James A. Scott crafts compelling narratives that delve into complex historical events with a thrilling approach that immerses readers in the heart of the action. His novels, informed by extensive global travels, offer insightful explorations of diverse cultures and incidents. Scott's background in military service lends an authentic depth and power to his storytelling, enriching his fictional worlds. His work demonstrates a distinct talent for weaving historical intricacies into captivating and resonant tales.
Set in Southern California during the Golden Age of Aviation, the story follows fifteen-year-old Shannon Donnelly, an orphan on the run from her parents' killers. Inspired by Amelia Earhart, she pursues her dream of flying amidst the glamour of 1930s Hollywood. As she navigates air races and the challenges of the Great Depression, Shannon finds herself in a love triangle and faces a deadly adversary, leading to a thrilling rescue mission in Nazi-occupied France. This fast-paced adventure captures the spirit of the era with romance and danger.
An examination and discussion of the public and the hidden discourses
(transcripts) of those who wield power and of those who feign deference to it.
Examples are drawn from literature, history and politics to illustrate the
many guises the interaction of such discourses can take.
Weapons of the Weak is an ethnography by James C. Scott that studies the effects of the Green Revolution in rural Malaysia. One of the main objectives of the study is to make an argument that the Marxian and Gramscian ideas of false consciousness and hegemony are incorrect. He develops this conclusion throughout the book, through the different scenarios and characters that come up during his time of fieldwork in the village. This publication, based on 2 years of fieldwork (1978-1980), focuses on the local class relations in a small rice farming community of 70 households in the main paddy-growing area of Kedah in Malaysia. Introduction of the Green Revolution in 1976 eliminated 2/3 of the wage-earning opportunities for smallholders and landless laborers. The main ensuing class struggle is analyzed being the ideological struggle in the village and the practice of resistance itself consisting of: foot-dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance and sabotage acts. Rich and poor are engaged in an unremitting if silent struggle to define changes in land tenure, mechanization and employment to advance their own interests, and to use values that they share to control the distribution of status, land, work and grain.
"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades."--John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail--sometimes catastrophically--in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. "Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit."--New Yorker "A tour de force."-- Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Offering a completely new perspective on the anthropology of the highlands of Southeast Asia, James Scott proposes that far from being remnant populations, the peoples who inhabit the mountain chain between Vietnam and India are the descendants of runaways from lowland state-mking initiatives.
Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary
cooperation without hierarchy, this book provides a perspective from everyday
social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions. It
describes an anarchist sensibility that celebrates the local knowledge, common
sense, and creativity of ordinary people.
An Economist Best History Book 2017 "History as it should be written."--Barry Cunliffe, Guardian "Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilization and political order."--Walter Scheidel, Financial Times Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family--all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.
