The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione's classic account of Renaissance court life, offers profound insight into the refined behavior which defined the era's ruling class. The courtly customs and manners of Italy to a great extent characterized the Renaissance, which elevated art and expression to new heights. Baldassare Castiglione published this book with the intention of chronicling the manners, customs and traditions which underpinned how courtiers, nobles, and their servants, behaved. Although ostensibly a book of etiquette and good conduct, Castiglione's treatise carries enormous historical value. He derived his observations directly from the many gatherings and receptions conducted by society's elite. Conversations with the officials, diplomats and nobility of the era further enhanced the accuracy of this book, imbuing it with an authenticity seldom seen elsewhere.

Nick Buckley MBE came to international attention in June 2020 when he was fired by the board of The Mancunian Way, a charity he had founded, for criticizing the far-left policies of Black Lives Matter. He then mounted a successful fightback that resulted in his reinstatement and the resignation of the board who had fired him. Buckley had spent two decades preventing youth crime, homelessness, and antisocial behaviour in the UK's toughest neighborhoods. In 2019 he was awarded the MBE for his work with Mancunian Way, which promotes early intervention and personal responsibility. Buckley was a social campaigner for issues that keep people in poverty feeling victimized. But when he found himself cancelled, he felt his life was destroyed. Slowly becoming poisoned by the toxicity of self-pity, he decided he needed to give himself a good talking to. He was lucky. It had been his career to give people a good talking to, and he was good at it. He took his own medicine and got his life back within weeks. In Lessons in Courage, Buckley argues that in our febrile cultural climate we increasingly need people to be courageous and to do what is right, not what is convenient or acceptable to fashionable ideologues. Buckley sets out a series of lessons learned throughout his life, not having realized that he was in training for a life-defining battle. These are the tough but inspiring lessons he wants to offer the next person to face an angry and intolerant mob and to others who self-censor or hold back for fear of drowning in turbulent waters.

Using quantitative research, this volume investigates the characteristics, problems and trends of the automobile society in China's mega cities and large cities. It also addresses topics related to cars and cities, traffic safety and cars' consumption. China has experienced more than 30 years of rapid economic development, and people's living conditions have greatly improved. One of the symbols of this is family-car ownership, which has increased year by year. China is rapidly becoming an automobile society like North America. But China has huge population and limited urban space, and most of the cities are deteriorating environmentally. Added to this are the low degree energy self-sufficiency and people's lack of awareness of traffic rules, all of which have brought various social problems, such as traffic congestion, lack of parking spaces, air pollution, energy shortage and frequent accidents. The volume presents a series of studies examining the characteristics and problems of China's automobile society development from the perspective of sustainable development. The reports in the volume are both academic and highly readable, making it an interesting resource for researchers and general readers alike. It offers insights into the trends and problems of private cars in China, as well as observations on China's social change through the unique medium of cars.

The essential revision guide for AS and 1st-year A level Sociology from trusted and best-selling author Ken Browne. This indispensable book provides everything you need to revise for the exams, with a clear topic-by-topic layout to recap key theories and central ideas. The revision guide maps perfectly onto Ken Browne s Sociology for AQA Volume 1 with each topic cross-referenced to the main textbook so you can revisit any sections you need to. The book includes a guide to exam questions and how to answer them with sample worked answers showing how to achieve top marks. All specification options are covered, with exam tips throughout the book. With this revision guide to take you through the exam and Sociology for AQA Volume 1 to develop your sociological imagination, Ken Browne provides the complete resource for success in sociology. See also Sociology for AQA Revision Guide 2 for the 2nd-year A level coverage, and visit www.politybooks.com/browne for extra resources.

In this book, a celebration of the work of the sociologist Peter Dickens serves as the catalyst for exploring the relationship between human 'internal nature' (our health and psychological well-being) and 'external nature' (the environment on which we depend and which we collectively transform). Across contributions from Ted Benton, James Ormrod, Kate Soper, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, Graham Sharp, James Addicott, Kathryn Dean and Peter Dickens himself, the book draws attention to alienation associated with the promotion of different knowledges in late capitalist production. But it also highlights the possibilities for generating less alienated relations with our environment in the future. As well as discussing the philosophical and theoretical issues involved, the book contains contemporary case studies of ultra-processed food, satellite farming, computerised thinking and dark tourism.

This 25-volume set has titles originally published between 1951 and 1995. It explores several different aspects of the police and their approaches to policing over the years. Many of the titles are from the 1980s, where the police were beginning to come under increasing scrutiny and their relationship with the public was under pressure. Topics include: accountability, community policing, police work, policy, training, along with international comparisons. Ongoing debates of police accountability and police race relations today mean this collection is a timely resource for those interested in criminology, particularly the recent history of the police and their role in society.

The Boys' Brigade arrived in Southern Rhodesia in 1948, with initial efforts being very localised. Momentum increased with the influx of post war immigrants from Britain and South Africa. By the early 1970s The Boys' Brigade Rhodesia was at its strongest numerically, but the civil war years preceding independence in 1980, decimated the organisation in the rural areas, especially in Victoria province where it was at its strongest. The following years were particularly hard for The Boys' Brigade but, by the late 1980s, membership was on the increase again. The current political and economic situation has severely affected the organisation's ability to continue as it had in the past and the future of uniformed youth work in Zimbabwe remains unknown.The achievements of The Boys' Brigade are recorded in this book, which has been meticulously researched, in consultation with many past and present members. The history book is a formal record of events which took place, including detailed appendices of every known Company, all the Queen's Badge and Founder's Badge awards and includes a photo gallery of past office bearers.

The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake's notorious elusiveness. The mushroom's success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.

This book examines key moments in which collective and state violence invigorated racialized social boundaries around Mexican and African Americans in the United States, and in which they violently contested them. Bringing anti-Mexican violence into a common analytical framework with anti-black violence, A savage song examines several focal points in this oft-ignored history, including the 1915 rebellion of ethnic Mexicans in South Texas, and its brutal repression by the Texas Rangers and the 1917 mutiny of black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Houston, Texas, in response to police brutality. Aragon considers both the continuities and stark contrasts across these different moments: how were racialized constructions of masculinity differently employed? How did African and Mexican American men, including those in uniform, respond to the violence of racism? And how was their resistance, including their claims to manhood and nation, understood by law enforcement, politicians, and the press? Building on extensive archival research, the book examines how African and Mexican American men have been constructed as 'racial problems', investigating, in particular, their relationship with law enforcement and ideas about black and Mexican criminality. -- .

Although written from a biblical/Christian perspective this book's theme has practical value for everyone. It presents a new relational paradigm supported by love, justice, mutuality, and other spiritual qualities. The author believes scripture teaches that all human beings are created to live in fulfilling relationships even those who are homosexual. People of faith, family, & community are urged to support same gender couples by validating their committed partnership; however, nearly 50% of American citizens and church members do not support legalizing same gender marriage. This historical perspective on marriage reveals marriage has experienced considerable positive change and practice during the past 75 years and needs to be redefined. Until the 20th century procreation (be fruitful and multiply) was marriage's major purpose. While procreation remains important, mutuality has become the major emphasis. As written in Genesis 2:18 (NRSV), God sought a partner for the man. In many marriages partnership has replaced patriarchy, providing an enriching relational experience in family life. The author presents a new relational paradigm which includes both heterosexual and homosexual couples seeking a lifelong committed relationship. Marriage of male and female and the union of same gender couples will share the title, partnership safeguarded by the same legal standards. For male and female, their title will be a marital partnership; for same gender couples their title will be a same gender partnership.

Multiple Normalities enhances sociological understandings of normality by illustrating it with the help of British novels. It demonstrates commonalities and differences between the meanings of normality in these two periods, exemplifying the emergence of the multiple normalities and the transformation of ways in which we give meaning to the world.

Using the potential of place as an approach and of places as ethnographic contexts, the authors in this volume investigate the multiple entanglements of 'religion' and 'modernity' in contemporary settings. The guiding questions of such an approach are: How are modernity and religion spatially articulated in and through places? How do these articulations help us to understand the ways in which religion becomes socially and culturally significant in modern contexts? And how do they reveal the ways in which modernity unfolds within religion? Thus, places are not only understood as neutral locations or extensions, but as spatial modes to mediate properties, contents and processes of religion and modernity. Based on ethnographic and historical research in Southeast and East Asia and featuring reflections on the concepts of religion and modernity respectively, the authors offer a deeper understanding of the articulation of a religious modernity in these regions and beyond. Contributors are: Nikolas BROY CHAN Yuk Wah, Michael DICKHARDT, Volker GOTTOWIK, Patrice LADWIG, Andrea LAUSER, Jovan MAUD, YEOH Seng-Guan, Clemens SIX, Paul SORRENTINO, Alexander SOUCY, Sing SUWANNAKIJ.

Social scientists have generally remained impervious to a major economic and cultural adaptation--namely, the peripatetic lifestyle--although this adaptation has been an integral part of developments within the socioeconomic and cultural networks that social scientists study. This lack of interest derives perhaps from the ambiguous integration of peripatetics into these networks as well as the often negatively charged constructs -Gypsies, outsiders, or marginal others--imposed on peripatetics by dominant cultures. As peddlers of the strange to borrow a phrase from Clifford Geertz, peripatetics are situated at the fringes of their host societies and many students of the social ecological and behavioral sciences still continue to overlook the roles of peripatetic peoples.

This collection presents the latest in cross-cultural comparative research on the nature of peripatetic peoples. Contributors examine the place of peripatetic peoples in the everyday lives and diverse cognitive maps of client communities. Relying on Georg Simmel's construct of The Stranger, the contributors to this volume suggest that peripatetic peoples are simultaneously outsiders and insiders, but most important, they are entrepreneurial middlemen traders par excellence. All told, the essays provoke vital reassessments of the anthropological focus on the role and status of cultural brokers and go-betweens in political, economic, and social interactions.

The food industry is now entering a transition age, as scientific advancements and technological innovations restructure what people eat and how people think about food. Food Tech Transitions provides a critical analysis of food technology and its impact, including the disruption potential of production and consumption logic, nutrition patterns, agronomic practices, and the human, environmental and animal ethics that are associated with technological change. This book is designed to integrate knowledge about food technology within the social sciences and a wider social perspective. Starting with an overview of the technological and ecological changes currently shaping the food industry and society at large, authors tackle recent advancements in food processing, preserving, distributing and meal creation through the lens of wider social issues. Section 1 provides an overview of the changes in the industry and its (often uneven) advancements, as well as related social, ecological and political issues. Section 2 addresses the more subtle sociological questions around production and consumption through case-studies. Section 3 embraces a more agronomic and wider agricultural perspective, questioning the suitability and adaptation of existing plants and resources for novel food technologies. Section 4 investigates nutrition-related issues stemming from altered dietary patterns. Finally, Section 5 addresses ethical questions related to food technology and the sustainability imperative in its tripartite form (social, environmental and economic). The editors have designed the book as an interdisciplinary tool for academics and policymakers working in the food sciences and agronomy, as well as other related disciplines.

This is the first book in bioethics that explains how it is that you actually go about doing good bioethics. Bioethics has made a mistake about its methods, and this has led not only to too much theorizing, but also fragmentation within bioethics. The unhelpful disputes between those who think bioethics needs to be more philosophical, more sociological, more clinical, or more empirical, continue. While each of these claims will have some point, they obscure what should be common to all instances of bioethics. Moreover, they provide another phantom that can lead newcomers to bioethics down blind alleyways stalked by bristling sociologists and philosophers. The method common to all bioethics is bringing moral reason to bear upon ethical issues, and it is more accurate and productive to clarify what this involves than to stake out a methodological patch that shows why one discipline is the most important. This book develops an account of the nature of bioethics and then explains how a number of methodological spectres have obstructed bioethics becoming what it should. In the final part, it explains how moral reason can be brought to bear upon practical issues via an 'empirical, Socratic' approach.

While 'space' and 'place' appear as key concepts in the study of culture, their complexity and mutability require ever-new frameworks when approaching them critically. Including chapters by authors from different fields, career stages, and geopolitical backgrounds, the contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, social, and environmental urgencies across the globe. With chapters investigating both real and imaginary spaces and places, the diversified discussions included in this collection provide a cohesive study for disclosing latent understandings of multiple phenomena characterizing the world in which we live. From the protests in Egyptian and Turkish squares, to the power-related narratives embedded in institutional buildings, from the development of the commercial arena in Victorian and Edwardian London, to the effects of current environmental concerns on the evaluation of urban and rural locations, the volume ultimately serves as a progressive connection of fields, minds, and outlooks through an innovative, pluralistic vision. This interdisciplinary focus not only emphasizes the centrality of spaces and places when disentangling the complexities comprising our past and present, but also suggests a more pluralistic approach for exploring fundamental concepts in future spaces and places studies.

This first-person narrative tells the true story of Marguerite Kirchner, whose multicultural family was living in Germany when WWII began. We have remained as true as possible to Marguerite's account which reveals to readers the cruelty of war and the innocence of past generations. As a child, her family lived a luxurious life. Her mother was a French aristocrat, and her father a wealthy Austrian diplomat, and so her story begins. Always defiant, Margie was forced into a labor camp for dissident teenagers. She attended the University of Berlin during the Berlin bombings, became a young teacher in the Polish war zone, was captured as a prisoner of war and escaped, and after the war, worked for the Allied Forces, helping repatriate those who had been displaced. Her story demonstrates cunning and great courage. She went from affluence to poverty and survived the war on her wits alone, dependent on only herself and the skills she'd acquired from traveling with her family. Only after the war does she reflect on what her single-minded struggle for survival cost her, and a new journey, of a very different kind, begins.

Racial history has always been the thorn in America's side, with a swath of injustices--slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills--perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white have also had to struggle with their own racial consciousness.

In A Great Conspiracy against Our Race, Peter Vellon explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and "swarthy" race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City. Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white.

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race vividly illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. Vellon also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity. This work is an important contribution to not only Italian American history, but America's history of immigration and race.

Explores key sociological concepts and theory in relation to European crises, identity, inequality and social order. It offers a firm understanding of the modernization of Europe and everyday European life, while not neglecting the historical context. Essential reading for students of sociology in European contexts.