Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

$12.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

"It is easier to imagine the end of the world," the theorist Fredric Jameson has remarked, "than to imagine the end of capitalism." Jacobin Editor Peter Frase argues that technological advancements and environmental threats will inevitably push our society beyond capitalism, and Four Futures imagines ju st how this might look. Extrapolating possible futures from current changes the world is now experiencing, and drawing upon speculative fictions to illustrate how these futures might be realized, Four Futures examines communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism - or in other words, the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail. ...Show more

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

$12.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

A New York Times BestsellerWith a New AfterwordIn an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international situation, Noam Chomsky examines the way that the United States, despite the rise of Europe and Asia, still largely sets the terms of global discourse. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from the sordid history of U.S. involvement with Cuba to the sanctions on Iran, he details how America's rhetoric of freedom and human rights so often diverges from its actions. He delves deep into the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel-Palestine, providing unexpected and nuanced insights into the workings of imperial power on our increasingly chaotic planet. And, in a new afterword, he addresses the election of Donald Trump and what it shows about American society. Fierce, unsparing, and meticulously documented, Who Rules the World? delivers the indispensable understanding of the central issues of our time that we have come to expect from Chomsky. An American Empire Project ...Show more

Mother Is a Verb - An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott

$25.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: near fine

Welcome to a work of history unlike any other. Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity--the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothe rs? How? In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate and expansive, lyrical and precise. As a history, Mother Is a Verb draws on the terrain of Britain and North America from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth. Knott searches among a range of past societies, from those of Cree and Ojibwe women to tenant farmers in Appalachia; from enslaved people on South Carolina rice plantations to tenement dwellers in New York City and London's East End. She pores over diaries, letters, court records, medical manuals, items of clothing. And she explores and documents her own experiences. As a memoir, Mother Is a Verb becomes a method of asking new questions and probing lost pasts in order to historicize the smallest, even the most mundane of human experiences. Is there a history to interruption, to the sound of an infant's cry, to sleeplessness? Knott finds answers not through the telling of grand narratives, but through the painstaking accumulation of a trellis of anecdotes. And all the while, we can feel the child on her hip. ...Show more

History of Political Thought by Raymond G. Gettell

$15.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

First published in 1924. This extensive volume explores the history of political theory from Ancient Greece up until proletarian thought in the early twentieth century. The author pays particular attention to the connection between economic and political theory during the eighteenth and nineteenth centu ries. History of Political Thought will be of great interest to students of history, politics, and philosophy. ...Show more

Maid - Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

$12.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: very good

Educated meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid. A beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in the western world. Includes a foreword by international bestelling author Barbara Ehrenreich. 'My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.' As a struggling single mum, determined to keep a roof over her daughter's head, Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, working long hours in order to provide for her small family. In Maid, she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society. As she worked hard to climb her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labour jobs as a cleaner whilst also juggling higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of the overworked and underpaid. Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of the upper-middle classes and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. 'I'd become a nameless ghost,' Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the 'servant' worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children. ...Show more

Counter-Blast by Marshall McLuhan

$12.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset

$5.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: good

Social upheaval in early 20th-century Europe is the historical setting for this seminal study by the Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset. Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's vision of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denominator and drifting toward chaos brought its author in ternational fame and has remained one of the influential books of the 20th century. ...Show more

Political Parties - A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical tendencies of Modern Democracy by Robert Michels

$14.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

Towards the Light : The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West by A.C. Grayling

$25.00 NZD

Category: History | Reading Level: very good

He begins with the often-violent conflicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - involving the likes of Torquemada, Servetus, Zwingli and Castellio - which were sparked by the pursuit of freedom of thought, uncontrolled by the Church and the Inquisition. In time, this drive towards greater independ ence and individual liberty led to bitter fighting in seventeenth-century Europe, including the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War. Then, in part arising from the English constitutional settlement of 1688, came the eighteenth-century revolutions in America and France that swept away monarchies in favour of more representative forms of government. These in turn made possible the abolition of slavery, and later, rights for working men and women, universal education, the enfranchisement of women, and the idea of universal human rights and freedoms. First published 2007. ...Show more

A World without Islam by Graham E. Fuller

$14.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

What if Islam never existed? To some, it's a comforting thought: no clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. But what if that weren't the case at all? In A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM, Graham E. Fuller guides us along an illuminating journey through history, geopolitics, and religion to investigate whether or not Islam is indeed the cause of some of today's most emotional and important international crises. Fuller takes us from the birth of Islam to the fall of Rome to the rise and collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He examines and analyzes the roots of terrorism, the conflict in Israel, and the role of Islam in supporting and energizing the anti-imperial struggle. Provocatively, he finds that contrary to the claims of many politicians, thinkers, theologians, and soldiers, a world without Islam might not look vastly different from what we know today. Filled with fascinating details and counterintuitive conclusions, A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM is certain to inspire debate and reshape the way we think about Islam's relationship with the West. ...Show more

People Like Us: How arrogance is dividing Islam and the West by Waleed Aly

$14.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

No two civilisations have spoken so many words about each other in recent years as those of Islam and the West. And no two seem to have communicated less. People Like Us confronts the themes that define this chasm head-on: women, jihad, secularism, terrorism, reformation and modernity. Its piercing exam ination of these subjects reveals our thoughtless and destructive tendency to assume that the world's problems could be solved if only everyone became more like us. The result is deep mutual ignorance and animosity, reinforced by both Muslim and Western commentators. As a Muslim born and raised in Australia, Waleed Aly stands at the intersection of these two civilisations. In this book, he draws on his knowledge of Western and Islamic intellectual traditions to present an analysis that is surprising and challenging, but always enlightening. ...Show more

Democracy Crisis and Renewal by Paul Ginsborg

$12.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

Despite the global expansion of democracy, a looming threat has appeared in the countries that claim to love it most: declining electoral turnout, diminishing faith in political institutions and the growing gap between the political class and those who elect them...Historian and commentator Paul Ginsbor g goes back to first principles and examines anew a concept that we once fought for in this brilliant and bold new diagnosis of our political system. Political parties have lost swathes of members and effective power is ever more concentrated in the hands of their leaders. Behind these trends lie changing relationships between economics, the media and politics. Electoral spending has spiralled out of all control, with powerful economic interests exercising undue influence. The 'level playing field', on which democracy's contests have supposedly been fought, has become ever more sloping and uneven. In many 'democratic' countries media coverage, especially that of television, is heavily biased. Electors become viewers and active participation gives way to mass passivity. Can things change? ...Show more