Other books that might interest you

• 

  Creatures of Politics - Media...

  Michael Lempert, Michael J....

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This analysis of campaign messaging and image-making is “a fascinating read and an illuminating look into the complex realm of political rhetoric” (Publishers Weekly). 
   
  It’s a common complaint that a presidential candidate’s style matters more than substance and that the issues have been eclipsed by mass-media-fueled obsession with a candidate’s every slip, gaffe, and peccadillo. This book explores political communication in American presidential politics, focusing on what insiders call “message.” 
   
  Message, Michael Lempert and Michael Silverstein argue, is not simply an individual’s positions on the issues but the craft used to fashion the creature the public sees as the candidate. Lempert and Silverstein examine some of the revelatory moments in debates, political ads, interviews, speeches, and talk shows to explain how these political creations come to have a life of their own. From the pandering “Flip-Flopper” to the self-reliant “Maverick,” the authors demonstrate how these figures are fashioned out of the verbal, gestural, sartorial, behavioral—as well as linguistic—matter that comprises political communication. 
   
  “This book captures better than any other the way ‘messaging’ works . . . their lively account of the culture of presidential communication remains sensitive to both the comedy and the seriousness of its subject.” —Michael Warner, Yale University

  Show book

• 

  Aiding and Abetting - US Foreign...

  Jessica Trisko Darden

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The United States is the world's leading foreign aid donor. Yet there has been little inquiry into how such assistance affects the politics and societies of recipient nations. Drawing on four decades of data on US economic and military aid, Aiding and Abetting explores whether foreign aid does more harm than good.Jessica Trisko Darden challenges long-standing ideas about aid and its consequences, and highlights key patterns in the relationship between assistance and violence. She persuasively demonstrates that many of the foreign aid policy challenges the US faced in the Cold War era, such as the propping up of dictators friendly to US interests, remain salient today. Historical case studies of Indonesia, El Salvador, and South Korea illustrate how aid can uphold human freedoms or propagate human rights abuses.Aiding and Abetting encourages both advocates and critics of foreign assistance to reconsider its political and social consequences by focusing international aid efforts on the expansion of human freedom.

  Show book

• 

  A Life Without Limits - Sir Bert...

  Sir Bert Massie

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Severely disabled after contracting polio as a baby in working class Liverpool, Bert Massie found himself wondering as a boy why disabled people were expected to adapt to the world around them, and not the other way round. In his teens he began to campaign for rights for disabled people, and having battled his way through prejudice and the education system to become a Bachelor of Arts and a qualified social worker, he became a prominent figure in the fight for fair 
  treatment for disabled people leading to the ground breaking Disability Discrimination Act. He went on to serve as Chairman of the Disability Rights Commission and became a founding commissioner of the subsequent Equality and Human Rights Commission. His extraordinary achievements were recognised by the award of an OBE, then a CBE and finally, in 2007, a knighthood. This is his remarkable and engaging story, completed by his wife Maureen and friends after his death in October 2017. 
  Foreword by Lord Blunkett of Brightside and Hillsborough

  Show book

• 

  Saga of Erik the Red (Reeves...

  Various Various

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The Saga of Erik the Red is one of the two important thirteenth-century accounts of the Norse explorations of Greenland and North America, along with The Saga of the Greenlanders. Containing fantastic anecdotes about ghostly visitations, wise women-seers, and one-legged native Unipeds, the saga is just as fascinating for what is clearly authentic history. It vividly relates the conflict between Christianity and the old Norse religion; the significant place of extraordinary women in Icelandic and Greenland culture; the frequent incursions of the Norsemen into Ireland and Scotland, lands really not at all far from the centers of Norse activity; and first contact with the native inhabitants of the Dawnlands of northeastern North America. Most absorbing are the clear embodiments of real human personalities in this historical saga: Leif Erikson and his lover, the renownedly intelligent Thorgunna who boldly renounced social convention; Gudrid the daughter of Thorbiorn, beautiful and of strong and influential character; Thioldhild, the wife of Erik the Red, who refused to have sex with him so long as he resisted Christianity; Thorbiorg, the eldritch “Little Sibyl,” who dispensed prophecies to the settlers of Greenland; and Thorhall, the fey, untameable hunter, who held fast to his god Thor the Red-Bearded even when it meant being severed from human society.This translation by Arthur Middleton Reeves is taken from a weighty compilation of texts related to the Norse explorations entitled The Norse Discoveries of America and including the translations and editing of fellow Norse scholars North Ludlow Beamish and Rasmus Björn Anderson. ( Expatriate)

  Show book

• 

  Tricking Power into Performing...

  Shepherd Siegel

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Lovetells the history of tricksters who challenged the boundaries of doctrine to light the way to a more peaceful and playful society.

  Show book

• 

  Grave Attending - A Political...

  Karen Bray

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A thorough critique of the redemptive narratives of neoliberalism in US politics and society. 
   
  “This is a book about what it would mean to be a bit moody in the midst of being theological and political. Its framing assumption is that neoliberal economics relies on narratives in which not being in the right mood means a cursed existence.”  
   
  So begins Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed, which mounts a challenge to neoliberal narratives of redemption. Mapping the contemporary state of political theology, Karen Bray brings it to bear upon secularism, Marxist thought, affect theory, queer temporality, and other critical modes as a way to refuse separating one’s personal mood from the political or philosophical. Introducing the concept of bipolar time, she offers a critique of neoliberal temporality by countering capitalist priorities of efficiency through the experiences of mania and depression. And it is here Bray makes her crucial critical turn, one that values the power of those who are unredeemed in the eyes of liberal democracy?those too slow, too mad, too depressed to be of productive worth?suggesting forms of utopia in the poetics of crip theory and ordinary habit. Through performances of what she calls grave attending?being brought down by the gravity of what is and listening to the ghosts of what might have been?Bray asks readers to choose collective care over individual overcoming. 
   
  Grave Attending brings critical questions of embodiment, history, and power to the fields of political theology, radical theology, secular theology, and the continental philosophy of religion. Scholars interested in addressing the lack of intersectional engagement within these fields will find this work invaluable. As the forces of neoliberalism demand we be productive, efficient, happy, and flexible in order to be deemed worthy subjects, Grave Attending offers another model for living politically, emotionally, and theologically. Instead of submitting to such a market-driven concept of salvation, this book insists that we remain mad, moody, and unredeemed. Drawing on theories of affect, temporality, disability, queerness, work, and race, Bray persuades us that embodying more just forms of sociality comes not in spite of irredeemable moods, but through them. 
   
  “In Grave Attending, Bray forges a bold, and yet surprisingly gentle, theological response to the driving economies of salvation that flow through the bloodstream of US politics and American Christianity. Immersed in multiple scholarly discourses, Bray manages to expose the significance of theology amongst these, as her theological vision insists on countering the pathologizing forces that either numb us or compel us to rise above suffering. She catches readers off-guard by crafting a lyrical work of theology that claims moods and modes of reflection that are often deemed unsuitable and unworthy. Bray’s theology claims the damned and damns the redemptive.” —Shelly Rambo, Boston University

  Show book