Most Popular Books by Philip Smith

Philip Smith attacks the comfortable notion that punishment is about justice, reason and law. Instead, he argues that punishment is an essentially irrational act founded in ritual as a means to control evil without creating more of it in the process.

Smith''s hilarious and profound memoir about coming-of-age in 1960s Miami with a decorator father who discovers he has the power to talk to the dead and heal the sick.

This fascinating study of the Mandeans of Iraq—considered the last of the Gnostics—traces their history back to John the Baptist and the days of early Christianity. Among the casualties of western intervention in Iraq and ISIS are the Mandeans of Southern Iraq. These peace-loving people are now fleeing to the west. They are the last Gnostics—the only surviving remnant of the ancient sects who taught the direct knowledge of God, created their own gospels and myths, and were persecuted as heretical by the church in the second and third centuries. The Mandeans place weekly river baptisms at the center of their religious life, and the primary exemplar of their religion is none other than John the Baptist. So, what is the real history of this mysterious and long-lived sect? Can the Mandean peoples really be traced back to the first century? And who was John the Baptist? This book follows the history of the Mandeans from their present plight back through their earliest encounters with the West, their place in Islamic counties, their possible influence on the Templars, back to their origins as a first century baptismal sect connected to John the Baptist, and beyond.

Despite all the jokes about the poor quality of physician handwriting, physician adoption of computerized provider order entry (CPOE) in hospitals still lags behind other industries’ use of technology. As of the end of 2010, less than 22% of hospitals had deployed CPOE. Yet experts claim that this technology reduces over 80% of medication errors and could prevent an estimated 522,000 serious medication errors annually in the US. Even though the federal government has offered $20 billion dollars in incentives to hospitals and health systems through the 2009 stimulus (the ARRA HITECH section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), many organizations are struggling to implement advanced clinical information systems including CPOE. In addition, industry experts estimate that the healthcare industry is lacking as many as 40,000 persons with expertise in clinical informatics necessary to make it all happen by the 2016 deadline for these incentives. While the scientific literature contains numerous studies and stories about CPOE, no one has written a comprehensive, practical guide like Making CPOE Work. While early adopters of CPOE were mainly academic hospitals, community hospitals are now proceeding with CPOE projects and need a comprehensive guide. Making CPOE Work is a book that will provide a concise guide to help both new and experienced health informatics teams successfully plan and implement CPOE. The book, in a narrative style, draws on the author''s decade-long experiences of implementing CPOE at a variety of academic, pediatric and community hospitals across the United States.

This second edition provides an excellent overview of the field by covering the traditional themes and current trends in image centred photographic visual inquiry but extends this by demonstrating the rich possibilities available through the analysis of everyday objects, places and interactions. The book includes chapters on researching 2D and 3D visual data, along with lived and living visual data, and also features a brand new chapter on researching the virtual world of the internet. Drawing on theoretical traditions as diverse as semiotics, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism and material culture studies, the second edition provides an invaluable guide for researchers interested in conducting innovative visual inquiry. Packed with exercises and projects, the book makes it easy for students to undertake their own research with limited resources and budget. The new edition also features helpful icons alerting researchers to important ethical considerations that are vital in the field of visual research. Generously illustrated with images and diagrams, this new edition is the perfect companion to those doing projects, dissertations or theses involving visual research.

Why did America invade Iraq? Why do nations choose to fight certain wars and not others? How do we bring ourselves to believe that the sacrifice of our troops is acceptable? For most, the answers to these questions are tied to struggles for power or resources and the machinations of particular interest groups. Philip Smith argues that this realist answer to the age-old "why war?" question is insufficient. Instead, Smith suggests that every war has its roots in the ways we tell and interpret stories. Comprised of case studies of the War in Iraq, the Gulf War, and the Suez Crisis, Why War? decodes the cultural logic of the narratives that justify military action. Each nation, Smith argues, makes use of binary codes—good and evil, sacred and profane, rational and irrational, to name a few. These codes, in the hands of political leaders, activists, and the media, are deployed within four different types of narratives—mundane, tragic, romantic, or apocalyptic. With this cultural system, Smith is able to radically recast our "war stories" and show how nations can have vastly different understandings of crises as each identifies the relevant protagonists and antagonists, objects of struggle, and threats and dangers. The large-scale sacrifice of human lives necessary in modern war, according to Smith, requires an apocalyptic vision of world events. In the case of the War in Iraq, for example, he argues that the United States and Britain replicated a narrative of impending global doom from the Gulf War. But in their apocalyptic account they mistakenly made the now seemingly toothless Saddam Hussein once again a symbol of evil by writing him into the story alongside al Qaeda, resulting in the war''s contestation in the United States, Britain, and abroad. Offering an innovative approach to understanding how major wars are packaged, sold, and understood, Why War? will be applauded by anyone with an interest in military history, political science, cultural studies, and communication.

Between 1887 and 1895, the British art student Miles Vandercroft travelled around the world, sketching and painting the soldiers of the countries through which he passed. In this age of dramatic technological advancement, Vandercroft was fascinated by how the rise of steam technology at the start of the American Civil War had transformed warfare and the role of the fighting man. This volume collects all of Vandercroft''s surviving paintings, along with his associated commentary on the specific military units he encountered. It is a unique pictorial guide to the last great era of bright and colourful uniforms, as well as an important historical study of the variety of steam-powered weaponry and equipment that abounded in the days before the Great War of the Worlds.

Cultural Theory: An Introduction is a concise, accessible introduction to a complex field. Philip Smith provides a balanced, wide-ranging overview of contemporary cultural theory, covering the major thinkers and key concepts that have appeared and developed over the last century. The book has an abundance of special features for students, with summaries, biographical notes, suggestions for further reading, and cross-referencing. This book is an ideal guide for any student or researcher with an interest in the theoretical study of culture and society.

Since sociologists returned to the study of culture in the past several decades, a pursuit all but anathema for a generation, cultural sociology has emerged as a vibrant field. Edited by three leading cultural sociologists, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology presents the full theoretical and methodological vitality of this critically significant new area.The Handbook gathers together works by authors confronting the crucial choices all cultural sociologists face today: about analytic priorities, methods, topics, epistemologies, ideologies, and even modes of writing. It is a vital collection of preeminent thinkers studying the ways in which culture, society, politics, and economy interact in the world. Organized by empirical areas of study rather than particular theories or competing intellectual strands, the Handbook addresses power, politics, and states; economics and organization; mass media; social movements; religion; aesthetics; knowledge; and health. Allowing the reader to observe tensions as well as convergences, the collection displays the value of cultural sociology not as a niche discipline but as a way to view and understand the many facets of contemporary society. The first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology offers comprehensive and immediate access to the real developments and disagreements taking place in the field, and deftly exemplifies how cultural sociology provides a new way of seeing and modeling social facts. "This groundbreaking, readable handbook [is] the first single volume to attempt to unify its diverse contemporary applications in a wide range of traditional genres of sociology...Valuable for college universities and libraries supporting undergraduate and graduate degree programs in sociology and history."-CHOICE

The horror of the Holocaust lies not only in its brutality but in its scale and logistics; it depended upon the machinery and logic of a rational, industrialised, and empirically organised modern society. The central thesis of this book is that Art Spiegelman’s comics all identify deeply-rooted madness in post-Enlightenment society. Spiegelman maintains, in other words, that the Holocaust was not an aberration, but an inevitable consequence of modernisation. In service of this argument, Smith offers a reading of Spiegelman’s comics, with a particular focus on his three main collections: Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), Maus (1980 and 1991), and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). He draws upon a taxonomy of terms from comic book scholarship, attempts to theorize madness (including literary portrayals of trauma), and critical works on Holocaust literature.