Complaint!


Book Description

In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.




A Complaint Free World


Book Description

Full of practical ideas and inspiring stories from people who have already transformed their lives through the Complaint Free program, you'll learn not only how to stop complaining but also how to become more positive and live the life you’ve always dreamed about. More than ten million people in 106 countries have used the simple principles found in this book to eradicate the toxicity of complaining from their lives. And, as a result, they have experienced better health, happier relationships, greater career success and a significant increase in happiness. A Complaint Free World will explain what constitutes a complaint, why we complain, what benefits we think we receive from complaining, how complaining is destructive to our lives, and how we can get others around us to stop complaining. Find out how forming the simple habit of not complaining can transform your health, relationships, career and life. Consciously striving to reformat your mental hard drive is not easy, but you can start now by using the steps Bowen presents here. If you stay with it, you'll find that not only will you stop complaining, but others around you will cease to do so as well and in a short period of time, you'll have a more positive life. “A Complaint Free World is an engaging, enjoyable, easy-to-read reminder that the only permanent, constructive changes you can make in the world are the changes that you make in yourself.” –Gary Zukav, author of The Seat of the Soul and Soul to Soul




Fresh Complaint


Book Description

Proudly presenting the widely anticipated new work of fiction from the multi-award winning bestselling author of Middlesex--a #1 major bestseller in Canada--and The Marriage Plot--also an acclaimed national bestseller--and the beloved The Virgin Suicides. Featuring unseen stories from one of the most eclectic, dynamic fiction writers working today, Fresh Complaint brings together works both new and previously published--including the crème de la crème of Eugenides's beloved New Yorker stories, never before collected between two covers. Jeffrey Eugenides's bestselling novels have shown that he is an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, sexual identity, self-discovery, family love and what it means to be an American in our times. The stories in Fresh Complaint continue that tradition. Ranging from the reproductive antics of "Baster" to the wry, moving account of a young traveller's search for enlightenment in "Air Mail" (selected by Annie Proulx for The Best American Short Stories 1997), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future. Narratively compelling, beautifully written and packed with a density of ideas that belie their fluid grace, Fresh Complaint proves Eugenides to be a master of the short form as well as the long. Showcasing stories from as far back as the 1980s and as recently as 2017, Fresh Complaint is the career-spanning collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.




Complaint


Book Description

“It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” Thus spoke Hamlet, one of the great kvetchers of literature. Every day, gripers challenge our patience and compassion. Yet Pollyannas rile us up with their grotesque contentment and unfathomable rejection of protest. Avital Ronell considers how literature and philosophy treat bellyachers, wailers, and grumps—and the complaints they lavish on the rest of us. Combining her trademark jazzy panache with a fearless range of readings, Ronell opens a dialogue with readers that discusses thinkers with whom she has directly engaged. Beginning with Hamlet, and with a candid awareness of her own experiences, Ronell proceeds to show how complaining is aggravated, distracted, stifled, and transformed. She moves on to the exemplary complaints of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Johnson and examines the complaint-riven history of deconstruction. Infused with the author’s trademark wit, Complaint takes friends, colleagues, and all of us on a courageous philosophical journey.




Wilber Winkle Has a Complaint!


Book Description

Wilber Winkle, an idiosyncratic nebbish with a peculiar focus on the odd and unlikely fact, has corresponded for years with America's major corporations. Fuelling his complaints and comments is a single overriding premise: that the rights of consumers -- his rights -- are under siege, and he must do what he can to defend them. Employing the exasperating curiosity of a six year old and far-fetched notions which only he can devise, Wilber will have readers laughing aloud, trying to read their favourite Wilber letters to friends and relatives without cracking up. A devilishly clever book!




The Complaint


Book Description

New York attorney Brian Bradford should have listened to the advice of both his wife and a cherished colleague at the law firm. They warned him not to take the case. The lawsuit involved a new area of law in which he had little litigation experience. He nonetheless filed the Complaint. The target Defendant was ZeiiMed, the largest managed health care company in the world, with unlimited resources. His clients were doctors seeking a multi-million dollar recovery. The damages seemed enormous and the fees irresistibly high. He was truly in over his head. Little did Brian realize that ZeiiMed was an unforgiving, vengeful and diabolical opponent that didn't merely defeat its adversaries, it conquered them. After Brian fortuitously discovered corporate documentation that disclosed the illegal trade practices of ZeiiMed, the fight for survival began. He quickly realized he didn't have a chance of succeeding in Court without the able assistance of several bright and accomplished women, all of whom were a significant presence in his life. Brian decides to fight back in a manner as ruthless as the forces unleashed by ZeiiMed. The mayhem that results has irreversible consequences to many on both sides of the battle lines. His world will never be the same again. ZeiiMed will never relent in its pursuit of Brian and the women he loves. Tom Breen published two additional Brian Bradford novels following The Complaint: The Device Trial and The Drug Tampering Trial.




Culture of Complaint


Book Description

In this witty and belligerent polemic Robert Hughes inspects and dismantles the core elements of the contemporary American ethos. To the left, he skewers political correctness, Afro-centrism and academic obsession with theory. To the right, he fires broadsides at free-market capitalist demagogy. Hughes is superbly scathing about politically correct shibboleths which are idle gestures rather than real solutions to the problems of racism and sexism; he identifies the confusion between thinking and feeling which bedevils much debate and which leads people to equate intellectual disagreement with personal attack; he uses his own experiences as an art critic and historian to launch a blistering attack on many of the trends in contemporary art. Hughes identifies a hollowness at the cultural core of America and, in this lucid and invigorating diagnosis of a great nation at odds with itself, he has written a masterpiece of robust polemic.




The Complaint of Peace


Book Description




The Female Complaint


Book Description

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.




The Complaints


Book Description

'Unmissable Rankin, as gripping and involving as any Rebus story' CHOICE; 'A brilliant book' GUARDIAN From the No.1 bestselling author of A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES 'On the evidence of THE COMPLAINTS it looks as if Fox will be just as sure-footed a guide to the city as his grizzled predecessor' DAILY EXPRESS. Nobody likes The Complaints - they're the cops who investigate other cops. Complaints and Conduct Department, to give them their full title, but known colloquially as 'the Dark Side', or simply 'The Complaints'. Malcolm Fox works for The Complaints. He's just had a result, and should be feeling good about himself. But he's middle-aged, sour and unwell. He also has a father in a care home and a sister who persists in an abusive relationship. In the midst of an aggressive Edinburgh winter, the reluctant Fox is given a new task. There's a cop called Jamie Breck, and he's dirty. Problem is, no one can prove it. But as Fox takes on the job, he learns that there's more to Breck than anyone thinks. This knowledge will prove dangerous, especially when murder intervenes.