Thursday, December 17, 2009

Understanding and Preventing Suicide: The Development of Self-Destructive Patterns and Ways to Alter Them


Book Description

Illustrated with vignettes from the author's experience, this book offers a clear understanding of how suicidal thought develops, what we can do to change that way of thinking, how suicidal people can recover, and how the rest of us can cope when life is nonetheless lost. [Description provided by the publisher]

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits


Product Description

Dorothea Lange’s photographs define how we remember the Depression generation; now an evocative biography defines her creative struggles and enduring legacy. We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos—the “Migrant Mother” holding her child, the gaunt men forlornly waiting in breadlines—but few know the arc of her extraordinary life. In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it. 128 photos. [Description provided by the publisher]

American Cinema of the 1960s


Product Description

The profound cultural and political changes of the 1960s brought the United States closer to social revolution than at any other time in the twentieth century. The country fragmented as various challenges to state power were met with increasing and violent resistance. The Cold War heated up and the Vietnam War divided Americans. Civil rights, women's liberation, and gay rights further emerged as significant social issues. Free love was celebrated even as the decade was marked by assassinations, mass murders, and social unrest.

At the same time, American cinema underwent radical change as well. The studio system crumbled, and the Production Code was replaced by a new ratings system. Among the challenges faced by the film industry was the dawning shift in theatrical exhibition from urban centers to suburban multiplexes, an increase in runaway productions, the rise of independent producers, and competition from both television and foreign art films. Hollywood movies became more cynical, violent, and sexually explicit, reflecting the changing values of the time.

In ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1960s examines a range of films that characterized the decade, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and independent and experimental films. Among the films discussed are Elmer Gantry, The Apartment, West Side Story, The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill a Mockingbird, Cape Fear, Bonnie and Clyde, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider. [Description provided by the publisher]

To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir


Product Description

Gordon Parks was born with, he says, “a stubborn need to be somebody.” Though Parks is remembered most notably as a photographer and filmmaker, on his enthralling climb to fame between 1944 and 1978 he was successful in many pursuits, including journalism, poetry, and music. It was not always an easy journey, but by thirty-six he had overcome many obstacles to become a photographer and writer for Life magazine. To Smile in Autumn is a candid revelation of a man in the prime of his life and career. This autobiography, with a new foreword by Alexs Pate, is a testament to a person much attuned to the greater world and driven to leave his mark on it. [Description provided by the publisher]

Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery


Product Description

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution, coerced to service hundreds if not thousands of men before being discarded. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such "processing," and can be repeatedly "consumed."

Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, in the first journey of its kind, he traveled across four continents to investigate these crimes and take stock of their devastating human toll. Kara made several trips to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over four hundred slaves, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them.

In this book, Kara provides a riveting account of his journey into this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He draws on his background in finance, economics, and law to provide the first ever business analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form: sex trafficking. Kara describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to this and other forms of modern slavery over the past two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each industry. Finally, he identifies the sectors of the sex trafficking industry that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and recommends the specific legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help to abolish this form of slavery, once and for all.

The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of this book to the anti-slavery organization, Free the Slaves. [This description provided by the publisher]

Expectations and Demands in Online Teaching: Practical Experiences

Despite the considerable, growing interest in online education, most studies have focused only on the students perspective. Merely a handful of studies have attempted to address the teachers perspectives and little has been published on the online teaching experience itself.

Expectations and Demands in Online Teaching: Practical Experiences offers a better understanding of how teachers experience the online environment by exploring various dimensions of online teaching, including class preparation, process effectiveness and quality, and technology utilization. The book assists educational institution administrators supporting online education improve their understanding of how teachers experience online teaching, and of the issues these teachers face in their teaching. [Description provided by the publisher]

The War on Human Trafficking: U. S. Policy Assessed


Product Description

The War on Human Trafficking covers the policy battles surrounding efforts to abolish human trafficking. Anthony M. DeStefano details events leading up to the creation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 1000--the federal law that first addressed this phenomenon--and assesses the effectiveness and aftermath of the law. DeStefano also describes the tensions created as the Bush Administration used trafficking laws to attack prostitution and shows how the American response to these criminal activities was influenced by the events of September 11th and the war in Iraq. This important book gets beyond sensational stories of sexual servitude and explains the powerful economic conditions that impel immigrants to put themselves at risk. [Provided by the publisher]

Latino American Folktales (Stories from the American Mosaic)

Latino American Folktales: Stories from The American Mosaic edited by Thomas A. Green is designed to provide educators, students, and general readers with examples of a range of traditional Latino narratives: fictional tales, legends, myths, and personal experience.