Ways of Living

Paul Blyton, Betsy Blunsdon, Ken Reed and Ali Dastmalchian (eds)

Ways of Living: Work, Community and Lifestyle Choice

2009 Palgrave Macmillan

Publisher’s Description: A new look at the ways in which individual decisions are shaped by the different social contexts in which individuals are located – their communities and workplaces. This book examines the influence of different types of social networks on individual choices and the ways in which patterns of paid work shapes people’s broader lives.

Living on Borrowed Time

Zygmunt Bauman

Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo

2009 Polity

Publisher’s Description: The global financial crisis has shattered the illusion that all was well with capitalism and forced us to confront the great challenges we face today with a new sense of urgency. Few are better placed to do this than Zygmunt Bauman, a social thinker whose writings on liquid modernity have pioneered a new way of seeing the world in which we live at the dawn of the 21st Century.

Our liquid modern world is characterized by the transition from a society of producers to a society of consumers, the natural extension of which is the society of perpetual debtors. The ruling idea of the society of consumers is to prevent needs from being satisfied and to create demand; its natural extension is to enable consumers to consume more by borrowing. Debt was transformed into a crucial profit-earning asset of capitalism in liquid modern times. The present-day ‘credit crunch’ is not the outcome of the banks’ failure but rather the fruit of their success in transforming the majority of men and women, young and old, into a race of debtors. They got what they were looking for: a society of debtors whose condition of being in debt was made self-perpetuating, with more debts being offered, and more undertaken, as the only way of escaping from the debts already incurred.

Starting from this reflection on the current global financial crisis and prompted by the probing questions of his interlocutor, Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo, Bauman examines in an historical perspective some of the most pressing moral and political issues of our time, from international terrorism and the rise of religious and secular fundamentalism to the decline of the nation-state and the threats posed by global warming, issues whose seriousness and urgency attest to the fact that we are living today not only on borrowed money but also on borrowed time.

Apocalypse

John R. Hall

Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity

2009 Polity

Publisher’s Description: For most of us, “Apocalypse” suggests the cataclysmic end of the world. Yet in Greek “apocalypse” means “revelation,” and the real subject of the Book of Revelation is how the sacred arises in history at a moment of crisis and destiny. With origins in ancient religions, the apocalyptic has been a transformative force from the time of the Crusades, through the Reformation, the French Revolution and modern communism, all the way to the present day “Islamic Jihad” and “War on Terror.” In Apocalypse, John R. Hall explores the significance of apocalyptic movements and the role they have played in the rise of the West and “The Empire of Modernity.”

This brilliant cross-disciplinary study offers a novel basis for rethinking our social order and its ambivalent relations to sacred history.

After the Car

Kingsley Dennis and John Urry

After the Car

2009 Polity

Publisher’s Description: It is difficult to imagine a world without the car, and yet that is exactly what Dennis and Urry set out to do in this provocative new book. They argue that the days of the car are numbered: powerful forces around the world are undermining the car system and will usher in a new transport system sometime in the next few decades. Specifically, the book examines how several major processes are shaping the future of how we travel, including: · Global warming and its many global consequences · Peaking of oil supplies · Increased digitisation of many aspects of economic and social life · Massive global population increases. The authors look at changes in technology, policy, economy and society, and make a convincing argument for a future where, by necessity, the present car system will be re-designed and re-engineered.

Yet the book also suggests that there are some hugely bleak dilemmas facing the twenty first century. The authors lay out what they consider to be possible `post-car’ future scenarios. These they describe as `local sustainability’, `regional warlordism’ and `digital networks of control’.

Security and Environmental Change

Simon Dalby

Security and Environmental Change

2009 Polity

Publisher’s Description: In the early years of the new millennium, hurricanes lashed the Caribbean and flooded New Orleans as heat waves and floods seemed to alternate in Europe. Snows were disappearing on Mount Kilimanjaro while the ice caps on both poles retreated. The resulting disruption caused to many societies and the potential for destabilizing international migration has meant that the environment has become a political priority. The scale of environmental change caused by globalization is now so large that security has to be understood as an ecological process. A new geopolitics is long overdue.

In this book Simon Dalby provides an accessible and engaging account of the challenges we face in responding to security and environmental change. He traces the historical roots of current thinking about security and climate change to show the roots of the contemporary concern and goes on to outline modern thinking about securitization which uses the politics of invoking threats as a central part of the analysis. He argues that to understand climate change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the world economic system over the last few centuries. As the global urban system changes on a local and global scale, the world’s population becomes vulnerable in new ways. In a clear and careful analysis, Dalby shows that theories of human security now require a much more nuanced geopolitical imagination if they are to grapple with these new vulnerabilities and influence how we build more resilient societies to cope with the coming disruptions.

Europe’s Lost World

Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch, David Smith

Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland

2009 Council for British Archaeology Publishing

Publisher’s Description: This book, which examines climate change in the past, will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of the North Sea Basin, from archaeologists, geomorphologists & climatologists, to the interested public.

The past is sometimes said to be a foreign country, but less than 12,000 years ago Europe was a very different and almost unrecognisable place where Britain did not exist as a separate land. Over several thousand years the climate changed, sea levels rose and the entire coast of Europe morphed into the familiar shape we know today. Britain, formerly a range of hills on the edge of a great plain, gradually separated from continental Europe. This new book concludes a remarkable programme of archaeological research by the University of Birmingham to rediscover Doggerland, the enigmatic country which once linked the Yorkshire coast with a stretch of Continental Europe from Denmark to Normandy but which now lies beneath the North Sea.

The Culture of Speed

John Tomlinson

The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy

2007 Sage

Publisher’s Description: Is the pace of life accelerating? If so, what are the cultural, social, personal and economic consequences? This stimulating and accessible book examines how speed emerged as a cultural issue during industrial modernity. The rise of capitalist society and the shift to urban settings was rapid and tumultuous and was defined by the belief in ‘progress’. The first obstacle faced by societies that were starting to ’speed up’ was how to regulate and control the process. The attempt to regulate the acceleration of life created a new set of problems, namely the way in which speed escapes regulation and rebels against controls. This pattern of acceleration and control subsequently defined debates about the cultural effects of acceleration. However, in the 21st century ‘immediacy’, the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, has emerged as the core feature of control. This coming of immediacy will inexorably change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values.

Incisive and richly illustrated, this eye-opening account of speed and culture provides an original, essential guide to one of the central features of contemporary culture and personal life.

Shaping the Day

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800

2009 Oxford University Press

Publisher’s Description: Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day. Yet what seems so ordinary today is actually the extraordinary outcome of centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time.

Shaping the Day is a pathbreaking study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800. Drawing on many unique historical sources, ranging from personal diaries to housekeeping manuals, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period.

Many remarkable figures make their appearance, ranging from the well-known, such as Edmund Halley, Samuel Pepys, and John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, to less familiar characters, including sailors, gamblers, and burglars.

Overturning many common perceptions of the past-for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related-this unique historical study will engage all readers interested in how ‘telling the time’ has come to dominate our way of life.

The Labour of Leisure

Chris Rojek

The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time

2009 Sage

Publisher’s Description: Leisure has always been associated with freedom, choice and flexibility. The week-end and vacations were celebrated as ‘time off’. In his compelling new book, Chris Rojek turns this shibboleth on its head to demonstrate how leisure has become a form of labour.

Modern men and women are required to be competent, relevant and credible, not only in the work place but with their mates, children, parents and communities. The requisite empathy for others, socially acceptable values and correct forms of self-presentation demand work. Much of this work is concentrated in non-work activity, compromising traditional connections between leisure and freedom. Ranging widely from an analysis of the inflated aspirations of the leisure society thesis to the culture of deception that permeates leisure choice, Rojek shows how leisure is inextricably linked to emotional labour and intelligence. It is now a school for life.

In challenging the orthodox understandings of freedom and free time, The Labour of Leisure sets out an indispensable new approach to the meaning of leisure.

A Journey Through Ruins

Patrick Wright

A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London

2009 Oxford University Press

Publisher’s Description: A unique evocation of Britain at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s rule,  A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the country through the unexpected prism of every day life in East London.

Written at a time when the looming but still unfinished tower of Canary Wharf was still wrapped in protective blue plastic, its cast of characters includes council tenants trapped in disintegrating tower blocks, depressed gentrifiers worrying about negative equity, metal detectorists, sharp-eyed estate agents and management consultants, and even Prince Charles.

Cutting through the teeming surface of London, it investigates a number of wider themes: the rise and dramatic fall of council housing, the coming of privatization, the changing memory of the Second World War, once used to justify post-war urban development and reform but now seen as a sacrifice betrayed. Written half a century after the blitz, the book reviews the rise and fall of the London of the post-war settlement. It remains one of the very best accounts of what it was like to live through the Thatcher years.