Stardust to Stardust: Reflections on Living and Dying

Stardust to Stardust: Reflections on Living and Dying
Author: Erik Olin Wright
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1642592056

Erik Olin Wright, one of the most important sociologists of his time, takes readers along on his intimate and brave journey toward death, and asks the big questions about human mortality. From the renowned Marxist sociologist and educator Erik Olin Wright, Stardust to Stardust is a curated collection of writings from the months of his treatment and hospitalization for acute myeloid leukemia. This combination of personal narrative with Wright’s analytical perspective results in a deeply complex, philosophical meditation on death and the meaning of existence.

Sociology Meets Memoir

Sociology Meets Memoir
Author: Margaret K. Nelson
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2024-12-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479827355

How sociologists can approach memoir in their writing, research, and in the classroom Memoirs attract millions of readers with their compelling life stories, vivid details, and often startling revelations. Beyond entertainment value, however, Margaret K. Nelson argues that memoirs hold potential as powerful resources for sociologists to engage with, analyze, and teach. Sociology Meets Memoir is a short and accessible guide to the significance of memoirs for the field of sociology, from their many possible uses to the numerous challenges they pose. This guide enables sociologists to learn about the different ways memoirs have been used as a medium through which to exercise and encourage the “sociological imagination.” Nelson offers clear definitions of the various and nuanced terms associated with memoir and examples of how different types of stories have been effectively integrated into scholarly research. Readers will gain an understanding of the immense power of memoirs as sociological resources, offering unique access to voices from the past as well as voices from the present which are traditionally marginalized. Nelson also focuses on the genre’s limitations and the difficult methodological questions that accompany their use in scholarly endeavors. Sociology Meets Memoir is a vital tool for all sociologists interested in this growing genre. By reading this guide, students and teachers alike will gain an understanding of how they might approach the current outpouring of memoirs and incorporate them into their teaching, learning, writing, and research.

Public Sociology

Public Sociology
Author: Michael Burawoy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2021-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509519181

Michael Burawoy has helped to reshape the theory and practice of sociology across the Western world. Public Sociology is his most thoroughgoing attempt to explore what a truly committed, engaged sociology should look like in the twenty-first century. Burawoy looks back on the defining moments of his intellectual journey, exploring his pivotal early experiences as a researcher, such as his fieldwork in a Zambian copper mine and a Chicago factory. He recounts his time as a graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline – it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Erik Olin Wright
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788739558

What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values—equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity—can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society. Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author’s close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.

Envisioning Real Utopias

Envisioning Real Utopias
Author: Erik Olin Wright
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1789601452

Rising inequality of income and power, along with recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet few are attempting this task-most analysts argue that any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations is utopian. Erik Olin Wright's major new work is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. A systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors, Envisioning Real Utopias lays the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.

Our Sacred Source

Our Sacred Source
Author: Andrew Kneier
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725288257

Life is not a cakewalk for any of us. We each have our individual sufferings and challenges in life, and we each must endure vital questions that have no certain answers. Why are we here? Where is God when we need him? How do our lives matter in the long run? Our science cannot help us with such questions, but theology can. And that’s what this book has to offer. This book’s theology is based on an arresting theory about God. Turning to modern physics, it finds God in the origin of the universe and in the innermost foundations of the natural world. The universe flowed from his nature, but his nature was not perfect, which is why we have an imperfect world where bad things happen to good people. And yet we also find this God deep within us, enabling us to confront our suffering with resilience and grace. The evil in the world has power, but we have power too, the power from our inner God to hold steady against the slings and arrows of our misfortunes. The theology presented here builds on the discoveries of particle physics and quantum mechanics about the foundational building blocks and forces in all of creation. These reveal the abounding spirit and purposes of the Creator—a spirit that empowers us and instills in us purposes we can embrace and foster. It may seem we are essentially on our own as we navigate through life, but in this book’s theology, God is always and everywhere with us and in us.

Freedom to Fall

Freedom to Fall
Author: Carol Hampson
Publisher: BalboaPress
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2012-09-19
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1452555621

He climbed, only to let goand now she must follow Shockwaves had already reached the rock-climbing community when Carol was awakened in the night with the news of her sons death. Chris Hampsona well-known climber whose grace, warmth, commitment, and Zen-like focus inspired many friendshad fallen to his death in Yosemite National Park. This moving memoir tells how a mother, seeking to understand her sons passion and confronting deep questions of mortal life, learns to climb up from despair. She had always believed that to encourage her childrens freedom was the greatest gift she could give. But now that belief is shaken. Grasping for ground, struggling to accept his passing, she discovers a remarkable truth: love transcends time and space. You never really lose who you love. The first anniversary of Chriss death is marked by Carols pilgrimage to Yosemite where, among perennial climbers and granite gods, she scatters his ashes and begins to release him.

Engaging Erik Olin Wright

Engaging Erik Olin Wright
Author: Michael Burawoy
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1804294950

A collection of essays exploring emancipatory social science, inspired by the work of pioneering sociologist Erik Olin Wright Erik Olin Wright was one of the most brilliant and world renowned social scientists of our era. He left us in 2019 with an unfinished project - the articulation of class and utopia. Wright's sociological Marxism embarked from an original class analysis, with its trade-mark contradictory class locations, that empirically mapped class structures across the globe. In response to the collapse of communism and the rise of neoliberalism, Wright turned to the premise of class analysis, that is the possibility of socialism. Forsaking Marxism's allergy to utopian thinking, Wright searched the planet for institutions that might sow the seeds of socialism – such as cooperatives, participatory budgeting, basic income grants – institutions that might dissolve racial, gender, and class inequalities by eroding capitalism. His last book How to be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, published posthumously in over a dozen languages has become a manifesto for a new world, bringing together and inspiring social movement activists. The essays in this volume pay tribute to his generative theory, his crystalline teaching and his personal warmth. The authors – all close colleagues or former students – wrestle with the relationship between his two expanding research programs, class analysis and real utopias. They burn the candle from either end, all galvanized by Wright's genius and vision to reinvent Marxism.

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond
Author: Dave Sim
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre:
ISBN: 9781736860502

"The story traces the lives and techniques of Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon, RipKirby), Stan Drake (Juliet Jones), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), and more, dissecting their techniques through recreations of their artwork,and highlighting the metatextual resonances that bind them together"--Page 4 of cove

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Author: Roy Scranton
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2015-09-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 087286670X

"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History "Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change. For me, it crystallizes and expresses what I've been thinking about and trying to get a grasp on. The economical way it does so, with such clarity, sets the book apart from most others on the subject."--Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy "Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster. While I don't share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate "Concise, elegant, erudite, heartfelt & wise."--Amitav Ghosh, author of Flood of Fire "War veteran and journalist Roy Scranton combines memoir, philosophy, and science writing to craft one of the definitive documents of the modern era."--The Believer Best Books of 2015 Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life. In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality. Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age--for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.