Merchants Of Misery

Youth and Narcotics. Assassins of Youth. On Getting "Hooked". From Euphoria to Despair. A Panel of Prisoners. Doorway to the Underworld. Merchants of Misery. The Defense of Decency. "Kicking the Habit". Youth's Right to Know

Examines how corporations profit from the poor by bankrolling pawnshops and high-interest finance companies, and discusses current protests.

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a species whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism. Merchants of Despair traces the pedigree of this ideology and exposes its deadly consequences in startling and horrifying detail. The book names the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. It exposes the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement, including eugenics campaigns in the United States and genocidal anti-development and population-control programs around the world. Combining riveting tales from history with powerful policy arguments, Merchants of Despair provides scientific refutations to antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, industrial development, and, most recently, fear-mongering about global warming. Merchants of Despair exposes this dangerous agenda and makes the definitive scientific and moral case against it.

Winner of the Booker Prize A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into the slave trade and spread it throughout its colonies. Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.

This book offers views of Aztec lives and their interactions in rituals, markets, courts, and on the battlefield.