Just published and stiing on the desk in front of me:

Walsh, John, “The Street Vendors of Bangkok: Alternatives to Indoor Retailers at a Time of Economic Crisis?” in G.D. Sardana and Tojo Thatchenkery, eds., Enhancing Organizational Performance through Strategic Initiatives: Handbook of Management Cases (Macmillan India: Delhi, 2009), pp.279-88.

The whole book should be available via Proquest as well – but if anyone is desperate to read the text, please let me know.

Amartya Sen is the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics and has for decades been a sane, patient and sapient voice in applying academic ideas to the real world – which is a trait from which more economists could benefit and which can also be seen in the recent winner Paul Krugman. His various books have argued for the need for peace and democracy as a means of ending not just misery but poverty and starvation, while his understanding of the multivalent complexity of human society has let him argue for tolerance and understanding in place of the violence and confrontation that now characterise “political discourse” in so many places.

Read the full review here.

According to the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, the real is located outside of the symbolic and opposed to the imaginary. It cannot be achieved through the imaginary (or, consequently, imagination) and it lacks the structure of the symbolic, which is defined by opposition and binary constructs. People seek the real but it is something that can never be obtained and, therefore, it is a source of constant anxiety and stress to people. This is, so to speak, the key to Natsuo Kirino’s short novel Real World, which deals with the brief lives and loves of five Japanese teenagers, each of whom is in some sense or another searching for the “real.”

Read the full review here.

The only works of Shakespeare about which we can feel reasonably confident that we have the versions that the author intended are the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. That is because, in the early part of his career, Shakespeare appeared to think of himself more of a poet than a playwright and he wrote the latter largely as a means of supporting himself in the role of the former.

Read the full article here.

The Hunt Begins is an introductory kit for the Supernatural RPG from Margaret Weis Productions, which also holds the license for the Serenity RPG. Margaret Weis is a longstanding and well-respected name in the industry (dating back to the Dragonlance series of games and books) and it will be interesting to see whether this business model proves successful – there are numerous games which could be used to recreate a Supernatural-like game and one wonders who will is intended to be the target market for this system.

Read the full review here.

Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot, who lived from 1888-1965, is one of the most well-known and indeed most talented and influential poets of the twentieth century. His greatest works include The Waste Land and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. However, he also established a well-deserved reputation for being a leading literary critic.

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A Lover’s Complaint is one of Shakespeare’s least considered works – assuming that is, that the poem was actually written by him, in whole or in part. The poem was first published in 1609 as an addendum to the first published edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In as much as the poem deals with a form of love triangle, it is reminiscent of the subject matter of a number of the sonnets and perhaps it is this which persuaded the publisher to include it.

Read the full article here.

Although Marxist concepts in literary criticism are not as popular as they once were, they are still frequently used in trying to understand Shakespeare and his genius better and so it is worthwhile to try to understand what they are and what they mean.

Read the full article here.

Louis Althusser was a central (and often divisive) figure in the intellectual circles of the left in the 1960s and 1970s. In common with the ideas and analyses he studied, his work became unfashionable during the brief period after Gorbachev’s liquidation of the Soviet system in which it appeared liberal-democratic capitalism had conquered the world both intellectually and in really existing terms.

Read the full review here.

American exceptionalism is the ideology or belief that, for one or more of a variety of reasons, the USA as a country and as a people have a superior moral compass to other countries and people and that the actions of the country are inherently beneficial.

Read the full article here.