While the Pill is taken by most women and girls at some stage in their lives, few realise it is not without side-effects. Clear links have been made to depression, nausea, headaches and migraines, as well as a loss of libido. Contrary to what most of us believe, it is not a failsafe contraception. Around 2 in 10 women do conceive while taking the Pill. Others experience difficulties conceiving after coming off this drug. There are also nutritional concerns, which can affect the health of s...

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public event...

When Idaho pathologist Toni Day meets Perrine Memorial Hospitals new administrator, she immediately notices that his smile does not reach his blue eyes. There is no question in her mind that Marcus Manning is trouble. Manning, a good old boy with roots in Twin Falls, does not waste any time earning the enmity of medical staff and employees alike as he ruthlessly goes about eliminating anyone who might oppose him in his quest to become CEO not just of Perrine Memorial but of the entire syst...

Dr. Antoinette Day—a young, successful pathologist known to her friends and colleagues as Toni—has no idea what awaits her when Dr. Sally Shore arrives at Perrine Memorial Hospital in Twin Falls, Idaho, to fill in for a colleague recovering from a heart attack. Toni’s life is about to become a living hell.Dr. Shore is supposed to see patients, perform surgeries, and take turns covering the emergency room until the regular surgeon recovers from his quadruple bypass. But unfortunatel...

Pathologist Toni Day knows her mother like the back of her hand. When her mother calls and asks her to investigate the disappearance of her best friend’s husband, Dick, she knows better than to argue. Soon, Toni and her husband, Hal, are on their way back to her hometown of Long Beach, California, where another mystery awaits. Dick’s wife, Doris, is convinced that the historic house she shares with Dick is haunted. To make things even more complicated, Doris is also suffering from a myster...

The Politics of Moralizing issues a stern warning about the risks of speaking, writing, and thinking in a manner too confident about one's own judgments and asks, "Can a clear line be drawn between dogmatism and simple certainty and indignation?" Bennett and Shapiro enter the debate by questioning what has become a popular, even pervasive, cultural narrative told by both the left and the right: the story of the West's moral decline, degeneration, or confusion. Contributors explore...

Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild explores how Thoreau crafted a life open to "the Wild," a term that marks the startling element of foreignness in every object of experience, however familiar. Thoreau's encounters with nature, Bennett argues, allowed him to resist his all-too-human tendency toward intellectual laziness, social conformity, and political complacency. Bennett pursues this theme by constructing a series of dialogues between Thoreau and our contemporari...

I was born in the flat fertile Mississippi Delta in 1940. I grew up in a white clapboard plantation house on the heels of the Great Depression when cotton was still running the show in the south and well before the Civil Rights Movement. Love took me out of the Delta, and it was love that brought me back, for there are some things that cannot be forgotten or left behind. So, here it is. After all the years that have come and gone, here is a Delta girl seeing the grand old South through a w...

Summer wheat, heavy with grain, waved in the July wind, and when touched by the afternoon sun, cast a golden glow on the rocks of Cemetery Ridge. Jonathan stood with his countrymen, rifle drawn, wiping sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of a ragged Confederate uniform. Then the nod, Longstreet to Pickett, whose men charged screaming the blood-curdling Rebel yell. Brave soldiers, strength pressed to the breach, fell like autumn leaves. Blood ran freely down the hill. Gettysburg was a troug...

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the...

Taking seriously the argument that things have politics, Political Matter seeks to develop a fully materialist theory of politics, one that opens new possibilities for imagining the relationship between scientific and political practices. The contributors assert that without such a theory the profusion of complex materials with and through which we live-plastic bags, smart cars, and long-life lightbulbs, for example-too often leaves us oscillating between fearful repudiation and g...

In influx & efflux Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book Vibrant Matter: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx & efflux”—a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts in...