Everywhere she looked, the world was in poor shape. And because she’d quit drinking, she no longer had the comfort blanket of alcohol to tamp down her anxiety. How did sober people stay sane?

In recent times, the self-help industry has exploded into a multi- billion dollar global industry – and along with it has come every imaginable type of therapy, healing or general woo-woo. In the past, Rebecca scoffed at this industry, mocking its reliance on half-baked science and the way it appears to prey on the mentally fragile.

But as she searched for a meaning of life that did not involve booze, she found it increasingly hard to rationalize her default scepticism. This shit really seems to work for some people, she reasoned. And it’s not like I have any particularly solid alternatives.

Rebecca lives in Cape Town, the undisputed epicentre of ‘alternative’ paths to peace and enlightenment in South Africa. She decided that over the course of a year, she would embark on a quest for personal wellness, spiritual enlightenment and good old-fashioned happiness. She was willing, within reason, to try anything. She would open herself to even the most outlandish contemporary fads in self- improvement.

What followed was a twelve-month immersion in the world of auras, chakras, hallucinogenic drugs, sweat lodges, sangomas, past lives and more.

And by the end of it? Maybe she would find some new ways of thinking and living. Or maybe she would emerge with her prejudices untouched.

Either way, it would be a good story.

Rebecca Davis has been described as one of the funniest writers in South Africa today. Her razor-sharp wit combines with her acute powers of observation to produce social and political commentary that will have you in stitches even as it informs and provokes you to think seriously about the topics she discusses.

In Best White And Other Anxious Delusions, Davis offers advice on life's tricky issues; discusses the perils of being a 'Best white'; laments the fact that society does not have a universally adopted form of greeting, such as the high-five; explores the intricacies of social media and internet dating; considers the future of reading and tackles a range of controversial topics in between.

How, and what, children and young adults read are questions bound up with both aspirations and concerns. This book brings together experts from a range of academic disciplines to examine how this reading has been mediated in Anglo-American contexts. Reading Mediation explores mediation across case studies of different reading experiences, practices and modes: It considers social and solitary reading; it analyzes ideas of text-reader interaction through book design and textual strategies; and it examines methods readers use for orienting themselves in relation to the text. Throughout it interrogates how values and assumptions about the effects of reading are implicated in its mediation, underpinning book collections, programmatic and parental intervention and facilitation of reading as well as the study of children's reading and literature. Employing a variety of methodologies, the essays elaborate how using "mediation" as a connecting node of analysis promotes interdisciplinary dialogue, and they demonstrate its value as a critical term for the study of children's reading, literacy and print culture.

How has the position of Afrikaners changed since the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa? While the links between Afrikaner nationalist identity and the apartheid regime have been irrevocably altered, it is evident that this newly disempowered minority still commands a vast material and cultural capital. Certain Afrikaans speakers have become important players in the new South Africa and on the world stage. Davies argues that the global political economy and the closely associated ideology of globalization are major catalysts for change in Afrikaner identifications and positions. She identifies multiple Afrikaner constituencies and identities and shows how they play out in the complex social, economic and political landscape of South Africa. Accessible, informative and well-written, "Afrikaners in the New South Africa" is a vital contribution to our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa. It will be indispensable for those interested in South Africa, identity politics, globalization, international political economy and geography.

Examining writing for and about education in the period from 1740 to 1820, Rebecca Davies's book plots the formation of a written paradigm of maternal education that associates maternity with educational authority. Examining novels, fiction for children, conduct literature and educative and political tracts by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Martin Taylor and Jane Austen, Davies identifies an authoritative feminine educational voice. She shows how the function of the discourse of maternal authority is modified in different genres, arguing that both the female writers and the fictional mothers adopt maternal authority and produce their own formulations of ideal educational methods. The location of idealised maternity for women, Davies proposes, is in the act of writing educational discourse rather than in the physical performance of the maternal role. Her book contextualizes the development of a written discourse of maternal education that emerged in the enlightenment period and explores the empowerment achieved by women writing within this discourse, albeit through a notion of authority that is circumscribed by the 'rules' of a discipline.

Annual volume on medieval textual cultures, engaging with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with widely varied themes: law and literature; manuscript production, patronage, and aesthetics; real and imagined geographies; gender and its connections to narrative theory and to psychoanalysis. Investigations range from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, from England to the eastern Mediterranean. New arguments are put forward about the dating, context, and occasion of Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece, while the narrative dynamics of Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" and "Tale of Melibee" are examined from new perspectives. The topography of the Holy Lands appears both as a set of emotional sites, depicted in the Prick of Conscience in its account of the end of the world, and as co-ordinates in the cultural imaginary of medieval the wine-trade. Grendel's mother emerges as the invisible and unavowable centre of male heroic culture in Beowulf, and the fourteenth-century St Erkenwald is brought into contact with the community-building project of the medieval death investigation. Finally, the late medieval Speculum Christiani is revealed to be a work with deep aesthetic investments when read through the framework of how its medieval scribes encountered and shaped that work.

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.     In the early nuclear age, experts anticipated that all technologically-capable states would build these powerful devices. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late-1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and across decades the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.     Why do most states in the international system adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.    The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap. 

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.

In 1938, in the remote highlands of a mountainous island, explorers discovered thousands upon thousands of tribal people. Missionaries began to come, to bring the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Little did they know that many of the people of the tribes were waiting . . . waiting . . . for someone to come and help them out of the darkness of their old way of life. Witness Men consists of true missionary stories that took place throughout the highlands of Papua, Indonesia, from 1955 to 2010, when one of the tribes received their first New Testaments.

This is the first full biography of Justice Leah Ward Sears. In 1992 Sears became the first woman and youngest justice to sit on the Supreme Court of Georgia. In 2005 she became the first African American woman to serve as chief justice of any state supreme court in the country. This book explores her childhood in a career military family; her education; her early work as an attorney; her rise through Georgia's city, county, and state court systems; and her various pursuits after leaving the supreme court in 2009, when she transitioned into a life that was no less active or public. As the biography recounts Sears's life and career, it is filled with instances of how Sears made her own luck by demonstrating a sharpness of mind and sagacious insight, a capacity for grueling hard work, and a relentless drive to succeed. Sears also maintained a strict devotion to judicial independence and the rule of law, which led to decisions that would surprise conservatives and liberals alike, earned the friendship of figures as diverse as Ambassador Andrew Young and Justice Clarence Thomas, and solidified a reputation that would land her on the short list of replacements for two retiring U.S. Supreme Court justices. As a woman, an African American, a lawyer, and a judge, Sears has known successes as well as setbacks. Justice Leah Ward Sears shows that despite political targeting, the death of her beloved father, a painful divorce, and a brother's suicide, she has persevered and prevailed.

Colombia has been known as a land of violence - Colombian people have reacted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ by cursing the messengers, beating them, kidnapping them, killing them and burning down their houses. But from those burnings have shot out sparks and flames and laser beams of light, as the Gospel has continued to shine forth in the midst of darkness. God has delivered people from burning houses. God has healed the ones who cursed. God has even rescued kidnappers. Read fourteen true stories of the Light of the World shining in the land of Colombia, South America.

From one old woman's prayer a young girl was brought to faith, a missionary was sent to Africa and then a church was born from among the people of Central Africa. Missionaries from the West came with the message of Jesus Christ - but it was the men and women saved from cannibalism, the young boys who herded goats and who carted water who really brought the Good News even farther to more and more villages and homesteads in Africa ... and the Good News must go out.For more background information, as well as links for magazine articles, blogs, photos, and videos, see the Educator Resources Page at Rebecca Davis's website. Additionally, colouring pages are available to download further down this page in associated Media section.