Public administration ensures the development and delivery of the essential public services required for sustaining modern civilization. Covering areas from public safety and social welfare to transportation and education, the services provided through the public sector are inextricably part of our daily lives. However, mandatory budgetary cuts in recent years have caused public administrators to radically re-think how they govern in the modern age.

In this Very Short Introduction Stella Theo...

How much faith should we place in what scientists tell us? Is it possible for scientific knowledge to be fully 'objective'? What, really, can be defined as science? In the second edition of this Very Short Introduction, Samir Okasha explores the main themes and theories of contemporary philosophy of science, and investigates fascinating, challenging questions such as these. Starting at the very beginning, with a concise overview of the history of science, Okasha examines the nature of fundame...

Environmental Chemistry: A global perspective describes the chemical principles which underpin the natural processes occurring within and between the air, water, and soil, and explores how human activities have impacted on these processes, giving rise to environmental issues of global concern.

The most up-to-date and complete textbook for first time genomics students, Introduction to Genomics offers a fascinating insight into how organisms differ or match; how different organisms evolved; how the genome is constructed and how it operates; and what our understanding of genomics means in terms of our future health and wellbeing.

The most accessible and practical guide to research methods written especially for politics and international relations students.

On October 1, 2009, the People's Republic of China (PRC) celebrated the 60th anniversary of its founding. And what an eventful and tumultuous six decades it had been. During that time, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China was transformed from one of the world's poorest countries into the world's fastest growing major economy, and from a weak state barely able to govern or protect its own territory to a rising power that is challenging the United States for global i...

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his `most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling...

Frederick Douglass's Narrative recounts his life as a slave in Maryland and escape to freedom in 1838. An important slave autobiography, it is significant both for what it tells us about slave life and about its author. It is here reprinted with contexualizing source material and other writings by Douglass, as well as an introduction discussing its literary and historical significance.

This volume contains thirty-one state-of-the-art contributions from leading figures in the study of emotion today. The volume addresses all the central philosophical issues in current emotion research, including: the nature of emotion and of emotional life; the history of emotion from Plato to Sartre; emotion and practical reason; emotion and the self; emotion, value, and morality; and emotion, art and aesthetics. Anyone interested in the philosophy of emotion, and its wide-ranging implicatio...

Unique in its breadth of coverage ranging from historical accounts of drug use to clinical and preclinical behavioral studies, Psychopharmacology is appropriate for undergraduates studying the relationships between the behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs and their mechanisms of action. BL Chapter-opening vignettes foster student engagement BL Up-to-date and outstanding coverage of current research BL Breakout boxes present novel, and, in some cases, controversial topics for special discu...