Books about Disintegration from Amazon.com

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

"David Wojnarowicz is brilliantly attuned to American talk and responsive to the moods and innovations of society's truants. He also has the best conscience of any writer I know. This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately." -- Dennis Cooper

"Wojnarowicz's writing fairly smokes with acrid ironies. It's passionate and personal." -- New York

"Everyone should read Close to the Knives to understand the overall political agenda behind suffering, whether that suffering occurs because of a dysfunctional family, religion, or government. Wojnarowicz explores all of his painful life experiences as a plea for all of us to become more compassionate and caring human beings. This isn't just David's story, it's our story, our nation's story." -- Karen Finley.
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A dramatic attack on the thought of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan..
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This work uses 11 African case studies in its exploration of the phenomenon of collapsed states. The writers consider the causes of collapse; symptoms and early warning signs; and how the situation was met. They also assess the strengths and weaknesses of various responses, such as UN action..
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The Second World War affected the lives and shaped the experience of millions of individuals in Germany--soldiers at the front, women, children and the elderly sheltering in cellars, slave laborers toiling in factories, and concentration-camp prisoners and POWs clearing rubble in the Reich's devastated cities.
Taking a "history from below" approach, the volume examines how the minds and behaviour of individuals were moulded by the Party as the Reich took the road to Total War. The ever-increasing numbers of German workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht were replaced with forced foreign workers and slave labourers and concentration camp prisoners. The interaction in everyday life between German civilian society and these coerced groups is explored, as is that society's relationship to the Holocaust.
From early 1943, the war on the home front was increasingly dominated by attack from the air. The role of the Party, administration, police, and courts in providing for the vast numbers of those rendered homeless, in bolstering civilian morale with "miracle revenge weapons" propaganda, and in maintaining order in a society in disintegration is reviewed in detail.
For society in uniform, the war in the east was one of ideology and annihilation, with intensified indoctrination of the troops after Stalingrad. The social profile of this army is analysed through study of a typical infantry division. The volume concludes with an account of the various forms of resistance to Hitler's regime, in society and the military, culminating in the failed attempt on his life in July 1944..
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Yugoslavia's would-be system-builders failed three times over to build a workable system. The underlying problem was their failure to resolve the problem of legitimacy. In the 1980s, economic deterioration pushed people to despair and, under the pressure of Serbia's ambitious political establishment, the country broke up along ethnic fault lines. This volume, now in its fourth expanded edition, tells the story of socialist Yugoslavia's troubles and the challenges facing its successor states from May 1980 to 00/12.

The fourth edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a new chapter, a new epilogue, and revisions throughout the book. Sabrina Ramet, a veteran observer of the Yugoslav scene, traces the steady deterioration of Yugoslavia's political and social fabric in the years since 1980, arguing that, while the federal system and multiethnic fabric laid down fault lines, the final crisis was sown in the failure to resolve the legitimacy question, triggered by economic deterioration, and pushed forward toward war by Serbian politicians bent on power-either within a centralized Yugoslavia or within an "ethnically cleansed" Greater Serbia. With her detailed knowledge of the area and extensive fieldwork, Ramet paints a strikingly original picture of Yugoslavia's demise and the emergence of the Yugoslav successor states..
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A fabulous collection of early Science Fiction and Fantasy from a master story-teller

The complete adventures of the 'caveman in a lounge suit', the irascible, volcanic genius Professor Challenger and his stalwart regular band of fellow investigators into the frontiers of scientific improbability-Malone, the newspaperman, Lord Roxton, the soldier of fortune ever in pursuit of the next dangerous sensation and Professor Summerlee, Challenger's academic sparring partner. This volume , of course, includes the ever popular 'The Lost World', the predecessor to a varied collection of tales, in which man finds himself at odds with the ever hungry denizens of the prehistoric age. Enthusiasts will be overjoyed that Challenger and Co. gather together again for 'The Poison Belt' as mankind is doomed to almost certain extinction as a noxious miasma envelopes the planet. In 'The Land of Mists' our intrepid band take on the paranormal with excursions into the field of ghost hunting and the realms of spiritualism before Challenger and Malone must deal with an unscrupulous scientist who has succeeded in the invention of 'The Disintegration Machine' which he is prepared to sell to whichever government that is the highest bidder-irrespective of its appalling military potential. This collection concludes with 'When the World Screamed' in which the ever unconventional Challenger sets off on a perilous endeavour to prove that the earth itself is a living entity by giving it a painful shock! These are some of Conan-Doyle's best loved characters brought together in one roller coaster volume for your enjoyment..
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"We live in a time when the very private experience of having a personal destiny to fulfill has become a subversive political force of major proportions An this (perhaps) is the way the industrial world comes to an end, in a noisy celebration of social deviance and personal defiance."

In Person/Planet, Theodore Roszak, founder of the ecopsychology movement and author of such internationally acclaimed works as The Making of a Counter Culture and The Voice of the Earth, brings together the insights of deep ecology and humanistic psychology. The result is a powerful reassertion of Personalism, the philosophy that has most stubbornly resisted the dehumanizing forces of industrial society. Drawing his inspiration from such thinkers as Lewis Mumford, Thomas Merton, Emmanuel Mounier, Martin Buber, and Fritz Schumacher, Roszak explores the emerging congruency between environmental enlightenment and spiritual need. As bleak as the environmental fate of the Earth may seem, Person/Planet offers a daringly original and hopeful hypothesis: that the Earth herself is already working in the depths of the human psyche to heal our troubled urban-industrial culture. "The needs of the planet," Roszak believes, "are the needs of the person. The rights of the person are the rights of the planet.".
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The long era of Muslim political ascendancy that began in a small region of western Arabia reached its pinnacle some nine hundred years later with the siege of Vienna by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1529. Suleiman then concluded that, given the increasingly volatile geopolitical environment, Muslim expansionism in Eurasia had run its course. The subsequent decline of Ottoman power also meant, in effect, the decline of political Islam, which had been intimately bound to it for centuries. As Sicker shows, the problems faced by the Ottoman Empire were also faced by the Persian Empire and both underwent an extended period of political decline and territorial retrenchment in the face of imperialist pressures from Europe and Asia. The greatest challenge to the world of political Islam came from Western Europe, especially France and Great Britain. The Ottoman and Persian empires assumed a global importance in the 19th century, not because of anything in them of intrinsic economic value, but because of their geopolitical and geostrategic significance. They became, in effect, a buffer zone separating Europe from the wealth of the East, at a time when European imperialism was on the march in Asia. It thus came about that the rivalries of the Great Powers, most especially those of Great Britain, France, and Russia, were played out in the Middle East. This book will serve as a vital resource for students, scholars, and other researchers involved with Middle East History, Political Islam, and Modern European History..
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