California Press: 1495 books

"A stimulating history of how the imagination interacted with its sibling psychological faculties—emotion, perception and reason—to shape the history of human mental life."—The Wall Street Journal To imagine—to see what is not there—is the startling ability that has fueled human development...

Colonial documents and works of literature from early modern Spain are rife with references to public women, whores, and prostitutes. In Profit and Passion, Nicole von Germeten offers a new history of the women who carried and resisted these labels of ill repute. The elusive, ever-changing terminology...

Out of War draws on Mariane C. Ferme’s three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war. Ferme analyzes the relationship between violence, trauma, and the political imagination, focusing on “war times”—the...

Neoliberalism has been the defining paradigm in global health since the latter part of the twentieth century. What started as an untested and unproven theory that the creation of unfettered markets would give rise to political democracy led to policies that promoted the belief that private markets...

From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. Authors such as Octavia Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko, movie directors such as Bong Joon-Ho, and creators of digital media such as the makers...

Globalization defines our era. While it has created a great deal of debate in economic, policy, and grassroots circles, many aspects of the phenomenon remain virtual terra incognita. Education is at the heart of this continent of the unknown. This pathbreaking book examines how globalization and large-scale...

This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life’s connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin...

Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them...

The ability to deploy interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives that speak to interconnected global dimensions is critical if one’s work is to be relevant and applicable to the emerging global-scale issues of our time. The Global Turn is a guide for students and scholars across all areas of the...

This provocative collection showcases the work of emerging and established sociologists in the fields of sexuality and gender studies as they reflect on what it means to develop, practice, and teach queer methods. Located within the critical conversation about the possibilities and challenges of...

Human health is shaped by the interactions between social and ecological systems. In States of Disease, Brian King advances a social ecology of health framework to demonstrate how historical spatial formations contribute to contemporary vulnerabilities to disease and the opportunities for health...

A New York Times Best Wine Book of 2018 Flawless is the first book of its kind dedicated to exploring the main causes of faults in wine. From cork taint, to volatile acidity, to off-putting aromas and flavors, all wine connoisseurs have encountered unappealing qualities in a disappointing...

Deviance: Social Constructions and Blurred Boundaries draws on up-to-date scholarship across a wide spectrum of deviance categories, providing a symbolic interactionist analysis of the deviance process. The book addresses positivistic theories of deviant behavior within a description of the deviance...

“When I testify in court, I am often asked: ‘What is the damage of long-term solitary confinement?’ . . . Many prisoners emerge from prison after years in solitary with very serious psychiatric symptoms even though outwardly they may appear emotionally stable. The damage from isolation is dreadfully...