We would like to take this opportunity to tell our visitors that the RSA Fellow’s Library will be closed from Friday 21st December, and reopen again on Wednesday 2nd January. We wish you all a happy Christmas and look forward to welcoming you again in the New Year.
What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of September 2007. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....
000s – Generalities
Kevin Warwick
March of the Machines: The Breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence
University of Illinois Press, 2004, 006.3 WAR
While horror films and science fiction have repeatedly warned of robots running amok, Kevin Warwick takes the threats out of the realm of fiction and into the real world, truly giving us something to worry about. Meeting skeptics head on, Warwick goes beyond his penetrating attacks on their assumptions and prejudices about what should be considered as intelligence to reveal what he has already achieved: building robots that communicate in their own language, share experience, teach each other lessons, and behave as they wish with regard to human beings. Now available for the first time in America, March of the Machines is part history of robotics, part futurism. It surveys the substantial advances made in artificial intelligence over the past century while looking ahead to an increasingly uneasy relationship between humans and machines.
Nick Broomfield
The Early Works
Metrodome, 2006, 070.18 BRO
Capturing the nascent style and working methods of the filmmaker, developed between 1970 and 1991, The Early Works brings together Broomfield’s work from the National Film and Television School, his pioneering and controversial social documentary and the birth of his signature style. Included in this four-disc boxset are Who Care, Proud to the British, Behind the Rent Strike, Juvenile Liaison, Juvenile Liaison 2, Tattooed Tears, Driving Me Crazy, and Monster in a Box.
John Pilger
Documentaries that Changed the World and In The Name of Justice: Twelve More Groundbreaking Documentaries
Network, 2006 and 2007, both 070.18 PIL
Acclaimed film-maker and UN Media Peace Prize winner John Pilger curates two four-disk sets of his documentaries. Documentaries that Changed the World contains “Year Zero - The Silent Death of Cambodia,” “Nicaragua - A Nation’s Right to Survive,” “Burp! Pepsi V. Cock in the Ice Cold War,” “Flying the Flag, Arming the World,” “Vietnam - The Quiet Mutiny,” “Death of a Nation - The Timor Conspiracy,” “Inside Burma - Land of Fear,” “Welcome to Australia,” “Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq,” “Palestine is Still the Issue,” “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror,” and “Stealing a Nation.” In The Name of Justice contains “The Mexicans,” “Street of Joy,” “Pyramid Lake is Dying,” “A Faraway Country,” “Do You Remember Vietnam?,” “Vietnam: The Last battle,” “The Truth Game,” “Japan Behind the Mask,” “Apartheid Did Not Die,” “The Last Dream: Heroes Unsung,” “The Last Dream: Secrets,” and “The Last Dream: Other People’s Wars.”
100s – Philosophy & Psychology
Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering-Kofman
Derrida
ICA Projects, 2002, 149.97 DIC
The award-winning Derrida offers an intimate portrait of the brilliant, controversial philosopher and intellectual French icon Jacques Derrida, whose theory of ‘deconstruction’ has deeply influenced the studies of literature, philosophy, ethics, architecture and law, indelibly marking the intellectual landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Igor Aleksander
The World in my Mind, The Mind in my World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in People, Animals and Machines
Imprint Academic, 2007, 153 ALE
Never one to dodge the big questions, Igor Aleksander tackles them head on in this latest book: Is there a 'real world' or is our awareness of one an illusion? Are animals conscious? Can machines be conscious? What is it to be unconscious? Does the 'science of consciousness' impinge on religious thought? How is consciousness affected by mental deterioration? Aleksander's technique is to refine the search for answers by the application of his five 'axioms' concerning consciousness, which he has already derived and set out in earlier work: Being a 'self' in an out-there world; Recalling and imagining being a 'self' in experienced or fictitious worlds; Attending to individually important things; Being able to decide what to do next; and having emotional feelings about things that are happening or being planned.
James Flynn
What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 153.9 FLY
Professor James Flynn is one of the most creative and influential psychologists in the field of intelligence. The 'Flynn Effect' refers to the massive increase in IQ test scores over the course of the twentieth century and the term was coined to recognize his central role in measuring and analyzing these gains. For over twenty years, psychologists have struggled to understand the implications of IQ gains. Do they mean that each generation is more intelligent than the last? Do they suggest how each of us can enhance our own intelligence? Professor Flynn is finally ready to give his own views. He asks what intelligence really is and gives a surprising and illuminating answer. This book bridges the gulf that separates our minds from those of our ancestors a century ago. It is a fascinating and unique book that makes an important contribution to our understanding of human intelligence.
James Flynn will be giving a talk at the RSA on What is Intelligence? on 18 December: follow this link for more information.
Simon Critchley
Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
Verso, 2007, 170 CRI
This work talks about a new political ethics that confronts and faces down the injustices of the present. Part diagnosis of the times, part theoretical analysis of the impasses and possibilities of ethics and politics, part manifesto, Infinitely Demanding identifies a massive political disappointment at the heart of liberal democracy and argues that what is called for is an ethics of commitment that can inform a radical politics. Exploring the problem of ethics in Kant, Levinas, Badiou and Lacan that leads to a conception of subjectivity based on the infinite responsibility of an ethical demand, Critchley considers the possibility of political subjectivity and action after Marx and Marxism. It culminates in an argument for anarchism as an ethical practice and a re-motivating means of political organization.
Jonathan Baron
Against Bioethics
MIT, 2007, 174.2 BAR
This work argues that applied bioethics should embrace utilitarian decision analysis, thus avoiding recommendations expected to do more harm than good. Governments, health professionals, patients, research institutions, and research subjects look to bioethicists for guidance in making important decisions about medical treatment and research, and yet, argues Jonathan Baron, applied bioethics lacks the authority of a coherent guiding theory and is based largely on intuitive judgments. Baron proposes an alternative, arguing that bioethics could have a coherent theory based on utilitarianism and decision analysis. Although Baron opposes many current practices in bioethics, he argues that by combining utilitarianism and decision analysis, bioethics can achieve its aims of providing authoritative guidance in resolving thorny medical and ethical issues.
John Harris
Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
Princeton University Press, 2007, 174.9599935 HAR
Decisive biotechnological interventions in the lottery of human life - to enhance our bodies and brains and perhaps irreversibly change our genetic makeup - have been widely rejected as unethical and undesirable, and have often met with extreme hostility. But in Enhancing Evolution, leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning to make a forthright, sweeping, and rigorous ethical case for using biotechnology to improve human life. Human enhancement, Harris argues, is a good thing - good morally, good for individuals, good as social policy, and good for a genetic heritage that needs serious improvement. Whether one looks upon biotechnology with hope, fear, or a little of both, Enhancing Evolution makes a case for it that no one can ignore.
200s – Religion
Philip Gröning
Into Great Silence
Soda Pictures, 2006, 255 GRÖ
Nestled deep in the postcard-perfect French Alps, the Grande Chartreuse is considered one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready. Gröning, sans crew or artificial lighting, lived in the monks’ quarters for six months, filming their daily prayers, tasks, rituals and rare outdoor excursions. This transcendent, closely observed film seeks to embody a monastery, rather than simply depict one, and has no score, no voiceover and no archival footage.
Werner Herzog
Wheel of Time
Soda Pictures, 2007, 294.335 HER
Documentary film about the largest Buddhist ritual to promote peace and tolerance, held by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Bodh Gaya, India and Graz, Austria in 2002, including exclusive interviews with the Dalai Lama, access to secret rituals for the first time on film as well as footage of a pilgrimage to the Holy Mount Kailash in Tibet.
300s – Social Sciences
John Junkerman and Noam Chomsky
Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in our Times
Brussels Avenue, 2003, 303.482 CHO
Noam Chomsky’s voice may be controversial, but his incisive arguments, based on decades of research and analysis, deserve to be heard and considered. Power and Terror chronicles interviews and public talks given in the spring of 2002, and sees Chomsky placing the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the context of American foreign intervention through the post-war decades. It also contains the 2003 interview “After Iraq”.
Spike Lee
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
HBO, 2006, 303.48576335 LEE
Director Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke is the definitive document of the unmitigated disaster Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It's also a contemporary manifestation of an ancient tradition: an oral history, told by the people who lived it, with no narration and only the occasional use of archival cable and broadcast news footage in addition to Lee's own film.
Florence Ayisi and Kim Longinotto
Sisters in Law
Drakes Avenue Pictures, 2007, 305.426711 AYI
Despite having their visas revoked and only making it to the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 following the intervention of Pascal Thomas, president of the French Director’s Guild, the female judge-and-prosecutor team of Beatrice Ntuba and Vera Ngassa at the heart of this documentary about a court located in Cameroon eventually saw it awarded the Prix Art Essai that year. The film follows them handling the strange cases with mirthful glee and the tough ones with an iron will as the attempt to support their town’s women in bringing forward cases of abuse.
Jasmine Dellal
American Gypsy: A Stranger in Everybody’s Land
POV, 2007, 305.891497 DEL
There are one million Gypsies, or Rom, in America, who most people know nothing about. Never before has a camera been allowed in to explore their world. Shot over the course of five years, this feature documentary tells the tale of one Romani family in the United States who have broken the wall of secrecy surrounding their people. American Gypsy follows the story of Jimmy Marks, a flamboyant community leader who becomes passionately obsessed with fighting a civil rights battle to defend his family, his history and his honour.
Lindsay Anderson, John Fletcher, Walter Lessally and Karel Reisz
Free Cinema
BFI, 2006, 306.09 AND
A highly influential but critically neglected movement in British cinema history, Free Cinema not only re-invented British documentary in the 1950s but also served as a precursor for the better known British New Wave of social-realist feature films in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The BFI has broguth together, for the first time, the eleven films of the three British Free Cinema programmes in the 3-disk boxset, along with the documentary “Small is Beautiful: The story of the Free Cinema films told by their makers”.
Rem Koolhaas
Mutations
Actar, 2001, 307.76 KOO
The acceleration of the phenomenon of urbanization constitutes one of the challenges of our time. In a world redefined by communication networks and by the progressive erasure of borders lead by economic forces, Mutations reflects on the transformations that the acceleration of these processes inflicts on our environment, and on the space left for architecture to operate. Introduced by charts and statistics on global urbanization and a series of essays describing the nature of the changes operating in our cities and in our economies, the book is organized as a highly illustrated atlas/survey of contemporary urban landscapes.
Ed Husain
The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left
Penguin Books, 2007, 320.5570941092 HUS
When Ed Husain was sixteen he became an Islamic fundamentalist. Five years later, he rejected fundamentalist teachings and returned to normal life and his family. Why are young British Muslims becoming extremists? What are the risks of another home-grown terrorist attack on British soil? By describing his experiences inside these groups, the reasons he joined them and how, after leaving, he recovered my faith and mind, this book hopes to explain the appeal of extremist thought, how fanatics penetrate Muslim communities and the truth behind their agenda of subverting the West and moderate Islam.
Chris Atkins
Taking Liberties
Revolver Entertainment, 2007, 323 ATK
Taking Libertiesis a shocking but hilarious polemic documentary that charts the destruction of all your Basic Liberties under 10 Years of New Labour. Released to coincide with Tony Blair's departure, the film and the book follow the stories of normal people who's lives have been turned upside down by injustice - from being arrested for holding a placard outside parliament to being tortured in Guantanamo Bay.
Cliff Zukin, Scott Keeter, Molly Andolina, Krista Jenkins and Michael X. Delli Carpini
A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen
Oxford University Press, 2006, 323.04208420973 ZUK
In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, A New Engagement? challenges the conventional wisdom that today's youth is plagued by a severe case of political apathy. In order to understand the current nature of citizen engagement, it is critical to separate political from civic engagement. Using the results from an original set of surveys and the authors' own primary research, they conclude that while older citizens participate by voting, young people engage by volunteering and being active in their communities.
Greg Rosen
Serving the People: Co-operative Party History from Fred Perry to Gordon Brown
The Co-operative Party, 2007, 324.24107 ROS
Greg Rosen of the Labour History Group’s new book details the origins of the Co-operative Party, a group closely affiliated with the Labour Party, and takes it right up to date, showing how our work has been transformed over the last ten years. The book features a foreword by Gordon Brown.
Steve Yui-Sang Tsang
Intelligence and Human Rights in the Era of Global Terrorism
Praeger Security International, 2006, 327.12 TSA
This book argues that for intelligence organisations to face up to the challenges of global terrorism, they must change the way they think, and utilise all their resources effectively and creatively. Winning the hearts and minds of the terrorists' pool of potential recruits will be essential to cutting off the supply of suicide bombers. Al Qaeda is merely a global syndicate that commits serious crimes of a particularly heinous nature, and it is up to governments, civil society, and the media in different parts of the world to work together if the evidence unearthed by national intelligence services is to be accepted by the general public. Unless the emotional or quasi-religious appeal of the global terrorists can be removed, the simple arrest of bin Laden and his close associates - or even the destruction of Al Qaeda as an organization - will not be sufficient to prevent others from rising to replace them.
George Crile
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Cover Operation that Changed the History of Our Times
Atlantic Books, 2007, 327.12730581 CRI
In the last decade, two events have transformed the world: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam. This is the first book to explain the link between these two occurrences. George Crile spent nearly a decade researching and writing this original account of the biggest, most expensive secret war in history: the arming of the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. Moving from the secret chambers in CIA headquarters to stand-offs in the Khyber Pass, Charlie Wilson's War is one of the most thorough and vivid descriptions of CIA operations ever written. It is the missing chapter in the geopolitics of our time.
Michael Moore
Roger & Me
Warner Bros., 2004, 331 MOO
In 1989, Michael Moore, winner of 2002’s Best Documentary Feature Academy Award and Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize for Bowling For Columbine, triumphantly burst upon the American moviemaking scene with Roger and Me, a hilarious, penetrating forerunner of the independent film movement.
Werner Herzog
Grizzly Man
Revolver Entertainment, 2006, 333.9522 HER
Werner Herzog's persistent inquiry into the motivations of human obsession focuses this time on the self-proclaimed kind warrior Timothy Treadwell. A passionate wildlife preservationist and grizzly bear devotee, Treadwell lived unarmed among the grizzlies in a remote section of Alaska for 13 years, and eventually died in a bear attack. He filmed his experiences during his final five years, and Herzog makes use of this footage in a posthumous portrait of a complex, intriguing character.
David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky
Heavy Water: A Film for Chernobyl
Seventh Art, 2007, 333.7924 BIC
On 26th April 1986, a reactor at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded sending an enormous radioactive cloud over Northern Ukraine and its neighbouring Belarus. Unaware of the danger, locals went about their business as usual, breathing in the noxious dust all around them. One of the worst man-made disasters of the 20th Century, Chernobyl’s damaging effects can be felt to this day. Heavy Water: A Film for Chernobyl tells the story of that fateful day and the people who dealt with the disaster at ground-level: the fire-fighters, the soldiers, the 'liquidators', and their families.
Nick Francis and Marc Francis
Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Dogwoof, 2007, 338.17373 FRA
Arguably the most valuable legally traded commodity in the world after oil, coffee's dark five-hundred year history links alchemy and anthropology, poetry and politics, and science and slavery. Revolutions have been hatched in coffee houses, secret socities and commercial alliances formed, and politics and art endlessly debated. With over a hundred million people looking to it for their livelihood, the coffee industry is now the world's largest employer and the financial lifeblood of many third-world countries. But with world prices at a historic low, the future looks uncertain. Nick and Marc Francis explore coffee's dismal colonial past and its perilous corporate present, revealing the shocking exploitation at the heart of the industry.
Gordon Brown
Britain's Everyday Heroes: The Making of the Good Society
Mainstream, 2007, 361.2 BRO
'This book is about people in all parts of Britain who have given me a fresh insight into the needs and aspirations of our country, what is great about it now and how it can become greater in the future. It is the story of Britain's everyday heroes: the kind of heroes who live next door, and in the next street, and throughout our neighbourhoods - the kind of heroes we might ourselves become.' - Gordon Brown.
This item was kindly donated by David Robinson, a Fellow of the RSA.
Philip Beadle (ed.)
Making Links: Fifteen Visions of Community
Community Links, 2007, 361.2 COM
Making Links celebrates the 30th anniversary of Community Links, and innovative charity at the forefront of community-based regeneration. This book draws together carried views on our communities and the ways we interact.
Both Britain's Everyday Heroes: The Making of the Good Society and Making Links: Fifteen Visions of Community were kindly donated by David Robinson, a Fellow of the RSA, who also contributes an essay to the latter.
Clem Henricson
The Contractual Culture and Family Services: A Discussion
Family & Planning Institute, 2007, 362.404 HEN
Public service reform has been a significant issue for successive governments that have explored engagement with markets and differing degrees on centralisation and now localism. Yet for all the changing directions, a common theme throughout public service enhancement is a tightening of the contract with those who deliver public services on our behalf. How is this affecting children’s and family services? Is what has come to be known as the contractual culture’ in public services meeting children’s and family’s needs? This discussion report is intended to stimulate debate on the relationship between government, professionals and consumers of family services. It is critical reading for all those engaged in shaping the direction of this important and often contentious area of social policy.
Andrew Coyle
Understanding Prisons: Key Issues in Policy and Practice
Open University Press, 2005, 365 COY
There are over nine million men, women and children in prison around the world, and the number of people in prison in England and Wales has increased significantly in recent years. Yet in many respects prison remains the last secretive public institution in our society. Understanding Prisons provides a unique, in-depth examination of prisons - how they function, what they achieve, and their historical and political context.
Yvonna Jewkes (ed.)
Handbook on Prisons
Willan Publishing, 2007, 365 JEW
This is the most comprehensive and ambitious book on prisons to have been published, a key text for anybody studying the subject and an essential work of reference for practitioners working in prisons and other parts of the criminal justice system. It is especially timely in view of the many changes and debates about the role of prisons and their future organisation and management as part of the National Offender Management Service. A key aim of the book is to explore a wide range of historical and contemporary issues relating to prisons, imprisonment and prison management, and to chart likely future trends. Chapters in the book are written by leading scholars in the field, and reflect the range and depth of prison research and scholarship.
David Ramsbotham
Prisongate: The Shocking State of Britain’s Prisons and the Need for Visionary Change
Free Press, 2005, 365.941 RAM
The Victorian approach to the prison service was punitive rather than rehabilitating. Now that we understand that most prisoners are themselves victims of some sort that out-dated attitude must change. The role of the Criminal Justice System in our society is to protect the public by preventing crime. The prisons' role in this system is to prevent the next crime, or the next victim, by helping prisoners to lead useful and law-abiding lives both in their time in prison and afterwards. Statistics show they are failing. The only government White Paper on the subject of imprisonment, published in the wake of serious riots in Manchester in 1991, has not been actioned.
Mick Ryan
Penal Policy and Political Culture in England and Wales
Waterside Press, 2003, 365.942 RYA
Mick Ryan argues that penal populism, generated by special interest victims groups and the populist New Right of the 1980s hijacking the terms of the debate around prison policy, may make the liberal elite feel uncomfortable, but it will not go away. His argument is that we live in an age where political deference is in rapid retreat, and that the public voice will have an increasing role to play in determining how we respond to a whole range of sensitive social issues, including penal issues.
Nicolas Philibert
Être et Avoir
Tartan DVD, 2003, 372 PHI
Charting the events within a small single-class village school over the course of one academic year, Etre et Avoir takes a warm and serene look at primary education in the French heartlands. A dozen youngsters, aged 4-10, are brought together in a rural classroom and taught every subject by a single teacher. A master of quiet authority, he patiently navigates the children towards adolescence, cooling down their arguments and listening to their problems with extraordinary dedication. Soon, however, he will have to say goodbye to those older students, who are now ready to go onto the state school in the local town.
Lindy Woodhead
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge
Profile, 2007, 381.141092 WOO
The men who created the first department stores - what Zola called 'great cathedrals of shopping' - made vast fortunes, but no one grasped the concept of consumption as a sensual female entertainment better than the maverick American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge. In 1909, London's first dedicated department store built from scratch opened in a glorious burst of publicity, spearheaded by the largest advertising campaign ever mounted in the British press. In his eponymous store, Selfridge created nothing less than 'the theatre of retail'. His personal life was just as flamboyant, one of mistresses and mansions, racehorses and yachts.
This book was kindly donated to the library by Lindy Woodhead, a Fellow of the RSA.
Stephanie Black
Life and Debt
Axiom Films, 2004, 382.7 BLA
Narrated by excerpts from Jamaica Kinkaid’s A Small Place, Life and Debt is a woven tapestry of sequences focusing on the stories of individual Jamaicans whose strategies for survival and parameters of day-to-day existence are determined by the US and other foreign economic agendas.
On and Off the Rails: The British Transport Films Collection, Volume One
BFI, 2007, 385.36 BFI
Following the nationalisation of transport in 1948, the British Transport Commission set up its own in-house film production unit. Launched on 1st May, 1949, and led for 25 years by Edgar Anstey OBE - a founding father of the British documentary movement - it become one of the largest industrial film units in Britain.
400s – Language
500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics
Guy Brown
The Living End: The Future of Death, Aging and Immortality
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 571.939 BRO
Death has changed. The decline of infections, starvation, warfare, heart attack and stroke has allowed people to reach extreme old age but ushered in disability, dementia and degenerative disease, with profound consequences for the self and society. Dr Guy Brown explores these vital issues at various levels, from the cell, to the whole body, and to society. He reveals that cell death dominates modern medicine and reveals how cloning and electronic interfaces hint at new modes of 'survival' after death.
John Stewart
Evolution's Arrow: The Direction of Evolution and the Future of Humanity
Chapman Press, 2000, 576.8 STE
Evolution's Arrow argues that evolution is directional and progressive, and that this has major consequences for humanity. It demonstrates that evolution moves in the direction of producing cooperative organisations of greater scale and evolvability - evolution has organised molecular processes into cells, cells into organisms, and organisms into societies.
Hubert Sauper
Darwin’s Nightmare
Umbrella Entertainment, 2006, 591.7 SAU
Sometime in the 1960’s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. The new fish multiplied so fast, however, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their cargo: Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the centre of the continent.
600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)
Nigel M. de S. Cameron and M. Ellen Mitchell (eds)
Nanoscale: Issues and Perspective for the Nano Century
Wiley, 2007, 620.5 CAM
This book presents an authoritative examination of the present and potential impact of nanoscale science and technology on modern life. Because truly transformative technologies have far-reaching consequences, they always generate controversy. Establishing an effective process for identifying and understanding the broad implications of nanotechnology will advance its acceptance and success, impact the decisions of policymakers and regulatory agencies, and facilitate the development of judicious policy approaches to new technology options. Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century addresses the emerging ethical, legal, policy, business, and social issues.
Chris Paine
Who Killed the Electric Car?
Sony, 2007, 625.24 PAI
Chris Paine shows how this unique approach to vehicle design came into being and why General Motors ended up reclaiming its once-prized creation less than a decade later. He begins 100 years ago with the original electric car. By the 1920s, the internal-combustion engine had rendered it obsolete. By the 1980s, however, car companies started exploring alternative energy sources, like solar power. This, in turn, led to the late, great battery-powered EV1. Throughout, Paine deftly translates hard science and complex politics, such as California's Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, into lay person's terms.
Andy Gibb
Get that Job! The Complete, Thorough, Hands-on Guide to the Whole Recruitment and Selection Process - for Graduates and Ambitious Executives in Early Career
How To Books, 2007, 650.14 GIB
Choosing your career, changing your job, and getting selected by the organization that's right for you are amongst the most important decisions of your life. You need detailed practical advice - on career choice; on what organizations look for in the people they recruit; and on tips and techniques to get you through the stages of their selection process. These include presenting a cv, undergoing interviews, taking assessment tests, negotiating salaries and working with head hunters. All are covered in this book. Organizations are increasingly using sophisticated selection techniques, so this book is important if you are not to lose out to someone less talented but better prepared.
This book has been kindly donated to the Library by Andy Gibb, and Fellow of the RSA.
Robert Greenwald
Wal*Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Tartan Films, 2006, 658.879 GRE
Director Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) continues his expose of disturbing corporate doings with Wal*Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. From the benefits packages and treatment of staff to the effect of the company on small businesses, the documentary addresses the simple question: does America benefit from the presence of this low-priced chain? Employee testimony and statistics make Greenwald's case clear and effective, and the stories of enforced, unpaid overtime and the death of small businesses make for a compelling case against the company.
700s – The Arts
Robert Hoozee
British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art, 1750-1950
Mercatorfonds, 2007, 709.41 HOO
British Vision is an overview of two centuries of British art, representing every major artist, including William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, William Blake, John Constable, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The exhibition brings together over three hundred works of art from public and private collections throughout Britain, in addition to loans from major collections in Europe and the United States of America, including a self-portrait of James Barry, who painted the sequence The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture for our Great Room.
Sydney Pollack
Sketches of Frank Gehry
Artificial Eye, 2007, 720.92 POL
Frank Gehry and Sydney Pollack are two of the best-known names in their respective fields of architecture and filmmaking. In his first documentary, Academy Award-winning director Pollack turns his camera on to his long-time friend Gehry, one of the world s most celebrated architects and creator of some of the greatest buildings of the modern era including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Pollack uncovers Gehry s creative process, from his early abstract sketches and three dimensional models to the awe-inspiring finished structures. Shot in an informal, highly accessible style and featuring contributions from Gehry’s contemporaries, clients and admirers including Philip Johnson, Dennis Hopper and Julian Schnabel among others, the film is a fascinating portrait of the man whose masterpieces have transformed a conventional science into an extraordinary art form.
Gerfried Stocker
Ars Electronica 2007: Goodbye Privacy
Hatje Cantz, 2007, 776.7 STO
In the companion volume to the 2007 Ars Electronica Festival, artists, theoreticians and experienced network-nomads elaborate on our culture of everyday life and the late-breaking phenomena that are being played out between angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personae with digital media.
Alice Maude-Roxby (ed.)
Live Art on Camera: Performance and Photography
John Hansard Gallery, 2007, 778 MAU
A catalogue of the recent exhibition of the same name at Southampton University’s John Hansard Gallery that examined the nature of performance art and the status of the photographs and videos that document it.
This item has kindly been donated to the Library by the Gallery’s director, Stephen Foster, a Fellow of the RSA.
Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Žižek
A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
P Guide, 2007, 791.43 ŽIŽ
A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is a film about cinema itself, with close readings of some of the most intriguing and celebrated films in cinema’s history. Serving as guide is the charismatic Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, who delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves.
Daniel Frampton
Filmosophy
Wallflower, 2006, 791.4301 FRE
Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. The book coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Munsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of 'film-thinking', arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic 'intent' about the characters, spaces and events of film. With discussions of contemporary filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, this timely intervention into the study of film and philosophy will stir argument and discussion among both filmgoers and filmmakers alike.
Patrick Russell
100 British Documentaries
BFI, 2007, 791.436 RUS
Ever since John Grierson popularized the term documentary, British non-fiction film has been renowned, sometimes reviled, but seldom properly appreciated. 100 British Documentaries provides a uniquely accessible, occasionally provocative introduction to a rich and surprisingly varied tradition by considering 100 examples taken from across a century's worth of output. The 100 films range from the Victorian period to the present day.
Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine
Ballets Russes
Revolver Entertainment, 2006, 792.8 GEL
Filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine pay tribute to the revolutionary 20th Century dance troupe Ballets Russes (French for the Russian Ballet) in this enthralling documentary. From their humble origins as Russian refugees residing in turn-of-the-century Paris to dazzling feats of artistry, this documentary maps the company's illustrious career right up until its demise in the 1950s and '60s (brought about by rising costs, rocketing egos, outside competition, and internal mismanagement). Culled from archive footage and infused with juicy anecdotal interviews from many of the company's glamorous stars, Ballets Russes treats modern audiences to a rare glimpse of the phenomenon that transformed the face of ballet for generations to come.
Kevin Macdonald
Touching the Void
Film4, 2007, 796.522 MAC
Director Kevin McDonald tells this compelling story by combining talking-head interviews with Simpson and Yates and stunningly photographed narrative footage--in which Simpson and Yates' ordeal is actually re-enacted on Siula Grande. McDonald's re-enactment footage is both engrossing and eye-popping and it could easily stand alone as its own one-of-a-kind adventure film. The interviews, however, add depth that make this a unique, thrilling, and emotional piece of cinema.
Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell
Deep Water
Pathé!, 2006, 797.124 OSM
Deep Water tells the story of Donald Crowhurst, who entered the first Sunday Times Golden Globe solo, non-stop, round-the-world, boat race in 1968. His boat began its journey slowly but, as the race progressed, reports of his position at sea showed that electronics inventor Crowhurst was covering great distances every day. The news made headlines across the world but as the world waited for Crowhurst to cross the finishing line, the shocking truth was revealed. Deep Water includes interviews with Donald Crowhurst’s family and is narrated by actress Tilda Swinton.
800s – Literature
Fredric Jameson
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions
Verso, 2007, 809.38762 JAM
This is a brilliant study of utopia and science fiction, from Thomas More to Philip K. Dick, by the master literary critic. Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's most substantial work since Postmodernism, investigates the development of the Utopian form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of Utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more.
900s – Geography & History
Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis
Jonathan Cape, 2006, 920.55 SAT
Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is an exemplary memoir in graphic noel form, and collected here are its two volumes, The Story of a Childhood - detailing the effects of the Islamic Revolution on the six-year-old Marjane Satrapi and her committed, well-to-do Marxist parents - and its sequel The Story of a Reuturn about the time the family spent in Vienna after fleeing Iran in 1984, and their lives in Iran upon returning four years later. Persepolis gives the reader a snapshot of daily life in a country struggling with an internal cultural revolution and a bloody war, but within an intensely personal context. It's a very human history, beautifully and sympathetically told.
Mark Jonathan Harris
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
Warner Bros., 2000, 940.53 HAR
Winner of the 2001 Oscar for Best Documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers attempts to expose and understand one of the forgotten travesties of the Second World War. While the evacuation of British children during the Second World War has become the stuff of legend, the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children from Germany is less well known. This programme of "kindertransport" was to provide a vital escape route to England for many children, but would also leave many heartbroken families behind to face an uncertain future at the hands of the Nazis. Told mainly in the first person by those who made the journey, this American produced documentary is a moving testament to the most innocent victims--one and a half million children perished in the Holocaust.
Claude Lanzmann
Shoah
Eureka!, 2007, 940.5318 LAN
Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Polska Szkoła Dokumentu
Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizulne, 2007, 943.8 KIE
Polska Szkoła Dokumentu (The Polish School of Documentary) is two-disc set collecting 12 of acclaimed director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s previously hard-to-find documentaries. Against the policy of the Communist government to present the country as they wished it to be seen, Kieślowski sought to document how it really was, creating intimate portraits of the lives of individuals inside the bureaucratic systems.
Alexander Sokurov
Russian Ark
Artificial Eye, 2002, 947 SOK
Russian master Alexander Sokurov has tapped into the very flow of history itself for the flabbergasting Russian Ark. Sokurov (and cinematographer Tilman Buttner) use a single, unbroken, 90-minute shot to wind his way through the Hermitage in St Petersburg - the repository of Russian art and the former home to royalty. Gliding through time, we glimpse Catherine II, modern-day museumgoers, and the doomed family of Nicholas II. History collapses on itself, as the opulence of the past and the horrors of the 20th century collide, and each door that opens onto yet another breathtaking gallery is another century to be heard from. The movie climaxes with a grand ball and thousands of extras, prompting thoughts of just how crazy Sokurov had to be to try a technical challenge like this - and how far a distance we've travelled, both physically and spiritually, since the movie began.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Infidel: My Life
Free, 2007, 949.2073092 ALI
The brutal murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh in 2004 shocked the world. Shot and mutilated by a Muslim fanatic as he cycled to work, it was a stark reminder of the dangers of challenging an extreme Islamic worldview. It also changed the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, van Gogh's collaborator on the film that had offended his murderer. Born in Somalia and raised a Muslim, she had escaped an arranged marriage and made a new life as a Dutch parliamentarian, championing the reform of Islam and its attitude to women's rights. She now has twenty-four-hour police protection, but refuses to let that inhibit her willingness to speak out.
Joe Sacco
Safe Area Goražde
Jonathan Cape, 2007, 949.649742 SAC
In late 1995 and early 1996, cartoonist and reporter Joe Sacco travelled four times to Goražde, a UN-designated safe area during the Bosnian War, which had teetered on the brink of obliteration for three and a half years/ Still surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces, the mainly Muslim people of Goražde had endured heavy attacks and severe privation to hang on to their town while the rest of Eastern Bosnia was brutally ‘cleansed’ of its non-Serb population. But as much as Safe Area Goražde is an account of a terrible siege, it presents a snapshot of people who were slowly letting themselves believe that a war was ending and that they had survived.
Alan Johnston
Kidnapped and other Dispatches
Profile, 2007, 953.1055092 JOH
When Alan Johnston, the last western journalist who dared to remain in Gaza, was kidnapped by religious terrorists - millions of people, from the backstreets of Gaza to London, New York and Johannesburg, felt the need to express their anger and their determination to see him free. The captivity of Alan Johnston was a historical attack on the freedom of speech - and this collection of his dispatches is the long awaited and moving account of life in Gaza, his ordeal and his release.
James Longley
Iraq in Fragments
ICA Films, 2007, 956.7 LON
Iraq in Fragments is a hard-hitting, yet poignant documentary of three parts. A fatherless boy is inducted into an apprenticeship in a garage; Sadr supporters rally for regional elections, while violently enforcing Islamic law; a group of Kurdish farmers welcome the US presence and a freedom them have been denied until now. This incredibly photographed, well-balanced documentary looks at life through the eyes of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds and is the sum of the two years American director James Longley struggled to encapsulate a war that is being fought on three fronts.
Avi Mograbi
Nekam Achat Mishtey Eynay
Secondrun, 2006, 956.94 MOG
Shot in the Occupied Territories by renowned Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, Nekam Achat Mishtey Eynay (Avenge but One of my Two Eyes) is a controversial documentary drawing parallels between the Israeli - Palestinian situation today and the myths of Samson and Masada. Mograbi makes provocative comparisons between Israeli's deep-rooted identification with these stories and contemporary Palestinian suicide bombers. He offers a powerful, at times chilling, lament to the continuing cycles of violence, rooted in the past but threatening to completely engulf everyone's future. A believer in the power of dialogue, Mograbi is passionate in his desire to see an end to the bloodshed.
Phil Grabsky
The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan
Vital, 2006, 958.1 GRA
For over 25 years, Afghanistan has been at war. In March 2001, the ruling Taliban destroyed the tallest stone statues in the world, the 'Buddhas of Bamiyan'. One of the refugees who now lives among the ruins is an eight-year-old boy called Mir. This astonishingly intimate film explores the lives of Mir and his family. Through summer, winter and spring we follow Mir's adventures as he gets into the kind of fun and mischief of any 8-year-old boy, against the magnificent backdrop of Bamiyan and its ruined statues. As Mir grows, the adults around him reveal what life has been like over the past two decades, a period in which hundreds of thousands of children like Mir have been killed. Phil Grabsky's film is a unique portrait of everyday life in modern Afghanistan.
Barbet Schroeder
General Idi Amin Dada Autoportrait
Eureka!, 2007, 967.91042 SCH
If this documentary about one of the twentieth century’s most reviled dictators were fiction it would be acclaimed as a comic masterpiece; but it is all true. With an ambition the size of Napoleon, Idi Amin considered himself a major leader and revolutionary on the world stage. In reality, his regime was amateurish, disorganised, and his maniacal command both hilarious and bizarre.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Friday, December 07, 2007
Featured Book - "John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand"
Richard Reeves
John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
Atlantic, 2007, 192 REE
Journalist, author and RSA Fellow Richard Reeves' latest book is a rehabilitating biography of Britain's "greatest liberal," John Stuart Mill. Against Gladstone’s enduring characterisation of Mill as the patron saint of rationalism, Reeves highlights the controversy of he inspired as a prominent public intellectual of his day.
But if Mill wasn’t a dower intellectual, that’s not because his thought lacks merit. As Reeves argued in The Guardian recently, liberal democracy has become the standard form of Government and public ethics, yet there has been little use of past liberal philosophies to think about what this means for societies and their citizens.
Reeves’ work reviving John Stuart Mill as a philosopher worth engaging with is an important opening remark in this vital conversation.
To read more about Reeves' views on Mill, see his portait for Prospect magazine, and for more on Victorian Firebrand, see The Spectator's review.
To borrow a copy of John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, please contact the RSA Library.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Featured book - "We-Think"
Charlie Leadbeater
We-Think
forthcoming
Blogged by Tessy Britton at the Open RSA blog, Charles Leadbeater’s forthcoming book makes a mockery of the term “forthcoming book” by being available online, along with all the value-added digital goodies that are normally reserved for subscribers, for free, right now, months before it comes out in print.
One of the introductory speakers at the launch of RSA Networks yesterday, Leadbeater spoke then, as in does in this book, on the power of large groups of people operating on Open Source principles to create, refine and implement revolutionary and powerful new ideas, from the free operating system Linux to the community-organised classified ads of Craigslist.
In describing, explaining and promoting the capacity for self-regulating, self-creating networks of individuals to generate public goods, We-Think forms a valuable reference for the work the RSA is currently undertaking to transform the relationship the its Fellows, as well as between the Fellows themselves.
To find out more about the RSA’s work in this area you can follow, and join in, the discussions on the RSA Networks and OpenRSA blogs.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Featured Book - "Multicultural Odysseys"
Will Kymlicka
Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity
Oxford University Press, 2007, 323.1 KYM
We are currently witnessing the global diffusion of multiculturalism, both as a political discourse and as a set of international legal norms. States today are under increasing international scrutiny regarding their treatment of ethnocultural groups, and are expected to meet evolving international standards regarding the rights of indigenous peoples, national minorities, and immigrants. Yet this phenomenon isn’t just the result of internal pressure from the minorities that live within these states, but is also advocated, and even demanded, by inter-state bodies such as the UN and EU.
However, the formulation and implementation of these international norms has generated a number of dilemmas. The policies adopted by international organizations to deal with ethnic diversity are driven by conflicting impulses. Pessimism about the destabilizing consequences of ethnic politics alternates with optimism about the prospects for a peaceful and democratic form of multicultural politics.
The result is often an unstable mix of paralyzing fear and naive hope, rooted in conflicting imperatives of security and justice. Moreover, given the enormous differences in the characteristics of minorities (eg., their size, territorial concentration, cultural markers, historic relationship to the state), it is difficult to formulate standards that apply to all groups. Yet attempts to formulate more targeted norms that apply only to specific categories of minorities (eg., "indigenous peoples" or "national minorities") have proven controversial and unstable.
Yet the emerging international framework for minority rights has proved popular as a framework within which minority groups in a wide variety of countries, from tribal groups in Africa divided by state boundaries to immigrant groups in Western Europe, to make claims for greater recognition and autonomy. Against those critics who argue that this multiculturalism is a threat to the universal human rights it calls upon, Kymlicka shows that the laws and norms that govern these claims are inspired and constrained by the human rights revolution, and embedded in a framework of liberal-democratic values.
The RSA has recently hosted two lectures on how societies do or don’t cope with this new politics of multiculturalism: Paul Snideman on When Ways of Life Collide and Anne Phillips on Multiculturalism without Culture. Please cick the titles for more information and full audio downloads of the events.
To borrow a copy of Multicultural Odysseys, please contact the RSA Library.
Friday, November 09, 2007
RSA Library Update - November 2007
What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of September 2007. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....
000s – Generalities
Helen Forde
Preserving Archives
Facet, 2006, 025.84 FOR
Access to archival material - the documentary heritage of people all over the world that gives them their identity and ensures their rights - is dependent on the survival of fragile materials: paper, parchment, photographic materials, audiovisual materials and, most recently, magnetic and optical formats. The primary importance of such survival is widely acknowledged but sometimes overlooked in a rush to provide ever better means of access. But without the basic material, no services can be offered. Preservation is the heart of archival activity. Archivists in all types of organizations face questions of how to plan a preservation strategy in less than perfect circumstances, or deal with a sudden emergency, and this practical book considers the causes of threats to the basic material, outlines the preservation options available and offers flexible solutions applicable in a variety of situations.
100s – Philosophy & Psychology
Richard Reeves
John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
Atlantic, 2007, 192 REE
John Stuart Mill was a vigorous activist who began campaigning for accessible contraceptive methods when he was just seventeen, shocked into action after finding a recently killed newborn baby in a park. He would become, in time, the highest-ranked English thinker of the century, the author of On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his opinionated age. Mill was always a headstrong individual: as a journalist he fired off an article a week on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, and as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve the rights of free-speech and was bitterly opposed to slavery. To understand Mill, and his contribution not only to his own century but to ours, Reeves explores this figure's life and work in tandem. John Stuart Mill is a portrait of a man raised to promote happiness and whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.
200s – Religion
300s – Social Sciences
Nicola Madge and John Barker
Risk & Childhood
RSA, 2007, 302.12 MAD
Growing up is a risky business. From the moment of birth children face an array of hazards and challenges, most of which they overcome or deal with successfully - but some of which they do not. As parents and citizens we want to minimise the harm that may come to our children, but what does this mean in reality? How much safer can we make children’s lives, and should making them as safe as possible always be our goal? The new report from the The RSA Risk Commision seeks to answer these questions, and judging by the press it’s been getting, just in time, too.
Hannah Green and Celia Hannon
Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation
Demos, 2007, 302.231 GRE
Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media.
Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy.
Cass R. Sunstein
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
Oxford University Press, 2006, 303.4833 CAS
The rise of the information society offers not only considerable peril but also great promise. Beset from all sides by a never-ending barrage of media, how can we ensure that the most accurate information emerges and is heeded? Cass R. Sunstein here develops a deeply optimistic understanding of the human potential to pool information, combat groupthink, and to use that knowledge to improve our lives. New ways, many Internet-based, to share and aggregate information--including wikis, open-source software, and prediction markets--are helping companies, schools, governments, and individuals not only to acquire, but also to create, ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge without succumbing to the dangers of a hive-mind mentality. In a world where opinion and anecdote increasingly compete on equal footing with hard evidence, the on-line effort of many minds coming together could provide the best path to infotopia.
Cass R. Sunstein
Republic.com 2.0
Princeton University Press, 2007, 303.4833 CAS
What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to create echo chambers - to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the democratic benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly limit the information they receive, creating ever-smaller niches and fragmenting the shared public conversation on which democracy depends? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions before 9/11, in Republic.com, and they have become even more urgent in the years since. Now, in Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Web logs have emerged as a significant force in politics and where cyber-jihadists have embraced the Internet to thwart democracy and spread violence. Sunstein will present a lunchtime lecture here at the RSA on Republic.com 2.0 on Thursday 7 December. Please click here for more information and to book your place.
Libby Brookes
The Story of Childhood: Growing Up In Modern Britain
Bloomsbury, 2006, 305.230941 BRO
The bestseller charts would suggest that we savour stories of unhappy upbringings - are in fact greedy for them, the worse the better - but in today's ASBO-afflicted Britain, it is clear that there is much we don't understand about contemporary childhood. Children today are the focus of much of society's anxieties: about behaviour, nutrition, sexuality, consumerism, achievement, responsibility, about what exactly is the proper shape of a life. But, how does it really feel to be growing up today, from the inside? This extraordinary book tracks ten very different children between the ages of two and sixteen, each chosen for how they illuminate a particular archetype of childhood experience, or an especial locus of adult anxiety. Woven through each chapter are trips into more discursive territory, but essentially, this is childhood told from the inside: a travel book about a state of being, telling the story of contemporary childhood with the help of those who still reside there.
Joan Wallach Scott
The Politics of the Veil
Princeton University Press, 2007, 305.6970944 SCO
In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of conspicuous signs of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all. Joan Wallach Scott, the renowned pioneer of gender studies, argues that the law is symptomatic of France's failure to integrate its former colonial subjects as full citizens. She emphasizes the conflicting approaches to sexuality that lie at the heart of the debate - how French supporters of the ban view sexual openness as the standard for normalcy, emancipation, and individuality, and the sexual modesty implicit in the headscarf as proof that Muslims can never become fully French, and shows how the insistence on homogeneity is no longer feasible for France - or the West in general. The Politics of the Veil calls for a new vision of community, where common ground is found amid our differences and the embracing of diversity - not its suppression - is recognized as the best path to social harmony.
Andy Wilson
Northern Soul: Drug Use, Crime and Social Identity in the 1970s Northern Soul Scene
Willan, 2007, 306.1 WIL
This book provides a vivid historical ethnography of the 1970s Northern Soul scene, drawing on the author's personal involvement in this as well extensive research, and the book examines how cultural patterns and normative standards are established through individual practices and group interaction, aiming to show how participants in the scene became converted to actions that they once thought unacceptable - for a substantial majority this was amphetamine use, and for a minority, opiate use and burglary. Northern Soul shows how early life influences have a powerful impact on shaping social identity, attachment to the subculture, and involvement in crime.
McKenzie Ward
Gamer Theory
Harvard University Press, 2007, 306.487 WAR
Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace; both where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field - where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all. Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society, depicting a world as an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona: in place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer.
Daniel Hind
The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It
Verso Books, 2007, 320.01 HIN
Today, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there's a problem with these claims: they aren't true. In this urgent new book, Daniel Hind confronts the great machinery of deception in which we live, and which now threatens to destroy our civilization. In particular, he takes to task a group of prominent intellectuals who have exaggerated the threat posed by the so-called forces of unreason - religion, postmodernism and other mumbo-jumbo. The commentators, says Hind, distract us from much more pressing threats to an open democratic society based on freedom of speech and inquiry. This book shows that the real threats to reason aren't wacky or foreign or stupid; they reside in our state and corporate bureaucracies.
James Bohman
Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi
MIT, 2007, 321.8 BOH
This title offers an innovative conception of democracy for an era of globalization and delegation of authority beyond the nation-state: rule by peoples across borders rather than by the people within a fixed jurisdiction. Today, democracy is both exalted as the best means to realize human rights and seen as weakened because of globalization and delegation of authority beyond the nation-state. In this provocative book, James Bohman argues that democracies face a period of renewal and transformation and that democracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal. Democracy, he writes, should be rethought in the plural; it should no longer be understood as rule by the people (dêmos), singular, with a specific territorial identification and connotation, but as rule by peoples (dêmoi), across national boundaries.
Will Kymlicka
Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity
Oxford University Press, 2007, 323.1 KYM
We are currently witnessing the global diffusion of multiculturalism, both as a political discourse and as a set of international legal norms. States today are under increasing international scrutiny regarding their treatment of ethnocultural groups, and are expected to meet evolving international standards regarding the rights of indigenous peoples, national minorities, and immigrants. This phenomenon represents a veritable revolution in international relations, yet has received little public or scholarly attention. In this book, Kymlicka examines the factors underlying this change, and the challenges it raises. Against those critics who argue that multiculturalism is a threat to universal human rights, Kymlicka shows that the sort of multiculturalism that is being globalized is inspired and constrained by the human rights revolution, and embedded in a framework of liberal-democratic values.
Lawrence Lessig
Code, Version 2.0
Basic Books, 2006, 343.09944 LES
There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated - that is, its very essence is immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code, Version 2.0, first published in 2000 and revised to it’s current form through public debates on the book’s wiki, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no nature. It only has code - the software and hardware that makes cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom - as the original architecture of the Net did - or a place of oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable space, where behaviour is much more tightly controlled than in real space. But that's not inevitable either. We can - we must - choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee.
Lawrence Lessing
The Future of Ideas: The Face of the Commons in a Connected World
Vintage, 2003, 346.048 LES
The Internet revolution has come, and some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pockets of media magnates, has rewritten copyright and patent laws to stifle creativity and progress. Lessig weaves the history of technology and its relevant laws to make a lucid and accessible case to protect the sanctity of intellectual freedom. He shows how the door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology is creating extraordinary possibilities that have implications for all of us. Vital, eloquent, judicious and forthright, The Future of Ideas is a call to arms that we can ill afford to ignore.
Simon Parker and Sophia Parker
Unlocking Innovation: Why Citizens Hold the Key to Public Sector Reform
Demos, 2007, 353.48 PAR
Edited by Simon Parker and the RSA’s Sophia Parker, Unlocking Innovation collects essays and analysis from a wide range of public sector experts and practitioners. The chapters offer lessons on how public services can better engage their users based on examples of best practice in the public and private sectors. Sophia Parker has also written about effective engagement for the RSA Journal and the RSA Network’s blog.
Michael Barber
Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, Public Services and the Challenge of Achieving Targets
Politico’s, 2007, 361.60941 BAR
In Tony Blair's first term, 1997-2001, much was promised in reform of social services, but relatively little was achieved - except perhaps in Education, where Michael Barber was head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit. For 2001-05, the commitment was to real change in domestic policy, and Sir Michael Barber was appointed head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU), to concentrate on specific targets, initially 17, such as casualty waiting time, school tests, league tables, street crime, transport etc. Much was achieved, despite great tension, pressures, chaos and challenges, as a new working philosophy was created to combine otherwise 'warring parties' - the PM, the Chancellor, the Cabinet, the PM'S special team, and senior civil servants. Michael Barber reveals a fascinating insider and personal account of how the PMDU achieved so much, and provides a revealing picture of the major players, especially Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Edmund W. Gordon, Beatrice L. Bridglall and Aundra Saa Meroe (eds.)
Supplementary Education: the Hidden Curriculum of High Academic Achievement
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, 370.111 GOR
This book makes the case and lays the conceptual foundation for the significance of supplementary education in reducing the academic achievement gap between majority students and students of color. It further elaborates on the idea of supplementary education, which is based on the assumption that high academic achievement is closely associated with exposure to family and community-based activities and learning experiences that occur outside of school in support of academic learning.
Roberto Managabeira Unger
Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics
Princeton University Press, 2007, 382.71 UNG
Free Trade Reimagined begins with a sustained criticism of the heart of the emerging world economy: the theory and practice of free trade. Roberto Mangabeira Unger does not, however, defend protectionism against free trade. Instead, he attacks and revises the terms on which the traditional debate between free traders and protectionists has been joined. Unger's intervention in this major contemporary debate serves as a point of departure for a proposal to rethink the basic ideas with which we explain economic activity. He suggests, by example as well as by theory, a way of understanding contemporary economies that is both more realistic and more revealing of hidden possibilities for transformation than are the established forms of economics. One message of the book is that we need not choose between accepting and rejecting globalization; we can have a different globalization. Unger will present a lunchtime lecture here at the RSA on Free Trade Reimagined on Thursday 19 November. Please click here for more information and to book your place.
400s – Language
500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics
600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)
Helen Lewis and John Gertsakis (eds.)
Design + Enviroment: A Global Guide to Designing Greener Goods
Greenleaf, 2001 658.5752 LEW
This work helps the reader understand how and why design for environment (DfE) has become so critical to design. The authors show how to design a product that meets requirements for quality, cost, manufacturability and consumer appeal, while at the same time minimizing environmental impacts.
John Grant
The Brand Innovation Manifesto: How to Build Brands, Redefine Markets and Defy Conventions
John Wiley, 2006, 658.827 GRA
The days of the image brands are over, and ‘new marketing’ has gone mainstream. The world’s biggest companies are pursuing a post-advertising strategy, moving away from advertising and investing in leading edge alternatives. In the vanguard of the revolution has been John Grant, and in The Brand Innovation Manifesto, he redefines the nature of brands, showing why old models and scales no longer work and revealing that the key to success today is impacting people’s lifestyles (think Starbucks, iPod and eBay). At the heart of the book is the concept of the ‘brand molecule’ to which new cultural ideas can be constantly added to keep pace with change.
700s – The Arts
Derek Chong
Arts Management
Routledge, 2001, 700.68 CHO
Interest in aesthetics and organisation/management studies is growing at the start of the twenty first century, and this book offers a critical overview of arts management as a vital sub-discipline, addressing the artistic, managerial and social obligations of arts and cultural organisations operating in contemporary urban environs.
Brandon Taylor
Art for the Nation
Manchester University, 1999, 708.21 TAY
Art first became public in Britain through a series of interlocking relationships between national galleries, patrons, collections of art, and sections or classes of the population as a whole. This study concentrates on London, and analyzes the formation of the major national art institutions at its geographical and managerial centre. An image emerges of the character of official British culture and the audiences that it postulated and assumed. From the first public exhibitions in London in the 1760s through to the 1960s and beyond, a series of institutions either patronized by the monarch or administered directly by the state - or both - has set the tone for the manners and attitudes of the viewing public of the nation as a whole.
Jonathan Chapman (ed.)
Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories: a Collection of Sustainable Design Essays
Earthscan, 2007, 720.47 CHA
Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories unpacks the complex and crucial debates surrounding sustainable design to deliver a compelling manifesto for change, at a time of looming ecological crisis, mounting environmental legislations and limited sustainable design progress. This is a book about sustainable design, by the leading sustainable design thinkers, for creative practitioners of all disciplines - professionals, students and academics. This challenging book provides the reader with a rich resource of future visions, critical propositions, creative ideas and design strategies for working towards a sustainable tomorrow, today. It boldly presents alternative understandings of sustainable design, to curate a challenging, sometimes uncomfortable and always provocative collection of essays by some of the world's leading sustainable design thinkers. The result is an impacting anthology that reinvigorates the culture of critique that in previous years has empowered design with the qualities of social, environmental and economic revolution.
Christopher J. Kitching
Archive Buildings in the United Kingdom, 1993-2005
Phillimore & Co. Ltd, 2007, 725.150941 KIT
In two parts, both extensively illustrated with photographs and plans, this title will appeal to archivists, librarians, architects, engineers, planners, and the general reader. The first part is a guide to good practice in the design and construction of archive buildings, and the second part contains a number of case studies of individual buildings. The research for this book was jointly sponsored by The National Archives and the Society of Genealogists.
Stewart Walker
Sustainable by Design: Explorations in Theory and Practice
Earthscan, 2006, 745.2 WAL
Sustainable by Design offers a compelling and innovative, design-centred approach that explores both the meaning and practice of sustainable design, exploring the design process in the context of sustainability, and challenges conventional ways of defining, designing and producing functional objects. He discusses the personal design process, tacit knowledge, ephemeral design, experimental design, and the relationship between intellectual design criteria, physical expression and aesthetic experience. This book will introduce vital concepts to students and will inspire designers by providing a well-articulated basis for understanding the complexity and potential of sustainable design, and extolling the contribution of design to the creation of a more meaningful material culture.
800s – Literature
900s – Geography & History
Roy Porter
Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
Penguin, 2001, 941.07 POR
For generations the focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but makes a case for considering Britain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to 20th-century America. Porter immerses the reader in a society which, recovering from the horrors of the Civil War and decisively reinvigorated by the revolution of 1688, had emerged as something new and extraordinary - a society unlike any other in the world. This explosion of activity left no one unchanged and created a society with many of the values we recognize and value today - sceptical, pleasure-obsessed, garrulous, innovative, meritocratic.
000s – Generalities
Helen Forde
Preserving Archives
Facet, 2006, 025.84 FOR
Access to archival material - the documentary heritage of people all over the world that gives them their identity and ensures their rights - is dependent on the survival of fragile materials: paper, parchment, photographic materials, audiovisual materials and, most recently, magnetic and optical formats. The primary importance of such survival is widely acknowledged but sometimes overlooked in a rush to provide ever better means of access. But without the basic material, no services can be offered. Preservation is the heart of archival activity. Archivists in all types of organizations face questions of how to plan a preservation strategy in less than perfect circumstances, or deal with a sudden emergency, and this practical book considers the causes of threats to the basic material, outlines the preservation options available and offers flexible solutions applicable in a variety of situations.
100s – Philosophy & Psychology
Richard Reeves
John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
Atlantic, 2007, 192 REE
John Stuart Mill was a vigorous activist who began campaigning for accessible contraceptive methods when he was just seventeen, shocked into action after finding a recently killed newborn baby in a park. He would become, in time, the highest-ranked English thinker of the century, the author of On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his opinionated age. Mill was always a headstrong individual: as a journalist he fired off an article a week on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, and as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve the rights of free-speech and was bitterly opposed to slavery. To understand Mill, and his contribution not only to his own century but to ours, Reeves explores this figure's life and work in tandem. John Stuart Mill is a portrait of a man raised to promote happiness and whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.
200s – Religion
300s – Social Sciences
Nicola Madge and John Barker
Risk & Childhood
RSA, 2007, 302.12 MAD
Growing up is a risky business. From the moment of birth children face an array of hazards and challenges, most of which they overcome or deal with successfully - but some of which they do not. As parents and citizens we want to minimise the harm that may come to our children, but what does this mean in reality? How much safer can we make children’s lives, and should making them as safe as possible always be our goal? The new report from the The RSA Risk Commision seeks to answer these questions, and judging by the press it’s been getting, just in time, too.
Hannah Green and Celia Hannon
Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation
Demos, 2007, 302.231 GRE
Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media.
Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy.
Cass R. Sunstein
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
Oxford University Press, 2006, 303.4833 CAS
The rise of the information society offers not only considerable peril but also great promise. Beset from all sides by a never-ending barrage of media, how can we ensure that the most accurate information emerges and is heeded? Cass R. Sunstein here develops a deeply optimistic understanding of the human potential to pool information, combat groupthink, and to use that knowledge to improve our lives. New ways, many Internet-based, to share and aggregate information--including wikis, open-source software, and prediction markets--are helping companies, schools, governments, and individuals not only to acquire, but also to create, ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge without succumbing to the dangers of a hive-mind mentality. In a world where opinion and anecdote increasingly compete on equal footing with hard evidence, the on-line effort of many minds coming together could provide the best path to infotopia.
Cass R. Sunstein
Republic.com 2.0
Princeton University Press, 2007, 303.4833 CAS
What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to create echo chambers - to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the democratic benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly limit the information they receive, creating ever-smaller niches and fragmenting the shared public conversation on which democracy depends? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions before 9/11, in Republic.com, and they have become even more urgent in the years since. Now, in Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Web logs have emerged as a significant force in politics and where cyber-jihadists have embraced the Internet to thwart democracy and spread violence. Sunstein will present a lunchtime lecture here at the RSA on Republic.com 2.0 on Thursday 7 December. Please click here for more information and to book your place.
Libby Brookes
The Story of Childhood: Growing Up In Modern Britain
Bloomsbury, 2006, 305.230941 BRO
The bestseller charts would suggest that we savour stories of unhappy upbringings - are in fact greedy for them, the worse the better - but in today's ASBO-afflicted Britain, it is clear that there is much we don't understand about contemporary childhood. Children today are the focus of much of society's anxieties: about behaviour, nutrition, sexuality, consumerism, achievement, responsibility, about what exactly is the proper shape of a life. But, how does it really feel to be growing up today, from the inside? This extraordinary book tracks ten very different children between the ages of two and sixteen, each chosen for how they illuminate a particular archetype of childhood experience, or an especial locus of adult anxiety. Woven through each chapter are trips into more discursive territory, but essentially, this is childhood told from the inside: a travel book about a state of being, telling the story of contemporary childhood with the help of those who still reside there.
Joan Wallach Scott
The Politics of the Veil
Princeton University Press, 2007, 305.6970944 SCO
In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of conspicuous signs of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all. Joan Wallach Scott, the renowned pioneer of gender studies, argues that the law is symptomatic of France's failure to integrate its former colonial subjects as full citizens. She emphasizes the conflicting approaches to sexuality that lie at the heart of the debate - how French supporters of the ban view sexual openness as the standard for normalcy, emancipation, and individuality, and the sexual modesty implicit in the headscarf as proof that Muslims can never become fully French, and shows how the insistence on homogeneity is no longer feasible for France - or the West in general. The Politics of the Veil calls for a new vision of community, where common ground is found amid our differences and the embracing of diversity - not its suppression - is recognized as the best path to social harmony.
Andy Wilson
Northern Soul: Drug Use, Crime and Social Identity in the 1970s Northern Soul Scene
Willan, 2007, 306.1 WIL
This book provides a vivid historical ethnography of the 1970s Northern Soul scene, drawing on the author's personal involvement in this as well extensive research, and the book examines how cultural patterns and normative standards are established through individual practices and group interaction, aiming to show how participants in the scene became converted to actions that they once thought unacceptable - for a substantial majority this was amphetamine use, and for a minority, opiate use and burglary. Northern Soul shows how early life influences have a powerful impact on shaping social identity, attachment to the subculture, and involvement in crime.
McKenzie Ward
Gamer Theory
Harvard University Press, 2007, 306.487 WAR
Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace; both where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field - where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all. Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society, depicting a world as an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona: in place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer.
Daniel Hind
The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It
Verso Books, 2007, 320.01 HIN
Today, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there's a problem with these claims: they aren't true. In this urgent new book, Daniel Hind confronts the great machinery of deception in which we live, and which now threatens to destroy our civilization. In particular, he takes to task a group of prominent intellectuals who have exaggerated the threat posed by the so-called forces of unreason - religion, postmodernism and other mumbo-jumbo. The commentators, says Hind, distract us from much more pressing threats to an open democratic society based on freedom of speech and inquiry. This book shows that the real threats to reason aren't wacky or foreign or stupid; they reside in our state and corporate bureaucracies.
James Bohman
Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi
MIT, 2007, 321.8 BOH
This title offers an innovative conception of democracy for an era of globalization and delegation of authority beyond the nation-state: rule by peoples across borders rather than by the people within a fixed jurisdiction. Today, democracy is both exalted as the best means to realize human rights and seen as weakened because of globalization and delegation of authority beyond the nation-state. In this provocative book, James Bohman argues that democracies face a period of renewal and transformation and that democracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal. Democracy, he writes, should be rethought in the plural; it should no longer be understood as rule by the people (dêmos), singular, with a specific territorial identification and connotation, but as rule by peoples (dêmoi), across national boundaries.
Will Kymlicka
Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity
Oxford University Press, 2007, 323.1 KYM
We are currently witnessing the global diffusion of multiculturalism, both as a political discourse and as a set of international legal norms. States today are under increasing international scrutiny regarding their treatment of ethnocultural groups, and are expected to meet evolving international standards regarding the rights of indigenous peoples, national minorities, and immigrants. This phenomenon represents a veritable revolution in international relations, yet has received little public or scholarly attention. In this book, Kymlicka examines the factors underlying this change, and the challenges it raises. Against those critics who argue that multiculturalism is a threat to universal human rights, Kymlicka shows that the sort of multiculturalism that is being globalized is inspired and constrained by the human rights revolution, and embedded in a framework of liberal-democratic values.
Lawrence Lessig
Code, Version 2.0
Basic Books, 2006, 343.09944 LES
There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated - that is, its very essence is immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code, Version 2.0, first published in 2000 and revised to it’s current form through public debates on the book’s wiki, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no nature. It only has code - the software and hardware that makes cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom - as the original architecture of the Net did - or a place of oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable space, where behaviour is much more tightly controlled than in real space. But that's not inevitable either. We can - we must - choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee.
Lawrence Lessing
The Future of Ideas: The Face of the Commons in a Connected World
Vintage, 2003, 346.048 LES
The Internet revolution has come, and some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pockets of media magnates, has rewritten copyright and patent laws to stifle creativity and progress. Lessig weaves the history of technology and its relevant laws to make a lucid and accessible case to protect the sanctity of intellectual freedom. He shows how the door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology is creating extraordinary possibilities that have implications for all of us. Vital, eloquent, judicious and forthright, The Future of Ideas is a call to arms that we can ill afford to ignore.
Simon Parker and Sophia Parker
Unlocking Innovation: Why Citizens Hold the Key to Public Sector Reform
Demos, 2007, 353.48 PAR
Edited by Simon Parker and the RSA’s Sophia Parker, Unlocking Innovation collects essays and analysis from a wide range of public sector experts and practitioners. The chapters offer lessons on how public services can better engage their users based on examples of best practice in the public and private sectors. Sophia Parker has also written about effective engagement for the RSA Journal and the RSA Network’s blog.
Michael Barber
Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, Public Services and the Challenge of Achieving Targets
Politico’s, 2007, 361.60941 BAR
In Tony Blair's first term, 1997-2001, much was promised in reform of social services, but relatively little was achieved - except perhaps in Education, where Michael Barber was head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit. For 2001-05, the commitment was to real change in domestic policy, and Sir Michael Barber was appointed head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU), to concentrate on specific targets, initially 17, such as casualty waiting time, school tests, league tables, street crime, transport etc. Much was achieved, despite great tension, pressures, chaos and challenges, as a new working philosophy was created to combine otherwise 'warring parties' - the PM, the Chancellor, the Cabinet, the PM'S special team, and senior civil servants. Michael Barber reveals a fascinating insider and personal account of how the PMDU achieved so much, and provides a revealing picture of the major players, especially Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Edmund W. Gordon, Beatrice L. Bridglall and Aundra Saa Meroe (eds.)
Supplementary Education: the Hidden Curriculum of High Academic Achievement
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, 370.111 GOR
This book makes the case and lays the conceptual foundation for the significance of supplementary education in reducing the academic achievement gap between majority students and students of color. It further elaborates on the idea of supplementary education, which is based on the assumption that high academic achievement is closely associated with exposure to family and community-based activities and learning experiences that occur outside of school in support of academic learning.
Roberto Managabeira Unger
Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics
Princeton University Press, 2007, 382.71 UNG
Free Trade Reimagined begins with a sustained criticism of the heart of the emerging world economy: the theory and practice of free trade. Roberto Mangabeira Unger does not, however, defend protectionism against free trade. Instead, he attacks and revises the terms on which the traditional debate between free traders and protectionists has been joined. Unger's intervention in this major contemporary debate serves as a point of departure for a proposal to rethink the basic ideas with which we explain economic activity. He suggests, by example as well as by theory, a way of understanding contemporary economies that is both more realistic and more revealing of hidden possibilities for transformation than are the established forms of economics. One message of the book is that we need not choose between accepting and rejecting globalization; we can have a different globalization. Unger will present a lunchtime lecture here at the RSA on Free Trade Reimagined on Thursday 19 November. Please click here for more information and to book your place.
400s – Language
500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics
600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)
Helen Lewis and John Gertsakis (eds.)
Design + Enviroment: A Global Guide to Designing Greener Goods
Greenleaf, 2001 658.5752 LEW
This work helps the reader understand how and why design for environment (DfE) has become so critical to design. The authors show how to design a product that meets requirements for quality, cost, manufacturability and consumer appeal, while at the same time minimizing environmental impacts.
John Grant
The Brand Innovation Manifesto: How to Build Brands, Redefine Markets and Defy Conventions
John Wiley, 2006, 658.827 GRA
The days of the image brands are over, and ‘new marketing’ has gone mainstream. The world’s biggest companies are pursuing a post-advertising strategy, moving away from advertising and investing in leading edge alternatives. In the vanguard of the revolution has been John Grant, and in The Brand Innovation Manifesto, he redefines the nature of brands, showing why old models and scales no longer work and revealing that the key to success today is impacting people’s lifestyles (think Starbucks, iPod and eBay). At the heart of the book is the concept of the ‘brand molecule’ to which new cultural ideas can be constantly added to keep pace with change.
700s – The Arts
Derek Chong
Arts Management
Routledge, 2001, 700.68 CHO
Interest in aesthetics and organisation/management studies is growing at the start of the twenty first century, and this book offers a critical overview of arts management as a vital sub-discipline, addressing the artistic, managerial and social obligations of arts and cultural organisations operating in contemporary urban environs.
Brandon Taylor
Art for the Nation
Manchester University, 1999, 708.21 TAY
Art first became public in Britain through a series of interlocking relationships between national galleries, patrons, collections of art, and sections or classes of the population as a whole. This study concentrates on London, and analyzes the formation of the major national art institutions at its geographical and managerial centre. An image emerges of the character of official British culture and the audiences that it postulated and assumed. From the first public exhibitions in London in the 1760s through to the 1960s and beyond, a series of institutions either patronized by the monarch or administered directly by the state - or both - has set the tone for the manners and attitudes of the viewing public of the nation as a whole.
Jonathan Chapman (ed.)
Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories: a Collection of Sustainable Design Essays
Earthscan, 2007, 720.47 CHA
Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories unpacks the complex and crucial debates surrounding sustainable design to deliver a compelling manifesto for change, at a time of looming ecological crisis, mounting environmental legislations and limited sustainable design progress. This is a book about sustainable design, by the leading sustainable design thinkers, for creative practitioners of all disciplines - professionals, students and academics. This challenging book provides the reader with a rich resource of future visions, critical propositions, creative ideas and design strategies for working towards a sustainable tomorrow, today. It boldly presents alternative understandings of sustainable design, to curate a challenging, sometimes uncomfortable and always provocative collection of essays by some of the world's leading sustainable design thinkers. The result is an impacting anthology that reinvigorates the culture of critique that in previous years has empowered design with the qualities of social, environmental and economic revolution.
Christopher J. Kitching
Archive Buildings in the United Kingdom, 1993-2005
Phillimore & Co. Ltd, 2007, 725.150941 KIT
In two parts, both extensively illustrated with photographs and plans, this title will appeal to archivists, librarians, architects, engineers, planners, and the general reader. The first part is a guide to good practice in the design and construction of archive buildings, and the second part contains a number of case studies of individual buildings. The research for this book was jointly sponsored by The National Archives and the Society of Genealogists.
Stewart Walker
Sustainable by Design: Explorations in Theory and Practice
Earthscan, 2006, 745.2 WAL
Sustainable by Design offers a compelling and innovative, design-centred approach that explores both the meaning and practice of sustainable design, exploring the design process in the context of sustainability, and challenges conventional ways of defining, designing and producing functional objects. He discusses the personal design process, tacit knowledge, ephemeral design, experimental design, and the relationship between intellectual design criteria, physical expression and aesthetic experience. This book will introduce vital concepts to students and will inspire designers by providing a well-articulated basis for understanding the complexity and potential of sustainable design, and extolling the contribution of design to the creation of a more meaningful material culture.
800s – Literature
900s – Geography & History
Roy Porter
Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
Penguin, 2001, 941.07 POR
For generations the focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but makes a case for considering Britain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to 20th-century America. Porter immerses the reader in a society which, recovering from the horrors of the Civil War and decisively reinvigorated by the revolution of 1688, had emerged as something new and extraordinary - a society unlike any other in the world. This explosion of activity left no one unchanged and created a society with many of the values we recognize and value today - sceptical, pleasure-obsessed, garrulous, innovative, meritocratic.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Featured Book - "The Story of Childhood"
Libby Brooks
The Story of Childhood: Growing Up in Modern Britain
305.230941 BRO
Touching on the same themes as the current work by the RSA Risk Commission into childhood is The Story of Childhood: Growing Up in Modern Britain, by Guardian journalist Libby Brooks, who evidently doesn’t believe that children should be seen and not heard. Her book is a vivid snapshot of the state of modern childhood, through portraits of nine very different modern kids. Their voices ring from the page: sporty, savvy nine-year-old Lois; Nicholas, nearly a genius and bound for public school; Adam, the free-ranging country boy; fifteen-year-old Laura, who hates her looks and was bullied badly at school; and Majid, a politics-fixated, McDonald’s-eating motormouth.
Perhaps most poignant of all are the portraits of those most vilified of modern childhood figures, a young offender, Ashley, and Lauren, a teenage mum. Brooks skilfully avoids the clichés, interweaving her depiction of the children’s lives with a measured overview of the social and political context of these children’s lives: the problems of developing role models for young boys, the politics of respect, the state of sex education and more.
Most of all she asks questions about a ‘generation bred in captivity’, and the world they live in. Brooks doesn’t shy away from the big terrors of childhood today, and the book is hugely enlightening on issues such as self-harming, bullying, child pornography, obesity and eating disorders. But it is also infused with joy, as the story is told in the irrepressible voices of children. By the end it is hard to disagree with the book’s six-year-old Rosie that ‘without children this world would be sad, this world would be empty.’ Out of the mouths of babes indeed.
To borrow a copy of The Story of Childhood: Growing Up in Modern Britain, please contact the RSA Library.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Featured Book – “Everything is Miscellaneous”
David Weinberger
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
303.4834 WEI
David Weinberger’s new book shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings are information omnivores, constantly collecting, labelling, and organizing data. Much of this behaviour is the result of the limited nature of the physical world, which demands individual items be given a single positions within the filing systems we use to sort data and objects.
But where the physical world demanded everything had its one place, digital media allows multiple categories and multiple shelves: everything becomes miscellaneous. Weinberger shows how the internet’s collaborative principles are, via Wikipedia, limiting the power of experts, and suggests that the expectations generated by how easy it is to cross-reference resources on the internet, and how popular it has become to socially recommend sites to your friends through “tagging” services like del.icio.us, finally liberates information-gathering from the solitary pursuit of putting single items into individual boxes and instead allows people to organise the things that they use the way the need to: into as many different categories as possible.
With everyone able to take part in creating and editing folksonomies where before they had to adapt to the taxonomies and classification schemes of prior experts, and an on-going review process where all may be one’s peer, David Weinberger’s vision of the present is one that sees hope in the digital disorder that is remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture.
Online video précis in long form from Weinberger’s own Google Tech Talk, or Michael Wesch’s five-minute Information R/evolution.
To borrow a copy of Everything is Miscellaneous, please contact the RSA Library.
Friday, October 12, 2007
RSA Library Update - October 2007
RSA Library Update - September 2007
What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of September 2007. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....
000s – Generalities
100s – Philosophy & Psychology
200s – Religion
Barnaby Rogerson
The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad and the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism
Abacus, 2006, 297 ROG
The Prophet Muhammad taught the word of God to the Arabs. Within a generation of his death, his followers - as vivid a cast of heroic individuals as history has known - had exploded out of Arabia to confront the two great superpowers of the seventh-century and establish Islam and a new civilization. Within this fifty-year span of conquest and empire- building, Barnaby Rogerson also identifies the seeds of discord that destroyed the unity of Islam, and traces the roots of the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims to the rivalry of the two individuals who best knew and loved the Prophet: his cousin and son-in-law Ali and his wife Aisha.
300s – Social Sciences
Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress
Canongate, 2007, 303.4409 WRI
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 - by driving a whole herd over a cliff - had made too much. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century's runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet. A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.
James Martin
The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Out Future
Eden Project, 2007, 303.483 MAR
James Martin, one of the world's most widely respected authorities on the impact of technology on society, argues that we are living at a turning point in human history. 'We are travelling at breakneck speed into an era of extremes - extremes of wealth and poverty, extremes in technology, extremes in globalization. If we are to survive, we must learn how to manage them all.' Although we face huge challenges and conflicts, Martin argues that it is in the scientific breakthroughs of the new century that we will find new hope. In a clear, penetrating and insightful style he addresses the key questions of our age and proposes an interconnected set of solutions to its problems.
David Jennings
Net, Blogs and Rock ‘N’ Roll: Digital Discovery, How it Works and What it Means for Consumers, Creators and our Culture
Nicholas Brealey, 2007, 303.4833 JEN
Discovery is the next big thing after search. We are approaching the era of the 'celestial jukebox' where almost every film, TV programme, music track or book is available from a digital store in the sky. But how do consumers find out about and judge what they might like from such a huge and fast-growing source? David Jennings, Fellow of the RSA and speaker at a recent ThuRSdAy lecture, examines the new media revolution and shows how it all works. He introduces the three pillars of digital discovery - (trying out, links and community) - explaining how the history, culture and technology of media are interwoven with the rise of personalization and mobile players.
Andrew Keen
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy
Nicholas Brealey, 2007, 303.4833 KEE
Subject of the RSA lecture The Great Digital Seduction, The Cult of the Amateur sees Silicon Valley pundit Andrew Keen outline the grave consequences of today's new digital media, revealing how an avalanche of amateur content is threatening our values, economy, and ultimately innovation and creativity itself. Highly topical, provocative and controversial, it is a wake-up call offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in this assault. Valued cultural institutions - our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies - are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated, free content. In today's self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred.
David Weinberger
Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the New Digital Disorder
Times, 2007, 303.4834 WEI
David Weinberger’s new book, on the same theme as his recent Google Tech Talk shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings are information omnivores, constantly collecting, labelling, and organizing data. But where the physical world demanded everything had its one place, but digital media allows multiple categories and multiple shelves: everything becomes miscellaneous. David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture, demonstrating and encouraging the consequences this shift.
Peter Oborne
Triumph of the Political Class
Simon & Schuster, 2007, 320 OBO
Recent RSA Library Book of the Week, Peter Oborne's new book reveals how far we have left behind us the idea of people going into politics for that quaint reason, to serve the public. Notions of the greater good and putting something back now seem absurdly idealistic, such is the pervasiveness of cynicism in our politics and politicians. Of course, self-interest has always played a part, and Oborne will show how our current climate owes much to the venality of the eighteenth century. But in these allegedly enlightened times should we not know better? Do we not deserve better from those who seek our electoral approval? Full of revealing and insightful stories and anecdotes to support his case, and with a passionate call for reform, The Triumph of the Political Class is destined to be a defining political book of 2007.
Anthony Seldon (ed.)
Blair's Britain, 1997-2007
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 320.941 SEL
Tony Blair has dominated British political life for more than a decade. Like Margaret Thatcher before him, he has changed the terms of political debate and provoked as much condemnation as admiration. At the end of his era in power, this book presents a wide-ranging overview of the achievements and failures of the Blair governments. Bringing together Britain's most eminent academics and commentators on British politics and society, it examines the effect of the Prime Minister and his administration on the machinery of government, economic and social policy and foreign relations. Combining serious scholarship with clarity and accessibility, this book represents the authoritative verdict on the impact of the Blair years on British politics and society.
A. C. Grayling
Towards the Light: the Story of the Struggles for Liberty and the Rights that Made the Modern West
Bloomsbury, 2007, 323.04091821 GRA
A. C. Grayling itnerweaves political and personal stories from history struggle towards liberty, taking in celebrated and little-known heroes alike, including Martin Luther, John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Rosa Parks, whose bus protest became the catalyst of the US civil rights movement. The triumphs and sacrifices of these hard-won victories should make us value these precious rights even more highly, especially in an age when, as Grayling shows, democratic governments under pressure sometimes find it necessary to restrict rights in the name of freedom.
TUC
Propping Up Rural and Small Town Britain: Migrant Workers from the New Europe
TUC, 2004, 325.4 TUC
This report is based on information gathered from contact that the TUC has had with workers from the eight new eastern European EU member states since enlargement took place on 1 May, and shows that these new arrivals are to be found less in big cities than in smaller towns and rural areas, marking a departure from earlier waves of migration. The flow to more rural counties is associated with labour and skill shortages in a number of industries located outside urban areas, including hospitality, agriculture and food processing. The report details both successful government strategies for providing assistance to these workers, and details current areas of concern that require more attention.
UKREN
Overcoming Racism: Why A European Perspective is Crucial
UKREN, 2004, 325.4 UKR
This pamphlet sets out the case for why organisations such as the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) and the UK Race & Europe Network (UKREN) are well placed to lead resistance to the emergence of far-right and racist political groupings in European nations, by providing a Europe-wide network of support for anti-racism activists, and drawing on Europe’s common future and political and social integration to stress the potential of a post-racism society.
Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod
Happiness, Economics and Public Policy
Institute of Economic Affairs, 2007, 330.01 JOH
In Happiness, Economics and Public Policy, Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod analyse the economic research that underlies politicians' growing preoccupation with measures of 'well-being'. In a lucid and compelling analysis, written for economists and non-economists alike, the authors find that happiness research cannot be used to justify government intervention in the way its proponents suggest, arguing that the difficulties in measuring society's happiness are insurmountable, and policymakers should not claim that they can control and increase happiness through public policy decisions.
John J. Kao
Innovation Nation
Free Press, 2007, 338.06 KAO
How is it, leading expert on innovation John Kao asks, that today Finland is the world's most competitive economy and U.S. students rank twenty-fourth in the world in math literacy and twenty-sixth in problem-solving ability? Based on his in-depth experience advising many of the world's leading companies and studying cutting-edge innovation best practices in the most dynamic hot spots of innovation both in the United States and around the world, Kao argues that the United States still has the capability not only to regain our competitive edge, but to take a bold step out ahead of the global community and secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century.
John Kao is a Fellow of the RSA, and has kindly donated this item to its library.
Paul Collier
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It
Oxford University Press, 2007, 338.90091724 COL
Global poverty is falling rapidly, but in around fifty failing states, the world's poorest people face a tragedy that is growing inexorably worse. This bottom billion live on less than a dollar a day and while the rest of the world moves steadily forward, this forgotten billion is left further and further behind with potentially serious consequences not only for them but for the stability of the rest of the world. In The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier pinpoints the issues of corruption, political instability and resource management that lie at the root of the problem, and proposes initiatives are carefully designed to help the forgotten bottom billion, one of the key challenges facing the world in the twenty first century.
Vandana Shiva
Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge
South End Press, 1997, 341.758 SHI
Shiva exposes the new colonies in the North's assault on the South's biological resources -- the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants and animals -- and convincingly argues that international agreements enable Northern capital to appropriate biodiversity from its original owners by defining as non-science the seeds, medicinal plants, and indigenous knowledge of the South.
Vandana Shiva
Patents: Myths and Realities
Penguin Books, 2004, 346.0486 SHI
In today’s world. Patents affect all of us – whether we are farmers whose right to save seed is threatened, or consumers whose right to food and medicine is being eroded, or researchers whose freedom to exchange knowledge is blocked. This book examines the myths associated with the universalisation of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) in the context of trade liberalisation, and the real consequences of implementing such a regime. It thus demystifies patent laws and highlights the ethical, ecological and economic impacts of globalised patent regimes.
Paul Robinson
Military Honour and the Conduct of War: From Ancient Greece to Iraq
Routledge, 2006, 355.123 ROB
This study presents the first examination of the influence of ideas of honour on the causes, conduct and ending of wars from Ancient Greece to the present day. Paul Robinson begins with a theoretical examination of the concept of honour, to clearly explain the many contradictions and tensions inherent within honour systems. He then shows how honour has often contradictory and paradoxical effects on the conduct of war and illustrates this through case studies from Classical Greece to the current conflict in Iraq, highlighting how honour has been related to the practises, targets and casualties of war.
Michelle Tempest (ed.)
The Future of the NHS
XPL, 2006, 362.10941 TEM
The NHS is an extraordinary institution, with extraordinary staff delivering exterordinary results. Yet its future is a matter of vital public debate while contradictions remain: massive government spending yet Trusts that have huge deficits; low staff morale; falling waiting lists and record activity levels, yet rising public expectations. What is clear is that a consensus is need as to what the NHS should be and which direction it should take. This book stimulates debate on all these issues, with contributions falling in to four categories: political opinion; practice areas; organisation; and funding.
Vandana Shiva
Seed Dictatorship and Food Fascism
Navdanya/RFSTE, 2006, 363.192 SHI
In this pamphlet, physicist and environmental activist, Vandana Shiva questions the possibility of ‘owning’ a seed, arguing instead that the free exchange of such resources between farmers is both culturally important, and a valuable aid in ensuring biodiversity and food security. She details changes made in 2004 by the Indian government to the Patent Act, and the introduction of a Seed Act, both of which permitted to creation of commercial monopolies controlling the production and sale of seeds with specific genes or even general characteristics, and outlines the cultural ramifications of these laws.
Clive Stafford Smith
Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 364.660973092 SMI
Clive Stafford Smith is the 46-year-old human-rights lawyer who has famously - some would say notoriously - spent more than twenty years in the United States representing prisoners on Death Row. His clients include many detainees in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and he established the London-based charity Reprieve, developed to defend human rights in 1999. His book is, quite simply, devastating, and many will laugh and cry reading it: laugh in disbelief, and cry in despair at the utter inhumanity and lack of imagination wrapped up in hypocrisy so enormous that it beggers understanding. His experiences, graphically recounted in this book, have enabled him to shine a bright, unblinking light into the darkest corners of illegality that are being justified by governments in the name of the War on Terror.
Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and Judy H. Mullet
The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools: Teaching Responsibility, Creating Caring Climates
Good, Books, 2006, 371.5 AMS
Can an overworked teacher possibly turn an unruly incident with students into an opportunity for learning, growth, and community-building? If restorative justice has been able to salvage lives within the world of criminal behavior, why shouldn't its principles be applied in school classrooms and cafeterias? And if our children learn restorative practices early and daily, won't we be building a healthier, more just society? Two educators answer yes, yes, and yes, urging a focus on consequences rather than punishment. They insist that relationships – far more than rules – are central to building community, and that community fosters caring and belonging. They put up with no hypocrisy: teachers and administrators must live restorative practices, too.
Belinda Hopkins
Just Schools: a Whole School Approach to Restorative Justice
Jessica Kingsley, 2003, 371.50941 HOP
Restorative justice is a dynamic and innovative way of dealing with conflict in schools, promoting understanding and healing over assigning blame or dispensing punishment. It can create an ethic of care and justice that makes schools safer and happier, not only through reducing conflict, but also in terms of developing active citizenship skills, good self-esteem, open communication and team work in students. From a teaching background herself, Belinda Hopkins is at the forefront of the development of restorative justice in the UK, and in this practical handbook she presents a whole school approach to repairing harm using a variety of means including peer mediation, healing circles and conference circles.
400s – Language
500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics
John Brockman (ed.)
What is Your Dangerous Idea? Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
Pocket, 2007, 502 BRO
The history of science is replete with ideas that were considered socially, morally or emotionally dangerous in their time. The Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are obvious examples -- radical, brilliant insights that did not so much push the envelope as rip it into shreds. These ideas were dangerous because they challenged our comfort zone. But what are the dangerous ideas of the twenty-first century? Which theories do the world's leading thinkers and scientists regard as too hot to handle -- not because the idea might be false, but because it might turn out to be true? Collecting together the very best contributions to the renowned Edge.org question from the most eminent respondents, What is Your Dangerous Idea? is an endlessly fascinating and provocative insight into the bleeding-edge of intellectual endeavour.
Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
The Tiger that Isn't: Seeing Through a World of Numbers
Profile, 2007, 510 BLA
Numbers have become the all-powerful language of public argument. Too often, that power is abused and the numbers bamboozle. This book shows how to see straight through them - and how to seize the power for yourself. Public spending, health risks, environmental disasters, who is rich, who is poor, Aids or war deaths, pensions, teenage offenders, the best and worst schools and hospitals and immigration - life comes in numbers. Using vivid and everyday images and ideas, this book shows how close to hand insight and understanding can be, and how we can all use what is familiar to make sense of what is baffling.
600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)
FORESIGHT
Drugs Futures 2025?
Office of Science and Technology, 2005, 615.19 FOR
The findings of an investigation into possible future paths for pharmacology and drug design, Drugs Futures 2025? considers substances legal and illegal and draws on opinion both professional and public to present an overview of possible future research avenues and practical applications of chemical substances, drawing on perspectives as wide-ranging genetics, neuroscience, anthropology and social history.
R. E. Hester and R. M. Harrison (eds.)
Nanotechnology: Consequences for Human Health and the Environment
Royal Society of Chemistry, 2007, 620.5
This new volume seeks to give a broad overview of the sources, behaviour and risks associated with nanotechnology. Setting the subject into context, this book first of all describes the current range of products containing nano-materials and then looking at the consequences for the environment and human health for the introduction of nanoparticles and nano-tubes. A perspective from the United States indicates how in that country the threats posed by nanoparticles are being addressed. It provides comprehensive coverage of the current issues concerning engineered nanoparticles which will be of immediate value to scientists, engineering and policymakers within the field, as well as to students on advanced courses wishing to look closely into this topical subject.
Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Portfolio, 2006, 658.046 TAP
In just the last few years, traditional collaboration – in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center – has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, "Wikinomics" proves this fear is folly. A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, "Wikinomics" challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century.
Frank Lefley and Bob Ryan
The Financial Appraisal Profile Model
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, F 658.152 LEF
This book describes an integrated capital appraisal procedure that is commanding increasing attention in the academic world, industry, commerce and the professions. Formal techniques are widely used for the analysis of capital projects but are limited by their scope and by the difficulty in interpreting the significance of the results they produce. The FAP model overcomes these difficulties by creating an integrated process for the appraisal of the financial and strategic benefits of new project proposals and for the assessment of risk.
John Storey
Human Resource Management: A Critical Text, Second Edition
Thomson Learning, 2007, 658.3 STO
This volume gives comprehensive coverage of all the main areas of Human Resources Management and as such it should be suitable as a main course text. The second edition retains nearly all the existing contributors but there are several new chapters: HRM and Ethics by Woodall and Winstanley; Knowledge Management by Paul Quintas; Organizational Learning, Culture and Change by Graeme Salaman; and a chapter on recruitment entitled Employee Resourcing and authored by Paul Iles.
700s – The Arts
Norbert Lynton
William Tillyer: Against the Grain
21, 2001, 759.2 LYN/TIL
A survey of Tillyer's life and work by Norbert Lynton, one of the UK's longest standing art historians. Admired by fellow artists and collectors, Tillyer's work has mystified critics by his constant changing of style with each new phase seeming to contradict and undermine the last. Lynton looks at Tillyer's output as a whole, studying his life and work to try and give an understanding of its underlying consistency and inventiveness.
William Tillyeris a Fellow of the RSA, and has kindly donated this item to its library.
Fan-Pen Li Chen
The Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors
McGill-Queen's University, 2007, 791.50951 CHE
The Chinese Shadow Theatre includes several rare transcriptions of oral performances, including a didactic play on the Eighteen Levels of Hell and Investiture of the Gods, a sacred saga, and translations of three rare, hand-copied shadow plays featuring religious themes and women warrior characters. Drawing on extensive research and fieldwork, she argues that these plays served a mainly religious function during the Qing dynasty and that the appeal of women warrior characters reflected the lower classes’ high tolerance for the unorthodox and subversive.
800s – Literature
Germaine Greer
Shakespeare’s Wife
Bloomsbury, 2007, 822.33 GRE
Little is known about the wife of the world's most famous playwright, but much is said about her. Ann Hathaway has been mocked and vilified by scholars for centuries. The glaring omission of her name from Shakespeare's will has been gleefully used by many as evidence that she was nothing more than an ugly old wench whom William was shackled to after a thoughtless roll in the hay in his giddy youth. Yet Shakespeare went on to become the very poet of marriage, exploring the sacrament in all its aspects, spiritual, psychological, sexual and sociological. He is the creator of the most tenacious and intelligent heroines in English literature. Is it possible, therefore, that Ann was the inspiration? Part-biography, part-history, Shakespeare's Wife is fascinating in its reconstruction of Ann's life, and the daily lives of Elizabethan women.
900s – Geography & History
Naomi Klein
The Shock Doctrine: Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Penguin, 2007, 909.825 KLE
In this groundbreaking book, the bestselling author of No Logo exposes the gripping story of how America's 'free market' policies have come to dominate the world - through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Klein traces disaster capitalism’s intellectual origins back fifty years to the University of Chicago's economics department under Milton Friedman, whose influence is still felt around the world.
Peter Ackroyd
Thames: Sacred River
Chatto & Windus, 2007, 942.2 ACK
Thames: Sacred River is about the river from source to sea. It covers history from prehistoric times to the present, the flora and fauna of the river, paintings and photographs inspired by the Thames, its geology, smells and colours, its literature, laws and landscape, its magic and myths, its architecture, trade and weather. Peter Ackroyd has a genius for digging out the most surprising and entertaining details, and for writing about them in magisterial prose.
What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of September 2007. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....
000s – Generalities
100s – Philosophy & Psychology
200s – Religion
Barnaby Rogerson
The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad and the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism
Abacus, 2006, 297 ROG
The Prophet Muhammad taught the word of God to the Arabs. Within a generation of his death, his followers - as vivid a cast of heroic individuals as history has known - had exploded out of Arabia to confront the two great superpowers of the seventh-century and establish Islam and a new civilization. Within this fifty-year span of conquest and empire- building, Barnaby Rogerson also identifies the seeds of discord that destroyed the unity of Islam, and traces the roots of the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims to the rivalry of the two individuals who best knew and loved the Prophet: his cousin and son-in-law Ali and his wife Aisha.
300s – Social Sciences
Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress
Canongate, 2007, 303.4409 WRI
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 - by driving a whole herd over a cliff - had made too much. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century's runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet. A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.
James Martin
The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Out Future
Eden Project, 2007, 303.483 MAR
James Martin, one of the world's most widely respected authorities on the impact of technology on society, argues that we are living at a turning point in human history. 'We are travelling at breakneck speed into an era of extremes - extremes of wealth and poverty, extremes in technology, extremes in globalization. If we are to survive, we must learn how to manage them all.' Although we face huge challenges and conflicts, Martin argues that it is in the scientific breakthroughs of the new century that we will find new hope. In a clear, penetrating and insightful style he addresses the key questions of our age and proposes an interconnected set of solutions to its problems.
David Jennings
Net, Blogs and Rock ‘N’ Roll: Digital Discovery, How it Works and What it Means for Consumers, Creators and our Culture
Nicholas Brealey, 2007, 303.4833 JEN
Discovery is the next big thing after search. We are approaching the era of the 'celestial jukebox' where almost every film, TV programme, music track or book is available from a digital store in the sky. But how do consumers find out about and judge what they might like from such a huge and fast-growing source? David Jennings, Fellow of the RSA and speaker at a recent ThuRSdAy lecture, examines the new media revolution and shows how it all works. He introduces the three pillars of digital discovery - (trying out, links and community) - explaining how the history, culture and technology of media are interwoven with the rise of personalization and mobile players.
Andrew Keen
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy
Nicholas Brealey, 2007, 303.4833 KEE
Subject of the RSA lecture The Great Digital Seduction, The Cult of the Amateur sees Silicon Valley pundit Andrew Keen outline the grave consequences of today's new digital media, revealing how an avalanche of amateur content is threatening our values, economy, and ultimately innovation and creativity itself. Highly topical, provocative and controversial, it is a wake-up call offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in this assault. Valued cultural institutions - our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies - are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated, free content. In today's self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred.
David Weinberger
Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the New Digital Disorder
Times, 2007, 303.4834 WEI
David Weinberger’s new book, on the same theme as his recent Google Tech Talk shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings are information omnivores, constantly collecting, labelling, and organizing data. But where the physical world demanded everything had its one place, but digital media allows multiple categories and multiple shelves: everything becomes miscellaneous. David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture, demonstrating and encouraging the consequences this shift.
Peter Oborne
Triumph of the Political Class
Simon & Schuster, 2007, 320 OBO
Recent RSA Library Book of the Week, Peter Oborne's new book reveals how far we have left behind us the idea of people going into politics for that quaint reason, to serve the public. Notions of the greater good and putting something back now seem absurdly idealistic, such is the pervasiveness of cynicism in our politics and politicians. Of course, self-interest has always played a part, and Oborne will show how our current climate owes much to the venality of the eighteenth century. But in these allegedly enlightened times should we not know better? Do we not deserve better from those who seek our electoral approval? Full of revealing and insightful stories and anecdotes to support his case, and with a passionate call for reform, The Triumph of the Political Class is destined to be a defining political book of 2007.
Anthony Seldon (ed.)
Blair's Britain, 1997-2007
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 320.941 SEL
Tony Blair has dominated British political life for more than a decade. Like Margaret Thatcher before him, he has changed the terms of political debate and provoked as much condemnation as admiration. At the end of his era in power, this book presents a wide-ranging overview of the achievements and failures of the Blair governments. Bringing together Britain's most eminent academics and commentators on British politics and society, it examines the effect of the Prime Minister and his administration on the machinery of government, economic and social policy and foreign relations. Combining serious scholarship with clarity and accessibility, this book represents the authoritative verdict on the impact of the Blair years on British politics and society.
A. C. Grayling
Towards the Light: the Story of the Struggles for Liberty and the Rights that Made the Modern West
Bloomsbury, 2007, 323.04091821 GRA
A. C. Grayling itnerweaves political and personal stories from history struggle towards liberty, taking in celebrated and little-known heroes alike, including Martin Luther, John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Rosa Parks, whose bus protest became the catalyst of the US civil rights movement. The triumphs and sacrifices of these hard-won victories should make us value these precious rights even more highly, especially in an age when, as Grayling shows, democratic governments under pressure sometimes find it necessary to restrict rights in the name of freedom.
TUC
Propping Up Rural and Small Town Britain: Migrant Workers from the New Europe
TUC, 2004, 325.4 TUC
This report is based on information gathered from contact that the TUC has had with workers from the eight new eastern European EU member states since enlargement took place on 1 May, and shows that these new arrivals are to be found less in big cities than in smaller towns and rural areas, marking a departure from earlier waves of migration. The flow to more rural counties is associated with labour and skill shortages in a number of industries located outside urban areas, including hospitality, agriculture and food processing. The report details both successful government strategies for providing assistance to these workers, and details current areas of concern that require more attention.
UKREN
Overcoming Racism: Why A European Perspective is Crucial
UKREN, 2004, 325.4 UKR
This pamphlet sets out the case for why organisations such as the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) and the UK Race & Europe Network (UKREN) are well placed to lead resistance to the emergence of far-right and racist political groupings in European nations, by providing a Europe-wide network of support for anti-racism activists, and drawing on Europe’s common future and political and social integration to stress the potential of a post-racism society.
Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod
Happiness, Economics and Public Policy
Institute of Economic Affairs, 2007, 330.01 JOH
In Happiness, Economics and Public Policy, Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod analyse the economic research that underlies politicians' growing preoccupation with measures of 'well-being'. In a lucid and compelling analysis, written for economists and non-economists alike, the authors find that happiness research cannot be used to justify government intervention in the way its proponents suggest, arguing that the difficulties in measuring society's happiness are insurmountable, and policymakers should not claim that they can control and increase happiness through public policy decisions.
John J. Kao
Innovation Nation
Free Press, 2007, 338.06 KAO
How is it, leading expert on innovation John Kao asks, that today Finland is the world's most competitive economy and U.S. students rank twenty-fourth in the world in math literacy and twenty-sixth in problem-solving ability? Based on his in-depth experience advising many of the world's leading companies and studying cutting-edge innovation best practices in the most dynamic hot spots of innovation both in the United States and around the world, Kao argues that the United States still has the capability not only to regain our competitive edge, but to take a bold step out ahead of the global community and secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century.
John Kao is a Fellow of the RSA, and has kindly donated this item to its library.
Paul Collier
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It
Oxford University Press, 2007, 338.90091724 COL
Global poverty is falling rapidly, but in around fifty failing states, the world's poorest people face a tragedy that is growing inexorably worse. This bottom billion live on less than a dollar a day and while the rest of the world moves steadily forward, this forgotten billion is left further and further behind with potentially serious consequences not only for them but for the stability of the rest of the world. In The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier pinpoints the issues of corruption, political instability and resource management that lie at the root of the problem, and proposes initiatives are carefully designed to help the forgotten bottom billion, one of the key challenges facing the world in the twenty first century.
Vandana Shiva
Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge
South End Press, 1997, 341.758 SHI
Shiva exposes the new colonies in the North's assault on the South's biological resources -- the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants and animals -- and convincingly argues that international agreements enable Northern capital to appropriate biodiversity from its original owners by defining as non-science the seeds, medicinal plants, and indigenous knowledge of the South.
Vandana Shiva
Patents: Myths and Realities
Penguin Books, 2004, 346.0486 SHI
In today’s world. Patents affect all of us – whether we are farmers whose right to save seed is threatened, or consumers whose right to food and medicine is being eroded, or researchers whose freedom to exchange knowledge is blocked. This book examines the myths associated with the universalisation of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) in the context of trade liberalisation, and the real consequences of implementing such a regime. It thus demystifies patent laws and highlights the ethical, ecological and economic impacts of globalised patent regimes.
Paul Robinson
Military Honour and the Conduct of War: From Ancient Greece to Iraq
Routledge, 2006, 355.123 ROB
This study presents the first examination of the influence of ideas of honour on the causes, conduct and ending of wars from Ancient Greece to the present day. Paul Robinson begins with a theoretical examination of the concept of honour, to clearly explain the many contradictions and tensions inherent within honour systems. He then shows how honour has often contradictory and paradoxical effects on the conduct of war and illustrates this through case studies from Classical Greece to the current conflict in Iraq, highlighting how honour has been related to the practises, targets and casualties of war.
Michelle Tempest (ed.)
The Future of the NHS
XPL, 2006, 362.10941 TEM
The NHS is an extraordinary institution, with extraordinary staff delivering exterordinary results. Yet its future is a matter of vital public debate while contradictions remain: massive government spending yet Trusts that have huge deficits; low staff morale; falling waiting lists and record activity levels, yet rising public expectations. What is clear is that a consensus is need as to what the NHS should be and which direction it should take. This book stimulates debate on all these issues, with contributions falling in to four categories: political opinion; practice areas; organisation; and funding.
Vandana Shiva
Seed Dictatorship and Food Fascism
Navdanya/RFSTE, 2006, 363.192 SHI
In this pamphlet, physicist and environmental activist, Vandana Shiva questions the possibility of ‘owning’ a seed, arguing instead that the free exchange of such resources between farmers is both culturally important, and a valuable aid in ensuring biodiversity and food security. She details changes made in 2004 by the Indian government to the Patent Act, and the introduction of a Seed Act, both of which permitted to creation of commercial monopolies controlling the production and sale of seeds with specific genes or even general characteristics, and outlines the cultural ramifications of these laws.
Clive Stafford Smith
Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 364.660973092 SMI
Clive Stafford Smith is the 46-year-old human-rights lawyer who has famously - some would say notoriously - spent more than twenty years in the United States representing prisoners on Death Row. His clients include many detainees in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and he established the London-based charity Reprieve, developed to defend human rights in 1999. His book is, quite simply, devastating, and many will laugh and cry reading it: laugh in disbelief, and cry in despair at the utter inhumanity and lack of imagination wrapped up in hypocrisy so enormous that it beggers understanding. His experiences, graphically recounted in this book, have enabled him to shine a bright, unblinking light into the darkest corners of illegality that are being justified by governments in the name of the War on Terror.
Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and Judy H. Mullet
The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools: Teaching Responsibility, Creating Caring Climates
Good, Books, 2006, 371.5 AMS
Can an overworked teacher possibly turn an unruly incident with students into an opportunity for learning, growth, and community-building? If restorative justice has been able to salvage lives within the world of criminal behavior, why shouldn't its principles be applied in school classrooms and cafeterias? And if our children learn restorative practices early and daily, won't we be building a healthier, more just society? Two educators answer yes, yes, and yes, urging a focus on consequences rather than punishment. They insist that relationships – far more than rules – are central to building community, and that community fosters caring and belonging. They put up with no hypocrisy: teachers and administrators must live restorative practices, too.
Belinda Hopkins
Just Schools: a Whole School Approach to Restorative Justice
Jessica Kingsley, 2003, 371.50941 HOP
Restorative justice is a dynamic and innovative way of dealing with conflict in schools, promoting understanding and healing over assigning blame or dispensing punishment. It can create an ethic of care and justice that makes schools safer and happier, not only through reducing conflict, but also in terms of developing active citizenship skills, good self-esteem, open communication and team work in students. From a teaching background herself, Belinda Hopkins is at the forefront of the development of restorative justice in the UK, and in this practical handbook she presents a whole school approach to repairing harm using a variety of means including peer mediation, healing circles and conference circles.
400s – Language
500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics
John Brockman (ed.)
What is Your Dangerous Idea? Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
Pocket, 2007, 502 BRO
The history of science is replete with ideas that were considered socially, morally or emotionally dangerous in their time. The Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are obvious examples -- radical, brilliant insights that did not so much push the envelope as rip it into shreds. These ideas were dangerous because they challenged our comfort zone. But what are the dangerous ideas of the twenty-first century? Which theories do the world's leading thinkers and scientists regard as too hot to handle -- not because the idea might be false, but because it might turn out to be true? Collecting together the very best contributions to the renowned Edge.org question from the most eminent respondents, What is Your Dangerous Idea? is an endlessly fascinating and provocative insight into the bleeding-edge of intellectual endeavour.
Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
The Tiger that Isn't: Seeing Through a World of Numbers
Profile, 2007, 510 BLA
Numbers have become the all-powerful language of public argument. Too often, that power is abused and the numbers bamboozle. This book shows how to see straight through them - and how to seize the power for yourself. Public spending, health risks, environmental disasters, who is rich, who is poor, Aids or war deaths, pensions, teenage offenders, the best and worst schools and hospitals and immigration - life comes in numbers. Using vivid and everyday images and ideas, this book shows how close to hand insight and understanding can be, and how we can all use what is familiar to make sense of what is baffling.
600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)
FORESIGHT
Drugs Futures 2025?
Office of Science and Technology, 2005, 615.19 FOR
The findings of an investigation into possible future paths for pharmacology and drug design, Drugs Futures 2025? considers substances legal and illegal and draws on opinion both professional and public to present an overview of possible future research avenues and practical applications of chemical substances, drawing on perspectives as wide-ranging genetics, neuroscience, anthropology and social history.
R. E. Hester and R. M. Harrison (eds.)
Nanotechnology: Consequences for Human Health and the Environment
Royal Society of Chemistry, 2007, 620.5
This new volume seeks to give a broad overview of the sources, behaviour and risks associated with nanotechnology. Setting the subject into context, this book first of all describes the current range of products containing nano-materials and then looking at the consequences for the environment and human health for the introduction of nanoparticles and nano-tubes. A perspective from the United States indicates how in that country the threats posed by nanoparticles are being addressed. It provides comprehensive coverage of the current issues concerning engineered nanoparticles which will be of immediate value to scientists, engineering and policymakers within the field, as well as to students on advanced courses wishing to look closely into this topical subject.
Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Portfolio, 2006, 658.046 TAP
In just the last few years, traditional collaboration – in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center – has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, "Wikinomics" proves this fear is folly. A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, "Wikinomics" challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century.
Frank Lefley and Bob Ryan
The Financial Appraisal Profile Model
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, F 658.152 LEF
This book describes an integrated capital appraisal procedure that is commanding increasing attention in the academic world, industry, commerce and the professions. Formal techniques are widely used for the analysis of capital projects but are limited by their scope and by the difficulty in interpreting the significance of the results they produce. The FAP model overcomes these difficulties by creating an integrated process for the appraisal of the financial and strategic benefits of new project proposals and for the assessment of risk.
John Storey
Human Resource Management: A Critical Text, Second Edition
Thomson Learning, 2007, 658.3 STO
This volume gives comprehensive coverage of all the main areas of Human Resources Management and as such it should be suitable as a main course text. The second edition retains nearly all the existing contributors but there are several new chapters: HRM and Ethics by Woodall and Winstanley; Knowledge Management by Paul Quintas; Organizational Learning, Culture and Change by Graeme Salaman; and a chapter on recruitment entitled Employee Resourcing and authored by Paul Iles.
700s – The Arts
Norbert Lynton
William Tillyer: Against the Grain
21, 2001, 759.2 LYN/TIL
A survey of Tillyer's life and work by Norbert Lynton, one of the UK's longest standing art historians. Admired by fellow artists and collectors, Tillyer's work has mystified critics by his constant changing of style with each new phase seeming to contradict and undermine the last. Lynton looks at Tillyer's output as a whole, studying his life and work to try and give an understanding of its underlying consistency and inventiveness.
William Tillyeris a Fellow of the RSA, and has kindly donated this item to its library.
Fan-Pen Li Chen
The Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors
McGill-Queen's University, 2007, 791.50951 CHE
The Chinese Shadow Theatre includes several rare transcriptions of oral performances, including a didactic play on the Eighteen Levels of Hell and Investiture of the Gods, a sacred saga, and translations of three rare, hand-copied shadow plays featuring religious themes and women warrior characters. Drawing on extensive research and fieldwork, she argues that these plays served a mainly religious function during the Qing dynasty and that the appeal of women warrior characters reflected the lower classes’ high tolerance for the unorthodox and subversive.
800s – Literature
Germaine Greer
Shakespeare’s Wife
Bloomsbury, 2007, 822.33 GRE
Little is known about the wife of the world's most famous playwright, but much is said about her. Ann Hathaway has been mocked and vilified by scholars for centuries. The glaring omission of her name from Shakespeare's will has been gleefully used by many as evidence that she was nothing more than an ugly old wench whom William was shackled to after a thoughtless roll in the hay in his giddy youth. Yet Shakespeare went on to become the very poet of marriage, exploring the sacrament in all its aspects, spiritual, psychological, sexual and sociological. He is the creator of the most tenacious and intelligent heroines in English literature. Is it possible, therefore, that Ann was the inspiration? Part-biography, part-history, Shakespeare's Wife is fascinating in its reconstruction of Ann's life, and the daily lives of Elizabethan women.
900s – Geography & History
Naomi Klein
The Shock Doctrine: Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Penguin, 2007, 909.825 KLE
In this groundbreaking book, the bestselling author of No Logo exposes the gripping story of how America's 'free market' policies have come to dominate the world - through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Klein traces disaster capitalism’s intellectual origins back fifty years to the University of Chicago's economics department under Milton Friedman, whose influence is still felt around the world.
Peter Ackroyd
Thames: Sacred River
Chatto & Windus, 2007, 942.2 ACK
Thames: Sacred River is about the river from source to sea. It covers history from prehistoric times to the present, the flora and fauna of the river, paintings and photographs inspired by the Thames, its geology, smells and colours, its literature, laws and landscape, its magic and myths, its architecture, trade and weather. Peter Ackroyd has a genius for digging out the most surprising and entertaining details, and for writing about them in magisterial prose.
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