Sociology History

Growing up on a council estate in East London, rapper Guvna B thought he knew everything he needed to know about what it means to be a man. But when a personal tragedy sent him reeling, he knew he had to face these assumptions head on if he was going to be able to overcome his grief. In this intimate, honest and unflinching memoir, Guvna B draws on his personal experiences to explore how toxic masculinity affects young men today. Exploring ideas of male identity, Unspoken is an inspirational account of Guvna’s journey.

This meticulously researched book tells the story of Midwestern agriculture during a period of epochal change in farm technology, farm management, and farm life. The hard work, tight communities, and values that had characterized the family farm were replaced by large corporate enterprises with massive acreages, high-tech methods, and global outlooks. While many decry this change as loss, Nordin and Scott find a net gain. This is their richly detailed account of one of the great transformations in American life.

Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-20th century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decades-long hiatus, researchers are once again testing how effective these drugs are in relieving symptoms for a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, from depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder to posttraumatic stress disorder and substance addiction.

In 2018, Joe Hammond, wrote a piece for the Guardian about the 33 birthday cards he was writing for his two sons. It was shared by thousands. In A Short History of Falling he tells the story behind that piece, about the experience of living with - and dying of - motor neurone disease (ALS). A Short History of Falling is not a lament. It is a deeply imaginative meditation on what it feels like to confront the fact that your family will persist through time without you.

Jess enlisted in the Marines immediately after graduating from high school in 2001, and in 2004 she volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps' first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq. Her platoon was tasked with recovering and processing the remains of fallen soldiers. With sensitivity and insight, Jess describes her job retrieving and examining the remains of fellow soldiers lost in combat in Iraq, and the psychological intricacy of coping with their fates, as well as her own.

Throughout history, there have been numerous epidemics that have threatened mankind with destruction. Diseases have the ability to highlight our shared concerns across the ages, affecting every social divide from national boundaries, economic categories, racial divisions, and beyond. Whether looking at smallpox, HIV, Ebola, or COVID-19 outbreaks, we see the same conversations arising as society struggles with the all-encompassing question: What do we do now?

This book chronicles the long and tortured history of the NCAA's attempt to maintain the myth of amateurism and the student-athlete, along with the attendant fiction that the players academic achievement is the top priority of Division-I athletic programs. It is an indictment of the current system, making the case that big-time college sports cannot continue its connection to universities without undermining the mission of higher education. It concludes with bold proposals to separate big-time college sports from the university, transforming them into on-campus business operations.

Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. Exploring seven old towns, from Frankfurt and Prague to Vilnius in Lithuania, Marek Kohn examines how they have been used since the Second World War to conceal political tensions and reinforce certain versions of history.

When racist curriculum "goes viral" on social media, it is typically dismissed as an isolated incident from a "bad" teacher. Educator Bree Picower, however, holds that racist curriculum isn't an anomaly. It's a systemic problem that reflects how Whiteness is embedded and reproduced in education. In Reading, Writing, and Racism, Picower argues that White teachers must reframe their understanding about race in order to advance racial justice and that this must begin in teacher education programs.

Breathe explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African-American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love.

Through in-depth conversations with spiritually fluid people, renowned scholar Duane Bidwell explores how people come to claim and be claimed by multiple religious traditions, how spiritually fluid people engage radically opposed truth claims, and what this growing population tells us about change within our communities.

In partnership with Texas Monthly, the following articles spotlighting true crime are now available in a bundle as an audio download: "The Cheerleader Murder Plot" features a woman who went to extreme, murderous lengths to ensure her daughter's spot on the cheerleading squad. "The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob" profiles the mysterious Peggy Jo Tallas who, disguised as a man, robbed banks and confounded police for years. Also featuring "A Kiss Before Dying", "The Talented Mr. Khater", and "Just Desserts".

The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement - whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens - speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully.

In this Very Short Introduction, Philip N. Jefferson explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. He shows how a person's level of vulnerability to adverse changes in their life is very much dependent on the circumstances of their birth, including where their family lived, whether it was peacetime or wartime, whether they had access to clean water, and whether they are male or female.

The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.

What is visible to the naked eye has been exhaustively raked over; in Underground London, acclaimed travel writer Stephen Smith provides an alternative guide and history of the capital. It's a journey through the passages and tunnels of the city, the bunkers and tunnels, crypts and shadows. As well as being a contemporary tour of underground London, it's also an exploration through time.

In this last book by the late Donald Pitkin comes a story of the Schorcht family, through whose fortunes and struggles one can see the transformations of Germany through the long 20th century.

From January until April 2003, for 101 days, Asne Seierstad worked as a reporter in Bagdad for Scandinavian, German, and Dutch media. Through her articles and live television coverage she reported on the events in Iraq before, during, and after the attacks by the American and British forces.

When 1919 began, the city of Chicago seemed on the verge of transformation. Modernizers had an audacious, expensive plan to turn the city from a brawling, unglamorous place into "the Metropolis of the World". But just as the dream seemed within reach, pandemonium broke loose and the city’s highest ambitions were suddenly under attack by the same unbridled energies that had given birth to them in the first place.

What happens to the elite, close-knit soldiers of Australia's Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment after they leave the Who Dares Wins world of special forces? For some, there are highly paid jobs in the world's war zones and trouble spots protecting global corporations from terrorism, sabotage and violence. Others become powerful government advisers, many join foreign armies to train their special forces and expand the global brotherhood.