A rich, immersive, funny and heartbreaking memoir of the charming bookseller who runs two tiny bookshops in the remote village of Manapouri in Fiordland, in the deep south of New Zealand. 'An extraordinary story.' Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller
Poverty remains one of the most urgent issues of our time. In this fully updated edition of her important intervention on the topic, Ruth Lister introduces students to the meaning and experience of poverty in the contemporary world. The book opens with a lucid discussion of current debates around the definition and measurement of poverty in industrialized societies, before embarking on a multifaceted exploration of its conceptualization. It draws on thinking in the field of international development and real-life accounts to emphasize aspects of poverty such as powerlessness, lack of voice, loss of dignity and respect. In so doing, the book embraces the relational, cultural, symbolic as well as material dimensions of poverty and makes important links between poverty and other concepts like capabilities, social divisions and exclusion, agency and citizenship. Lister concludes by making the case for reframing the politics of poverty as a claim for redistribution and recognition. The result is a rich and insightful analysis, which deepens and broadens our understanding of poverty today. Poverty will be essential reading for all students in the social sciences, as well as researchers, activists and policy-makers.
**Re-published as City of Ruins in July 2021. Original title: Augury**The people of an ancient city awaken one night to find the earth beneath them trembling. At the Emperor’s Palace, though, the feasting goes on. Even as the omens multiply, the High Priest insists that the gods’ favour can be bought as it always has been — with gold and ritual sacrifice.Only the Augur — fearless, ageless, a prophetess who was once the power behind the throne — can see what is coming. Around her, an unlikely resistance gathers: Saba and Aemilia, her two young acolytes, stolen from distant homelands long ago; Myloxenes, the truth-seeking son of the High Priest, in flight from his savage father; and Antonus, pain-wracked and exiled, raising his family far from the depravity of the Palace he once called home.
Demonstrating the relevance of theory to political and policy debates and practice, this dynamic and fully updated second edition helps students to grasp the real-life implications of social policy theory. It includes a new chapter featuring debates around disability, sexuality and the environment.