You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Reversible Destiny traces the history of the Sicilian mafia to its nineteenth-century roots and examines its late twentieth-century involvement in urban real estate and construction as well as drugs. Based on research in the regional capital of Palermo, this book suggests lessons regarding secretive organized crime: its capacity to reproduce a subculture of violence through time, its acquisition of a dense connective web of political and financial protectors during the Cold War era, and the sad reality that repressing it easily risks harming vulnerable people and communities. Charting the efforts of both the judiciary and a citizen's social movement to reverse the mafia's economic, political, and cultural power, the authors establish a framework for understanding both the difficulties and the accomplishments of Sicily's multifaceted antimafia efforts.
Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily presents the relationship between the early colonial period, a time when Sicily exported wheat and animal products, and a later neocolonial period, during which manpower is the principal energy loss. The book discusses the rise and development of the Mafia; cultural codes that are important to contemporary social Sicilian organization; and the origins of these codes in early adaptations of the Sicilian people to externally generated political and economic forces. The text will be of value to sociologists, economists, historians, and people who want a deeper understanding of the Mafia.
In Berlin Now, and on the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Wall, a legendary Berliner tells the inside story of the city. Over the last five decades, no other city has changed more than Berlin. Divided in 1961, reunited in 1989, it has morphed over the last twenty-five years into Europe's most vibrant melting-pot of artists, immigrants and entrepreneurs. Pieces of the wall are collected around the world. Blending memoir, history, anecdote and reportage, this legendary Berliner takes us behind the scenes - from wrenching stories of life under the Stasi, to the difference between East and West Berliners' sex-lives, to a present-day investigation of its arts scene, night-life, tumultuous pol...
Berlin before the fall of the Wall is a city divided, yet its ordinary residents find ways to live and survive on both sides. There is Robert, teller of bar room anecdotes over beer and vodka, adjusting to a new life in the west; Pommerer, trying to outwit the system in the east; the unnamed narrator, who 'escapes' back-and-forth to collect stories; his beguiling, exiled lover Lena; the three boys who defect to watch Hollywood films; and the man who leaps across the Wall again and again - simply because he cannot help himself. All are, in their different ways, wall jumpers, trying to lose themselves but still trapped wherever they go. Ultimately, the walls inside their heads prove to be more powerful than any man-made barrier . . .
Peter Schneider challenges the notorious myth that roses are difficult to grow, arguing that it’s all about choosing the right petals for the right place! Providing in-depth profiles of hundreds of varieties, Schneider helps you decide which roses will work best in your flower bed or along an eye-catching garden trellis. Simple instructions that use proven techniques make growing roses easy and enjoyable, even in colder climates, while more than 400 gorgeous photos make this book as visually irresistible as it is useful.
For more than a quarter of a century, Pat Schneider has helped writers find and liberate their true voices. Now, Schneider's acclaimed methods are made available in a single well-organized and highly readable volume.
The historical decline of fertility in Europe has occupied a central place in social history and demography over the past quarter-century. Most scholars credit Europeans with modulating sexual behavior, through either abstinence or the practice of coitus interruptus, as a rational choice made in the interest of personal economic comfort; yet peasant and working classes have typically lagged behind in birth control and have given rise to the adage that "sexual embrace is the festival of the poor." Scholarly analyses of "lag" often reinforce this stigmatizing view. Now this subject is given a fresh look through a case study in Sicily, one of the last outposts of Western Europe's demographic tr...
This book presents a theory of autistic subjectivity from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Dr. Brenner describes autism as a singular mode of being that is fundamentally linked to one’s identity and basic practices of existence, offering a rigorous alternative to treating autism as a mental or physical disorder. Drawing on Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic understanding of the subject, Brenner outlines the unique features of the autistic subjective structure and provides a comprehensive synthesis of contemporary work on the psychoanalysis of autism. The book examines research by theorists including Jean-Claude Maleval, Éric Laurent, Rosine and Robert Lefort that has been largely unavailable to Anglophone audiences until now. In this book autism is posited to be a singular subjective structure not reducible to neurosis or psychosis. In accordance with the Lacanian approach, autism is examined with detailed attention to the subject’s use of language, culminating in Brenner’s “autistic linguistic spectrum.” A compelling read for students and scholars of psychoanalysis and autism researchers and clinicians.
Lured to post-Communist East Berlin by an inheritence that includes an old apartment building, Eduard, a German scientist, soon finds the city transforming his life in bizarre, absurd ways. 10,000 first printing.
Reversible Destiny traces the history of the Sicilian mafia to its nineteenth-century roots and examines its late twentieth-century involvement in urban real estate and construction as well as drugs. Based on research in the regional capital of Palermo, this book suggests lessons regarding secretive organized crime: its capacity to reproduce a subculture of violence through time, its acquisition of a dense connective web of political and financial protectors during the Cold War era, and the sad reality that repressing it easily risks harming vulnerable people and communities.