamics and the impact of neoliberalism, i.e. deregulation and liberalized markets, is just one cause of this authoritarian shift. The contributors to this volume examine the impact of neoliberal economic policies in relation to cultural and political factors and how these have promoted the recent authoritarian turn, as well as probing the economic policies and performance of the illiberal regimes.

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  Plowshares into Swords -...

  David Ekbladh

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  An in-depth look at how the ideas formulated by the interwar League of Nations shaped American thinking on the modern global order. 
  Plowshares into Swords recaptures the power of knowledge and information developed between World War I and World War II by an international society of institutions and individuals committed to liberal international order and given focus by the League of Nations in Geneva. That information and analysis revolutionized critical debates in a world in crisis. In doing so, David Ekbladh transforms conventional understandings of the United States’ postwar hegemony, showing that important elements of it were profoundly influenced by ideas that emerged from international exchanges. The League’s work was one part of a larger transnational movement that included the United States and which saw the emergence of concepts like national income, gross domestic product, and other attempts to define and improve the standards of living, as well as new approaches to old questions about the role of government. Forged as tools for peace these ideas were beaten into weapons as World War II threatened. Ekbladh recounts how, though the US had never been a member of the organization, vital parts of the League were rescued after the fall of France in 1940 and given asylum at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. However, this presence in the US is just one reason its already well-regarded economic analyses and example were readily mobilized by influential American and international figures for an Allied “war of ideas,” plans for a postwar world, and even blueprints for the new United Nations. How did this body of information become so valuable? As Ekbladh makes clear, the answer is that information and analysis themselves became crucial currencies in global affairs: to sustain a modern, liberal global order, a steady stream of information about economics, politics, and society was, and remains, indispensable.

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  The ANC Billionaires - Big...

  Pieter Du Toit

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  'We were talking about the rise of Japan, about Ronald Reagan's Star Wars … globalisation, technology. And they were still banging on about the Freedom Charter.' – Anglo American's Michael Spicer on the ANC in the mid-1980s.
  In 1985, a group of white South African business leaders, led by Gavin Relly, the executive chairperson of Anglo American, travelled to a game lodge in Zambia to meet with the exiled ANC leadership under Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki. This visit set in motion a coordinated and well-resourced plan by big business to influence and direct political change in South Africa.
  In The ANC Billionaires, top-selling author Pieter du Toit draws on first-hand accounts by major roleplayers about the contentious relationship between capital and the ANC before, during and after the country's transition to democracy, and shows how the liberation organisation was completely unprepared to navigate the intersection between business and politics.
  He also ties the rise of the new elite – including Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Saki Macozoma – to the ANC, a party of government and patronage.

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  More Stories from Langley -...

  Edward Mickolus

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  Who knew the CIA needed librarians? More Stories from Langley reveals the lesser-known operations of one of the most mysterious government agencies in the United States. 
   
   
   
  Edward Mickolus is back with more stories to answer the question, "What does a career in the CIA look like?" Advice and anecdotes from both current and former CIA officers provide a look at the side of intelligence operations that is often left out of the movies. What was it like working for the CIA during 9/11? Do only spies get to travel? More Stories from Langley has physicists getting recruited to "the agency" during the Cold War, foreign-language majors getting lucky chances, and quests to "learn by living" turning into sweaty-palmed calls to the U.S. embassy after being detained by Russian intelligence officers. 
   
   
   
  The world only needs so many suave super spies. More Stories from Langley shows how important academics, retired soldiers, and bilingual nannies can be in preserving the security of our nation.

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