Books published by Palgrave Macmillan UK

The book tells about people who lived in an era of historical cataclysms, wars and revolutions, changes in political formations. The generation of the Kazakh intelligentsia responded to the historical challenge facing the Kazakhs at a turning point in history. These are people born at the end of the 19th century, educated in different countries and united by the idea of overcoming colonial dependence on the Russian Empire.The author aims to form a holistic view of a galaxy of outstanding personalities who, in an important historical period, were able to take responsibility for the people and their future. The history of the country is perceived through the prism of their destinies, views, activities and death.The material of the book is a biographical sketch and covers the history of Kazakhstan in the first third of the twentieth century, until the period of the Great Terror (1937¿1938).

This book develops a theoretically rich analysis of quantification and subjectivity, tracing new linkages between educational policy and everyday life in schools, diving deeper into ¿ordinary¿ schools as they encounter and navigate quantified forms of recognition. With a focus on Chile as a critical case of neoliberal experimentation, this book investigates whether intense exposure to quantified forms of meaning and sense-making in school settings could develop into metrics-driven dispositions or attachments. Contemporary demands on schools for calculation, prediction, and comparison by the use of accountability tools like high-stakes testing, league tables, consequential inspection ratings and ¿progress¿ measures evidence the relentless presence of quantification in teaching and learning. This book argues the importance of bridging political, sociological and anthropological literatures together with affect and subjectivity theories to understand the complex ways in which standardisation, optimisation, automation, and surveillance crystallise into quantification-based forms of intelligibility.

In 1908, Joseph Conrad was criticised by a reviewer for being a man 'without either country or language': even his shipboard communities were the product of a 'cosmopolitan' vision. This book takes off from that criticism and begins by exploring the history and meanings of the term 'cosmopolitan'. It then considers the multinational world of Conrad's ships - and of the Merchant Marine more generally - to differentiate multinationalism from cosmopolitanism. Subsequent chapters then address nationalism, nation-formation and the concept of the nation through a reading of Nostromo; cosmopolitanism and internationalism in The Secret Agent; nationalism, internationalism and transnational activism in relation to Under Westen Eyes; and Conrad's own transnational activism in his later essays. While drawing distinctions between cosmopolitanism, internationalism and transnationalism as the appropriate conceptual framings for Conrad's works, this book traces Conrad's own engagement with nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnational activism in relation to the political events of his time.

This book dissects the reproductive intentions and behaviours of the one-child generation cohort in China, situated in the wider context of changing family life patterns and gendered lenses. Demonstrating that the one-child family is still favoured by the one-child generation, this book uncovers the socioeconomic dimensions and mechanisms of family relations underlying young people¿s decision-making processes. It also incorporates individual considerations and experiences of childbearing from over 50 interviews to contribute to the development of China's social policy. Whereas men¿s childbearing beliefs were relatively unexplored in the literature, the author included male interviewees to better reflect gender differences in relation to childbearing, employment and family. Analysing the relationship between life routine and the desire (or lack thereof) to increase China's population, the author argues that the current childbearing policy fails to accommodate theneeds and demands of young people, thus limiting the uptake of Chinäs new policy.

"The ultimate playbook for crushing it at work, from the CEO of Barstool Sports. She works hand-in-hand with a founder who's a lightning rod for controversy -- OK, for stepping in it. She's grown a chaotic company (Vanity Fair calls it a 'pirate ship') housed over a dentist's office outside of Boston that published giveaway papers into a juggernaut with more than 5 billion monthly video views and 225 million followers valued at 550 million dollars. Erika Ayers Badan calls herself a 'token CEO', the rare female employee in the highest rank of a bro-roar sports and new media culture. She's also a massive student of work: how to do it, how to be effective at it, how to get noticed, how to crush it, how to figure out what you love and do it as a job. She's figured it out, after big marketing jobs in large traditional corporations like Microsoft and AOL, for herself; she's figured it out for friends; she's figured it out for the thousands of people who listen to her Barstool podcast, 'Token CEO' every week. And in this book, she's figuring it out for everybody else. With the verve and motivation of books like You are a badass and the smart, specific ideas of titles like Atomic habits, Nobody cares about your career is a real playbook. It's about how work really works and how you can get work to work for you. It's about thank you notes and thankless tasks, the energy in meetings and energy vampires, how to pick a boss and how to get a boss to pick you. It's about being all in (but not bringing your whole self to work -- some of you is better left at home) and becoming valuable to your workplace. It's about participating -- with your brain, your skills, your experience, and your willingness to pitch in and offer yourself up for something you may not even know how to do yet. It's about making your own luck at work. Nobody cares about your career is for first-time job seekers who think no company will ever want them, people stuck in second or third jobs who don't know how to move on to the next thing, people who have the job they thought was their brass ring but who discovered it's not all that. Her chapter titles include: Chapter 1: Do Whatever Makes You Happy and F*ck Anyone Who Says Otherwise Chapter 10: Know What Your Company is Paying You to Do Chapter 12: Don't Be an Asshole at Work Chapter 13: The Messy Stuff: Being Human, Getting Drunk, Sex, and Other Disaster Scenarios at Work Chapter 16: Feedback is a Gift. Feedforward is for wimps"--

A behind-the-scenes look at The New Yorker cartoon caption contest, its history, how it's judged, and the secrets to writing a winning captionEvery week, thousands of people enter The New Yorker cartoon caption contest in hopes of seeing their name and caption in print. But only one person has made it to the finalists' round an astounding fifteen times and won eight contests: Lawrence Wood, also known as the Ken Jennings of caption writing.What's Wood's secret? What makes a caption good or bad? How do you beat the crowd? And most important, what makes a caption funny?Packed with 175 of the magazine's best cartoons and featuring a foreword by Bob Mankoff, former cartoon editor of The New Yorker and creator of the caption contest, Your Caption Has Been Selected takes you behind the scenes to learn about the contest's history, the way it's judged, and what it has to say about humor, creativity, and good writing. Lawrence reveals his own captioning process and shows readers how to generate the perfect string of words to get a laugh. Informative, funny, and just a little vulgar, this book is perfect for fans of the contest, readers interested in how humor works, and anyone who dreams of the day they receive an e-mail stating, "Your caption has been selected."

This open access book provides an analysis of human actors and their capacity to explore and conceptualise their own agency by being curious, gathering knowledge, and shaping identities in their travel reflections on Asia. Thus, the actors open windows across time to present a profound overview of diverse descriptions and constructions of Asia. It is demonstrated that international and transnational history contributes to and benefits from analyses of national and local contexts that in turn enrich our understanding of transcultural encounters and experiences across time. The book proposes an actor-centred contextual approach to travel writing to recount meaningful constructions of Asia's physical, political and spiritual landscapes. It offers comparative reflections on the patterns of encounter across Eurasia, where from the late medieval period an idea of civilisation was transculturally shared yet also constantly questioned and reframed. Tailored for academic and public discussions alike, this volume will be invaluable for both scholars of Global History and interested audiences to stimulate further discussions on the nature of global encounters in Asia.

Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenzäs viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of the first human influenza virus in 1933. Instead, it was rooted in the development of medical virus research and virological ways of knowing that grew out of a half-century of changes and innovations in medical science that were shaped through two influenza pandemics, two world wars, and by state-sponsored programs to scientifically modernise British medicine. A series of transformations, in which virological ideas and practices were aligned with and incorporated into medicine and public health, underpinned the viralisation of influenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Collaboration, conflict and exchange between researchers, medical professionals and governmental bodies lay at the heart of this process. This book is a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies, and institutions, and philanthropies in Britain, the USA and beyond, forged a new medical consensus on the identity and nature of influenza. Shedding new light on the modern history of influenza, this book is a timely account of how ways of knowing and controlling this intractable epidemic disease became viral.

The book takes time as the axis, selecting 98 bridges (or bridge groups) across the country and 7 representative bridges out of the country, reflecting the steps and development of China's bridge construction in related majors and engineering technicians in colleges and universities. This book aims to let the general public understand the arduous history of China's bridge construction and the rapid development of China's bridge construction without the country's economic development, strength, and hard work of the bridge people. It is also hoped that the public will enjoy the convenience of bridges, highways, railroads, and urban roads and at the same time enhance their awareness of bridge knowledge, knowledge, love, and scientific use of bridges. This book is used by the general public to understand the development of China's bridge construction, but also as a reference book for teachers and students of bridge engineering-related majors and engineering technicians in colleges and universities.

This book sheds light on the addressees of online reviewer discourse on wine, perfume and chocolate in order to explore how the discourse construes the consumer of experiential luxury. In the 21st century, luxury is more complex than ever before. Luxury products have become more affordable and hence accessible to new markets and consumer segments, and the groups of consumers seeking luxury experiences are more heterogeneous than ever. Yet, consumption choices as well as how these are thought about, evaluated and talked about still function to position consumers with respect to both how they see themselves and how they want others to see them. Many consumers seek to consume in subtle and sophisticated ways. They strive to develop consumption expertise with a view to maximizing their enjoyment from the luxury experience, avoiding overt displays of wealth while signalling status by means of luxury insight only available to the cognoscenti. One way for aficionados to develop their insight into the diversified and elusive realm of contemporary luxury is to engage with online reviewer discourse. The authors take a discourse analytic approach informed by the Appraisal model to expose the imagined addressees¿ characteristics and behaviour, the luxury values they embrace and the goals of their luxury consumption. The authors argue that the activity of online reviewers is such a crucial arena in contemporary luxury that a new form of luxury consumption has emerged, which they label review-based luxury. This book will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Communication, Argumentation, Media Studies and Marketing, as well as anyone with a general interest in wine, perfume and chocolate as experiential luxury.

Militarizing Outer Space explores the dystopian and destructive dimensions of the Space Age and challenges conventional narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry. Concentrating on weapons, warfare and viölence, this provocative volume examines real and imagined endeavors of arming the skies and conquering the heavens. The third and final volume in the groundbreaking ¿European Astroculture trilogy, ¿Militarizing Outer Space zooms in on the interplay between security, technopolitics and knowledge from the 1920s through the 1980s. Often hailed as the site of heavenly utopias and otherworldly salvation, outer space transformed from a promised sanctuary to a present threat, where the battles of the future were to be waged. Astroculture proved instrumental in fathoming forms and functions of warfare¿s futures past, both on earth and in space. The allure of dominating outer space, the book shows, was neither limited to the early twenty-first century nor to current American space force rhetorics.

The enthusiastic response to the Dictionary has prompted this second substantially enlarged, revised and updated edition. It now contains essential details of the lives of over 2000 women from all periods, cultures and walks of life - from queens to cooks, engineers to entertainers, pilots to poisoners. The new entries include women who have hit the headlines in the past five years - from Cory Aquino to Madonna - but the historical coverage has also been broadened in response to new research and a special new feature is the extended treatment of women from Third World countries. With subsections for further reading, comprehensive subject index and bibliographical survey, the Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography is an invaluable reference source - and a fascinating bed-time read.

This book is a critical study of visual representations of José Martí The National Hero of Cuba, and the discourses of power that make it possible for Martí's images to be perceived as icons today. It argues that an observer of Martí's icons who is immersed in the Cuban national narrative experiences a retrospective reconstruction of those images by means of ideologically formed national discourses of power. Also, the obsessive reproduction of Martí's icons signals a melancholia for the loss of the martyr-hero. But instead of attempting to "forget Martí," the book concludes that the utopian impulse of his memory should serve to resist melancholia and to visualize new forms of creative re-significations of Martí and, by extension, the nation.

This book explores the answers to fundamental questions about the human mind and human behaviour with the help of two ancient texts. The first is Oedipus Rex (Oedipus Tyrannus) by Sophocles, written in the 5th century BCE. The second is human DNA, with its origins around 4 billion years ago, and continuously revised by chance and evolution. With Sophocles as a guide, the authors take a journey into the Genomic era, an age marked by ever-expanding insights into the human genome. Over the course of this journey, the book explores themes of free will, fate, and chance; prediction, misinterpretation, and the burden that comes with knowledge of the future; self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies; the forces that contribute to similarities and differences among people; roots and lineage; and the judgement of oneself and others.Using Oedipus Rex as its lens, this novel work provides an engaging overview of behavioural genetics that demonstrates its relevance across the humanities and the social and life sciences. It will appeal in particular to students and scholars of genetics, education, psychology, sociology, and law.

In mathematics there are limits, speed limits of a sort, on how many computational steps are required to solve certain problems. The theory of computational complexity deals with such limits, in particular whether solving an n-dimensional version of a particular problem can be accomplished with, say, 2 n n steps or will inevitably require 2 steps. Such a bound, together with a physical limit on computational speed in a machine, could be used to establish a speed limit for a particular problem. But there is nothing in the theory of computational complexity which precludes the possibility of constructing analog devices that solve such problems faster. It is a general goal of neural network researchers to circumvent the inherent limits of serial computation. As an example of an n-dimensional problem, one might wish to order n distinct numbers between 0 and 1. One could simply write all n! ways to list the numbers and test each list for the increasing property. There are much more efficient ways to solve this problem; in fact, the number of steps required by the best sorting algorithm applied to this problem is proportional to n In n .

An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates' direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development. At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

An indispensable exploration of the runaway bestselling series! From Left Behind to Glorious Appearing, the books in the Left Behind series have sold over 60,000,000 copies worldwide and their popularity continues to grow. What makes the books about the apocalypse so popular? What is it about the end times that fascinates millions around the globe? And what does the Bible really say about the end of the world? In Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times, six experts gather to answer these provocative questions and more, guiding readers through the different Christian millennialist views and how they developed. They explore the historical, biblical, social and political issues raised by the Left Behind series' religious perspective, present broad questions that curious readers might ask, and encourage us to reflect on the issues the series raises. An entertaining and informative book for fans as well as skeptics, this is a top-notch resource you won't want to be without! Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times answers some of the most often-asked questions about this fascinating series of books: * How popular are the Left Behind books . . . and why? * What does the Bible say about the end times? * How did Left Behind's particular vision of the end times develop? * When do Christians think the end times will happen? * How are other religions treated in the Left Behind series? * What social and political messages appear in the Left Behind books? This MUST-HAVE book also includes a READER'S GUIDE with: * Reader's Group Discussion Questions * Full Glossary of Religious Terms * Suggestions For Further Reading from a Variety of Perspectives This book has not been approved, licensed, or sponsored by any of the writers, publishers, or distributors of the books in the Left Behind series nor by any person or entity involved in the creation, production, or distribution of any media based on the series.

This new edition provides a new preface to this highly popular book. The theme of the book is China's relations with the non-Chinese world, not only political and economic, but cultural, social and technological as well. It seeks to show that China's history is part of everyone's history. In particular it traces China's relationship since the thirteenth century to the emergent world order and the various world institutions of which that order is comprised. Each chapter discusses China's comparative place in the world, the avenues of contact between China and other civilizations, and who and what passed along these channels.

This book explores the complex domain of social reality, asking what this reality is, how it is composed and what its dynamics are in both theoretical and practical terms. Through the examination of some of the most important contemporary theories of social ontology, the book discusses the fundamentals of the discipline and lays the foundations for its development in the political sphere. By analyzing the notion of State and the redesign of ontology, the author argues in favor of a realist conception of the State and shows the reasons why this promotes a better understanding of the dynamics of power and the actualization of a greater justice between generations. This book captures the relationship between different generations within the same political context, and presents it as a necessary condition for the re-definition of the concepts of State and meta-State.

Tanasescu examines the rights of nature in terms of its constituent parts. Besides offering a thorough theoretical grounding, the book gives a first detailed overview of the actual cases of rights for nature so far. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the rights of nature to date, both analytically and in terms of actual cases.

This book offers a detailed exploration of the plot genotype, the functional structure behind the plots of classical fairy tales. By understanding how plot genotypes are used, the reader or creative writer will obtain a much better understanding of many other types of fiction, including short stories, dramatic texts and Hollywood screenplays.

Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears reveals under-acknowledged nineteenth-century legacies which shaped Woolf as a writing woman. Marion Dell identifies significant lines of descent from the lives and works of Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.

Sudduth provides a critical exploration of classical empirical arguments for survival arguments that purport to show that data collected from ostensibly paranormal phenomena constitute good evidence for the survival of the self after death. Utilizing the conceptual tools of formal epistemology, he argues that classical arguments are unsuccessful.