Title: Against the OddsIn the heart of Harlem, Devon Walker's journey begins with the legacy of his father, Marcus—a man who taught him the value of loyalty, hard work, and perseverance. From the backseat of Daniel Sutton's town car to the towering heights of the New York financial world, Devon carves his own path, defying expectations and breaking barriers.Bridges and Boundaries is a tale of ambition, family, and the resilience needed to navigate ...

In his book Imagining America (originally published in 1980), Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope, Americans are unkempt brutes, throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells, they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gosp...

'Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.' -- Spectator World'Marvellous... the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton's. -- A. N. Wilson, The OldieA kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens's imagination and the world he created.See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange...

This anthology for Medical Sociology courses, is edited by two leading experts in the field. It brings together readings from the scholarly literature on health, medicine, and health care, covering some of the most timely health issues of our day, including eating disorders, the effects of inequality on health, how race, class, and gender affect health outcomes, the health politics of asthma, the effects of health care reform, the pharmaceutical industry, health information on the Internet...

Over the past half-century, the social terrain of health and illness has been transformed. What were once considered normal human events and common human problems—birth, aging, menopause, alcoholism, and obesity—are now viewed as medical conditions. For better or worse, medicine increasingly permeates aspects of daily life.Building on more than three decades of research, Peter Conrad explores the changing forces behind this trend with case studies of short stature, social anxiety, ...

In this dazzling book, the story of the spectacular rise and subsequent waning of American influence across the world since 1945 is told by cultural critic and historian Peter Conrad. Politics, war and commerce form the inevitable backdrop to his tale, but Conrad also treats us to a kaleidoscopic presentation of America's unstoppable creativity: its output of great, good and enjoyably bad art, of jeans and jazz, fast food and fridges, space travel, comic books and motorbikes, technologies ...

Despite our cultures proclaimed respect for scientific reason, we live in a society that is no less bedazzled-and bedevilled-by myth than those of our remote ancestors. Roland Barthes first examined the mythical resonances of consumer products in the 1950s. Far from being demystified, consumerism has since morphed into a universal religion, its compulsory ritual of shopping essential to our economic survival. Myth has also invaded the political realm, as terrorists brandish black flags and...

It dominates our lives. It is the twentieth-century medium. And yet we're all a little sheepish when it comes to television, disowning it by disavowal or by inventing subtle, innocuous disguises for it. Why is this? In this book, first published in 1982, Peter Conrad argues that our unease stems from the way that the medium works: it absorbs the messages it transmits, it invents a reality of its own and ends by luring the world into the confines of its box. Television's achievemen...

Set in the islands of the Malay Archipelago, Victory tells the story of a disillusioned Swede, Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young English musician, from the clutches of a brutish German hotel owner. Seeking refuge at Heyst’s remote island retreat on Samburan, the couple is soon besieged by three villains dispatched by the enraged hotelier. The arrival on the island paradise of this trio of fiends sets off a terrifying series of events that ultimately ends in catastrophe.

Timeless insights into military logistics sprang out of the hardships and sacrifices of Canadians who fought in Afghanistan.Good battlefield logistics have always been more about people than things. Yet military logisticians in the Canadian Armed Forces have suffered in the cellar — the underappreciated bottom of the institution — for decades. These soldiers were called upon mightily in the summer of 2006 to sustain an infantry battlegroup in one of the world’s har...

From politics and war, to jeans and sneakers: a look at America’s influence on the world from an international perspectiveOn the day after 9/11, foreign newspapers ran headlines announcing “We Are All Americans Now.” Though the sentiment was not new, it was also not quite the same as when Henry Luce announced in 1941, the inauguration of what he called “the American Century,” during which the US was to raise all men “from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmis...

Weaves ancient myth into modern celebrity and consumerist culture to expose the absurdity and occasional insanity of twenty-first-century society, economy, and politicsDespite a proclaimed respect for scientific reason, humans are still as intrigued by myth as their remote ancestors. Laptops and smartphones are sold under a logo that invokes the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden; skimpily clad classical nymphs cavort in TV reality shows; Narcissus makes a comeb...