Epistola publishing house is a family-owned company founded in 2009. We seek to provide quality reading with variety of themes to enrich the lives of young readers. Our books have distinctively educational purpose, inspiring discussion with parents, teachers or other children. In order to provide the best possible reading and achieve quality, we collaborate with renowned domestic and foreign authors.
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Singapore's largest independent publisher of fiction and non-fiction for all ages. Check out our latest catalogue here: July – December 2018 (PDF.)
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The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.
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.”
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Hatred of Jews is long-standing, widespread and powerful. After Auschwitz, the lesson used to be: “Never again!” However, anti-Semitic resentment, like an epidemic, still grips the bourgeois middle-class in our society. In his book “A Jew for One Hour”, Kurt Oesterle convincingly demonstrates how hatred of Jews functions in aesthetic and emotional terms with no empathy whatsoever. He also shows that for the past 200 years of German literature a line of tradition can be acknowledged “in defence of Jewishness”. Kurt Oesterle accounts for this in his book of stories with an impressive depth of knowledge, with a generous heart and mind and incredible commitment. A truly significant book.
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The 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease epidemic in the UK, during which millions of animals were culled over a nine-month period, had a devastating and long-lasting impact on individuals and communities. In 2002 the European Parliament noted that policymakers need to have a better understanding of the social and psychological impact of such events on adults and children, on farmers and non-farmers. Although many studies about FMD have been published since 2001, this is the first to offer a detailed examination of the various ways in which the outbreak affected the fabric of rural life and rural culture across classes and across generations. Drawing on the experiences of farmers, the media, artists, writers, children and churches, this collection provides a space for academic inquiry, political and poetic reflection and artistic expression. ;
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Joachim Gardemann outlines his encounters and experiences as a pediatrician in crisis zones while working for the Red Cross all over the world. He describes people in existential emergency situations, who have been traumatized but survived a genocide on the border with Rwanda. People who have fled from civil wars in Congo or escaped from the Kosovo war. He traces the suffering of people in Iran, China and Haiti after losing their relatives and all their possessions in severe earthquakes. At their moments of greatest vulnerability, in the shelters and dirt of a refugee camp in Jordan, he meets people who have fled from the turmoil of the civil wars in Sudan and Syria. He sketches poignant portraits of the victims of the tsunami disaster in Sri Lanka. He gives a striking account of the devastation wrought by the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. He creates a worthy memorial to those who died of Ebola, who lost their lives as doctors and nurses in the fight against Ebola as well as to those who survived.
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The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this study of a very significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.
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The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this, the first study of this significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.
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This series provides texts central to medieval studies courses and focuses upon the diverse cultural, social and political conditions that affected the functioning of all levels of medieval society. Translations are accompanied by introductory and explanatory material and each volume includes a comprehensive guide to the sources' interpretation, including discussion of critical linguistic problems and an assessment of recent research on the topics covered. From 1348 to 1350 Europe was devastated by an epidemic that left between a third and one half of the population dead. This source book traces, through contemporary writings, the calamitous impact of the Black Death in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its spread across England from 1348 to 1349. Rosemary Horrox surveys contemporary attempts to explain the plague, which was universally regarded as an expression of divine vengeance for the sins of humankind. Moralists all had their particular targets for criticism. However, this emphasis on divine chastisement did not preclude attempts to explain the plague in medical or scientific terms. Also, there was a widespread belief that human agencies had been involved, and such scapegoats as foreigners, the poor and Jews were all accused of poisoning wells. The final section of the book charts the social and psychological impact of the plague, and its effect on the late-medieval economy.
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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.
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During the corona crisis, Robert Koch‘s name has been on everyone‘s lips: Robert Koch is regarded as one of the shining lights in German medical history. However, the expedition that he undertakes in 1906 to the “protected area” of German East Africa even the institute named after him describes as the darkest chapter in Koch‘s history. Lichtwarck-Aschoff‘s oppressive book tells how the Nobel laureate conducted medical tests on people suffering from the sleeping sickness transmitted by the tsetse fly, and recommended the internment of sick people in camps. The aim was to preserve the labour power of the healthy colonised – even if that were at the cost of the infected suffering damage to their body and soul or even dying.
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This fascinating work challenges many of the accepted facts about the concentration camps run by the British during the South African War. The author demonstrates that much of what we have traditionally understood about these camps originates the testimony which was solicited, selected and published by key women activists within Boer proto-nationalist circles. Using detailed archival evidence, she shows that much of the history of the camps results from a deliberate imposition of 'post/memory' - a process by which what was 'remembered' was shaped and reshaped to support the development of a racialised nationalist framework. Many of the camps' occupants died from successive epidemics of measles, typhoid, enteritis and pneumonia rather than deliberate ill-treatment, yet the book shows how mourning for those who died was overridden by state commemorative activities concerned with promoting pan-Boer nationalist aspirations. The innovative and groundbreaking approach of the author invites the reader to step into and explore with her the commemorative sites passed by nationalist land acts, which still powerfully mark the South African landscape. ;
