Showing titles in Sociology

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception.

From poverty and policing, homelessness and overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme that links all these afflictions: proximity. Proximity is how close we are to the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever that action happens to be. Almost every job requires a level of experience and training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country—our political class.

On 14 June 2017, a 24-storey block of flats went up in flames. The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to ‘stay put'. Many did–and they died. It was a disaster decades in the making. Peter Apps exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused this tragedy. It is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for change.

No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, “another world.” During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival.

Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy provides an in-depth and exciting account of the history, philosophy, and experience of homeopathic medicine. At the core of Impossible Cure is the amazing story of how the author's son was cured of autism with homeopathy. It also includes dozens of other testimonials of homeopathic cure, for a variety of physical, mental, and emotional conditions.

Dr Shahed Yousaf is a prison doctor dedicated to caring for people on the margins of society. An outsider on the inside, in Stitched Up he introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters, including killers, con men and auto-cannibals. To Dr Yousaf, they are patients first and prisoners second—because any one of us could end up on the wrong side of the law. He tells us honestly and compassionately what it's like to be their doctor in a system that's chronically overcrowded, drastically under-resourced and all too easy to ignore.

The Koran: It may be the most controversial book in the world. Some see it as a paean to peace, others call it a violent mandate for worldwide Islamic supremacy. How can one book lead to such dramatically different conclusions?

The last collection of true-life nursing stories from the number one best-selling author of the Call the Midwife series, soon to be a major BBC TV series. Jennifer Worth's best-selling memoirs of her time as a midwife have inspired and moved readers of all ages. Now, in In the Midst of Life she documents her experiences as a nurse and ward sister, treating patients who were nearing the ends of their lives.

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of things aid and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methodological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now.

'Brilliant, unpredictable and endlessly fascinating' IAN MORTIMER 'I love this book' TRACY BORMAN 'Gunn and Gromelski cast a brilliant light into a lost world' SUSAN BRIGDEN A unique new window onto Tudor life, told through ordinary people's untimely deaths. How did ordinary people live in Tudor...

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.

Financial Times Book of the Year Telegraph Top 50 Books of the Year Guardian Book of the Year New Statesman Book of the Year ‘Roundly debunks racism’s core lie – that inequality is to do with genetics, rather than political power’ Reni Eddo-Lodge For millennia, dominant societies have...

Psychiatrist, humanist, revolutionary, Frantz Fanon was one of the great political analysts of our time. He has had a profound impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world. A Dying Colonialism is Fanon’s incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as “primitive,” in order to destroy those oppressors.

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense - one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The book explores the incentives, the visions, and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups but for societies as a whole.

Acclaimed nature writer Neil Ansell has suffered from progressive hearing loss his whole life. As his world is becoming ever more silent, he suddenly hears something quite unexpected — the haunting call of the great northern diver. It is this extraordinary experience which makes him realise that there might still be remarkable sounds in nature within his reach — if he can only find himself in the right place at the right time. This moving book charts Neil's mission to hear rare and elusive creatures that he had not previously encountered.

It's about time we made motherhood more diverse.... When Candice fell pregnant and stepped into the motherhood playing field, she found her experience bore little resemblance to the glossy magazine photos of women in horizontal stripe tops and the pinned discussions on Mumsnet about what pushchair to buy. Leafing through the piles of prenatal paraphernalia, she found herself wondering: "Where are all the black mothers?". 

The long-awaited, inspirational guide to life for a generation of black British women inspired to make lemonade out of lemons, and find success in every area of their lives. ‘This book is a gift for anyone who wants to better understand what Black women and girls are up against – and the...

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks...

Recognising Black British experience within the Black Lives Matter movement, 19 prominent Black figures explain why Black lives should be celebrated when too often they are undervalued. Drawing from personal experience, they stress how Black British people have unique perspectives and experiences that enrich British society and the world; how Black lives are far more interesting and important than the forces that try to limit it.