As human beings, we have an innate disposition to care about our well-being. We all care about staying alive, as well as about avoiding disease, physical pain, bodily harm, disability and assaults on our dignity. Adequate nourishment, water, shelter, security, satisfying work, autonomy, relationships with others and self-esteem are essential to human life and functioning. This illuminating study compares well-being across civic status, economic standing and gender during Amsterdam’s Golden...

Do you remember Melba chocolate, spud guns, Embassy records, pick 'n' mix, broken biscuits, Homemaker china, Californian Poppy perfume, and Ladybird children's clothes? Then you will love the book that brings these, and many other memories, flooding back. The Wonder of Woolies is a celebration of that great British store - Woolworth's - in the words of people who worked and shopped there. In addition to memories from every corner of Britain, the book describes the rise of the '3d and 6d st...

How to Get a PhD is the market leading, classic book for PhD students and their supervisors.

Gothic Horror brings specific images to mind—crumbling castles, dark Parisian alleyways, mad wives in attics, dark and lonely moors, cathedrals where more evil than good exists. Georgia Gothic replaces those locations with antebellum plantations, creatures hidden in backyard sheds, rural folks who might or might not be making pacts with a variety of terrors because that's how it's always been done, city folks hiding their secrets in the trunks of their cars or in their correspondence, hous...

Catastrophic storms, searing heat waves, crumbling waterfronts, warming oceans, air-fouling forest fires and mass extinction have become facts of life. Under these conditions, it is difficult to imagine that the global industrial civilization will continue in its present form. This requires us to reconsider the subject of ecocomposition from a new perspective: “What does it mean to teach college writing in the face of this sobering reality?” The introduction reviews the history of ecocompo...

Just when the clamor over "traditional" marriage couldn’t get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, "What tradition?" In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian lovers to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is—and how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors. It was when marriage moved into the emotional sphere...

Twenty-five high-octane stories from the hottest thriller authors in one anthology, edited by #1 New York Times –bestselling author Lee Child.Lee Child and the International Thriller Writers, Inc. present an anthology of remarkable stories in First Thrills. Showcasing many of the organization's bestselling authors as well as rising stars in the genre, here are twenty-five brand-new, never-before published, storie...

Lee Smith is a "teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy . . . [and] a reader’s dream" (Houston Chronicle). A celebrated and bestselling writer with a dozen novels under her name, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and The Last Girls, she is just as widely recognized for her exceptional short stories. Here, in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Smith collects seven brand-new stories along with seven of her favorites f...

How standards of living have skyrocketed since 1800, and the political philosophy that made it possible: "Persuasive…richly detailed and erudite."— Financial TimesThere's little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in this concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon...

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the CityThe seventh novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.Nearly two decades after ending his groundbreaking Tales of the City saga of San Francisco life, Armistead Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero Michael Tolliver—the fifty-five-year-old sweet-spirited gardener and survivor of the plague that too...

The houses of history is a clear, jargon-free introduction to the major theoretical approaches employed by historians. This innovative critical reader provides accessible introductions to fourteen schools of thought, from the empiricist to the postcolonial, including chapters on Marxist history, Freud and psychohistory, the Annales, historical sociology, narrative, gender, public history and the history of the emotions.Each chapter begins with a succinct descripti...

Some SecretsWhen Liv Dugan ducks out of work for lunch, it's just an ordinary day. When she returns, she stumbles onto a massacre. All her colleagues at Zuma Software have been shot. Only luck has left Liv unscathed, and that might be running out. . .Will Follow YouLiv suspects the shootings are tied to her past--and to the package she recently received from her long-dead adoptive mother. Sensing she's being followed, Liv jumps into...