David Mason – författare

Bill Struth is the most celebrated Manager in the history of Rangers Football Club. In his 34 year tenure, he led the club to 30 major trophies and nurtured many of the club''s greatest players. To them, he was simply ''Mr. Struth'' - a father figure who guided them with the principle that, ''... to be a Ranger is to sense the sacred trust of upholding all that such a name means in this shrine of football.''If these words set the ideals for his players to attain, his own personal life was clouded by moments of indiscretion which were to influence the course of his life and career. Drawing on family accounts and Rangers archives, the book explores his early life in Edinburgh and Fife, as well as his celebrated years in Glasgow. It recounts his career in professional athletics and in football with Heart of Midlothian, Clyde and ultimately, Rangers. It reflects on the legacy of the Struth era and his influences that remain at Ibrox today.

Mattering Spiritualities brings together an array of international scholars and practitioners to explore spirituality in embodiment through the lens of performance, performative writing, and performance studies.

The book concerns spirituality and takes the body as the site of whatever it is we call spirituality. The methodological assumption is that the opposition of body and spirit is a false binary that calls for re-examination and revision. It stems from the argument that people can deliberately shift their boundaries of perception and knowing through practice, technologies and performative techniques that can alter the way in which they perceive the ecologies in which they are embedded. This approach understands that careful attention to which bodies are performing in any given scenario is crucial, as is a sensitivity to the ramifications of any body’s race, gender, class, and biological ability. Performance can therefore be regarded as anything through which individuals and collectives experiment with bodies as technologies. Each chapter engages with such experiments to explore how bodies experience and relate to other bodies, human and other-than-human, but also how, by mobilizing bodies and changing relationships between them, practitioners can transform people, spaces and places, objects, ecologies large and small, and shift the borders-of-the-known. Such experiments can also reveal intersectional dynamics within given social, political, and biological borders offering new perspectives and angles of analysis.

This collection intends to serve transdisciplinary studies and to support varied learning and teaching environments for undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD students.

Mattering Spiritualities brings together an array of international scholars and practitioners to explore spirituality in embodiment through the lens of performance, performative writing, and performance studies.

The book concerns spirituality and takes the body as the site of whatever it is we call spirituality. The methodological assumption is that the opposition of body and spirit is a false binary that calls for re-examination and revision. It stems from the argument that people can deliberately shift their boundaries of perception and knowing through practice, technologies and performative techniques that can alter the way in which they perceive the ecologies in which they are embedded. This approach understands that careful attention to which bodies are performing in any given scenario is crucial, as is a sensitivity to the ramifications of any body’s race, gender, class, and biological ability. Performance can therefore be regarded as anything through which individuals and collectives experiment with bodies as technologies. Each chapter engages with such experiments to explore how bodies experience and relate to other bodies, human and other-than-human, but also how, by mobilizing bodies and changing relationships between them, practitioners can transform people, spaces and places, objects, ecologies large and small, and shift the borders-of-the-known. Such experiments can also reveal intersectional dynamics within given social, political, and biological borders offering new perspectives and angles of analysis.

This collection intends to serve transdisciplinary studies and to support varied learning and teaching environments for undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD students.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the drug Thalidomide (marketed in the UK by Distillers Company without sufficient testing) was a sedative and medication prescribed for morning sickness. The Thalidomide tragedy is the story of one of the worst disasters ever inflicted by medicine which led to thousands of babies worldwide being born with a range of birth defects.

‘The ugly story of a good fight’

Fifty years after its first publication in 1976 Routledge is now reissuing Thalidomide: My Fight with a substantial new introduction by the author. It is the powerful story of one man’s battle for his daughter – a battle which began privately and ended publicly.

It is the story of what happened when David Mason, a private family man, took on one of the UK’s largest corporations and clung on doggedly as his own legal team and other parents of Thalidomide babies turned against him – until he won. For the measure of the final success of the Thalidomide campaign was not just the immense publicity it created, thanks in part to fearless journalism; rather it was that, starting from an offer of compensation of £3.25 million, the amount eventually awarded to the affected children exceeded £30 million.

Thalidomide: My Fight is an inspiration to others who, when finding themselves up against odds that look formidable, feel like giving in. The book is a striking record of how a human tragedy, faced with courage, brought about a private fight for justice that ended as a public crusade.

In an era of ‘David and Goliath’ battles such as the Post Office Horizon Scandal and the Corby Toxic Waste Scandal this account remains as powerful and pertinent now as when it was first published.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the drug Thalidomide (marketed in the UK by Distillers Company without sufficient testing) was a sedative and medication prescribed for morning sickness. The Thalidomide tragedy is the story of one of the worst disasters ever inflicted by medicine which led to thousands of babies worldwide being born with a range of birth defects.

‘The ugly story of a good fight’

Fifty years after its first publication in 1976 Routledge is now reissuing Thalidomide: My Fight with a substantial new introduction by the author. It is the powerful story of one man’s battle for his daughter – a battle which began privately and ended publicly.

It is the story of what happened when David Mason, a private family man, took on one of the UK’s largest corporations and clung on doggedly as his own legal team and other parents of Thalidomide babies turned against him – until he won. For the measure of the final success of the Thalidomide campaign was not just the immense publicity it created, thanks in part to fearless journalism; rather it was that, starting from an offer of compensation of £3.25 million, the amount eventually awarded to the affected children exceeded £30 million.

Thalidomide: My Fight is an inspiration to others who, when finding themselves up against odds that look formidable, feel like giving in. The book is a striking record of how a human tragedy, faced with courage, brought about a private fight for justice that ended as a public crusade.

In an era of ‘David and Goliath’ battles such as the Post Office Horizon Scandal and the Corby Toxic Waste Scandal this account remains as powerful and pertinent now as when it was first published.