Showing titles in Sociology

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable, audiobook edition of The Road to Character by David Brooks, read by Arthur Morey and David Brooks. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In The Road to Character David Brooks, best-selling author of The Social Animal and New York Times columnist, explains why...

Step into the Victorian underworld of Angel Meadow, the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution. In the shadow of the world's first cotton mill, 30,000 souls trapped by poverty are fighting for survival as the British Empire is built upon their backs.

Slavoj Žižek's first book is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. 

What if we didn’t consider death the worst possible outcome? What if we discussed it honestly, embraced end-of-life care and prepared for the end of our lives with hope and acceptance? In this empathetic and knowledgeable guide, TikTok star Julie McFadden – known online as ‘Hospice Nurse Julie’ – shares the valuable lessons she’s learned in her fifteen years as a palliative care nurse.

We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control.

The bestselling author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20's engaging and practical guide to how to become lucky, based on her classes at Stanford University and her popular TED talk. Much of what we call luck is the result of deliberate actions and consistent efforts. As Tina Seelig shared in...

Using her experience as a storyteller, broadcaster, and (undercover) life-coach, Clare Bowditch collaborates with neuroscientist Dr Charlotte Keating to detail useful Cognitive Behavioural Therapy concepts that will help you tame your inner critic. With practical steps and Clare’s trademark humour and intimate storytelling style, Tame Your Inner Critic will teach you the skills to retrain your brain and achieve your big fat dreams.

Simon Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama recreates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators.

After serving as a nurse in WW2, Molly Corbally joined the brand-new NHS and became one of the first official District Health Visitors, attending to mothers and babies from all walks of life in the picturesque village near Coventry she came to call home. Social work was uncharted territory at the time, and Britain was very much worse for wear - TB, polio, measles and whooping cough were just some of the hazards new babies faced. Social conditions could also add to the problems, when poverty and alcoholism were rife. 

Brought to you by Penguin. The Extinction of Experience reveals the true cost of our digital age – and shows us how to return to the real world, while we still can. Human experiences are disappearing. Community is now found online; schools prioritise typing; and with headphones in and eyes...

In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature - places we escape to and can’t escape from - have influenced us throughout history and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating.

An "introduction to the nonfascist life" (Michel Foucault, from the Preface) When it first appeared in France, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our...

Brought to you by Penguin. Steven Pinker, one of the world's greatest thinkers and bestselling author of Enlightenment Now, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Language Instinct, reveals the power and perils of thinking alike. As a cognitive scientist, the ultimate subject of Steven...

Ben Judah is an acclaimed foreign correspondent, but here he turns his reporter's gaze on home, immersing himself in the hidden world of London's immigrants to reveal the city in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers and witch-doctors. From the backrooms of its mosques, Tube tunnels and nightclubs to the frontlines of its streets, Judah has supped with oligarchs and spent nights sleeping rough, worked on building sites and talked business with prostitutes; he's heard stories of heartbreaking failure, but also witnessed extraordinary acts of compassion. 

Religion is at the heart of man’s societies. ‘For a long time,’ Durkheim writes early on in his book, ‘it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin.’  Durkheim decided to examine how and why this phenomenon functioned and evolved - by looking specifically at simple societies and their religions, rather than at religions in more complex or developed societies.

Brought to you by Penguin. The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than...

At the dawn of the 21st century, British society is still shaped by a private education system devised to gentrify the Victorian middle classes and produce gentlemen to run the Empire. Yet it is not on the political agenda. It is rarely the subject of public debate, and we remain blind to its psychological implications. Can we afford to go on ignoring this issue? Will we continue to sacrifice the welfare of our children to satisfy our antiquated social aspirations?

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.

Brought to you by Penguin. Frantz Fanon's urgent, dynamic critique of the effects of racism on the psyche is a landmark study of the black experience in a white world. Drawing on his own life and his work as a psychoanalyst to explore how colonialism's subjects internalize its prejudices...