Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. It looks good, tastes good, and it's cheap. But the real cost never appears on the menu. This book tells the story of Britains love's affair with fast food. The author visits the lab that re-created the smell of strawberries ; examines the safety records of abattoirs ; reveals why fries taste so good ; and what really lurks between the sesame buns - and shows how fast food is transforming not only our diets but our world.

Written by one of America's leading political thinkers, this is a book about the good, the bad, and the ugly of identity politics. Amy Gutmann rises above the raging polemics that often characterize discussions of identity groups and offers a fair-minded assessment of the role they play in democracies. She addresses fundamental questions of timeless urgency while keeping in focus their relevance to contemporary debates: Do some identity groups undermine the greater democratic good and thus their own legitimacy in a democratic society? Even if so, how is a democracy to fairly distinguish between.

How should we live? What do we owe to other people? In Goodness and Advice, the eminent philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson explores how we should go about answering such fundamental questions. In doing so, she makes major advances in moral philosophy, pointing to some deep problems for influential moral theories and describing the structure of a new and much more promising theory. Thomson begins by lamenting the prevalence of the idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between fact and value--that to say something is good, for example, is not to state a fact, but to do something more like expres.

Collaborations, which bring organizations together in a community to implement or improve an innovative program or change a policy or procedure, have become a central strategy for promoting community change. Funders require them; nonprofits see them as useful solutions to their problems of declining resources and increasing complexity (including multicultural issues); and communities demand them as evidence that key stakeholders are coming together to address problems of mutual concern. Moreover, no matter how powerful the concept, the implementation of community collaborations can usually be.

Democracy is widely accepted today, perhaps as never before, as the most suitable form of government. But what is democracy, and does it always produce good government? Democracy is often associated with the existence of competitive elections. But theory and experience suggest that these are not sufficient for democracy to function reasonably well. In this book, a number of experts from North America and Europe use a rational choice approach to understand the 'foundations' of democracy - what makes democracy successful, and why. In doing so, they consider diverse problems of democratic governance such as the importance of morals or virtue in political life, negative advertising, the role of social capital and civil society in sustaining democracy, the constitutional and cultural prerequisites of democracy, and the interaction of democracy and markets.

"In this collection of essays Onora O'Neill explores and argues for an account of justice that is fundamentally cosmopolitan rather than civic, yet takes serious account of institutions and boundaries, and of human diversity and vulnerability. Starting from conceptions that are central to any account of justice - those of reason, action, judgement, coercion, obligations and rights - she discusses whether and how culturally or politically specific concepts and views, which limit the claims and scope of justice, can be avoided. She then examines the demands and scope of just institutions, arguing that there are good reasons for taking the claims of distant strangers seriously, but that doing so points not to a world without boundaries but to one of porous boundaries and dispersed power. Bounds of Justice will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, politics and international relations."--Jacket.

This book begins with six articles that address how psychological theory, research, and practice bear on collaborating with communities, interpreting changes in students, and using psychological techniques to understand and act on social problems. The remaining articles demonstrate how service-learning can be effectively integrated into a variety of psychology courses so that student learning is enhanced in breadth and depth. Woven through all of the chapters are the five values that Prilleltensky (1997) identifies as most salient for how psychologists can foster the good life: compassion, self-determination, human diversity, collaboration and democratic participation, and distributive justice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

"Is it possible for a deeply religious person to be a good citizen in a liberal democracy? There is room for doubt regarding many religious believers. Why? Many religious people take themselves to be conscience bound to support coercive laws for which they have only religious reasons. But many political theorists claim that such exclusive reliance on religious reasons violates the norms of good citizenship and does so for any of a number of reasons: It grinds to a halt productive conversation on the laws to which we are subject: it injects gratuitously divisive factors in already overheated discussions; it fails to respect the autonomy and personhood of citizens who find religious reasons implausible." "Against this position regarding the proper role of religious convictions in liberal politics, Christopher Eberle argues that citizens can discharge every expectation we reasonably have of them, even if they have only a religious rationale for a favored coercive law. In making his case, Eberle articulates an ideal of citizenship that permits citizens to engage in politics without privatizing their religious commitments and yet does not license a mindless and intransigent sectarianism." "A controversial book that offers a substantial challenge to political liberalism, this work will be read with particular interest by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, law, and religious studies, as well as by general readers who seek insight into the relationship between religious commitments and liberal politics."--Jacket.

The author visited over 400 American beaches while researching this book. Scott Douglass is a civil engineering professor that has studied beach erosion problems and solutions along all the nation's shores. He worked his way through college by lifeguarding on the Jersey shore, studied beaches for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Coastal Engineering Research Center, did laboratory investigations of how waves break on beaches for his Ph. D., and has consulted on coastal engineering projects throughout the country. He has written dozens of academic papers including many on the role of engineering in beach management. Douglass finds that even though we have been destroying some of our beaches with poor sand management decisions, good coastal engineering has saved many of the most popular beaches in America. This book tells you where beach sand comes from, how waves are formed and how they break and move sand down the coast, how "works of man" have blocked this movement and caused beach erosion, and what can be done to save the beaches for future generations of Americans. A three-part prescription for healthy beaches is proposed: "backing off", "bypassing sand", and "beach nourishment". So if you love waves and beaches, and care about the future of your favorite beach spot, then read this book while you enjoy the beach.

When members are elected to the House of Representatives they have a certain freedom to decide how they will act as members and how they will build their reputations. Just as in the market place entrepreneurs build businesses, so in the House of Representatives members have the freedom to choose to build legislative programs that will enhance their reputations in the institution. And yet entrepreneurship is also costly to members. Gregory Wawro explains why members of the House engage in legislative entrepreneurship by examining what motivates them to acquire policy knowledge, draft legislation, build coalitions, and push their legislation in the House. He considers what incentives members have to perform what many have perceived to be the difficult and unrewarding tasks of legislating. This book shows how becoming a legislative entrepreneur relates to members' goals of reelection, enacting good public policy, and obtaining influence in the House. The analysis differs from previous studies of this behavior, which for the most part have employed case study methods and have relied on anecdotal evidence to support their arguments. Wawro analyzes legislative entrepreneurship in a general and systematic fashion, developing hypotheses from rational-choice-based theories and testing these hypotheses using quantitative methods. Wawro argues that members engage in legislative entrepreneurship in order to get ahead within the House. He finds that the more legislative entrepreneurship that members engage in, the more likely it is that they will advance to prestigious positions. This book is of interest to students of Congress, legislative behavior and institutions, elections, and campaign finance. Gregory Wawro is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University.