The Electric Connection: Its Effects on Mind and Body

Michael Shallis

Explores our dangerous dependence on a force of nature we don’t really understand. “Natural electricity is generally a beneficent force, controlled as it is by magnetism. But the electricity that now pulses through our cables in our homes, offices and factories, beneath our feet and above our heads, has been unleashed from its magnetic bonds; even the electrical industries acknowledge that prolonged exposure is harmful. In our everyday lives it can make us ill; we can develop severe allergies to it. And in its purest, strongest form, in the computer world, it can influence our minds, alter our characters, and markedly affect our health—already physicians have recognized a painful and dangerous physical syndrome that attends intense and protracted work with a computer… And something even more threatening may happen: a change in consciousness and character that has already been observed may come to affect an important segment of humanity.” GR

Publisher: New Amsterdam
Hardback: 287 pages

Slavery in the Arab World

Murray Gordon

The slave trade in the Arab world antedated Mohammed and still exists in parts of Arab Africa today. This work presents the ideological underpinnings and the historical treatment of the slave in the Arab world. It also shows contrasts between slavery in the Arab world and in the Old South, and examines the factors that determined the status of slaves in the Islamic world. Sometimes these factors led to insurrections like the Baghdad Slave War (A.D. 880-894) and to the rise and fall of many Muslim kingdoms in Africa. That the relationship between the European powers and Muslim slave brokers led to an expansion of the slave trade is well-documented in this book. MET

Publisher: New Amsterdam
Paperback: 265 pages