Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
243,769
result(s) for
"TWENTIETH CENTURY"
Sort by:
Fat nation : a history of obesity in America
The diet and weight-loss industry is worth $66 billion – billion!! The estimated annual health care costs of obesity-related illness are 190 billion or nearly 21% of annual medical spending in the United States. But how did we get here? Is this a battle we can't win? What changes need to be made in order to scale back the incidence of obesity in the US, and, indeed, around the world? Here, Jonathan Engel reviews the sources of the problem and offers the science behind our modern propensity toward obesity. He offers a plan for helping address the problem, but admits that it is, indeed, an uphill battle. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of the costs in years of life and vigor lost, it is a battle worth fighting.
Fat Nation is a social history of obesity in the United States since the second World War. In confronting this familiar topic from a historical perspective, Jonathan Engel attempts to show that obesity is a symptom of complex changes that have transpired over the past half century to our food, our living habits, our life patterns, our built environments, and our social interactions. He offers readers solid grounding in the known science underlying obesity (genetic set points, complex endocrine feedback loops, neurochemical messengering) but then makes the novel argument that obesity is a result of the interaction of our genes with our environment. That is, our bodies have always been programmed to become obese, but until recently never had the opportunity to do so. Now, with cheap calories ubiquitous (particularly in the form of sucrose), unwalkable physical spaces, deteriorating rituals and norms surrounding eating, and the withering of cooking skills, nearly every American daily confronts the challenge of not putting on weight. Given the outcomes, though, for those who are obese, Engel encourages us to address the problems and offers suggestions to help remedy the problem.
eBook
Fit to Be Citizens?
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
eBook
Stranger than we can imagine : an alternative history of the 20th century
\"In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, agriculture and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change and postmodernism. In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives. Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century \"about which we know too much\" in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect-whether he's discussing Einstein's theories of relativity, the Beat poets' interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
White Burgers, Black Cash
The long and pernicious relationship between fast food
restaurants and the African American community Today, fast
food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and
marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But
throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed
specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully
avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash , Naa
Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s
to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its
current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.
Fast food has historically been tied to the country's self-image
as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life's simple
pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry's
core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex
trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to
Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black
communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food's racial and
spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York
City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the
biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King,
McDonald's, and more.
Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising
details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the
inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a
national meal.
eBook
Private Practices
Private Practices examines the relationship between science, sexuality, gender, race, and culture in the making of modern America between 1920 and 1950, when contradictions among liberal intellectuals affected the rise of U.S. conservatism. Naoko Wake focuses on neo-Freudian, gay psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, founder of the interpersonal theory of mental illness. She explores medical and social scientists' conflicted approach to homosexuality, particularly the views of scientists who themselves lived closeted lives.
Wake discovers that there was a gap--often dramatic, frequently subtle--between these scientists' \"public\" understanding of homosexuality (as a \"disease\") and their personal, private perception (which questioned such a stigmatizing view). This breach revealed a modern culture in which self-awareness and open-mindedness became traits of \"mature\" gender and sexual identities. Scientists considered individuals of society lacking these traits to be \"immature,\" creating an unequal relationship between practitioners and their subjects. In assessing how these dynamics--the disparity between public and private views of homosexuality and the uneven relationship between scientists and their subjects--worked to shape each other, Private Practices highlights the limits of the scientific approach to subjectivity and illuminates its strange career--sexual subjectivity in particular--in modern U.S. culture.
eBook
EEG
\"In this masterful final work, Daša Drndić's combative, probing voice reaches new heights. In her relentless search for truth she delves into the darkest corners of our lives. And as she chastises, she atones. Andreas Ban failed in his suicide attempt. Even as his body falters and his lungs constrict, he taps on the glass of history--an impenetrable case filled with silent figures--and tries to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, fearlessly, he continues to dissect society and his environment, shunning all favors as he goes after evil and the hidden secrets of others. History remembers the names of perpetrators, not of the victims. Ban travels from Rijeka to Rovinj in nearby Istria, from Belgrade to Toronto to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian palazzi. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the CIA and died peacefully in their beds. Ban's family is with him too: those he has lost and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban plays a stunning last match against Death\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Psychiatry under the Influence
Psychiatry Under the Influence investigates the actions and practices of the American Psychiatric Association and academic psychiatry in the United States, and presents it as a case study of institutional corruption.
eBook