"With an admirable grasp of Polish history, essential to understanding this not immediately appealing city, David Crowley explains the complex background to the grey pre -1989 environment and changes since." - Architects Journal"I realise that it is the many layers of Madrid that I encountered on that initial visit that make the city so remarkable – layers that this excellent book luxuriates in, as it plots the twists and turns of history that have shaped the city . . . a splendid guide, delivered in charming and frequently amusing prose that displays a deep affection for the city and its inhabitants." - La Revista, the British-Spanish Society magazine"The midlife crisis has always been an embarrassment for the affluent societies that produce it . . . So what is the elusive social dysfunction that even the cynical can sense in their fortunate lives? Jackson’s study of midlife turmoil, Broken Dreams, presents the full answer to this question with a history that honors the many variations of human experience to which the midlife crisis lays claim . . . Jackson provides an honest reckoning with the midlife crisis and the profound choice it poses to those who might suffer one." - The Hedgehog Review"Hypochondria tends to be regarded as the exaggeration if not complete fabrication of ailments or illness. In this important and beautifully written book, however, Susannah Mintz provides a very different account of essential expression, profound reflection, and often untapped potential for making meaningful personal and sociocultural connections." - David Bolt, Professor and Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies, Liverpool Hope University"Glenda Norquay narrates Stevenson’s all-too-brief and eventful life with grace and verve and a fine eye for the telling detail. This is a learned book, but Norquay wears her learning lightly. Not only does she reveal Stevenson himself in all his multi-faceted complexity, she vividly conjures up the many disparate worlds he moved through, from Scotland to the South Seas." - Stephen Arata, Professor of English, University of Virginia"Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen have produced an informative and romantic gazetteer of the sounds that resonate in our souls . . . The Sound Atlas makes a too rarely considered case for a quieter kind of ecology, within which essential sounds can have broadcasting bandwidth." - Derek Turner, Engelsberg Ideas"As guide books go, The Sound Atlas must surely stand as one of the most fascinating and creative written to date . . . Vieser and Yuen have assembled a collection of 36 essays on the subject of sound, each offering an insight into strange sounds across landscapes and imagination." - Jules Stewart, Geographical"Hypochondria is a capacious and audacious book—capacious in its investigation of an impressive range of representations of the condition, audacious in its open-mindedness toward this often dismissed, if not maligned, complaint. Mintz regards hypochondria as a legitimate “identity position,” a not necessarily pathological reaction to being a bodymind. Indeed, she dares to suggest that hypochondria poses a challenge to compulsory healthiness that we should attend to, rather than disregard." - G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English and Founding Director of Disability Studies Program, Hofstra University"This history of the midlife crisis is a first (to this reviewer's knowledge), and the result is a delight to this just-passed-midlife reader . . . The introduction gives one a sense of the wide range of the material Jackson explores: psychoanalytic, social scientific, cultural, and literary. Most of the classic studies come from masculine models of life stages; the midlife crisis was a gendered concept from its origin. The author concludes his historical study with some timeless advice: "avoidance of internal conflicts and external pressures is a high-risk strategy at midlife. . . . Left unattended, our midlife delusions will continue to ruin lives long after we have gone." . . . Highly recommended." - Choice"The book is engaging, readable, and enjoyable. It made me feel as if I were being shown around Warsaw by a friend who was a long term resident." - Geography"For the historically and culturally curious traveller, there is no better guide to Madrid. A treasure-trove of fascinating anecdotes and details, not to be missed." - Jason Webster, author of Violencia: A New History of Spain"This is now my favourite guide book to a city I love. It is impressively knowledgeable and well-researched. A joy to read! Jules Stewart and Helen Crisp have beautifully captured the essence of the city that never sleeps." - Ainhoa Paredes, journalist and London correspondent for the Spanish TV channel Telecinco"The book is intended for a general audience but loses none of its academic rigour. It is thoroughly evidenced throughout its humorous, engaging, and clearly written prose. The structure allows the author to present Dante’s Comedy of Errors and David Nobbs’ Reginal Perrin alongside the psychiatric work of Carl Jung and Elliott Jacques without jarring the reader at all." - Metascience"Mintz provides a fresh and rich account of the surprisingly creative and communicative potential of hypochondria, attentive to what it reveals about medical and ableist norms, old age, care, and discrimination. The pleasure of reading Hypochondria comes not only from its honed prose but the challenge it poses to think, even to know, differently." - Jennifer Cooke, Professor of English, Loughborough University and author of Contemporary Feminist Life-writing: The New Audacity"This cosmopolitan sound collection opens with a background hiss that was detected in 1964: astronomers first blamed it on pigeons roosting in their antenna before realizing that it was cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang. The book also features icebergs crackling and music mysteriously created by tapping stone pillars in a medieval Hindu temple in India." - Nature"This is a fascinating idea: thirty-six brief essays exploring that most evanescent of phenomena, sound – how it acts on the human sensibility, how it is captured in memory and understood in culture. It begins with the sounds of deep space and winds its way through an extraordinary array of acoustic experiences from both animate and inanimate sources - moths, bats, cicadas, and whales as much as stones and seas and Eelds. The authors promise a commentary that blends personal experience with cultural insight, informed by history and science alike. I’m seriously intrigued by this, and I have a lot of trust in Reaktion as a publisher." - Mathew Lyons, The Broken Compass"Medical historian Jackson examines in this thought-provoking scholarly study the social and cultural factors that made the midlife crisis “a key feature of private lives and public debate” in the mid-20th century . . . Jackson’s expansive range and nuanced readings of popular culture more than make his case. This is a pinpoint dissection of an influential if slippery concept." - Publishers Weekly"In what will surely be recognized as the classic account of how the midlife crisis became the lens through which we perceive and experience middle age, Mark Jackson uncovers the cultural, demographic, economic, and social scientific factors that led us to see midlife as a uniquely problematic life stage. Whether you consider midlife as a point at which discontented women and men compulsively seek to preserve their youthful dreams and vitality or as an opportunity for reinvention and renewal, Broken Dreams will prompt you to view middle age in a fresh light: as a stage that is perhaps life’s most complex and challenging." - Steven Mintz, Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin and author of 'The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood' (2015)"The world is full of noises, and The Sound Atlas is a fascinating and resonant guide to many of its most extraordinary and beautiful ones." - Caspar Henderson, author of A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous"I’ve always thought that music has nurtured me more than literature or art, but I never realized that there was such a rich soundscape outside of music! This book taught me that to “see” sound is to touch life." - Kyoichi Tsuzuki, photographer and journalist"Synthesising his account from a wide variety of source materials, Jackson demonstrates convincingly that even though midlife itself resists neat definition, it nevertheless transcended biomedical, social, and cultural domains from the early twentieth century onwards. Covering a diverse range of themes, but focusing particularly on gender, this important book will serve as a touchstone for all historians concerned with ageing, family, sex, and the life course." - James F. Stark, Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds and author of 'The Cult of Youth: Anti-Ageing in Modern Britain' (2020)"This globe- and cosmos-spanning immersion in sonic oddities, sacred musics, slender silences, and singing stones inspires appreciation for the resonance of places, creaturely language, and what exists beyond earshot at frequencies not often considered. Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen are excellent aural tour guides on this journey, linking together different geographies and historical moments in unexpected and thoughtful ways. Their words vibrate, reminding us not only of the ways our bodies respond to sound but of how we might be more responsive and responsible for human contributions to a wild planetary soundscape." - Gavin Van Horn, author of The Way of Coyote and co-editor of the anthologies Kinship and Elementals"The Sound Atlas is an open invitation to see the world in a new way, by listening to it. Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen invite you to imagine a new map of the world that cannot be seen. This book entertains a delightful contradiction: that it might be best read with eyes closed and only ears open. It contains sonic images of real and remarkable places, imagined spaces and moments in past, present and future time, as well as richly coloured evocations of natural phenomena and acoustic artefacts, unheard places of transience and memory and man-made worlds, built from some forgotten, ephemeral auditive substance. All you need to do once you’ve read this book is close your eyes so that you can hear it all, and experience the sensory world anew." - Tim Hinman, soundmaker and podcaster"This is a fascinating idea: thirty-six brief essays exploring that most evanescent of phenomena, sound – how it acts on the human sensibility, how it is captured in memory and understood in culture. It begins with the sounds of deep space and winds its way through an extraordinary array of acoustic experiences from both animate and inanimate sources - moths, bats, cicadas, and whales as much as stones and seas and Eelds. The authors promise a commentary that blends personal experience with cultural insight, informed by history and science alike. I’m seriously intrigued by this, and I have a lot of trust in Reaktion as a publisher." - Mathew Lyons, The Broken Compass
