Powerful feathers envelop my deltoids and pectorals, transforming my upper torso into a symphony of brilliant black. For some strange reason, I feel no anxiety over my plumage. Somehow, I innately know what to do with my new wings as they caressed the air and drew my body through the sky with control. Of course, I do a few flips and dives through the playground, celebrating my freedom from the clutches of gravity.How high can I climb? How fast can I dive?Soaring high above ...

Since its creation in 1934, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become the most heavily visited of all our national parks, with yearly visitation sometimes surpassing 10 million people. As the national park system celebrated its centennial in 2016, Ben Anderson decided to explore and closely observe, across the seasons, as much of the nation’s most popular national park as practicable during the year. On the three or four hikes he took each month, he revisited a number of trails fa...

Improving the brain is a lifelong journey that requires a combination of various strategies and techniques. The brain is a complex and dynamic organ, and there are many ways to support its health and function. Effective ways to improve the brain are discussed in Brain Improvement Tips.In this book you will discover how to:INCREASE BRAIN BLOOD FLOW THROUGH PHYSICAL EXERCISE AND PROPER NUTRITION.BOOST ...

Social work as a profession and academic discipline has long centered women and issues of concern to women, such as reproductive rights, labor rights, equal rights, violence and poverty. In fact, the social work profession was started by and maintained in large part by women and has been home to several generations of feminists starting with recognized first wave feminists. This wide-ranging volume both maps the contemporary landscape of feminist social work research, and offers a deep eng...

This book is the first transnational history of rambling and mountaineering. Focussing on the critical turn-of-the-century era, it offers new insights into alpine development, attitudes to danger, cultures of time, internationalism and domesticity in the outdoors. It charts an emerging group of mass tourist activities, and argues that these thousands of walkers and climbers can only be understood within the context of the urban cultures from which most of them came. In doing so, it offers ...

Youth workers and other helping professionals regularly find themselves in situations where, despite their experience and education, they simply do not know what to do or how to respond to the circumstances facing them. This book takes up the moment of not-knowing as experienced by youth workers, providing accessible phenomenological descriptions of the experience as lived by several youth workers. In addition to exploring the five dominant themes of the experience, the book situates not-k...

Emerging over the past ten years from a set of post-structuralist theoretical lineages, non-representational theories are having a major impact within Human Geography. Non-representational theorisation and research has opened up new sets of problematics around the body, practice and performativity and inspired new ways of doing and writing human geography that aim to engage with the taking-place of everyday life. Drawing together a range of innovative contributions from leading writers, th...

Since the mid-1990s, affect has become central to the social sciences and humanities. Debates abound over how to conceptualise affect, and how to understand the interrelationships between affective life and a range of contemporary political transformations. In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson explores why understanding affect matters and offers one account of affective life that hones in on the different ways in which affects are ordered. Intervening in debates around non-representational...

There is a growing body of work examining the ‘consequences’, or more accurately the inter-relationships between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and society at the microsocial (individual, household) level. The vast majority of this work has so far been focused on the US and the subsequent publications have consequently provided predominantly US-centred analyses.This book will re-dress this balance by providing analyses of the situation in Europe and is associate...

Language interpreters played a vital role in the recent US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. These men served alongside American soldiers in parts of the world where doing so meant they could not go back home safely. They served with the promise of support, visas and better lives in the US and abroad after the fighting was over and for many, those promises went unfulfilled.VICE News host Ben Anderson traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq to meet with several interpreters—to document th...

In which bedlam threatens to envelope the world, unless Oscar can do something about it, which he's willing to consider, providing it involves an enormous breakfast first.

Just as the Great Fire of London took place one year after the Great Plague broke out, in the 14th Century, Germany and Latvia were still burying their dead from the Black Death, or bubonic plague, when they were hit by a strange epidemic--often called Dancing Mania, St. John's Dance, or St. Vitus' Dance--that caused thousands of people to literally "dance" themselves to death. Due to the spasmodic jerkings and twitchings of the "dancers," it was thought at the time that the victims were p...