Discussing the idea with reference to accounts of awakening in esoteric literature, as well as contemporary psychological methods, Living Space: Openness and Freedom through Spatial Awareness proposes that a common denominator in both physical and emotional healing is the creation of more perceptual and conscious space and that an easier and more spacious awareness can be achieved by relatively simple changes to the way we pay attention. These ideas have implications for the way we balance body, mind and spirit.

Presenting a detailed reinterpretation and reconstruction of the political thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation uses original readings of Machiavelli's texts to develop a new theoretical model of democratic practice. The book critically and creatively juxtaposes certain concepts drawn from Machiavelli's work in order to produce new political insights. Christopher Holman identifies two unique ideas in Machiavelli through his rearrangement of Machiavellian concepts. The first, drawn primarily from The Prince, is an image of the individual human being as a creative subject that seeks the exteriorization of desire via political creation. The second, drawn primarily from The Discourses on Livy, is an image of the democratic republic as a form of regime in which this desire for creative self-expression is universalized, all citizens being able to affirm their psychic orientation toward innovation through their equal access to political institutions and orders. Such institutions and orders, to the extent that they function as media for the expression of a fundamental human creativity, must be arranged so that they are capable of continual interrogation and refinement. In the final instance, a new ethical ground for the normative defense of democratic life is constructed, one grounded in the orientation of individual beings toward novelty and innovation.

Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Ranciere, Etienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour. The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding equality and emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More.

Politics as Radical Creation examines the meaning of democratic practice through the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. It provides an understanding of democratic politics as a potentially performative good-in-itself, undertaken not just to the extent that it seeks to achieve a certain extrinsic goal, but also in that it functions as a medium for the expression of creative human impulses. Christopher Holman develops this potential model through a critical examination of the political philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. Holman argues that, while Arendt and Marcuse's respective theorizations each ultimately restrict the potential scope of creative human expression, their juxtaposition - which has not been previously explored - results in a more comprehensive theory of democratic existence, one that is uniquely able to affirm the creative capacities of the human being. Yielding important theoretical results that will interest scholars of each theorist and of theories of democracy more generally, Politics as Radical Creation provides a valuable means for rethinking the nature of contemporary democratic practice.

How does the contemporary restructuring of health care affect nursing practice? Increasingly since the 1970s, and more intensively under recent reforms, Canadian health care is the focus of information-supported, professionally based management. In "Managing to Nurse," Janet M. Rankin and Marie L. Campbell probe the operation of this new form of hospital and its effect management on nurses and nursing.

Written from the nurse's perspective, this institutional ethnography discovers a major transformation in the nature of nursing and associated patient care: the work is now organized according to an accounting logic that embeds a cost-orientation into care-related activities. Rankin and Campbell illustrate how nurses adapt to this new reality just as they, themselves, perpetuate it - how they learn to recognize their adaptations as professionally correct and as an adequate basis for nursing judgement. Although "Managing to Nurse" may contradict contemporary beliefs about health care reform, the insiders' account that it provides is undeniable evidence that nurses' caring work is being undermined and patient care is being eroded, sometimes dangerously, by current health care agendas.