The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author and feminist icon - a woman very much ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos 'A happy, hilarious book' Daily Express Nancy Spain was one of the most celebrated - and notorious - writers and broadcasters of the 50s and 60s. Witty, controversial and brilliant, she lived openly as a lesbian (sharing a household with her two lovers and their various children) and was frequently litigated against for her newspaper columns - Evelyn Waugh successfully sued her for libel... twice. Nancy Spain had a deep love of the Mediterranean. So it was no surprise when, in the 1960s, she decided to build a place of her own on the Greek island of Skiathos. With an impractical nature surpassed only by her passion for the project, and despite many obstacles, she gloriously succeeded. This classic memoir is infused with all Spain's chaotic brilliance, zest for life and single-minded pursuit of a life worth living. Perfect for fans of A PLACE IN THE SUN and ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY 'Full of fun, and that zest of intelligence that never left her' Sunday Times

Dartington Hall was a social experiment of kaleidoscopic vitality, set up in Devon in 1925 by a fabulously wealthy American heiress, Dorothy Elmhirst (nee Whitney), and her Yorkshire-born husband, Leonard. It quickly achieved international fame with its progressive school, craft production and wide-ranging artistic endeavours. Dartington was a residential community of students, teachers, farmers, artists and craftsmen committed to revivifying life in the countryside. It was also a socio-cultural laboratory, where many of the most brilliant interwar minds came to test out their ideas about art, society, spirituality and rural regeneration. To this day, Dartington Hall remains a symbol of countercultural experimentation and a centre for arts, ecology and social justice. Practical Utopia presents a compelling portrait of a group of people trying to live out their ideals, set within an international framework, and demonstrates Dartington's tangled affinities with other unity-seeking projects across Britain and in India and America.

Nostalgia, they say, is not what it used to be. Once a witticism, this statement about the past has come to pass. Nostalgia really isn't what it used to be. Less than a generation ago, it was regarded as reactionary, as regressive, as reprehensible. Now, it is considered conducive to health, wealth, and human wellbeing. It is something that helps sell products and move merchandise, an underexploited critical resource with emancipatory potential. Nowhere is this transformation better illustrated than in the neo-burlesque community, whose members not only embrace the art-form's golden age, and happily acquire heritage goods and vintage services, but turn their nostalgic leanings to emancipatory effect. They are retro revolutionaries, feather boa-wearing insurgents who find women's liberation in sequins and stilettos. This book shines a spotlight on weapons-grade nostalgia, indicating how it is integral to insurrections throughout history, be they political, technological, or cultural. It reveals, through a combination of empirical ethnographic research and revolutionary literary criticism, the part nostalgia plays in a subversive consumer collective that uses fans, fishnets, and frivolity to fight for the right to party against patriarchy and find a fourth-wave form of female emancipation that foregoes old-school feminist fault-finding for good old-fashioned fun, fun, fun.

William Coperthwaite is a teacher, builder, designer, and writer who for many years has explored the possibilities of true simplicity on a homestead on the north coast of Maine. In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Helen and Scott Nearing, Coperthwaite has fashioned a livelihood of integrity and completeness-buying almost nothing, providing for his own needs, and serving as a guide and companion to hundreds of apprentices drawn to his unique way of being."A Handmade Life" carries Coperthwaite's ongoing experiments with hand tools, hand-grown and gathered food, and handmade shelter, clothing, and furnishings out into the world to challenge and inspire. His writing is both philosophical and practical, exploring themes of beauty, work, education, and design while giving instruction on the hand-crafting of the necessities of life. Richly illustrated with luminous color photographs by Peter Forbes, the book is a moving and inspirational testament to a new practice of old ways of life.

Vilified and marginalized, the Romani people--widely referred to as Gypsies, Roma, and Travelers--are seen as a people without place, either geographically or socially, no matter where they live or what they do. In this new chronological history of the Romani, "Another Darkness, Another Dawn" demonstrates how their experiences provide a way to understand mainstream society's relationship with outsiders and immigrants.
Becky Taylor follows the Gypsies, Roma, and Travelers from their roots in the Indian subcontinent to their travels across the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires to Western Europe and the Americas, exploring their persecution and enslavement at the hands of others. Rather than seeing these peoples as separate from society and untouched by history, she sets their experiences in the context of broader historical changes. Their history, she reveals, is ultimately linked to the founding of empires; the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; numerous wars; the expansion of law, order, and nation-states; the Enlightenment; nationalism; modernity; and the Holocaust. Taylor also shows how the lives of the Romani today reflect the increasing regulation of modern society. Ultimately, she demonstrates that history is not always about progress: the place of Gypsies remains as contested and uncertain today as it was upon their first arrival in Western Europe in the fifteenth century.
As much a history of Europe as of the Romani, "Another Darkness, Another Dawn "paints a revealing portrait of a people who still struggle to be understood.

In Virtual Activism: Sexuality, the Internet, and a Social Movement in Singapore, cultural anthropologist Robert Phillips provides a detailed, yet accessible, ethnographic case study that looks at the changes in LGBT activism in Singapore in the period 1993-2019. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted with activist organizations and individuals, Phillips illustrates key theoretical ideas - including illiberal pragmatics and neoliberal homonormativity - that, in combination with the introduction of the Internet, have shaped the manner by which LGBT Singaporeans are framing and subsequently claiming rights. Phillips argues that the activism engaged in by LGBT Singaporeans for governmental and societal recognition is in many respects virtual. His analysis documents how the actions of activists have resulted in some noteworthy changes in the lives of LGBT Singaporeans, but nothing as grand as some would have hoped, thus indexing the "not quite" aspect of the virtual. Yet, Virtual Activism also demonstrates how these actions have encouraged LGBT Singaporeans to fight even harder for their rights, signalling the "possibilities" that the virtual holds.

Infuse a drop of magick into your everyday life. Writer, fashion alchemist and modern witch, Gabriela Herstik, unlocks the ancient art of witchcraft so that you can find a brand of magick that works for you. From working with crystals, tarot and astrology, to understanding sex magick, solstices and full moons; learn how to harness energy, unleash your inner psychic and connect with the natural world. Full of spells and rituals for self-care, new opportunities and keeping away toxic energy, Craft is the essential lifestyle guide for the modern woman who wants to take control and reconnect with herself. After all, empowered women run the world (and they're probably witches).

Why is it that the more advanced our society becomes, the unhappier we are? Seeking an answer from the only honest perspective, Tobias Jones and his wife opened up their family home and ten acre woodland to those going through crises in their lives, or suffering from depression, addiction and loneliness. They will encounter extraordinary people: from 'Roadkill Kev' to 'Mary Poppins'; build a chapel, raise pigs and encounter both violent antagonism and astounding generosity. At the same time, they will open themselves, their children and their ideals up to the most demanding of judgements and transformations. Five years on, they think they are on to something. To sit down to eat together, to work on the land, to have no tolerance for drugs but a lot of tolerance for change aEURO" it takes time and many mistakes, but they have found a way to help people. This is the story of how.

Kate Nicholls left England to raise her five children in Botswana: an experience that would change each of their lives. Living on a shoestring in a lion conservation camp, Kate home-schools her family while they also learn at first hand about the individual lives of wild lions. Their deep attachment to these magnificent animals is palpable. The setting is exotic but it is also precarious. When the author is subjected to a brutal attack by three men, it threatens to destroy her and her family: post-traumatic stress turns a good mother into a woman who is fragmented and out of control. In this powerfully written, raw and often warmly funny memoir, we witness the devastation of living with a mother whose resilience is almost broken, and how familial structures shift as the children mature and roles change. Under the CamelthornTree addresses head-on the many issues surrounding motherhood, education, independence, and the natural world; and highlights the long-lasting effect of gender violence on secondary victims. Above all, it is an inspiring account of family love, and a powerful beacon of hope for life after trauma.

Playing Out of Bounds investigates the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament (NACIVT), an annual event that began in the 1930s in the streets of Manhattan and now attracts 1200 competitors from the U.S. and Canada. Its two key features are the 9-man game, where there are nine instead of the usual six volleyball players on the court, and the fact that player eligibility is limited to "100% Chinese" and Asian players, as defined in the tournament rules. These rules that limit competitors to specific ethno-racial groups is justified by the discrimination that Chinese people faced when they were denied access to physical activity spaces, and instead played in the alleyways and streets of Chinatowns. Drawing on interviews, participant-observation, and analysis of websites and tournament documents, Playing Out of Bounds explores how participants understand and negotiate their sense of belonging within this community of volleyball players and how membership within and the boundaries of this community are continually being (re)defined. This identity/community building occurs within a context of anti-Asian racism, growing numbers of mixed race players, and fluidity of what it means to be Canadian, American, Chinese, and Asian.

Max Weber is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology and the author of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but he also made important contributions to modern political and democratic theory. In Democracy and the Political in Max Weber's Thought, Terry Maley explores, through a detailed analysis of Weber's writings, the intersection of recent work on Weber and on democratic theory, bridging the gap between these two rapidly expanding areas of scholarship.Maley critically examines how Weber's realist 'model' of democracy defines and constrains the possibilities for democratic agency in modern liberal-democracies. Maley also looks at how ideas of historical time and memory are constructed in his writings on religion, bureaucracy, and the social sciences. Democracy and the Political in Max Weber's Thought is both an accessible introduction to Weber's political thought and a spirited defense of its continued relevance to debates on democracy.

Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories opens up new and exciting perspectives on how systems of state surveillance developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking a transnational approach, the book challenges us to rethink the presumed novelty of contemporary surveillance practices, while developing critical analyses of the ways in which state surveillance has profoundly shaped the emergence of contemporary societies. Contributors engage with a range of surveillance practices, including medical and disease surveillance, systems of documentation and identification, and policing and security. These approaches enable us to understand how surveillance has underpinned the emergence of modern states, sustained systems of state security, enabled practices of colonial rule, perpetuated racist and gendered forms of identification and classification, regulated and policed migration, shaped the eugenically inflected medicalization of disability and sexuality, and contained dissent. While surveillance is thus bound up with complex relations of power, it is also contested. Emerging from the book is a sense of how state actors understood and legitimized their own surveillance practices, as well as how these practices have been implemented in different times and places. At the same time, contributors explore the myriad ways in which these systems of surveillance have been resisted, challenged, and subverted.

In recent years a spate of books and articles have argued that the world today is so mobile, so interconnected and so integrated that it is, in one prominent assessment, flat. But as Harm de Blij contends in The Power of Place, geography continues to hold billions of people in an unrelenting grip. We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape what we become, individually and collectively. From our "mother tongue" to our father's faith, from medical risks to natural hazards, where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming the obstacles in our way. Incorporating a series of revealing maps, de Blij focuses on the rough terrain of the world's human and environmental geography. The world's continuing partition into core and periphery, and apartheid-like obstructions to migration from the former to the latter, help explain why, in this age of globalization, less than 3 percent of "mobals" live in countries other than where they were born. Maps of language distribution suggest why English, the Latin of the latter day, may become as hybridized as its forerunner. The fateful map of religion casts a shadow of what he calls "endarkenment" over the future of the planet in a time of increasingly destructive weaponry. De Blij also looks at the ways we are redefining place so as to make its power even more potent than it has been, with troubling implications for the future. Optimistic demographic projections based on declining national populations in the global core are tempered by the prospect that the vast majority of the 3 billion additions to the world's population will burden the periphery. Megacities such as Lagos and Jakarta with their corridors and nodes of globalization foreshadow a future of potentially explosive social contrasts. Subnational entities from southern Sudan to northern Sri Lanka seek independence at a time when the planet's limited living space is already fragmented into 200 states. Looking down from the business-class compartment of a transcontinental airliner, the world looks a lot flatter than it does from the doorway of a dwelling in a local village. Harm de Blij brings us back to earth to reveal the all-too-rugged contours of place.

Given the importance that entrepreneurship and start-up businesses in technology-intensive sectors like life sciences, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, financial technologies, software and others have come to assume in economic development, the access of entrepreneurs to appropriate levels of finance has become a major focus of policymakers in recent decades. Yet, this prominence has led to a variety of policy models across countries and even within countries, as different levels of government have adapted to new challenges by refining or transforming pre-existing institutions and crafting new policy tools. Small Nations, High Ambitions investigates the roots of such policy diversity at the "subnational" level, offering in-depth accounts of the evolution of Quebec's and Scotland's policy strategies in the entrepreneurial finance sector and venture capital more specifically. As compared to other regions and provinces in the United Kingdom and Canada, Quebec and Scottish venture capital ecosystems rely on a high degree of state intervention, either direct (through public investment funds) or indirect (through government-backed, hybrid, or tax-advantaged funds). These two regions can thus be described as "sponsor states," heavily involved in the strategic backing of innovative businesses. Whereas most of the literature on venture capital has focused on economic variables to explain variations in policy models, this book seeks to explain policy divergence in Quebec and Scotland through political and ideological lenses. Its main argument is that the development of venture capital ecosystems in these regions was underpinned by Quebecois and Scottish nationalisms, which induced preferences for policy asymmetry and state intervention.

Engaging with discussions surrounding the culture of disease, Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives explores politically insistent narratives of illness. Resisting the optimism of pink ribbon culture, these stories use anger as a starting place to reframe cancer as a collective rather than an individual problem. Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives discusses the ways emotion, gender, and sexuality, in relation to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, all become complicated, relational, and questioning. Providing theoretically informed close-readings of breast cancer narratives, this study explores how disruption functions both personally and politically. Highlighting a number of contributors in the field of health and gender studies including Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathlyn Conway, Audre Lorde, and Teva Harrison, this work takes into account documentary film, television, and social media as popular mediums used to explore stories of disease.

Most Americans take for granted much of what is materially involved in the daily rituals of dwelling. In Dwelling in Resistance, Chelsea Schelly examines four alternative U.S. communities-"The Farm," "Twin Oaks," "Dancing Rabbit," and "Earthships"-where electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation practices differ markedly from those of the vast majority of Americans. Schelly portrays a wide range of residential living alternatives utilizing renewable, small-scale, de-centralized technologies. These technologies considerably change how individuals and communities interact with the material world, their natural environment, and one another. Using in depth interviews and compelling ethnographic observations, the book offers an insightful look at different communities' practices and principles and their successful endeavors in sustainability and self-sufficiency.

'Helps you keep achieving - and find peace and happiness in the process' Amy Edmondson We are living an earned life when the choices, risks, and effort we make in each moment align with an overarching purpose in our lives, regardless of the eventual outcome. In his most personal and powerful work to date, world-renowned leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith offers a better way to approach fulfilment that goes against everything we're taught about achievement. Taking inspiration from Buddhism, Goldsmith reveals that the key to living the earned life, unbound by regret, requires connecting the habit of earning rewards to something greater than our personal successes. Goldsmith implores readers to avoid the Great Western Disease of "I'll be happy when...." He offers practical advice and exercises aimed at helping us shed the obstacles that prevent us from creating fulfilling lives. From learning to privilege your future over your present, knowing how to weigh up opportunity and risk accurately, honing your 'one-trick genius' and needing to earn credibility twice, the book is packed with transformative insights and tools that will help readers close the gap between what they plan to achieve and what they actually get done-and avoid the trap of existential regret, the kind that reroutes destinies and persecutes our memories. Full of illuminating stories from Goldsmith's legendary career as a coach to some of the world's highest-achieving leaders and reflections on his own life, The Earned Life is a roadmap for ambitious people seeking a higher purpose. 'Inspiring insight from the world's top coach. Goldsmith left me tingling from the journey of reflection I'd been taken on' Bruce Daisley

'Beautifully written and structured, deeply moving, and realised in wise, thoughtful, chiselled prose... it is that rarity: a genuine non-fiction classic' William Dalrymple 'A troubling and moving account of lives gone wrong in the search for an eastern Utopia' Damon Galgut, author of the Booker Prize-winning The Promise A spellbinding story about love, faith, the search for utopia - and the often devastating cost of idealism. It's the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world - Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright. So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon? This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone, and it carries deep personal resonance: Diane and John were the parents of Akash's wife, Auralice. Akash and Auralice grew up in Auroville; like the rest of their community, they never really understood those deaths. In 2004, Akash and Auralice return to Auroville from New York, where they have been living with John's family. As they re-establish themselves, along with their two sons, in the community, they must confront the ghosts of those distant deaths. Slowly, they come to understand how the tragic individual fates of John and Diane intersected with the collective history of their town. Better to Have Gone is a book about the human cost of our age-old quest for a more perfect world. It probes the under-explored yet universal idea of utopia, and it portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one utopian community. Richly atmospheric and filled with remarkable characters, spread across time and continents, this is narrative writing of the highest order - a heartbreaking, unforgettable story.

Despite acute labour shortages during the Second World War, Canadian employers--with the complicity of state officials--discriminated against workers of African, Asian, and Eastern and Southern European origin, excluding them from both white collar and skilled jobs. Jobs and Justice argues that, while the war intensified hostility and suspicion toward minority workers, the urgent need for their contributions and the egalitarian rhetoric used to mobilize the war effort also created an opportunity for minority activists and their English Canadian allies to challenge discrimination.Juxtaposing a discussion of state policy with ideas of race and citizenship in Canadian civil society, Carmela K. Patrias shows how minority activists were able to bring national attention to racist employment discrimination and obtain official condemnation of such discrimination. Extensively researched and engagingly written, Jobs and Justice offers a new perspective on the Second World War, the racist dimensions of state policy, and the origins of human rights campaigns in Canada.

The world is not as mobile or as interconnected as we like to think. As Harm de Blij argues in The Power of Place, in crucial ways-from the uneven distribution of natural resources to the unequal availability of opportunity-geography continues to hold billions of people in its grip. We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape what we become, individually and collectively. From our "mother tongue" to our father's faith, from medical risks to natural hazards, where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny. Hundreds of millions of farmers in the river basins of Asia and Africa, and tens of millions of shepherds in isolated mountain valleys from the Andes to Kashmir, all live their lives much as their distant ancestors did, remote from the forces of globalization. Incorporating a series of persuasive maps, De Blij describes the tremendously varied environments across the planet and shows how migrations between them are comparatively rare. De Blij also looks at the ways we are redefining place so as to make its power even more potent than it has been, with troubling implications.

'Emine and Paul live and breathe Ayurveda every day, and I love their gentle, intuitive, conscious approach to life.' - Jasmine Hemsley, author of East by West and co-author of the Hemsley + Hemsley books Sattva is one of the three basic life forces outlined in Ayurvedic teachings. Among the beautiful qualities it embodies - unity, harmony, purity, vitality, clarity, gentleness and serenity - are essences of nature that we're craving more than ever in our busy lives. In this book, you'll find a complete lifestyle prescription for balance and peace in our hectic Western world. Sattva offers a simple guide to living in harmony with seasonal cycles, resources for conscious living and nourishment for body and soul. A celebration of ancient, holistic wisdom for intuitive modern living, Sattva has the power to help us move from chaos into consciousness. Let it remind you of your natural state of being.

Food trucks announcing "halal" proliferate in many urban areas but how many non-Muslims know what this means, other than cheap lunch? Here Middle Eastern historians Febe Armanios and Bogac Ergene provide an accessible introduction to halal (permissible) food in the Islamic tradition, exploring what halal food means to Muslims and how its legal and cultural interpretations have changed in different geographies up to the present day. Historically, Muslims used food to define their identities in relation to co-believers and non-Muslims. Food taboos are rooted in the Quran and prophetic customs, as well as writings from various periods and geographical settings. As in Judaism and among certain Christian sects, Islamic food traditions make distinctions between clean and impure, and dietary choices and food preparation reflect how believers think about broader issues. Traditionally, most halal interpretations focused on animal slaughter and the consumption of intoxicants. Muslims today, however, must also contend with an array of manufactured food products-yogurts, chocolates, cheeses, candies, and sodas-filled with unknown additives and fillers. To help consumers navigate the new halal marketplace, certifying agencies, government and non-government bodies, and global businesses vie to meet increased demands for food piety. At the same time, blogs, cookbooks, restaurants, and social media apps have proliferated, while animal rights and eco-conscious activists seek to recover halal's more wholesome and ethical inclinations. Covering practices from the Middle East and North Africa to South Asia, Europe, and North America, this timely book is for anyone curious about the history of halal food and its place in the modern world.

'Essential reading' Roger Robinson 'Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent' Mary Karr 'Sure, wise and devastating . . . a joy' Caleb Azumah Nelson 'Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent' Washington Post Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of life - and love - in an unjust world. This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke and Black woman who wrote with defiance, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for decades - even as she was known colloquially as 'the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles'. Wicked Enchantment gathers 130 of Coleman's poems in a selection by Terrance Hayes. Funny, angry, endlessly alive and written with an immediacy and frankness that captivate, here is the essential work of a poet of fierce resistance and self-belief against the odds.

A "Walden "for the 21st century, the true story of a man who has radically reinvented "the good life"
In 2000, Daniel Suelo left his life savings--all thirty dollars of it--in a phone booth. He has been living without money--and with a newfound sense of freedom and security--ever since.

"The Man Who Quit Money "is an account of how one man learned to live, sanely and happily, without earning, receiving, or spending a single cent. Suelo doesn't pay taxes, or accept food stamps or welfare. He lives in caves in the Utah canyonlands, forages wild foods and gourmet discards. He no longer even carries an I.D. Yet he manages to amply fulfill not only the basic human needs-for shelter, food, and warmth-but, to an enviable degree, the universal desires for companionship, purpose, and spiritual engagement. In retracing the surprising path and guiding philosophy that led Suelo into this way of life, Sundeen raises provocative and riveting questions about our relationships with money and the decisions we all make, by default or by design--about how we live and how we might live better.