Serpentine Books
Independent publisher of crime, thrillers, sci-fi, mysteries, romantic comedies and mash-ups.
View Rights PortalIndependent publisher of crime, thrillers, sci-fi, mysteries, romantic comedies and mash-ups.
View Rights PortalAbout E-planet E-planet Educational Services is an international organisation created by a dedicated and enthusiastic team of experts on education, marketing and development. Our goal is to provide our partners, students and customers with top-level services and products. That is why we have developed a unique, fully integrated company for ESL (English as a Second Language) educational services and business training. We combine traditional methods with cutting-edge technology to achieve a variety of purposes!
View Rights PortalThe Gothic and death offers the first ever published study devoted to the subject of the Gothic and death across the centuries. It investigates how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning and memorialisation ('the Death Question') - have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in such fields as Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies and Thanatology Studies, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known. This area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms such as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction and Bollywood film noir.
Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected in academic debate in the fields of mass violence and genocide studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims after they are killed? In the context of mass violence, death does not constitute the end of the executors' work. Their victims' remains are often treated and manipulated in very specific ways, amounting in some cases to true social engineering, often with remarkable ingenuity. To address these seldom-documented phenomena, this volume includes chapters based on extensive primary and archival research to explore why, how and by whom these acts have been committed through recent history. Interdisciplinary in scope, Destruction and human remains will appeal to readers interested in the history and implications of genocide and mass violence, including researchers in anthropology, sociology, history, politics and modern warfare.
This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. It contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy. It will be read in universities by social scientists and anthropologists and also by those with an interest in maritime Scotland.
Making a bold intervention into critical security studies literature, this book explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security. It considers the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman alongside literature from the sociology of death, before undertaking a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Centre in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. By interviewing the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, the book shows that practices of memorialisation are a retrospective security endeavour - they conceal and re-narrate the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority. The book will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of critical security studies, memory studies and international politics.
Throughout the 1990s, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was forced to face the challenges posed by the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis and a succession of outbreaks of political violence in Rwanda and its neighbouring countries. Humanitarian workers were confronted with the execution of almost one million people, tens of thousands of casualties pouring into health centres, the flight of millions of people who had sought refuge in camps and a series of deadly epidemics. Drawing on various hitherto unpublished private and public archives, this book recounts the experiences of the MSF teams working in the field. It is intended for humanitarian aid practitioners, students, journalists and researchers with an interest in genocide and humanitarian studies and the political sociology of international organisations.
This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann's systems theory, the book examines how each approaches epistemology. It opens by looking at twentieth-century epistemology, particularly the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It then moves on to discuss structuralism, poststructuralism, critical realism, the epistemological problematics of Foucault's writings and the dialectics of systems theory. This unique work takes a comparative look at structuralism and post-structuralism's epistemological theory with special reference to scientific reason. It also investigates Luhmann's works in epistemology. The aim is to explore whether the focal point for epistemology and the sciences remain that social and political interests actually form a concrete point of concern for the sciences as well.
Addiction from the supermarket The most powerful drug cartel of the 21st century sells pizzas, chocolate bars and mixed sweets. The promise: a quick and happy snack at low cost. The truth: this “food” isn’t nutritious, but is addictive and fattening, while bringing bumper profits for the investors. “Big Food” is becoming more powerful, but the costs due to the consequences of obesity now risk overwhelming global healthcare services. Obesity ranks as a killer before smoking or high blood pressure. A direct analysis of a man-made epidemic that is dominated by a few large companies and kept going by multiple profiteers. Their motto: “Teach the world to snack.”
This book examines the links between major contemporary public sector reforms and neoliberal thinking. The key contribution of the book is to enhance our understanding of contemporary neoliberalism as it plays out in the public administration and to provide a critical analysis of generally overlooked aspects of administrative power. The book examines the quest for accountability, credibility and evidence in the public sector. It asks whether this quest may be understood in terms of neoliberal thinking and, if so, how? The book makes the argument that while current administrative reforms are informed by several distinct political rationalities, they evolve above all around a particular form of neoliberalism: constructivist neoliberalism. The book analyses the dangers of the kinds of administrative power seeking to invoke the self-steering capacities of society and administration itself.
This book outlines the ways sport helps to create transnational social fields that interconnect migrants dispersed across a region known as the Black Atlantic: England, North America and the Caribbean. Many Caribbean men's stories about their experiences migrating to Canada, settling in Toronto, finding jobs and travelling involved some contact with a cricket and social club. This book offers a unique contribution to black diaspora studies through showing sport as a means of allaying the pain of ageing in the diaspora, creating transnational social networks and marking ethnic boundaries on a local scale. The book also brings black diaspora analysis to sport research, and through a close look at what goes on before, during and after cricket matches provides insights into the dis-unities, contradictions and complexities of Afro-diasporic identity in multicultural Canada. It will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, sport studies and black diaspora studies.
Embryo research, cloning, assisted conception, neonatal care, saviour siblings, organ transplants, drug trials - modern developments have transformed the field of medicine almost beyond recognition in recent decades and the law struggles to keep up. In this highly acclaimed and very accessible book, now in its sixth edition, Margaret Brazier and Emma Cave provide an incisive survey of the legal situation in areas as diverse as fertility treatment, patient consent, assisted dying, malpractice and medical privacy. The book has been fully revised and updated to cover the latest cases, from assisted dying to informed consent; legislative reform of the NHS, professional regulation and redress; European regulations on data protection and clinical trials; and legislation and policy reforms on organ donation, assisted conception and mental capacity. Essential reading for healthcare professionals, lecturers, medical and law students, this book is of relevance to all whose perusal of the daily news causes wonder, hope and consternation at the advances and limitations of medicine, patients and the law.
Ex-Marine und Bestsellerautor Jack Dana könnte eigentlich ein ruhiges Leben führen: Er hat seinen Erzfeind Abner Brown zu Fall gebracht, ist glücklich liiert mit der schönen Anwältin Heidi Krohn und hat gerade begonnen, sein neues Buch zu schreiben. Doch dann werden sein Freund Simon Lathrop und dessen Frau auf brutalste Weise ermordet. Jack vermutet sogleich, dass die Tat mit Abner Brown in Verbindung stehen könnte, schließlich hatte Lathrop Jack geholfen, Abner zu Fall zu bringen. Als dann auch noch sein Laptop gehackt und er massiv bedroht wird, besteht für Jack kein Zweifel mehr daran, dass hier einer Abners Tod rächen will – jemand, der Abner sehr nahegestanden haben muss. Er nimmt die Herausforderung an, um Heidis und sein eigenes Leben zu retten, und gerät in große Gefahr … Louis Begleys neuer Roman verstrickt den Leser tief in die Machenschaften eines international agierenden Syndikats gewissenloser Gangster.
Ex-Marine und Bestsellerautor Jack Dana könnte eigentlich ein ruhiges Leben führen: Er hat seinen Erzfeind Abner Brown zu Fall gebracht, ist glücklich liiert mit der schönen Anwältin Heidi Krohn und hat gerade begonnen, sein neues Buch zu schreiben. Doch dann werden sein Freund Simon Lathrop und dessen Frau auf brutalste Weise ermordet. Jack vermutet sogleich, dass die Tat mit Abner Brown in Verbindung stehen könnte, schließlich hatte Lathrop Jack geholfen, Abner zu Fall zu bringen. Als dann auch noch sein Laptop gehackt und er massiv bedroht wird, besteht für Jack kein Zweifel mehr daran, dass hier einer Abners Tod rächen will – jemand, der Abner sehr nahegestanden haben muss. Er nimmt die Herausforderung an, um Heidis und sein eigenes Leben zu retten, und gerät in große Gefahr … Louis Begleys neuer Roman verstrickt den Leser tief in die Machenschaften eines international agierenden Syndikats gewissenloser Gangster.
Dancing in the English style explores the development, experience, and cultural representation of popular dance in Britain from the end of the First World War to the early 1950s. It describes the rise of modern ballroom dancing as Britain's predominant popular style, as well as the opening of hundreds of affordable dancing schools and purpose-built dance halls. It focuses in particular on the relationship between the dance profession and dance hall industry and the consumers who formed the dancing public. Together these groups negotiated the creation of a 'national' dancing style, which constructed, circulated, and commodified ideas about national identity. At the same time, the book emphasizes the global, exploring the impact of international cultural products on national identity construction, the complexities of Americanisation, and Britain's place in a transnational system of production and consumption that forged the dances of the Jazz Age.
Fred Flintstone lived in a sunny Stone Age American suburb, but his ancestors were respectable, middle-class Victorians. They were very amused to think that prehistory was an archaic version of their own world because it suggested that British ideals were eternal. In the 1850s, our prehistoric ancestors were portrayed in satirical cartoons, songs, sketches and plays as ape-like, reflecting the threat posed by evolutionary ideas. By the end of the century, recognisably human cave men inhabited a Stone Age version of late-imperial Britain, sending-up its ideals and institutions. Cave men appeared constantly in parades, civic pageants and costume parties. In the early 1900s American cartoonists and early Hollywood stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton adopted and reimagined this very British character, cementing it in global popular culture. Cave men are an appealing way to explore and understand Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Death lurks in the shadows Who are you? Hamburg Criminal Psychologist Dr. Evelin Wolf wonders as she examines the severely disturbed homeless man with the conspicuous scar across his face. The extremely aggressive man with no memory or identity is alleged to have committed a brutal murder. But Evelin and Assistant District Attorney Alex Gutenberg doubt his guilt and suspect there is something more behind the supposedly crystal-clear case. Shortly thereafter, Hamburg is shaken by a series of murders unparalleled in cruelty and sadism. The perverted killer draws a bloody trail across the Hanseatic city and links it with a clear message to Alex and Evelin: Revenge. Alex and Evelin work feverishly to solve both cases. In the process, they make a fatal mistake. And the killer exploits it mercilessly…
The most dangerous people are those you trust. The dismembered body of a young woman is discovered in a forest near Hamburg. Her remains give a terrifyingly vivid account of the unimaginably cruel torture she suffered before her death. She won't be the only victim. Within a very short period of time, more women are discovered. Assistant District Attorney Alex Gutenberg and criminal psychologist Dr. Evelin Wolf feverishly try everything to bring down the serial killer before he takes his next victim. A clue leads them to a severely mentally disturbed inmate of an asylum for the criminally insane. He seems to be the key to solving the current crimes. But the interned remains silent. Evelin has only one chance: She must succeed in penetrating the inmate's tainted mind. But the price is high. Evelin tracks down a terrible secret and suddenly finds her own life at stake…