A hilarious novel about surviving a chaotic school inspection with a side of pig-related pandemonium!In a struggling semi-rural school, a downtrodden head teacher faces the dreaded school inspection. To make matters worse, a reality TV crew arrives to film the chaos, just as a war erupts between the local ice cream factory and a pig farmer. Can anyone survive this perfect storm of madness?Steve Baker, an award-winning education author, brings his insider kn...

Once a forbidding area of swamps and forests, Berkley was uninhabited until the early 19th century. In 1924, the Detroit News disparaged the "frontier community" and wrote that it "resembles a settlement in the oil waste of Wyoming." Still, forward-thinking residents thought Berkley had a bright future. Two factions with competing ideas raced with paperwork to the Oakland County Courthouse in Pontiac; the triumphant group, desiring a small town, camped out overnight to be the first in line...

What do you get if you blend a downtrodden head teacher, a hostile school inspector, an incompetent reality TV film crew, an ice cream factory and a load of unruly pigs? A hilarious novel from the pen of Steve Baker, a brilliant writer and school behaviour specialist.Outstanding tells the story of a school inspection set against the backdrop of a struggling school in a semi-rural setting. Educating Norfolk have been invited in to film the cash strapped school and just happ...

Knowing How Long the Game Will Last Can Radically Change How You Play.Few people feel they control their own lives. They operate on autopilot, enslaved by anxiety, debt, and desperation. They tolerate unrewarding jobs and unfulfilling relationships. They don't do what they want to do, but rather what they feel they have to do. Stop sacrificing your best just to make a living - and start designing the life you deserve!Quality Time Remaining™ is the most approachable framewor...

Brain-talk Meets God-talk is a story that begins in Egypt's Eastern Desert.In Part 1, it's the year AD 356, and a wise old Christian fights his last spiritual battle in the darkness of the desert. Then time-leap forward to this decade in the United States and observe a Christian in Iowa fighting clinical depression.Discover the connection between the men. Get ready for the hope found in a gift that links them, though they are 1,600 years apart in t...

In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois,...

Animals have always been compelling subjects for artists, but the rise of animal advocacy and posthumanist thought has prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between artist and animal. In this book, Steve Baker examines the work of contemporary artists who directly confront questions of animal life, treating animals not for their aesthetic qualities or as symbols of the human condition but rather as beings who actively share the world with humanity.The concerns of the artis...

Lucien and Olivia by André Narbonne, author of Twelve Miles to Midnight, is a comic statement on the beautiful waywardness of life. Built on scenes of discovery and error, the novel satirizes the transactional view of human relations that has elbowed its way into our lives by way of contemporary political discourse. The novel is set in the 1980s before cell phones, personal computers, and Facebook “likes.” Lucien is a marine engineer on a Canadian tanker. While on one-mon...

Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making, and all are dedicated to exploring the conditions and potentials of human life. In this exciting book, Tim Ingold ties the four disciplines together in a way that has never been attempted before. In a radical departure from conventional studies that treat art and architecture as compendia of objects for analysis, Ingold proposes an anthropology and arc...

A study of Kusama's era-defining work, a “sublime, miraculous field of phalluses,” against the background of abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness.Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psych...

Archaeologies of Presence is a brilliant exploration of how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. Drawing together carefully commissioned contributions by leading international scholars and artists, this radical new work poses a number of essential questions:What are the principle signifiers of theatrical presence?How is presence achieved through th...

What is craft? How is it different from fine art or design? In A Theory of Craft, Howard Risatti examines these issues by comparing handmade ceramics, glass, metalwork, weaving, and furniture to painting, sculpture, photography, and machine-made design from Bauhaus to the Memphis Group. He describes craft as uniquely blending function with a deeper expression of human values that transcend culture, time, and space. Craft must articulate a role for itself in contemporary society, s...