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July 2021My Life with Viruses
A researcher’s history of the fascinating world of pathogens
by Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker in association with Jeanne Rubner
In times of the coronavirus pandemic many people have certainly condemned them, but Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker has dedicated his life to researching them and is intrigued by viruses – even if sometimes he is keenly aware of their fatal effects. To mark his 80th birthday the biochemist describes the co-evolution and co-existence as well as the eternal ‘battle’ between humans and viruses. Winnacker takes up the cause of these ‘biological elements between animate and inanimate nature’ because they play an important role in fundamental research and genetic technology, and without them human beings would not be what they are.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019The secret life of romantic comedy
by Celestino Deleyto
The secret life of romantic comedy offers a new approach to one of the most popular and resilient genres in the history of Hollywood. Steering away from the rigidity and ideological determinism of traditional accounts of the genre, this book advocates a more flexible theory, which allows the student to explore the presence of the genre in unexpected places, extending the concept to encompass films that are not usually considered romantic comedies. Combining theory with detailed analyses of a selection of films, including To Be or Not to Be (1942), Rear Window (1954), Kiss Me Stupid (1964), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Before Sunset (2004), the book aims to provide a practical framework for the exploration of a key area of contemporary experience - intimate matters - through one of its most powerful filmic representations: the genre of romantic comedy. Original and entertaining, The secret life of romantic comedy is perfect for students and academics of film and film genre.
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Science & MathematicsSeptember 2024The elephant and the dragon in contemporary life sciences
A call for decolonising global governance
by Joy Y. Zhang, Saheli Datta Burton
This book provides a powerful diagnosis of why the global governance of science struggles in the face of emerging powers. Through unpacking critical events in China and India over the past twenty years, it demonstrates that the 'subversiveness' assumed in the two countries' rise in the life sciences reflects many of the regulatory challenges that are shared worldwide. It points to a decolonial imperative for science governance to be responsive and effective in a cosmopolitan world. By highlighting epistemic injustice within contemporary science, the book extends theories of decolonisation.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2024Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas
by Linda Levy Peck, Adrianna E. Bakos
Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women's experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women's agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women's experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.
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2024The second half of your life - a manual
Tips and strategies for successful ageing
by Dr. Petra Kiedaisch
In the middle of our lives, the cards are reshuffled: marriages are divorced, careers are questioned, friendships are ended, questions of meaning are asked, bodies change - and not just hormonally. At the same time, children leave home and parents become carers. From the age of 45, the majority of our population is at the centre of a second upheaval that affects all facets of our lives and leaves us at a loss in many ways. Not only in our daily lives, but also when it comes to planning for our own old age. This guide is designed to help us find our way. It presents the most important information from all areas relevant to a good life after 45. Leading experts from the fields of medicine, nutrition, philosophy, theology, psychology, care, law and finance give recommendations on what to look out for and what tools are needed to get through these challenging years unscathed. Useful checklists round off the articles. The book shows us the unique opportunity to see these challenges not as a crisis but as a source of strength. Not only can we come through this period of our lives healthy and happy, but we can also shape it so that the next age threshold is no longer frightening. During the second phase of adolescence, we lay the foundations for whether and how we will grow older. Be it in terms of health or living together with family and friends. With contributions from: Prof. Dr. Martin Gessmann (philosophy), Dipl. Psych. Claudia Kühner (psychology), Dr Suso Lederle (medicine), Dr Petra Forster (nutrition), Christian Hald, Anja Heine (law), Prof Dr Philipp Schreiber (finance), Prof Dr Thomas Klie (nursing care insurance), Georg Eberhardt (religion).
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2020The life–cycle in Western Europe, c.1300–c.1500
by S. H. Rigby, Deborah Youngs
This is the first study to examine the entire life cycle in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a wide range of secondary and primary material, the book explores the timing and experiences of infancy, childhood, adolescence and youth, adulthood, old age and, finally, death. It discusses attitudes towards ageing, rites of passage, age stereotypes in operation, and the means by which age was used as a form of social control, compelling individuals to work, govern, marry and pay taxes. The wide scope of the study allows contrasts and comparisons to be made across gender, social status and geographical location. It considers whether men and women experienced the ageing process in the same way, and examines the differences that can be discerned between northern and southern Europe. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suffered famine, warfare, plague and population collapse. This fascinating consideration of the life cycle adds a new dimension to the debate over continuity and change in a period of social and demographic upheaval.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2024How to be multiple
The philosophy of twins
by Helena de Bres, Julia de Bres
In How to be multiple, Helena de Bres - a twin herself - argues that twinhood is a unique lens for examining our place in the world and how we relate to other people. The way we think about twins offers remarkable insights into some of the deepest questions of our existence, from what is a person? to how should we treat one another? Deftly weaving together literary and cultural history, philosophical enquiry and personal experience, de Bres examines such thorny issues as binary thinking, objectification, romantic love and friendship, revealing the limits of our individualistic perspectives. In this illuminating, entertaining book, wittily illustrated by her twin sister, de Bres ultimately suggests that to consider twinhood is to imagine the possibility of a more interconnected, capacious human future.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2024The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia
Engaging in everyday struggle
by Alexandrina Vanke
Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.
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AnthropologyMarch 2017Ageing selves and everyday life in the north of England
Years in the making
by Series edited by Alexander Smith, Cathrine Degnen
Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.
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September 2023Being Able to Stop
Against the delusion of permanent growth
by Edited by Jean-Pierre Wils
We moderns were the inhabitants of an age of impetuous forward movement and voracious discontent. Our main virtue was to increase our reach. Increasing our having and accelerating our being were the signposts towards the future. We just could not get enough. Using the blinkers of ignorance and self-anaesthesia, however, we managed to forget the tremendous costs incurred by this intoxication. Now disillusionment has set in. We look to the future with anxiety. We know that we have long since crossed a line and that a revision of our lifestyle is imminent. We have a bad feeling, and doubts about progress often give way to anger and rebellion. Which stocks of the modern narrative should we defend; which would we do better to let go? How will we even "be able to stop"? The path to a different society needs an attractive goal, because without the prospect of a different, better life, we will not move forward. We should start practising immediately. There is no time to lose.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2022Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan
The cult of the Two Grand Elders
by Fabian Graham
In Singapore and Malaysia, the inversion of Chinese Underworld traditions has meant that Underworld demons are now amongst the most commonly venerated deities in statue form, channelled through their spirit mediums, tang-ki. The Chinese Underworld and its sub-hells are populated by a bureaucracy drawn from the Buddhist, Taoist and vernacular pantheons. Under the watchful eye of Hell's 'enforcers', the lower echelons of demon soldiers impose post-mortal punishments on the souls of the recently deceased for moral transgressions committed during their prior incarnations. Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan offers an ethnography of contemporary Chinese Underworld traditions, where night-time cemetery rituals assist the souls of the dead, exorcised spirits are imprisoned in Guinness bottles, and malicious foetus ghosts are enlisted to strengthen a temple's spirit army. Understanding the religious divergences between Singapore and Malaysia (and their counterparts in Taiwan) through an analysis of socio-political and historical events, Fabian Graham challenges common assumptions about the nature and scope of Chinese vernacular religious beliefs and practices. Graham's innovative approach to alterity allows the reader to listen to first-person dialogues between the author and channelled Underworld deities. Through its alternative methodological and narrative stance, the book intervenes in debates on the interrelation between sociocultural and spiritual worlds, and promotes the destigmatisation of spirit possession and discarnate phenomena in the future study of mystical and religious traditions.
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MedicineDecember 2020African nurses and everyday work in twentieth-century Zimbabwe
by Clement Masakure, Jane Schultz
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April 2021On the Purposes of Life and Whether They Exist
A philosophical fitting
by Axel Braig
The musician, doctor and philosopher Axel Braig considers philosophy a little like the weather: he looks for the right clothes for every situation. Braig is primarily concerned with practical, effective things from the two-and-a-half millennia fund of (Western) thinking, such as helpful approaches in existential crises. In this book, he introduces us to philosophical thinkers from Plato to Montaigne to Levinas and Feyerabend. Braig not only shares his own philosophical biography, but above all encourages us to philosophise ourselves.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Britain in China
by Robert Bickers
This is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design, but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into conflict not only with the Chinese population, but with the British imperial government. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British.
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Science & MathematicsMarch 2022The elephant and the dragon in contemporary life sciences
by Joy Y. Zhang, Saheli Datta Burton, Des Fitzgerald
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2021Religion and life cycles in early modern England
by Caroline Bowden, Emily Vine, Tessa Whitehouse
Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550-1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.
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Medieval historyMay 2006The life–cycle in Western Europe, c.1300–c.1500
by Deborah Youngs
This is the first study to examine the entire life cycle in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a wide range of secondary and primary material, the book explores the timing and experiences of infancy, childhood, adolescence and youth, adulthood, old age and, finally, death. It discusses attitudes towards ageing, rites of passage, age stereotypes in operation, and the means by which age was used as a form of social control, compelling individuals to work, govern, marry and pay taxes. The wide scope of the study allows contrasts and comparisons to be made across gender, social status and geographical location. It considers whether men and women experienced the ageing process in the same way, and examines the differences that can be discerned between northern and southern Europe. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suffered famine, warfare, plague and population collapse. This fascinating consideration of the life cycle adds a new dimension to the debate over continuity and change in a period of social and demographic upheaval.
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November 2016Coming to Terms with Life
by Matthias Wengenroth
Do you struggle with thoughts and feelings that make life difficult? Have you tried all sorts of ways of dealing with this without getting anywhere? Do you feel that life is passing you by? Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which this book describes in a clear and entertaining way, provides new and very enlightening insights into the causes of human suffering. At the same time, ACT shows how we can improve the way we handle the difficult aspects of being human, while also developing our abilities and strengths. This title shows how using the described simple but effective methods can lead you to a happier, better life. Target Group: people who want to utilize their potential more fully, people interested in acceptance and commitment therapy, people practicing or interested in psychotherapy (psychologists, doctors, coaches, social workers)
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MedicineResearch Work in Nursing
A Handbook and Workbook for Nurses
by Eva-Maria Panfil
This successful handbook and workbook set has rapidly established itself as the standard. With a concise and specific approach, it summarizes all the information on scientific research relevant for nurses. It clearly explains what research in nursing entails, the techniques that are used, and what products can result from the research. Target Group: Nursing students, nursing trainers, those engaging in further training
