An exploration of all the ways in which birds are social creatures—from breeding to nesting to babysittingIn The Social Lives of Birds, evolutionary biologist and author of Slow Birding Joan Strassmann examines what it means for birds of a feather to flock together. Some birds sleep together. Some join the foraging groups of other species. Some are only social during breeding season, forming nesting colonies in trees, cliffs, and sandbanks. Some a...

How ritualized public ceremonies affirm or challenge cultural identities associated with the American SouthW. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, ...

The groundbreaking first-person account of successful recovery from dissociative identity disorder, now featuring a new preface by the authorWhen Joan Frances Casey, a married twenty-six-year-old graduate student, “awoke” on the ledge of a building ready to jump, it wasn’t the first time she couldn’t explain her whereabouts. Soon after, Lynn Wilson, an experienced psychiatric social worker, diagnosed Joan with multiple personality disorder. She prescribed a radical...

An exploration of all the ways in which birds are social creatures—from breeding to nesting to babysittingIn The Social Lives of Birds, evolutionary biologist and author of Slow Birding Joan Strassmann examines what it means for birds of a feather to flock together. Some birds sleep together. Some join the foraging groups of other species. Some are only social during breeding season, forming nesting colonies in trees, cliffs, and sandbanks. Some a...

First published in 1993, The Media and Disasters looks behind the key scenes in the drama unfolding in the aftermath of the Pan Am 103 explosion: Lockerbie, visited by an estimated 1000 journalists in the month following the disaster; New York’s Kennedy Airport, where families learned in the presence of the media that their loved ones had perished; Syracuse University, plunged into mourning the loss of 35 students from the school’s study abroad programme; and homes on both sides o...