What do we know about ordinary people in our towns and cities, about what really matters to them and how they organize their lives today? This book visits an ordinary street and looks into thirty households. It reveals the aspirations and frustrations, the tragedies and accomplishments that are played out behind the doors. It focuses on the things that matter to these people, which quite often turn out to be material things – their house, the dog, their music, the Christmas decorations. These are the means by which they express who they have become, and relationships to objects turn out to be central to their relationships with other people – children, lovers, brothers and friends. If this is a typical street in a modern city like London, then what kind of society is this? It’s not a community, nor a neighbourhood, nor is it a collection of isolated individuals. It isn’t dominated by the family. We assume that social life is corrupted by materialism, made superficial and individualistic by a surfeit of consumer goods, but this is misleading. If the street isn’t any of these things, then what is it? This brilliant and revealing portrayal of a street in modern London, written by one the most prominent anthropologists, shows how much is to be gained when we stop lamenting what we think we used to be and focus instead on what we are now becoming. It reveals the forms by which ordinary people make sense of their lives, and the ways in which objects become our companions in the daily struggle to make life meaningful.
At the end of life, our comfort lies mainly in relationships. In this book, Daniel Miller, one of the world's leading anthropologists, examines the social worlds of people suffering from terminal or long-term illness.
The new uplifting book from Matt Haig, the New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library, for anyone in search of hope, looking for a path to a more meaningful life, or in need of a little encouragement. “It is a strange ...
—Beverlyn Cain, June 4, 2014 Tools to Use against the Bully Acknowledging that the Bully of Fear is always at the ready to pester us, we can educate ourselves without huge effort on how to prevent our buttons from getting pushed and how ...
This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing.
I had associated Matty with the shell-shocked soldiers of the Great War since reading 'Futility' by Wilfred Owen. Owen is a character in Regeneration along with Siegfried Sassoon, who makes some corrections to Owens's poem 'Anthem for.
In an interview with Bill Simmons, the acclaimed and prolific screenwriter Aaron Sorkin summed up this phenomenon when he talked about the first time he ever wrote for fun: “It was one of those nights in New York where it feels like ...
101 short stories of the dumbest things people have ever done.
A heartbreaking page-turner, Willa C. Richards’ debut novel is the story of a broken family looking for answers in the face of the unknown, and asks us to reconsider the power and truth of memory.
In the text, in the musings in italics, I have usually referred to the primary carer in the person's early life as mother. I realize that this is not always the case.
Riveting and arresting, The Comfort of Lies explores the collateral damage of infidelity and the dark, private struggles many of us experience but rarely reveal.