Products

Finding happiness and contentment: What makes us truly content and what lures us down the wrong path.
How to live more authentically: Draw courage from the experiences of a psychoanalyst to fight for yourself!

A psychoanalyst takes stock after thirty years on the “other side of the couch.” What has really helped his patients? What does happiness mean and how can we achieve it? Adler concludes that in the end, it was always the seemingly simple changes that really helped: making friends, finding a sense of security and confidence, having goals in life, rediscovering curiosity, and taking everything much more calmly. Above all, to draw on a deeply felt sense of one’s own self, rather than on external and internal constraints. To be authentic and to identify and implement the things in life that bring true satisfaction. This book helps readers find out for themselves: what do I truly need? How do I become secure in myself? How can I shape the best possible version of my life?

In the ever-evolving landscape of startups, risks and opportunities draw in creative and entrepreneurial individuals who strive to realise their visions. While much of this occurs concealed from the gaze of the public, innovation has transformed from an enigmatic black box into a predictable and manageable process—provided one possesses the right tools and knows where to look and what actions to take.

The method presented here for evaluating and managing startup risks is geared towards the uncertain world of innovative startups and enables entrepreneurs and investors to navigate it more confidently. The book focuses on the initial stages of startup creation all the way through to implementation and marketing. It adopts an incremental delivery perspective, underscoring the importance of understanding the intricate processes of bringing an innovative idea to fruition. The book also explores broader applications of the proposed Hypothesis Testing Method for the systemic development of innovation-promoting ecosystems and startups in the context of post-war economic recovery.

This guide will be invaluable to practitioners seeking to navigate the complexities of innovation, harnessing the potential of cutting-edge startups, and contributing to the resurgence of economies emerging from the aftermath of armed conflict.

This captivating volume brings together case studies drawn from four post-Soviet states—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. The collected papers illustrate how the events that started in 1985 and brought down the USSR six years later led to the rise of fifteen successor states, with their own historicized collective memories. The volume’s analyses juxtapose history textbooks for secondary schools and universities and explore how they aim to create understandings as well as identities that are politically usable within their different contexts.

From this emerges a picture of multiple perestroika(s) and diverging development paths. Only in Ukraine—a country that recently experienced two popular uprisings, the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity—the people themselves are ascribed agency and the power to change their country. In the other three states, elites are, instead, presented as prime movers of society, as is historical determinism.

The volume’s contributors are Diana Bencheci, Andrei Dudchik, Liliya Erushkina, Marharyta Fabrykant, Alexandr Gorylev, Andrey Kashin, Alla Marchenko, Valerii Mosneaga, Alexey Rusakov, Natalia Tregubova, and Yuliya Yurchuk.

The war in Ukraine has been fought with, among others, irregular armed groups since 2014—volunteers, paramilitaries, and mercenaries. Based on interviews in the Russian-controlled Donbas and with Ukrainian combatants, the contributions to this volume disclose various micro-dynamics of the mobilization, group formation, and fighting. Who were these fighters and who organized them?

Russia has been increasingly employing mercenaries as a way to conduct undeclared, but ruthless wars beyond her borders. Ukraine’s formation of irregular armed groups in 2014 was a response to the army’s initially glaring inability to counter Russia’s military intervention. Most of the irregular battalions acted from the beginning under governmental orders. They have never operated autonomously, but compensated for operational weaknesses of regular armed groups. The initially high power of irregular battalions derived from state support, the capabilities of commanders, social networks, and the faculties of the fighters.

This book presents a collection of reportages from Ukraine spanning roughly one year, from February 2022 to February 2023. Its focus is on the experiences of women in the context of war, whether they are soldiers, volunteers, refugees, or do not fit into any of these categories. Through their stories, the book sheds light on how women are trying to make sense of the conflict and the unique struggles they face.

The reportages vary in their content and perspective. One follows the story of a woman-soldier who had to combat invading troops while dealing with the deportation of her child to Russia. Another tells of a woman who passed through a filtration process and managed to rescue her handicapped mother from Russia. There is also the tale of a woman whose partner died in battle and who joined the army in his memory, and that of a journalist who faced personal challenges while identifying Russian soldiers.

Other stories feature women who represent different backgrounds and challenges, such as a grandmother who tries to maintain a sense of normalcy and tend to her garden despite the bombing, an African Ukrainian aspiring to be a dancer while facing prejudices, and a disabled activist who rescues other people with disabilities who are stranded under occupation.

Despite their different experiences, these women share commonalities such as being Ukrainian, female, and having been touched by war, loss, and heroism in different ways. Through their stories, the book offers a diverse and nuanced portrayal of the impact of war on womenʼs lives.

This edited volume critically assesses different aspects of five literary genres – novels, poetry, short-stories, drama, and non-fictional prose – contributed to by the Indian diasporic writers settled principally in North America and Europe. Films made by or on members of the Indian diaspora have been also checked out. The predominant approach in the anthology is not only a feminist one, although special emphasis is given on assessing the writings by females.

The emphasis of the anthology is on: (a) critical analyses of themes, styles, diction, and relevance of the writings; (b) assessment of the research potentialities of these writings; (c) examining how literary theories could be used for explaining and assessing the writings; (d) proper contextualization of the writings; and (e) finding out the historical roots and suggesting the future ‘prospects’ of such writings.

The essays included in the book re-read Indian diasporic writings for their appreciable points as well as those which need development. The collection fills in lacuna of critical approaches to Indian diasporic writings presently available in the market. In fact, there is scarcely any book presently available that covers critical approaches to all the five literary genres of Indian diasporic writings.

This book explores the relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence in the building and breaking of nations and states on the territory of contemporary Ukraine during the Second World War and in its aftermath. At its center are various institutions of the Soviet state. Other states and rival political movements also enter the picture insofar as their acitivities influenced Soviet policies. Methodologically, the study shifts attention from a limited body of normative texts and their creators within the Soviet political and cultural elite to a wider array of practices, organizations, and players engaged in power struggles and production of knowledge about the past in different social domains. Specifically, it brings into focus groups not normally thought of as participants in the production of Soviet memory discourse, notably NKVD officers, Soviet archivists, Ukrainian nationalists, Nazi collaborators, and former partisans in the German-occupied territories.

The book not only demonstrates the complexity of nation-shaping processes, but also restores agency to some seemingly powerless actors.

The war separated families, took lives, broke fates ... It is very important to know and remember it at any time. Even many decades later, new details, memories, and testimonies appear.

This book gathers several fascinating, true family stories written from accounts of parents, grandparents, etc. The authors, whose articles were collected with the help of the popular scientific publication Historical Truth, tell us about the worst war of the 20th century, about the fate of those people whose lives were divided forever into “before” and “after.” Here we can find first-hand accounts about Ukrainians who fought in various armies, about the lives of deported people, about the fate of people taken to compulsory labor camps, and about the men and women who remain in our memories forever.

This book, based on wide-ranging research on water, views the world through the rippling, complex lens of water. It looks at the emergence of civilizations and their decay, delves into creation myths, ponders the place of water in the human psyche as expressed in art and poetry and folklore, considers its role as a factor of production, a source of energy, a conduit of transportation, and a consumer good, examines changing concepts of physical and spiritual cleanliness, and notes the magical powers of springs and wishing wells and rainmakers. It reveals how this colorless, tasteless, and odorless substance has made such an impact on our bodies and our souls. Like water itself, it meanders far and wide, and it may, just possibly, restore our sense of wonder at this elixir of life.

Nina Selbst's pellucid and friendly style of writing and her overflowing enthusiasm for her subject assure the reader not only an enlightening experience but also a pleasurable one.

Serhy Yekelchyk analyzes the uneasy post-Soviet transition in Ukrainian historical writing. He discusses the challenge of transcending not just Soviet ideological dogmas, but also the “Soviet” way of understanding historical processes and human actions. Two major factors have been influencing this transition: contacts with the Ukrainian diaspora and the “rediscovery,” also facilitated by the diaspora, of long-suppressed Ukrainian historical scholarship from the early twentieth century. However, the diaspora was more than the keeper of pre-Soviet historical narratives. By the early 1990s, it had professional historians practicing modern historical approaches, which also made an impact on the Ukrainian historical scholarship. Yekelchyk explores the application of Post-Colonial theory to Ukrainian and diasporic writing on the central problem of Modern Ukrainian history, that of nation building. He also highlights new—transnational and cultural-history—approaches to the study of Ukrainian history.

One of the book’s most important conclusions concerns the global character of present-day Ukrainian historiography, with scholars originally from Ukraine and those of non-Ukrainian background playing an increasingly prominent role in the West, and Ukrainian-based historians actively participating in Western projects, publications, and debates.

The whole Communist world is in the middle of a democratic revolution. Hall Gardner’s novel depicts the protests taking place prior to the June 1989 Tiananmen Square repression—a subject still taboo in China.

Hired to teach English, Mylex H. Galvin records his experience in his “Anti-Marco Polo” journal after he meets expats from around the world, while trying to come to grips with the Chinese language, history, and politics.

Galvin becomes disillusioned with the poverty and environmental destruction that he finds in China; his barefoot doctor heroes are not capable of treating AIDS; Chinese and African students clash in Nanjing—with no sense of international solidarity.

As the democracy movement heats up, he is torn between the love of Tao Baiqing, a Daoist, and Mo Li, a student of English Lit, and unwittingly betrays the ties between the journalist, Hayford, and the democracy activist, Chia Pao-yu—accused of leaking “top secrets” to Hayford.

As Galvin studies China’s relations with the Western world since Marco Polo, with emphasis on the “hundred years of humiliation,” he becomes haunted by nightmares of a “clash of civilizations” and warns against a coming Apocalyptic Color War between the Balding Eagle and the Chinese Dragon—as the latter transmogrifies from Red into shades of Red-Brown-Black.

Chia Pao-yu is alive and well! The Beijing University pro-democracy activist is living in exile under an assumed name, Jean Valjaur (JV). As was rumored in the prequel, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors, Chia was not executed for helping to organize the April-June 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Now in Paris, he witnesses the Bataclan terrorist attacks, the Yellow Vest protests, and survives the COVID-19 (or Horseshoe Bat) pandemic—after having survived the AIDS pandemic in China in the 1980s. He pursues his self-study of Asian influence on Pop artists and Beat poets. He likewise critiques the views of western “Maoists,” like Mylex H. Galvin—whom Chia depicts as a “Wokeist” before his time.

During the pandemic lockdown, Chia reflects on the reasons why he became a pro-democracy, pro-environment and anti-nuclear dissident. In Paris, Chia finds work with the Foundation for Human Values Forever (HVF), directed by the charismatic feminist Bereft LaPlante.

He meets dissidents like himself who have suffered for their political views and gender. Now a French citizen, Chia participates in Hong Kong protests, and takes part in a conference on the “Future of China” in Washington, D.C. There, he witnesses President Trump’s threat to call in U.S. "G.I. Joes" to repress protests in June 2020—a threat that recalls the June 1989 Tiananmen Square repression by the People’s Liberation Army.

Back in Paris, he accidentally learns that the HVF Foundation finances questionable activities not related to humanitarian causes—and quits after a drunken LaPlante, accused of anti-Semitism, attempts to seduce him. He then starts to work for the secretive Society for the Exploration of Cosmic Consciousness (SECC) that publishes a version of his “Planetary Manifesto” that is redacted by Artificial Intelligence.

His warning now appears lost in the babble of Social Media: If the U.S. Balding Eagle, the Chinese Red Dragon, and the Russian Double-Headed Eagle cannot soon resolve their differences, then the popular hopes of “Barbies” and “Kens” for global peace will soon be crushed by the boots of "G.I. Joe" and rival militias. Chia soon disappears in a suspected trade-off for a Western spy held by Beijing—at least that is how the Global News Media carries the story.

Most studies of consciousness proceed from a standpoint where external reality already pre-exists. As such, these studies would be inherently unable to recognize it if consciousness in fact arose at the same level where reality itself takes its source—at the level where wave functions collapse and thereby generate the fabric of material reality.

At the same time, a number of compelling contemporary interpretations of physics strongly hint that consciousness must most likely be a fundamental constituent of reality, that it cannot be emergent, and that the role of the brain is limited to the harnessing, optimization, and deployment of consciousness within material reality—aka the realm of collapsed wave functions. This view seems to be also supported by a range of credible observations made by a number of credible professionals who operate at the margins of studies of consciousness, such as psychiatrists, who occasionally observe puzzling cases involving unusual phenomena related to consciousness. If we back-engineer the inevitable macroscopic consequences of a consciousness born at the same level as the building blocks of physical reality itself, we discover that such marginal phenomena become then fully explainable. The book offers readers new insights into interpretations of current research in physics and enables readers without a background in physics to understand the implications and their relevance to our understanding of consciousness.

The Western understanding of what happened in Ukraine during World War II has been shaped by historical and ideological constructs created in the Kremlin. The Ukrainian specificity has been dissolved in the concept of the “great victorious Russian people” and distorted by attempts to equate Ukrainian nationalists to German Nazis, while the occupation and colonization of Ukraine by Russian Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 1930s has widely been ignored or artificially silenced.

In her Four Essays on World War II, Olena Stiazhkina inscribes the Ukrainian history of the war into a wider European and world context.

The Soviet and contemporary Russian narratives about World War II have been used to justify the Kremlin’s policies towards democratic countries. Today, Russia re-mains deeply engaged in the falsification of the past, which underpins the claims of the so-called “Russian World” and the ongoing war against Ukraine.

Olena Stiazhkina’s book promotes a new, historically adequate understanding of what happened in Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.

Lex Fullarton takes a closer look at the three pillars of the sustainable development framework known as the “Triple Bottom Line” (TBL). The concept of the TBL is that for a project to be sustainable it must not simply be profitable in economic terms, but it must also benefit society and enhance the natural environment. In the twenty-first century, the greatest threat to Earth’s natural environment and the population of the planet is the rise of greenhouse gas emissions caused from burning fossil fuel as an energy source. The rise of GHG emissions has resulted in a rise in the ambient air temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and is resulting in a significant change in climatic conditions on Earth.

Fullarton scrutinizes the problem of getting industry and governments to understand the significance of creating harmony within the TBL. One of the main problems is that partisan politics tends to fragment the factors of the TBL rather than bring them together. Fullarton takes a strong stand in suggesting that taxation systems, which have traditionally been viewed primarily as a means of raising government finance, can be effectively applied to influence industrial and consumer attitudes towards transiting away from polluting fossil-fuel energy sources towards non-polluting renewable energy use.

In 2012, soon after his election to a third presidential term as president, following a four-year stint as prime minister (to avoid modifying the constitution), and in the wake of an unprecedented wave of popular protests, Vladimir Putin issued his “May Decrees.” Notable among them was the government’s commitment to increase the salaries of doctors, scientific researchers and university teachers to double the average in their respective regions by 2018. But then on December 30 of that year, the government issued a “road map” for education, revealing that the salary increases in higher education would be paid for, not by significant new government funding, but by “optimization,” which would eliminate 44% of the current teaching positions in higher education. This was justified in part by a forecasted drop in student enrollment.
Thus opened a new, accelerated period of reform of higher education. David Mandel examines the impact of these reforms on the condition of Russia’s university teachers and the collective efforts of some teachers, a small minority, to organize themselves in an independent trade union to defend their professional interests and their vision of higher education.
Apart from the subject’s intrinsic interest, an in-depth examination of this specific aspect of social policy provides valuable insight into the nature of the Russian state as well as into the condition of “civil society,” in particular the popular classes, to which Russian university teachers belong according to their socio-economic situation, if not necessarily their self-image.