Peter Conrad - Böcker

Over the past half-century, the social terrain of health and illness has been transformed. What were once considered normal human events and common human problems-birth, aging, menopause, alcoholism, and obesity-are now viewed as medical conditions. For better or worse, medicine increasingly permeates aspects of daily life. Building on more than three decades of research, Peter Conrad explores the changing forces behind this trend with case studies of short stature, social anxiety, "male menopause," erectile dysfunction, adult ADHD, and sexual orientation. He examines the emergence of and changes in medicalization, the consequences of the expanding medical domain, and the implications for health and society. He finds in recent developments-such as the growing number of possible diagnoses and biomedical enhancements-the future direction of medicalization. Conrad contends that the impact of medical professionals on medicalization has diminished. Instead, the pharmaceutical and biotechnical industries, insurance companies and HMOs, and the patient as consumer have become the major forces promoting medicalization.This thought-provoking study offers valuable insight into not only how medicalization got to this point but also how it may continue to evolve.

Books end, but the stories they tell continue. Stories exist to be retold, and those which are retold often enough acquire the status of myth. To Be Continued considers four such continuations of English literature, extending between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, and surveying Europe, America, Africa, and Japan. It first asks what happened to Chaucer's pilgrims after the poet deserted them halfway through their pilgrimage: could they ever have arrived at Canterbury? T S Eliot has one answer, William Burroughs another; films by Michael Powell and Pasolini contribute other guesses, and a song by Elvis Presley makes its own enigmatic contribution. Next, two Shakespearean plays undergo universalization: Romeo and Juliet is translated into music by a succession of Romantic composers, and King Lear is reinterpreted by a series of nineteenth century novelists and modern dramatists. Finally, the story of Prometheus is traced from Aeschylus to the monster movies of the 1930s, by way of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. These post-dated meanings enrich and complicate their sources, keeping them alive: a myth, as Levi-Strauss pointed out, is the sum total of all its possible variants and versions. Accessible and entertaining, To Be Continued shows how, by retelling its stories, our culture recreates and reckons with its past.

People who saw the first moving pictures at the end of the nineteenth century were delighted by a new art that communicated without words – yet they were also alarmed to be witnessing events in a strange, mute, spectral realm, where the laws of time and space were suspended and magical transformations could occur. Some early commentators hailed cinema as a blessing and praised it for resurrecting the dead; others likened it to a hypnotic trance or a hallucinogenic drug. The medium has always been excited by speed, and it enjoys sending the body on furious kinetic chases; at the same time, it stealthily probes our minds, invading our dreams and titillating our desires. Although this is an art kindled by light and inflamed by colour, it is nurtured by darkness and can reduce life to an insubstantial shadow play. Either way, as Peter Conrad argues in this brilliant book, the movie camera has given us new eyes and changed forever our view of reality. The Mysteries of Cinema sets out to map this ambiguous territory by taking readers on a thematic roller-coaster ride through movie history. Directors and critics speculate about the nature of cinematic vision, and there are contributions to the debate from writers like Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, artists including Salvador Dalí, George Grosz and Fernand Léger, and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich. The book begins from the audacious innovations of silent film, and examines the influence of French surrealism and German expressionism; it accounts for the appeal of Hollywood genres like the Western, the horror film and the musical, and ends by considering the fate of the moving image in our visually glutted society. Combining contagious enthusiasm with an eye for the subjective quirks of filmmakers and the allure of favourite performers, Conrad delivers an astonishing addition to the literature on the seventh art.With 61 illustrations

Peter Conrad’s exhilarating book exposes the absurdity and occasional insanity of our godforsaken, demon-haunted contemporary culture. Conrad casts his brilliant beam upon subjects from the Queen to the Kardashians, via Banksy, Nando’s, vaping, the vogue of the cronut, the mushroom-like rise of Dubai, the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, the growth of the Pacific garbage patch... In Judge Judy, he shows us a matronly Roman goddess dispensing justice with a fly swatter. In the metamorphosis of Caitlyn Jenner from Olympic athlete and paterfamilias into idealized female form, he sees parallels to the deeds of the residents of Mount Olympus themselves. Finally, after surveying advances in biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, he asks whether we might be on the brink of a post-human world.

Alfred Hitchcock remains the most famous of film-makers. Why was he so successful in enticing us to share his fears and desires? Cultural critic Peter Conrad can date the start of his Hitchcock obsession to his first boyhood viewing of Hitchcock's Psycho, one afternoon in Tasmania some forty years ago. The master's grip upon his imagination has never slackened since. Now, Conrad explains how Hitchcock's mastery of the mechanical art enabled him to unnerve us, shock us, in ways that no artist had previously managed. He shows how Hitchcock made the ordinary world seem fantastically fraught, and how his recurrent themes tapped our common fantasies. Thus Conrad proposes Hitchcock as 'the greatest of the twentieth century's surrealists, wickedly expert at erasing the border between actuality and our haunted, licentious dreams'.

With the advent of the Human Genome Project, the new genetics has moved to the cutting edge of science and medicine. The development and use of such genetics will have a profound impact on our understanding of disease and behaviour. This volume presents new sociological research which explores the structure andproduction of genetic knowledge, its social meaning, impact and implication s for society.

This engaging and accessible reader takes a social problems approach to health and medicine, providing a broad and critical lens on contemporary health problems. Designed for courses on social problems and on medical sociology, the volume embraces two fundamental principles: that health and illness are at least partly socially produced, and that health care is not an unfettered good and often brings with it serious social problems. The volume is organized into six sections, addressing the medicalization of human problems; the social construction of health problems; social movements; gender; race and class and the provision of health care; and medical accountability. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the depth and richness of a social problems approach to health and medicine, and the critical perspective it brings to our understanding of health and illness in U.S. society.

This is a new and expanded edition of a classic case-study in the medicalization of ADHD, originally published in 1976. The book centres on an empirical study of the process of identifying hyperactive children, providing a perceptive and accessible introduction to the concepts and issues involved. In this revised edition, Peter Conrad sets the original study in context, demonstrating the continuing relevance of his research. He highlights the issues at stake, outlining recent changes in our understanding of ADHD and reviewing recent sociological research. Peter Conrad is Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences at Brandeis University, USA. He has written extensively in the area of medical sociology, publishing nine books and over eighty articles and chapters.

Composed entirely of specially commissioned chapters by some of the outstanding scholars in medical sociology, this edition reflects important changes in the study of health and illness. In addition to updated and reconceived chapters on the impacts of gender, race, and inequality on health, this volume has new chapters on topics that include: social networks, neighborhoods, and social capital; disability; dying and ""the right to die""; health disparities; the growing influence of the pharmaceutical industry; patient safety; evidence-based medicine and quality of care; health social movements; genetics; religion, spirituality, and health

Composed entirely of specially commissioned chapters by some of the outstanding scholars in medical sociology, this edition reflects important changes in the study of health and illness. In addition to updated and reconceived chapters on the impacts of gender, race, and inequality on health, this volume has new chapters on topics that include: social networks, neighborhoods, and social capital; disability; dying and ""the right to die""; health disparities; the growing influence of the pharmaceutical industry; patient safety; evidence-based medicine and quality of care; health social movements; genetics; religion, spirituality, and health

This classic text on the nature of deviance, originally published in 1980, is now reissued with a new Afterword by the authors. In this new edition of their award-winning book, Conrad and Schneider investigate the origins and contemporary consequences of the medicalization of deviance. They examine specific cases—madness, alcoholism, opiate addiction, homosexuality, delinquency, and child abuse—and draw out their theoretical and policy implications. In a new chapter, the authors address developments in the last decade—including AIDS, domestic violence, co-dependency, hyperactivity in children, and learning disabilities—and they discuss the fate of medicalization in the 1990s with the changes in medicine and continued restrictions on social services.

In his book Imagining America (originally published in 1980), Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope, Americans are unkempt brutes, throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells, they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gospel of art; D. H. Lawrence wants to rescue them by fomenting revolution in their stale, sterile society. For W. H. Auden, Americans are an existential people, sad citizens of a deracinated modern world, suffering from anxiety; for Chrsitopher Isherwood, they are bland, sun-tanned Oriental angels. But there is a logic to the succession of these images, which Peter Conrads’s narrative follows. The Victorians are disturbed by America because it is not yet a society and lacks the upholstery of manners. Their modern successors, however, praise it for this very disability and find there a psychological, mystical or even psychedelic freedom denied to them by the Europe they have left behind.Imagining America is stimulating both as cultural history and literary criticism. Superbly written, it presents an argumentative tour de force in a style that is witty and diverting.

In his book Imagining America (originally published in 1980), Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope, Americans are unkempt brutes, throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells, they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gospel of art; D. H. Lawrence wants to rescue them by fomenting revolution in their stale, sterile society. For W. H. Auden, Americans are an existential people, sad citizens of a deracinated modern world, suffering from anxiety; for Chrsitopher Isherwood, they are bland, sun-tanned Oriental angels. But there is a logic to the succession of these images, which Peter Conrads’s narrative follows. The Victorians are disturbed by America because it is not yet a society and lacks the upholstery of manners. Their modern successors, however, praise it for this very disability and find there a psychological, mystical or even psychedelic freedom denied to them by the Europe they have left behind.Imagining America is stimulating both as cultural history and literary criticism. Superbly written, it presents an argumentative tour de force in a style that is witty and diverting.

Traditional secret-based credentials can't scale to meet the complexity and size of cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Today's applications are spread across a diverse range of clouds and colocation facilities, as well as on-prem data centers. Each layer of this modern stack has its own attack vectors and protocols to consider.How can you secure access to diverse infrastructure components, from bare metal to ephemeral containers, consistently and simply? In this practical book, authors Ev Kontsevoy, Sakshyam Shah, and Peter Conrad break this topic down into manageable pieces. You'll discover how different parts of the approach fit together in a way that enables engineering teams to build more secure applications without slowing down productivity.With this book, you'll learn:The four pillars of access: connectivity, authentication, authorization, and auditWhy every attack follows the same pattern, and how to make this threat impossibleHow to implement identity-based access across your entire infrastructure with digital certificatesWhy it's time for secret-based credentials to go awayHow to securely connect to remote resources including servers, databases, K8s Pods, and internal applications such as Jenkins and GitLabAuthentication and authorization methods for gaining access to and permission for using protected resources

It dominates our lives. It is the twentieth-century medium. And yet we're all a little sheepish when it comes to television, disowning it by disavowal or by inventing subtle, innocuous disguises for it. Why is this? In this book, first published in 1982, Peter Conrad argues that our unease stems from the way that the medium works: it absorbs the messages it transmits, it invents a reality of its own and ends by luring the world into the confines of its box. Television's achievement is to have estranged us from the reality which it puports to represent, but which it actually refracts. This invasion of our lives is monitored and projected in programmes designed to ape the human routine. Following a discussion of television as furniture, Peter Conrad explores its various versions of reality: the simulated conversation of the talk show, the competitive consumerism of the games, the messianic commercials, the eventless protraction of the soap operas and the camera's incitement of happenings which the television calls news.

It dominates our lives. It is the twentieth-century medium. And yet we're all a little sheepish when it comes to television, disowning it by disavowal or by inventing subtle, innocuous disguises for it. Why is this? In this book, first published in 1982, Peter Conrad argues that our unease stems from the way that the medium works: it absorbs the messages it transmits, it invents a reality of its own and ends by luring the world into the confines of its box. Television's achievement is to have estranged us from the reality which it puports to represent, but which it actually refracts. This invasion of our lives is monitored and projected in programmes designed to ape the human routine. Following a discussion of television as furniture, Peter Conrad explores its various versions of reality: the simulated conversation of the talk show, the competitive consumerism of the games, the messianic commercials, the eventless protraction of the soap operas and the camera's incitement of happenings which the television calls news.

This is a new and expanded edition of a classic case-study in the medicalization of ADHD, originally published in 1976. The book centres on an empirical study of the process of identifying hyperactive children, providing a perceptive and accessible introduction to the concepts and issues involved. In this revised edition, Peter Conrad sets the original study in context, demonstrating the continuing relevance of his research. He highlights the issues at stake, outlining recent changes in our understanding of ADHD and reviewing recent sociological research. Peter Conrad is Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences at Brandeis University, USA. He has written extensively in the area of medical sociology, publishing nine books and over eighty articles and chapters.

'Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.' -- Spectator World'Marvellous... the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton’s. -- A. N. Wilson, The OldieA kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created.See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe. As well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad’s book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.Dickens the Enchanter takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to read him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.

'Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.' -- Spectator World'Marvellous... the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton’s. -- A. N. Wilson, The OldieA kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created.See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe. As well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad’s book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.Dickens the Enchanter takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to read him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.

Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been a common psychiatric diagnosis in both children and adults since the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. But the diagnosis was much less common-even unknown-in other parts of the world. By the end of the twentieth century, this was no longer the case, and ADHD diagnosis and treatment became an increasingly widespread global phenomenon. As the diagnosis was adopted around the world, the definition and treatment of ADHD often changed in the context of different psychiatric professions, medical systems, and cultures. Global Perspectives on ADHD is the first book to examine how this expanding public health concern is diagnosed and treated in 16 different countries. In some countries, readers learn, over 10% of school-aged children and adolescents are diagnosed with ADHD; in others, that figure is less than 1%. Some countries focus on medicating children with ADHD; others emphasize parent intervention or child therapy.Showing how a medical diagnosis varies across contexts and time periods, this book explains how those distinctions shape medical interventions and guidelines, filling a much-needed gap by examining ADHD on an international scale. Contributors: Madeleine Akrich, Mari J. Armstrong-Hough, Meredith R. Bergey, Eugenia Bianchi, Christian Broer, Peter Conrad, Claire Edwards, Silvia A. Faraone, Angela M. Filipe, Alessandra Frigerio, Valeria Portugal Goncalves, Linda J. Graham, Hiroyuki Ito, Fabian Karsch, Victor Kraak, Claudia Malacrida, Lorenzo Montali, Yasuo Murayama, Sebastian Rojas Navarro, Orla O'Donovan, Francisco Ortega, Monica Pena Ochoa, Brenton J. Prosser, Vololona Rabeharisoa, Patricio Rojas, Tiffani Semach, Ilina Singh, Rachel Spronk, Junko Teruyama, Masatsugu Tsujii, Fan-Tzu Tseng, Manuel Vallee, Rafaela Zorzanelli

Now with SAGE Publishing!

The Tenth Edition of The Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical Perspectives addresses the crucial issues in this field with over 45 readings (1/3 of which are new to this edition) from the scholarly literature on health and medicine, thus providing students with the most balanced and comprehensive analysis of health care today. This best-selling anthology includes both micro-level and structural perspectives, frameworks for understanding these critical issues, and a breadth of material that allows instructors to mix and match materials to meet their course needs.

New to this Edition

17 readings are new to this edition. All introductions by the editors have been updated to reflect new readings and the latest data. The sections on Financing Medical Care and Health Care Reform have been merged to reflect the current debate about health policy taking place largely within the context of financing. The section previously called Comparative Health Policies is now called Global Issues, with an expanded scope that includes health inequalities between countries, the globalization of ADHD, and the international migration of health care workers. New material on the dilemmas of medical technology provides both a conceptual framework for understanding the key issues as well as a case study about genetic counseling to help students apply those concepts directly. New readings on illness, medicine, and the internet offer increasingly relevant information on how individuals address health and illness in their increasingly technology-dominated lives. A new section on globalization helps students understand the impact of factors such as the international pharmaceutical industry, international migration, and the role of the internet.

In 1623 the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, better known as The First Folio. In doing so they preserved literature's most dramatically vital and poetically rich account of our human world. Endlessly reinterpreted by critics and performers, Shakespeare's inexhaustible work has remained abreast of contemporary concerns ever since, and it continues to hold a mirror up to the nature of our troubled society and our contradictory selves. The plays accompany us through the ages of mankind, from comic springtime to wintry age, compressing our life in time into the three hours' traffic of the stage; the characters in them have shaped the way we think about politics and war, consciousness and morality, love and death. Peter Conrad examines the world-view of the plays, their generic originality and their astonishingly inventive language. He goes on to explore Shakespeare's global legacy as his characters migrate to every continent and are reinvented by later writers, painters, composers, choreographers and film-makers.