The surprising origins and people behind the world's most influential magical tales: the people who told and re-shaped them, the landscapes that forged them, and the cultures that formed them and were in turn formed by them.

In LOVE AND CHOICE, Lucy Fry seeks to remind readers of the revolutionary power of choice and, when built into any relationship's foundation, the happiness it creates.

This book examines the role of civil society organizations in defending the rights and addressing the needs of vulenerable groups, paying close attention to services for the elderly. The authors build on theories of state and non-governmental organizations to examine roles in the social contexts of Mexico and the U.S.

Published ten years after the first edition, this new handbook offers topical, and comprehensive information on the welfare systems of all twenty-eight EU member states and their recent reforms, giving the reader an invaluable introduction and basis for comparative welfare research.

Gives readers an overview of the major theorists and schools of sociological thought. In this title, key theories are integrated with biographical sketches of theorists, and are placed in their historical and intellectual context.

What's Wrong with Fat? examines the social implications of understanding fatness as a medical health risk, disease, and epidemic. Examining the ways in which debates over fatness have developed, Abigail Saguy argues that the obesity crisis literally makes us fat, intensifies negative body image, and justifies weight-based discrimination.

In this Very Short Introduction, Barry Stephenson approaches ritual from theoretical and historical perspectives, detailing the efforts to understand the nature and function of ritual, and developing a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life.

Fresh material brings this "delightful to read, fascinating" (The New York Times) classic to new readers.

Do Funerals Matter? is a creative interweaving of historical, sociocultural, and research-based perspectives on death rituals, drawing from myriad sources to create a picture of what death rituals have been, and where, especially in the Western world, they are going.

Traditionally, the effectiveness of medical treatments is attributed to specific elements, such as drugs, but many things in medicine cannot be accounted for in this way. For example, inert drugs (placebos) often have dramatic effects on people. This 2002 book guides the reader expertly through a very complex body of literature.