New Books & Media: New eBooks

"This book examines the connections between energy justice and human rights. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the author discusses the implementation of energy justice in practice. The book explores the rise of justice issues in the energy sector, the interdisciplinary nature of energy justice, the economics of energy justice and provides a practical case study on distributive justice. The penultimate chapter focuses on human rights and energy justice in a world first, and explores the topic from the perspective of the opportunity of last resort. This opportunity of last resort is the national courts and is the place where societies can seek to have justice enforced through a variety of human rights being protected. Finally, energy justice risks are highlighted alongside the authors proposed framework for the next generation of energy justice scholars."

While dramatic changes taking place in the Middle East offer important opportunities to the Kurdish century-long struggle for recognition, serious obstacles seem to keep reemerging every time the Kurds anywhere make progress. The large Kurdish geography, extending from western Iran to near the eastern Mediterranean, and a century of repression and denial have engendered various Kurdish groups with competing and at times conflicting views and goals. The Kurds in the Middle East: Enduring Problems and New Dynamics, with an emphasis on continuity and change in the Kurdish Question, brings together a group of well-known scholars to shed light on this complex issue.

Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor's daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her twenties working as a research chemist, entering politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within fifteen years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West. In this "masterpiece of discernment and insight" (The New York Times Book Review), acclaimed biographer Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of Merkel's unlikely ascent. With unparalleled access to the chancellor's inner circle and a trove of records only recently come to light, she teases out the unique political genius that had been the secret to Merkel's success… At once a "riveting" (Los Angeles Review of Books) political biography, an intimate human portrait, and a revelatory look at successful leadership in action, The Chancellor brings forth one of the most extraordinary women of our time.

Private equity (PE) firms pervade all aspects of our modern lives. Unlike other corporations, which generally manufacture products or provide services, they leverage considerable debt and other people's money to buy and sell businesses with the sole aim of earning supersized profits in the shortest time possible. With a voracious appetite and trillions of dollars at its disposal, the private equity industry is now buying everything from your opioid treatment center to that helicopter that helps swoop you up from a car crash site. It may even control how and when you can get your kidney dialysis. In Ethically Challenged, Laura Katz Olson describes how PE firms are gobbling up physician and dental practices; home care and hospice agencies; substance abuse, eating disorder, and autism services; urgent care facilities; and emergency medical transportation…The first book to comprehensively address private equity and health care, Ethically Challenged raises the curtain on an industry notorious for its secrecy, exposing the nefarious side of its maneuvers.

While the 21st century insulin crisis provokes protest and political dialogue, public conception of diabetes remain firmly unchanged. Popular media representations portray diabetes as a condition couched in lifestyle choices. In the groundbreaking volume (Un)doing Diabetes, authors destabilize depictions so powerful, so subtle, and so unquestioned, that readers may find assertions counterintuitive. (Un)doing Diabetes is the first collection of essays to use disability studies to explore representations of diabetes across a wide range of mediums- from Twitter to TV and film, to theater, fiction, fanfiction, fashion and more. This disability studies approach to diabetes locates individual experiences of diabetes within historical and contemporary social conditions. In undoing diabetes, authors deconstruct assumptions the public commonly holds about diabetes, while writers doing diabetes present counter-narratives community members create to represent themselves.

This book comprehensively covers the topic of COVID-19 and other pandemics and epidemics data analytics using computational modelling. Biomedical and Health Informatics is an emerging field of research at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. The new era of pandemics and epidemics bring tremendous opportunities and challenges due to the plentiful and easily available medical data allowing for further analysis…Assessing COVID-19 and Other Pandemics and Epidemics using Computational Modelling and Data Analysis will play a vital role in improving human life in response to pandemics and epidemics. The state-of-the-art approaches for data mining-based medical and health related applications will be of great value to researchers and practitioners working in biomedical, health informatics, and artificial intelligence.

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy.

Sasha LaPointe has always longed for a sense of home. When she was a child, her family moved around frequently, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for young Sasha. With little more to guide her than a passion for the thriving punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and a desire to live up to the responsibility of being the namesake of her beloved great-grandmother--a linguist who helped preserve her Indigenous language of Lushootseed--Sasha throws herself headlong into the world, determined to build a better future for herself and her people. Set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own.

For the overwhelming majority of women leaving correctional institutions in the United States, there is one aspect of their identity that informs their needs, opportunities, hopes, and dreams: their roles as mothers. This Is Our Freedom provides an intimate and moving portrait of women's journeys prior to and after incarceration. In interviews with seventy formerly incarcerated mothers, Geniece Crawford Mondé captures how women reframe their marginalized identity and place themselves at the center of their own stories. With incisive analysis, Mondé reveals the complex ways that motherhood shapes post-incarceration life, while highlighting how the lasting legacy of mass incarceration continues to impact society's most vulnerable members.

In the 15th century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna's will cross. In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon's story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders whose lives are gloriously intertwined. Doerr's dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own.