Showing all 3 resultsSorted by latest
-
£12.99
This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labour, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean. Pare-Poupart’s story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees and working in more ‘respectable’ fields, he is still on a truck – out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him. His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends, as a committed freegan. Trash! – the French edition of which is a runaway bestseller in Canada – explains an
-
£16.99
Hitler and Goring are standing on top of the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on the Berliners’ faces. Goring says, ‘Why don’t you jump?’ When a woman working in a factory told this joke to a colleague in Germany in 1943, she was arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to death by guillotine – it didn’t matter that her husband was a good German soldier who died in battle. In this groundbreaking work of history, Rudolph Herzog takes up such stories to show how widespread humour was during the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating and frightening history: from the suppression of the anti-Nazi cabaret scene of the 1930s, to jokes made at the expense of the Nazis during WWII, to the collections of ‘whispered jokes’ that were published in the immediate aftermath of the war. Herzog argues that jokes provide a hitherto missing chapter of WWII history. The jokes show that not all Germans were hypnotized by Nazi prop
-
£14.99
Why do charges of ‘privilege’ haunt every new protest wave? In this electrifying blend of short history and manifesto, Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins picks apart the insult that demonstrators are merely elite status-seekers – and shows why the same complaints surfaced against Vietnam-era marchers, Iraq War protesters, and, most recently, the Gaza encampments that shook US campuses nationwide. Robbins spars with contemporary critics, like David Brooks and Musa al-Gharbi, who insist that campus activists are secretly angling for elite credentials. Along the way, he recounts his own run-ins with university discipline boards and offers a reckoning with what it really costs – financially, socially, and personally – to stand against abuses of power.
