First Hill Books

The memoir Academia, Chernobyl, Expeditions and The Greeks: A Research Psychologist on the Move recounts memorable experiences over the course of the author’s career as an academic psychologist engaged in research on stress and coping in extreme environments. The focus of the book is on the author’s personal experiences – the events, people, and the environment with its natural beauty or devastation encountered while conducting this research.

This book is a concise, comprehensive resource for readers facing the prospects of their own aging and of caring for elderly relatives―an often overwhelming task for which life rarely prepares us. It covers legal, financial, social, medical, and other aging challenges, offering abundant practical advice intertwined with engaging personal anecdotes.

This volume first explores the potential of machine translation of literature; goes on to explore possibilities for artificial literary creation; and finishes by assessing recent spectacular progress in generative artificial intelligence (AI) – throughout, with reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s hyperconscious literary art.

Becoming a Doctor is an intimate account of one person’s transformation from naïve student to professorial physician. Packed with unforgettable anecdotes and surprising insights, the book is far more than a memoir of medical education. Chapter by chapter, it exposes the challenging issues that doctors and patients face, such as medical authority, bedside empathy and the approach of death. This story is for anyone who, when seeing doctor, has wondered ‘How did you get to be that way?’

This book explores the interdisciplinary pathways that environmental psychologists have taken to become educators, researchers, and consultants in this highly applied and growing field. Individuals with backgrounds in architecture, urban planning, and geography, as well as in the health sciences (and beyond), describe how they discovered environmental psychology—and hope that others will follow.

Civilisation may be a Ponzi scheme but it doesn’t have to end.The challenge of increasingly scarce resources, environmental degradation and energy-hungry Artificial Intelligence are merely “locked” opportunities. Even challenging regions like the Middle East can turn challenges into opportunities; we can alltranscend scarcity-driven ‘Black Wars’ for resources like oil and water and towards a technology-led ‘Blue Peace’ of shared prosperity.

Autumn, 1914. As the generals take over from the politicians, and as both her husband and the man she loves fight on the front, Clara, a passionate young London wife, waits fearfully to see who will return from the fighting and what will become of her.  

The book examines and explains China’s increasingly significant impact on world affairs and global economics. It analyses China’s role in global power shifts, with China’s economic, political and technological evolution since 1990 as background, and assesses its position today and in the next decades, especially regarding its relationship with the other great power America.

This work is both a family history and a social history of Scotland with a focus on Edinburgh. 

This anthology consists of original compositions and arrangements as well as adaptations, arrangements and orchestrations of pre-existing compositions of Ron Westray, to date.

This course will examine Contemporary Black Urban Music and its historical development by tracing the evolution of soul and funk music into rap and hip-hop.

Every nation strives to build a creative, innovative economy, yet only a few achieve a genuine economic breakthrough. This is why such successes are called “economic miracles.” This book argues that there are no miracles: success depends on how a country’s social institutions are configured. It offers a step-by-step plan for setting them up effectively. Economic development does not have to be left to intuition or chance—it can be managed.