University of Chicago Press Books: New books

Between Reality and Dream

Margaret Richardson — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

K. G. Subramanyan is one of the most influential Indian artists, teachers, and theorists of the twentieth century. Born in 1924, Subramanyan has lived and worked during a transformative period in Indian history, one shaped by the contradictions of colonialism and nationalism, tradition and modernism, and indigenism and globalization. From 1950 to his retirement from teaching in 1989, he helped shape the aesthetic vision of the art departments at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda and the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. With great clarity, sensitivity, and wit, he continues to inspire generations of artists and scholars through his prolific writings, lectures, and art.

Between Reality and Dream is the first major study to examine the formation and significance of Subramanyan’s polymorphic aesthetic vision of art and culture within the context of modern India. It analyzes the many influences Subramanyan absorbed in India and abroad while elucidating his unique contributions to contemporary Indian art theory and practice. By providing both practical methods for artists and a visionary way of living, Subramanyan’s ideas have shaped the art scene in India for more than half a century.

This Strange Idea of the Beautiful

François Jullien; Krysztof Fijalkowski; Michael Richardson — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In This Strange Idea of the Beautiful, François Jullien explores what it means when we say something is beautiful. Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonly agreed upon definition of what is beautiful and offers a new way of beholding art.

Jullien argues that the Western concept of beauty was established by Greek philosophy and became consequently embedded within the very structure of European languages. And due to its relationship to language, this concept has determined ways of thinking about beauty that often go unnoticed or unchecked in discussions of Western aesthetics. Moreover, through globalization, Western ideals of beauty have even spread to cultures whose ancient traditions are based upon radically different aesthetic foundations; yet, these cultures have adopted such views without question and without recognizing the cultural assumptions they contain.

Looking specifically at how Chinese texts have been translated into Western languages, Jullien reveals how the traditional Chinese refusal to isolate or abstract beauty is obscured in translation in order to make the works more understandable to Western readers. Creating an engaging dialogue between Chinese and Western ideas, Jullien reasseses the essence of beauty.

Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays

Chiori Miyagawa — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The seven plays that comprise Chiori Miyagawa’s Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays explore themes of memory and identity.Her plays combine poetic language with harsh reality, and time and space are fluid in the worlds she creates—they converge and separate while the characters inhabit many dimensions at once with ease. In one way or another, the heroes and heroines of these plays are outsiders—emotionally (as in Awakening), physically (as in Comet Hunter) or socially (as in Broken Morning), and the line that separates life and death is thin.

In the title play, a woman in New York City begins to live in the world of a thousand-year-old Japanese memoir that she is reading. The characters in Leaving Eden enter, exit, and re-enter Anton Chekhov’s Russia from 1887 to 1904, only to end up at a wedding reception in 2005 in New York where Chekhov appears and takes a seat at a table. Inspired by the 1899 Kate Chopin novella of the same name, Awakening follows Edna in her journey toward death, through fragmented childhood memories and visions of freedom. Red Again, begins after Sophocles’s Antigone dies. She lands in Buddhist bardo, contemplating the history of human violence.

“Chiori Miyagawa adamantly refuses to provide those signposts that more comforting dramatists leave to reassure audiences. The force of her work lies in its jarring historical and cultural discontinuities, its mixture of brutality and beauty, its disorienting verbal and visual impact.”—Martin Harries, New York University

Jandavlattepa, Vol. I

Ladislav Stanco; Kazim Abdullaev — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Crime and Justice, Volume 40

Michael Tonry; Tapio Lappi-Seppälä — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cure.

Volume 40, Crime and Justice in Scandinavia, offers the most comprehensive and authoritative look ever available at criminal justice policies, practices, and research in the Nordic countries. Topics range from the history of violence through juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, and sentencing to controversial contemporary policies on prostitution, victims, and organized crime. Contributors to this volume include Jon-Gunnar Bernburg, Ville Hinkkanen, Cecilie Høigård, Hanns von Hofer, Charlotta Holmström, Janne Kivivuori, Lars Korsell, Tapio Lappi-Seppälä, Paul Larsson, Martti Lehti, Torkild Hovde Lyngstad, Sven-Axel Månsson, Anita Rönneling, Lise-Lotte Rytterbro, Torbjørn Skardhamar, May-Len Skilbrei, and Henrik Tham.

Healing Ground

John Huddleston — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In Healing Ground artist John Huddleston considers, in prose and photographs, a fertile landscape that has been continuously farmed for centuries. Here, the family farm endures bolstered by a new interest in local, sustainable food production.

With a democratic attention, Huddleston records agricultural cycles of life and death and the seasonal transformations of the fields. The landscape is dotted with Huddleston’s own sculptures, works composed from natural materials that reflect and comment on climate, geography, and agricultural practices.

Through these photographs and the accompanying essay by environmental leader Bill McKibben, Healing Ground affirms the beauty of a productive, working landscape.

Carson Pirie Scott

Joseph M. Siry — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Long recognized as a Chicago landmark, the Carson Pirie Scott Building also represents a milestone in the development of architecture. The last large commercial structure designed by Louis Sullivan, the Carson building reflected the culmination of the famed architect's career as a creator of tall steel buildings. In this study, Joseph Siry traces the origins of the building's design and analyzes its role in commercial, urban, and architectural history.

Museums Matter

James Cuno — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the Enlightenment, a manifestation of society’s growing belief that the spread of knowledge and the promotion of intellectual inquiry were crucial to human development and the future of a rational society. But in recent years, museums have been under attack, with critics arguing that they are little more than relics and promoters of imperialism. Could it be that the encyclopedic museum has outlived its usefulness?

With Museums Matter, James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, replies with a resounding “No!” He takes us on a brief tour of the modern museum, from the creation of the British Museum—the archetypal encyclopedic collection—to the present, when major museums host millions of visitors annually and play a major role in the cultural lives of their cities. Along the way, Cuno acknowledges the legitimate questions about the role of museums in nation-building and imperialism, but he argues strenuously that even a truly national museum like the Louvre can’t help but open visitors’ eyes and minds to the wide diversity of world cultures and the stunning art that is our common heritage. Engaging with thinkers such as Edward Said and Martha Nussbaum, and drawing on examples from the politics of India to the destruction of the Bramiyan Buddhas to the history of trade and travel, Cuno makes a case for the encyclopedic museum as a truly cosmopolitan institution, promoting tolerance, understanding, and a shared sense of history—values that are essential in our ever more globalized age.

Powerful, passionate, and to the point, Museums Matter is the product of a lifetime of working in and thinking about museums; no museumgoer should miss it.

Brush and the Pen

Dario Gamboni; Mary Whittall — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

French symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) seemed to thrive at the intersection of literature and art. Known as “the painter-writer,” he drew on the works of Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé for his subject matter. And yet he concluded that visual art has nothing to do with literature. Examining this apparent contradiction, The Brush and the Pen transforms the way we understand Redon’s career and brings to life the interaction between writers and artists in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Dario Gamboni tracks Redon’s evolution from collaboration with the writers of symbolism and decadence to a defense of the autonomy of the visual arts. He argues that Redon’s conversion was the symptom of a mounting crisis in the relationship between artists and writers, provoked at the turn of the century by the growing power of art criticism that foreshadowed the modernist separation of the arts into intractable fields. In addition to being a distinguished study of this provocative artist, The Brush and the Pen offers a critical reappraisal of the interaction of art, writing, criticism, and government institutions in late nineteenth-century France.

Infinity Net

Yayoi Kusama; Ralph McCarthy — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In 1957, encouraged by Georgia O’Keeffe, artist Yayoi Kusama left Japan for New York City to become a star. By the time she returned to her home country in 1973, she had established herself as a leader of New York’s avant-garde movement, known for creating happenings and public orgies to protest the Vietnam War and for the polka dots that had become a trademark of her work. Her sculptures, videos, paintings, and installations are to this day included in major international exhibitions.

Available for the first time in English, Infinity Net paints a multilayered portrait of this fascinating artist. Taking us from her oppressive childhood in postwar Japan to her present life in the psychiatric hospital where she voluntarily stays—and is still productive—Kusama’s autobiography offers insight into the persona of mental illness that has informed her work. While she vibrantly describes the hallucinatory episodes she experiences, her tale is punctuated by stories of her pluck and drive in making her artistic voice heard. Conveying the breadth and ambition of her own work, Kusama also offers a dazzling snapshot of 1960s and 1970s New York City and her encounters with its artists—she collaborates with Andy Warhol, shares an apartment with Donald Judd, and becomes romantically entangled with Joseph Cornell. Replete with the sense of the sheer necessity within an artist to create, Infinity Net is an energetic and juicy page-turner that offers a glimpse into Kusama’s exhilarating world.

Champion Trees of Britain and Ireland

Owen Johnson — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

What kinds of trees grow where, how long do they live, and how large do they grow? Champion Trees of Britain and Ireland answers these questions and more, surveying the finest examples of every kind of tree growing in the British Isles, from ancient yews to towering sequoias.

This encyclopedic volume coves over 5,000 trees, 60% of which are newly discovered or rerecorded since the last publication of the Tree Register in 2003. Dazzlingly illustrated throughout, part one of Champion Trees lists all existing species alphabetically by botanical name. Part two offers a guide to visiting thousands of Britain and Ireland’s finest specimens, listing trees by geographical region and county and describing the tallest, largest, and finest trees in each area. It also includes a checklist of all native trees and fascinating facts about “superlative trees”—the oldest, tallest, thickest, fastest-growing, and rarest trees in the British Isles. Champion Trees concludes with a checklist of native tree species in cultivation and instructions for measuring a tree.

Aloe Names Book

O. M. Grace; R. R. Klopper; E. Figueiredo; G. F. Smith — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The genus Aloe is arguably one of Africa’s most iconic and valued plant genera. It is prized by succulent plant collectors, horticulturalists, and pharmaceutical companies alike for its fleshy leaves and therapeutic medicinal properties.

The Aloe Names Book compiles for the first time the current taxonomy of each species, the over 1,500 names by which aloes are known globally, as well as hundreds of historical names and the richly descriptive meanings of Latin names used for aloes. This volume also features an easily searchable, definitive list of aloe-derived products, accompanied by an introduction to aloes, a comprehensive reference list, and color photographs of over 300 aloe species. The Aloe Names Book will be an essential reference for succulent enthusiasts, growers, researchers and agencies responsible for trade in endangered species.

Sounding of the Whale

D. Graham Burnett — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

From the Bible’s “Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?” to Captain Ahab’s “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!,” from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery.

In the twentieth century, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even Nature was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that continues to this day. The book closes with a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation.

A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, The Sounding of the Whale tells a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see these behemoths from below.

Pseudo-Skylax’s Periplous

Graham Shipley — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The Periplous—often attributed to Skylax of Karyanda but in fact written by an unknown author during the fourth century BC—describes the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas as known by the ancient Greeks in great detail, noting towns, rivers, harbors, and mountains. This is the first full edition of the Periplous to be published since 1855, and the first complete English translation. Graham Shipley’s commentary and the sixteen specially produced maps make this edition ideal for teachers and students of the Greek language.

Pseudo-Skylax’s Periplous

Graham Shipley — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Memory

Alison Winter — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Picture your twenty-first birthday. Did you have a party? If so, do you remember who was there? Now step back: how clear are those memories? Should we trust them to be accurate, or is there a chance that you’re remembering incorrectly? And where have the many details you can no longer recall gone? Are they hidden somewhere in your brain, or are they gone forever?

Such questions have fascinated scientists for hundreds of years, and, as Alison Winter shows in Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, the answers have changed dramatically in just the past century. Tracing the cultural and scientific history of our understanding of memory, Winter explores early metaphors that likened memory to a filing cabinet; later, she shows, that cabinet was replaced by the image of a reel of film, ever available for playback. That model, too, was eventually superseded, replaced by the current understanding of memory as the result of an extremely complicated, brain-wide web of cells and systems that together assemble our pasts. Winter introduces us to innovative scientists and sensationalistic seekers, and, drawing on evidence ranging from scientific papers to diaries to movies, explores the way that new understandings from the laboratory have seeped out into psychiatrists' offices, courtrooms, and the culture at large. Along the way, she investigates the sensational battles over the validity of repressed memories that raged through the 1980s and shows us how changes in technology—such as the emergence of recording devices and computers—have again and again altered the way we conceptualize, and even try to study, the ways we remember.

Packed with fascinating details and curious episodes from the convoluted history of memory science, Memory is a book you'll remember long after you close its cover.

Supreme Court Economic Review, Volume 19

Ilya Somin; Todd J. Zywicki — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Supreme Court Economic Review is an interdisciplinary journal that provides a forum for scholarship in law and economics, public choice, and constitutional political economy. Its approach is broad-ranging and the contributions it brings together apply explicit or implicit economic reasoning to the analysis of legal issues before the court, with special attention to Supreme Court decisions, judicial process, and institutional design.

American Egyptologist

Jeffrey Abt — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud.

In American Egyptologist, Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted’s life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America’s most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology.

An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, American Egyptologist restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.

Conjugations

Sangita Gopal — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres like science fiction and horror. In this bold study of what she names New Bollywood, Sangita Gopal contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films’ evolving treatment of romantic relationships.

Gopalargues that the form of the conjugal duo in movies reflects other social forces in India’s new consumerist and global society. She takes a daring look at recent Hindi films and movie trends—the decline of song-and-dance sequences, the upgraded status of the horror genre, and the rise of the multiplex and multi-plot—to demonstrate how these relationships exemplify different formulas of contemporary living. A provocative account of how cultural artifacts can embody globalization’s effects on intimate life, Conjugations will shake up the study of Hindi film.

Southern Stalemate

Christopher Bonastia — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In 1959, Virginia’s Prince Edward County closed its public schools rather than obey a court order to desegregate. For five years, black children were left to fend for themselves while the courts decided if the county could continue to deny its citizens public education. Investigating this remarkable and nearly forgotten story of local, state, and federal political confrontation, Christopher Bonastia recounts the test of wills that pitted resolute African Americans against equally steadfast white segregationists in a battle over the future of public education in America.

Beginning in 1951 when black high school students protested unequal facilities and continuing through the return of whites to public schools in the 1970s and 1980s, Bonastia describes the struggle over education during the civil rights era and the human suffering that came with it, as well as the inspiring determination of black residents to see justice served. Artfully exploring the lessons of the Prince Edward saga, Southern Stalemate unearths new insights about the evolution of modern conservatism and the politics of race in America.

Capitalism Takes Command

Michael Zakim; Gary J. Kornblith — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, Capitalism Takes Command presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management—an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America’s new revolutionary tradition.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an “ism” and how business became a political philosophy, Capitalism Takes Command brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.

Capitalism Takes Command

Michael Zakim; Gary J. Kornblith — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Cancer on Trial

Peter Keating; Alberto Cambrosio — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Until the early 1960s, cancer treatment consisted primarily of surgery and radiation therapy. Most practitioners then viewed the treatment of terminally ill cancer patients with heroic courses of chemotherapy as highly questionable. The randomized clinical trials that today sustain modern oncology were relatively rare and prompted stiff opposition from physicians loath to assign patients randomly to competing treatments. And yet today these trials form the basis of medical oncology. How did such a spectacular change occur? How did medical oncology pivot from a nonentity and, in some regards, a reviled practice to the central position it now occupies in modern medicine?

In Cancer on Trial Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio explore how practitioners established a new style of practice, at the center of which lies the cancer clinical trial. Far from mere testing devices, these trials have become full-fledged experiments that have redefined the practices of clinicians, statisticians, and biologists. Keating and Cambrosio investigate these trials and how they have changed since the 1960s, all the while demonstrating their significant impact on the progression of oncology. A novel look at the institution of clinical cancer research and therapy, this book will be warmly welcomed by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science and medicine, as well as clinicians and researchers in the cancer field.

Pontecorvo Affair

Simone Turchetti — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project.

The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.

Good Fences, Bad Neighbors

Boaz Atzili — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Border fixity—the proscription of foreign conquest and the annexation of homeland territory—has, since World War II, become a powerful norm in world politics. This development has been said to increase stability and peace in international relations. Yet, in a world in which it is unacceptable to challenge international borders by force, sociopolitically weak states remain a significant source of widespread conflict, war, and instability.

In this book, Boaz Atzili argues that the process of state building has long been influenced by external territorial pressures and competition, with the absence of border fixity contributing to the evolution of strong states—and its presence to the survival of weak ones. What results from this norm, he argues, are conditions that make internal conflict and the spillover of interstate war more likely. Using a comparison of historical and contemporary case studies, Atzili sheds light on the relationship between state weakness and conflict. His argument that under some circumstances an international norm that was established to preserve the peace may actually create conditions that are ripe for war is sure to generate debate and shed light on the dynamics of continuing conflict in the twenty-first century.

Good Fences, Bad Neighbors

Boaz Atzili — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Wondrous Curiosities

Stephanie Moser — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

When the British Museum opened its doors more than two centuries ago, scores of visitors waited eagerly outside for a first glimpse of ancient relics from Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even today, in this age of satellite television and high-speed Internet access, museums maintain their unique allure, continuing to play a vital role in connecting us with little-known terrains and the deep mysteries of our historical past. That’s because, as Stephanie Moser argues in Wondrous Curiosities, museum displays don’t just transmit knowledge—they actually create it.

Based on her exploration of the British Museum’s world-famous collection of Egyptian antiquities, this pioneering study reveals the powerful role of museums in shaping our understanding of science, culture, and history. Drawing on guidebooks and archival documents, Moser demonstrates that this British exhibition of ancient Egyptian artifacts was central to the way we came to define the remarkable society that produced them. And she also reveals the specific strategies—such as using pattern and symmetry, juxtaposing different types of objects, and singling out particular items—that the British Museum and others used, and still use, in representing the past. With a wealth of illustrations and a detailed account of how the museum acquired and displayed its Egyptian collections, Wondrous Curiosities will fascinate curators and scholars of British history, Egyptology, art history, archaeology, and the history of science.

Seasick

Alanna Mitchell — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

We have long lorded over the ocean. But only recently have we become aware of the myriad life-forms beneath its waves. We now know that this delicate ecosystem is our life-support system; it regulates the earth’s temperatures and climate and comprises 99 percent of living space on earth. So when we change the chemistry of the whole ocean system, as we are now, life as we know it is threatened.

In Seasick, veteran science journalist Alanna Mitchell dives beneath the surface of the world’s oceans to give readers a sense of how this watery realm can be managed and preserved, and with it life on earth. Each chapter features a different group of researchers who introduce readers to the importance of ocean currents, the building of coral structures, or the effects of acidification. With Mitchell at the helm, readers submerge 3,000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava lamp–like dead zone covering 17,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama.

The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey through a hidden realm of the planet and urges conservation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang.

Great American City

Robert J. Sampson; William Julius Wilson — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Great American City argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live.

To demonstrate the powerfully enduring impact of place, Robert J. Sampson presents here the fruits of over a decade’s research in Chicago combined with his own unique personal observations about life in the city, from Cabrini Green to Trump Tower and Millennium Park to the Robert Taylor Homes. He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, health, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, and immigration. Even national crises cannot halt the impact of place, Sampson finds, as he analyzes the consequences of the Great Recession and its aftermath, bringing his magisterial study up to the fall of 2010.

Following in the influential tradition of the Chicago School of urban studies but updated for the twenty-first century, Great American City is at once a landmark research project, a commanding argument for a new theory of social life, and the story of an iconic city.

Reaching Audiences

Julia Knight; Peter Thomas — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

From Hollywood blockbusters to art films, distributors play an important role in getting films in front of audiences and thus in shaping the nature of film culture. Of central concern to Reaching Audiences are the distribution practices developed to counter Hollywood’s dominance of the marketplace, designed to ensure audiences have access to a more diverse moving image culture. Through a series of case studies, the book tracks the inventive distribution and exhibition initiatives developed over the last forty years by small companies on the periphery of the United Kingdom’s film industry—practices now being replicated by a new generation of digital distributors. Although largely invisible to outsiders, the importance of distribution networks is widely recognized in the industry, and this book is a key contribution to our understanding of the role they play.

Amateur Images and Global News

Kari Andén-Papadopoulos; Mervi Pantti — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Modern technology has enabled anyone with a digital camera or cell phone to capture images of newsworthy events as they develop, and news organizations around the world increasingly depend on these amateur images for their coverage of unfolding events. However, with globalization facilitating wider circulation, critics have expressed strong concern over exactitude and objectivity. The first book on this topic, Amateur Images and Global News considers at length the ethical and professional issues that arise with the use of amateur images in the mainstream news media—as well as their role in producing knowledge and framing meanings of disasters in global and national contexts.

Radio Content in the Digital Age

Angeliki Gazi,; Guy Starkey; Stanislaw Jedrzejewski — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The traditional radio medium has seen significant changes in recent years as part of the current global shift toward multimedia content, with both digital and FM making significant use of new technologies, including mobile communications and the Internet. This book focuses on the important role these new technologies play—and will play as radio continues to evolve. This series of essays by top academics in the field examines new options for radio technology as well as a summary of the opportunities and challenges that characterize academic and professional debates around radio today.

Jan van Eyck

Craig Harbison — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The surviving work of Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1395–1441) consists of a series of painstakingly detailed oil paintings of astonishing verisimilitude. Most explanations of the meanings behind these paintings have been grounded in a disguised religious symbolism that critics have insisted is foremost. But in Jan van Eyck, Craig Harbison sets aside these explanations and turns instead to the neglected human dimension he finds clearly present in these works. Harbison investigates the personal histories of the true models and participants who sat for such masterpieces as the Virgin and Child and the Arnolfini Double Portrait.

This revised and expanded edition includes many illustrations and reveals how van Eyck presented his contemporaries with a more subtle and complex view of the value of appearances as a route to understanding the meaning of life.

Art Forgery

Thierry Lenain — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With the recent advent of technologies that make detecting art forgeries easier, the art world has become increasingly obsessed with verifying and ensuring artistic authenticity. In this unique history, Thierry Lenain examines the genealogy of faking and interrogates the anxious, often neurotic, reactions triggered in the modern art world by these clever frauds.

Lenain begins his history in the Middle Ages, when the issue of false relics and miracles often arose. But during this time, if a relic gave rise to a cult, it would be considered as genuine even if it obviously had been forged. In the Renaissance, forgery was initially hailed as a true artistic feat. Even Michelangelo, the most revered artist of the time, copied drawings by other masters, many of which were lent to him by unsuspecting collectors. Michelangelo would keep the originals himself and return the copies in their place. As Lenain shows, authenticity, as we think of it, is a purely modern concept. And the recent innovations in scientific attribution, archaeology, graphology, medical science, and criminology have all contributed to making forgery more detectable—and thus more compelling and essential to detect. He also analyzes the work of master forgers like Eric Hebborn, Thomas Keating, and Han van Meegeren in order to describe how pieces baffled the art world.

Ultimately, Lenain argues that the science of accurately deciphering an individual artist’s unique characteristics has reached a level of forensic sophistication matched only by the forger’s skill and the art world’s paranoia.

Chicken

Annie Potts — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

No creature has been subject to such extremes of reverence and exploitation as the chicken. Hens have been venerated as cosmic creators and roosters as solar divinities. Many cultures have found the mysteries of birth, healing, death and resurrection encapsulated in the hen’s egg. Yet today, most of us have nothing to do with chickens as living beings, although billions are consumed around the world every year.

In Chicken Annie Potts introduces us to the vivid and astonishing world of Gallus gallus. The book traces the evolution of jungle fowl and the domestication of chickens by humans. It describes the ways in which chickens experience the world, form families and friendships, communicate with each other, play, bond, and grieve. Chicken explores cultural practices like egg-rolling, the cockfight, alectromancy, wishbone-pulling and the chicken-swinging ritual of Kapparot; discovers depictions of chickenhood in ancient and modern art, literature and film; and also showcases bizarre supernatural chickens from around the world including the Basilisk, Kikimora and Pollio Maligno. Chicken concludes with a detailed analysis of the place of chickens in the world today, and a tribute to those who educate and advocate on behalf of these birds.

Numerous beautiful illustrations show the many faces (and feathers and combs and tails) of Gallus, from wild roosters in the jungles of Southeast Asia to quirky Naked-Necks and majestic Malays. There are chickens painted by Chagall and Magritte, chickens made of hair-rollers, and chickens shaped like mountains. The reader of Chicken will encounter a multitude of intriguing facts and ideas, including why the largest predator ever to walk the earth is considered the ancestor of the modern chicken, how mother hens communicate with their chicks while they're still in the egg, why Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece required him to play a chicken, whether it’s safe to take eggs on a sea-voyage, and how “chicken therapy” can rejuvenate us all. This book will fascinate those already familiar with and devoted to the Gallus species, and it will open up a whole new gallinaceous world for future admirers of the intelligent and passionate chicken.

Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology

Gary Lackmann — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The past decade has been characterized by remarkable advances in meteorological observation, computing techniques, and data-visualization technology. However, the benefit of these advances can only be fully realized with the introduction of a systematic, applied approach to meteorological education that allows well-established theoretical concepts to be applied to modernized observational and numerical datasets.

This textbook links theoretical concepts to modern technology and facilitates the meaningful application of concepts, theories, and techniques using real data. As such, it will both serve those planning careers in meteorological research and weather prediction, and provide a template for the application of modern technology in a classroom and laboratory setting.

Synoptic-dynamic meteorology, synoptically driven mesoscale phenomena, weather forecasting, and numerical weather prediction are covered in depth in this text, which is intended for undergraduates and beginning graduate students in the atmospheric sciences.

Labour Migration in Malaysia and Spain

Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

This study confronts the double paradox of state-regulated labor migration: while markets benefit from open borders that allow them to meet the demand for migrant workers, the boundaries of citizenship impose a degree of limitation on cross-border migration. At the same time, the exclusivity of citizenship requires closed membership, yet civil and human rights undermine the state’s capacity to exclude foreigners once they are inside the country. By considering how Malaysia and Spain have responded to the demand for foreign labor, this book analyzes the unavoidable clash of markets, citizenship, and rights.

“This truly comparative book will become a standard work in the field. It opens new research venues, with major implications for a state migration control theory that has too long been Atlanto-centred.”—Leo Lucassen, Leiden University

Afterall

Nuria Enguita Mayo; Pablo Lafuente; Dieter Roelstraete — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Afterall, a journal of art, context and enquiry, offers in-depth considerations of the work of contemporary artists along with essays that broaden how to understand it. Issue 28 maps a history of objects, photography and experience. The articles include Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum writing about the move to activate the audience in contemporary art, Pablo Lafuente dissecting the role of the object in participatory practices, an exploration of Emily Wardill’s elusive films of objects and ossified social relations, a look at the photographic and sculptural practice of Jean-Luc Moulène, and discussions of the work of 1970s Chicago collective AfriCOBRA and the return of modernism in the work of Carol Bove, Mathias Poledna, and others.

Unfinished Gestures

Davesh Soneji — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Unfinished Gestures presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India who are generally called devadasis, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasi communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities.

Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by devadasis in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of devadasi identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today, Unfinished Gestures charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.

Unfinished Gestures

Davesh Soneji — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Ecce Homo

Kent L. Brintnall — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Images of suffering male bodies permeate Western culture, from Francis Bacon’s paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs to the battered heroes of action movies. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines—including religious studies, gender and queer studies, psychoanalysis, art history, and film theory—Ecce Homo explores the complex, ambiguous meanings of the enduring figure of the male-body-in-pain.

Acknowledging that representations of men confronting violence and pain can reinforce ideas of manly tenacity, Kent L. Brintnall also argues that they reveal the vulnerability of men’s bodies and open them up to eroticization. Locating the roots of our cultural fascination with male pain in the crucifixion, he analyzes the way narratives of Christ’s death and resurrection both support and subvert cultural fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Through stimulating readings of works by Georges Bataille, Kaja Silverman, and more, Brintnall delineates the redemptive power of representations of male suffering and violence.

Ecce Homo

Kent L. Brintnall — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Shakespeare's Freedom

Stephen Greenblatt — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.

Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.

A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

Objectifying China, Imagining America

Caroline Frank — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With the ever-expanding presence of China in the global economy, Americans more and more look east for goods and trade. But as Caroline Frank reveals, this is not a new development. China loomed as large in the minds—and account books—of eighteenth-century Americans as it does today. Long before they had achieved independence from Britain and were able to sail to Asia themselves, American mariners, merchants, and consumers were aware of the East Indies and preparing for voyages there. Focusing on the trade and consumption of porcelain, tea, and chinoiserie, Frank shows that colonial Americans saw themselves as part of a world much larger than just Britain and Europe

Frank not only recovers the widespread presence of Chinese commodities in early America and the impact of East Indies trade on the nature of American commerce, but also explores the role of the this trade in American state formation. She argues that to understand how Chinese commodities fueled the opening acts of the Revolution, we must consider the power dynamics of the American quest for china—and China—during the colonial period. Filled with fresh and surprising insights, this ambitious study adds new dimensions to the ongoing story of America’s relationship with China.

Objectifying China, Imagining America

Caroline Frank — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Seeking the Straight and Narrow

Lynne Gerber — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Losing weight and changing your sexual orientation are both notoriously difficult to do successfully. Yet many faithful evangelical Christians believe that thinness and heterosexuality are godly ideals—and that God will provide reliable paths toward them for those who fall short. Seeking the Straight and Narrow is a fascinating account of the world of evangelical efforts to alter our strongest bodily desires.

Drawing on fieldwork at First Place, a popular Christian weight-loss program, and Exodus International, a network of ex-gay ministries, Lynne Gerber explores why some Christians feel that being fat or gay offends God, what exactly they do to lose weight or go straight, and how they make sense of the program’s results—or, frequently, their lack. Gerber notes the differences and striking parallels between the two programs, and, more broadly, she traces the ways that other social institutions have attempted to contain the excesses associated with fatness and homosexuality. Challenging narratives that place evangelicals in constant opposition to dominant American values, Gerber shows that these programs reflect the often overlooked connection between American cultural obsessions and Christian ones.

Seeking the Straight and Narrow

Lynne Gerber — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

More Concise Algebraic Topology

J. P. May; K. Ponto — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With firm foundations dating only from the 1950s, algebraic topology is a relatively young area of mathematics. There are very few textbooks that treat fundamental topics beyond a first course, and many topics now essential to the field are not treated in any textbook. J. Peter May’s A Concise Course in Algebraic Topology addresses the standard first course material, such as fundamental groups, covering spaces, the basics of homotopy theory, and homology and cohomology. In this sequel, May and his coauthor, Kathleen Ponto, cover topics that are essential for algebraic topologists and others interested in algebraic topology, but that are not treated in standard texts. They focus on the localization and completion of topological spaces, model categories, and Hopf algebras.

The first half of the book sets out the basic theory of localization and completion of nilpotent spaces, using the most elementary treatment the authors know of. It makes no use of simplicial techniques or model categories, and it provides full details of other necessary preliminaries. With these topics as motivation, most of the second half of the book sets out the theory of model categories, which is the central organizing framework for homotopical algebra in general. Examples from topology and homological algebra are treated in parallel. A short last part develops the basic theory of bialgebras and Hopf algebras.

Shareholder Democracies?

Mark Freeman; Robin Pearson; James Taylor — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Understanding the challenges of corporate governance is central to our comprehension of the economic dynamics driving corporations today. Among the most important institutions in capitalism today, corporations and joint-stock companies had their origins in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And as they became more prevalent, the issue of internal governance became more pressing. At stake—and very much contested—was the allocation of rights and obligations among shareholders, directors, and managers.

This comprehensive account of the development of corporate governance in Britain and Ireland during its earliest stages highlights the role of political factors in shaping the evolution of corporate governance as well as the important debates that arose about the division of authority and responsibility. Political and economic institutions confronted similar issues, including the need for transparency and accountability in decision making and the roles of electors and the elected, and this book emphasizes how political institutions—from election procedures to assemblies to annual reporting—therefore provided apt models upon which companies drew readily. Filling a gap in the literature on early corporate economy, this book provides insight into the origins of many ongoing modern debates.

Aristotle's Politics

Eugene Garver — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

“Man is a political animal,” Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the Politics. In this novel reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, Eugene Garver traces the surprising implications of Aristotle’s claim and explores the treatise’s relevance to ongoing political concerns. Often dismissed as overly grounded in Aristotle’s specific moment in time, in fact the Politics challenges contemporary understandings of human action and allows us to better see ourselves today.

Close examination of Aristotle’s treatise, Garver finds, reveals a significant, practical role for philosophy to play in politics. Philosophers present arguments about issues—such as the right and the good, justice and modes of governance, the relation between the good person and the good citizen, and the character of a good life—that politicians must then make appealing to their fellow citizens. Completing Garver’s trilogy on Aristotle’s unique vision, Aristotle’s Politics yields new ways of thinking about ethics and politics, ancient and modern.

Regimens of the Mind

Sorana Corneanu — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In Regimens of the Mind, Sorana Corneanu proposes a new approach to the epistemological and methodological doctrines of the leading experimental philosophers of seventeenth-century England, an approach that considers their often overlooked moral, psychological, and theological elements. Corneanu focuses on the views about the pursuit of knowledge in the writings of Robert Boyle and John Locke, as well as in those of several of their influences, including Francis Bacon and the early Royal Society virtuosi. She argues that their experimental programs of inquiry fulfill the role of regimens for curing, ordering, and educating the mind toward an ethical purpose, an idea she tracks back to the ancient tradition of cultura animi. Corneanu traces this idea through its early modern revival and illustrates how it organizes the experimental philosophers’ reflections on the discipline of judgment, the study of nature, and the study of Scripture.

It is through this lens, the author suggests, that the core features of the early modern English experimental philosophy—including its defense of experience, its epistemic modesty, its communal nature, and its pursuit of “objectivity”—are best understood.

Cécile Wick. Colored Waters

Nadine Olonetzky; Martin Jaeggi — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Cécile Wick’s work, oscillating among photography, painting, and drawing, is one of the most important oeuvres in contemporary Swiss art. Solo exhibitions in various galleries and a large retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Berne have recently showcased her prints and etchings to great acclaim.

Cécile Wick. Colored Waters offers readers the first glimpse of the artist’s more recent photographs and, in particular, drawings. Watercolors, ink drawings, inkjet prints and photographs are presented in series, putting media and motifs in a dialogue and revealing new aspects of Wick’s work.

Around 160 color reproductions of artworks are complemented with essays by Martin Jaeggi and Nadine Olonetzky on subjects such as light, traces, signs, buildings, nature, and rhythm in Wick’s oeuvre.

Indigenous Peoples and Languages of Alaska

Michael Krauss; Gary Holton; Jim Kerr; Colin Thor West — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

This exquisitely illustrated and extensive map charts the peoples and languages of Alaska natives. The author, who founded the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and directed it until 2000, was responsible for assembling the archive of Alaska Native language documentation and has for more than two decades worked to bring the world’s attention to the enormity of the language endangerment crisis. A central contribution to the field of Alaska studies, Indigenous People and Languages of Alaska offers a unique geographic perspective and reflects the most up-to-date, contemporary research. It will serve as an essential resource for Native and linguistic researchers.

Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture

Fritz Allhoff — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the lesser of two evils.

Allhoff does not take this position lightly. He begins by examining the way terrorism challenges traditional norms, discussing the morality of various practices of torture, and critically exploring the infamous ticking time-bomb scenario. After carefully considering these issues from a purely philosophical perspective, he turns to the empirical ramifications of his arguments, addressing criticisms of torture and analyzing the impact its adoption could have on democracy, institutional structures, and foreign policy. The crucial questions of how to justly authorize torture and how to set limits on its use make up the final section of this timely, provocative, and carefully argued book.

In the Watches of the Night

Peter C. Baldwin — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public spaces. Peter C. Baldwin’s evocative book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors—scavengers, newsboys, and mashers alike—in the nocturnal city.

Baldwin examines work, crime, transportation, and leisure as he moves through the gaslight era, exploring the spread of modern police forces and the emergence of late-night entertainment, to the era of electricity, when social campaigns sought to remove women and children from public areas at night. While many people celebrated the transition from darkness to light as the arrival of twenty-four hours of daytime, Baldwin shows that certain social patterns remained, including the danger of street crime and the skewed gender profile of night work. Sweeping us from concert halls and brothels to streetcars and industrial forges, In the Watches of the Night is an illuminating study of a vital era in American urban history.

Art of Medicine

Julie Anderson; Emm Barnes; Emma Shackleton; Antony Gormley — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Since ancient times people have depended on medical practitioners to enhance life, to treat illness and injuries, and to help reduce pain and suffering. The scientifically based discipline that we know today stands beside diverse traditions, belief systems, and bodies of medical knowledge that have evolved in fascinating ways across cultures and continents. Throughout this history, successive generations have created artistic representations of these varied aspects of medicine, illustrating instruction manuals, documenting treatments, and creating works of art that enable individuals to express their feelings and ideas about medicine, health, and illness. From ancient wall paintings and tomb carvings to sculpture, installations, and digitally created artworks, the results are extraordinary and pay tribute to how medicine has affected our lives and the lives of our ancestors.

Drawing on the remarkable holdings of the Wellcome Collection in London, The Art of Medicine offers a unique gallery of rarely seen paintings, artifacts, drawings, prints, and extracts from manuscripts and manuals to provide a fascinating visual insight into our knowledge of the human body and mind, and how both have been treated with medicine. Julie Anderson, Emm Barnes, and Emma Shackleton take readers on a fascinating visual journey through the history of medical practice, exploring contemporary biomedical images, popular art, and caricature alongside venerable Chinese scrolls, prehistoric Mesoamerican drawings, paintings of the European Renaissance, medieval Persian manuscripts, and more. The result is a rare and remarkable visual account of what it was and is to be human in sickness and health.

Complete Perfectionist

Juan Ramón Jiménez; Christopher Maurer — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Few have written more memorably about the work of poetry and the poetics of work than Juan Ramón Jiménez, winner of a Nobel Prize and discerning teacher of an entire generation of Spanish poets. In this series of aphorisms, Jiménez brings together the elements of perfect work, both in writing and in other realms. Among these elements—the wellsprings of any kind of creation—are instinct and inspiration, memory and forgetting, silence and noise, love and regret.

A treasure for poets and writers, The Complete Perfectionist includes helpful commentary by noted translator Christopher Maurer and shows perfection as a process of “becoming” rather than an end product. In these insightful pages, a poet haunted by perfection reveals his methods of writing and revision, and measures the social and ethical dimensions of el trabajo gustoso, or pleasurable work. This revised and expanded edition includes many aphorisms recently published in Spanish and not previously included.

Cornish Studies 19

Philip Payton — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The nineteenth volume in this acclaimed series furthers the mission to investigate and elucidate the nature of Cornish identity, as well as to discuss its implications for society and governance in contemporary Cornwall.

“Cornish Studies . . . consistently provides rich material for the understanding of the British past and present as a whole, and of their impact on the wider world.”—Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol

Subjectivity

Dominique Chateau — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With the rise of French and Italian New Wave cinema, the concept of subjectivity came to the forefront of film criticism and theory. The subjective camera allows for the audience to experience film in a wholly different way, manipulating or enriching viewers and forcing them to engage with film as a medium. Subjectivity advances the debate over its role in the history, philosophy, and culture of cinema. This engaging, multifaceted study of a single, controversial concept addresses the New Wave movement and also expands its focus to include a variety of genres within the rapidly changing medium of film. With a diverse array of contributors including Vivian Sobchack, Francesco Casetti, Laura Marcus, Jose Moure, and many other prominent film theorists, this engaging collection of essays both challenges and enhances our understanding of film history. Subjectivity is essential reading for film scholars, media theorists, and fans of the French and Italian new wave.

Digital Facsimile of Terence’s Comedies

Bernard J. Muir; Andrew J. Turner — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer, best known as Terence, was highly regarded in the second century BC for his six comedies, such as “Adelphoe,” which focused on child-rearing, and “Andria,” which contained messages about moderation and charity. Due to the fact that Terence’s plays often carried a moral lesson, they remained popular into the early modern period, and even Martin Luther suggested the plays be used for instruction in schools.

Among the treasures of the Bodleian Library is a mid-twelfth-century manuscript that illustrates all six of Terence’s comedies alongside explanatory notes. This DVD presents a complete facsimile of the entire manuscript and a new transcription specially prepared for this publication. Users can navigate easily through the plays and the accompanying illustrations of the complete facsimile. Users can also zoom in to the illustrations at the beginning of each scene, which are based on earlier Carolingian models that were themselves derived from Late Antique illustrations.

This interactive digital facsimile makes readily available to scholars and students of classical drama and early modern culture an extremely valuable teaching and research tool, as well as a facsimile of a beautiful and fascinating document of the High Middle Ages.

Credit Crunch Health Care

Cam Donaldson — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

World-leading health economist Cam Donaldson defends NHS-type systems on the same basis as their detractors: economic efficiency. However, protecting government funding of health care is not enough: scarcity has to be managed. Donaldson goes on to show how we can get more out of our systems by addressing issues of value for money. In particular, he demonstrates what has been achieved through health care reform but questions how much more this can deliver relative to getting serious about priority setting.The issues addressed in the book have global relevance and this accessible book will therefore appeal to the public, health professionals and health policy specialists.

Changing Social Equality

Jon Kvist; Johan Fritzell; Bjørn Hvinden; Olli Kangas; Bjorn Hvinden — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The Nordic countries have been able to raise living standards and curb inequalities without compromising economic growth. But with social inequalities on the rise how do they fare when compared to countries with alternative welfare models, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany?Taking a comparative perspective, this book casts new light on the changing inequalities in Europe. It will be invaluable for students and policy makers interested in European social policy and living conditions.

New History of the Isle of Man

Seán Duffy — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

This volume is the third of a five-volume definitive history of the Isle of Man, from the evolution of its natural landscape through prehistory and modern times. The reassessment of the island’s medieval legacy explored here highlights the island’s position as a hub of English, Scottish, Irish and Norwegian power politics as well as it considers the complex nexus of interrelationships—linguistic, economic, and political—that linked the various peoples of the British Isles and Scandinavia.

New History of the Isle of Man

Seán Duffy — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Fifty Years in Politics and the Law

Lord Morris of Aberavon — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Lord Morris of Aberavon is one of Wales’s most famous and influential figures. This personal account of his life covers his illustrious career at the heart of Welsh and Westminster politics as attorney general. Trained as a barrister, he went on to serve as parliamentary secretary, minister of state, and secretary of state. He returned to government twenty years later as attorney general for England and Wales, and thus became one of the few Labour ministers to hold office under Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, and Tony Blair.

Electronic Beowulf

Kevin Kiernan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

One of the oldest and most significant works of Western Literature, the epic poem Beowulf survives from ca. 1000 AD in a single copy in the Nowell Codex, one of two manuscript books that make up British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv. This new edition of Electronic Beowulf brings that historic and crucial manuscript to the desktop of anyone studying the work.

Electronic Beowulf includes a huge database of digital images and presents new strategies designed to help students learn the language, grammar, and metre of the poem. The interactive interface devices give easy access to a range of student features, with cross-references to print editions, access to an interlinear translation, and options for a variety of desktop arrangements. In addition to the image-based edition of Beowulf, the CD provides facsimiles of the entire composite codex as well as the eighteenth-century transcripts and nineteenth-century collations that rescued much of the text from damage sustained after a 1731 fire in the Cotton Library.

With its many tools for mastering the Anglo-Saxon verse, Electronic Beowulf will be indispensible for scholars and students of Old English and epic literature.

Holocaust as Culture

Imre Kertész; Thomas Cooper — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical.

In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self.

The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse

Mark Peel — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London and Melbourne, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse is a pioneering comparative study that examines how these stories of poverty were narrated and reshaped by ethnic diversity, economic crisis, and war.

Probing the similarities and differences in the ways Americans, Australians, and Britons understood and responded to poverty, Mark Peel draws a picture of social work that is based in the sometimes fraught encounters between the poor and their interpreters. He uses dramatization to bring these encounters to life—joining Miss Cutler and that resurrected horse are Miss Lindstrom and the fried potatoes and Mr. O’Neil and the seductive client—and to give these people a voice. Adding new dimensions to the study of charity and social work, this book is essential to understanding and tackling poverty in the twenty-first century.

Unrepentant Renaissance

Richard Strier — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the revival of Stoicism and Platonism. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them. Richard Strier reveals that many long-recognized major texts did question the most traditional values and uncovers a Renaissance far more bumptious and affirmative than much recent scholarship has allowed.

The Unrepentant Renaissance counters the prevalent view of the period as dominated by the regulation of bodies and passions, aiming to reclaim the Renaissance as an era happily churning with surprising, worldly, and self-assertive energies. Reviving the perspective of Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Strier provides fresh and uninhibited readings of texts by Petrarch, More, Shakespeare, Ignatius Loyola, Montaigne, Descartes, and Milton. Strier’s lively argument will stir debate throughout the field of Renaissance studies.

Perils of Global Legalism

Eric A. Posner — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The first months of the Obama administration have led to expectations, both in the United States and abroad, that in the coming years America will increasingly promote the international rule of law—a position that many believe is both ethically necessary and in the nation’s best interests.

With The Perils of Global Legalism, Eric A. Posner explains that such views demonstrate a dangerously naive tendency toward legalism—an idealistic belief that law can be effective even in the absence of legitimate institutions of governance. After tracing the historical roots of the concept, Posner carefully lays out the many illusions—such as universalism, sovereign equality, and the possibility of disinterested judgment by politically unaccountable officials—on which the legalistic view is founded. Drawing on such examples as NATO’s invasion of Serbia, attempts to ban the use of land mines, and the free-trade provisions of the WTO, Posner demonstrates throughout that the weaknesses of international law confound legalist ambitions—and that whatever their professed commitments, all nations stand ready to dispense with international agreements when it suits their short- or long-term interests.

Provocative and sure to be controversial, The Perils of Global Legalism will serve as a wake-up call for those who view global legalism as a panacea—and a reminder that international relations in a brutal world allow no room for illusions.

Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind

Charles Darwin; Paul H. Barrett; Howard E. Gruber — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

First published in 1974 as a companion volume to Darwin on Man by Howard E. Gruber, Paul Barrett’s transcriptions of Darwin’s M and N notebooks served to shed new light on the evolutionist’s methods and motivation.

According to Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Times Book Review, “Darwin kept [these notebooks] primarily in 1838, when he was 29 years old. In them, he recorded his early conviction of evolutionary continuity between humans and all other animals. . . . These notebooks display all the features of humanistic intellect that his detractors denied. We find erudition in his comments on Plato, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Whewell, Burke, Montaigne, Lessing and Spencer. . . . We appreciate an artistic bent in his delight with nature and her prophet Wordsworth. . . . We grasp the breadth of his bold attempt to clothe all human thought and behaviour in a new evolutionary garb. . . . Charles Darwin was reconstructing the world and he knew exactly what he was doing.”

Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle

Robert G. Hoyland — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Theophilus of Edessa was a Greek astrologer and scholar in the court of the Muslim caliphs in the eighth century. Making use of his fluency in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic, he brought together historical sources from each language to comprise a single chronicle that charted world-changing events in the Near East from 590–750 CE, among them the Arab conquests, the rise to power of a Muslim Arab dynasty, and the last great war of antiquity, between Byzantium and Iran.

Though no longer extant, Theophilus’s work is known from extensive citations by later historians, and Robert Hoyland has here collected and translated these citations to present the scope of the original text. Included are translations of four chronicles, several of which are being made available here for the first time to the English-language reader.

Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle

Robert G. Hoyland — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Liverpool Underworld

Michael Macilwee — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

From dock theft to prostitution to the usual slew of alcohol-related offenses, Liverpool in the nineteenth century was “the black spot on the Mersey,” with a distinct criminal landscape that included a high level of female offenders and armies of juvenile thieves.

Using newspapers, autobiographies, and firsthand accounts, this book explores the social background that helped to create and sustain the high level and variety of crime and looks at how various institutions attempted to bring order to the streets. A mix of statistical analysis and accounts of criminal practice—from poaching to pocket-picking—Liverpool Underworld forms a fascinating account of the city’s underworld.

Liverpool Underworld

Michael Macilwee — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Slaves Waiting for Sale

Maurie D. McInnis — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia.

This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Kind of Touching Beauty

Jean-Paul Sartre; Pedro Meyer; Chris Turner — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Photographer Pedro Meyer is one of the pioneers of contemporary photography and was an early leader in its digital revolution. In A Kind of Touching Beauty his lens is focused on the American city, capturing its growth and transition through the 1980s and ’90s. Alongside Meyer’s striking images that distill the spirit of the city, the book presents essays by Jean-Paul Sartre. Originally published as part of The Aftermath of War and based upon Sartre’s extended visit to America in 1945, the essays create a parallel journey with Meyer’s photographs—the same cities are seen at a different time, through a different cultural lens.

Marked by a philosopher’s vision and a writer’s sensitivity, Sartre’s meditations on America are at once poetic and incisive. As he travels the length and breadth of the country, Sartre discovers the soul of American cities, so distinct from the spirit of urban Europe: “Everyone is free here. . . . The cities are open. They are open to the world and to the future. That is what gives them all an air of adventure; and . . . a kind of touching beauty.”

Together, the photographs and essays articulate the enduring essence of American urban existence—its relationship with time, with labor and humanity, and with the open spaces that are emblematic of America.

Making Architecture

Andrea Deplazes — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

This highly illustrated volume captures the dramatic, unbridled creativity that lies at the heart of great architecture. Presenting dozens of wildly innovative designs from the very young architects in training at the ETH Zurich, Making Architecture reveals all the energy of students working at the height of their powers, recognizing the incredible untapped potential of common materials, the power of subtle objects, and the ways that architecture can utterly transform ordinary urban spaces. An exquisite book, Making Architecture is sure to inspire both new and experienced architects, as well as general readers drawn to the unlimited potential and breathtaking beauty of contemporary architecture.

Science on Ice

Chris Linder — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard of his time with the 1910 Scott expedition to the South Pole. And that’s how most of us still imagine polar expeditions: stolid men with ice riming their beards drawing sledges and risking death for scientific knowledge. But polar science has changed drastically over the past century—as Chris Linder shows us, brilliantly, with Science on Ice.

An oceanographer and award-winning photographer, Linder chronicles four polar expeditions in this richly illustrated volume: to a teeming colony of Adélie penguins, through the icy waters of the Bering Sea in spring, beneath the pack ice of the eastern Arctic Ocean, and over the lake-studded surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Each trip finds Linder teamed up with a prominent science journalist, and together their words and pictures reveal the day-to-day details of how science actually gets done at the poles. Breathtaking images of the stark polar landscape alternate with gritty, close-up shots of scientists working in the field, braving physical danger and brutal conditions, and working with remarkable technology designed to survive the poles—like robotic vehicles that chart undersea mountain ranges—as they gather crucial information about our planet's distant past, and the risks that climate change poses for its future.

The result is a combination travel book and paean to the hard work and dedication that underlies our knowledge of life on earth. Science on Ice takes readers to the farthest reaches of our planet; science has rarely been more exciting—or inspiring.

Institutional Revolution

Douglas W. Allen — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. Following its onset in eighteenth-century Britain, sweeping changes in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and technology began to gain unstoppable momentum throughout Europe, North America, and eventually much of the world—with profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions.

In The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen offers a thought-provoking account of another, quieter revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and allowed for the full exploitation of the many new technological innovations. Fundamental to this shift were dramatic changes in institutions, or the rules that govern society, which reflected significant improvements in the ability to measure performance—whether of government officials, laborers, or naval officers—thereby reducing the role of nature and the hazards of variance in daily affairs. Along the way, Allen provides readers with a fascinating explanation of the critical roles played by seemingly bizarre institutions, from dueling to the purchase of one’s rank in the British Army.

Engagingly written, The Institutional Revolution traces the dramatic shift from premodern institutions based on patronage, purchase, and personal ties toward modern institutions based on standardization, merit, and wage labor—a shift which was crucial to the explosive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution.

Sciences of the Soul

Fernando Vidal; Saskia Brown — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The Sciences of the Soul is the first attempt to explain the development of the disciplinary conception of psychology from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Fernando Vidal traces this development through university courses and textbooks, encyclopedias, and nonacademic books, as well as through various histories of psychology.

Vidal reveals that psychology existed before the eighteenth century essentially as a “physics of the soul,” and it belonged as much to natural philosophy as to Christian anthropology. It remained so until the eighteenth century, when the “science of the soul” became the “science of the mind.” Vidal demonstrates that this Enlightenment refashioning took place within a Christian framework, and he explores how the preservation of the Christian idea of the soul was essential to the development of the science. Not only were most psychologists convinced that an empirical science of the soul was compatible with Christian faith; their perception that psychology preserved the soul also helped to elevate its rank as an empirical science. Broad-ranging and impeccably researched, this book will be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe.

Philosophy of Improvisation

Gary Peters — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of clichés. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, The Philosophy of Improvisation ranges across the arts—from music to theater, dance to comedy—and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation.

Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy—including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and Deleuze—offering readings of their reflections on improvisation and exploring improvisational elements within their thinking. Peters’s wry, humorous style offers an antidote to the frequently overheated celebration of freedom and community that characterizes most writing on the subject. Expanding the field of what counts as improvisation, The Philosophy of Improvisation will be welcomed by anyone striving to comprehend the creative process.

What Is Education?

Philip W. Jackson — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

One day in 1938, John Dewey addressed a room of professional educators and urged them to take up the task of “finding out just what education is.” Reading this lecture in the late 1940s, Philip W. Jackson took Dewey’s charge to heart and spent the next sixty years contemplating his words. The stimulating result of a lifetime of thinking about educating, What Is Education? is a profound philosophical exploration of how we transmit knowledge in human society and how we think about accomplishing that vital task.

Most contemporary approaches to education follow a strictly empirical track, aiming to discover pragmatic solutions for teachers and school administrators. Jackson argues that we need to learn not just how to improve on current practices but also how to think about what education means—in short, we need to answer Dewey by constantly rethinking education from the ground up. Guiding us through the many facets of Dewey’s comments, Jackson also calls on Hegel, Kant, and Paul Tillich to shed light on how a society does, can, and should transmit truth and knowledge to successive generations. Teasing out the implications in these thinkers’ works ultimately leads Jackson to the conclusion that education is at root a moral enterprise.

At a time when schools increasingly serve as a battleground for ideological contests, What Is Education? is a stirring call to refocus our minds on what is for Jackson the fundamental goal of education: making students as well as teachers—and therefore everyone—better people.

Signifying Europe

Johan Fornäs — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Signifying Europe provides a systematic overview of the wide range of symbols used to represent the Europe and Europeanness, both by the political elite and the broader public. Through a critical interpretation of the meanings of the various symbols—and their often contradictory or ambiguous dimensions—Johan Fornäs uncovers illuminating insights into how Europe currently identifies itself and is identified by others outside its borders. While the focus is on the European Union’s symbols, those symbols are also interpreted in relation to other symbols of Europe. Offering insight into the cultural dimensions of European unification, this volume will appeal to students, scholars, politicians interested in European policy issues, cultural studies, and postnational cultural identity.

From Ship's Cook to Baronet

David Jenkins — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Sir William Reardon Smith, founder of the Reardon Smith shipping line, was one of the foremost figures in south Wales in the early twentieth century. Starting as a cabin boy, he made a fortune as a ship owner at the height of the Welsh coal trade and subsequently showed great entrepreneurial initiative during the Great Depression, acquiring motor vessels and establishing new trade routes. He is also remembered as a great philanthropist, particularly through his association with the National Museum of Wales.

This thorough portrait of the entrepreneur combines an autobiography of the first forty years of Sir William’s life—which was discovered fifty years after his death at the age of eighty—a substantial essay on the latter half of his life, and extensive appendices that include a family tree, company lists, and shipping maps.

Memories of May '68

Chris Reynolds — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

This book sheds new light on one of the most significant periods in recent French history, the student revolts of May 1968. These events saw a strictly student-based revolt quickly become an all-out social crisis that threatened the political status quo of the time. In its exposure of a deep-seeded malaise, 1968 has gone on to acquire iconic status as a watershed year in the development of innumerable sectors of French society.

Focussing on the portrayal of these events during the subsequent decennial commemorations, Chris Reynolds analyzes the construction of the history of 1968. By highlighting the paradox between the plethora of existing material on 1968 and the relatively narrow frame through which the year’s events are viewed, Reynolds raises complex issues concerning the gap between memory and history.

Memories of May '68

Chris Reynolds — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

On Tarrying

Joseph Vogl — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, and decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy, and political theory, and have left their imprint on the most intimate processes of individual decision-making and geo-political strategies. But, in On Tarrying, Joseph Vogl argues for a third way, a mode of thought that doesn’t insist on these divisive either/ors. Neither an active refusal to engage with the world nor a consistent strategy of resistance, tarrying, as defined by Vogl, defers, multiplies, and suspends the strictures of decision-making.

In his far-ranging reflections Vogl shows that the traditional insistence on the exclusivity of these terms impoverishes and distorts the range of human responses to a world full of possibilities. His readings of texts by Freud, Sophocles, Friedrich Schiller, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka provide rich examples of how to resist the binary of activity and passivity through tarrying. This important book offers the first-ever extended analysis of tarrying as a mode of subversion and presents provocative new readings and interpretations of significant works of German literature and thought.

Zachary Macaulay 1768-1838

Iain Whyte — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

A prominent British anti-slavery campaigner, Zachary Macaulay devoted forty years of exhaustive research to combating what he called a “foul stain on the nation,” and his work was instrumental in laying the foundation for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. With a focus on his unswerving commitment to the cause, this biography—the first of its kind—examines Macaulay’s life and the people and events that influenced it.

Zachary Macaulay 1768–1838 illustrates the man behind the writings—his passions and his prejudices, his shyness and steely resolve, and, above all, his willingness to work unremittingly in the background, generating the power to drive the engine of anti-slavery to victory.

Invitation to the Bold of Heart

Dorothee Elmiger; Katy Derbyshire — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

A fire broke out in the coal seams of their town years ago, and the flames are still smoldering underground. Margaret and Fritzi, the two sisters who are the heroines of Invitation to the Bold of Heart, the debut novel by Swiss writers Dorothee Elmiger, are the last remaining youth of this vanishing town. Their inheritance is nothing but an abandoned swathe of land ruled by devastation. But the sisters won’t accept this state of affairs—they set out on an expedition, determined to piece together the fragments of their family history. Only by learning their own story can they look to the future with hope. When they rediscover a long-forgotten river, the Margaret and Fritzi can sense a new life ahead.

Invitation to the Bold of Heart is a startling dystopian tale of hope and exploration and a testament to the timeless need of youth to rebel against authority.

Praise for the German Edition

“The reader, too, gets to be at the mercy of this text—I myself turned into an echo chamber when I read it.”— Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, author of My Secret Is Mine: Studies on Religion and Eros in the German Middle Ages

I Swear I Saw This

Michael Taussig — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery.

Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease.

I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

I Swear I Saw This

Michael Taussig — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Secularism in Antebellum America

John Lardas Modern — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of new technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today.

Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

Lucretian Renaissance

Gerard Passannante — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost—a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe.

By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Passannante argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters—a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering.

From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be “reborn”?

Artist Scholar

G. James Daichendt — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Artist Scholar: Reflections on Writing and Research is part history, introduction, and discussion for artists and designers entering, graduating, and employed by the contemporary art academy in the United States. The evolution of art education in the university continues to expand in the 21st century as the variables of craft, skill, technique, theory, history and criticism shift and expand as the perspective of arts-based research is introduced into this professionalized environment. Given this context: what can M.F.A. students do to improve their understanding of writing and research without sacrificing their commitment to their studio art process?

Through a series of essays, the text argues for better writing at the M.F.A. level with the purpose of becoming better artists. By contextualizing art practice in the university and providing a foundation for future artist scholarship, it serves as an invitation to artist scholars to push their work further and develop the confidence to situate their art in the university context.

R. S. Thomas

Daniel Westover — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) is the most recognizable literary figure in Wales. His controversial politics and public personality made him a cultural icon and, since his death, have led to debates about his cultural significance. Yet such debates have too frequently marginalized the poetry itself, producing a potentially flawed understanding of his work. This study argues that Thomas’s reputation must be grounded in poetry, not personality. Accordingly, the author traces the poet’s development over six decades, analyzing his various prosodies and demonstrating how Thomas’s tensions and anxieties manifest themselves in the continually shifting style of his poems.

R. S. Thomas

Daniel Westover — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Creating a Physical Biology

Phillip R. Sloan; Brandon Fogel — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

In 1935 geneticist Nikolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky, radiation physicist Karl G. Zimmer, and quantum physicist Max Delbrück published “On the Nature of Gene Mutation and Gene Structure,” known subsequently as the “Three-Man Paper.” This seminal paper advanced work on the physical exploration of the structure of the gene through radiation physics and suggested ways in which physics could reveal definite information about gene structure, mutation, and action. Representing a new level of collaboration between physics and biology, it played an important role in the birth of the new field of molecular biology. The paper’s results were popularized for a wide audience in the What is Life? lectures of physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1944.

Despite its historical impact on the biological sciences, the paper has remained largely inaccessible because it was only published in a short-lived German periodical. Creating a Physical Biology makes the Three Man Paper available in English for the first time. Brandon Fogel’s translation is accompanied by an introductory essay by Fogel and Phillip Sloan and a set of essays by leading historians and philosophers of biology that explore the context, contents, and subsequent influence of the paper, as well as its importance for the wider philosophical analysis of biological reductionism.

Creating a Physical Biology

Phillip R. Sloan; Brandon Fogel — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Polar Bears in Northwest Greenland

Erik W. Born; Anna Heilmann; Lene Kielsen Holm; Kristin L. Laidre — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

This volume presents the results of an interview survey on the catch of polar bears in Northwest Greenland between 1952 and 2005. The results are based on detailed descriptions of 588 subsistence catches by Inuit polar bear hunters. The rationale for this study was the indication from hunting statistics suggesting that the catch of polar bears in Northwest Greenland had increased since the early 1990s. This change occurred simultaneously with marked changes in weather conditions and sea ice cover in Northwest Greenland. The information provided by seventy-two experienced polar bear hunters living in the Qaanaaq and Upernavik areas offers a detailed and unique account of polar bear catch, polar bear biology, climate change, and the effect of these changes on both the species and the subsistence hunt.

Heiberg's Perseus and Other Texts

Jon Stewart — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The poet and part-time philosopher Johan Ludvig Heiberg published the first issue of his review Perseus, Journal for the Speculative Idea in June of 1837 as a part of his long-standing campaign to convert his Golden Age contemporaries to G.W.F. Hegel?s philosophical system. The journal was created in large part as a result of a dispute that Heiberg had with the editorial board of the prestigious Maanedsskrift for Litteratur about an article that he had submitted. Feeling unfairly persecuted, Heiberg retracted his submission and resolved to found a new philosophical journal of his own, in which his controversial piece could be published. Thus Perseus was born. In his prefatory address to the journal?s readers, Heiberg calls upon the Greek hero Perseus to be the champion for the cause of Hegelian idealism and to do battle with the pernicious Medusa of realism and empiricism. Although Heiberg?s Hegelian review only appeared in two issues in 1837 and 1838, it was widely read and discussed among Danish students and intellectuals of the time. It was reviewed at length by the philosopher Frederik Christian Sibbern and satirized by Søren Kierkegaard in Prefaces. There can be no doubt that Heiberg?s Perseus represents a landmark in Golden Age culture.

Enlightenment Orientalism

Srinivas Aravamudan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.

More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

Enlightenment Orientalism

Srinivas Aravamudan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London

Fran Lloyd; Helen M. Potkin; Davina Thackara — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

From the northernmost borough of Hillingdon to the southern boroughs of Kingston, Merton, and Croydon, this volume focuses on public sculpture in the eight boroughs of outer south and west London. Of the three hundred monuments detailed, most were commissioned by aristocratic patrons to adorn private residences, among them Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House and Hampton Court Palace—famous for architectural and garden sculptures by John Van Nost, Caius Gabriel Cibber, and Edward Pierce. The nineteenth century saw private patronage replaced by public support, as ambitious programs of sculpture were launched to emphasize civic virtues. With more than two hundred illustrations, this book locates public sculpture in the context of the metropolis and offers insight into the shifting identities of the outer boroughs.

Time Travel and Warp Drives

Allen Everett; Thomas Roman — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Sci-fi makes it look so easy. Receive a distress call from Alpha Centauri? No problem: punch the warp drive and you're there in minutes. Facing a catastrophe that can't be averted? Just pop back in the timestream and stop it before it starts. But for those of us not lucky enough to live in a science-fictional universe, are these ideas merely flights of fancy—or could it really be possible to travel through time or take shortcuts between stars?

Cutting-edge physics may not be able to answer those questions yet, but it does offer up some tantalizing possibilities. In Time Travel and Warp Drives, Allen Everett and Thomas A. Roman take readers on a clear, concise tour of our current understanding of the nature of time and space—and whether or not we might be able to bend them to our will. Using no math beyond high school algebra, the authors lay out an approachable explanation of Einstein's special relativity, then move through the fundamental differences between traveling forward and backward in time and the surprising theoretical connection between going back in time and traveling faster than the speed of light. They survey a variety of possible time machines and warp drives, including wormholes and warp bubbles, and, in a dizzyingly creative chapter, imagine the paradoxes that could plague a world where time travel was possible—killing your own grandfather is only one of them!

Written with a light touch and an irrepressible love of the fun of sci-fi scenarios—but firmly rooted in the most up-to-date science, Time Travel and Warp Drives will be a delightful discovery for any science buff or armchair chrononaut.

Beth Sholom Synagogue

Joseph M. Siry — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

In a suburb just north of Philadelphia stands Beth Sholom Synagogue, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue and among his finest religious buildings. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007, Beth Sholom was one of Wright’s last completed projects, and for years it has been considered one of his greatest masterpieces.

But its full story has never been told. Beth Sholom Synagogue provides the first in-depth look at the synagogue’s conception and realization in relation to Wright’s other religious architecture. Beginning with his early career at Adler and Sullivan’s architectural firm in Chicago and his design for Unity Temple and ending with the larger works completed just before or soon after his death, Joseph M. Siry skillfully depicts Wright’s exploration of geometric forms and structural techniques in creating architecture for worshipping communities. Siry also examines Wright’s engagement with his clients, whose priorities stemmed from their denominational identity, and the effect this had on his designs—his client for Beth Sholom, Rabbi Mortimer Cohen, worked with Wright to anchor the building in the traditions of Judaism even as it symbolized the faith’s continuing life in postwar America. With each of his religious projects, Wright considered questions of social history and cultural identity as he advanced his program for an expressive, modern American architecture. His search to combine these agendas culminated in Beth Sholom, where the interplay of light, form, and space create a stunning and inspiring place of worship.

Filled with over three hundred illustrations, this remarkable book takes us deep inside the synagogue’s design, construction, and reception to bring us an illuminating portrait of the crowning achievement of this important aspect of Wright’s career.

American Nietzsche

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture.

In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike.

A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.

Narrating the Catastrophe

Jac Saorsa — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

An extraordinary collaboration between contemporary art and critical discourse, Narrating the Catastrophe guides readers through unfamiliar textual landscapes where “being” is defined as an act rather than a form. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of intersubjective narrative identity as well as the catastrophe theory of Gilles Deleuze, Jac Saorsa establishes an alternative perspective from which to interpret and engage with the world around us. A highly original—and visually appealing—take on a high-profile issue in contemporary critical debate, this book will appeal to all those interested in visual arts and philosophy.

Directory of World Cinema: East Europe

Adam Bingham — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Since the 1970s, the works of filmmakers from the nations of Eastern Europe— among them, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Béla Tarr, István Szabó, and Jirí Menzel—have experienced an international upsurge in popularity. Charting the trends of the national cinemas of Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, as well as the lesser-known industries of Serbia, Slovakia, and Romania, this new volume in the Directory of World Cinema series explores important genres in the cinema of Eastern Europe, including war films, new wave, comedies, and surrealist art cinema, with essays on the most prolific filmmakers, in-depth reviews of key titles, and suggested resources for further study. Fifty full-color stills round out this invaluable guide to the burgeoning cinema of Eastern Europe.

China's Environment and China's Environment Journalists

Hugo de Burgh; Zeng Rong — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Environmental issues are of growing concern in China, with numerous initiatives aimed at cultivating dialogue and increasing awareness. And key to these initiatives is the environmental journalist. The first English-language study of this burgeoning new field, this book investigates Chinese environmental journalists—their methodologies, their attitudes toward the environment, and their views on the significance of their work—and concludes that most respond enthusiastically to government promptings to report on the environment and climate change. Additional chapters demonstrate journalists’ impact in helping to shape governmental decision making.

Far Field

Andrea Polli; Jane Marsching — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Human understanding of the rapidly changing environments of the North and South Poles—and the realities of climate change—has been radically transformed by a host of innovations afforded by the digital technologies. Far Field presents essays from artists and scholars who address the shift in our collective cultural understanding through a selection of the most significant artistic, scientific, technological, and philosophical interpretations of the poles over the past decade. Amply illustrated and including fascinating first person accounts of projects at the poles, this cutting-edge volume will have important implications for contemporary cultural studies and the critical study of climate change.

Spoken Vietnamese for Beginners

Nguyen Long; Marybeth Clark; Nguyen Bich Thuan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

This textbook is designed for English-speaking students wishing to
acquire a basic working ability in conversational Vietnamese. The
twenty lessons in this volume are centered around short conversations
based on common topics—introductions, friends and family
members, work—as well as other everyday situations. Each set of
conversations builds on previously studied material and introduces
new sentence structures.

Spoken Vietnamese for Beginners also contains exercise sections that
allow students to practice new and old vocabulary. Every fifth lesson in
the book reviews previously covered material with written exercises, narrative
readings, and suggested conversations so students can practice the
Vietnamese they have learned. Self-tests are also included so students
can individually review their understanding of the language.

The conversations and exercises in this textbook will be made
available online as audio files. The book and accompanying audio—
an integral component to Spoken Vietnamese for Beginners—can be
used either with a teacher or for self-study. Language professors and
their students—or those learning Vietnamese on their own—will
appreciate the accessible approach and manageable size of this very
practical textbook.

Contemporary Vietnamese

Nguyen Bich Thuan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

This textbook presumes knowledge of the contents of Spoken Vietnamese
for Beginners or an understanding of the basic vocabulary and sentence
structures of Vietnamese. Its aim is to build on that understanding
through the development of general conversation skills and reading
comprehension. The book follows the format of Spoken Vietnamese for
Beginners as well: each lesson opens with conversations, a second section
explains and gives additional examples of sentence structures and
expressions, and a third section offers exercises based on the conversations
as well as various readings. A fourth section provides grounding in
expanded vocabulary.

The conversations in this textbook revolve around a foreign student
coming to Vietnam to study. In the conversations, people share opinions
across cultures and ask for information ranging from the practicalities
of travel to cultural awareness. The vocabulary covered here touches on
health, economics, etiquette, and religion.

The conversations and exercises in this textbook will be made available
online as audio files. The book and accompanying audio—an integral
component to Contemporary Vietnamese—can be used either with a
teacher or for self-study. Language professors and their students—or
those learning Vietnamese on their own—will appreciate the accessible
approach and manageable size of this textbook.

Contemporary Vietnamese Readings

Nguyen Bich Thuan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

This textbook is intended for advanced intermediate students preparing
for work or research in Vietnam or with materials written in Vietnamese.
It acquaints them with a range of written styles, expands their lexical
range in a variety of topics, develops reading comprehension skills, and
expands their awareness of Vietnamese culture and values.

Contemporary Vietnamese Readings incorporates authentic reading
materials such as street signs, banners, advertisements, news articles
from north and south Vietnamese newspapers and magazines, and
excerpts from novels and short stories. The materials are categorized
under such themes as the Vietnamese land and its people, society and
culture, current affairs, the environment, health and safety, demography
and family planning, politics, diplomacy and law, economics and finance,
literature, and Vietnamese women. The wide variety of different
readings and genres represented in this textbook assume prior mastery of
basic Vietnamese vocabulary and sentence structures at a level equivalent
to completing a beginning and intermediate textbook series.

Language professors and their students, or anyone seeking a more
advanced understanding of Vietnamese—or more nuanced understanding
of Vietnamese culture—will appreciate the instructional value
of Contemporary Vietnamese Readings.

Work, Health and Wellbeing

Sarah Vickerstaff; Chris Phillipson; Ross Wilkie — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The relationship between health and work is widely recognised as complex and multifaceted. In the context of an ageing population our ability to enable people with health issues to continue working is becoming more critical. This multi-disciplinary volume brings together original research from diverse disciplinary backgrounds investigating how we can define and operationalise a bio-psychosocial model of ill-health to improve work participation in middle and later life.