Based on a large number of interviews with women politicians of many generations and women who have entered the three-tier Panchayati Raj institutions since the mid-1990s in Kerala, this book tries to initiate fresh debate on the impact of the large-scale induction of women into the institutions of local self-government in India. The State of Kerala has been hailed as a success story in accommodating gender concerns in local-level planning and political decentralisation; this conclusion ha...

THE ONLY BOOK ON IRISH HISTORY YOU'LL EVER NEED!From invasions to rebellions, heroic martyrs to pragmatic politicians, industrial development to mass emigration, A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes by renowned Irish historian Jonathan Bardon will take you on a sweeping journey through Irish history, getting behind the historical headlines to reveal the lived experience of Irish people.Written in easy-to-read bitesize episodes, Bardon's original and engaging style will make you feel as tho...

A newly revised edition of an American classic, Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize—winning Buried Child is as fierce and unforgettable as it was when it was first produced in 1978.A scene of madness greets Vince and his girlfriend as they arrive at the squalid farmhouse of Vince’s hard-drinking grandparents, who seem to have no idea who he is. Nor does his father, Tilden, a hulking former All-American footballer, or his uncle, who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Only th...

A riveting investigation of the brutal murders of two Dartmouth professors –– a book that, like In Cold Blood, reveals the chilling reality behind a murder that captivated the nation.On a cold night in January 2001, the idyllic community of Dartmouth College was shattered by the discovery that two of its most beloved professors had been hacked to death in their own home. Investigators searched helplessly for clues linking the victims, Half and Susanne Zant...

In March 1986, while living in Brooklyn, Chris Bohjalian and his wife were cab-napped on a Saturday night and taken on a forty-five-minute joy ride in which the driver ignored all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight he deposited the young couple on a near-deserted street, where police officers were about to storm a crack house. Bohjalian and his wife were told to hit the ground for their own protection. While lying on the pavement, Bohjalian's wife suggested that perhaps it was ...

A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife. In her poignant and genre-busting debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us with our own mortality and inspires us to think about what is important. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to Trás-os-Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abando...

The novelist who wrote The Grapes of Wrath and the director who produced Crisis and Lights Out in Europe combined their superb talents to tell the story of the coming of modern medicine to the natives of Mexico. There have been several notable examples of this pen-camera method of narration, but The Forgotten Village is unique among them in that Steinbeck wrote the text before a single picture was shot. The book and the movie from which The Forgotten...

Driftwood and Tangle is a moving and poignant memoir of life in the north-west of Scotland just after the outbreak of the Second World War.Margaret Leigh recounts the years she spent in Wester Ross, Moidart, Coigeach and Barra as a crofter, an activity which enabled her to experience the land in all its moods and capture the essence of this remote and beautiful part of Scotland in finely crafted prose.In addition to her evocative description of the land itself, she...

From headlines to documentaries, urban schools are at the center of current debates about education. From these accounts, one would never know that 51 million Americans live in rural communities and depend on their public schools to meet not only educational but also social and economic needs. For many communities, these schools are the ties that bind. Why Rural Schools Matter shares the untold story of rural education. Drawing upon extensive research in two southern towns, Mara T...

Canadian women on the political left in the first half of the twentieth century fought with varying degrees of commitment for women's rights. Women's dreams of equality were in part a vision of economic and class equality, though they also represented profound desires for equality with men - both within their own parties and in the larger society. In both the Communist Party of Canada and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a male-dominated leadership seldom embraced women's causes w...

Two Appalachian authors record personal stories of local resistance against the coal industry in this "revelatory work . . . oral history at its best" (Studs Terkel).Developed as an alternative to strip mining, mountaintop removal mining consists of blasting away the tops of mountains, dumping waste into the valleys, and retrieving the exposed coal. This process buries streams, pollutes wells and waterways, and alters fragile ecologies—all of which has a devastatin...

“People’s lives are written on the fields of old farms. The rows of the fields are like lines on a page, blank and white in winter, filled in with each year’s story of happiness, disappointment, drought, rain, sun, scarcity, plenty. The chapters accumulate, and people enter and leave the narrative. Only the farm goes on.”—From the IntroductionIn One Small Farm, Craig Schreiner’s evocative color photographs capture one family as they maintain the rhythms and routines of sma...