Best Selling Books by Mike Rowe

Emmy-award winning gadfly Rowe presents a ridiculously entertaining, seriously fascinating collection of his favorite episodes from America''s #1 short-form podcast, The Way I Heard It, along with a host of memories, ruminations, illustrations, and insights.

Over recent years race has become one of the most important issues faced by the police. This book seeks to analyse the context and background to these changes, to assess the impact of the Lawrence Inquiry and the MacPherson Report, and to trace the growing emphasis on policing as an ''antiracist'' activity, proactively confronting racism in both crime and non-crime situations. Whilst this change has not been wholly or consistently applied, it does represent an important change in the discourse that surrounds police relations with the public since it changes the traditional role of the police as ''neutral arbiters of the law''. This book shows why race has become the most significant issue facing the British police, and argues that the police response to race has led to a consideration of fundamental issues about the relation of the police to society as a whole and not just minority groups who might be most directly affected.

Drawing on six years of ethnographic research, this book critically examines police culture, exploring police behaviours, decisionmaking and actions. Police culture is a concept widely used, often critically, to characterise the working attitudes and behaviours of (usually uniformed) police officers. It is shorthand for a workplace imbued with machismo, racism, sexism, a thirst for danger and excitement, cynicism and conservatism. Rather than looking for culture or identifying how culture affects behaviours, this book identifies factors that influence the decisions and actions, including technology, targets, training, timing, intelligence, geography and supervision, thus reassembling police culture much as Bruno Latour sought to reassemble the social. The analysis develops a clearer and critical understanding of culture by explicitly connecting the debates about police culture to those about organisational culture. Offering a detailed ethnography of two shifts, it grounds the analysis of the idea of police culture in a ''thick description'' of the day- to- day activities observed in the police station and the patrol car, rather than using brief illustrative extracts. The book dispenses with any assumption of the utility of the concept of police culture, not least because it is opaque, and reassembles our understanding of policing and, if it retains any relevance, of police culture. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of policing, criminology, sociology, law, politics and all those interested in the day- to- day lives of police officers.

Chicago has always had a reputation as a "wide open town" with a high tolerance for gangsters, illegal liquor, and crooked politicians. It has also been the home for countless black musicians and the birthplace of a distinctly urban blues-more sophisticated, cynical, and street-smart than the anguished songs of the Mississippi delta--a music called the Chicago blues. This is the history of that music and the dozens of black artists who congregated on the South and Near West Sides. Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin'' Wolf, Elmore James, Tampa Red, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Wells, Eddie Taylor--all of these giants played throughout the city and created a musical style that had imitators and influence all over the world.

Your job is not your vocation. Everyone hungers for work that has meaning and purpose. But what gives work meaning? Vocation, or "calling," is the answer Protestant Christianity offers: each person is called by God to serve the common good in a particular line of work. Your vocation, evidently, might be almost anything: as a nurse, a wilderness guide, a calligrapher, a missionary, an activist, a venture capitalist, a politician, an executioner... Yet, as Will Willimon writes in this issue, the New Testament knows only one form of vocation: discipleship. And discipleship is far more likely to mean leaving father and mother, houses and land, than it is to mean embracing one''s identity as a fisherman or tax collector. This issue of Plough focuses on people who lived their lives with that sense of vocation. Such a life demands self-sacrifice and a willingness to recognize one''s own supposed strengths as weaknesses, as it did for the Canadian philosopher Jean Vanier. It involves a lifelong commitment to a flesh-and-blood church, as Coptic Archbishop Angaelos describes. It may even require a readiness to give up one''s life, as it did for Annalena Tonelli, an Italian humanitarian who pioneered the treatment of tuberculosis in the Horn of Africa. But as these stories also testify, it brings a gladness deeper than any self-chosen path. Also in this issue: - Scott Beauchamp on mercenaries - Nathan Schneider on cryptocurrencies - Stephanie Saldaña on Syrian refugee art - Peter Biles on loneliness at college - Phil Christman on Bible translation - Michael Brendan Dougherty on fatherhood - Insights on vocation from C. S. Lewis, Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother Teresa, Eberhard Arnold, Dorothy Sayers, Jean Vanier, and Gerard Manley Hopkins - poetry by Devon Balwit and Carl Sandburg - reviews of books by Robert Alter, Edwidge Danticat, Matthew D. Hockenos, Amy Waldman, and Jeremy Courtney - art and photography by Pola Rader, Dean Mitchell, Mark Freear, Timothy Jones, Paweł Filipczak, Mary Pal, Harley Manifold, Sami Lalu Jahola, Marc Chagall, and Russell Bain. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus'' message into practice and find common cause with others.

Police Street Powers and Criminal Justice analyses the utilisation, regulation and legitimacy of police powers. Drawing upon six-years of ethnographic research in two police forces in England, this book uncovers the importance of time and place, supervision and monitoring, local policies and law. Covering a period when the police were under intense scrutiny and subject to austerity measures, the authors contend that the concept of police culture does not help us understand police discretion. They argue that change is a dominant feature of policing and identify fragmented responses to law and policy reform, varying between police stations, across different policing roles, and between senior and frontline ranks.

The Social Fund relies on officials to judge the merits of applications for assistance within a closely circumscribed framework of directions and guidance. Variations in the treatment of cases are inevitable in such a framework. However, the variations are not readily explicable in terms of the circumstances, or needs, of the applicants. This article outlines the complex interplay of financial constraints, management targets and other pressures, describing a system akin to a game in which not all rules are known to all players, producing results that could not have been intended.

In the late 1820s, when British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel introduced legislation into the British parliament to create the very first police department, the phrase that the ''police are the public, and the public are the police'' was developed to allay public fears that the new institution would become an oppressive army of an overmighty central state. Unwittingly perhaps, this set the stage for efforts to create modern day police departments that are inclusive of the general community and reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the wider population.Further to this founding principle, in many countries, the need to recruit a more ethnically and racially diverse police service has been a pressing concern for several decades. Although this imperative is regarded as a core task for police services in liberal democratic countries with a common law tradition, it is worth noting that this aspect of the ''diversity agenda'' has not been confined to such contexts. Indeed a more diverse pattern of recruitment has been sought by police services in imperialist and segregated societies too.