The protests unleashed by Iran's disputed presidential election in June 2010 brought the Islamic Republic's vigorous cyber culture to the world's attention. Iran has an estimated 700,000 bloggers, and new i media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were thought to have played a key role in spreading news of the protests. The internet is often celebrated as an agent of social change in countries like Iran, but most literature on the subject has struggled to grasp what this new phenomenon actually means. In this work, the authors give a flavour of contemporary Internet culture in Iran and analyse how this new form of communication is affecting the social and political life of the country. Although they warn against stereotyping bloggers as dissidents, they argue that the internet is changing things in ways which neither the government nor the democracy movement could have anticipated. Blogistan offers both a new reading of Iranian politics and a new conceptual framework for understanding the politics of the internet, with implications for the wider Middle East, China and beyond. -- Book cover.

"Brodsky chronicles how RAWA members, whose identities have been concealed in order to survive, have run schools and orphanages, supplied medical care in secret, and covertly documented fundamentalist atrocities against Afghan women through cameras hidden in their clothes. Since the toppling of the Taliban, RAWA continues its important work, not only helping women and children survive the aftermath of years of abuse, but continuing to fight for human rights, equality for women, and a free and democratic Afghanistan."--BOOK JACKET.

"Poems of elegy in the aftermath of a great love from the internationally best-selling, award-winning novelist (Fugitive Pieces, The Winter Vault) and poet. In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns with strikingly original poems to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." Here are the ways in which passion must accept, must insist, that "death. give / not only take from us." This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, and almost classical in its precision. In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers--so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other--Michaels embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. Love's sheltering understanding is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / not outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive"--

Looks at acid rain, overfishing, waste disposal, oil spills, and the greenhouse effect, explains how they affect the oceans, and describes what must be done to save the oceans

Book by Insdorf, Annette

Both revealing and compelling, Annette Kolodny’s Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century is drawn from the author’s experience as a distinguished teacher, a prize-winning scholar of American literature, a feminist thinker, and an innovative administrator at a major public university. In chapters that range from the changing structure of the American family and its impact on both curriculum and university benefits policies to recommendations for overhauling the culture of decision making on campus, this former Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona explores the present state of higher education and offers a sobering view of what lies ahead. In this volume Kolodny explains the reasons for the financial crisis in higher education today and boldly addresses the challenges that remain ignored, including rising birthrates, changing demographics both on campus and across the country, the accelerating globalization of higher education and advanced research, and the necessity for greater interdisciplinarity in undergraduate education. Moreover, while sensitive to the complex burdens placed on faculty today, Kolodny nonetheless reveals how the professoriate has allowed itself to become vulnerable to public misperceptions and to lampooning by the media. Not simply a book about current problems and future challenges, Failing the Future is rich with practical solutions and workable programs for change. Among her many insights, Kolodny offers a thorough defense of the role of tenure and outlines a new set of procedures to ensure its effective implementation; she proposes a structure for an “Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment Policy”; and she provides a checklist of family-sensitive policies universities can offer their staff, faculty, and administrators. Kolodny calls on union leaders, campus communities, policymakers, and the general public to work together in unprecedented partnerships. Her goal, as she states in a closing coda, is to initiate a revitalized conversation about public education. This book should be required reading for all those concerned with the future of higher education in this country—from college trustees to graduate students entering the professoriate, from faculty to university administrators, from officers of campus-based unions to education policymakers.

Essays discuss Marcel Duchamp, the Shroud of Turin, insect mimicry, Russian art, art criticism and theory, and psychoanalysis

With his concept of "O," Wilfred Bion provided a new psychoanalytic space in which to explore the mind. Dr Annie Reiner's new book, Bion and Being: Passion and the Creative Mind, examines the similarities between this psychoanalytic space and the artist's creative sensibility, as well as mystical and religious states. This most mysterious and revolutionary of Bion's analytic ideas reflects what is essentially a state of being, an experience of mental integrity and union between emotional and rational functions of the mind which is the basis of thinking and creativity. In an effort to provide emotional understanding to Bion's theoretical ideas, Dr Reiner uses examples of artists, poets, writers, theologians, and philosophers, including Rilke, Cummings, Shakespeare, Beckett, and Nietzsche, to illustrate these psychoanalytic concepts. She also presents detailed clinical examples of patient's dreams to explore the obstacles to these states of being, as well as how to work clinically to develop access to these creative states.

Nearly four years after leaving Vienna to escape the Nazis, Stephie Steiner, now sixteen, and her sister Nellie, eleven, are still living in Sweden, worrying about their parents and striving to succeed in school, and at odds with each other despite their mutual love.

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (1937-1945) and translated from the Hungarian by Peter Hargitai recounts the misadventures of a closeted intellectual forced to fit into a life of conventional morality and its notions of manhood. Thirty-six-year-old Mihály takes his new bride to Italy for their honeymoon, where chance separates them, and he finds himself on the run from his marriage. Wandering aimlessly from Perugia to Rome, he begins a break-through journey of fatally erotic longing that culminates on the edge of an abyss too dark to contemplate. Set in Europe during the rise of Fascism, his visionary states are eerily prophetic about one of the darkest periods in human history and of the author's own doom.

True crime account of Buddy Jacobson, one-time horse trainer, would-be builder of a property empire, model-agency owner, compulsive womanizer, and murderer.

Anthony Heilbut is a Grammy-winning record producer famous for his work with gospel music; he is also the author of The Gospel Sound, which celebrates the sound and contributors of the gospel scene. He is an agnostic with Jewish roots who adores gospel music. The Fan Who Knew Too Much, extends “…Heilbut’s fascination with outsiders, loners, and exiles in 20th-century American Culture (Ian Crouch).” The book is comprised of eight essays that range from art to obsession. Heilbut explores the roles of gays in the gospel church, profiles the life and work of Aretha Franklin, discusses the rise of the soap opera and Irna Phillips, its most influential figure, detours to an expose on male sopranos, and explores the roles of émigrés from Hitler’s Germany to America. On this broad journey through American culture, “Anthony Heilbut has been a guide and a mentor...I know of no one who has the love and depth of knowledge of this extraordinary author (Paul Simon).”

A group of young people are rehearsing The Importance of Being Earnest but, as they attempt to perform a play which is alien to them, it becomes apparent that their surroundings are not normal. Gradually, as tensions mount, squabbles ensue and each young person's story starts to emerge, the location is found to be an institution - reinforced by the final grim, chilling echoes of doors slamming and being locked.

"In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism's foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham's life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people. Abraham's first life is an early adulthood of questioning the polytheism of his home city of Ur Kasdim until its ruler, Nimrod, condemns him to death and he is rescued, he believes, by a miracle. In his second life, Abraham's focus is no longer on critique but rather on conversion and on his leadership over his growing household, until God's command that he sacrifice his son Isaac. This test, the Akedah (or "Binding"), ends with another miracle, as he believes, but as Julius argues, it is also a catastrophe for Abraham. The Akedah represents for him an unsurpassed horizon--and in Jewish life thereafter. This book focuses on Abraham as leader of the first Jewish project, Judaism, and the unresolvable, insurmountable crisis that the Akedah represents--both in his leadership and in Judaism itself" --

Konst som provokation

"This Council-sponsored Independent Task Force finds that Africa is of growing strategic importance to the United States in addition to being an important humanitarian concern. In a world where economic opportunity, security threats, disease, and even support for democracy transcend borders, a policy based on humanitarian concerns alone serves neither U.S. interests, nor Africa's. Furthermore, the Task Force finds that critical humanitarian interests would be better served by a more comprehensive U.S. approach toward Africa; nor is it valid to treat Africa more as an object of charity than a diverse continent with partners the United States can work with to advance shared objectives"--OCLC