First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures--communication, food, transportation, energy, and information--are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse. In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls "time regime of modernity" that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.

As bad as they are, why aren't terrorists worse? With biological, chemical and nuclear weapons at hand, they easily could be. Jessica Stern argues that the nuclear threat of the Cold War has been replaced by the more imminent threat of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

This book contains the first comprehensive history using extensive primary sources to trace the 1977 earthquake disaster response by the Ceauşescu communist regime, contextualizing its contribution to the public risk that remains in Romania's capital Bucharest. It traces a history of one authoritarian government’s disaster response linking its decisions and ultimate inactions to contemporary public risk. The book begins with a stand-alone chapter to introduce readers to twentieth-century Communist Romania and contextualize the Ceauşescu regime’s response. It provides insights into how Radio Free Europe filled the information vacuum, how the political police, the Securitate, worked as first responders, and how scientific experts debated the best course of action. It examines how the regime requested specific foreign assistance and activated its Securitate abroad to encourage such, prioritized restoration of the economy, and "encouraged" domestic cash and labor contributions in the name of recovery. The book examines how the disaster response abruptly ended, leaving thousands of structurally unsafe buildings. It explains the contemporary seismic risk and post-communist mitigation efforts to reduce it. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and policy-makers in the fields of history, disaster studies, urban planning, politics, and those interested in communist-era Romania, Europe, and Eurasia; totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.