Lawrence B. Angus Books

Published in association with the European Society of Medical Oncology, this book is designed for trainee oncologists, oncology nurses, and those working with cancer patients on a day-to-day basis. Using an accessible writing style suitable for a wide audience of caregivers, the book focuses on the "soft skills" required in communicating with patients. Topics include the aetiology of cancer, diagnosis and staging, and explaining the purpose of treatment, including chemotherapy, hormone treatment, and immunological and gene-based therapies. The book also discusses patient support groups, monitoring remission, and relapse. Communicating with Cancer Patients is written by UK oncologists but has wide international application.

This book – the finale in a trilogy by the authors – traces the way in which a number of disadvantaged schools and communities were able to move beyond deficit, victim-blaming and pathologizing approaches and access resources of trust, relationships, connectedness and hope. It describes how these Australian schools and communities were able to benefit from working with ‘street-level’ bureaucrats who had reinvented themselves around notions of socially just forms of capacity-building. The book provides a set of insights into what is possible from a critical engagement for school and community renewal perspective, by working with the resources that exist within disadvantaged contexts, even in damaging neoliberal policy times. Critically Engaged Learning breaks new and important ground across urgent and fractured boundaries.

Smyth's research is pursued with vigour through the lives he researches, as he interrupts and punctures `bad' theory, supplanting it with more democratic alternatives, which, by his own admission, makes his research (and all research), political.

Although they are typically viewed as silent witnesses in schools during the worldwide infatuation with school reform, this book, in fact, reveals young people to be active agents with something worthwhile to say about their schooling and what might be done to make learning more exciting and relevant to their lives and aspirations. The authors foreground the stories of some 100 young informants from low socioeconomic backgrounds who had been repelled by school, but found their way back in to learning through alternative education programs that offered them a sense of direction, hope, and purpose - although they also presented them with some tensions and dilemmas. At a time when educational policies are bearing down heavily on schools through national testing regimes, accountability standards, and other repressive measures, it is refreshing to hear from young people about ways that schools can be made more humane and educationally rewarding places.

Becoming Educated examines the education of young people, especially those from the most `disadvantaged' contexts. This book shifts the focus to matters such as taking social class into consideration, puncturing notions of poverty and disadvantage, understanding neighborhoods as places of hope and creating spaces within which to listen to young peoples' aspirations.