{"title":"Books by Peter Conrad","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780500022993","title":"The Mysteries of Cinema","description":"People who saw the first moving pictures at the end of the nineteenth century were delighted by a new art that communicated without words – yet they were also alarmed to be witnessing events in a strange, mute, spectral realm, where the laws of time and space were suspended and magical transformations could occur. Some early commentators hailed cinema as a blessing and praised it for resurrecting the dead; others likened it to a hypnotic trance or a hallucinogenic drug. The medium has always been excited by speed, and it enjoys sending the body on furious kinetic chases; at the same time, it stealthily probes our minds, invading our dreams and titillating our desires. Although this is an art kindled by light and inflamed by colour, it is nurtured by darkness and can reduce life to an insubstantial shadow play. Either way, as Peter Conrad argues in this brilliant book, the movie camera has given us new eyes and changed forever our view of reality.          The Mysteries of Cinema sets out to map this ambiguous territory by taking readers on a thematic roller-coaster ride through movie history. Directors and critics speculate about the nature of cinematic vision, and there are contributions to the debate from writers like Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, artists including Salvador Dalí, George Grosz and Fernand Léger, and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich. The book begins from the audacious innovations of silent film, and examines the influence of French surrealism and German expressionism; it accounts for the appeal of Hollywood genres  like the Western, the horror film and the musical, and ends by considering the fate of the moving image in our visually glutted society.     Combining contagious enthusiasm with an eye for the subjective quirks of filmmakers and the allure of favourite performers, Conrad delivers an astonishing addition to the literature on the seventh art.    With 61 illustrations","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56290216280437,"sku":"9780500022993","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780500022993_1f96332e-5493-4a16-a341-1d410b03fe21.jpg?v=1786013423"},{"product_id":"9780500293546","title":"Mythomania","description":"Peter Conrad’s exhilarating book exposes the absurdity and occasional insanity of our godforsaken, demon-haunted contemporary culture. Conrad casts his brilliant beam upon subjects from the Queen to the Kardashians, via Banksy, Nando’s, vaping, the vogue of the cronut, the mushroom-like rise of Dubai, the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, the growth of the Pacific garbage patch... In Judge Judy, he shows us a matronly Roman goddess dispensing justice with a fly swatter. In the metamorphosis of Caitlyn Jenner from Olympic athlete and paterfamilias into idealized female form, he sees parallels to the deeds of the residents of Mount Olympus themselves. Finally, after surveying advances in biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, he asks whether we might be on the brink of a post-human world.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56291260793205,"sku":"9780500293546","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780500293546_ded06454-3c18-4d0b-84c4-8bdb279c6741.jpg?v=1786014031"},{"product_id":"9781098131890","title":"Identity–Native Infrastructure Access Management","description":"Traditional secret-based credentials can't scale to meet the complexity and size of cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Today's applications are spread across a diverse range of clouds and colocation facilities, as well as on-prem data centers. Each layer of this modern stack has its own attack vectors and protocols to consider.   How can you secure access to diverse infrastructure components, from bare metal to ephemeral containers, consistently and simply? In this practical book, authors Ev Kontsevoy, Sakshyam Shah, and Peter Conrad break this topic down into manageable pieces. You'll discover how different parts of the approach fit together in a way that enables engineering teams to build more secure applications without slowing down productivity.   With this book, you'll learn:The four pillars of access: connectivity, authentication, authorization, and auditWhy every attack follows the same pattern, and how to make this threat impossibleHow to implement identity-based access across your entire infrastructure with digital certificatesWhy it's time for secret-based credentials to go awayHow to securely connect to remote resources including servers, databases, K8s Pods, and internal applications such as Jenkins and GitLabAuthentication and authorization methods for gaining access to and permission for using protected resources","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56296249098613,"sku":"9781098131890","price":36.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781098131890_363d6f0b-c103-4e1e-b1fa-123db02fd38f.jpg?v=1786017270"},{"product_id":"9781399409193","title":"Dickens the Enchanter","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.' -- \u003ci\u003eSpectator World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Marvellous... the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton’s. -- A. N. Wilson, \u003ci\u003eThe Oldie\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSee Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad’s book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eDickens the Enchanter\u003c\/i\u003e takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to read him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682767020405,"sku":"9781399409209","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56298555605365,"sku":"9781399409193","price":22.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781399409209_d266e703-be65-4165-8dd4-3f7a42ab97c9.jpg?v=1792511635"},{"product_id":"the-medicalization-of-society","title":"The Medicalization of Society","description":"\u003cp\u003eOver the past half-century, the social terrain of health and illness has been transformed. What were once considered normal human events and common human problems--birth, aging, menopause, alcoholism, and obesity--are now viewed as medical conditions. For better or worse, medicine increasingly permeates aspects of daily life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBuilding on more than three decades of research, Peter Conrad explores the changing forces behind this trend with case studies of short stature, social anxiety, \"male menopause,\" erectile dysfunction, adult ADHD, and sexual orientation. He examines the emergence of and changes in medicalization, the consequences of the expanding medical domain, and the implications for health and society. He finds in recent developments--such as the growing number of possible diagnoses and biomedical enhancements--the future direction of medicalization.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConrad contends that the impact of medical professionals on medicalization has diminished. Instead, the pharmaceutical and biotechnical industries, insurance companies and HMOs, and the patient as consumer have become the major forces promoting medicalization. This thought-provoking study offers valuable insight into not only how medicalization got to this point but also how it may continue to evolve.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481470771573,"sku":"9780801885853","price":24.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780801885853.jpg?v=1786089733"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-peter-conrad.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}