BiblioVault - Books about Isolation

The Cinema of Isolation

A History of Physical Disability in the Movies

Norden, Martin F

Rutgers University Press, 1994

Filmmakers have often encouraged us to regard people with physical disabilities in terms of pity, awe, humor, or fearas "Others" who somehow deserve to be isolated from the rest of society. In this first history of the portrayal of physical disability in the movies, Martin Norden examines hundreds of Hollywood movies (and notable international ones), finds their place within mainstream society, and uncovers the movie industry's practices for maintaining the status quokeeping people with disabilities dependent and "in their place."

Norden offers a dazzling array of physically disabled characters who embody or break out of the stereotypes that have both influenced and been symptomatic of societys fluctuating relationship with its physically disabled minority. He shows us "sweet innocents" like Tiny Tim, "obsessive avengers" like Quasimodo, variations on the disabled veteran, and many others. He observes the arrival of a new set of stereotypes tied to the growth of science and technology in the 1970s and 1980s, and underscores movies like My Left Foot and The Waterdance that display a newfound sensitivity. Nordens in-depth knowledge of disability history makes for a particularly intelligent and sensitive approach to this long-overlooked issue in media studies.

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Driven by Fear

Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence

Guenter B. Risse

University of Illinois Press, 2015

From the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, authorities required San Francisco's Pesthouse to segregate the diseased from the rest of the city. Although the Pesthouse stood out of sight and largely out of mind, it existed at a vital nexus of civic life where issues of medicine, race, class, environment, morality, and citizenship entwined and played out. Guenter B. Risse places this forgotten institution within an emotional climate dominated by widespread public dread and disgust. In Driven by Fear, he analyzes the unique form of stigma generated by San Franciscans. Emotional states like xenophobia and racism played a part. Yet the phenomenon also included competing medical paradigms and unique economic needs that encouraged authorities to protect the city's reputation as a haven of health restoration. As Risse argues, public health history requires an understanding of irrational as well as rational motives. To that end he delves into the spectrum of emotions that drove extreme measures like segregation and isolation and fed psychological, ideological, and pragmatic urges to scapegoat and stereotype victims--particularly Chinese victims--of smallpox, leprosy, plague, and syphilis.

Filling a significant gap in contemporary scholarship, Driven by Fear looks at the past to offer critical lessons for our age of bioterror threats and emerging infectious diseases.

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Feelings at the Margins

Dealing with Violence, Stigma and Isolation in Indonesia

Edited by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and Thomas Stodulka

Campus Verlag, 2014

Feelings at the Margins offers a uniquely interdisciplinary take on the contemporary phenomenon of marginalization in Indonesia and its emotional impact on affected individuals and groups. By combining anthropological, political, and historical perspectives on Indonesian particularities with more universal conclusions, this volume is sure to attract not only scholars with a regional interest in the archipelago, but also researchers more broadly concerned with the interplay between stigma, marginality, culture, and emotion. Moreover, the book’s vivid ethnographic case studies—detailing recurring acts of violence against communities based on their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, descent, and religion—and discussion of significant sociocultural and political developments in early twenty-first-century Indonesia will make it a valuable resource for scholars of social and political activism.

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Guidance Note 2

Isolation & Switching

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022

Guidance Note 2: Isolation & Switching provides clear guidance on what can be a confusing aspect of BS 7671. It is ideal for those working in specification, testing and inspection and for consulting engineers, as well as electrical installers and has been fully updated to BS 7671:2018:2022.

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Guidance Note 2

Isolation & Switching

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019

Guidance Note 2: Isolation & Switching provides clear guidance on what can be a confusing aspect of BS 7671. It is ideal for those working in specification, testing and inspection and for consulting engineers, as well as electrical installers and has been fully updated to BS 7671:2018.

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Guidance Note 2

Isolation & Switching

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2015

Guidance Note 2: Isolation & Switching is an essential guide and reference manual on this sometimes confusing aspect of BS 7671. Aspects of the book updated to the changes in Amendment 3 include:

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The History of Special Education

From Isolation to Integration

Margret A. Winzer

Gallaudet University Press, 1993

This comprehensive volume examines the facts, characters, and events that shaped this field in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. From the first efforts to teach disabled people in early Christian and Medieval eras to such current mandates as Public Law 94-142, this study breaks new ground in assessing the development of special education as a formal discipline.

The History of Special Education presents a four-part narrative that traces its emergence in fascinating detail from 16th-century Spain through the Age of Enlightenment in 17th-century France and England to 18th-century issues in Europe and North America of placement, curriculum, and early intervention. The status of teachers in the 19th century and social trends and the movement toward integration in 20th century programs are considered as well.

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In Isolation

Dispatches from Occupied Donbas

Stanislav Aseyev

Harvard University Press, 2022

In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Aseyev scrutinizes his immediate environment and questions himself in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the working-class residents of the industrial region of Donbas.

In this work of documentary prose, Aseyev focuses on the early period of the Russian-sponsored military aggression in Ukraine’s east, the period of 2015–2017. The author’s testimony ends with his arrest for publishing his dispatches and his subsequent imprisonment and torture in a modern-day concentration camp on the outskirts of Donetsk run by lawless mercenaries and local militants with the tacit approval and support of Moscow. For the first time, an inside account is presented here of the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that the citizens of Europe’s largest country continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

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Isolation and Engagement

Presidential Decision Making on China from Kennedy to Nixon

William Waltman Newmann

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Presidents and their advisors consistently seek to improve the management of their foreign policy decision processes. This book analyzes the successes and failures of administrations from Kennedy to Nixon as they sought to strike a balance between the personal style of the president and the need for a strong interagency structure that could systematically evaluate policy options. The narrative focuses on US decision making on China and Taiwan during the crucial era when the US was considering moving from a policy of isolating China to a policy of engagement, culminating in Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China. William Waltman Newmann has created an Evolution-Balancing model, tested with case studies focusing on China policy by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, showing how the relationships between a president and his advisors change based on the weaknesses or pathologies of the president’s management style. The author’s research is based on declassified archival material from the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford presidential libraries.

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The Road from Isolation

The Campaign of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, 1938-1941

Donald J. Friedman

Harvard University Press

Sex and Isolation

And Other Essays

Bruce Benderson; Foreword by Catherine Texier

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Winner of France’s 2004 Prix de Flore for his memoir The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, Bruce Benderson has gained international respect for his controversial opinions and original take on contemporary society. In this collection of essays, Benderson directs his exceptional powers of observation toward some of the most debated, as well as some of the most neglected, issues of our day.
In Sex and Isolation, readers will encounter eccentric street people, Latin American literary geniuses, a French cabaret owner, a transvestite performer, and many other unusual characters; they’ll visit subcultures rarely described in writing and be treated to Benderson’s iconoclastic opinions about culture in former and contemporary urban society. Whether proposing new theories about the relationship between art, entertainment, and sex, analyzing the rise of the Internet and the disappearance of public space, or considering how religion and sexual identity interact, each essay demonstrates sharp wit, surprising insight and some startling intellectual positions.
This is the first American volume of Benderson’s collected essays, featuring both new work and some of his best-known writings, including his famous essay “Toward the New Degeneracy.”

Outstanding University Press Book selection, Foreword Magazine

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Watching the Traffic Go By

Transportation and Isolation in Urban America

By Paul Mason Fotsch

University of Texas Press, 2007

2007 — Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Publication Award – Urban Communication Foundation

As twentieth-century city planners invested in new transportation systems to deal with urban growth, they ensured that the automobile rather than mass transit would dominate transportation. Combining an exploration of planning documents, sociological studies, and popular culture, Paul Fotsch shows how our urban infrastructure developed and how it has shaped American culture ever since.

Watching the Traffic Go By emphasizes the narratives underlying our perceptions of innovations in transportation by looking at the stories we have built around these innovations. Fotsch finds such stories in the General Motors "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair, debates in Munsey's magazine, films such as Double Indemnity, and even in footage of the O. J. Simpson chase along Los Angeles freeways.

Juxtaposed with contemporaneous critiques by Lewis Mumford, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, Fotsch argues that these narratives celebrated new technologies that fostered stability for business and the white middle class. At the same time, transportation became another system of excluding women and the poor, especially African Americans, by isolating them in homes and urban ghettos.

A timely, interdisciplinary analysis, Watching the Traffic Go By exposes the ugly side of transportation politics through the seldom-used lens of popular culture.

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