Neil Smith

A misfit victim of a school shooter lands in an afterlife exclusively for 13-year-olds, where he finds unexpected happiness and friendship with a boy who appears to be another victim of the same shooter. By the author of Bang Crunch. Original.

From the award-winning author of Bang Crunch and Boo, Jones is the harrowing, funny, utterly unforgettable story of a pair of siblings attempting to survive the horror show of their family. Abi and Eli share a special bond. Eli looks up to his sister Abi, two years older, who knows how to inhabit the souls of animals, and sometimes even the soul of her brother. They share jokes, codes, and an obsession with impressive feats of word power—such are the survival tricks for growing up Jones. Pal, their alcoholic father, is haunted by demons from the Korean War, and their less-than-nurturing mother Joy hasn’t got the courage to leave him. Always moving to where Pal gets work, the Joneses go from Montreal to Boston, Salt Lake City, Chicago, and back to Montreal. No matter where they go, though, they can never get away from Jones Town. And then, on Eli’s twelfth birthday, the darkness deepens when he stumbles on something he doesn’t understand—an episode that represents the beginning of Abi’s unraveling, although no one knows it yet. Over the years, Eli and Abi lurch towards and into adulthood on separate paths that sometimes cross, negotiating the world through sexual experimentation, drugs and alcohol, art and language. Searing, affecting and often darkly funny, Jones explores the treacherous intersection between love and violence, and the extreme measures Abi and Eli must take to escape the legacy of a toxic inheritance.

Jones

Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space

Uneven Development

Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom - which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of the new middle class tastes and a demand for urban living - to reveal gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late-20th century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban frontiers, the book explores the interconnections of urban policy, eviction and homelessness. The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor and the homeless. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification is a policy of revenge.

Gentrification and the Revanchist City

The New Urban Frontier

Bang Crunch (Vintage Contemporaries)

This unique book provides an introductory overview of modern theoretical linguistics which manages to be both accessible and humorous without sacrificing either scholarship of insight. In a series of magisterial vignettes Smith emphasizes the perennial necessity of appealing to linguistic theory if we are to gain any real understanding of the phenomena of language. However profound or however trivial the questions we raise and try answer - What exactly does one have to know to count as a speaker of a language? What would it mean for a language to have no vowels? Why do little children call lorries 'lollies'? Precisely what with this sentence is wrong? - we need to recourse to a theory even to make them coherent. In particular, the author argues that we can find solutions to our puzzles, and explanations for these phenomena, if we exploit on the one hand Chomsky's theory of Generative Grammar, and on the other Sperber and Wilson's theory of Relevance.

Reflections on Language

The Twitter Machine

"Abi Jones a la capacité de projeter son âme dans le corps des animaux - et dans celui d'un seul être humain : son frère Eli. Ce lien indéfectible leur permet de tenir le coup face à l'alcoolisme et la brutalité paternelle et à l'indifférence maternelle. Entre Montréal, Boston, Salt Lake City et Chicago, les deux enfants grandissent, unis par leur sens de l'humour décapant, leurs expériences douteuses et leur amour des mots. La vie suit son cours à Jonestown, la ville qu'on ne peut jamais quitter même en déménageant à l'autre bout du continent. Mais un jour, Eli fait une découverte qui bouleverse son monde et révèle l'ampleur de la souffrance d'Abi. À l'aube de l'âge adulte, le frère et la sœur se soutiennent comme ils le peuvent, mais les ravages de Jonestown emportent Abi de plus en plus loin, là où Eli ne pourra bientôt plus la rejoindre. Drôle, cruel, tendre et tordu, Jones est un roman initiatique inoubliable, une ode à la force des liens fraternels, le récit honnête d'une enfance meurtrie, d'une survie difficile et des limites de l'amour." --

Setha Low

The Politics of Public Space

Peter Smith

Ray Ennion

John Cantrell

Written by experienced examiners to completely cover the 20th century aspects of the Cambridge IGCSE in History, this comprehensive text covers all the relevant material and provides focused skills development to ensure students achieve their best.

20th Century History for Cambridge IGCSE®

Das Leben nach Boo

Peter Williams

Gentrification of the City

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.

History in an Hour

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War: History in an Hour

Arguing that American globalism had a very distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision, this text explores US global ambition. The story unfolds through an account of the career of Isaiah Bowman, the most famous American geographer of the 20th century.

Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

American Empire

Setha M. Low

Why is public space disappearing? Why is this disappearance important to democratic politics and how has it become an international phenomenon? Public spaces are no longer democratic spaces, but instead centres of private commerce and consumption, and even surveillance and police control. "The Politics of Public Space" extends the focus of current work on public space to include a consideration of the transnational - in the sense of moving people and transformations in the nation or state - to expand our definition of the 'public' and public space. Ultimately, public spaces are one of the last democratic forums for public dissent in a civil society. Without these significant central public spaces, individuals cannot directly participate in conflict resolution. "The Politics of Public Space" assembles a superb list of contributors to explore the important political dimensions of public space as a place where conflicts over cultural and political objectives become concrete.

In nine richly varied stories, written in intense, clear-eyed prose, the reader is led into an exploration of the human need for connection, however tenuous or absurd, and at whatever cost.

Stories

Bang Crunch

Noam Chomsky

Chris Knight

Nicholas Allott

With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam War period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand – and change – our world. According to The New York Times, Chomsky ‘may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today’. This book revisits ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century on. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book finishes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its 50th anniversary.

Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others 50 years

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

In Uneven Development, a classic in its field, Neil Smith offers the first full theory of uneven geographical development, entwining theories of space and nature with a critique of capitalism. Featuring groundbreaking analyses of the production of nature and the politics of scale, Smith's work anticipated many of the uneven contours that now mark neoliberal globalization. This third edition features an afterword examining the impact of Neil's argument in a contemporary context.

Noam Chomsky is one of the leading intellectual figures of modern times. He has had a major influence on linguistics, psychology and philosophy, and a significant effect on many other disciplines, from anthropology to mathematics, education to literary criticism. In this rigorous yet accessible account of Chomsky's work and influence, Neil Smith analyses Chomsky's key contributions to the study of language and the study of mind. He gives a detailed exposition of Chomsky's linguistic theorizing, discusses the psychological and philosophical implications of Chomsky's work, and argues that he has fundamentally changed the way we think of ourselves, gaining a position in the history of ideas on a par with that of Darwin or Descartes. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to account for Chomsky's most recent work, including his continued contributions to linguistics, his further discussion on evolution, and his extensive work on the events of September 11th, 2001.

Neil Smith

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