Back to Full Employment
Robert Pollin
MIT Press, HB, 9780262017572
Full employment used to be an explicit goal of economic policy in most of the industrialised world. Some countries even achieved it. Economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States—today faced with its highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression—should put full employment back on the agenda. Explaining views on full employment in macroeconomic theory from Marx to Keynes to ... More/Buy
The Best Australian Business Writing 2012
Andrew Cornell (ed)
NewSouth, PB, 9781742233628
Have Baby Boomers been forced back to work since the GFC? Why do we rely on the arbitrary and illusory numbers of double-entry book-keeping to direct our policies, institutions, economies and societies? Will pre-commitment cards for poker machines coerce the addicted gambler to think before he or she acts? Is airport security a waste of time and money? Not just a ... More/Buy
Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America
Jonathan Kozol
Ecco Press, HB, 9781400052462
In this culminating work about a group of inner-city children he has known for many years, Jonathan Kozol returns to the scene of his prize-winning books Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace. He tells the stories of young men and women who have come of age in one of the most destitute communities of the United States. Some of them ... More/Buy
Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age
Steven Johnson
Allen Lane, HB, 9781846147111
What connects the 'miracle on the Hudson' to the planning of the French railway system, or the mysterious outbreak of strange smells in downtown Manhattan to the invention of the Internet? With his characteristic flair for multidisciplinary storytelling, Steven Johnson shows in Future Perfect that what lies behind these and many other fascinating human stories is the concept of networked thinking. ... More/Buy
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia
Joseph Michael Reagle, Jr
MIT Press, PB, 9780262518208
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community - a community of Wikipedians who are expected to 'assume good faith' when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture. Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared, universal encyclopedia; its early twentieth-century ancestors include Paul Otlet's Universal Repository ... More/Buy
Idiotism
Neal Curtis
Pluto Press, PB, 9780745331553
Idiotism examines the condition of society in late capitalism where the market logic of neoliberalism has become the new 'common sense', taken as the model for the organisation and management of all aspects of social life. Using the Greek word idios, meaning 'private', Neal Curtis calls this privatisation of the world 'idiotism'. Constructing a new vocabulary with which to understand contemporary ... More/Buy
Journalism
Jo Sacco
Jonathan Cape, PB, 9780224097321
'The blessing of an inherently interpretive medium like comics is that it hasn't allowed me to . . . make a virtue of dispassion. For good or for ill, the comics medium is adamant, and it has forced me to make choices. In my view, that is part of its message.' - from the preface by Joe Sacco Over the past ... More/Buy
Journalism at the crossroads: Crisis and opportunity for the press
Margaret Simons
Scribe Publications, PB, 9781922070203
Our mainstream press is in crisis, and the future of journalism is uncertain. In response to plunging sales and profitability, and an inexorable increase in online and social-media platforms, the Fairfax and News Limited organisations have embarked on major cost-cutting and restructuring exercises. Hundreds of journalists' jobs will be shed, printing plants will close, and The Age and The Sydney Morning ... More/Buy
Kitsch!: Cultural Politics and Taste
Ruth Holliday, Tracey Potts
Manchester University Press, PB, 9780719066160
From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural politics and taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested ... More/Buy
Loving this Planet: Leading Thinkers Talk about How to Make a Better World
Helen Caldicott (ed)
New Press, PB, 9781595588067
Extending well beyond the scope of conventional environmental discussions, the stirring conversations Helen Caldicott has collected in this book give the reader Martin Sheen on grassroots movements and unionised labor; Chris Hedges on the costs of standing up for your morals; and Lily Tomlin on contemporary politics, in a sarcastic and witty exchange that is at once hilarious and inspiring. Loving ... More/Buy
Murdoch's Pirates: Before the phone hacking, there was Rupert's pay-TV skullduggery
Neil Chenoweth
Allen & Unwin, HB, 9781743311806
What happens when one of the biggest media groups in the world sets up its own private security force? What happens when part of this operation goes rogue? News of the World is not the first Murdoch company to be accused of skullduggery. Murdoch's Pirates is about the dark deeds of a secret division of News Corp, based in Jerusalem, operating ... More/Buy
Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
Katherine Angel
Allen Lane, HB, 9781846146671
Unmastered is a new kind of book that allows us to think afresh about desire. Incisive, moving, and lyrical, it opens up a larger space for the exploration of feelings that can be difficult to express. Touching on experiences of desire and pleasure, as well as grief and pain, the book probes the porousness between masculine and feminine, thought and sensation, ... More/Buy