One of the most common complaints parents hear is that their child has great potential but is lazy. In the workplace one hears that a colleague is brilliant but just can't seem to deliver on time. Dr Levine believes that in reality very few people are truly lazy. Nearly all 'lazy' children and unproductive adults are in fact suffering from some sort of 'output failure,' that is, some problem of the mind that inhibits their productivity, despite their good intentions. In this book Dr Levine draws heavily on his years of clinical experience to construct the stories of representative children and adults who failed to be productive for the most common reasons. Too often we focus only on failure but people benefit enormously from recognition of their successes. In explaining outside or environmental factors that can affect productivity, Dr Levine points to the role of parents as well as teachers in identifying a child's weaknesses and nurturing the capacity to deliver, with such practical suggestions as describing the ideal study environment for a child. Whether the problem is manifested in motor breakdown, memory shortfall, verbal problems, lack of mental energy or underlying disorganization, Dr Levine provides a workable solution and dismisses the 'lazy' label.

A social psychologist uncovers the psychological basis of the "laziness lie," which originated with the Puritans and has ultimately created blurred boundaries between work and life with modern technologies and offers advice for not succumbing to societal pressure to "do more."

When people cannot find good work, can they still find good lives? By investigating this question in the context of South Africa, where only 43 percent of adults are employed, Christine Jeske invites readers to examine their own assumptions about how work and the good life do or do not coincide. The Laziness Myth challenges the widespread premise that hard work determines success by tracing the titular "laziness myth," a persistent narrative that disguises the systems and structures that produce inequalities while blaming unemployment and other social ills on the so-called laziness of particular class, racial, and ethnic groups. Jeske offers evidence of the laziness myth's harsh consequences, as well as insights into how to challenge it with other South African narratives of a good life. In contexts as diverse as rapping in a library, manufacturing leather shoes, weed-whacking neighbors' yards, negotiating marriage plans, and sharing water taps, the people described in this book will stimulate discussion on creative possibilities for seeking the good life in and out of employment, in South Africa and elsewhere.

'Different minds learn differently' writes Dr Mel Levine, one of the best-known education experts and paediatricians in America today. And that's a problem for many children, because most schools still cling to a one-size-fits-all education philosophy. In A MIND AT A TIME, Dr Levine shows parents and others who care for children how to identify these individual learning patterns. He explains how parents and teachers can encourage a child's strengths and bypass the child's weaknesses. This type of teaching produces satisfaction and achievement instead of frustration and failure. Different brains are differently wired with eight fundamental systems of learning that draw on a variety of neurodevelopmental capacities. Certain students are strong in certain areas and some are strong in others, but no one is equally capable in all eight. Learning begins at school, but it doesn't end there. Frustrating a child's desire to learn will have lifelong repercussions. We must begin to pay more attention to individual learning styles, to individual minds, urges Dr Levine, so that we can maximise our children's learning potential. A MIND AT A TIME shows us how.

The Myth of the Lazy Native is Syed Hussein Alatas’ widely acknowledged critique of the colonial construction of Malay, Filipino and Javanese natives from the 16th to the 20th century. Drawing on the work of Karl Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge, Alatas analyses the origins and functions of such myths in the creation and reinforcement of colonial ideology and capitalism. The book constitutes in his own words: ‘an effort to correct a one-sided colonial view of the Asian native and his society’ and will be of interest to students and scholars of colonialism, post-colonialism, sociology and South East Asian Studies.

How stigma derails well-intentioned public health efforts, creating suffering and worsening inequalities. 2020 Winner, Society for Anthropological Sciences Carol R. Ember Book Prize,Shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize Stigma is a dehumanizing process, where shaming and blaming are embedded in our beliefs about who does and does not have value within society. In Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting, medical anthropologists Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich explore a darker side of public health: that well-intentioned public health campaigns can create new and damaging stigma, even when they are otherwise successful. Brewis and Wutich present a novel, synthetic argument about how stigmas act as a massive driver of global disease and suffering, killing or sickening billions every year. They focus on three of the most complex, difficult-to-fix global health efforts: bringing sanitation to all, treating mental illness, and preventing obesity. They explain how and why humans so readily stigmatize, how this derails ongoing public health efforts, and why this process invariably hurts people who are already at risk. They also explore how new stigmas enter global health so easily and consider why destigmatization is so very difficult. Finally, the book offers potential solutions that may be able to prevent, challenge, and fix stigma. Stigma elimination, Brewis and Wutich conclude, must be recognized as a necessary and core component of all global health efforts. Drawing on the authors' keen observations and decades of fieldwork, Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting combines a wide array of ethnographic evidence from around the globe to demonstrate conclusively how stigma undermines global health's basic goals to create both health and justice.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter spends a year sharing the lives of two "welfare mothers" in Philadelphia, offering an emphatic but unsentimental look at those who rely on the patchwork of federal programs.