Since independence in 1960, Nigeria’s successor leaderships and the private sector manifestly failed to dispense good governance and corporate social responsibility. Both sectors, tacitly aided by foreign institutions and corporations have perverted the ends of government and justice. Ergo, in Barbarism to Decadence, Abudu Rasheed “Richard” Oki offers an encompassing but cursory evaluation of each successor corrupting maladministration, participatory industry roles, and systemic debaucheries, along with the vast derivative adverse impacts on the citizenry. Through research, eyewitness accounts, personal experience, etc., the book presents an assessment of the devastating decades of adventitious effects of otherworldly corruption on the nation, and a look at the overall septic effects of the vice on the rest of other black African nations. Ab initio, it delves in on characteristic fractious leaderships; past immiserating military decades; compromised judiciary/law enforcement; fraudulent elections; decrepit power supply and infrastructure; human health and educational fetidness, duplicitous and complicit local and international media; natural resource curse and colossal environmental pollution; modern-day religious chicanery and radicalized Islamic terrorism; elites’ otherworldly and authoritative brigandage; and ever-present suffocating misfeasance and malfeasance in the private sector. There are also the overall, undermining roles from overseas nations, institutions, and corporations; and, sui generis, China’s hegemonic role. These are part of vast interrelated factors that hermetically immure and immolate her lumpen masses in the bonds of anomie. That correlative societal demise is portrayed in marasmus and spectral looks, along with mass spiritual and mental atrophies. Yet her affluent minority and foreign expropriation of its raw wealth and assets remain at exhilarating boil. The grim hard facts and figures indicate that Nigeria absolutely needs to be set on the right path for the long-term needs of her marred population. Meanwhile, the masses intrinsically remain restive with brutish thoughts, here and there. To wit, the crystallization of that armed mass revolutionary mettle should never be discounted in her future. So, the book provides crosscurrents, and propounds on ways to sustainably adjust her venal course mainstream. Pithily, it seeks to provide a clarion call to jettison present, and block future, serially rogue leaderships for the summum bonum.

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

The Barbaric Triumph examines all aspects of the life and work of Robert E. Howard -- the originator of the sword-&-sorcery antasy genre and the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Featured are essays by Leo Grin, Edwrad A. Waterman, Charles Hoffman, Paul Spencer, Mark Finn, Steven R. Trout, Lauric Guillaud, Scott Connors, George Knight, Don Herron, and more. From the phantoms of Hate simmering beneath Howard's blood-drenched prose to Howard's lifelong interest in philosophy, from Howard's visionary use of the American Frontier Myth to his tales of boxing, The Barbaric Triumph builds on the pioneering research of Heron's previous book on Howard, The Dark Barbarian and takes it to new levels.

The Barbaric Triumph examines all aspects of the life and work of Robert E. Howard -- the originator of the sword-&-sorcery antasy genre and the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Featured are essays by Leo Grin, Edwrad A. Waterman, Charles Hoffman, Paul Spencer, Mark Finn, Steven R. Trout, Lauric Guillaud, Scott Connors, George Knight, Don Herron, and more. From the phantoms of Hate simmering beneath Howard's blood-drenched prose to Howard's lifelong interest in philosophy, from Howard's visionary use of the American Frontier Myth to his tales of boxing, The Barbaric Triumph builds on the pioneering research of Heron's previous book on Howard, The Dark Barbarian and takes it to new levels.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a common mind-set emerged among many intellectuals--"la decadence." Many novels and novellas of the period were populated with protagonists who were fragile, refined, self-absorbed, and preoccupied with a trivially exquisite aesthetic. A Baedeker of Decadence presents thirty-two international works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon. Schoolfield tracks down the symptoms of decadence in narrative works written in more than a dozen languages, providing synopses and passages in English translation to give a sense of each author's style and tone. Schoolfield throws new light on the close intellectual kinship of authors from August Strindberg to Bram Stoker to Thomas Mann, and on the ingredients, themes, motifs, and preconceptions that characterized decadent literature.

Lively and well written, Bread and Circuses analyzes theories that have treated mass culture as either a symptom or a cause of social decadence. Discussing many of the most influential and representative theories of mass culture, it ranges widely from Greek and Roman origins, through Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and the theorists of the Frankfurt Institute, down to Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Bell, Brantlinger considers the many versions of negative classicism and shows how the belief in the historical inevitability of social decay—a belief today perpetuated by the mass media themselves—has become the dominant view of mass culture in our time. While not defending mass culture in its present form, Brantlinger argues that the view of culture implicit in negative classicism obscures the question of how the media can best be used to help achieve freedom and enlightenment on a truly democratic basis.

"Civilization" is a constantly invoked term. It is used by both politicians and scholars. How useful, in fact, is this term? Civilization and Its Contents traces the origins of the concept in the eighteenth century. It shows its use as a colonial ideology, and then as a support for racism. The term was extended to a dead society, Egyptian civilization, and was appropriated by Japan, China, and Islamic countries. This latter development lays the groundwork for the contemporary call for a "dialogue of civilizations." The author proposes instead that today the use of the term "civilization" has a global meaning, with local variants recognized as cultures. It may be more appropriate, however, to abandon the name "civilization" and to focus on a new understanding of the civilizing process.

Decadence and Literature explains how the concept of decadence developed since Roman times into a major cultural trope with broad explanatory power. No longer just a term of opprobrium for mannered art or immoral behaviour, decadence today describes complex cultural and social responses to modernity in all its forms. From the Roman emperor's indulgence in luxurious excess as both personal vice and political control, to the Enlightenment libertine's rational pursuit of hedonism, to the nineteenth-century dandy's simultaneous delight and distaste with modern urban life, decadence has emerged as a way of taking cultural stock of major social changes. These changes include the role of women in forms of artistic expression and social participation formerly reserved for men, as well as the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ relationships, a development with a direct relationship to decadence. Today, decadence seems more important than ever to an informed understanding of contemporary anxieties and uncertainties.

Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

In Oscar Wilde, the words and wit of the 19t h century author, poet and playwright demonstrate his keen o bservation and analysis of the society in which he lived. '