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"A rare example of cultural studies done with zest as well as depth...this must be the first book to make a firm link between [Jacques Tati's] Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and [Roland Barthe's] Mythologies." -- New Statesman & Society

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts - automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism - as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s. An October Book.
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Mid-Course Correction is written for those who sense a need for putting order back in their lives again. It offers hope for those who have experienced defeat and disappointment in their lives, but also for those who have been "successful" yet yearn for something more. MacDonald focuses on making choices that lead to personal transformation, significant communal relationships, practical service in the kingdom of God, and a revitalized life of faith and worship. He demonstrates that new significance and meaning are available no matter what your situation has been.

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The essays in this collection consider the diaries and journals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Diaries and journals took many forms -depending on the occupation, gender, social status, and religious commitment of the writer. They ranged in their forms from brief notes related to family business, and national events in preprinted almanacs or the pages of a family Bible, to examinations of spiritual and material States in books dedicated to that purpose. Both Domestic and foreign travel afforded women and men reasons for keeping a diary, and these varied from highly scientific accounts to more personal considerations of the pleasures and discomforts of travel generically, the diary is situated uneasily, yet fascinatingly between literature and history. Once considered as a pure form of unstructured personal truth telling, the diary is now recognized as a form of writing created by historic conditions, governed by cultural imperatives, and based on literary models, and therefore reflects powerfully on its historical moments and the relationship between life as lived and life as represented in texts..
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The vision of the year 2020 Laszlo sketches is not a science fiction account of a technological utopia, nor is it the doomsday world pictured by pessimists. Laszlo argues for a holistic approach to education, the environment, and political economic systems and shows what is involved in reaching it, and how people today can take an active and positive part in growing toward it.
In this imaginative and visionary book, Ervin Laszlo, one of the world's foremost systems thinkers, takes the readers on a trip to the future. As it approaches, will the dangers we have initiated on our world reach a threshold which will end humanity and perhaps other life?.
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Between the late twelfth century and the mid fourteenth, Castile saw a reordering of mental, spiritual, and physical space. Fresh ideas about sin and intercession coincided with new ways of representing the self and emerging perceptions of property as tangible. This radical shift in values or mentalités was most evident among certain social groups, including mercantile elites, affluent farmers, lower nobility, clerics, and literary figures--"middling sorts" whose outlooks and values were fast becoming normative.

Drawing on such primary documents as wills, legal codes, land transactions, litigation records, chronicles, and literary works, Teofilo Ruiz documents the transformation in how medieval Castilians thought about property and family at a time when economic innovations and an emerging mercantile sensibility were eroding the traditional relation between the two. He also identifies changes in how Castilians conceived of and acted on salvation and in the ways they related to their local communities and an emerging nation-state.

Ruiz interprets this reordering of mental and physical landscapes as part of what Le Goff has described as a transition "from heaven to earth," from spiritual and religious beliefs to the quasi-secular pursuits of merchants and scholars. Examining how specific groups of Castilians began to itemize the physical world, Ruiz sketches their new ideas about salvation, property, and themselves--and places this transformation within the broader history of cultural and social change in the West.

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In Reordering the Natural World, Annabelle Sabloff argues that the everyday practices of contemporary capitalist society reinforce the conviction that we are profoundly alienated from the rest of nature. At the same time, she reveals the often disguised affinities and sense of connection urban Canadians manifest in their relations with animals and the natural world.

Sabloff reflects on how the discipline of anthropology has contributed to the prevailing Western perception of a divide between nature and culture. She suggests that the present ecological crisis has resulted largely from the ways in which Western societies have construed nature as a cultural system. Since new ideas about nature may be critical in changing humanity's destructive interactions with the biosphere, Reordering the Natural World is invaluable in exploring how urban Canadians develop and sustain their current relationship with the macrocosm, and in considering whether these relationships might be altered by reconceptualizing anthropology itself as an integral part of natural history.

With this unique text, Sabloff not only provides provocative insight into the study of relations between humans and the natural world, she lays the cornerstone for building an entirely new structure for the study of anthropology itself..
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