Other books that might interest you

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  No Place on the Corner - Jan...

  Jan Haldipur

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  What’s it like to be stopped and frisked by the police while walking home from the supermarket with your young children? How does it feel to receive a phone call from your fourteen-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of fifteen? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” policing methods were a violation of rights.
  
  Through riveting interviews and with a humane eye, Jan Haldipur shows how a community endured this aggressive policing regime. Although the police mostly targeted younger men of color, Haldipur focuses on how everyone in the neighborhood―mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers, and sisters, even the district attorney’s office―was affected by this intense policing regime and thus shows how this South Bronx community as a whole experienced this collective form of punishment. One of Haldipur’s key insights is to demonstrate how police patrols effectively cleared the streets of residents and made public spaces feel off-limits or inaccessible to the people who lived there. In this way, community members lost the very “street corner” culture that has been a hallmark of urban spaces. This profound social consequence of aggressive policing effectively keeps neighbors out of one another’s lives and deeply hurts a community’s sense of cohesion.

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  Flash Count Diary - Menopause...

  Darcey Steinke

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  “Many days I believe menopause is the new (if long overdue) frontier for the most compelling and necessary philosophy; Darcey Steinke is already there, blazing the way. This elegant, wise, fascinating, deeply moving book is an instant classic. I’m about to buy it for everyone I know.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The ArgonautsThis program is read by the author.A brave, brilliant, and unprecedented examination of menopause.Menopause hit Darcey Steinke hard. First came hot flashes. Then insomnia. Then depression. As she struggled to understand what was happening to her, she slammed up against a culture of silence and sexism. Some books promoted hormone replacement therapy. Others encouraged accepting the coming crone. Beyond that, there was little that offered a path to understanding menopause in a complex, spiritual, and intellectually engaged way. She felt lost until she encountered a scientific fact that had escaped her through the early stages of dealing with this life change: the only two creatures on earth that go through menopause, she discovered, are human women and female killer whales. Her fascination with this fact became the starting point for Flash Count Diary, a powerful exploration into aspects of menopause that have rarely been written about, including the changing gender landscape that reduced levels of hormones brings, the actualities of transforming desires, and the realities of prejudice against older women. Steinke learned that in the seventeenth century women who had hot flashes in front of others could be accused of being witches, that the model of Marcel Duchamp's famous Étant donnés was a post-reproductive woman, and that seeing whales in the wild can lead to orcagasms. Flash Count Diary takes listeners from Brooklyn to the red light district in Amsterdam, and finally to a watery encounter with a wild killer-whale matriarch in Washington State’s Salish Sea. Flash Count Diary will change the way you think about menopause. It’s a deeply feminist audiobook, honest about the intimations of mortality that menopause signals but also an argument for the ascendency, beauty, and power of the post-reproductive years in women’s lives.

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  Ships from History - A Brief...

  Kelly Mass

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  This combo consists of 2 books: 
  1 - Mayflower: In 1620, a group of English families, known now as the Pilgrims, were carried from England to the New World on the Mayflower. When the Mayflower finally showed up in America on November twenty-first, 1620, it had 102 guests and a team of around 30 on board and was anchored off Cape Cod. 
  The Pilgrims, as opposed to their Puritan coworkers, chose to break away from the Church of England because of its Roman Catholic heritage and the church's hesitation to reform, requiring them to pray in personal instead of in the church. In 1608, a group of English families left England for the Netherlands, where they could practice their faith without fear of persecution. As early as 1620, the Plymouth Group population had determined to cross the Atlantic to the New World, which they viewed as a "new Promised Land." 
  2 - Titanic: At the time of her first journey from Southampton to N.Y. City, RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and died in the North Atlantic Ocean on April fifteenth, 1912. An overall of 2,224 guests and team were reported to have been on board when the ship sank, making it one of the absolute worst single ship catastrophes and the absolute worst peacetime superliner or cruise liner sinking to date. As a result of the general public's interest in the after-effects, the mishap has acted as a structure for the category of catastrophe movies. 
  The RMS Titanic was the second of 3 Olympic-class ocean liners run by the White Star Line when she began service in the year 1912. Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast produced her. That mishap said the life of the shipyard's Chief Naval Designer, Thomas Andrews.

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  Landmines in War and Peace -...

  Mike Croll

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  Land mines and their antecedents have been used on the battlefield from ancient times, through the world wars, to the modern conflicts in the developing world. Their use in the developing world caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and the resulting international outrage transformed rapidly into a highly effective global movement to ban land mines and a multi million dollar mine action business.  This book describes how technology and military tactics defined land mine development and deployment, why they are such an effective weapon of war, and how an unlikely alliance of soldiers, peace activists, development workers and celebrities succeeded in banning the use of antipersonnel mines.  Comparisons are made between the post WW2 clearance of around 100 million land mines in Europe and contemporary efforts to clear a similar number in the developing world. By 1947 Europe was largely mine free, yet after nearly 20 years and expenditure of $4 billion the land mine crisis in the developing world continues.  The elusive search for the easy way to clear mines is described. Despite experiments with machines, airships, rats and explosive clearance methods, mine clearance remains a hazardous, labor-intensive task undertaken by teams of deminers using metal detectors and needle-like probes.

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  Failing Intelligence - How Blair...

  Brian Jones

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  This is the first book on Iraq by a British intelligence official involved in the process that led to Britain taking part in the 2003 invasion. As the former head of the UK Defence Intelligence Staff's nuclear, biological and chemical section, Brian Jones is ideally placed to pronounce upon the way in which Britain was taken to war and the way in which the intelligence reporting on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was manipulated to justify Saddam Hussein's removal from power. Jones calls on his own experience and knowledge, a variety of leaked documents, and the expert testimony given to a series of inquiries, including the current Chilcot inquiry, to examine how and why Tony Blair and George W. Bush, managed to deceive their legislatures and their electorates into believing that Iraqi WMD was a real threat that could attack the West within 45 minutes. He describes how Blair and Bush sought to use subsequent inquiries to cover up their own culpability in the deception, in order to facilitate re-election and keep their jobs. In conclusion, Jones pulls together the lessons that should have been learned in relation to both the use of intelligence to justify policy-making and with regard to broader international issues of security and governance.

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  The Dunning-Kruger Effect - Why...

  William Rands

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  The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that leads individuals with limited knowledge or ability in a particular area to overestimate their competence. Named after psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who first identified this phenomenon in 1999, the effect reveals a paradox in human cognition: the less people know, the more likely they are to believe they know everything. Conversely, experts in a field tend to underestimate their abilities, assuming that others possess the same level of expertise. This bias is not only fascinating from a psychological standpoint but also carries significant implications for personal, professional, and societal development. 
  At the core of the Dunning-Kruger effect is the misjudgment of one’s capabilities, which stems from a lack of metacognitive awareness—the ability to assess one’s own knowledge and skills accurately. Incompetent individuals, lacking the expertise required to recognize their deficiencies, are unable to discern how little they know. This lack of insight leads them to overestimate their abilities and make decisions based on flawed reasoning. As a result, they may unknowingly engage in behaviors that exacerbate their incompetence, further reinforcing their false sense of expertise. 
  One of the most compelling aspects of the Dunning-Kruger effect is its broad applicability across various fields. From everyday social interactions to high-stakes decision-making in professional environments, this cognitive bias affects people at all levels. In the workplace, for example, leaders with limited knowledge in a specific domain may make decisions that negatively impact their teams, while employees with expertise may remain silent or defer to those who appear more confident. In education, students and teachers alike may fall victim to this effect, with the former believing they fully understand a topic despite limited comprehension, and the latter overestimating their teaching efficacy.

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