Barry Jones – författare

People from different cultural backgrounds prefer adhering to their own religious beliefs which could restrict treatment options leading to the detriment of health, especially if it involves the health of a disabled child.

This comprehensive but concise work highlights the problems faced in managing the care of disabled children from different cultural backgrounds. It examines the problems inherent in the medical, social and educational management of children with developmental disability in populations whose value systems differ from other cultures. In particular it considers how care may be varied according to cultural background, without compromising its quality.

The book is of immense value to all healthcare and social care professionals, policy makers and shapers, patient organisations and those with an interest in medical ethics.

People from different cultural backgrounds prefer adhering to their own religious beliefs which could restrict treatment options leading to the detriment of health, especially if it involves the health of a disabled child.

This comprehensive but concise work highlights the problems faced in managing the care of disabled children from different cultural backgrounds. It examines the problems inherent in the medical, social and educational management of children with developmental disability in populations whose value systems differ from other cultures. In particular it considers how care may be varied according to cultural background, without compromising its quality.

The book is of immense value to all healthcare and social care professionals, policy makers and shapers, patient organisations and those with an interest in medical ethics.

An updated edition of the classic study of capital punishment originally published 50 years ago, with a new introduction by Barry Jones.

The Penalty Is Death was first published in 1968, in the aftermath of the hanging of Ronald Ryan in Victoria — the last man executed in Australia. At the time, capital punishment had been abolished as the penalty for murder in only 30 nations, although there was a moratorium on its use in many more. In 2022, the number of abolitionist nations has risen to 108, and 54 more have longstanding moratoriums. The World Coalition against the Death Penalty reported the number of recorded executions in 2021 at 2,397, with about 2,000 in China.

Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary sources, The Penalty is Death includes some of the most significant voices in the international history of debates about capital punishment from the eighteenth century to the present day. It contains an historical overview of the arguments for and against capital punishment; legal, political, and philosophical analysis and commentary; and firsthand accounts of the reality of executions and their aftermaths.

It features the views of great novelists such as Charles Dickens, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell; philosophers such as Max Charlesworth; legal scholars such as Cesare Beccaria; and rigid enforcers such as J Edgar Hoover. Barry Jones’s important new introduction brings the story up to date, including the continuing use of the death penalty in the US.

A follow-up to the author’s prescient bestseller, first published in 1982, that alerted the public to the likely impacts of information technologies and the emergence of a post-industrial society.

When Sleepers, Wake! was released in Australia, it immediately became influential around the world: it was read by Deng Xiaoping and Bill Gates; was published in China, Japan, South Korea, and Sweden; and led to the author being the first Australian minister invited to address a G-7 summit meeting, held in Canada in 1985.

Now its author, the polymath and former politician Barry Jones, turns his attention to what has happened since — especially to politics, health, and our climate in the digital age — and to the challenges faced by increasingly fragile democracies and public institutions.

Jones sees climate change as the greatest problem of our time, but political leaders have proved incapable of dealing with complex, long-term issues of such magnitude. The Trump phenomenon overturns the whole concept of critical thinking and analysis. Meanwhile, technologies such as the smartphone and the ubiquity of social media have reinforced the realm of the personal. This has weakened our sense of, or empathy with, ‘the other’, the remote, and the unfamiliar, and all but destroyed our sense of community, of being members of broad, inclusive groups. The COVID-19 threat, which was immediate, and personal, showed that some leaders could respond courageously, while others denied the evidence.

In the post-truth era, politicians invent ‘facts’ and ignore or deny the obvious, while business and the media are obsessed with marketing and consumption for the short term. What Is to Be Done is a long-awaited work from Jones on the challenges of modernity and what must be done to meet them.