“I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book…there are clues and messages for every fortunate reader who picks it up.” —Annie Proulx*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice*A landmark history of the peasant experience, exploring a now neglected way of life that once encompassed most of humanity, but is rapidly vanishing in our time.“What the skeleton is to anatomy, the pe...

A historian's personal journey into the complex questions of immigration, home and nationFrom Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts?...

Sibert Medalist, National Book Award Honoree, and New York Times bestselling author Sy Montgomery dives below the surface to study giant manta rays in Ecuador in this final installment in the award-winning Scientists in the Field series.On the vast Pacific, the ocean heaves and sighs like a beating heart. But dive beneath the surface, and angels appear. Giant manta rays—wider than a car is long, with wingspans stretching up to twenty feet—glide past with b...

An e book that will soften the hearts of even the most stubborn non-believers and atheists, written by a former devout atheist. If this book opens the eyes of only one person, it will have been worth the effort.

For centuries, spiritual seekers have profited from reading accounts of people’s spiritual journeys. Well-known examples include Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, Teresa of Avila’s The Story of Her Life, Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, and M.K. Gandhi’s The Story of my Life. Reading such spiritual autobiographies can provide us with light for our own journeys and can help us correct course when we veer off the path. Some readers of this autobiography by Kevin Patrick Joyce, Surprise...

This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organization of colonial forms of governance.A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns – from t...

What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the ...

With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their uncertainty has taken on many guises and the social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together.Drawn form sociology, cultural studies, history and theology, an internati...

“I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book…there are clues and messages for every fortunate reader who picks it up.” —Annie Proulx*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice*A landmark history of the peasant experience, exploring a now neglected way of life that once encompassed most of humanity, but is rapidly vanishing in our time.“What the skeleton is to anatomy, the pe...

Brought to you by Penguin.In a hyper-competitive world obsessed with rankings, super-wealth and greatness, how can we live up to democratic ideals of equality?Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about these questions from different angles in different countries - from post-war Japan, where democracy was imposed on a defeated country, to post-communist Poland, with sudden gaps of wealth and security, and the US and South Africa with their legacies of ...

Brought to you by Penguin.The story of the last generation of British miners: fathers and sons, brothers and comrades, big hitters and broken men, strikers and scabs.Mining Men explores how these men felt when the pits were closed and what happened next, including former miners who became factory workers, detectives, driving instructors, counsellors, the local mayor and one who even ended up working on Fleet Street. Featuring accou...

Brought to you by Penguin.This rich and enjoyable book by the acclaimed author of Japan Story explores the many ways in which Asia has influenced Europe and North America over centuries of tangled, dynamic encountersFrom the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy ...