National Network for Equitable Library Service

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so. Indeed, only when large numbers of Iranians began to think the unthinkable, in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Noam Chomsky and George W. Bush seldom agree, but they both argued that 9/11 stood alone in American history. Although the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction was new, Mark Anderson maintains that the response to the attack was not: it was, in fact, as old as the Republic itself.

Before she became a psychiatric nurse at "The Mental" in the 1950s, Kay Parley was a patient there, as were the father she barely remembered and the grandfather she'd never met. Part memoir, part history, and beautifully written, Inside The Mental offers an episodic journey into the stigma, horror, and redemption that she found within the institution's walls. Now in her nineties, Parley looks back at the emerging use of group therapy, the advent of patients' rights, evolving ethics in psychiatry, and the amazing cast of characters she met there.

When freelance journalist Alexandra Shimo arrives in Kashechewan, a fly-in, northern Ontario reserve, to investigate rumours of a fabricated water crisis and document its deplorable living conditions, she finds herself drawn into the troubles of the reserve. Unable to cope with the desperate conditions, she begins to fall apart.

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life.

For more than twenty-five years, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has made children her passion and her cause. Her experience with children has strengthened her conviction that how children develop and what they need to succeed is inextricably entwined with the society in which they live and how well it sustains and supports its families and individuals. In other words, it takes a village to raise a child.

Essential Law for Social Work Practice in Canada addresses the need for an up-to-date, hands-on legal information guide that social workers can use as they interact with the Canadian federal and provincial legal system. It includes a helpful overview of Canadian law and the implications for social workers, and a description of the structure of the court system. It addresses topics of current and growing importance such as citizenship and refugees, human rights, family laws, child protection, health care issues including mental illness and youth criminal justice.

This comprehensive and accessible text fills the need for a political economy view of global environmental politics, focusing on the ways key economic processes affect environmental outcomes. It examines the main actors and forces shaping global environmental management, particularly in the developing world. Moving beyond the usual academic emphasis on international agreements and institutions, it strives to integrate debates within the real world of global policy and the academic world of theory.

Most writing on sociological method has been concerned with how accurate facts can be obtained and how theory can thereby be more rigorously tested. In The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss address the equally Important enterprise of how the discovery of theory from data--systematically obtained and analyzed in social research--can be furthered. The discovery of theory from data--grounded theory--is a major task confronting sociology, for such a theory fits empirical situations, and is understandable to sociologists and laymen alike.