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The age of ageing better? A manifesto for our future
- Author:
- DIXON Anna
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2020
- Pagination:
- 304
- Place of publication:
- London
This book takes a radically different view of what an ageing society means, turning the misleading and depressing narrative of burden and massive extra cost of people living longer on its head and showing how society could thrive if we started thinking differently. One in three babies born today will live to 100. In less than 20 years, one in four people will be over 65. This has huge implications for society – for communities, jobs, homes, and health. The ‘population pessimists’ tell us that this age shift is a disaster – that it will bankrupt our economy, and heap pressure on our NHS. Newspapers paint older people as ‘selfish boomers’, hoarding wealth and opportunity. Society tells us that getting older is something to be afraid of. In this book, Anna Dixon tackles these pessimistic views head-on. She shows that our longer lives are a huge opportunity. Drawing on many years’ experience in the health sector, as well as interviews with experts and policymakers, 'The Age of Ageing Better?' sets out the radical changes needed to ensure no-one misses out on a good later life. (Edited publisher abstract)
Sleeping arrangements
- Author:
- CUNNINGHAM Laura Shaine
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2006
- Pagination:
- 228p.
- Place of publication:
- London
This factual novel tells the story of Lily Shaine, a girl who starts out fatherless, is orphaned at 8, is raised by her two eccentric uncles, and slowly accumulates for herself a strong and deeply loving family. Uncle Len is a 6 foot 6 inch private investigator, a trench-coated cross between Abraham Lincoln and Sam Spade. Uncle Gabe, the librarian, is a confirmed dreamer who writes gospel songs in his spare time. With her two uncles as mentors, the human jungle of the Bronx in the 1950s as her playground, the schoolroom as her torture chamber, and very knowing little girls as her playmates, Lily learns the secrets of life, sex, death and, above all, family love. A wry, funny and deeply affectionate portrait of the most unlikely of happy families, Sleeping Arrangements is a memoir of an unorthodox childhood.
Poppy Shakespeare
- Author:
- ALLAN Clare
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2006
- Pagination:
- 341p.
- Place of publication:
- London
Poppy Shakespeare, an arresting account of madness set in a North London day hospital, is Clare Allan's first novel. At the heart of the novel, lies the problem of expression, and most particularly the gap between experience and the expression of it. The day hospital was full of extreme experience. Whatever the truth of theories of genetic predisposition, chemical imbalance and all the other explanations with which society seeks to console itself, the fact remains that histories of abuse, for example, are massively more common amongst the mentally ill than they are in the general population.
Send in the idiots: stories from the other side of autism
- Author:
- NAZEER Kamran
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2007
- Pagination:
- 230p.
- Place of publication:
- London
Nazeer, a successful British government policy adviser, was diagnosed early on with autism; he now seeks out the fate of four autistic classmates at his former New York City school. He first encountered the "idiots" (as one of them called the group) more than 20 years ago, in an unnamed private school that has subsequently closed. In addition to interviewing the former pupils, all but one (who committed suicide) enjoying varying degrees of success in the greater world, Nazeer also visits the school's former director and special-needs teacher to learn how teaching autistic students has evolved. Considered a neurobiological disorder, autism largely confines a child to his or her own mental world. André, for example, living in Boston with his sister, became a competent computer researcher and manages to mediate the challenges of ordinary conversation through the use of a puppet. Randall, a courier in Chicago, demonstrates how early "parallel" play led to a satisfying love relationship (developing empathy is difficult for the autistic). Craig became an accomplished speechwriter until his awkward social skills derailed him, while Elizabeth immersed herself in playing the piano before withdrawing completely. Nazeer delicately interweaves his own story of being "cured" for an enlightening journey through the unreachable mind.
The story of my father
- Author:
- MILLER Sue
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2003
- Pagination:
- 171p.
- Place of publication:
- London
This book about the author's caring for her Alzheimer's-afflicted father, is an example of an illness memoir. Her father, James Nichols, started showing signs of dementia in 1986, when he was picked up by the police after ringing a stranger's doorbell in the middle of the night, announcing he was lost. The author's careful recounting of James's slow demise and progression through the various stages of an assisted living community are punctuated by pleasant memories and even humour, e.g., when James, a retired religious scholar, assesses his surroundings and comments, "No one ever seems to graduate from here." As she recalls childhood stories and family memories, the author simultaneously offers a memoir of her own development as a writer. "[T]his is the hardest lesson... for a caregiver: you can never do enough to make a difference in the course of the disease," she writes. "We always find ourselves deficient in devotion.... Did you visit once a week? you might have visited twice. Oh, you visited daily? but perhaps he would have done better if you'd kept him at home. In the end all those judgments, those self-judgments, are pointless. This disease is inexorable, cruel. It scoffs at everything."
Access in London: essential for anyone who has difficulty getting around
- Authors:
- COUCH Gordon, FORRESTER William, MCGAUGHEY David
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2003
- Pagination:
- 438p.
- Place of publication:
- London
Aimed at disabled people and anyone who has difficulty getting around. Includes tips on travelling and who to contact for assistance; detailed sections on accommodation, shopping, theatres, pubs, football grounds, museums, buses, trains and the Underground; describes seating and toilet facilities, steps and distances; and contains detailed maps and diagrams highlighting step free routes.
Opening Skinner's box: great psychological experiments of the 20th century
- Author:
- SLATER Lauren.
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2004
- Pagination:
- 276p.,bibliog.
- Place of publication:
- London
In this text, the author proposes to examine the salient themes and conflicts of the 20th century by looking at the great neurological and psychological experiments that dominated the terrain from the early 1900s through to the very edge of the next millennium. Experiments include Harlow's wire monkeys, Moniz's lobotomy, Skinner's pecking pigeons, Milgram's "shock" machine, Kandel's sea slugs and the light they cast on the molecular workings of memory. Each chapter, devoted to a different experiment, is told as a complex story of motive and ambition within which is ensconced a scientific (or pseudo-scientific) analysis of just what the data means for the selves and societies we struggle to create.
A head full of blue: a memoir
- Author:
- JOHNSTONE Nick
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2002
- Pagination:
- 210p.
- Place of publication:
- London
Presents an account of the author's battle with alcoholism. The author got drunk for the first time at the age of 14. Alcohol seemed to stall the depression that had plagued him since childhood and by his late teens he was already drinking to excess. At university he was drinking "a can of beer before classes" and more often than not would "be sipping a beer at 8.45 in the morning". The booze was augmented by anti-depressants, bouts of self-mutilation and an emotionally destructive sexual relationship. By the time he left university he was a fully-fledged alcoholic. The author unflinchingly details the binges, the periods of abstinence, the vomiting blood, the therapy sessions, the AA meetings, the constant gnawing need for alcohol and his long and very slow (and ongoing) recovery. He describes the shabby subterfuge of the alcoholic; recounting how he took to hiding empty wine bottles in his wardrobe to avoid detection and how he tried to mask his drinking at work.
Hard work: life in low-pay Britain
- Author:
- TOYNBEE Polly
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 2003
- Pagination:
- 242p.,bibliog.
- Place of publication:
- London
Britain has the lowest social spending and the highest poverty in Europe. As the income gap between top and bottom has widened, so social mobility has shuddered to a halt. The low-paid are caught in an economic double bind that victimises them and shames the rest of us The bookk asks whether this the end of social progress? Official estimates suggest that of some 600,000 agency workers, 200,000 are paid less than permanent staff. Fair pay might cut into the agency business. Temporary work is useful flexibility for employers to take on extra staff when needed, but that is no reason to underpay them.
The nurture assumption: why children turn out the way they do
- Author:
- HARRIS Judith Rich
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury
- Publication year:
- 1998
- Pagination:
- 480p.,bibliog.
- Place of publication:
- London
Argues that the nurture assumption is nothing more than a cultural myth, and that parents have little power to determine the sort of people their children will become. It is what children expreince outside the home, in the company of their peers that matters most. Parents don't socialise children: children socialise children.