Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery

Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery PDF Author: Jennifer Brady
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443860735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
After nearly forty years of dictatorship and an abrupt transition to democracy in the twentieth century, Spain is now in a moment of great rediscovery. The Peninsular country’s precarious past, paired with its current situation of economic crisis (currently Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in the Eurozone) and movements to recover languages, literatures and cultures other than Spanish, creates a country where artists, authors and directors are exploring existential and social issues in new and revitalized ways. The chapters included in Collapse, Catastrophe, and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the Twenty First Century explore filmic, literary and cultural representations of modern-day Spain, and the contributing authors offer insight into how the past has affected the country’s artistic and literary production of today and how film and literature dialogue with the social and economic situation of Spain in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anchored to current cultural and social trends, this collection presents a variety of perspectives and a wide range of analyses of some of the most pertinent contemporary Spanish texts and films with the goal of expanding conceptualizations of the cultural panorama of Spain today.

Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery

Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery PDF Author: Jennifer Brady
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443860735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book Here

Book Description
After nearly forty years of dictatorship and an abrupt transition to democracy in the twentieth century, Spain is now in a moment of great rediscovery. The Peninsular country’s precarious past, paired with its current situation of economic crisis (currently Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in the Eurozone) and movements to recover languages, literatures and cultures other than Spanish, creates a country where artists, authors and directors are exploring existential and social issues in new and revitalized ways. The chapters included in Collapse, Catastrophe, and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the Twenty First Century explore filmic, literary and cultural representations of modern-day Spain, and the contributing authors offer insight into how the past has affected the country’s artistic and literary production of today and how film and literature dialogue with the social and economic situation of Spain in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anchored to current cultural and social trends, this collection presents a variety of perspectives and a wide range of analyses of some of the most pertinent contemporary Spanish texts and films with the goal of expanding conceptualizations of the cultural panorama of Spain today.

Understanding Collapse

Understanding Collapse PDF Author: Guy D. Middleton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110715149X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect PDF Author: Ugo Bardi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319572075
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The essence of this book can be found in a line written by the ancient Roman Stoic Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca: "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid". This sentence summarizes the features of the phenomenon that we call "collapse," which is typically sudden and often unexpected, like the proverbial "house of cards." But why are such collapses so common, and what generates them? Several books have been published on the subject, including the well known "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (2005), "The collapse of complex societies" by Joseph Tainter (1998) and "The Tipping Point," by Malcom Gladwell (2000). Why The Seneca Effect? This book is an ambitious attempt to pull these various strands together by describing collapse from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint. The reader will discover how collapse is a collective phenomenon that occurs in what we call today "complex systems," with a special emphasis on system dynamics and the concept of "feedback." From this foundation, Bardi applies the theory to real-world systems, from the mechanics of fracture and the collapse of large structures to financial collapses, famines and population collapses, the fall of entire civilzations, and the most dreadful collapse we can imagine: that of the planetary ecosystem generated by overexploitation and climate change. The final objective of the book is to describe a conclusion that the ancient stoic philosophers had already discovered long ago, but that modern system science has rediscovered today. If you want to avoid collapse you need to embrace change, not fight it. Neither a book about doom and gloom nor a cornucopianist's dream, The Seneca Effect goes to the heart of the challenges that we are facing today, helping us to manage our future rather than be managed by it.

Disasters and History

Disasters and History PDF Author: Bas van Bavel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108752381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but also within the same societies according to social groups, ethnicity and gender. They also demonstrate how studying past disasters, including earthquakes, droughts, floods and epidemics, can provide a lens through which to understand the social, economic and political functioning of past societies and reveal features of a society which may otherwise remain hidden from view. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Collapse

Collapse PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times

Meltdown

Meltdown PDF Author: Thomas E. Woods
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1596981067
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
With a foreword from Ron Paul, Meltdown is the free-market answer to the Fed-created economic crisis. As the new Obama administration inevitably calls for more regulations, Woods argues that the only way to rebuild our economy is by returning to the fundamentals of capitalism and letting the free market work.

Disaster by the Bay

Disaster by the Bay PDF Author: Harry Paul Jeffers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A colorful city -- eighth largest in the country -- reduced to rubble by a massive earthquake and then consumed by flames... In this vivid, fast-paced chronicle of what has been called the worst peacetime disaster to ever befall America, veteran journalist and author H. Paul Jeffers provides a gripping account of the nightmarish days in April 1906 when earthquake and fire devastated San Francisco. Drawing on a wide range of eyewitness material, Jeffers follows a variety of individuals as they come to terms with an unthinkable event. Celebrities like Enrico Caruso and John Barrymore; the civil and military authorities who tried to bring order out of the chaos; merchants who struggled heroically to save their shops and goods from the ruins and the flames; the suddenly homeless ordinary men and women who composed messages on scraps of paper and sticks of wood (all of which, incredibly, the postal service actually delivered) to tell of their survival: from all these and many other perspectives Jeffers creates a riveting mosaic of catastrophe and its aftermath. With the one-hundredth anniversary of the quake approaching, this skillful and engrossing narrative will be of keen interest to readers from west coast to east. Book jacket.

Textbook of Disaster Psychiatry

Textbook of Disaster Psychiatry PDF Author: Robert J. Ursano
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107138493
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This book presents a decade of advances in the psychological, biological and social responses to disasters, helping medics and leaders prepare and react.

Shifting Subjectivities in Contemporary Fiction and Film from Spain

Shifting Subjectivities in Contemporary Fiction and Film from Spain PDF Author: Jennifer Brady
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527523489
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This collection of essays analyzes shifting notions of self as represented in films and novels written and produced in Spain in the twenty-first century. In doing so, the anthology establishes an international dialogue of multicultural perspectives on trends in contemporary Spain, and serves as a useful reference for scholars and students of Spanish literature and cinema. The primary avenues of exploration include representations of recovery in post-crisis Spain, marginalized texts and identities, silenced subjectivities, intersecting relationships, and spaces of desire and control. The individual chapters focus on major events, such as the global economic crisis, the tension between majority and minority cultures within Spain, and the ongoing repercussions of past trauma and historical memory. In doing so, they build upon theories of identity, subjectivity, gender, history, memory, and normativity.

Indiscreet Fantasies

Indiscreet Fantasies PDF Author: Andrés Lema-Hincapié
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684482488
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Pedro Almodóvar may have helped put queer Iberian cinema on the map, but there are multitudes of LGBTQ filmmakers from Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country who have made the Peninsula one of the world’s most vital sources for queer film. Together, they have produced a cinema whose expressions of queer desire have challenged the region’s conservative religious and family values, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation. Indiscreet Fantasies is a unique collection that offers in-depth analyses of fifteen different films produced in the region over the past fifty years, each by a different director, from Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia (The House That Screamed, 1969) to João Pedro Rodrigues’s O ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016). Contributors examine how queer Iberian cinema has responded to historical trauma—from the AIDS crisis to the repressive and homophobic Franco regime—and explore how these films demonstrate a fluid understanding of sexuality, gender, and national identity. The result will give readers a new appreciation for the cultural diversity of Iberia and the richness of its thought-provoking queer cinema. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.