Pleasure and Panic


Book Description

Pleasure and Panic illustrates how attitudes toward drug and alcohol consumption are complicated by the politics, economics, and culture of their times.




Pleasure and Panic


Book Description

Booze, dope, smokes, and weed. Mind-altering, mood-changing substances have been part of human society for millennia. Pleasure and Panic reveals how attitudes toward drug and alcohol consumption have always been deeply embedded in cultural fears and social, political, and economic disparities. Contributors to this collection explore how drugs and alcohol intersect with diverse histories, including gender, medicine, popular culture, and business. Pleasure and Panic brings a dispassionate voice to current debates about liberalizing drug and alcohol laws and challenges existing ideas about how to deal with the so-called problems of drug and alcohol use.




The Pleasure of Panic


Book Description

From NYT Bestselling Author, JA Huss, comes a new sexy standalone in the Jordan's Game series. Oaklee Ryan needs a boyfriend but not for any of the reasons you might think... It's a simple request. But the girl... Well, she's not so simple. Oaklee Ryan is a pragmatist. She lives in reality, she deals with facts, and she's goal oriented. So when she paid a visit to Jordan Wells asking for a game, calling it, "The Boyfriend Experience," he thought he knew what she was getting at. Wining, dining, maybe a date to a wedding to appease her meddling mother... No. That's not quite what Oaklee had in mind. Lawton Gabriel took this game as a favor to his friend. And it only took him five minutes to regret it. Because Oaklee Ryan is insane. She's loud, she's demanding, and she's dead set on getting her way. If she thinks he's gonna turn into her version of a boyfriend... Just. No. He'll do anything it takes to get out of this crazy contract!




Food, Morals and Meaning


Book Description

First published in 2006. Food, Morals and Meaning examines our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. However, instead of seeing this discipline as dominant or oppressive it argues that a rationalisation of pleasure plays a positive role in our lives, allowing us to better understand who we are. The book begins by exploring the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of 'natural' appetite which had to be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in 18th and 19th Century Europe. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children. Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.




Candy


Book Description

For most Americans, candy is an uneasy pleasure, eaten with side helpings of guilt and worry. Yet candy accounts for only 6 percent of the added sugar in the American diet. And at least it's honest about what it is—a processed food, eaten for pleasure, with no particular nutritional benefit. So why is candy considered especially harmful, when it's not so different from the other processed foods, from sports bars to fruit snacks, that line supermarket shelves? How did our definitions of food and candy come to be so muddled? And how did candy come to be the scapegoat for our fears about the dangers of food? In Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure, Samira Kawash tells the fascinating story of how candy evolved from a luxury good to a cheap, everyday snack. After candy making was revolutionized in the early decades of mass production, it was celebrated as a new kind of food for energy and enjoyment. Riding the rise in snacking and exploiting early nutritional science, candy was the first of the panoply of "junk foods" that would take over the American diet in the decades after the Second World War—convenient and pleasurable, for eating anytime or all the time. And yet, food reformers and moral crusaders have always attacked candy, blaming it for poisoning, alcoholism, sexual depravity and fatal disease. These charges have been disproven and forgotten, but the mistrust of candy they produced has never diminished. The anxiety and confusion that most Americans have about their diets today is a legacy of the tumultuous story of candy, the most loved and loathed of processed foods.Candy is an essential, addictive read for anyone who loves lively cultural history, who cares about food, and who wouldn't mind feeling a bit better about eating a few jelly beans.




Power Button


Book Description

Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and “like” something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the origins of today's push-button society by examining how buttons have been made, distributed, used, rejected, and refashioned throughout history. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1925, when “technologies of the hand” proliferated (including typewriters, telegraphs, and fingerprinting), Plotnick describes the ways that button pushing became a means for digital command, which promised effortless, discreet, and fool-proof control. Emphasizing the doubly digital nature of button pushing—as an act of the finger and a binary activity (on/off, up/down)—Plotnick suggests that the tenets of precomputational digital command anticipate contemporary ideas of computer users. Plotnick discusses the uses of early push buttons to call servants, and the growing tensions between those who work with their hands and those who command with their fingers; automation as “automagic,” enabling command at a distance; instant gratification, and the victory of light over darkness; and early twentieth-century imaginings of a future push-button culture. Push buttons, Plotnick tells us, have demonstrated remarkable staying power, despite efforts to cast button pushers as lazy, privileged, and even dangerous.




The Panic Years


Book Description

Renowned journalist Nell Frizzell explores what happens when a woman begins to ask herself: should I have a baby? We have descriptors for many periods of life—adolescence, menopause, mid-life crisis, quarter-life crisis—but there is a period of profound change that many women face, often in their late twenties to early forties, that does not yet have a name. Nell Frizzell is calling this period of flux “the panic years,” and it is often characterized by a preoccupation with one major question: should I have a baby? And from there—do I want a baby? With whom should I have a baby? How will I know when I’m ready? Decisions made during this period suddenly take on more weight, as questions of love, career, friendship, fertility, and family clash together while peers begin the process of coupling and breeding. But this very important process is rarely written or talked about beyond the clichés of the “ticking clock.” Enter Frizzell, our comforting guide, who uses personal stories from her own experiences in the panic years to illuminate the larger social and cultural trends, and gives voice to the uncertainty, confusion, and urgency that tends to characterize this time of life. Frizzell reminds us that we are not alone in this, and encourages us to share our experiences and those of the women around us—as she does with honesty and vulnerability in these pages. Raw and hilarious, The Panic Years is an arm around the shoulder for every woman trying to navigate life’s big decisions against the backdrop of the mother of all questions.




The Debt to Pleasure


Book Description

A "New York Times" Notable Book, "The Debt to Pleasure" is a wickedly funny ode to food as the novel's snobbish narrator instructs readers in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu.




The Art of Surrender


Book Description

**Winner of Reader's Favorite Book Award** **Winner of Book Excellence Award** **Winner of the Body Mind Spirit Book Award** For seekers of truth, Al Zaabi is a wise and intrepid guide through the wilderness of the self. In plainspoken and heartfelt language, she shine light on the spiritual path and reveals the beauty and necessity of surrender, which has for too long been misunderstanding in the west. -Krista Bremer, author of A Tender Struggle Do you ever wish you could switch off the chatter in your mind? This is what brings many of us to self-help, the fears and worries that go along with being human. It is the reason many of us investigate spirituality: emotions and the thoughts beneath them. Indeed, many approaches to religion and spirituality will tell you that the mind causes your suffering and teach you to quiet your inner voice. The Art of Surrender stands out among self-help books because it offers a completely new approach to spirituality, health, and healing. You do not have to silence your thoughts. Your brain and mind are a gift; they have a spiritual purpose, which is to seek the truth and establish genuine spirituality. Drawing on her Muslim heritage and her wise and careful exploration of spirituality without religion yet informed by it, Eiman Al Zaabi guides you in the delightful art of spiritual inquiry, investigating ideas for yourself and incorporating only those truths that resonate deeply. Whether you are taking the first steps on your spiritual journey or have long traveled such a path, The Art of Surrender will transform your relationship with yourself, the Divine, and the world around you. You’ll learn the deepest needs of your soul and discover how to meet them. You’ll be guided through the four stages of the spiritual journey: finding Source, knowing Source, aligning with Source, and surrendering to Source. With this approach to self-help, anxiety melts away as you develop a spirituality of gratitude and trust. When you read this book, you’ll discover the ultimate state of fulfillment and joy: surrender.




Pleasure Consuming Medicine


Book Description

On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway. Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets. For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state. As he demonstrates, the state’s performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption; in fact, it exacerbates those dangers. Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.