Marion Boyars: 50 books

A work of seminal importance, this book presents Ivan Illich's penetrating analysis of the industrial mode of production which characterises our contemporary world. The conviviality for which noted social philosopher Ivan Illich is arguing is one in which the individual's personal energies are under...

Each of the four essays reprinted here was written for a specific occasion and together comprise only the smallest selection from a larger corpus questioning commodity and energy-intensive economies. The essays are presented thematically instead of chronologically to offer a better view of the sweep...

In this political essay, Ivan Illich calls for the right to useful unemployment: a positive, constructive, and even optimistic concept dealing with that activity by which people are useful to themselves and others outside the production of commodities for the market.

Halilhan Sunteriler, would-be entrepreneur, rescues a red Volvo from the scrap heap, which he believes will lead him to big money in business ventures. So he solicits the help of his staunch friend Gogi, the most 'cultured' man of the neighbourhood, and gradually, Halilhan's two younger brothers,...

A strange magical story of a young girl growing up in modern Turkey, from her birth in a small rural village haunted by fairies and demons to hertraumatic move to the big city. It concentrates on the daughter's struggle gainst her overbearing mother and is both fantastic and hallucinatory.

The cast-offs of modern urban society are driven out onto the edges of the city and left to make a life there for themselves. They are not, however, in any natural wilderness, but in a world of refuse and useless junk - a place which denies any form of sustainable life. Here, the unemployed, the homeless,...

An analysis of the work of William Golding by acclaimed literary critic Virginia Tiger, who argues that Golding used the imaginative impact of words to convey experiences that conventional language fails to get across. This is the only book to offer a complete commentary on all his literary work and...

This is the first full-scale study of the world of eighteenth-century British cookery books, their authors, their readers and their recipes. For many decades, we have treated them as collectables - often fetching thousands at auction and in rare-book catalogues - or as quaint survivors, while ignoring...

Digby was a natural writer, as entertaining as instructive. Many of the recipes are for drinks, particularly of meads or metheglins, but the culinary material provides a remarkable conspectus of accepted practice among court circles in Restoration England, with extra details supplied from Digby's...

The fourteenth volume of the Leeds Symposium on Food History 'Food and Society' series •The theme is the ways we cooked our food since medieval times.David Eveleigh discusses the rise of the kitchen range, from the 19th-century coal-fired monsters to the electric and gas cookers of the early 20th...

Sally Grainger has gathered, in one convenient volume, her modern interpretations of 64 of the recipes in the original text. This is not 'recipes inspired by the old Romans' but rather a serious effort to convert the extremely gnomic instructions in the Latin into something that can be reproduced...

The medical establishment has become a major threat to health'. So begins Ivan Illich's spirited and reasoned attack upon the mythic prestige of contemporary medicines, examining the customs and rituals conducted by the medical profession. Relentlessly and with full documentation taken from recognized...

In this fascinating and controversial collection of essays Ivan Illich, Irving K Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan and Harley Shaiken challenge the power and mystery of professions. Why do we put so much resource into medicine, education and the law with so little apparent result? Why do we hold...

Peter Brears has a long acquaintance with jellies in every guise. He was fed them in childhood, he turned to curating their moulds and associated artefacts while director of York and Leeds museums, he has made them for innumerable historical food shows and events.And jelly is a much bigger thing than...