Drug discovery originating in Africa has the potential to provide significantly improved treatment of endemic diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. This book critically reviews the current status of drug discovery research and development in Africa, for diseases that are a major threat to the health of people living in Africa. Compiled by leading African and international experts, this book presents the science and strategies of modern drug discovery. It explores how the use of natural products and traditional medicines can benefit from conventional drug discovery approaches, and proposes solutions to current technological, infrastructural, human resources, and economic challenges, which are presented when attempting to engage in full-scale drug discovery. Topics addressed are varied; from African medicinal plants to marine bioprospecting, pharmacogenetics and the use of nanotechnology. This book brings together for the first time a collection of strategies and techniques that need to be considered when developing drugs in an African setting. It is an unprecedented and truly international effort, highlighting the remarkable effort made so far in the area of drug discovery research by African scientists, and scientists from other parts of the world working on African health problems.

Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another.

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams Award Is the capital of Latin America a small island at the mouth of the Hudson River? Will California soon hold the balance of power in Mexican national politics? Will Latinos reinvigorate the US labor movement? These are some of the provocative questions that Mike Davis explores in this fascinating account of the Latinization of the US urban landscape. As he forefully shows, this is a demographic and cultural revolution with extraordinary implications. With Spanish surnames increasing five times faster than the general population, salsa is becoming the predominant ethnic rhythm (and flavor) of contemporary city life. In Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, and (shortly) Dallas, Latinos outnumber non-Hispanic whites; in New York, San Diego and Phoenix they outnumber Blacks. According to the Bureau of the Census, Latinos will supply fully two-thirds of the nation's population growth between now and the middle of the 21st century when nearly 100 millions Americans will boast Latin American ancestry. Davis focuses on the great drama of how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. Pundits are now unanimous that Spanish-surname voters are the sleeping giant of US politics. Yet electoral mobilization alone is unlikely to redress the increasing income and opportunity gaps between urban Latinos and suburban non-Hispanic whites. Thus in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the militant struggles of Latino workers and students are reinventing the American left. Fully updated throughout, and with new chapters on the urban Southwest and the explodiing counter-migration of Anglos to Mexico, Magical Urbanism is essential reading for anyone who wants to grasp the future of urban America This paperback edition of Mike Davis's investigation into the Latinization of America incorporates the extraordinary findings of the 2000 Census as well as new chapters on the militarization of the border and violence against immigrants.

Essays on modern socialism by regular columnists from Chartist magazine.

- Takes readers from conceptualizing to executing compelling photographs for fully realized visual narratives. - Provides career advice from a seasoned professional with credits including National Geographic and The White House. - Includes a series of self-assignments to practice the topics covered.

- Takes readers from conceptualizing to executing compelling photographs for fully realized visual narratives. - Provides career advice from a seasoned professional with credits including National Geographic and The White House. - Includes a series of self-assignments to practice the topics covered.

This book draws upon the author's first-hand clinical experience as an Expert Witness in child and family legal proceedings to explore the success of psychotherapy assessments and interventions. Focusing on families who are seeking to be re-united after the removal of their children into foster care, Mike Davies discusses critical aspects of therapy which can help to identify and engage those who will benefit from additional support. Chapters combine heuristic, case studies, and narrative research methodologies, considering parents' stories, self-identity issues and assessment criteria, to uncover an emerging framework that illuminates an innovative therapeutic approach. Divided into three parts, the book develops a comprehensive overview of and thorough investigation into therapeutic assessment during childcare legal proceedings, including explorations into crucial issues such as how and why some families are granted therapeutic intervention, as well as the level of understanding and expertise that professionals and local services can provide in these contexts. Therapeutic Assessment and Intervention in Childcare Legal Proceedings will be of key reading for researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of child and adolescent mental health, law, social work and psychotherapy. The book will also be of interest to social workers, expert psychologists, psychotherapists, family therapists, psychiatrists, and those specialising in public law.

Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another.

Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Thanks to breakthroughs in production and food science, agribusiness has been able to devise new ways to grow more food and get it more places more quickly. There is no shortage of news items on hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry - each animal genetically identical to the next - packed together in megabarns, grown out in a matter of months, then slaughtered, processed and shipped to the other side of the globe. Less well known are the deadly pathogens mutating in, and emerging out of, these specialized agro-environments. In fact, many of the most dangerous new diseases in humans can be traced back to such food systems, among them Campylobacter, Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E, and a variety of novel influenza variants.Agribusiness has known for decades that packing thousands of birds or livestock together results in a monoculture that selects for such disease. But market economics doesn't punish the companies for growing Big Flu - it punishes animals, the environment, consumers, and contract farmers. Alongside growing profits, diseases are permitted to emerge, evolve, and spread with little check. "That is," writes evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, "it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people."In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. Wallace details, with a precise and radical wit, the latest in the science of agricultural epidemiology, while at the same time juxtaposing ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens, microbial time travel, and neoliberal Ebola. Wallace also offers sensible alternatives to lethal agribusiness. Some, such as farming cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed crop-livestock systems, are already in practice off the agribusiness grid.While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace's collection appears the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science to derive a new understanding of the evolution of infections. Highly capitalized agriculture may be farming pathogens as much as chickens or corn.

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the reelection of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

Considered by many to be Ireland's most important revolutionary, James Connolly devoted his life to struggles against exploitation, oppression and imperialism. Active across the world, Connolly was a peerless organiser, sharp polemicist, and highly original thinker. This collection of his most important writings, with an extensive introduction from the editor, returns Connolly to his proper place in Irish and global history, and seeks to inspire people today with his vision of a world free of militarism, injustice and deprivation.

Drug discovery originating in Africa has the potential to provide significantly improved treatment of endemic diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. This book critically reviews the current status of drug discovery research and development in Africa, for diseases that are a major threat to the health of people living in Africa. Compiled by leading African and international experts, this book presents the science and strategies of modern drug discovery. It explores how the use of natural products and traditional medicines can benefit from conventional drug discovery approaches, and proposes solutions to current technological, infrastructural, human resources, and economic challenges, which are presented when attempting to engage in full-scale drug discovery. Topics addressed are varied; from African medicinal plants to marine bioprospecting, pharmacogenetics and the use of nanotechnology. This book brings together for the first time a collection of strategies and techniques that need to be considered when developing drugs in an African setting. It is an unprecedented and truly international effort, highlighting the remarkable effort made so far in the area of drug discovery research by African scientists, and scientists from other parts of the world working on African health problems.

Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity. In 1918 a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least 40 million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another world catastrophe is imminent. A virus of astonishing lethality, known as H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of East Asia. It kills two out of three people it infects. The World Health Organisation warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes within two years. In this urgent and extraordinarily frightening book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral apocalypse-in-the-making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague. He also details the scandalous failure of the Bush administration, obsessed with hypothetical bio-terrorism, to safeguard Americans from the greatest biological threat since HIV/AIDS. sacrificed the poor in Africa and South Asia, for whom, in the almost certain event of a pandemic, there will be no anti-virals or vaccines.

No writer in the US today brings together analysis and history as comprehensively and elegantly as Mike Davis. In these contemporary, interventionist essays, Davis goes beyond critique to offer real solutions and concrete possibilities for change.

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, and even from economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Countering the chorus of anti-immigrant voices that have grown increasingly loud in the current political moment, No One is Illegal exposes the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and puts a human face on the immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border to work in the United States. This second edition has a new introduction to frame the analysis of the struggle for immigrant rights and the roots of the backlash.

In his book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. Now in this expanded edition of that 2005 book, Davis explains how the problems he warned of remain, and he sets the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of previous disastrous outbreaks, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago. In language both accessible and authoritative, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today's viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.

The Occupy Movement took the world by storm in 2011, with protest camps cropping up all over the Western world. Occupiers managed to get everyone's attention as they fought for their rights in earnest, but the movement has stalled in recent months as activists are not exactly sure what should be their next plan of action. Enter Mike Davis. With wit, humour and a remarkable grasp of the political marginalisation of the poor and working class by the 1%, Davis crafts a striking defence of the Occupy Movement and lays out well considered next steps to advance the movement.