Based on five journeys to Syria, with a cast of lively characters, this book is in danger of becoming a testament to the last of the Levant. With B AND W photos.

From life along the Tigris River in the 1970s to the ongoing Arab Spring uprisings, Phil Karber has witnessed decades of change throughout the Middle East. Fear and Faith in Paradise draws on his wealth of experience to sketch a timely and compelling portrait of the region throughout history. Seamlessly moving between past and present, Karber skillfully develops two overarching themes: How America's footprint can be shifted from a military to a humanitarian emphasis and how fear is used as a cudgel by today’s monotheistic leaders to sacrifice the faithful. Whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, they all invoke their own vision of paradise, often as incentive, in hopeless conflicts that seem doomed to be repeated. Karber’s down-to-earth writing vividly conveys the region’s charm and beauty against a backdrop of power struggles among competing faiths, nationalisms, and outside forces.

Marius Kociejowski follows up his now classic The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool with The Pigeon Wars of Damascus. A metaphysical journalist in search of echoes rather than analogies, hints as opposed to verities, Kociejowski discovers once again at the periphery of Damascene society—for the outcast is often made of the very thing that rejects him—a way to understand the challenges and changes refashioning post-9/11 Syria and the Middle East, reminding us once again of the deeper purpose of travel: to absorb and understand the spirit of a place, and to return changed.

Travel and holiday.

The central theme of this book is the operation of intersecting discourses of power, privilege and positioning as they are revealed in fraught encounters between in-groups and out-groups in our deeply fractured world. The authors offer a unique perspective on inter-group dynamics and structural violence at local, societal, cultural and global levels, dissecting processes of toxic ‘othering’ and psychosocial (re-)traumatisation. The book offers the Diogenes Paradigm as a unique conceptual tool with which to analyse the ways in which those of us who come to be located outside or on the margins of dominant social structures are, in one way or another, the inheritors of the legacies of centuries of oppression and exclusion. This analysis offers a distinctive psycho-social redefinition of trauma that foregrounds the relationship between the inhospitable environments we generate and the experiences of un-housedness that we thereby perpetuate. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence directly addresses pressing global issues of racial trauma, human mobility and climate disaster, and offers a manifesto for the creative re-imagining of the places and spaces in which conversations about restructuring and reparation can become sustainable. This is an essential and compelling book for anyone committed to social justice, especially for all practitioners working in health, social care and community justice settings, and researchers and academics across the behavioural and social sciences.

What do we mean by the word imagination? Does it just refer to our powers of invention and ingenuity, or might it have a larger visionary scope and purpose? Might it be vital to a vital life? What about the creative process itself: how does it work, in what circumstances does it flourish, and what conditions hinder or repress its activity? These and related themes are explored, often in unexpected and provocative ways, in this inspirational collection of essays, poems and reflections.The book takes its title from the opening essay, The Gist of Arvon, in which John Moat reflects with characteristic humanity, vigour and wit on the wider implications of the original vision and sense of purpose, which he shared with his close friend, the late John Fairfax, when they set up the Arvon Foundation together more than forty years ago.John's piece is followed by those of the contributing authors, who approach the issues from a stimulating variety of perspectives. Thus, amongst other lively contributions, Seamus Heaney writes about the inspirational nature of haunting encounters, Alice Oswald reveals a poet's imagination in full flight across pages from her work-book, Carol Ann Duffy contributes poems she wrote while tutoring at Arvon Centres, and there are freshly written pieces by novelists such as Andrew Miller, Adam Thorpe and Maggie Gee, while Jules Cashford, Linda Proud and Patrick Harpur offer mythological and philosophical insights on the book's themes. The book has a Foreword by Andrew Motion, and reprints a fascinating essay in which Ted Hughes gave thought to the important educational significance of the work done at Arvon's Centres.Through its celebration of the imagination, The Gist seeks to bring encouragement and inspiration to anyone whose pulses are quickened by the urge to live a creative life.