"We’re going to build a wall.” Borders have been drawn since the beginning of time, but in recent years artificial barriers have become increasingly significant to the political conversation across the world. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States while promising to build a wall on the Mexico border, and in Europe, the international movements of migrants and refugees have sparked fierce discussion about whether and how countries should restrict access to their territory by erecting physical barriers. Virtual walls are also built and crushed at increasing speed. In the post-9/11 era there is a greater danger from so-called "transnational non-state actors”, and computer hacking and cyberterrorism threaten to overwhelm our technological barriers. In this timely and original book, Said Saddiki scrutinises the physical and virtual walls located in four continents, including Israel, India, the southern EU border, Morocco, and the proposed border wall between Mexico and the US. Saddiki’s detailed analysis explores the tensions between the rise of globalisation, which some have argued will lead to a "borderless world” and "the end of the nation-state”, and the rapid development in recent decades of border control systems. Saddiki examines both regular and irregular cross-border activities, including the flow of people, goods, ideas, drugs, weapons, capital, and information, and explores the disparities that are reflected by barriers to such activities. He considers the consequences of the construction of physical and virtual walls, including their impact on international relations and the rise of the multi-billion dollar security market. World of Walls: The Structure, Roles and Effectiveness of Separation Barriers is important reading for all those interested in the topics of immigration, border security, international relations, and policy.

The New York Times–bestselling author examines the borders that shape our world in “an incisive, meticulous survey of humanity’s physical barriers” (Booklist, starred review). The globe has always been a world of walls, from the Great Wall of China to Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall. But a new age of isolationism is upon us, as evidenced by Britain’s Brexit, and growing support for a US/Mexico border wall. China holds back Western culture with the great Firewall, while European countries erect barriers against immigrants, terrorism, and currency issues. In fact, more than a third of the world’s nation-states have barriers along their borders. In The Age of Walls, Tim Marshall examines how walls and borders have been shaping our political landscape for hundreds of years and how they figure in the diplomatic relations and geo-political events of today. Written in his brisk, inimitable style, he draws on his real life experiences as a reporter from hotspots around the globe, and provides an engaging context that is often missing from political discussion.

The first novel from the award-winning author of Brightness Falls from the Air, a writer “known for gender-bending, boundary-pushing work” (Tor.com). Up the Walls of the World is the 1978 debut novel of Alice Sheldon, who had built her reputation with the acclaimed short stories she published under the name James Tiptree Jr. A singular representation of American science fiction in its prime, Tiptree’s first novel expanded on the themes she addressed in her short fiction. “From telepathy to cosmology, from densely conceived psychological narrative to the broadest of sense-of-wonder revelations, the novel is something of a tour de force” (The Science Fiction Encyclopedia). Known as the Destroyer, a self-aware leviathan roams through space gobbling up star systems. In its path is the planet Tyree, populated by telepathic wind-dwelling aliens who are facing extinction. Meanwhile on Earth, people burdened with psi powers are part of a secret military experiment run by a drug-addicted doctor struggling with his own grief. These vulnerable humans soon become the target of the Tyrenni, whose only hope of survival is to take over their bodies and minds—an unspeakable crime in any other period of the aliens’ history . . . Praise for James Tiptree Jr. “[Tiptree] can show you the human in the alien and the alien in the human and make both utterly real.” —The Washington Post “Novels that deal with the mental gymnastics of superminds, or with concepts like eternity and infinity, are doomed to fall short of the mark. But Tiptree’s misses are more exciting than the bulls‐eyes of less ambitious authors.” —The New York Times

Traces the history of the Middle Ages through the lives of eight people representative of the period. Grades 7-9.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."— Hamlet After William Shakespeare's Horatio sees the ghost of Hamlet's father, and scarcely believes his own eyes, Hamlet tells him that there is more to reality than he can know or imagine, including ghosts. Hamlet's statement suggests that the walls of the material world, which we perceive with our senses and analyze with our intellects, have doors that open into the More beyond them. Philosopher Peter Kreeft explains in this book that the More includes "The Absolute Good, Platonic Forms, God, gods, angels, spirits, ghosts, souls, Brahman, Rta (the Hindu ontological basis for cosmological karma), Nirvana, Tao, 'the will of Heaven', The Meaning of It All, Something that deserves a capital letter." With razor-sharp reasoning and irrepressible joy, Kreeft helps us to find the doors in the walls of the world. Drawing on history, physical science, psychology, religion, philosophy, literature, and art, he invites us to welcome what lies on the other side so that we can begin living the life of Heaven in the here and now.

What does it mean to live against a wall? Travel to the world’s most disputed edges to meet the people who live alongside the razor wire, concrete, and steel and how the structure of the walls has influenced their lives. In this ambitious first person narrative, Marcello Di Cintio shares tea with Saharan refugees on the wrong side of Morocco’s desert wall. He meets with illegal Punjabi migrants who have circumvented the fencing around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. He visits fenced-in villages in northeast India, walks Arizona’s migrant trails, and travels to Palestinian villages to witness the protests against Israel’s security barrier. From Native American reservations on the U.S.-Mexico border and the “Great Wall of Montreal” to Cyprus’s divided capital and the Peace Lines of Belfast, Di Cintio seeks to understand what these structures say about those who build them and how they influence the cultures that they pen in. He learns that while every wall fails to accomplish what it was erected to achieve – the walls are never solutions – each wall succeeds at something else. Some walls define Us from Them with Medieval clarity. Some walls encourage fear or feed hate. Some walls steal. Others kill. And every wall inspires its own subversion, either by the infiltrators who dare to go over, under, or around them, or by the artists who transform them.

“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” (Library Journal)—walls—and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live. With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed—to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves—rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia's steppes; learn of bizarre Spartan rituals; watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes; witness the epic siege of Constantinople; chill at the fate of French explorers; marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line; tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin; gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty; and contemplate the wall mania of our own era. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “provocative, well-written, and—with walls rising everywhere on the planet—timely,” Walls gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them? Find out in this masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling.