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The inspiring true story of David Nyuol Vincent, a Sudanese refugee who survived famine, wars and 17 years in refugee camps to build a new life in Australia. David Nyuol Vincent was a little boy when he fled southern Sudan with his father, as war raged in their country. He left behind his distraught mother and sisters, his village and his childhood. For months David and his father walked across southern Sudan, barefoot, desperately searching for safety, food and water. They survived the perilous Sahara Desert crossing into Ethiopia only to be separated. David was taken in and trained as a child soldier, surviving the next 17 years of his life alone in refugee camps. Life was a relentless str...
I Am Morbid tells the astounding story of David Vincent, former bassist and singer with Morbid Angel, and now outlaw-country performer and leader of the I Am Morbid supergroup. Written with the bestselling author Joel McIver, it’s an autobiography that transcends the heavy metal category by its very nature. Much more than a mere memoir, I Am Morbid is an instruction manual for life at the sharp end—a gathering of wisdom distilled into ten acute lessons for anyone interested in furthering their fortunes in life. Morbid Angel redefined the term pioneers. A band of heavy-metal-loving kids from all over America who broke through a host of music industry prejudices and went on to scale huge c...
Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perc...
Privacy: A Short History provides a vital historical account of an increasingly stressed sphere of human interaction. At a time when the death of privacy is widely proclaimed, distinguished historian, David Vincent, describes the evolution of the concept and practice of privacy from the Middle Ages to the present controversy over digital communication and state surveillance provoked by the revelations of Edward Snowden. Deploying a range of vivid primary material, he discusses the management of private information in the context of housing, outdoor spaces, religious observance, reading, diaries and autobiographies, correspondence, neighbours, gossip, surveillance, the public sphere and the s...
In 1750, half the population were unable to sign their names; by 1914 England, together with handful of advanced Western countries, had for the first time in history achieved a nominally literate society. This book seeks to understand how and why literacy spread into every interstice of English society, and what impact it had on the lives and minds of the common people.
First published in 1981, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom is a study of 142 working class autobiographies all of which cover some part of the period between 1790 and 1850. It is a full-scale examination of a form of source material that is significantly extensive. The book illustrates many aspects of ordinary working-class family life as well as the working-class pursuit of knowledge and literacy and the attempts of the middle-class educators to impose their notion of ‘useful knowledge.’ Dr. Vincent concludes with an assessment of the contribution of autobiography to nineteenth century working class history. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology and literature.
The Culture of Secrecy is the first comprehensive study of the restriction of official information in modern British history. It seeks to understand why secrets have been kept, and how systems of control have been constructed - and challenged - over the past hundred and sixty years. The authortranscends the conventional boundaries of political or social history in his wide-ranging diagnosis of the `British disease' - the legal forms and habits of mind which together have constituted the national tradition of discreet reserve. The chapters range across bureaucrats and ballots, gossip andgay rights, doctors and dole investigators in their exploration of the ethical basis of power in the public, professional, commercial and domestic spheres. Professor Vincent examines concepts such as privacy and confidentiality, honour and integrity, openness and freedom of expression, which haveserved as benchmarks in the development of the liberal state and society.
Despite 21st-century fears of an 'epidemic' of loneliness, its history has been neglected. This is the first book on the history of loneliness to be published in English.
This survey of crime in ENgland from the medieval period to the present day synthesizes case-study and local-level material and standardizes the debates and issues for the student reader.
A comprehensive text/reference for the operation and testing of infrared (IR) detectors. Includes formulas and examples for most laboratory applications. Covers detector types, radiometric concepts, test equipment, measurements and error analysis.