Bøker av Esther Leslie

This book provides a history of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a large Britain- based chemical firm which was a major industrial player in the twentieth century. Once a model for Britain's industrial reach and dominance, ICI collapsed in the mid-2000s, with some still profitable elements sold off to other chemical firms. The book focuses on the firm's origin site in the Northeast of England, around Middlesbrough, engaging the remnants of the company magazine, oral histories and social media posts, and material artifacts in the world, to relate a history of the social, environmental, cultural and imaginative and bodily impact of the presence (and then absence) of ICI. This unique work is open to coincidence and speculation, drawing on science fictional and urban myth narratives which emanate from the area. Through the lens of global narratives of industrial and philosophical innovation, it inquires into uncommon and diverse themes, such as the manufacture of Quorn, the place of photographic mediation of the factory, and industrial disease. Setting out from a context of heavy industry and material processing, the book seeks to stimulate poetic and creative thinking around the ways in which people's lives were enmeshed with synthetic chemicals and the dreams that seemed to ooze and seep from them as by-products.

Mad Pride is set to become the first great civil liberties movement of the 21st century. Sick of discrimination, marginalisation, medication and being treated like shit, psychiatric patients are preparing to rise from the ghettos and make the world a fit place to live in. Featuring 24 authors - including Nick Blinko, Luther Blissett, Chris P and Fatma Durmush - boasting about the wild things they've done when they've been losing it and sharing their accounts of liberation through madness, this collection celebrates madness in all its forms as a means to all-out social revolution. Tough, uncompromising, subversive and very funny, this is a book that no one in their right mind will read. It reveals that madness, normally considered an unglamorous subject, is in fact all about sex, drugs, and rock n roll!

New in the Critical Lives series, this is the first new biography of Walter Benjamin in more than a decade.

Esther Leslie's path-breaking study of Walter Benjamin is unlike any other book presently available in English on Benjamin, in seeking to make a case for a more politicised reading of Benjamin's oeuvre. In looking at the entirety of Benjamin's work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin 'canon' - Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker, correcting the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship, and repositioning Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. *BR**BR*In her examination of Benjamin's commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin's work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie re-contextualises Benjamin's writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.