Showing titles in Sociology

Brought to you by Penguin. LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION Discover the essential, must-read book about how the UK legal system is failing women, as told by one of Britain’s foremost lawyers. For more than quarter of a century, Harriet Wistrich has fought the corner of...

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: The belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Author James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime. 

Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are entrepreneurs who embezzle and cops who kill the outgrowths of bad systems or are they just bad people? Are tyrants made or born? If you were thrust into a position of power, would new temptations to line your pockets or torture your...

A Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year 2023 'Illuminates some of the great trends of our time' - Gideon Rachman, Financial Times 'Vivid, urgent and unsettling' - Tom Holland, author of Dominion _____ What does it now mean to call yourself European? Who makes up this population...

Ziwe made a name for herself by asking guests like Alyssa Milano, Fran Lebowitz, and Chet Hanks direct questions. In Black Friend, she turns her incisive perspective on both herself and the culture at large. Throughout the book, Ziwe combines pop-culture commentary and personal stories that grapple with her own (mis)understanding of identity. From a hilarious case of mistaken identity via a jumbotron to a terrifying fight-or-flight encounter in the woods, Ziwe raises difficult questions for comedic relief.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Anger. Fear. Guilt. Denial. Silence. These are the ways in which ordinary white people react when it is pointed out to them that they have done or said something that has - unintentionally - caused racial offence or...

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Stephanie Green isn't like most other doctors. Nearly every day, she confronts life-and-death situations behind the scenes at Heathrow, where the truth is almost always stranger than fiction. Here, she reveals the exhilarating drama of working in the world's sixth busiest airport and what is required to make life-and-death decisions in the hidden no-man's-land of medicine, geopolitics, terror and tragedy that is The Heathrow Doctor. 

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the “identity politics” so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, “identity politics” is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

In this devastating critique of the mindset behind the failed social policies of the past 30 years, Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes, but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and more. This is an empirical study in which “politically correct” theory is repeatedly confronted with facts, and the sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites.

Neuroscientist, philosopher, podcaster and best-selling author Sam Harris has been exploring some of the greatest questions concerning the human mind, society and the events that shape our world. Harris’ search for deeper understanding of how we think has led him to engage and exchange with some of our most brilliant and controversial contemporary minds - Daniel Kahneman, Robert Sapolsky, Anil Seth and Max Tegmark - in order to unpack and understand ideas of consciousness, free will, extremism and ethical living.

Imagine you are dying with a secret. Something you've never had the courage to tell your friends and family. Or a last wish - a task you need carried out before you can rest in peace. Now imagine there's a man who can take care of all that, who has no respect for the living, who will do anything...

Bringing together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive writing, On Women examines the oppression of women and the tools necessary for liberation. First written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays examine the 'biological division of labour', the double standard for ageing and the struggle for real power, topics which are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. For any Sontag fan, this collection of lost essays is a revelation into her achievements as an essayist.

Brought to you by Penguin. We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this...

Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues. In this book, Mikaela Loach offers a fresh and radical perspective for real climate action that could drastically change the world as we know it for the benefit of us all.

America has a God-shaped hole in its heart, argues New York Times bestselling author Ben Shapiro, and we shouldn't fill it with politics and hate. In 2016, Ben Shapiro spoke at UC Berkeley. Hundreds of police officers were required from 10 UC campuses across the state to protect his speech...

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

Centering on the seminal lockout of 20,000 workers in Dublin in 1913, Strumpet City by Irish writer James Plunkett encompasses a wide sweep of city life. From the destitution of "Rashers" Tierney, the poorest of the poor, to the solid, aspirant respectability of Fitz and Mary, the priestly life of Father O'Connor, and the upper-class world of Yearling and the Bradshaws, it paints a portrait of a city of stark contrasts, with an urban working class mired in vicious poverty. To hear the book is to immerse yourself in social and historical writing akin to Chekhov and Tolstoy.

Africa Is Not a Country is a kaleidoscopic portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive story. You already know these stereotypes. So often Africa is depicted simplistically as an arid red landscape of famines and safaris, uniquely plagued by poverty and strife. In this funny and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, creating a fresh and multifaceted view of this vast continent.

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND FOUNDER OF THE EVERYDAY SEXISM PROJECT, LAURA BATES. 'Following [Everyday Sexism] will make most women feel oddly saner.' Caitlin Moran 'Piercingly astute.' Stylist Laura Bates, pioneering feminist, activist and bestselling author, has given...