A photo-journey through the homes and lives of 30 families, revealing culture and economic levels around the world.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER THE TIMES SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR **Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award** Picked as a Book of the Year by FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST and NEW STATESMAN A BBC RADIO 4 Book of the Week 'A compelling narrative of the human story' TIM MARSHALL, author of Prisoners of Geography 'Lively, rich and exciting... full of surprises' PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads _____________ Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. They built our world, and they will transform our future. These are the six most crucial substances in human history. They took us from the Dark Ages to the present day. They power our computers and phones, build our homes and offices, and create life-saving medicines. But most of us take them completely for granted. In Material World, Ed Conway travels the globe - from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe, to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan, to the eerie green pools where lithium originates - to uncover a secret world we rarely see. Revealing the true marvel of these substances, he follows the mind-boggling journeys, miraculous processes and little-known companies that turn the raw materials we all need into products of astonishing complexity. As we wrestle with climate change, energy crises and the threat of new global conflict, Conway shows why these substances matter more than ever before, and how the hidden battle to control them will shape our geopolitical future. This is the story of civilisation - our ambitions and glory, innovations and appetites - from a new perspective: literally from the ground up.

At a time when the world is grappling with rising food and energy prices and climate change, Living in a Material World provides an insight into some of the contributing factors behind these challenges. The emergence of new consumers in China, India, Russia and the Middle East has added formidable competition to the natural resources that have been taken for granted in the developed world. Everything we consume involves the use of metals, fossil fuels or agriculture. Our high tech 'lifestyles' depend on the secure supply of these raw materials which we take from planet earth and use to make our lives more comfortable, more productive or more manageable. The effect of this increasing global demand for commodities has pushed up prices of materials from oil and copper to corn and wheat; forcing consumers to pay more for the many 'necessities' of life, from a loaf of bread to electricity bills. Since the commodity boom has unfolded, commodities have gone from the back page of the newspaper to the front; with more and more headlines about record food and oil prices, dire climate change warnings, energy security and China's demand for more raw materials. This era of high oil and food prices is no passing phase: The supply of many key natural resources is stretched to the limit. But what is the real cost? Living in a Material World makes the link between raw materials and the consumer, and shows how they are relevant to everybody, everyday - now more so than at any time since the last oil shock nearly three decades ago. A unique insight into this 'once in a generation' boom, the book shows how the increasing value of commodities is impacting on consumers and investors, in ways we are only just beginning to understand. "It was a great pleasure to read this book which provides an essential background to understanding commodities for anybody interested in understanding them more closely. It is so rare to see all the essential elements brought together in one book." –Chris Brodie, Krom River Partners LLP "Kevin Morrison set out to write a book about the daily relevance that raw materials have for the ordinary consumer. He has achieved his objective par excellence. The subject matter has been comprehensively researched and well documented - yet the writer has avoided using complicated technical language. The style of the book is more in tune with a novel and the main topics are treated with a special sense of humour. I would readily recommend this work to anyone interested in how global energy issues have a direct affect on us all." –Mehdi Varzi, President, Varzi Energy, London

Today, urban scholars think of cities and regions as evolving through networks of human associations, technologies, and natural ecologies. This being the case, planners are faced with the task of navigating a profoundly material world. Planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable: in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored. This inclusive vision has consequences for how planners envision the connections among norms, technologies and life-worlds as well as how they design and implement their plans. The contributors to this volume utilize a variety of examples – ecologically-sensitive, regional planning in Naples (Italy); congestion pricing in New York City; and public participation in Europe, among others – to explore how planners engage a heterogeneous and restless world. Inspired by assemblage thinking and actor-network theory, each chapter draws on this "new materialism" to acknowledge, in quite pragmatic ways, that spatial politics is a process of becoming that is inseparable from the materiality of urban practices.

All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.

Examines the objects and artifacts, the representations in art, and the examples of documentation that reveal the day-to-day life of ancient Egyptians.

Travel should always be undertaken with care, forethought and careful planning. Ideally one should have a map to hand, or an experienced guide with knowledge of the terrain and the climate. The same goes for a voyage into the spiritual domain, and those who choose to travel beyond the material world will find in Matthew Wilson the ideal guide. This collection of inspirational passages gives an insight into the author's own journey - from his early empathetic connection as a registered nurse through to his current career as an active medium - but also encourages the reader, step by step, on their own path. Drawing together poems, hard-won personal beliefs and the established practices of meditation and yoga, these passages offer comfort and rigour, inspiration and discipline. This is an essential companion on the most difficult journey one can make - into the limitless space within self.

In Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology, Gil Germain provocatively argues that humans are fast becoming spirit-like creatures, beings who assume their bodies are incidental to what it means to be human, and the 'real world' an accidental quality of the human condition. Technology, it is suggested, authorizes such an understanding and legitimates a manner of action that obscures the centrality of embodiment. Technology properly understood is thus an otherworldly or spiritual force. Spirits in the Material World challenges the assumptions underpinning the technological world view through a reading of leading contemporary theorists who have addressed the interconnection between technology and embodiment. The book both reveals and contests the multifarious ways in which technology's spiritual thrust is manifested in contemporary thought and practice. While respecting technology's hold on modernity and its predisposition toward disembodiment, Germain gives important reasons why this inclination toward spiritization ought to be resisted and what shape this resistance must take if it is to be meaningful. Spirits in the Material World will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars and students alike, especially those interested in philosophy of technology, postmodernism, political theory, phenomenology, the end of history debate, and deep ecology.

In this book, McMahon argues that a reading of Kant’s body of work in the light of a pragmatist theory of meaning and language (which arguably is a Kantian legacy) leads one to put community reception ahead of individual reception in the order of aesthetic relations. A core premise of the book is that neo-pragmatism draws attention to an otherwise overlooked aspect of Kant’s "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," and this is the conception of community which it sets forth. While offering an interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory, the book focuses on the implications of Kant’s third critique for contemporary art. McMahon draws upon Kant and his legacy in pragmatist theories of meaning and language to argue that aesthetic judgment is a version of moral judgment: a way to cultivate attitudes conducive to community, which plays a pivotal role in the evolution of language, meaning, and knowledge.