You may also like
A Surgeon and a Maverick
Regular price $29.95 Save $-29.95“[A] remarkable journey.”—The Telegraph
The incredible life story of legendary cardiac surgeon and scientist Magdi Yacoub, an outsider who succeeded against the odds
Veteran journalists Simon Pearson and Fiona Gorman follow the remarkable life of heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub from his formative years in Egypt, through spectacular success at Cairo University, to his long and distinguished career in Britain. Although at times he clashed with the medical establishment in London, Yacoub pioneered great advances in heart surgery. He was knighted in 1992, and in 2014, he was awarded the highest honor in the gift of the Queen, the Order of Merit.
Written with unprecedented access and drawing on extensive interviews and research, the biography recounts how Yacoub transformed the treatment of children with congenital heart disease. He performed some of the first heart transplants in Britain and the first heart-lung transplants in Europe. At London’s Harefield Hospital, he created the greatest heart transplant center in the world. Among his patients are men and women who are still thriving more than thirty-five years after he gave them new hope.
This story is also about science, the development of new medical techniques, and a deeper understanding of how the human body works. Today, at an age when most people have long since retired, Yacoub is still pushing the boundaries of scientific understanding and surgical know-how. He is also taking heart surgery to places that until now have had little access to cardiac treatment, developing centers of excellence across Africa, including in Egypt, where his hospital in Aswan has an international reputation, and a new center is rising in Cairo.
Yacoub’s life is one of triumph and tragedy, success and failure, fierce criticism and high praise—it is also an enthralling journey through the worlds of scientific research and medical politics and ethics at the highest levels.
Flesh and Spirit
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95Chronicles a Black Puerto Rican man’s odyssey and transformation from an incarcerated gang member to the Co-Founder of the Young Lords Party.
Growing up fatherless and poor, Felipe Luciano didn’t yearn for wealth or dream of becoming a famous actor or athlete. He was tired of being poor and ached to be a man, to reach that point of sagacity, courage, and independence that would signal to the world that he was now a warrior, ready to fight the battle for truth and justice, to slay the dragon of evil, whatever that might be. In Flesh and Spirit, Luciano paints a vivid portrait of his life in New York City as a member of the city’s Latino community as well as his pivotal role in the Young Lords and The Last Poets.
Luciano’s memoir begins when as a teenage Brooklyn gang member he is convicted of manslaughter. This pivotal moment changes the trajectory of his life. The American kid raised on Davy Crockett and Superman TV tales emerged from the womb of prison into a harsh, new monochromatic black/white world without the benefit of rose-colored glasses. It was a painful shattering of all his childhood beliefs and the realization that he was a poor Black Puerto Rican in white America clutching onto values that didn’t work. The only flotsam in this churning sea of ’60s social turmoil was college, poetry, revolutionary activity, and sometimes God. After getting an education, Luciano went on to become an acclaimed poet and political activist who advocates for the Latino population of New York City, for the kids growing up in the same circumstances he did.
Sparing no one—not the revolutionaries, the Revolution, nor the author himself—Flesh and Spirit is written with honesty and humility to help guide young people of color and other Americans through the labyrinths of ideology, organization, missteps, false paths, and phony societal promises.
Featuring archival photographs by Michael Abramson reproduced from Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 © 2011 Haymarket Books.
Performing Female Blackness
Regular price $24.99 Save $-24.99Performing Female Blackness examines race, gender, and nation in Black life using critical race, feminist and performance studies methodologies.
This book examines what private and public performances of female blackness reveal about race, gender, and nation and considers how Canada shapes these performances. Naila Keleta-Mae proposes that performance is part of the ontology of female blackness in the public and private spaces that constitute everyday life because people who are female and Black are constantly expected to perform fantasies—be it their own or, far more commonly, those insisted on by dominant culture.
By exploring Black expressive culture in familial, literary, and performance settings, the author demonstrates how people who are read as female and Black in private and public settings, are figuratively on stage regardless of the cultural, political, or historical contexts in which they find themselves. Written in poetry, prose and journal-form and drawing from the author’s own life and artistic works, Performing Female Blackness is ideal for scholars, educators, and students of race, gender, performance, and Black expressive culture.
The Value of a Whale
Regular price $18.95 Save $-18.95Public understanding of, and outcry over, the dire state of the climate and environment is greater than ever before. Parties across the political spectrum claim to be climate leaders, and overt denial is on the way out. Yet when it comes to slowing the course of the climate and nature crises, despite a growing number of pledges, policies and summits, little ever seems to change. Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. We remain on course for a catastrophic 3°C of warming. What's holding us back?
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the ‘solutions’ being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The book examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us – in the face of crisis – what we really value.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable cities and communities
Twelve Feminist Lessons of War
Regular price $18.95 Save $-18.95Twelve Feminist Lessons of War draws on firsthand experiences of war from women in places as diverse as Ukraine, Myanmar, Somalia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Algeria, Syria, and Northern Ireland to show how women's wars are not men's wars. With her engaging trademark style, Cynthia Enloe demonstrates how patriarchy and militarism have embedded themselves in our institutions and our personal lives.
Enloe reveals how the social and political influences that shape war—from military recruitment and economic collapse to sexual assault and reproductive rights (and their denial)—are deeply gendered and pervade women's lives before, during, and in the aftermath of war. Her razor-sharp analysis, at once accessible and provocative, highlights how women's emotional and physical labor is used to support government policies and how women's rights activists—against all odds—remain committed in the midst of armed violence. Twelve Feminist Lessons of War is the gritty and grounded book we need to understand what is happening to our world.