John Reader

A Biography of the Continent

Africa

Photojournalist Reader (Africa: A Biography of the Continent) traces the humble potato from its roots in the Peruvian Andes to J.R. Simplot's multibillion-dollar-a-year French fry business. Despite its predilection to disease, the potato is a highly adaptable, high-yield, and nutrient-packed foodstuff. While this title focuses primarily on the potato's presence in South America and Europe, it also touches on Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and China-currently the world's largest producer and consumer of potatoes. Verdict: Curiously little attention is paid to the tuber's contributions to the culinary and beverage landscape; the UK subtitle of this work, "The Potato in World History," provides a more accurate description of the focus of the text.

A History of the Propitious Esculent

Potato

A panoramic, illustrated history of Africa from the dawn of human history to the end of apartheid charts the rise and fall of its civilizations, its complex history of slavery, its struggle with colonialism, and its great diversity. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Explores the adaptation of different cultures to the environmental and geographical conditions they live with, to find the best means of food production and subsistence

Man on Earth

From the gold potatoes at the Sun Temple in Cuzco, Peru, the muddy ones in Ireland and those grown in China for MacDonalds chips, via Mrs Beeton, Charles Darwin, Lenin and Chairman Mao, to the mapping of the potato genome, the story of the spud is both satisfying and fascinating.

The Untold History of the Potato

From diaries, newspaper stories, and interviews, Reader introduces the people who have studied the evolution of man and examines their theories about man's origins

The Hunt for Earliest Man

Missing Links

Updates the author's classic work on the individuals, fossil discoveries, competing theories, and genetic research involved in the international quest for the human race's origins.

In Search of Human Origins

This book argues that identified weaknesses in recent theological engagement with New Materialism can be successfully addressed by incorporating insights from Relational Christian Realism. Central themes are those of the relational and the apophatic as they represent different but essential strands of a materialist theology. The relational refers to the work of Deleuze and its influence upon key New Materialist thinkers such as De Landa, Bryant, and Braidotti but supplemented from Relational Christian Realism by Latour and Badiou and with reference to the concept of the apophatic as found in Keller and Kearney. Examining the concepts of transcendence, human agency, and a New Enlightenment, the book moves into more practical areas of aesthetics and technology concluding with a response to the contemporary apocalyptic of climate change. Being “beyond in the midst” requires developing spaces of faithful dissent and holding the tension between the relational and the apophatic in theology.

Spaces of Faithful Dissent

Theology and New Materialism

Maggi Savin-Baden

This book is about the relationships between technologies and the content of religious belief and practice. A number of models are now starting to emerge, but each of these depends on the theological or philosophical framework within which the debate is set. At at the same time, there are dilemmas operating at different ends of the spectrum. For example, at one end there is a tendency towards subsuming the digital within the divine, and at the other an instrumental stance relating to how technology is deployed. Either of these stances could be said to ignore rather than acknowledge that the human itself is being changed as a result of the interactions with the digital. The book explores the following areas: · Where is God to be found or present in the postdigital condition? · What are the implications of the postdigital condition for spirituality and indeed for the activity of God through the Holy Spirit? · How do concepts of transhumanism or posthumanism effect understandings of the incarnation? · Does the doctrine of the Trinity need revisiting in the light of the digital as medium of relationship? · Does Creation now include the postdigital? · What of the Kingdom of God now that the kingdom of the Tech giants is so powerful all-consuming?

Technology, Belief, and Practice

Postdigital Theologies

Harvey Croze

Illuminations of Nature's Fearful Symmetry

Pyramids of Life

A highly readable exploration of the biology, history and social influence of our most humble and versatile foodstuff. Baked, roasted, boiled, mashed, steamed, french-fried — the potato is one of the most familiar and ubiquitous foods we have, and part of our sense of humble, mundane normality. But the story of the solarum tuberosum is one of struggle, disease and survival. Naturally fat-free, potatoes consist mainly of energy-giving carbohydrates, as well as protein and half of our RDA of Vitamin C and Potassium. People have been known to sustain active lives for months fuelled only by potatoes and a little margarine. These bundles of nutrition, which grow safely and cheaply underground in almost any weather and soil conditions, have fuelled industrial revolutions and population explosions. Reader follows the potato’s fascinating journey, from its origins and evolution in the Andes thousands of years ago, to its slightly mysterious arrival in Europe where it became a crucial part of the gastronomic and social fabric. 2008 has been designated International Year of the Potato by the UN and, as global population swells and famine remains a constant risk, Reader asks what role the spud still has to play. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Potato in World History

Propitious Esculent

Traces the history of paleontology, looks at the age of dinosaurs, explains the theory of evolution, and suggests where human beings fit into nature's scheme

The First 3.5 Billion Years

The Rise of Life

"This book explores the city's raisons d'etre, functions and forms, its achievements and problems, from fortifications to sewers, factories to markets, theatres and bars. John Reader's history of Africa was praised by the Sunday Times for 'masterfully ranging across time and space, making extraordinary and thought-provoking connections'. His new book, an exploration of the nature of the city and of city-life will draw on the same skills, both as a researcher and writer. From the ruins of the earliest cities to the present, Reader will explore how cities develop and thrive, how they can decline and die, how they remake themselves. He will investigate their parasitic relationship with the country around them, the webs of trade and immigration they inhabit, how they feed and water themselves and dispose of their wastes, focusing as much on Baron Haussman's creation of the Paris sewers as of his plans for the grands boulevards, on prostitution as on government, on human lives as on architecture, on markets as on cathedrals, in a sweeping exploration of what the city is and has been, fit to stand alongside Lewis Mumford's 1962 classic The City in History.

Cities

Helen Cameron

Victoria Slater

Practical theology and theological reflection are growing areas of theological studies. This book aims to create a bridge between pastoral practice and public theology.

John Reader

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