Village Values

The book draws extensively on research on modern Greece in recent decades, and on the many perceptive commentaries on recent events in the Greek press. It adopts both an analytical and chronological approach and shows how Greece has both converged with western Europe and remained distinctively Balkan. David Close writes clearly and forcefully, and presents a lively picture of the Greek political system, economic development, social changes and foreign relations. Aimed at readers coming to the subject for the first time, this is a readable and informative introduction to contemporary Greece.

"This is not a new book. We have maintained much of the original work, published in 1990 as Thai Village Life: Culture and Transition in the Northeast. We have spent a considerable time editing the original text and refining our observations. We have also attempted to indicate, especially in the Introduction and the Epilogue, how things have changed."--P. vii.

The Kindness Economy is a powerful new force for change in business and a growing trend that will improve everything from how we work to how we live in our homes, communities, and cities. In an age of much unkindness, burnout, and notoriously monstrous management, we need a new, positive vision for the future. In this book, futurist and trend researcher Oona Horx Strathern offers an optimistic look at how we can create a healthy economy in which we are kinder to people and the planet while still making a profit. Through examples and anecdotes as well as personal and professional insights, The Kindness Economy explores how we can combine values with value and think differently about how we want to spend, work, and live.

This book includes a collection of articles that present recent developments in the fields of optimization and dynamic game theory, economic dynamics, dynamic theory of the firm, and population dynamics and non standard applications of optimal control theory. The authors of the articles are well respected authorities in their fields and are known for their high quality research in the fields of optimization and economic dynamics.

Focusing on a range of twentieth-century texts and including relevant twenty-first century writing, Garden Plots explores the ways in which gardens in fiction represent more than just a familiar theme. Bound up with wider aesthetic and ideological issues, gardens, like literary forms, are subject to transformations. The term 'plots' is a keyword in this approach. It refers to garden plots, literary plots, and more generally, the plotting that is political, polemical, and subversive. Each of the six chapters includes four texts that are familiar and representative. Authors include Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Carol Shields, J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jamaica Kincaid, and Philip K. Dick.