Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties Review

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(More customer reviews)Rowman & Littlefield titles are not discounted by Amazon. Why? Are they an academic press? So I went to the university library and got a copy there to check it out. It's excellent material; consistently good from essay to essay. On that basis I would buy the book for future reference if it weren't so darn expensive. I know Rowman & Littlefield ain't paying huge royalties to the editors who in any case draw their principal income from the university. So why does the consumer get stuck with paying the premium for an anthology such as this? C'mon trade books are discounted; why not books such as this one? Again, with the usual Amazon discount I would have bought this book straight away and not even have bothered with the library edition. I spend thousands of dollars a year on books, CDs, and other media; it's part of my job. But please give us a break on the price.

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Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing 'war on terror' amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

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