David Karp – författare

What are the limits of sympathy in dealing with another person's troubles? Where do we draw the line between caring for a loved one, and being swallowed up emotionally by the obligation to do so? Quite simply, what do we owe each other? In this vivid and thoughtful study, David Karp chronicles the experiences of the family members of the mentally ill, and how they draw "boundaries of sympathy" to avoid being engulfed by the day-to-day suffering of a loved one. Working from sixty extensive interviews, the author reveals striking similarities in the experiences of caregivers: the feelings of shame, fear, guilt and powerlessness in the face of a socially stigmatized illness; the frustration of navigating the complex network of bureaucracies that govern the mental health system; and most of all, the difficulty negotiating an "appropriate" level of involvement with the mentally ill loved one while maintaining enough distance for personal health. Throughout the narratives, Karp sensitively explores the overarching question of how people strike an equilibrium between reason and emotion, between head and heart, when caring for a catastrophically ill person. The Burden of Sympathy concludes with a critical look at what it means to be a moral and caring person at the turn of the century in America, when powerful cultural messages spell out two contradictory imperatives: pursue personal fulfillment at any cost and care for the family at any cost.An insightful, deeply caring look at mental illness and at the larger picture of contemporary values, The Burden of Sympathy is required reading for caregivers of all kinds, and for anyone seeking broader understanding of human responsibility in the postmodern world.

Over the past quarter-century, U.S. politicians have responded to the public's fear of crime by devoting ever more resources to building and strengthening the criminal justice apparatus, which as a result has grown tremendously in size and cost. Policymakers have also taken steps to toughen procedures for dealing with suspects and criminals, and br

Over the past quarter-century, U.S. politicians have responded to the public's fear of crime by devoting ever more resources to building and strengthening the criminal justice apparatus, which as a result has grown tremendously in size and cost. Policymakers have also taken steps to toughen procedures for dealing with suspects and criminals, and broaden legal definitions of what constitutes crime, which has led to the incarceration, under harsher-than-ever conditions, of a record-high percentage of the U.S. population. Yet public confidence in the criminal justice apparatus is, if anything, lower than ever before, and fear of crime continues to be high.In recent years, some activists, scholars, criminal-justice officials, and politicians have begun to call for a reexamination of "get-tough" crime policies. A more sensible approach to crime, they argue, would focus on "community justice"--that is, on building healthy communities in which criminality cannot take root, and on making citizens and criminal-justice into partners rather than adversaries. In this thought-provoking study, Todd Clear and David Karp provide both a broad theoretical analysis of this ideal, and a close examination of a range of attempts to put it into practice in communities throughout the country. They conclude that by making the criminal justice system and the public into partners rather than adversaries, community-justice strategies for dealing with crime are both more effective and more resource-efficient than the failed "get-tough" approach.

An operating system is a piece of software that should do its work in the background while you do your work in the foreground. In an ideal world, that's precisely how an operating system would work. In our world, however, operating systems constantly get in our way. They annoy us. And few are more annoying than Microsoft Windows 98. Perhaps you're annoyed with the icons that Windows deposits on your desktop and that you never use. Or you're frustrated with the new elements of the Windows 98 interface. Or you consider Windows 98's central feature, its integration of Windows and the Web, to be a massive inconvenience. With Windows 98 Annoyances, you can put an end to these and countless other annoyances. Given the book's format, which presents particular problems and immediately offers one or more solutions, you can quickly identify the Windows 98 features that most annoy you and equally quickly provide a fix for them. In the process, you'll take charge of Windows so that it works the way you want, rather than the way that Microsoft or some other software publisher has configured it. Based on the author's extremely popular Windows Annoyances Web site (http://www.annoyances.org), Windows 98 Annoyances provides an authoritative collection of techniques for customizing Windows 98, including: Useful keyboard shortcuts that let you work with Windows 98 more efficiently Techniques for working with the Windows registry, the database of system and application-specific configuration information Available third-party software and utilities that handle some of the more complex workarounds and customizations Dealing with software applications that overwrite your file associations without warning A discussion of scripting with the Windows Scripting Host as a means of eliminating many of the Windows 98's annoyances Also included with the book is a CD that contains a 30-day trial version of O'Reilly Utilities: Quick Solutions for Windows 98 Annoyances, with a discount offer toward the purchase of the fully licensed version of the software.Intermediate and advanced Windows users will find Windows 98 Annoyances to be the definitive resource for customizing Windows 98.