By Sophy Roberts

From acclaimed journalist Sophy Roberts, a journey through one of the harshest landscapes on earth―where music reveals the deep humanity and the rich history of Siberia

Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell.

Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos―grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood.

How these pianos traveled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia is largely a story of music in this fascinating place, fol-lowing Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of different instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful―and peppered with pianos.

NY. Grove Press. 2020. 410p.

By Adrian Goldsworthy

The complete and definitive history of how Roman generals carved out the greatest and longest-lasting empire the world has ever seen. The Roman army was one of the most effective fighting forces in history. The legions and their commanders carved out an empire which eventually included the greater part of the known world. This was thanks largely to the generals who led the Roman army to victory after victory, and whose strategic and tactical decisions shaped the course of several centuries of warfare. This book, by the author of THE PUNIC WARS, concentrates on those Roman generals who displayed exceptional gifts of leadership and who won the greatest victories. With 26 chapters covering the entire span of the Roman Empire, it is a complete history of Roman warfare.

London. Phoenix. 2014. 464p.

By Russell Martin

The basis for the movie of the same name, an astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels–from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.

When Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer, snipping a lock of Beethoven’s hair as a keepsake–as was custom at the time–in the process. For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews.

After Fremming’s death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby’s, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer’s chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence.

In Beethoven’s Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, a tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.

NY. Broadway Books. 2000. 276p.

By Mary Beard

In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.

New York. Liveright Publishing. 2015. 606p.

By Waziri B Adisa, Tunde A Alabi taalabi@unilag.edu.ng, and Samuel O Adejoh

Violence or its threats have been a part of many African cities since the end of the Cold War, when many African countries transitioned from military to civilian rule. While the incidence of organised crime and violent victimisation of innocent citizens is not new to many West African cities, the emergence of terrorist organisations, armed bandits, kidnappers and armed gangs in a city like Lagos has created new security challenges. The challenges include the inability of the government to cope with the rising number of young people in organised cult clashes and the threats to peace and stability in Lagos metropolis. This study is designed to investigate the influence of socio-demographic (senatorial district, gender, age, ethnic group, marital status, education, employment, duration of residency and type of apartment) and community factors (presence of nightclubs/hotels, use of private security and frequency of police patrol) on residents’ experience of crime victimisation, robbery and organised crime. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design and a quantitative method of data collection. A structured questionnaire was used to elicit information from 300 respondents across three senatorial districts of Lagos State. The study found that factors such as location, type of apartment, nightclubbing, duration of residence, employment status and use of private security predicted at least one of the three dependent variables. The implications of the findings are discussed.

International Review of Victimology Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 69-91

By The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Transnational organized crime in the West African region must be regarded as an issue of growing concern. In order to highlight the problem, an overview of the development of the phenomenon in five countries of the region—Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone—is provided, tracing both its extent as well as the range of illicit activities that are engaged in. These are diverse and include: drug trafficking, advanced fee and Internet fraud, human trafficking, diamond smuggling, forgery, cigarette smuggling, illegal manufacture of firearms, trafficking in firearms, armed robbery and the theft and smuggling of oil. A number of challenges present themselves in providing an accurate picture of transnational organized crime in West Africa, including the difficulty of gathering reliable information on essentially hidden practices. Having regard to these, the project used consultants in each of the five countries to collect information based on detailed guidelines, including the collection of data on three criminal groups engaged in transnational activities. This, combined with a review of the available secondary literature as well as other inputs, forms the basis for the information presented. Any analysis of organized crime in the region must take into account the specific historical context and socio-economic conditions that have given rise to it. The report traces the historical development of organized crime, examining the broad socio-economic and political context that has made the region particularly vulnerable. These include: the difficult economic circumstances characteristic of the last decades, civil war, state weakness, as well as specific conditions conducive to corrupt practices. The degree to which some forms of organized criminal activity are simply accepted as normal “business” activities by their perpetrators is underscored. The report provides an explanation for the specific modes of operation of West African criminal groups, highlighting in particular their very loose and networked structures. Such structures resemble those for small legal business operations in the region, built as they are on close family and community ties. Although press reports sometimes refer to “drug barons” or “mafias” in the region there is no evidence of West African drug cartels in the sense of hierarchical, permanent and corporate-like structures.

Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2005. 48p

By Simone Haysom and Ken Opala

Since the 1990s, organized criminal gangs have assumed larger and larger roles in Kenyan urban spaces. Nearly 30 years later, the gang phenomenon is tied to the most pressing issues facing Kenya: violence and ethnic polarization, corruption at national and sub-national levels, and security-services abuses. The role of violent and coercive groups has become so widespread in Kenyan cities that they even determine the cost and provision of urban services, and they are now so entrenched in politics that aspiring candidates consider it impractical to enter the game without funding gangs of their own. Though the Kenyan state acknowledges the serious impact of gang activities, its interventions to address the problem have only contained the phenomenon for brief periods before it flares up again. The objectives of this report are to describe the conditions that allow criminal gangs to be so resilient and powerful. It also aims to understand the drivers of their engagement with the urban economy, and the obstacles to more effective handling of the problem by the state and communities. Ultimately, this report argues that it is relationships of protection and patronage between gangs and politicians that allow gangs to flourish and undermine the state response to the problem. The degree to which this is the case is particularly pronounced in Kenya and is one of the defining characteristics of its gang world. However, this phenomenon is not unique to Kenya. In many parts of the world, organized crime has a relationship with political power, which is typically highly collaborative. Over the past decade, the use of criminal gangs to mobilize voters or intimidate rivals’ supporters has been documented in countries such as the Philippines, El Salvador, Nepal, Guyana and Jamaica. Many classic criminological studies also point out not only how organized criminal networks flourish during political transitions, but also how they play important roles in state formation.2 This role is always dysfunctional, and these relationships undermine democracy and the prospects for effective governance.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime

2020. 68p.

Edited with Introduction, Biographical Sketch and Notes by Roger N. Baldwin

From the introduction:” Kropotkin's confidence in the capacity of mankind to achieve such a socicty may seem naive. But evidence is not lacking, even in this violent and confused era, to sustain a belief in it. Personal freedom, voluntary association, and democratic control of power are still vital forces in political thought and practical struggles.”

NY. Dover. 1970. 137p.

Edited By Sean E. Anderson and Gregory J. Howard

When ti first appeared in 1993, the Journalof CriminalJustice and Popular Culture was breaking ground in more ways than one. At that point,the idea of electronicpublication was still innovative in itself, but more adventurous still was the whole notion of a serious academic journal devotedto the interaction of criminal justice and popular culture. Historically, criminologists and criminal justice scholars had usually viewed themselves a s objective social scientists whose highest goal was to analyze the problems of crime and deviance in terms of rigorous quantitative or qualitative research, which often meant denouncing the vulgarand harmfulmyths presented by the m e d i aa n dpopular culture. From the 1970s, however, newer scholarship, influenced by media research and particularly the cultural studies movement, showed how impos- sible it was to frame problems without paying due attention to the role of popular culture, which performed s o crucial a role in shaping the social and political attitudes not merely of the "uninformed masses," but also of legisla- tors, experts and policymakers.

Harrow and Heston Publishers Guilderland. New York. 1998. 144p.

By Shirley Hazzard

From the introduction: “Nations from time to time assume that it is allowable and inevitable for them to fall upon each other on some pretext or other.“ So the historian Jakob Burckhardt wrote, more than a century ago, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War—warning that “the most ominous thing is not the pre­sent war, but the era of wars upon which we have entered.” In the same fateful year of 1870, Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: “Within a century, shall we see millions of men kill each other at one go?* The acceleration and inco­herence of social and economic change, the transformations wrought by scientific discovery, the growth of populations, and of their enfranchised discontent—all these raised, in the minds of reflective men and women, a sense of moving toward some dread culmination, propelled by factors never before present in human etpcrience. Over these apprehen­sions, the discrepancy between the narrow thinking of states­men and the huge scale of the mounting crisis cast—as it does today—the shadow of a prodigious incongruity.”

NY. Viking Penguin. 1990. 196p.

By Julia Davidson, et al.

By Julia Davidson, et al.

The development of email and social media platforms has changed the way in which people interact with each other. The open sharing of personal data in public forums has resulted in online harassment in its many forms becoming increasingly problematic. The number of people having negative online experiences is increasing, with close to half of adult internet users reporting having seen hateful content online in the past year.

London: University of East London, 2019. 138p.

By William Allchorn

Over the past few years, North America, particularly the US, has become a focal point for practitioners and researchers studying the radical right. Given the recent rise in white supremacist violence (see the green portion of Figure 1), policymakers are more aware of the urgency of the threat posed by radical right violent extremism, as reflected in a shift in priorities away from overwhelming focus upon religiously inspired extremism. For example, in September 2019, the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS) named white supremacist violent extremists as part of “an evolving domestic threat.” On 5 April 2020, the Russian Imperial Movement was listed as a ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ group by the US State Department, the first time a white supremacist group was placed on this list. This shift in policy is compounded by the rise of transnational, digitally-anchored, radical right ‘accelerationist’ organisations founded and operating on behalf of an American constituency, such as Atomwaffen Division and the Base, with the leader of the latter apparently also based in Russia.

Abu Dhabi - United Arab Emirates:  Hedayah and Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, 2021. 66p.

By The Council on American-Islamic Relations

Anti-Muslim bigotry is a common and widespread feature of our country’s mainstream cultural and political landscape. However, it is important to remember that Islamophobic attitudes and policies are propagated by special interest groups with deep sources of funding. This decentralized group of actors is known as the Islamophobia Network, a close-knit family of organizations and individuals that share an ideology of extreme anti-Muslim animus, and work with one another to negatively influence public opinion and government policy about Muslims and Islam.

To provide a better understanding of how the Islamophobia Network operates, CAIR’s Islamophobia report Hijacked by Hate maps the flow of funding from charitable organizations to anti-Muslim special interest groups, and their destructive impact on public life.

Hijacked by Hate finds that the Islamophobia Network has been drawing upon mainstream American philanthropic institutions for financial and political support for years. CAIR researchers have found 1,096 organizations responsible for funding 39 groups in the Islamophobia Network between 2014 and 2016. The report also reveals the total revenue capacity of the Islamophobia Network during this period to reach at least $1.5 billion. This money has been channeled into politics, media, law enforcement, educational institutions, lobbying groups, and a whole assortment of industries to advance anti-Muslim and anti-Islam animus in America.

Philadelphia: Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 2019. 152p

By Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson

This report presents National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data on hate crime victimizations from 2005 to 2019. Hate crimes in the NCVS include violent and property crimes that the victim perceived to be motivated by bias against the victim's race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or religion. It includes crimes reported and not reported to police. The report examines the number of hate crimes over time, characteristics of hate crimes, perceived bias motivations for these hate crimes, reporting to police and reasons hate crimes were not reported, and demographic characteristics of victims and offenders

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021. 24p.

By Derya Iner  

The third Islamophobia in Australia report has been sourced from Australia-based Islamophobic incidents reported to the Islamophobia Register Australia (IRA) by victims, proxies and witnesses during 2018 and 2019. The IRA is the first of its kind in Australia to provide a unique platform for Islamophobic incidents to be reported, recorded and analysed to produce research reports in collaboration with Charles Sturt University’s Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation (CISAC). Report Objectives The overarching aims of the Islamophobia research reports are to raise public awareness about the increasing and normalising of Islamophobia in the Australian context and inspire academics, policymakers and the public to take action in their respective roles and areas to counter Islamophobia for a better, socially inclusive Australia. Like all forms of hate, Islamophobia contributes to entrenching a hate culture in society, which upsets liberal democracies, civic rights and the Australian way of life that is symbolised with mateship and “fair go” understanding. Populist far-right groups also use Islamophobia as permitted hate (Poynting and Perry 2006) and a legitimised gateway to sow divisive ideologies, eventually affecting other minority groups and the spirit of democratic and equitable involvement for all.   

Bathurst Australia: Charles Sturt University, 2022. 160p.

By Tim Squirrell and Clara Martiny

E-commerce sites have attracted controversy in isolated incidents for over a decade, being forced to delist merchandise highlighted by media for being egregiously insensitive or hateful. As a result, these merchandise platforms have for the most part developed relatively rigorous guidelines for what items can be sold on them.

ISD investigated five such platforms to determine to what extent these guidelines are being enforced, and whether merchandise platforms are facilitating the sale of, and profiting from, products that promote hate, extremism and harmful misinformation.

Etsy, Redbubble, Zazzle, Teespring and Teepublic each have revenues in the millions of dollars per year, providing infrastructure for independent creators and artists to sell their outputs. Etsy sells primarily handmade and vintage products, while the other four platforms are predominantly t-shirt stores, or ‘print-on-demand’, allowing buyers to choose materials (such as t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and posters) on which to print their chosen art.

In analyzing products sold across these platforms, ISD found a wide range of items promoting everything from harmful misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, to antisemitism and anti-LGBTQ+ hate, to neo-Nazi narratives and symbols. While there is evidence that these platforms are in many cases removing the most egregious and obvious forms of bigotry, it is still extremely simple to find and purchase hateful products across the full range of these platforms.

Policy recommendations for e-commerce platforms are provided, including expanding keyword lists to include coded language and references, three-strike rules for vendors of borderline items, and restricting adverts and sponsorship on controversial search terms.

Amman: Berlin: London: Paris: Washington DC ; institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2022. 40p.

United States. White House Office

From the Executive Summary: "The 2021 Presidential Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking charges OSTP to (1) review agency scientific integrity policy effectiveness and (2) to develop a framework for regular assessment and iterative improvement of agency scientific integrity policies and practices (Framework). This document builds on the review published in January 2022 by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) entitled 'Protecting the Integrity of Government Science', which identified good agency practices on scientific integrity and areas in need of consistency across agencies. This Framework includes key resources for agencies as they work to develop and improve scientific integrity policies, practices, and culture. The Framework reflects input from the interagency Scientific Integrity Task Force and other key Federal officials, and includes considerations from public input. [...] The goal of this Framework is to assist agencies across the Federal Government as they take next steps together to strengthen, implement, and institutionalize scientific integrity policy, practice, and culture. Figure 1 illustrates the process by which agencies can take to use the components of this Framework with the goal of making iterative improvements over time."

White House: www.whitehouse.gov/. 2023. 68p.

Edited by Tom Bottomore & Robert Nisbet

From the cover: This landmark contribution to the history of social thought, edited by two of the world’s leading sociologists, contains spe­cially commissioned contributions by seventeen internationally renowned scholars. These authoritative essays provide the most comprehensive account of the development of sociological anal­ysis available. “It will undoubtedly become the standard reference on the sub­ject.” “Generally excellent... a valuable contribution [which] can be read with profit both by diverse specialists and by students with little familiarity with the history of social thought."

NY. Basic Books. 1978. 715p. THIS BOOK CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Norman O. Brown

From the Preface: This study of the Greek god Hermes explores the hy­pothesis that the interrelation of Greek mythology and Greek history is much closer than has generally been recognized. Such a hypothesis seems almost inescap­able in the face of the radical transformation that the attributes and personality of Hermes underwent during the archaic period of Greek history. What I have sought to do here is to correlate these changes with the revo­lution in economic techniques, social organization, and modes of thought that took place in Athens between the Homeric age and the fifth century b.c. Such a cor­relation, I submit, casts new light on the mythology of Hermes, and especially on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.

NY. Vintage. 1947. 1969. 183p.

By Sonia Soul. Art by Michael Lacinere. Translation by Philip Kamp.

From the introduction: “.Intellect is the gift of the human race, the greatest and most enduring of all. This is the means by which it perceives, exists, creates and evolves, No matter haw extensive knowledge is, it has its limits. Intellect thirsts for fulfillment, to ceaselessly push these limits outward. Thus, people in that far-off period wanted to learn for they felt powerless and vulnerable in a world without bounds. They were deeply concerned with the beginning and the end and all the supernatural forces that could not be mastered. Through intellect, humanity came to fashion its view of the world. Utilizing the raw information from its immediate surroundings, it cultivated knowledge and experience, while imagination filled in the rest. Mankind had need of "Myth" because that was his own personal truth. His path in this increased his certitude about the world he had created around himelf. This is how we have come to accept the myth. In its conventional sense, that is, a narration that informs us about an older order of the world and explains it. The content of Greek mythology is not a simple matter. There is a practically endless series of accounts from various periods, and derivations on which  an  enormous classificatory endeavor has been expended and that is only the beginning. ...”

Athens. Techni. 1998. 118p.