This book is about the anatomy of neoliberalism and education from a Marxist perspective. It is the dialectical materialism of neoliberal ideas, examining the material conditions of how these ideas and practices emerged, and under what conditions. Each of these elements is related to the other and can only be properly understood as part and parcel of the whole system of capitalism, which links them together. This book investigates neoliberalism's political, cultural, and financial tools. It goes deep in the forces who have supported neoliberalism and how it became ""common sense"". It explores the imperialist outcomes and the social devastation it created. It then goes to see how these ideas and policies have been implemented in education. In short, it is the materialist conception of the history of the American empire. It then uses the analytic tools developed through this investigation to re-read the neoliberal educational reforms.

Do you love someone enough to let them go?It was love at first sight when talented art student Felicity "Flick" Johnston-Hart and Jim MacDuff's worlds collided at Oxford University. However, after years of blissful marriage, everything crashes down when their marriage comes to a painful and abrupt end, thanks to Flick's interfering mother Penelope. Finally succumbing to maternal pressure, Flick falls into the high-flying career her mother believed she was destined for. However, she soon realises life without Jim isn't all she'd hoped, and that some decisions, once made, cannot be undone. Meanwhile, Jim is settling back into life as a single man in the beautiful Highland village of Shieldaig, when an unexpected visitor brings painful news. A letter from beyond the grave leads him to do something he never imagined and takes him on a journey he didn't anticipate. Can either of them heal and truly move on? Or is it true that a broken heart can never be a blank canvas? This book was previously published as Through the Glass. Praise for Lisa Hobman: 'I love it! - escape to the beautiful Isle of Skye with this feel-good, uplifting story of lost love and second chances...' Holly Martin 'Simply gorgeous. An uplifting story of two broken individuals trying to find the courage to take a chance on love again' Jessica Redland 'A really uplifting, feel-good read about hope, love and second chances, that really did warm my heart.' Kim Nash 'A gorgeous, heart-warming romantic journey, reminds us to never give up on love...' Lucy Coleman 'You will fall in love with this story of fresh starts and mending broken hearts' Mandy Baggot 'A heart-breakingly beautiful story of love and loss set in the stunning village of Glentorrin. Be prepared to fall in love over and over again.' Nancy Barone 'What a beautiful read this was. I was rooting for Juliette from the first page. Lisa handled some tough subjects with a delicate and deft touch. I'm ready to escape to Skye!' Sarah Bennett

Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana examines the political economy surrounding the use of enslaved laborers in the capital of Spanish imperial Cuba from 1762 to 1835. In this first book-length exploration of state slavery on the island, Evelyn P. Jennings demonstrates that the Spanish state's policies and practices in the ownership and employment of enslaved workers after 1762 served as a bridge from an economy based on imperial service to a rapidly expanding plantation economy in the nineteenth century. The Spanish state had owned and exploited enslaved workers in Cuba since the early 1500s. After the humiliating yearlong British occupation of Havana beginning in 1762, however, the Spanish Crown redoubled its efforts to purchase and maintain thousands of royal slaves to prepare Havana for what officials believed would be the imminent renewal of war with England. Jennings shows that the composition of workforces assigned to public projects depended on the availability of enslaved workers in various interconnected labor markets within Cuba, within the Spanish empire, and in the Atlantic world. Moreover, the site of enslavement, the work required, and the importance of that work according to imperial priorities influenced the treatment and relative autonomy of those laborers as well as the likelihood they would achieve freedom. As plantation production for export purposes emerged as the most dynamic sector of Cuba's economy by 1810, the Atlantic networks used to obtain enslaved workers showed increasing strain. British abolitionism exerted additional pressure on the slave trade. To offset the loss of access to enslaved laborers, colonial officials expanded the state's authority to sentence deserters, vagrants, and fugitives, both enslaved and free, to labor in public works such as civil construction, road building, and the creation of Havana's defensive forts. State efforts in this area demonstrate the deep roots of state enslavement and forced labor in nineteenth-century Spanish colonialism and in capitalist development in the Atlantic world. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana places the processes of building and sustaining the Spanish empire in the imperial hub of Havana in a comparative perspective with other sites of empire building in the Atlantic world. Furthermore, it considers the human costs of reproducing the Spanish empire in a major Caribbean port, the state's role in shaping the institution of slavery, and the experiences of enslaved and other coerced laborers both before and after the beginning of Cuba's sugar boom in the early nineteenth century.

Using digital and mobile technologies provides smart healthcare options for the inhabitants of urban centers. The IOT revolution that has exploded in the segment of energy, transportation, security and infrastructure will have sweeping healthcare implications. A centralized healthcare system, data collection and sharing, analysis and testing methods will usher in a new age to combat modern times. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, 5G, and smart cameras as well as innovative strategies and design are just a few of the ways smart cities can address healthcare problems. Smart cities rely heavily on sensors to perceive parameters such as temperature, humidity, allergens, pollution and power grid status. All these affect deeply the way cities function and the adaptation phase cities will pass in achieving a balanced 'out of danger' co-living with Covid-19. The scope of this publication encompasses empirical work and scientific documentation on the two meeting areas: resilience and the smart city in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic in cities. Moreover, interface concept development and urban technologies production systems that can be replicable in many cities, including AI, machine learning and ICT are discussed. Strategically responding to system data updates enables healthcare to be smarter. Building capacity programs on how a community might gain universal access to valuable information, partners, networks, new learning paradigms and/or to eventually familiarize itself with innovative tracking, mentoring and fighting technologies and address the challenges in solving today's healthcare challenges.

In 1963, Betty Friedan's transcendent work, The Feminine Mystique, changed forever the way women thought about themselves and the way society thought about women. In 1993, with The Fountain of Age, Friedan changes forever the way all of us, men and women, think about ourselves as we grow older and the way society thinks about aging. Struggling to hold on to the illusion of youth, we have denied the reality and evaded the new triumphs of growing older. We have seen age only as decline. In this powerful and very personal book, which may prove even more liberating than The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan charts her own voyage of discovery, and that of others, into a different kind of aging. She finds ordinary men and women, moving into their fifties, sixties, seventies, discovering extraordinary new possibilities of intimacy and purpose. In their surprising experiences, Friedan first glimpsed, then embraced, the idea that one can grow and evolve throughout life in a style that dramatically mitigates the expectation of decline and opens the way to a further dimension of "personhood." The Fountain of Age suggests new possibilities for every one of us, all founded on a solid body of startling but little-known scientific evidence. It demolishes those myths that have constrained us for too long and offers compelling alternatives for living one's age as a unique, exuberant time of life, on its own authentic terms. Age as adventure! In these pages, film producers and beauticians, salespersons and college professors, union veterans and business tycoons, former (and forever) housewives, male and female empty-nesters and retirees, have crossed the chasm of age... and kept going. They have foundfulfillment beyond career, bonding that transcends youthful dreams of happily-ever-after, and a richer, sweeter intimacy not tied to mechanical measures of sexual activity, but to deep and honest sharing. While gerontologists focus on care, illness, and the concept of age as deterio