Showing titles in Human Geography

Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places.

Bloomsbury presents The Bridleway by Tiffany Francis-Baker, read by Olivia Mace. WINNER OF THE ELWYN HARTLEY-EDWARDS AWARD FOR EQUINE WRITING, 2023. Tiffany Francis-Baker explores how the relationship between humans and horses has shaped the British landscape and how this connection has become...

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.

Humans have long transformed the planet, scratching its surface for stones and ores, planting and harvesting crops, sparking fires for light and heat. But since the dawn of industrialization and especially since 1950, our impact has accelerated sharply. Economic, technological, and demographic changes have driven rapid and ongoing shifts in patterns of pollution, human health, and rising sea level and temperatures.

Bloomsbury presents The North Will Rise Again by Alex Niven, read by Dan Pye. "Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North." Madeleine...

In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature - places we escape to and can’t escape from - have influenced us throughout history and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating.

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.

Can Donald Trump really build that wall? What does Brexit mean for Ireland's border? And what would happen if Elon Musk declared himself president of the Moon? In Border Wars, Professor Klaus Dodds takes us on a journey into the geopolitical conflict of tomorrow in an eye-opening tour of the world's best-known, most dangerous and most unexpected border conflicts from the Gaza Strip to the space race. Along the way, we'll discover just what borders truly mean in the modern world.

Bloomsbury presents Age of the City by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin, read by Nathaniel Priestley. One of the Financial Times' Best Economics Books of 2023 Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social...

"Read it, please. Straight through to the end. Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important." —Barbara Kingsolver Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly...

We are currently experiencing the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time. Across the world, from Ukraine to Sudan to Mexico, people are forced to flee their homes every day due to conflict, climate change and persecution. And devastatingly, the scale of this crisis is only predicted to get worse: by 2050, 1 in 10 people on earth will be displaced. Having met and interviewed hundreds of people impacted by migration, charity founder Jaz O'Hara shares 31 remarkable and inspiring stories, from refugees to volunteers working on the frontline: ordinary people with extraordinary experiences.

Reissued on the 10th anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the Earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever.

All places are not created equal. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who's Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you.

To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change we need to study people who live in harsh environments. This audiobook tells the personal stories of humans living in extreme situations, and of the financial infrastructure they create. Here, economies are not concerned with the familiar stock market crashes, housing crises, or banking scandals of the financial pages.

In recent years our world has seen transformations of all kinds: intense climate change accompanied by significant weather extremes; deadly tsunamis caused by submarine earthquakes; unprecedented terrorist attacks; costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a terrible and overlooked conflict in Equatorial Africa costing millions of lives; an economic crisis threatening the stability of the international system.

In The Journey of Humanity, Oded Galor offers a revelatory explanation of how humanity became, only very recently, the unique species to have escaped a life of subsistence poverty, enjoying previously unthinkable wealth and longevity. He reveals why this process has been so unequal around the world, resulting in the great disparities between nations that exist today. He shows why so many of our efforts to improve lives have failed and how they might succeed.

A sweeping history of the British village, both rural and urban, which makes a compelling case for why we need to protect our local communities, from bestselling author Simon Jenkins We are a nation of villages, from the rural, picturesque hamlets of Castle Combe and Clovelly, to the tight-knit...

In 1861, the great journalist and social advocate Henry Mayhew published London Labour and the London Poor, an oral history of those living and working on the streets of Victorian London. Nothing on this scale had been attempted before. On the surface, the streets of London in 1861 and in 2019 are entirely different places. But dig just a little and the similarities are striking and, in many cases, shocking. Taking Mayhew's book as inspiration, Jennifer Kavanagh explores the changes and continuities by collecting and mapping stories from today's London. 

Postcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial deconstruction of Western dominance. This Very Short Introduction discusses both the history and key debates of postcolonialism, and considers its importance as a means of changing the way we think about the world. Robert J. C. Young examines the key strategies that postcolonial thought has developed to engage with the impact of sometimes centuries of Western political and cultural domination.