Other books that might interest you

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  Host Cities - How Refugees Are...

  Karen Jacobsen

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  A revealing study of how the arrival of refugees affects and transforms cities Cities all over the world experience large humanitarian influxes, and refugees and citizens alike must navigate the related risks and opportunities. Over the past twenty-five years, Karen Jacobsen has studied the interaction of refugees and cities and has trained scores of graduate students, many of whom now work with United Nations agencies or humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. Her research team at Tufts and this global network of aid workers give her firsthand knowledge of the impact of forced migration on cities and the lives of refugees living there. Focusing on cities and refugees in Africa and the Middle East, Jacobsen draws universal lessons, distilling her research findings and wisdom from decades of experience into clear, vivid prose. The book is valuable for researchers, policy analysts, donors, and humanitarian workers in cities around the globe and for all readers trying to understand, beyond the headlines, one of the most troubling and volatile issues of our time.

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  How States Die - Membership and...

  Douglas Lemke

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  When states die, there are massive consequences. Somalia's death in 1991 created a safe haven for criminal non-state actors and has unsettled the Horn of Africa for decades. When the Iraqi state was dismantled in 2003, a similar set of consequences plagued the Middle East and the international system more broadly.In How States Die, Douglas Lemke provides an analysis of this phenomenon by reconceptualizing the definitions of the state and state death. A state exists, according to Lemke, whenever a set of state-like political entities exercise control over a populated territory. This includes both sovereign states and "territorial contenders," which lack formal diplomatic recognition. Conceiving statehood in this way vastly increases the population of states that have experienced state death, which casts new light on the phenomenon. This increased range not only expands the list of ways states can die; it also provides insights into whether diplomatic recognition is associated with longer life and shows that state strength is not related to state death. Similarly, in contrast to the conventional wisdom, victories in conflict do not coincide with longer state survival. State death is one of the central questions within international relations, and Lemke's reformulation of what a state is will transform our understanding of how and why these deaths happen.

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  Egyptian Sacred Sciences and...

  Norah Romney

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  Egypt's civilization can be traced back to the Time three hundred years before and after the advent of modernity, though there is no agreement on its origins. Egypt's sequential conquest of Persia, Greece, and Rome ushered in the Graeco-Roman Period. During this period of Roman expansion, polytheistic religions predominated, monotheistic faiths emerged, Greek philosophy saw into science and technology, and diverse cultures coexisted in a tolerant atmosphere. 
  Egypt was the oldest civilization in the Graeco-Roman world. Throughout the ancient world, there were significant civil disturbances. Scholars, historians, and explorers flocked to the place to document its disappearance. They also saw the last breath of the unwavering devotion, unparalleled dignity, and extraordinary approach to existence that had lived in the memory of Time. Despite its geographical and political isolation, Egypt also experienced a unique artistic synthesis that allowed the dissemination of Egyptian ideas previously inaccessible.

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  Intimate Subjects - Touch and...

  Simeon Koole

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  An insightful history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain told through a single sense: touch. 
    
  When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present. 
    
  Intimate Subjects takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge. 
    
  With imagination and verve, Intimate Subjects offers a new way of theorizing the body and the senses, as well as a new way of thinking about embodiment and vulnerability today.

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  Limitless Mind - Learn Lead and...

  Anonymous

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  In this revolutionary book, a professor of education at Stanford University and acclaimed math educator who has spent decades studying the impact of beliefs and bias on education, reveals the six keys to unlocking learning potential, based on the latest scientific findings. 
  From the moment we enter school as children, we are made to feel as if our brains are fixed entities, capable of learning certain things and not others, influenced exclusively by genetics. This notion follows us into adulthood, where we tend to simply accept these established beliefs about our skillsets (i.e. that we don’t have “a math brain” or that we aren’t “the creative type”). These damaging—and as new science has revealed, false—assumptions have influenced all of us at some time, affecting our confidence and willingness to try new things and limiting our choices, and, ultimately, our futures.  
  Stanford University professor, bestselling author, and acclaimed educator Jo Boaler has spent decades studying the impact of beliefs and bias on education. In Limitless Mind, she explodes these myths and reveals the six keys to unlocking our boundless learning potential. Her research proves that those who achieve at the highest levels do not do so because of a genetic inclination toward any one skill but because of the keys that she reveals in the book. Our brains are not “fixed,” but entirely capable of change, growth, adaptability, and rewiring. Want to be fluent in mathematics? Learn a foreign language? Play the guitar? Write a book? The truth is not only that anyone at any age can learn anything, but the act of learning itself fundamentally changes who we are, and as Boaler argues so elegantly in the pages of this book, what we go on to achieve.

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  The Chinese Great Leap Forward...

  Sarah Willards

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  The origins of the Great Leap Forward are deeply rooted in the political ambition and ideological vision of Mao Zedong, the founding leader of the People’s Republic of China. Following the success of the Communist revolution in 1949, Mao sought not only to rebuild a war-torn nation but to rapidly transform it into a socialist utopia capable of rivaling the industrial powers of the West. By the mid-1950s, China had already launched its First Five-Year Plan, modeled after the Soviet approach to centralized economic planning. Encouraged by early gains in heavy industry, Mao envisioned a second phase of development that would leap over traditional stages of economic growth. 
  At the heart of this vision was a push for mass mobilization. Mao believed that the sheer size of China's population could be harnessed as a revolutionary force capable of achieving miraculous feats. The Great Leap Forward, initiated in 1958, was designed to propel China into a modern communist society by emphasizing agricultural collectivization and rural industrialization simultaneously. Rather than relying on expert knowledge or slow-paced industrial planning, Mao favored decentralized enthusiasm and ideological commitment, trusting that the collective will of the people would overcome any technical limitations. 
  One of the most radical elements of this plan was the establishment of people’s communes, which replaced the traditional family unit and private farming with large-scale collective labor. Households were merged into communes comprising thousands of individuals, who would eat, sleep, and work under strict communal arrangements. The idea was to increase efficiency and free up labor for industrial production, especially in rural areas where backyard furnaces were set up to produce steel. This was accompanied by an aggressive campaign to eliminate what were seen as capitalist tendencies, including private plots and individual incentives.

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