David Mason

Under omprövning rymmer ett stort antal bidrag som förenas av att de utifrån ett kritiskt perspektiv diskuterar vår tids mest karakteristiska estetiska hållningar och konstnärliga tendenser. Antologin försöker se framåt, förbi de modernistiska och postmodernistiska strategier som kännetecknat 1900-talets utveckling inom konstarter som litteratur, musik, bildkonst och arkitektur. Detta innebär också en omvärdering av kulturhistorien, där en rad förbisedda författarskap och konstnärskap lyfts fram. Och där kulturhistorien utvärderas med avseende på vad som kan te sig fruktbart och ofruktbart för framtiden.

This is the first detailed, wide-ranging report to be published on excavations in the extramural settlement of the Roman legionary fortress at Chester (north-western England), specifically those around the western side of the fortress. This publication concentrates on ten interventions carried out over twenty-five years in the area to the west and south of the fortress and attempts to summarise in more detail than has been done hitherto discoveries elsewhere around its perimeter. Discussions attempt to characterise the townscape, its development and population, and also to explore the role of the Chester extramural settlement generally. It is hoped that this publication will be useful in providing a context for future fieldwork and analysis.

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.

FORMER COLORADO POET LAUREATE From the volcanic landscapes of the Pacific Rim to the mythic echoes of Greece and India, Cold Fire is a radiant meditation on memory, nature, and the enduring sparks of love and creation. David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

Believer in Blue is the fascinating autobiography of Marvin Andrews, who famously overcame serious injury and defied expert medical opinion to help Rangers win the title on 'Helicopter Sunday'. A year later, he led Trinidad and Tobago to an unprecedented qualification for the 2006 World Cup. Reared in San Juan in humble circumstances, Andrews overcame adversity to build a life in football. A 5,000-mile flight to Scotland opened up a career with Raith Rovers in 1997. There, he also found the local church where he was ordained in 2006. The experience would change his life forever. He became a hero when he helped Livingston FC to their first major honour in 2004 - the Scottish League Cup. When Rangers came calling, the scene was set for that drama on 'Helicopter Sunday'. The image of Marvin on his knees giving thanks to God has become iconic. His t-shirt proclaimed, 'The things that are impossible with men, are possible with God', and so it seemed. That moment was the pinnacle of his footballing life.

Believer in Blue is the fascinating autobiography of Marvin Andrews, who famously overcame serious injury and defied expert medical opinion to help Rangers win the title on 'Helicopter Sunday'. A year later, he led Trinidad and Tobago to an unprecedented qualification for the 2006 World Cup. Reared in San Juan in humble circumstances, Andrews overcame adversity to build a life in football. A 5,000-mile flight to Scotland opened up a career with Raith Rovers in 1997. There, he also found the local church where he was ordained in 2006. The experience would change his life forever. He became a hero when he helped Livingston FC to their first major honour in 2004 - the Scottish League Cup. When Rangers came calling, the scene was set for that drama on 'Helicopter Sunday'. The image of Marvin on his knees giving thanks to God has become iconic. His t-shirt proclaimed, 'The things that are impossible with men, are possible with God', and so it seemed. That moment was the pinnacle of his footballing life.

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level responses to these assertions of Black Humanity.Rights and Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level responses to these assertions of Black Humanity.Rights and Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.

"Witty and heartfelt essays, shaken and stirred."--Kirkus Reviews"Mason's sharp interpretations make a persuasive case that great literature's complexity and ambiguity can, at its best, produce empathy and understanding in readers. Book lovers will find much to ponder."--Publishers Weekly"These essays are by turns expansive, sustaining and astringent, occasionally bromidic yet often incisive. One feels Mason hitting his stride as he enthuses infectiously over Tom Stoppard and Kay Ryan, Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath ('a lesson in critical circumspection'), fellow poet-critics Clive James and John Burnside, unfashionable writers such as Joyce Carey and Weldon Kees, and the Australian Helen Garner. He argues convincingly, if counterintuitively, for the outsider status of Dana Gioia, and laments that despite his 'mastery of dramatic voice' and 'comic melancholia, ' Michael Donaghy is 'yet to find a major American publisher.'"--Jaya Savige, Times Literary Supplement"Literary criticism," David Mason writes, "ought to entertain as well as illuminate." In these essays Mason tells stories about embodiment and change, incarnation and metamorphosis, drawing connections between art and life without confusing the two. Mason considers the many kinds of change we encounter in our lives, our desire for justice, and the ways great writers complicate that desire. He discusses the lives and works of Montaigne, Diderot, and Neruda, as well as his colorful father's fascination with a fictional character. He takes up such contemporary figures as the daring Australian writer Helen Garner, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the poet-critic Dana Gioia; and he has fresh things to say about the perils of fame in the careers of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney and mourns the loss of poet Michael Donaghy. Incarnation & Metamorphosis is a book about living with literature--Mason writes that literature tells "us that we are seen, warts and all. Criticism, such as the essays in this book, is a way of seeing back."

The Rangers Story celebrates the rich history of Rangers FC, one of the oldest and most successful football clubs in the world. This is the story of a special city, the story of the birth of football and of a club that is revered by fans throughout the world. It is a story of humble beginnings in 19th-century Glasgow that charts the development of the 'Association game' in Scotland. Drawing on 36 years of research, the author tells of the triumphs - a record number of Scottish championships and victory in Europe - but also of the disasters, like the 1902 and 1971 Ibrox tragedies, each reverberating throughout the UK. The book explores the importance of men such as Struth, Souness, Smith and Gerrard, who with determination and ambition built this great club and its traditions. Then there were the great players such as Baxter, Gascoigne, and Laudrup. It is no wonder Rangers has followers worldwide, each carrying the emotional attachment of their fathers and grandfathers before them. To them the club is everything - the beginning and the end.

The Rangers Story celebrates the rich history of Rangers FC, one of the oldest and most successful football clubs in the world. This is the story of a special city, the story of the birth of football and of a club that is revered by fans throughout the world. It is a story of humble beginnings in 19th-century Glasgow that charts the development of the 'Association game' in Scotland. Drawing on 36 years of research, the author tells of the triumphs - a record number of Scottish championships and victory in Europe - but also of the disasters, like the 1902 and 1971 Ibrox tragedies, each reverberating throughout the UK. The book explores the importance of men such as Struth, Souness, Smith and Gerrard, who with determination and ambition built this great club and its traditions. Then there were the great players such as Baxter, Gascoigne, and Laudrup. It is no wonder Rangers has followers worldwide, each carrying the emotional attachment of their fathers and grandfathers before them. To them the club is everything - the beginning and the end.

David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”

The Rangers Story celebrates the rich history of Rangers FC, one of the oldest and most successful football clubs in the world. This is the story of a special city, the story of the birth of football and of a club that is revered by fans throughout the world. It is a story of humble beginnings in 19th-century Glasgow that charts the development of the 'Association game' in Scotland. Drawing on 36 years of research, the author tells of the triumphs - a record number of Scottish championships and victory in Europe - but also of the disasters, like the 1902 and 1971 Ibrox tragedies, each reverberating throughout the UK. The book explores the importance of men such as Struth, Souness, Smith and Gerrard, who with determination and ambition built this great club and its traditions. Then there were the great players such as Baxter, Gascoigne, and Laudrup. It is no wonder Rangers has followers worldwide, each carrying the emotional attachment of their fathers and grandfathers before them. To them the club is everything - the beginning and the end.

This title was first published in 2002: Numerous reports have identified the serious problems of under-representation of, and discrimination against, minority ethnic groups in the British NHS. It is widely argued that this both raises issues of social justice and undermines the quality of service to minority ethnic patients. Nowhere are these problems more acute than among the largest occupational group in the NHS - nurses. This book reports the results of research carried out for the English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting to evaluate NHS equal opportunities policy. Drawing on additional original research involving interviews with key policy actors, this fascinating book examines the prospects for a national strategy linking the business and justice cases for the delivery of greater equity in employment and service delivery.

Eastern and Western Europe continue to change in their relationship to one another and in their ongoing dynamic with the post-Soviet states. Economic development, electoral upheaval, and the Bosnian crisis all color the transition from communism to democracy and from a Cold War outlook to a new global order still taking shape.In this fully revised and updated edition of his popular and critically acclaimed text, David Mason brings the revolutionary events of 1989 into context with the transitional yet turbulent 1990s. We see new parties, new politics, new constitutions, and new opportunities in light of economic shock therapies, ?left turns? in recent elections, and dissolving sovereignties and alliances. Despite savage ethnic conflict, economic scarcity, and political insecurity, Mason shows us that East-Central Europe is consolidating and reemerging as a region to be reckoned with on the global stage.