Society & Social Sciences Books

Elemental, fierce and full of wonder, the Cairngorm mountains are the high and rocky heart of Scotland. To know them would take forever, to love them demands a kind of courageous surrender.In The Hidden Fires, Merryn Glover undertakes that challenge with...

Detroit 67 is the story of Motor City in the year that changed everything. Twelve chapters take you on a turbulent year-long journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political and interracial...

Critically acclaimed author Malachy Tallack returns in the Autumn of 2016 with a brand new excursion into the beautiful, mysterious and mythical landscapes of the world with Un-Discovered Islands. Gathered in this book are over twenty...

At Scapa Flow on 21 June 1919, there occurred an event unique in naval history. The German High Seas Fleet, one of the most formidable ever built was deliberately sent to the bottom of the sea at the British Grand Fleet's principal anchorage at Orkney by...

Meadow explores the intimate and complex relationship between people, place and plants which, over many centuries, has shaped the colour and character of the classic hay meadows of the British Isles.The surviving hay meadows of the British Isles are an...

This beautiful book is a celebration of the mighty oak, through the passion and vision of artist Mark Frith.Mark has drawn large scale portraits of 22 of Britain's oldest living oaks, with exceptional detail conveyed in these intricate graphite works,...

Journeys to school are an important time and space of transition between homes and schools for children around the world.This book comprises various chapters providing insights on children's experiences of this essential part of their lives and schooling...

While the alt right and post-truth attitudes render democracy fragile, so does professional journalism when it reports on the most vulnerable subjects in society but rarely addresses them as the imagined audience. A dialogical critique of divisions in...

Visit a place where your accent is an aphrodisiac, invites a Las Vegas tourist board ad on the London Underground. Just the right amount of wrong, offers another from The Cosmopolitan Hotel. Clearly, it works. Over forty million people a year travel to...

As a gay man living in London and working as a nutritionist, Daniel O'Shaughnessy knows that the LGBTQ+ community has specific dietary and health needs.He works with individuals on matters you might expect: weight loss and muscle gain, addiction,...

Why should we adopt animals?What's the problem with organic meat?What are the economics of plant-based foods?What about honey?What is the relationship between veganism and feminism?What is vegansexualism?Veganism is on the rise. Plant-based foods and...

The first comprehensive history of the Catholic Church's notorious Index, with resonance for ongoing debates over banned books, censorship, and free speech.For more than four hundred years, the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum...

As Nelson Mandela said, 'a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.' Shadowland tells the sometimes inspiring, often painful stories of Germany's prisoners, and thereby shines new...

However much his work has been reviled or contested, Sigmund Freud remains one of the most significant thinkers of the last one hundred and fifty years. He founded psychoanalysis, and his vision of human behavior and the unconscious mind provided a...

Positive Vibrations tells of how reggae was shaped by, and in turn helped to shape, the politics of Jamaica and beyond, from the rudies of Kingston to the sexual politics and narcotic allegiances of the dancehall. Insightful and full of incident, it...

Opinion polls dominate media coverage of politics, especially elections. But how do the polls work? How do you tell the good from the bad? And in light of recent polling disasters, can we trust them at all? Polling UnPacked gives you the full story, from...

Opium's Orphans is the first full history of drug prohibition and the 'war on drugs'. A no-holds-barred but balanced account, it shows that drug suppression was born of historical accident, not rational design. The war on drugs...

Suspended between sea and sky, battered by the waves and the wind, lighthouses mark the battlelines between the elements. They guard the boundaries between the solid human world and the primordial chaos of the waters; between stability and instability;...

A myth-busting journey through the twilight world of fringe ideas and alternative facts. Is a secret and corrupt Illuminati conspiring to control world affairs and bring about a New World Order? Was Donald Trump a victim of massive voter fraud? Is...

Why is doping a perennial problem for sports? Is this solely a contemporary phenomenon? And should doping always be regarded as cheating, or do today's anti-doping measures go too far?Drawing on case studies from the early twentieth century to the...

This book explores prejudice towards groups who are thought to have caused and spread the COVID-19 virus. The book examines four cases around the world: the residents of Wuhan, China; Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the USA, Britain and Israel;...

More than 80 years before the invention of Coca-Cola, sweet carbonated drinks became popular around the world, provoking remarkably similar arguments that they do today. Are they medicinally, morally, culturally or nutritionally good or bad? They have...

When we eat, we eat the world: taking something from outside and making it part of us. But what does it taste of? And can we develop our taste? In Taste, Sarah Worth argues that taste is a sense that needs educating, for the real pleasures of eating only...

This is a global history of hummus bi-tahina, the delicious combination of chickpeas, tahini, lemon and garlic that we know and love as hummus. The story begins in the medieval kitchens of the near and middle east and ends with its rise in popularity in...

From hand-knitted mittens to exquisitely embroidered confections and Bluetooth-enabled gloves that function like a mobile phone, the extraordinary variety of gloves is a tribute to human ingenuity. So, too, is the diversity of their often contradictory...

Spanning 65,000 years, this book provides a history of food in Australia from its beginnings, with the arrival of the first peoples and their stewardship of the land, to a present where the production and consumption of food is fraught with anxieties and...

Whether they make it themselves or just enjoy it with breakfast, people can be passionate about their favourite jam, jelly or marmalade. Award-winning jam-maker Sarah B. Hood looks at the history of these sweet treats from simple fruit preserves to...

An Inky Business is a book about the making and printing of news. It is a history of ink, paper, printing press and type, and of those who made and read newspapers in Britain, continental Europe and America from the British Civil Wars to the Battle of...

Sushi and sashimi are by now a global sensation and have become perhaps the best known of Japanese foods but they are also the most widely misunderstood. Oishii: The History of Sushi reveals that sushi began as a fermented food with a sour taste, used as...

Fermented Foods serves up the history and science behind some of the world's most enduring food and drink. It begins with wine, beer and other heady brews before going on to explore the often whimsical histories of fermented breads, dairy,...

This book traces the many ways humans have thought about and pictured squidsIn myths and legends, squids are portrayed as fearsome sea-monsters, lurking in the watery deeps waiting to devour humans. Even as modern science has tried to turn those monsters...

The first historical account of the development of prison gangs world-widePower on the Inside is the first book to examine the historical development of prison gangs worldwide, from those that emerged inside mid-nineteenth-century Neapolitan prisons to...

A trenchant expose of the effects of automation on worker's livesIn recent decades digital devices have reshaped daily life, while tech companies' stock prices have thrust them to the forefront of the business world. In this rapid, global development,...

People have been fascinated by merpeople since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer's Odyssey to Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid to the 1984 film Splash, myths, stories and legends of half-human half-fish creatures...

The first history of American handmade and homemade pornography, The People's Porn offers the backstory to the explosion of amateur pornography on the web. In doing so, it provides a much-needed counterweight to ahistorical and...

What does it mean to be human? And what, if anything, does it have to do with being a member of the animal species Homo sapiens? This dazzling book gets to the very heart of our rather unscientific motivations and prejudices, showing how they...

Fear and fascination set wasps apart from other insects. Despite their iconic form and distinctive colours, they are surrounded by myth and misunderstanding. Often portrayed in cartoon-like stereotypes bordering on sad parody, wasps have an unwelcome and...

Kingfishers are a sight to behold. The dash and verve of this cosmopolitan bird has been admired for millennia, appearing in creation myths, imperial regalia and cultural iconography, and they were once valued as highly as gold. Artists used their...

Fat. Such a little word evokes big responses. While 'fat' describes the size and shape of bodies - their appearance - our negative reactions to corpulence also depend on something tangible and tactile. As this book argues, there is more to fat than meets...

All aboard for a delicious ride on nine legendary railway journeys! Meals associated with train travel have been an important aspect of railway history for more than a century - from dinners in dining cars to lunches at station buffets to foods purchased...

Mondo: The Art of Soundtracks highlights all the original art created exclusively for Mondo's vinyl releases by world-renowned artists for film, television, and video game soundtracks.Featuring stunning new takes on classic and modern material,...

What does it mean to be a Bad Jew?Many Jews use the term 'Bad Jew' as a weapon against other members of the community or even against themselves. You can be called a Bad Jew if you don't keep kosher; if you only go to temple on Yom Kippur; if you don't...

In much of Central Africa, eating wildlife is seen as a normal, desirable and common-sense practice. Almost all wild animals, from the largest mammals to the smallest invertebrates, are hunted, traded and consumed, providing vital income and nutrition...

The war in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray began in November 2020. It inflicted more casualties than any other contemporary conflict in the world. It has also been among the least understood.The fighting and accompanying blockade led to an...

'Empire Building' is a new account of the East India Company's impact on India, focussing on how it changed the sub-continent's built environment in the context of defence, urbanisation, and infrastructural development...

Recep Tayyip Erdoan, Turkey's pugnacious president, is now the country's longest-serving leader. On his way to the top, he has fought many wars. This book tells the story of those battles against domestic enemies through the lens of the Syrian conflict,...