Author: Ramez Naam
Publisher: Axon Press
Published: 2012-12-18
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 194294800X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Book 1 of the Nexus Trilogy - Continued in Book 2: Crux In the near future, the experimental nano-drug Nexus can link humans together, mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it. When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he's thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage - for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes. From the halls of academe to the halls of power, from the headquarters of an elite US agency in Washington DC to a secret lab beneath a top university in Shanghai, from the underground parties of San Francisco to the illegal biotech markets of Bangkok, from an international neuroscience conference to a remote monastery in the mountains of Thailand - Nexus is a thrill ride through a future on the brink of explosion. Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlisted for the Prometheus Award Shortlisted for the Kitschies Award An NPR Best Book of 2013! "Good. Scary good." - Wired "Provocative... A double-edged vision of the post-human."- The Wall Street Journal "A lightning bolt of a novel, with a sense of awe missing from a lot of current fiction."- Ars Technica "Starred Review. Naam turns in a stellar performance in his debut SF novel... What matters here is the remarkable scope and narrative power of the story."- Booklist "A superbly plotted high-tension technothriller ... full of delicious, thoughtful moral ambiguity ... a hell of a read."- Cory Doctorow "A gripping piece of near future speculation... all the grit and pace of the Bourne films."- Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space "A sharp, chilling look at our likely future."- Charles Stross, author of Singularity Sky and Halting State "The most brilliant hard SF thriller I've read in years. Reminds me of Michael Crichton at his best."- Brenda Cooper, author of The Creative Fire "A rich cast of characters...the action scenes are crisp, the glimpses of future tech and culture are mesmerizing."- Publishers Weekly "Any old writer can take you on a roller coaster ride, but it takes a wizard like Ramez Naam to take you on the same ride while he builds the roller coaster a few feet in front of you."- John Barnes, author of Directive 51 "Michael Crichton-like."- SFX Magazine "An incredibly imaginative, action-packed intellectual romp!"- Dani Kollin, Prometheus Award-winning author of The Unincorporated Man "The only serious successor to Michael Crichton."- Scott Harrison, author of Archangel
Author: Yuen Yuen Ang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-05-28
Total Pages: 275
ISBN-13: 1108802389
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why has China grown so fast for so long despite vast corruption? In China's Gilded Age, Yuen Yuen Ang maintains that all corruption is harmful, but not all types of corruption hurt growth. Ang unbundles corruption into four varieties: petty theft, grand theft, speed money, and access money. While the first three types impede growth, access money - elite exchanges of power and profit - cuts both ways: it stimulates investment and growth but produces serious risks for the economy and political system. Since market opening, corruption in China has evolved toward access money. Using a range of data sources, the author explains the evolution of Chinese corruption, how it differs from the West and other developing countries, and how Xi's anti-corruption campaign could affect growth and governance. In this formidable yet accessible book, Ang challenges one-dimensional measures of corruption. By unbundling the problem and adopting a comparative-historical lens, she reveals that the rise of capitalism was not accompanied by the eradication of corruption, but rather by its evolution from thuggery and theft to access money. In doing so, she changes the way we think about corruption and capitalism, not only in China but around the world.
Author: Benedict Rogers
Publisher: Optimum Publishing International
Published: 2022-10-25
Total Pages: 684
ISBN-13: 0888903286
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Benedict Rogers, born in London, England, first went to China at age eighteen to teach English for six months in Qingdao, three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. That opened the door to a thirty-year adventure with China, from teaching English in schools and hospitals to working as a journalist in Hong Kong for the first five years after the handover to travelling to China’s borders with Myanmar/Burma and North Korea to document the plight of refugees escaping from Beijing-backed satellite dictatorships and then campaigning for human rights in China, especially for Uyghurs, Christians and Falun Gong practitioners, human rights defenders, journalists and dissidents, and the people of Hong Kong. This book tells the story of his fight for freedom for the peoples of China and neighbouring countries Myanmar and North Korea and sets out how a global movement for human rights in China is emerging and what the free world should do next. It describes the importance of the “China Nexus” in the author’s journey and geopolitics and its challenges. Pioneering international inquiries into forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, the genocide of the Uyghurs and global action for Hong Kong, as well as highlighting the Vatican’s silence, the author has been at the heart of advocacy for human rights in China in recent years. In 2017, on the orders of Beijing, he was denied entry to Hong Kong, 20 years after he had moved to the city and began his working life as a journalist and activist. Benedict Rogers co-founded Hong Kong Watch and worked with a variety of other international groups at the forefront of the fight for freedom, including the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance for China (IPAC), the Stop Uyghur Genocide Campaign, the China Democracy Foundation, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission which he co-founded, and the international human rights organization CSW with which he has worked for over 25 years. This book hits the Chinese Communist Party hard on their lack of Human Rights efficacy, genocide, and despicable and barbaric organ harvesting programs (an estimated $1 billion US a year business). Rogers takes the readers on a journey through some of the leaders and participants in the Human rights activities that China has suppressed since its inception in 1949. He goes on to dispute and lays to rest all of the specious claims by the tyrants in Beijing that all Chinese citizens are equal and are afforded human and civil rights. Currently, the regime is engaged in re-education, cultural assimilation, and multiple genocides, leading to better citizens for China and the world if one believes Chinese officials. China’s ambassador to Canada says reports of genocide and forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province are the “lie of the century,” despite international bodies like the United Nations deeming the reports of such activities “numerous and credible.” The author will completely dispel that notion.
Author: Jennifer Terry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1995-12-22
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 9780253116352
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"... the papers in Deviant Bodies reveal an ongoing Western preoccupation with the sources of identity and human character." -- Times Literary Supplement "Highly recommended for cultural studies... " -- The Reader's Review "It would be useful for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in the sociology of the body, the history and sociology of science and medicine, and women's studies courses, particularly those exploring the feminist critiques of science and medicine." -- Contemporary Sociology "... a powerful deconstruction of the scientific gaze in configuring bodily deviance as a means of legitimating the social order within multiple historical and social contexts.... the many excellent selections will make for compelling reading for students of medical anthropology and the history of science." American Anthropologist Deviant Bodies reveals that the "normal," "healthy" body is a fiction of science. Modern life sciences, medicine, and the popular perceptions they create have not merely observed and reported, they have constructed bodies: the homosexual body, the HIV-infected body, the infertile body, the deaf body, the colonized body, and the criminal body.
Author: Anne-Marie Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-08-18
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 1107179270
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book explores China's growing strength at the poles and how it could shift the global balance of power. The strategic plans of China are of interest to a broad audience of scholars, policymakers, and international entities, and this well-researched work will be an important resource.
Author: Raeann R Hamon
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2003-08-14
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 1452237697
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"A book like this is needed because we teach about couple formation as in some ways ′universal′ and in other ways culturally bound. We have few resources for showing how various countries and cultures are the same and yet different....I am interested in giving students a broad view of relationships and families, and this text would help me." --Susan Hendrick, Texas Tech University "I believe that this is a much needed book. . . . Faculty in family studies, personal relationships and other fields are working to. . . diversify their courses, and this book has the potential to be a true asset in such endeavors." -- Sally A. Lloyd, Miami University Mate Selection Across Cultures explores one of the most basic human endeavors—couple formation—with particular attention to those relationships that lead to marriage. Which characteristics are most prized in a mate? How do variables like personal and cultural values, religious beliefs and practices, political and historical contexts, socioeconomic standing, and interpersonal attraction affect the pairing process? Editors Raeann R. Hamon and Bron B. Ingoldsby examine the enterprise of mate selection and look at the similarities and differences of human bonds around the globe. Mate Selection Across Cultures provides a contemporary, global perspective on the couple formation process in various regions of the world including countries such as Ecuador, Kenya, Israel, and many more. This book is unique in that it explores the vast sub-cultural diversity and variation that exists within any one country and also reviews such concepts as modernization/traditionalism, arranged marriage/free choice, love/family practicality, cohabitation/marriage, and collectivism/individualism. In addition to exploring these dichotomies, the editors delineate the partner selection process and investigate the practices, customs, traditions, rituals, and ceremonies associated with the formalization of these relationships. Features of this text: Expert contributors provide students with an "insider view" of the original research and of the existing literature on the individual countries and regions addressed Includes countries for which there is little or no published family scholarship Case studies, vignettes, and photos of courtship and wedding traditions across cultures enliven the text for readers Uniformity across chapters makes it easy for instructors and students to examine comparisons between and among different cultures Mate Selection Across Cultures is an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in marriage, family, and human relations in Family Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, and related disciplines.
Author: Paul Hawken
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2021-09-21
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 052550849X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A radically new understanding of and practical approach to climate change by noted environmentalist Paul Hawken, creator of the New York Times bestseller Drawdown Regeneration offers a visionary new approach to climate change, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation. It is the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world. Regeneration describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded. This means we must address current human needs, not future existential threats, real as they are, with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything. Paul Hawken and the nonprofit Regeneration Organization are launching a series of initiatives to accompany the book, including a streaming video series, curriculum, podcasts, teaching videos, and climate action software. Regeneration is the inspiring and necessary guide to inform the rapidly spreading climate movement.
Author: Chris Berry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-07-25
Total Pages: 760
ISBN-13: 1838714979
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Chinese cinema continues to go from strength to strength. After art-house hits like Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984) and Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), the Oscar-winning success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) disproved the old myth that subtitled films could not succeed at the multiplex. Chinese Films in Focus II updates and expands the original Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes with fourteen brand new essays, to offer thirty-four fresh and insightful readings of key individual films. The new edition addresses films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the Chinese diaspora and the historical coverage ranges from the 1930s to the present. The essays, by leading authorities on Chinese cinema as well as up-and-coming scholars, are concise, accessible, rich, and on the cutting edge of current research. Each contributor outlines existing writing and presents an original perspective on the film, making this volume a rich resource for classroom use, scholarly research and general reading for anyone wanting to understand more about the historical development and rich variety of Chinese cinema. Contributors: Annette Aw, Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Felicia Chan, Esther Cheung, Robert Chi, Rey Chow, Mary Farquhar, Carolyn FitzGerald, Ping Fu, Kristine Harris, Margaret Hillenbrand, Brian Hu, Tan See Kam, Haiyan Lee, Vivian Lee, Helen Hok-Sze Leung, David Leiwei Li, Song Hwee Lim, Kam Louie, Fran Martin, Jason McGrath, Corrado Neri, Jonathan Noble, Beremoce Reynaud, Cui Shuqin, Julian Stringer, Janice Tong, Yiman Wang, Faye Hui Xiao, Gang Gary Xu, Audrey Yue, Yingjin Zhang, John Zou The Editor: Chris Berry is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Author: Nancy N. Chen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0231128053
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The charismatic form of healing called qigong, which at its core involves meditative breathing exercises, achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Anthropologist Nancy N. Chen examines the cultural context of medicine and healing practices in the PRC, Taiwan, and the United States, and the pages of her book come alive with the narratives of the numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats she interviewed.