Suicide by Emile Durkheim

$10.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: good

Tools and Weapons: Promise and Peril in the Digital Age by Brad Smith; Carol Ann Browne

$14.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

"A clear, compelling guide to some of the most pressing debates in technology today." - Bill Gates, from the foreword From Microsoft's President and one of the tech industry's wisest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. __________ Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: when your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. Now, though, we have reached an inflection point: Silicon Valley has moved fast and it has broken things. A new understanding has emerged that companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future. And governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation that is impacting our communities and changing the world. In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith takes us into the cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no pre-existing playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of AI, big tech's relationship to inequality and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book opens up the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points, as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. Every tool can be a weapon in the wrong person's hands, and companies are being challenged in entirely new ways to embrace the totality of their responsibilities. We have moved from a world in which Silicon Valley could take no prisoners to one in which tech companies and governments must work together to address the challenges and adapt to the changes technology has unleashed. There are huge ramifications to be thought through, and Brad Smith provides a marvellous and urgently necessary contribution to that effort. __________ In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith takes us behind the scenes on some of the biggest stories to hit the tech industry in the past decade. From Edward Snowden's NSA leak to the NHS WannaCry ransomware attack, this book is essential reading to understand what's happening in the world around us. ...Show more

Essays on the Anthropology of Reason by Paul Rabinow

$15.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Series: Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History Ser. | Reading Level: very good

This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to pa rticular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power.The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences. ...Show more

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

$12.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

In January 2012, the hacker collective Anonymous brought down the FBI website in response to planned American laws against internet piracy. In 2011, LulzSec, a sister organisation, broke into and blocked computer systems at VISA, Mastercard and PayPal. The groups have infiltrated the networks of totalit arian governments in Libya and Tunisia. They have attacked the CIA and NATO. But instead of being sanctimonious and secretive, these cyber activists are flippant and taunting, never hesitating to mock those they've outsmarted. Today, governments, big businesses and social activists are waking up to the true power of the internet, and how it can be manipulated. This is the story of a hive mind, with many hackers across the globe connected to slice through security systems and escape untraced. Through the stories of four key members, "We Are Anonymous" offers a gripping, adrenalin-fuelled narrative drawing upon extensive research, and hundreds of conversations with the hackers themselves. By coming to know them - their backgrounds, families, motivations - we come to know the human side of their virtual exploits, showing exactly why they're so passionate about disrupting the internet's frontiers. ...Show more

Anorexic Bodies - A Feminist and Sociological Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa by Morag MacSween

$15.00 NZD

Category: Medicine | Reading Level: very good

This book explores the ways in which anorexic women use their eating to control their bodies. It argues that the female body in modern Western culture is understood as open and accessible and female appetite as dangerous and voracious. Anorexia attempts to resist both these constructions in the creation of a closed, desireless body. Since anorexic women resist the power of collective ideologies their resistance cannot work - the closed body becomes its own prison. ...Show more

Homo Academicus by Pierre Bourdieu; P. Collier (Translator)

$25.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

This highly acclaimed work, in which Pierre Bourdieu turns hisattention to the academic world and offers a brilliant analysis ofmodern intellectual culture, is now available in paperback. Theacademy is shown to be not just a realm of dialogue and debate, butalso a sphere of power in which reputations an d careers are made,defended and destroyed. Bourdieu constructs a map of the intellectual field in Franceand analyzes the forms of capital power, the lines of conflict andthe patterns of change which characterize the system of highereducation in France today. ...Show more

The Social Self by David Bakhurst (Editor); Christine Sypnowich (Editor)

$16.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Series: Inquiries in Social Construction Ser. | Reading Level: very good

Much discussion in recent years has centred on the status of the self, identity and subjectivity in the light of powerful arguments about the social origins of personhood. The Social Selfpresents many dimensions of the debate, spanning psychology, philosophy, politics and feminist theory, and provides a critical overview of the key themes involved. The internationally renowned contributors examine the senses in which we are `social selves′ whose very identities are intimately bound up with the communities and cultures in which we live. Drawing on Wittgenstein, Marx, Foucault, Bakhtin, Gilligan and MacIntyre, among others, the chapters show the diversity of influences that have shaped this exciting and controversial issue. ...Show more

Webtopia: The Worldwide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work by Peter Lewis

$15.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s was a world of limited choice, one where we all watched the same television programs and the household phone was at the heart of allnetworks people belonged to: family, school, church and the neighbourhood. The arrival of the internet promised a utopian, creative and democr atic future that would break down traditional institutions and replace them with exciting collaborative networks. So how did we end up here? In Webtopia, Peter Lewis draws from his own pre- and post-tech experience and conversations with entrepreneurs, politicians, pastors, parents, teachers and journalists to show us that technology is not the problem. We are. If we fix our relationship with technology, it will be easier to fix our relationships with each other in a fragmenting world. Riveting, engaging and wise, Webtopia traces our digital journey to this point and, fearlessly, marks out the best route from here. 'This book is an encounter with a born raconteur. This makes for a highly readable book, but it also reflects something more profound: that people power the web and modern tech is the embodiment of human genius, human folly and every human choice that lies in between.' -- Edward Santow, Australian Human Rights Commissioner   ...Show more

Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

$20.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

"David Epstein manages to make me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told that everything I thought about something was wrong. I loved Range." Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Outliers.Range is the ground-breaking and exhilarating exploration into how to be successful in the 21st Century, f rom David Epstein the acclaimed author of The Sports Gene.What if everything you have been taught about how to succeed in life was wrong? From the '10,000 hours rule' to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many hours of deliberate practice. And, worse, that if you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong.In this landmark book, David Epstein shows that the way to excel is by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly, juggling many interests - in other words, by developing range.Studying the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, and scientists Epstein discovered that in most fields - especially those that are complex and unpredictable - generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. They are also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see. Range proves that by spreading your knowledge across multiple domains is the key to success rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range explains how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience and interdisciplinary thinking in a world that increasingly demands, hyper-specialization. ...Show more

The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture by Timothy Taylor

$16.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: very good

Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption by Stephen J. Harper

$15.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Reading Level: near fine

On the Age of Disruption This is an age of increasing disruption of all sorts-one that is now having significant political impacts in even the most stable, advanced democracies. On President Trump I do not know whether Donald Trump's presidency will succeed or not. But what I do know is that the issues that gave rise to his candidacy are not going away. On Public Policy The policy-maker has to understand why something is good public policy and continually evaluate how it is playing out. And if it's not working out well for the public, in a democracy, you fix the policy; you do not denounce the public. On International Trade Trade is complicated. It has winners and losers. Trade negotiations require clear-eyed knowledge and in-depth assessment. It is as possible to get a bad deal as a good deal. And political leaders have a responsibility to know the difference. On Immigration The real key to a successful immigration system is convincing the public that the system serves the national interest, that it is not injurious to working people, and that it is administered with integrity and consistency. On Conservatism Conservatism is rooted not in abstract "first principles" but in real-world experience applies to the needs of regular people. On Global Business Get back to basics. Invest and hire, contribute positively to the communities in which you operate, and make sure the people you touch know about your enterprise and what you are doing for them. Distance your own firm from unnecessary controversy and bad business behaviour. Book jacket. ...Show more

The Buckminster Fuller Reader by Buckminster Fuller; James Meller (Editor)

$10.00 NZD

Category: Social Science | Series: Pelican Ser. | Reading Level: good