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Social science

  • Auteur:
    Mazzi, Maria Serena
    Sommaire:

    Prostitution is often called the oldest profession in the world. Even in the Middle Ages, people believed that there would always be women willing to use their bodies for profit. But who were these women who offered themselves up to men? In A Life of Ill Repute Maria Serena Mazzi traces and reconstructs prostitution in the early fourteenth century, describing how in medieval European society women - often extremely poor and overwhelmed by debt, or victims either of predatory men full of duplicitous intentions or simply of rape - were traded as commodities. Prostitutes, according to Mazzi, were despised and condemned but considered necessary in an ambiguous and contradictory society that tolerated their sexual exploitation to safeguard the virtue of honest women and counter the vice of homosexuality, while allowing men to vent their own impulses. The theory of the lesser evil - encouraged by both the church and the state - is the grounds on which prostitution flourished in medieval Europe. In the Middle Ages prostitution was censured and considered disgraceful, but at the same time it was deemed inevitable and even necessary. A Life of Ill Repute uncovers the hypocrisy and speciousness of ecclesiastical, political, and social arguments for the justification of the existence of public prostitution.

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    Foundation, Children's Aid Society, Aitken, Gail, Bellamy, Donald F., McCullagh, John
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    Begun in 1891, the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto is the largest child welfare agency in North America. It has played a leading roll as an advocate of children’s welfare; it has been instrumental in influencing child welfare practice not only in Ontario but all of Canada and elsewhere. With an emphasis on the post-World War II period, A Legacy of Caring examines the political, social, and economic factors that led to changes within the society itself as well as developments in legislation and social policy. The society has been a training ground for many highly committed professionals who have gone on to be leaders in other governmental and nongovernmental agencies in Canada and abroad.

  • Auteur:
    Grigore-Dovlete, Monica
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    À la fin de l'année 1989, la Roumanie faisait son chemin vers la démocratie. Depuis, le pays connaît de nombreux changements, dont un renouveau religieux.  Pourquoi la religion est-elle si présente en Roumanie postcommuniste ? Quels sont les impacts de cette présence accrue de la religion dans la société? C'est sur le terrain, dans des pèlerinages réalisés dans des monastères réputés pour leurs miracles, leurs confesseurs charismatiques et leurs reliques que l'auteure cherche des réponses à ces questions. En observant les croyances et les pratiques des pèlerines et des femmes au quotidien – et sans omettre la conduite des « porteurs de la religion officielle » –, le livre explore quatre thèmes qui constituent autant de facettes de la religion vécue : le sort, le charisme, la matérialité et les reliques.  À travers ces thèmes, le livre brosse le tableau d'une religion quotidienne dans un contexte orthodoxe et propose une piste explicative sur le renouveau religieux en Roumanie après 1989, ainsi que des transformations sociales propres à la période postcommuniste.  Publié en Français.

  • Auteur:
    Heying, Heather, Weinstein, Bret
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    A provocative exploration of the tension between our evolutionary history and our modern woes and what we can do about it. We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet we are listless, divided, and miserable. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, but our political landscape is unmoored, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these truths? And how should we respond? For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our troubles is clear: the accelerating rate of change in the modern world has outstripped the capacity of our brains and bodies to adapt. We evolved to live in clans, but today many people don't even know their neighbors' names. In our haste to discard outdated gender roles, we increasingly deny the flesh-and-blood realities of sex and its ancient roots. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society we are not built for is killing us. In this book, Heying and Weinstein draw on decades of their work teaching in college classrooms and exploring Earth's most biodiverse ecosystems to confront today's pressing social ills from widespread sleep deprivation and dangerous diets to damaging parenting styles and backward education practices. Asking the questions many modern people are afraid to ask, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century outlines a science-based worldview that will empower you to live a better, wiser life.

  • Auteur:
    Johnson, Paul
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    This historical magnum opus covers 4,000 years of the history of the Jews as a people, a culture, and a nation, showing the impact of Jewish character and imagination upon the world.

  • Auteur:
    Drout, Michael D. C.
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    Wheaton College professor Michael Drout addresses the foundation of language and its connectin to specific portions of the brain. The components of language are explained in easy-to-understand terms and the progression of language from Germanic to Modern English is fully illustrated. Finally, Drout examines the future not only of language, but of all the world's languages.

  • Auteur:
    Martin, Sandra
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    Winner of British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in 2017.

    We can't avoid death, but the prospect is a lot less terrifying since the Supreme Court of Canada legalized physician-assisted death. Competent adults, suffering grievously from intolerable medical conditions, will have the right to ask for a doctor's help in ending their lives. That much is clear. The challenge now is to pass legislation that reflects this landmark decision and develop regulations that reconcile the Charter rights of both doctors and patients. If we get the balance right between compassion for the suffering and protection of the vulnerable, between individual choice and social responsibility, we can set an example for the world.

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    A unique collection of narratives from women from all around the globe. These are stories of compassion and bravery, empowered by the vision of a better world for all life. They emphasize the need to empower the feminine and assure gender balance and human rights for all. This accumulation of women's stories reveals the role of women in creating needed changes in areas of health and nutrition, supporting efforts toward sustainable environments, promoting political and social rights, protecting women from the travesties of war and rape and promoting religious diversity and better conditions for all beings.

  • Auteur:
    Hartfield, Claire
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    On a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the "white" beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one. Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the explosion that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture. Archival photos and prints, source notes, bibliography, index.

  • Auteur:
    Gaucher, Megan
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    What is family? Citing national security and societal welfare, the Harper government adopted a strict definition of family to limit access to citizenship for certain immigrants. Megan Gaucher analyzes the government’s assessment of sexual-minority refugee claimants’ relationship history, common-law and married spousal sponsorship applications, and marriage fraud, concluding that this narrative of citizenship reinforces racialized, gendered, and sexualized assumptions about the “Canadian family.” As many Western governments ponder more restrictive immigration policies, A Family Matter offers a timely examination of the Canadian approach and proposes a course for re-evaluating how family is defined and for implementing fairer assessments of immigrants and refugees.

  • Auteur:
    Forth, Gregory
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    The Nage people of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores refer to someone who begins something but is regularly distracted by other matters as "a dog pissing at the edge of a path." In this first comprehensive study of animal metaphors in a non-Western society, Gregory Forth focuses on how the Nage understand metaphor and use their knowledge of animals to shape specific expressions. Based on extensive field research, A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path explores the meaning and use of over 560 animal metaphors employed by the Nage. Investigating how closely their indigenous concept of pata péle corresponds to the Greek-derived English concept of metaphor, Forth demonstrates that the Nage people understand these figures of speech in the same way as Westerners - namely as conventional ways of speaking about people and objects, not expressions of an essential identity between their animal vehicles and human referents. Theoretically engaging with anthropology's recent ontological turn, the book considers whether metaphors reveal significant differences in conceptions of human-animal relations, the human-animal contrast, and human understanding of other humans in different parts of the world. An incredible catalogue of animal-based linguistic art and Nage verbal conventions, A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path illuminates essential features of metaphorical thought everywhere.

  • Auteur:
    Dej, Erin
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    A Complex Exile shows that the homelessness sector inadvertently reinforces the social exclusion of people who are homeless. Over 235,000 people couch-surf, stay in emergency shelters, or live on the street in Canada every year. However, the very policies, practices, and funding models that exist to house the homeless, promote social inclusion, and provide mental health care form a homelessness industrial complex. These practices emphasize personal responsibility and individualized responses that ultimately serve to subtly exclude people. This book goes beyond bio-medical and psychological perspectives on homelessness, mental illness, and addiction, to call for a transformation in how we respond to homelessness in Canada.

  • Auteur:
    Hayes, Chris
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    Emmy Award-winning news anchor and New York Times best-selling author Chris Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a Colony and a Nation. America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a post-racial world, but nearly every empirical measurewealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregationreveals that racial inequality hasn't improved since 1968. With the clarity and originality that distinguished his prescient bestsellerTwilight of the Elites ("a stunning polemic," said Ta-Nehisi Coates), award-winning journalist Chris Hayes offers a powerful new framework in which to understand our current crisis. Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order; fear trumps civil rights; and aggressive policing resembles occupation. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution' Blending wide-ranging historical research with political, social, and economic analysis, A Colony in a Nation explains how a Nation founded on justice constructed the Colonyand how it threatens our democracy.

  • Auteur:
    King, Martin Luther
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    His speeches stirred a generation to change - and outlined a practical way to economic freedom and true democracy. His words would help bring about the end of a brutally unequal system - and would show a timeless method for achieving fairness and justice for all.
    These 12 moving speeches voiced by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are original recordings collected here for the first time ever. In addition, some of the world's most renowned leaders and theologians share with you their reflections on these speeches, and give priceless firsthand testimony on the events that inspired their delivery.
    This audio takes you behind the scenes on an astonishing spoken historical journey - from a small, crowded church in Montgomery, AL, where "The Birth of a New Nation" ignited the modern civil rights movement; to the center of the nation's conscience; to the Mason Temple in Memphis, where more than 10,000 people heard Dr. King give his last transcendent speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop", the night before his assassination.
    Narrators include Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Reverend Leon H. Sullivan, Hon. Walter E. Fauntroy, Yolanda King, Dr. Dorothy I. Height, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King III, Rep. John Lewis, Ambassador George McGovern, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

  • Auteur:
    Talvet, Jüri, Hix, H. L.
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    In a provocative and thoughtful essay, Estonia's preeminent poet and cultural critic, Jüri alvet, investigates the role of culture in the postmodern world. Against the large background of historical values in western and world culture, Talvet inveighs against monologues and grand narratives launched by Western centers, envisaging instead a cultural symbiosis that would create a new and fertile dialogue between the centers, borders, and peripheries of the world, enrich cultural sensibility, and broaden concern for the Other.

  • Auteur:
    Piketty, Thomas
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    It is easy to be pessimistic about inequality, which we know has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than leading economist Thomas Piketty. In this book, Piketty reveals that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic because, over the centuries, we have been moving toward greater equality.

  • Auteur:
    Richardson, Peter
    Sommaire:

    A Mother Jones "Best Book of 2009," A Bomb in Every Issue uncovers the largely untold story of Ramparts magazine, the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the '60s and repeatedly scooped the New York Times, changing American journalism forever. Launched in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts quickly transformed into a "radical slick," winning a George Polk Award in 1967 for its "explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition." According to the Los Angeles Times, the magazine "not only blew the cover off the biggest stories of the era, it also helped set the ideological agenda for its core demographic, the New Left, and forced the mainstream press to follow its lead." Ramparts' list of contributors-including Noam Chomsky, CEsar ChAvez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag-formed a who's who of the American left. Although Ramparts folded for good in 1975, former staffers founded Rolling Stone and Mother Jones and include some of the most illustrious names in journalism (names like Robert Scheer, Jann Wenner, and Warren Hinckle), and Ramparts remains an inspiration to investigative journalists today.

  • Auteur:
    Smart, Susan
    Sommaire:

    A Better Place describes the practices around death and burial in 19th-century Ontario. Funeral rituals, strong religious beliefs, and a firm conviction that death was a beginning not an end helped the bereaved through their times of loss in a century where death was always close at hand. The book describes the pioneer funeral in detail as well as the factors that changed this simple funeral into the elaborate etiquette-driven Victorian funeral at the end of the century. It includes the sources of various funeral customs, including the origins of embalming that gave rise to the modern-day funeral parlour. The evolution of cemeteries is explained with the beginnings of cemeteries in specific towns given as examples.An understanding of these changing burial rites, many of which might seem strange to us today, is invaluable for the family historian. In addition, the book includes practical suggestions for finding death and burial records throughout the century.

  • Auteur:
    Nelund, Amanda
    Sommaire:

    Women are the fastest growing group of incarcerated people in Canada. A Better Justice?offers a carefully reasoned analysis of alternative, community-based justice programs. Using Winnipeg as a test case, Amanda Nelund reveals the complexity that underlies the governance of criminalized women. She finds that alternative programs neither reproduce dominant justice system norms nor provide complete alternatives, reflecting a tension between neoliberal and social justice approaches. By identifying potential ways to resist existing norms within these programs, A Better Justice?points to improved justice strategies – and ultimately to greater social justice for criminalized women in Canada.

  • Auteur:
    Steigerwald, Bill
    Sommaire:

    In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust life was for the ten million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.

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