Can we abolish global poverty? Should we do away with foreign aid? Is the United Nations redundant? Why should I bother? Can I help?Mike Edwards offers timely answers to issues that have been propelled to center stage. "Future Positive" is a comprehensive and authoritative rethink of an international system facing a period of unprecedented change. In a world of globalizing markets, eroding state sovereignty, expanding citizen action and uncertainty about fundamental truths, what is the best way to tackle problems of global poverty and violence?Michael Edwards charts a "third way" between heavy-handed intervention and complete laissez-faire. Covering an enormous amount of ground in clear, lively and non-technical terms, "Future Positive" explains how the international system operates, the pressures it faces, and the changes it must undergo, and offers concrete new ideas to re-frame international relations and foreign aid.

As Western aid budgets are slashed and government involvement with aid programmes reduced, NGOs in the voluntary sector are finding themselves taking an ever-increasing share of development work overseas. As they do so, they are forced to grow and to assume new responsibilities, taking more important and wide-ranging decisions - in many cases, without having had the chance to step back and review the options before them and the best ways of maximizing the impact they make. This collection of essays explores the strategies available to NGOs to enhance their development work, reviewing the ways that options can be understood, appropriate programmes and likely problems.

This volume sets out to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the 'photobook'. It critiques the popular art-market definition of the photobook as simply a photographer's book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. Focusing on North American, British and French photobooks from 1920 to the present, the chapters revisit canonical works - by Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas and Roland Penrose - while also delving into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, DIY communities and the poetic impulse. They throw new light on the way that gendered, racial or colonial assumptions are resisted. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a better understanding of how the meaning of a photobook is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market. -- .

In the last ten years, NGOs have become a force for transformation in global politics and economics. Their numbers and size have grown dramatically and they have assumed far more extensive responsibilities as intermediaries between governments, businesses and other institutions, and local communities and citizens. With this growth has come an ever-more pressing requirement for effective management among NGOs and their operations.Focusing on development organizations working on issues of poverty and injustice, but relevant to NGOs in all sectors, this volume brings together a selection of key writings on how NGOs can position and organize themselves to achieve maximum impact and effectiveness. The editors set out the management challenges facing NGOs in a stimulating Introduction followed by a range of contributions divided into ten sets of issues.

Civil society, or citizen's groups, have taken centre stage in international policy debates and global problem solving. They hold out the promise of a global community and global governance. This volume, by leading scholars and participants, shows how to understand the changes that are occurring, particularly in relation to the international institutions involved. It includes case studies from all the major social movements of the 1990s.

The last decade has seen some significant changes in international development and in the status of non-governmental organisations operating in the field. Not only has the number of NGOs virtually doubled; many of them have seen a considerable growth in their budgets, and have grown closer to governments and official aid agencies. NGOs are acknowledged by many to be more effective agents of development than governments or commercial interests ? even as a ?magic bullet? for development problems. Despite these positive trends, the real impact of the NGO sector is not well documented. This is partly because NGO performance-assessment and accountability methods are weak, and partly because NGOs are caught up increasingly in the world of official aid, which pushes them towards certain forms of evaluation at the expense of others. This unique book takes a hard and critical look at these issues, and describes how NGOs can, and must, improve the way they measure and account for their performance if they are to be truly effective.

The last decade has seen some significant changes in international development and in the status of non-governmental organisations operating in the field. Not only has the number of NGOs virtually doubled; many of them have seen a considerable growth in their budgets, and have grown closer to governments and official aid agencies. NGOs are acknowledged by many to be more effective agents of development than governments or commercial interests ? even as a ?magic bullet? for development problems. Despite these positive trends, the real impact of the NGO sector is not well documented. This is partly because NGO performance-assessment and accountability methods are weak, and partly because NGOs are caught up increasingly in the world of official aid, which pushes them towards certain forms of evaluation at the expense of others. This unique book takes a hard and critical look at these issues, and describes how NGOs can, and must, improve the way they measure and account for their performance if they are to be truly effective.

The language of the Bible can be beautiful but profoundly elusive, possessing a strangeness that only deepens the committed reader’s sense of its impenetrability. Based on the 2022 Richard E. Myers lectures given by renowned literary scholar Michael Edwards—the first Englishman ever elected to the Académie française—this book offers a close reading of the Bible itself, directing attention to the text rather than to commentaries or to ostensible lessons to be discovered by paraphrase. Edwards explores the apparently simple instruction in Proverbs to eat honey and reveals unexpected complexity. He sounds the unfathomable depths of St. Paul’s revelation that the Christian has "died" and yet now lives in Christ—and goes on to ask what it would mean to take the awesome expression "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" seriously. Three final meditations complete the movement by scrutinizing the visionary world of Revelation: the riddle of the work’s composition, of its images, and of the enigmatic time in which its events occur.

Originally published in 1985, Land Rent, Housing and Urban Planning looks at the crucial social relationships associated with land ownership, and how these have played a crucial role in the economic development of many societies. The understanding of these relationships within modern capitalist societies has proved difficult. Land ownership relations emerge as requiring specific historical analysis for specific periods and societies and as being integral aspects of the capitalist mode of production as a whole - not merely mechanisms which redistribute some independently-determined surplus.

Originally published in 1985, Land Rent, Housing and Urban Planning looks at the crucial social relationships associated with land ownership, and how these have played a crucial role in the economic development of many societies. The understanding of these relationships within modern capitalist societies has proved difficult. Land ownership relations emerge as requiring specific historical analysis for specific periods and societies and as being integral aspects of the capitalist mode of production as a whole - not merely mechanisms which redistribute some independently-determined surplus.

Hebrew is a very, very old language. It was spoken in ancient Israel many thousands of years ago, and has been kept alive for centuries by Jews and scholars. Modern Hebrew was the dream and work of a man named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. He made new words from ancient words and gave Hebrew speakers a way to say modern words such as ice cream, bicycle, and airplane. This book is a child's introduction to modern Hebrew; but more than that, it is a joyous portrait of a very special family. Its heroine, Gabi, shares in the activities of five-year-olds everywhere; she dances, she pretends, she dresses up, she helps with the baby. Her exuberance about her own life bounces off every page, and the enthusiasm and warmth of her family surround her, and the reader, with love.

Mr. Tompkins is back! The mild-mannered bank clerk with the short attention span and vivid imagination has inspired, charmed, and informed young and old alike since the publication of the hugely successful Mr Tompkins in Paperback (by George Gamow) in 1965. Now, this highly affable character returns to embark on a set of adventures that explore the extreme edges of the universe--the smallest, the largest, the fastest, and the farthest. Just by following the experiences and dreams of Mr. Tompkins, readers discover and come to know the merry dance of cosmic mysteries, including: Einstein's theory of relativity, bizarre effects near light-speed, the birth and death of the universe, black holes, quarks, space warps and antimatter, the fuzzy world of the quantum, and that ultimate cosmic mystery--love. The story of Mr. Tompkins' journey to the frontiers of modern physics will delight and inform all readers. Russell Stannard is a best-selling popular science writer and the author of the critically acclaimed Uncle Albert series of science books for children.

Mr. Tompkins is back! The mild-mannered bank clerk with the short attention span and vivid imagination has inspired, charmed, and informed young and old alike since the publication of the hugely successful Mr Tompkins in Paperback (by George Gamow) in 1965. Now, this highly affable character returns to embark on a set of adventures that explore the extreme edges of the universe--the smallest, the largest, the fastest, and the farthest. Just by following the experiences and dreams of Mr. Tompkins, readers discover and come to know the merry dance of cosmic mysteries, including: Einstein's theory of relativity, bizarre effects near light-speed, the birth and death of the universe, black holes, quarks, space warps and antimatter, the fuzzy world of the quantum, and that ultimate cosmic mystery--love. The story of Mr. Tompkins' journey to the frontiers of modern physics will delight and inform all readers. Russell Stannard is a best-selling popular science writer and the author of the critically acclaimed Uncle Albert series of science books for children.

Babaji, revered guru of the famous Paramahansa Yogananda, author of An Autobiography of a Yogi, comes now to teach the world the secrets of entering the kingdom of heaven while still in a human body. In the book, Babaji, The Beginning Has No End, the ascended master communicates directly to his readers and explains how the opening of one's heart is the key to heavenly entrance. Times are changing. While his protege established centers for the achievement of Self-Realization, Babaji seeks now to take humanity higher. In essence, he wishes to help us leave behind the limited awareness of Self-Realization in exchange for the compelling experience of God-Realization which involves the complete awakening of Soul to its true nature and to finding its place once again, in the heart of the Supreme Creator.

Michael Edwards returned to the English tongue for his last book of poems, At the Brasserie Lipp (2019), after years as a French-language author. English revived many nerves of memory, and in Another Art of Poetry he explores them further, in ten chapters, each consisting of continuously numbered sections. There are 194 sections, so we can read the book as a continuous sequence, as ten discrete poems, or as single lyrics and epistles interspersed. There is something Augustan about the approach, humorous, alert, like a series of letters and reflections spoken to us. The formal variety of the sections reminds us how well Edwards knows his Eliot, Williams, Pound, his David Jones; he understands modernism and the other resources that inform the grateful poets who value our European and wider traditions. ('The godsend of influence.') Originality has to do with origins. 'Everything has been said,' he begins, 'and we come / just at the right moment.' His English re-visions once familiar landscapes in Wivenhoe, in Paris and elsewhere; it finds his antecedents, it restores access to belief and transcendence. Doorstones, an additional full collection, bridges the gap between At the Brasserie Lipp and this ars poetica.

Seated at a table in the celebrated Brasserie Lipp, the author experiences 'this in- / fernal ticking in the ink' and finds memory coming alive, recovering past moments as intensely present, spots of time which vivify him and his past. Through memory and poetry he experiences revelation of a Christian depth. England is a familiar yet now a foreign country: the author having written for years in French. 'English becomes / a strange tongue echoing readily with names / gainrising with the new-born world they name.' Distinct recollections open into one another, restored and changed in language. Music and painting, too, are evoked as windows on this world. The book includes ninety poems organised into thirty sections, each with three poems which are free-standing yet connected, speaking together. His English takes its bearings from the stress patterns of Anglo Saxon prosody. Not only the poet but his language itself returns to its beginnings.

Winner of the Leila Webster Memorial Music Award for the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music Chen Yi is the most prominent woman among the renowned group of new wave composers who came to the US from mainland China in the early 1980s. Known for her creative output and a distinctive merging of Chinese and Western influences, Chen built a musical language that references a breathtaking range of sources and crisscrosses geographical and musical borders without eradicating them. Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards provide an accessible guide to the composer's background and her more than 150 works. Extensive interviews with Chen complement in-depth analyses of selected pieces from Chen's solos for Western or Chinese instruments, chamber works, choral and vocal pieces, and compositions scored for wind ensemble, chamber orchestra, or full orchestra. The authors highlight Chen's compositional strategies, her artistic elaborations, and the voice that links her earliest and most recent music. A concluding discussion addresses questions related to Chen's music and issues such as gender, ethnicity and nationality, transnationalism, border crossing, diaspora, exoticism, and identity.