"What are democracies meant to do? And how does one know when one is a democratic state?" These incisive questions and more by leading political scientist, Steven Friedman, underlie this robust enquiry into what democracy means for South Africa post 1994.

Democracy and its prospects are often viewed through a lens which reflects the dominant Western understanding. New democracies are compared to idealised notions of the way in which the system is said to operate in the global North. The democracies of Western Europe and North America are understood to be the finished product and all others are assessed by how far they have progressed towards approximating this model. The goal of new democracies, like South Africa and other developing nation-states, is thus to become like the global North.

Power in Action persuasively argues against this stereotype. Friedman asserts that democracies can only work when every adult has an equal say in the public decisions that affect them. From this point of view, democracies are not finished products and some nations in the global South may be more democratic than their Northern counterparts. Democracy is achieved not by adopting idealised models derived from other societies – rather, it is the product of collective action by citizens who claim the right to be heard not only through public protest action, but also through the conscious exercise of influence on public and private power holders.

Viewing democracy in this way challenges us to develop a deeper understanding of democracy’s challenges and in so doing to ensure that more citizens can claim a say over more decisions in society.

This is Durban curry, continued... a show which has been running since the 1860s, when the first indentured labourers came from India to work in the sugar cane plantations of then colonial Natal. They brought spices, and seeds, and recipes. And when inevitably, the influences and memories of the mother cuisine faded, Durban curry became its own thing.

Recognisably different from its roots: redder, hotter. More tomatoes, more chillis. But growing in its new homeground as it pleased. Varying from cook to cook, chef to chef. That's what we documented in 2014 in Durban Curry, So Much of Flavour. Now, in 2019, we find it's changing again.

Not the classics. They are timeless. But Durban curry is not set in stone. The point about this community dish which has become a national treasure is, precisely and imprecisely, that it has always moved and mutated with the times. It continues, as it did right from the beginning, to respond to new circumstances and needs.

And the point about our first investigation into what made it distinctive is that it was “just a taste". We wrote: “We know there is much more to tell, many more kitchens to visit, and dishes to discover."

Political theorist Steven Friedman addresses how and why the current language around anti-Semitism in Israel has been distorted and weaponised to serve the political objectives of the Israeli state. Friedman’s critique examines what this implies for the fight against racism in South Africa and India, and in other parts of the world.

Good Jew, Bad Jew is a critique by one of South Africa’s foremost political theorists of mainstream understandings of Jewishness. Steven Friedman offers a searing analysis of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in service of political objectives that support the Israeli state and global white supremacy. Looking specifically at the way in which language is used to shape identities, Friedman uses many examples to illustrate how anyone that opposes the interests and policies of the Israeli state is increasingly defined as anti-Semitic.

The use of anti-racist language to defend racial domination distorts not only the meaning of what it is to be Jewish, but sheds light on how all dogmatic nationalisms function. Friedman uses India and South Africa as examples, but the analysis applies across the world too.

This is a detailed, deeply researched and critical work that will appeal to both specialists and general readers looking for a considered view on how language shapes belief systems, and how the powerful forces of racism and nationalism – and their opponents – are being misrepresented.

Has South Africa ‘done well’ at limiting illness and deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic? Academic and political commentator, Steven Friedman, thinks not. While the country’s mainstream media believes it has, in his view the evidence tells another story. South Africa has experienced by far the most cases and deaths in Africa – at one point as many as the rest of the continent combined.

One Virus, Two Countries offers a searing analysis of government and expert scientists’ responses to the pandemic. Friedman argues that South Africa is two societies in one – a ‘First World’ which resembles Western Europe and North America, and a ‘Third World’ which looks much like the rest of Africa or South Asia. The South African state, the media and the scientific community have largely tried to deal with the virus through a ‘First World’ lens in which much of the country was either invisible or a problem – not a partner. Friedman argues this approach prevented the country from responding in a way which would have protected most citizens. This is why case numbers and deaths are so high: South Africa has done worse than the rest of Africa not despite the fact that it has a ‘more developed’ health system, but because it does.

One Virus, Two Countries is a controversial book that will rouse much needed debate about South Africa’s health and economic system in a context of serious inequality.

There are countless books about menopause on the market. We've all accepted that women change at midlife. However, there is another much ignored change that affects hundreds of millions of women across the globe: manopause - the changes that all men go through starting at about age 40.

In this groundbreaking book, Lisa Friedman Bloch and Kathy Kirtland Silverman look at men's changes from a new and uplifting perspective. Aimed at women, Manopause explores how biological and psychological factors collide with the societal pressures men face, and provides advice on how women can help themselves and their men move through and enjoy this sometimes challenging phase.

Laying out the commonly accepted rules of what it means to 'be a man' - rules like 'Your worth is only as great as your power, money and status,' 'Push down your emotions,' and 'Always be aggressive and strong' - the authors explore how men strive to live up to these expectations, and how shouldering this burden becomes harder at midlife. Both physical changes and emotional realizations play in to men's fear that they are losing their grip. And yet, as the authors explain, it is these very changes that can open the door to a far richer and more fulfilling life. With a goal of creating greater understanding and compassion for the subject of manopause, Bloch and Silverman solidly ground readers with information about men's changes before guiding them through a practical discussion of how to handle the outward effects they experience. They address emotional reactions, behavioural issues, hormone loss, sex and intimacy, and family and work relationships with an eye to how all can be immeasurably improved.

By bringing this topic more into the public eye, they hope to help women and men everywhere learn to better alleviate the confusion, misunderstanding and discontent of manopause.

South Africa’s democracy is often seen as a story of bright beginnings gone astray, a pattern said to be common to Africa. The negotiated settlement of 1994, it is claimed, ended racial domination and created the foundation for a prosperous democracy – but greedy politicians betrayed the promise of a new society.

In Prisoners Of The Past, Steven Friedman astutely argues that this misreads the nature of contemporary South Africa. Building on the work of the economic historian Douglass North and the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani, Friedman shows that South African democracy’s difficulties are legacies of the pre-1994 past. The settlement which ushered in majority rule left intact core features of the apartheid economy and society. The economy continues to exclude millions from its benefits, while racial hierarchies have proved stubborn: apartheid is discredited, but the values of the pre-1948 colonial era, the period of British colonisation, still dominate. Thus South Africa’s democracy supports free elections, civil liberties and the rule of law, but also continues past patterns of exclusion and domination.

Friedman reasons that this ‘path dependence’ is not, as is often claimed, the result of constitutional compromises in 1994 that left domination untouched. This bargain was flawed because it brought not too much compromise, but too little. Compromises extended political citizenship to all but there were no similar bargains on economic and cultural change. Using the work of the radical sociologist Harold Wolpe, Friedman shows that only negotiations on a new economy and society can free South Africans from the prison of the past.

Animated adventure comedy featuring the voice talents of Martin Lawrence, Ashton Kutcher and Gary Sinise. When a domesticated grizzly bear called Boog (Lawrence) gets lured into leaving the creature comforts of home by a fast-talking mule deer named Elliott (Kutcher), he finds himself lost in the woods just three days before hunting season begins. Forced to rough it in the great outdoors, Boog goes native, rallying all the forest animals to take back their home and send the hunters packing.

Paul en sy ouers het onlangs van die platteland na die groot stad getrek. En al is die stad vol mense en bedrywigheid, is Paul eensaam. Op ’n dag gaan stap hy in die reen en kom op ’n klein hondjie af wat verdwaal is. Hy soek die eienaar van die hondjie, maar kry niemand en besluit om Vlekkie huis toe te vat. Hulle word groot vriende, maar Vlekkie mis sy basie, veral teen slaaptyd. Paul weet dis die regte ding om Vlekkie se eienaar te soek, al wil hy nie die hondjie verloor nie. Maar om die regte ding doen bring vir Paul onverwagse geluk... Dis ’n pragtige storie wat hartsnare roer. Dit leer kinders dat “optelgoed” nie “vatgoed” is nie en dat dit aan die regte eienaar behoort. En selfs, om die regte ding te doen, is meer verrykend en bevredigend as wat hulle dink.

Remake of the 1970s British thriller of the same name. When two American girls, Stephanie (Amber Heard) and Ellie (Odette Yustman), head off on a cycling tour in rural Argentina, they become separated from the rest of their group and end up drowning their sorrows in the local bar, where they soon attract the attention of every man in the vicinity. When Ellie subsequently disappears, Stephanie turns to the police for help - only to find that the local authorities already have their hands full with a string of unsolved kidnappings targeting young female tourists.

CGI animated adventure. When a domesticated grizzly bear called Boog gets lured into leaving the creature comforts of home by a fast-talking mule deer named Elliott, he finds himself lost in the woods just three days before hunting season begins. Forced to rough it in the great outdoors, Boog goes native, rallying all the forest animals to take back their home and send the hunters packing.

Gritty action thriller starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as a reporter trying to stop a serial killer. After discovering the dismembered body of his girlfriend, crime journalist Lewis Hicks (Gooding) finds a diary, seemingly left by the murderer, detailing a list of his next victims and the gruesome methods he will use to kill them. Realising his own name is on the list, Hicks must use all of his experience to track down the serial killer in a desperate race against time before the madman strikes again.

Frank Friedman's Practical Guide to Environmental Management, 11th Edition (PGEM) has earned its place among the classic texts on environmental management. PGEM provides readers with the firm grounding in history necessary to put environmental issues in context and a practical map to avoid the pitfalls and capitalize on the potential rewards inherent in the field. It is rare to find a book that combines insight with pragmatism so that it serves as both a desk reference and a definitive treatise. The Guide now enters its 11th edition with new material on the "new" EPA (including enforcement priorities and environmental justice), recent examples of practical utilization of sustainability principles, greenhouse gas issues, the new auditing standards, and several other areas. This edition of PGEM retains its focus on the practical, while also surveying the developing trends in environmental management. As Friedman notes, environmental management systems and corporate behavior, particularly in developing countries, increasingly serve as the de facto system of environmental governance and are key to ensuring environmental protection goals are met. In this new edition, Friedman does a superb job of orienting the environmental manager in this new era.

The debut novel from the "Munro-esque" (Houston Post) author of Disasters in the First World, Here Lies is Olivia Clare Friedman's visceral and portentous look at mourning, memory, and motherhood in an alternate Louisiana ravaged by climate change. Louisiana, 2042. Spurred by the effects of climate change, states have closed graveyards and banned burials, making cremation mandatory and the ashes of loved ones state-owned unless otherwise claimed. In the small town of St. Genevieve, Alma lives alone and struggles to grieve in the wake of her young mother Naomi's death, during which Alma failed to honor Naomi's final wishes. Now, Alma decides to fight to reclaim Naomi's ashes, a journey of unburial that will bring into her life a mysterious and fiercely loyal stranger, Bordelon, who appears in St. Genevieve after a storm, as well as a group of strong, rebellious local women who, together, teach Alma anew the meaning of family and strength. With poignance, poeticism, and deep insight in Here Lies, Olivia Clare Friedman gives us a stunning portrait of motherhood, friendship, and humanity in an alternate American South torn asunder by global warming. This is a stunning first novel from a unique and inventive writer.

The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine

An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster."

As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.

"Tombstone" is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, "Tombstone" is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in "The New York Review of Books," called the Chinese edition of "Tombstone ""groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years."

Walter Snow is doomed. He stares at the blank pages in his typewriter, hoping for the spark that will finally ignite his ambition to write the Great Armenian Novel.

And then he meets Clyde Potts. She is beautiful, intelligent, charming, perhaps psychic, and, for better or worse, very possibly unbalanced. With Potts's joie de vivre and her certified-insane partner in crime, Fox Harris, Snow is caught up in a series of pranks against corporate sprawl that they execute with a bit of booze and some wacky tobaccy from Australia known as Malabimbi Madness.

Things quickly spin out of control as the trio's ultimate, diuretically inspired prank leads to an unexpected, shocking conclusion, and Walter is left to wonder if the only things you ever keep in this life are the things you let slip through your fingers.

Halina Rudowski is on the run. When the Polish ghetto where she lives is evacuated, she narrowly escapes, but her mother is not as lucky. Along with her friend Batya, Halina makes her way to a secret encampment in the woods where Jews survive by living underground. As the group struggles for food, handles infighting, and attempts to protect themselves from the advancing Germans, Halina must face the reality of life without her mother.
Based on historical events, this gripping tale sheds light on a little-known aspect of the Holocaust: the underground forest encampments that saved several thousand Jews from the Nazis. In telling the story of one girl's survival, "Escaping into the Night" marks the arrival of a remarkable new voice in fiction.

A look at the early years of the great Lucas Radebe and Mark Fish, one black and one white footballer. It moves from football played with rolled-up old socks on the dusty veldt, to the glamour and passion of the English Premiership and the World Cup.;It traces the struggle for liberation in the township of Diepklooit and the backlash of apartheid Pretoria to the establishment of a democratic state. We follow Mark and Lucas's efforts on behalf of Bafana Bafana, at times heroic, at times controversial, as they steer their national side from African soccer baby to football giant in less than a decade.

Cincinnati has a distinguished television history. Beginning before WLW-T signed on the air in February 1948, its experimental station W8XCT broadcast from the 46th floor of the Carew Tower. WKRC-TV and WCPO-TV signed on in 1949, WCET in 1954, and WXIX-TV in 1968. Since then, television has become part of the family. Uncle Al, Skipper Ryle, Batty Hattie from Cincinnati, the Cool Ghoul, Peter Grant, Al Schottelkotte, Nick Clooney, Ruth Lyons, Paul Baby, Bob Braun, and Jerry Springer visited Cincinnati living rooms on television. Remember Midwestern Hayride, TV Dance Party, PM Magazine, Juvenile Court, Young People's Specials, Lilias, Dotty Mack, Bob Shreve, Mr. Hop, Bean's Clubhouse, The Last Prom, and Ira Joe? They are part of the collective Cincinnati history, part of the Cincinnati culture, and part of the Cincinnati family.

Top Secret/Majic is the result of nuclear physicist and renowned UFO investigator Stanton T. Friedman's twenty-one year search for the truth about the mysterious Operation Majestic 12, President Truman's top-secret UFO investigation team. In this updated edition of his landmark book, he tells the incredible tale of the July, 1947 recovery of a crashed flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, and the establishment by President Truman of a truly all-star cast to deal with the saucer and its non-human inhabitants. The first four Directors of Central Intelligence, the first Secretary of Defense, and several outstanding scientists and military leaders were part of the team. Through painstaking research and startling evidence--including documents that have never before been published--Friedman effectively exposes the U.S. government's biggest-kept secret: a fifty-eight year UFO cover-up.