Search results for ""columbia university press""
Columbia University Press The Botany of Beer: An Illustrated Guide to More Than 500 Plants Used in Brewing
From mass-produced lagers to craft-brewery IPAs, from beers made in Trappist monasteries according to traditional techniques to those created by innovative local brewers seeking to capture regional terroir, the world of beer boasts endless varieties. The diversity of beer does not only reflect the differences among the people and cultures who brew this beverage. It also testifies to the vast range of plants that help give different styles of beer their distinguishing flavor profiles.This book is a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated compendium of the characteristics and properties of the plants used in making beer around the world. The botanical expert Giuseppe Caruso presents scientifically rigorous descriptions, accompanied by his own hand-drawn ink images, of more than 500 species. For each one, he gives the scientific classification, common names, and information about morphology, geographical distribution and habitat, and cultivation range. Caruso provides detailed information about each plant’s applications in beer making, including which of its parts are employed, as well as its chemical composition, its potential toxicity, and examples of beers and styles in which it is typically used. The book also considers historical uses, aiding brewers who seek to rediscover ancient and early modern concoctions.This book will appeal to a wide audience, from beer aficionados to botany enthusiasts, providing valuable information for homebrewers and professional beer makers alike. It reveals how botanical knowledge can open new possibilities for today’s and tomorrow’s brewers.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Hitchcock Annual
Hitchcock Annual, volume 24, includes essays on unresolved ambiguities in Suspicion and trauma and recovery in Under Capricorn. A special feature of the volume is an expanded section reviewing current critical work on Hitchcock, including detailed review essays on recent books on such key topics as Hitchcock's comedy, collaborators, approach to acting, notion of pure cinema, and negotiations with censors through the years.
£22.00
Columbia University Press In the Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa Japan
In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai for whom she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave birth to two of his sons. Writing after Yoshiyasu’s retirement, she recalled it all—from the glittering formal visits of the shogun and his entourage to the passage of the seasons as seen from her apartments in the Yanagisawa mansion.In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japan’s early modern era. Featuring Machiko’s keen eye for detail, strong narrative voice, and polished prose studded with allusions to Chinese and Japanese classics, this memoir sheds light on everything from the social world of the Tokugawa elite to the role of literature in women’s lives. Machiko modeled her story on The Tale of Genji, illustrating how the eleventh-century classic continued to inspire its female readers and provide them with the means to make sense of their experiences. Elegant, poetic, and revealing, In the Shelter of the Pine is a vivid portrait of a distant world and a vital addition to the canon of Japanese literature available in English.
£27.00
Columbia University Press The Myth of Private Equity: An Inside Look at Wall Street’s Transformative Investments
Once an obscure niche of the investment world, private equity has grown into a juggernaut, with consequences for a wide range of industries as well as the financial markets. Private equity funds control companies that represent trillions of dollars in assets, millions of employees, and the well-being of thousands of institutional investors and their beneficiaries. Even as the ruthlessness of some funds has made private equity a poster child for the harms of unfettered capitalism, many aspects of the industry remain opaque, hidden from the normal bounds of accountability.The Myth of Private Equity is a hard-hitting and meticulous exposé from an insider’s viewpoint. Jeffrey C. Hooke—a former private equity executive and investment banker with deep knowledge of the industry—examines the negative effects of private equity and the ways in which it has avoided scrutiny. He unravels the exaggerations that the industry has spun to its customers and the business media, scrutinizing its claims of lucrative investment returns and financial wizardry and showing the stark realities that are concealed by the funds’ self-mythologizing and penchant for secrecy. Hooke details the flaws in private equity’s investment strategies, critically examines its day-to-day operations, and reveals the broad spectrum of its enablers. A bracing and essential read for both the financial profession and the broader public, this book pulls back the curtain on one of the most controversial areas of finance.
£27.00
Columbia University Press The Carriers: What the Fragile X Gene Reveals About Family, Heredity, and Scientific Discovery
A tiny mutation on the X chromosome can shape a family’s history. Passed down from a “carrier” parent to a child, fragile X syndrome is the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability and autism. Beyond that—and a rarity among genetic disorders—some fragile X carriers not only transmit the mutation but also experience related conditions themselves. In such cases, carriers can have tremors, infertility, and psychiatric disorders that complicate raising children with fragile X syndrome—and all too often, they suffer in silence.The Carriers investigates this common but still little-known genetic condition and its life-altering consequences. Anne Skomorowsky reveals how this disorder afflicts families across generations, telling the stories of the mothers and grandparents of fragile X patients and considering how genes interact with family dynamics. She interweaves the personal narratives and family histories of the people affected by fragile X disorders with clear and accessible explanations of the science behind them. Skomorowsky unpacks the latest research on the fragile X mutation and explores the history of its discovery. She highlights the roles of women as carriers, caregivers, and researchers who have made astonishing scientific breakthroughs over the last three decades.The Carriers is an essential book for fragile X families, including those just learning they are carriers, and for all readers interested in the complexities of heredity, the ethical dilemmas of genetic medicine, and the relationship between genes and personality.
£22.00
Columbia University Press Samak the Ayyar: A Tale of Ancient Persia
The adventures of Samak, a trickster-warrior hero of Persia’s thousand-year-old oral storytelling tradition, are beloved in Iran. Samak is an ayyar, a warrior who comes from the common people and embodies the ideals of loyalty, selflessness, and honor—a figure that recalls samurai, ronin, and knights yet is distinctive to Persian legend. His exploits—set against an epic background of palace intrigue, battlefield heroics, and star-crossed romance between a noble prince and princess—are as deeply rooted in Persian culture as are the stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur in the West. However, this majestic tale has remained little known outside Iran.Translated from the original Persian by Freydoon Rassouli and adapted by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, this timeless masterwork can now be enjoyed by English-speaking readers. A thrilling and suspenseful saga, Samak the Ayyar also offers a vivid portrait of Persia a thousand years ago. Within an epic quest narrative teeming with action and supernatural forces, it sheds light on the lives of ordinary people and their social worlds. This is the first complete English-language version of a treasure of world culture. The translation is grounded in the twelfth-century Persian text while paying homage to the dynamic culture of storytelling from which it arose.
£22.00
Columbia University Press Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet
What would it take to achieve a genuinely food-secure world—one without hunger or malnutrition, where everyone gets to consume the right quantity and quality of food to live a healthy, active, and productive life? Bringing about such a future requires transforming how our food is grown, managed, and distributed. From production to consumption, food systems must be sustainable, halting environmental degradation and even repairing the damage we have previously done.This book provides an accessible guide to making healthy diets from sustainable food systems available to all. Glenn Denning bridges the divisive worlds of science, policy, and practice. He synthesizes the most relevant literature and shares personal perspectives and insights gained over four decades working in more than fifty countries, coupled with the real-world experience of hundreds of leading experts. Universal Food Security lays out key priorities—sustainable intensification, market infrastructure, postharvest stewardship, healthy diets, and social protection—and presents how to achieve food systems transformation.Denning identifies the education and development of practitioner-leaders as the critical trigger of change. Universal Food Security informs and inspires those leaders—acting on their own and with others through institutions—to achieve a food-secure world. This book is an ideal handbook for students and practitioners looking to transform our food systems at all levels.
£27.00
Columbia University Press The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
Value investing is not just a system for success in the market. It is also an intellectual toolkit for achieving a deeper understanding of the world. In The Joys of Compounding, the value investor Gautam Baid builds a holistic approach to value investing and philosophy from his wide-ranging reading, combining practical approaches, self-cultivation, and business wisdom.Distilling investment and life lessons into a comprehensive guide, Baid integrates the strategies and wisdom of preeminent figures whose teachings have stood the test of time. Drawing on the work of investing greats like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Ben Graham, as well as philosophers and scholars, he artfully interweaves the lessons learned from his many teachers. Baid demonstrates their practical applications in the areas of business, investing, and decision making and also shows that these ideas can be applied to one’s own life with just as much reward.A celebration of the value investing discipline, this book also recounts Baid’s personal experiences, testifying to his belief that the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. The Joys of Compounding offers curated reflections on life and learning for all investors, investment enthusiasts, and readers seeking a dose of practical wisdom.This revised and updated edition highlights Baid’s distinctive voice.
£22.00
Columbia University Press The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance
Winner, 2024 Haskins Medal, Medieval Academy of America Winner, 2023 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, History of Science SocietyWinner, 2022 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies, American Academy of Religion Honorable Mention, 2023 John Boswell Prize, The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History (CLGBTH) Longlisted, 2022 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Studies, Lambda Literary AwardsThe Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks
Now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far. Readers everywhere are overwhelmed with a flow of data, news, and text. Visuals can cut through the noise and make it easier for readers to recognize and recall information. Yet many researchers were never taught how to present their work visually. This book details essential strategies to create more effective data visualizations. Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts. Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart’s design. Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations. This book will guide you as you define your audience and goals, choose the graph that best fits for your data, and clearly communicate your message.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution
Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges?In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.
£20.00
Columbia University Press Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism
Will the use of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and smart machines be the end of journalism as we know it—or its savior? In Newsmakers, Francesco Marconi, who has led the development of the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal’s use of AI in journalism, offers a new perspective on the potential of these technologies. He explains how reporters, editors, and newsrooms of all sizes can take advantage of the possibilities they provide to develop new ways of telling stories and connecting with readers.Marconi analyzes the challenges and opportunities of AI through case studies ranging from financial publications using algorithms to write earnings reports to investigative reporters analyzing large data sets to outlets determining the distribution of news on social media. Newsmakers contends that AI can augment—not automate—the industry, allowing journalists to break more news more quickly while simultaneously freeing up their time for deeper analysis. Marshaling insights drawn from firsthand experience, Marconi maps a media landscape transformed by artificial intelligence for the better. In addition to considering the benefits of these new technologies, Marconi stresses the continuing need for editorial and institutional oversight. Newsmakers outlines the important questions that journalists and media organizations should consider when integrating AI and algorithms into their workflow. For journalism students as well as seasoned media professionals, Marconi’s insights provide much-needed clarity and a practical roadmap for how AI can best serve journalism.
£22.00
Columbia University Press Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement
In 1951, a new type of publication appeared on newsstands—the physique magazine produced by and for gay men. For many men growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, these magazines and their images and illustrations of nearly naked men, as well as articles, letters from readers, and advertisements, served as an initiation into gay culture. The publishers behind them were part of a wider world of “physique entrepreneurs”: men as well as women who ran photography studios, mail-order catalogs, pen-pal services, book clubs, and niche advertising for gay audiences. Such businesses have often been seen as peripheral to the gay political movement. In this book, David K. Johnson shows how gay commerce was not a byproduct but rather an important catalyst for the gay rights movement.Offering a vivid look into the lives of physique entrepreneurs and their customers, and presenting a wealth of illustrations, Buying Gay explores the connections—and tensions—between the market and the movement. With circulation rates many times higher than the openly political “homophile” magazines, physique magazines were the largest gay media outlets of their time. This network of producers and consumers helped foster a gay community and upend censorship laws, paving the way for open expression. Physique entrepreneurs were at the center of legal struggles, especially against the U.S. Post Office, including the court victory that allowed full-frontal male nudity and open homoeroticism. Buying Gay reconceives the history of the gay rights movement and shows how consumer culture helped create community and a site for resistance.
£25.20
Columbia University Press So You Want to Be a Neuroscientist?
The pursuit to understand the human brain in all its intricacy is a fascinatingly complex challenge and neuroscience is one of the fastest-growing scientific fields worldwide. There is a wide range of career options open to those who wish to pursue a career in neuroscience, yet there are few resources that provide students with inside advice on how to go about it.So You Want to Be a Neuroscientist? is a contemporary and engaging guide for aspiring neuroscientists of diverse backgrounds and interests. Fresh with the experience of having recently launched her own career, Ashley Juavinett provides a candid look at the field, offering practical guidance that explores everything from programming to personal stories.Juavinett begins with a look at the field and its history, exploring our evolving understanding of how the brain works. She then tackles the nitty-gritty: how to apply to a PhD program, the daily life of a graduate student, the art of finding mentors and collaborators, and what to expect when working in a lab. Finally, she introduces readers to diverse young scientists whose career paths illustrate what you can do with a neuroscience degree. For anyone intrigued by the brain or seeking advice on how to further their ambitions of studying it, So You Want to Be a Neuroscientist? is a practical and timely overview of how to learn and thrive in this exciting field.
£16.99
Columbia University Press Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom
Academic freedom rests on a shared belief that the production of knowledge advances the common good. In an era of education budget cuts, wealthy donors intervening in university decisions, and right-wing groups threatening dissenters, scholars cannot expect that those in power will value their work. Can academic freedom survive in this environment—and must we rearticulate what academic freedom is in order to defend it?This book presents a series of essays by the renowned historian Joan Wallach Scott that explore the history and theory of free inquiry and its value today. Scott considers the contradictions in the concept of academic freedom. She examines the relationship between state power and higher education; the differences between the First Amendment right of free speech and the guarantee of academic freedom; and, in response to recent campus controversies, the politics of civility. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Bill Moyers in which Scott discusses the personal experiences that have informed her views. Academic freedom is an aspiration, Scott holds: its implementation always falls short of its promise, but it is essential as an ideal of ethical practice. Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom is both a nuanced reflection on the tensions within a cherished concept and a strong defense of the importance of critical scholarship to safeguard democracy against the anti-intellectualism of figures from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump.
£22.00
Columbia University Press Fandango and Other Stories
In a bucolic idyll, a terrorist agonizes over the act of violence he is about to commit. On a remote island in the South Pacific, the investigation of a case of mass suicide reveals further mysteries. In a far-flung colony, a cynical trio sends an unwitting man into the wilderness in search of a chimera. Mixing romance and high adventure, intrigue and the fantastic, these magnificent tales by one of Russia’s most enduringly popular writers deftly probe the depths of human nature and desire.Fandango and Other Stories presents a selection of essential short fiction by Alexander Grin, Russia’s counterpart to Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alexandre Dumas. By turns a sailor, a dockworker, a vagrant, a gold prospector, a lumberjack, a soldier, a deserter, an agitator, an exile, a prisoner, and a runaway, Grin wrote seven novels and over three hundred short stories that transport the reader to a realm of pure art and imagination. His ingenious plots explore conflicts of the individual and society in a romantic world populated by a cast of eccentric, cosmopolitan characters. Fandango and Other Stories includes works drawn from across the entirety of Grin’s varied career to encompass the range and sophistication of his writing. Bryan Karetnyk’s elegant translations bring Grin’s distinctive voice to a new generation of readers.
£13.99
Columbia University Press Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis
What are the causes of war? How might the world be made more peaceful? In this landmark work of international relations theory, first published in 1959, the eminent realist scholar Kenneth N. Waltz offers a foundational analysis of the nature of conflict between states. He explores works by both classic political philosophers, such as St. Augustine, Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, and modern psychologists and anthropologists to discover ideas intended to explain war among states and related prescriptions for peace. Waltz influentially distinguishes among three “images” of the origins of war: those that blame individual leaders or human nature, those rooted in states’ internal composition, and those concerning the structure of the international system. With a foreword by Stephen M. Walt on the legacy and continued relevance of Waltz’s work, this anniversary edition brings new life to a perennial international relations classic.
£22.00
Columbia University Press Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism
Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible.In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.
£22.00
Columbia University Press Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945
Long before karaoke’s ubiquity and the rise of global brands such as Sony, Japan was a place where new audio technologies found eager users and contributed to new cultural forms. In Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity.A far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound film in Japan, Electrified Voices shows how these technologies reshaped the production of culture. Audio technologies upended the status of the written word as the only source of prestige while revivifying traditional forms of orality. The ability to reproduce and transmit sound, freeing it from the constraints of time and space, had profound consequences on late nineteenth-century language reform; twentieth-century literary, musical, and cinematic practices; the rise of militarism and nationalism in the 1920s and 30s; and the transition to the postwar period inaugurated by Emperor Hirohito’s declaration of unconditional surrender to Allied forces—a declaration that was recorded on a gramophone record and broadcast throughout the defeated Japanese empire. The first cultural history in English of auditory technologies in modern Japan, Electrified Voices enriches our understanding of Japanese modernity and offers a major contribution to sound studies and global media history.
£25.20
Columbia University Press Liquid Light: Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition
The Santo Daime is a syncretic religion that arose in the Amazon region of Brazil in the middle of the twentieth century and now has churches throughout the world. Its spiritual practice is based around the sacramental use of ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew consumed only within regular ceremonies. In Liquid Light, G. William Barnard—an initiate of the religion and a scholar of religious studies—considers the religious practice and transformative inner experiences of the Santo Daime community.Immersing readers in his own journeys into nonordinary states of consciousness, Barnard provides a vivid as well as introspective depiction of the dramatic ritual and visionary worlds that a practitioner of this tradition encounters. He combines striking first-person accounts of the ritual life of the Santo Daime with accessible examinations of the psychological and philosophical significance of mystical states and mediumship. Bridging insider and outsider perspectives on religious experience, Barnard demonstrates how the Santo Daime offers its practitioners a transformative and profoundly illuminating spiritual path. Liquid Light also reflects on the broader implications of psychedelics, arguing that entheogenic religions can shed light on a wide range of key philosophical questions concerning consciousness, selfhood, and reality.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East
Winner, 2023 Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award, International History and Politics Section, American Political Science AssociationHonorable Mention, 2023 Barrington Moore Award, Comparative and Historical Sociology Section, American Sociological AssociationHonorable Mention, 2023 Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations, Historical International Relations Section, International Studies AssociationIt is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial powers unilaterally imposed artificial borders on the post-Ottoman world in postwar agreements. This book offers a new account of how the Great War unmade and then remade the political order of the region. Ranging from Morocco to Iran and spanning the eve of the Great War into the 1930s, it demonstrates that the modern Middle East was shaped through complex and violent power struggles among local and international actors.Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914–1918 phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles, the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined processes through which states were made, identities transformed, and boundaries drawn. This book’s vast scope encompasses successful state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political units—including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states—that nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.
£22.50
Columbia University Press Making Sense of the Alt-Right
During the 2016 election, a new term entered the American political lexicon: the "alt-right," short for "alternative right." Despite the innocuous name, the alt-right is a white-nationalist movement. Yet it differs from earlier racist groups: it is youthful and tech-savvy, obsessed with provocation and trolling, amorphous, predominantly online, and mostly anonymous. And it was energized by Donald Trump's presidential campaign. In Making Sense of the Alt-Right, George Hawley provides an accessible introduction to the alt-right, giving vital perspective on the emergence of a group whose overt racism has confounded expectations for a more tolerant America. Hawley explains the movement's origins, evolution, methods, and its core belief in white identity politics. The book explores how the alt-right differs from traditional white nationalism, libertarianism, and other online illiberal ideologies such as neoreaction, as well as from mainstream Republicans and even Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. The alt-right's use of offensive humor and its trolling-driven approach, based in animosity to so-called political correctness, can make it difficult to determine true motivations. Yet through exclusive interviews and a careful study of the alt-right's influential texts, Hawley is able to paint a full picture of a movement that not only disagrees with liberalism but fundamentally rejects most of the tenets of American conservatism. Hawley points to the alt-right's growing influence and makes a case for coming to a precise understanding of its beliefs without sensationalism or downplaying the movement's radicalism.
£22.50
Columbia University Press The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History
In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine.This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a “dialogue” between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.
£31.50
Columbia University Press Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi
Genuine Pretending is an innovative and comprehensive new reading of the Zhuangzi that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary philosophical readings, distances itself from the pursuit of authenticity and subverts the dominant Confucianism of its time through satirical allegories and ironical reflections. With humor and parody, the Zhuangzi exposes the Confucian demand to commit to socially constructed norms as pretense and hypocrisy. The Confucian pursuit of sincerity establishes exemplary models that one is supposed to emulate. In contrast, the Zhuangzi parodies such venerated representations of wisdom and deconstructs the very notion of sagehood. Instead, it urges a playful, skillful, and unattached engagement with socially mandated duties and obligations. The Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of what Moeller and D'Ambrosio call "genuine pretending": the paradoxical skill of not only surviving but thriving by enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or letting them define one's identity. A provocative rereading of a Chinese philosophical classic, Genuine Pretending also suggests the value of a Daoist outlook today as a way of seeking existential sanity in an age of mass media's paradoxical quest for originality.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927
The St. Croix–born, Harlem-based Hubert Harrison (1883–1927) was a brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and activist who combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a potent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his work is a key link in the two great strands of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle: the labor- and civil-rights movement associated with Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist movement associated with Garvey and Malcolm X.In this second volume of his acclaimed biography, Jeffrey B. Perry traces the final decade of Harrison’s life, from 1918 to 1927. Perry details Harrison’s literary and political activities, foregrounding his efforts against white supremacy and for racial consciousness and unity in struggles for equality and radical social change. The book explores Harrison’s role in the militant New Negro Movement and the International Colored Unity League, as well as his prolific work as a writer, educator, and editor of the New Negro and the Negro World. Perry examines Harrison’s interactions with major figures such as Garvey, Randolph, J. A. Rogers, Arthur Schomburg, and other prominent individuals and organizations as he agitated, educated, and organized for democracy and equality from a race-conscious, radical internationalist perspective. This magisterial biography demonstrates how Harrison’s life and work continue to offer profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.
£31.50
Columbia University Press Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays
In this essential collection of Andrei Platonov's plays, the noted Platonov translator Robert Chandler edits and introduces The Hurdy-Gurdy (translated by Susan Larsen), Fourteen Little Red Huts (translated by Chandler), and Grandmother's Little Hut (translated by Jesse Irwin). Written in 1930 and 1933, respectively, The Hurdy-Gurdy and Fourteen Little Red Huts constitute an impassioned and penetrating response to Stalin's assault on the Soviet peasantry. They reflect the political urgency of Bertolt Brecht and anticipate the tragic farce of Samuel Beckett but play out through dialogue and characterization that is unmistakably Russian. This volume also includes Grandmother's Little Hut, an unfinished play that represents Platonov's later, gentler work.
£31.50
Columbia University Press Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education
The past thirty years have seen dozens of otherwise successful investors try to improve education through the application of market principles. They have funneled billions of dollars into alternative schools, online education, and textbook publishing, and they have, with surprising regularity, lost their shirts.In Class Clowns, professor and investment banker Jonathan A. Knee dissects what drives investors' efforts to improve education and why they consistently fail. Knee takes readers inside four spectacular financial failures in education: Rupert Murdoch's billion-dollar effort to reshape elementary education through technology; the unhappy investors—including hedge fund titan John Paulson—who lost billions in textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin; the abandonment of Knowledge Universe, Michael Milken's twenty-year mission to revolutionize the global education industry; and a look at Chris Whittle, founder of EdisonLearning and a pioneer of large-scale transformational educational ventures, who continues to attract investment despite decades of financial and operational disappointment.Although deep belief in the curative powers of the market drove these initiatives, it was the investors' failure to appreciate market structure that doomed them. Knee asks: What makes a good education business? By contrasting rare successes, he finds a dozen broad lessons at the heart of these cautionary case studies. Class Clowns offers an important guide for public policy makers and guardrails for future investors, as well as an intelligent exposé for activists and teachers frustrated with the repeated underperformance of these attempts to shake up education.
£16.99
Columbia University Press Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures
Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this new book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism—the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components—has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. He draws on his Nobel Prize-winning work revealing the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory in sea slugs to shed light on the complex workings of the mental processes of higher animals. In Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Kandel shows how this radically reductionist approach, applied to the most complex puzzle of our time—the brain—has been employed by modern artists who distill their subjective world into color, form, and light. Kandel demonstrates through bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive functions how science can explore the complexities of human perception and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art. At the heart of the book is an elegant elucidation of the contribution of reductionism to the evolution of modern art and its role in a monumental shift in artistic perspective. Reductionism steered the transition from figurative art to the first explorations of abstract art reflected in the works of Turner, Monet, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Mondrian. Kandel explains how, in the postwar era, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Louis, Turrell, and Flavin used a reductionist approach to arrive at their abstract expressionism and how Katz, Warhol, Close, and Sandback built upon the advances of the New York School to reimagine figurative and minimal art. Featuring captivating drawings of the brain alongside full-color reproductions of modern art masterpieces, this book draws out the common concerns of science and art and how they illuminate each other.
£18.99
Columbia University Press The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media
A fast-growing social media marketing company, TechCo encourages all of its employees to speak up. By promoting open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy, the firm has fostered a uniquely engaged workforce and an enviable capacity for change. Yet the path hasn't always been easy. TechCo has confronted a number of challenges, and its experience reveals the essential elements of bureaucracy that remain even when a firm sets out to discard them. Through it all, TechCo serves as a powerful new model for how firms can navigate today's rapidly changing technological and cultural climate.Catherine J. Turco was embedded within TechCo for ten months. The Conversational Firm is her ethnographic analysis of what worked at the company and what didn't. She offers multiple lessons for anyone curious about the effect of social media on the corporate environment and adds depth to debates over the new generation of employees reared on social media: Millennials who carry their technological habits and expectations into the workplace. Marshaling insights from cultural and economic sociology, organizational theory, economics, technology studies, and anthropology, The Conversational Firm offers a nuanced analysis of corporate communication, control, and culture in the social media age.
£20.00
Columbia University Press Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima
"As we passed from the city center into the Fukushima suburbs I surveyed the landscape for surgical face masks. I wanted to see in what ratios people were wearing such masks. I was trying to determine, consciously and unconsciously, what people do in response. So, among people walking along the roadway, and people on motorbikes, I saw no one with masks. Even among the official crossing guards outfitted with yellow flags and banners, none. All showed bright and calm. What was I hoping for exactly? The guilty conscience again. But then it was time for school to start. We began to see groups of kids on their way to school. They were wearing masks." Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure is a multifaceted literary response to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that devastated northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. The novel is narrated by Hideo Furukawa, who travels back to his childhood home near Fukushima after 3/11 to reconnect with a place that is now doubly alien. His ruminations conjure the region's storied past, particularly its thousand-year history of horses, humans, and the struggle with a rugged terrain. Standing in the morning light, these horses also tell their stories, heightening the sense of liberation, chaos, and loss that accompanies Furukawa's rich recollections. A fusion of fiction, history, and memoir, this book plays with form and feeling in ways reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn yet draws its own, unforgettable portrait of personal and cultural dislocation.
£17.99
Columbia University Press Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices
As OPEC has loosened its grip over the past ten years, the oil market has been rocked by wild price swings, the likes of which haven't been seen for eight decades. Crafting an engrossing journey from the gushing Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s to today's fraught and fractious Middle East, Crude Volatility explains how past periods of stability and volatility in oil prices help us understand the new boom-bust era. Oil's notorious volatility has always been considered a scourge afflicting not only the oil industry but also the broader economy and geopolitical landscape; Robert McNally makes sense of how oil became so central to our world and why it is subject to such extreme price fluctuations.Tracing a history marked by conflict, intrigue, and extreme uncertainty, McNally shows how—even from the oil industry's first years—wild and harmful price volatility prompted industry leaders and officials to undertake extraordinary efforts to stabilize oil prices by controlling production. Herculean market interventions—first, by Rockefeller's Standard Oil, then, by U.S. state regulators in partnership with major international oil companies, and, finally, by OPEC—succeeded to varying degrees in taming the beast. McNally, a veteran oil market and policy expert, explains the consequences of the ebbing of OPEC's power, debunking myths and offering recommendations—including mistakes to avoid—as we confront the unwelcome return of boom and bust oil prices.
£22.00
Columbia University Press The Wise Advocate: The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership
Leadership is the habit of making good choices. Even in difficult and uncertain circumstances, the most effective leaders focus their attention and overcome entrenched patterns of behavior to push an organization to new heights of success. This capability is no fluke: the latest research on the brain shows that we can pinpoint the mental activity associated with it—and cultivate it for our benefit.In this book, Art Kleiner, a strategy expert; Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist; and Josie Thomson, an executive coach, give a transformative explanation of how cutting-edge neuroscience can help business leaders set a course toward better management. Mapping the functions of a manager onto established patterns of mental activity, they identify crucial brain circuits and their parallels in organizational culture. Strategic leaders, they show, play the role of wise advocates: able to go beyond day-to-day transactional behavior to a longer-term, broader perspective that articulates their organization’s deeper purpose. True leaders can play this influencer role in an organization because they have cultivated similar self-reflective habits in their own minds. Providing a powerful guide to decision strategies and their consequences, The Wise Advocate helps managers find their own inner voice and then make that voice ring out loud and clear, with a four-step program for practice and catalytic implications for management strategy, executive education, and business results.
£22.50
Columbia University Press Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm
"Picturing myself dying in a way I choose myself seems so comforting, healing and heroic. I'd look at my wrists, watch the blood seeping, and be a spectator in my last act of self-determination. By having lost all my self-respect it seems like the last pride I own, determining the time I die."-Kyra V., seventeen Reading the confessions of a teenager contemplating suicide is uncomfortable, but we must do so to understand why self-harm has become epidemic, especially in the United States. What drives teenagers to self-harm? What makes death so attractive, so liberating, and so inevitable for so many? In Teenage Suicide Notes, sociologist Terry Williams pores over the writings of a diverse group of troubled youths to better grasp the motivations behind teenage suicide and to humanize those at risk of taking their own lives. Williams evaluates young people in rural and urban contexts and across lines of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. His approach, which combines sensitive portrayals with sociological analysis, adds a clarifying dimension to the fickle and often frustrating behavior of adolescents. Williams reads between the lines of his subjects' seemingly straightforward reflections on alienation, agency, euphoria, and loss, and investigates how this cocktail of emotions can lead to suicide-or not. Rather than treating these notes as exceptional examples of self-expression, Williams situates them at the center of teenage life, linking them to abuse, violence, depression, anxiety, religion, peer pressure, sexual identity, and family dynamics. He captures the currents that turn self-destruction into an act of self-determination and proposes more effective solutions to resolving the suicide crisis.
£25.20
Columbia University Press Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts
Cultures of Representation is the first book to explore the cinematic portrayal of disability in films from across the globe. Contributors explore classic and recent works from Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Iran, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, Senegal, and Spain, along with a pair of globally resonant Anglophone films. Anchored by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's coauthored essay on global disability-film festivals, the volume's content spans from 1950 to today, addressing socially disabling forces rendered visible in the representation of physical, developmental, cognitive, and psychiatric disabilities. Essays emphasize well-known global figures, directors, and industries - from Temple Grandin to Pedro Almodovar, from Akira Kurosawa to Bollywood - while also shining a light on films from less frequently studied cultural locations such as those portrayed in the Iranian and Korean New Waves. Whether covering postwar Italy, postcolonial Senegal, or twenty-first century Russia, the essays in this volume will appeal to scholars, undergraduates, and general readers alike.
£25.20
Columbia University Press The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia
With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema-fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. A wide range of filmmakers are covered, from Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928), Chris Marker (Description of a Struggle, 1960), Nicolas Guillen Landrian (Coffea Arabiga, 1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969), Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976) and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique, 2004) to Nanni Moretti (Palombella Rossa, 1989), Mohammed Soueid (Civil War, 2002), Claire Denis (L'Intrus, 2004) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, 2011), among others. The volume argues that the essayistic in film-as process, as experience, as experiment-opens the road to key issues faced by the individual in relation to the collective, but can also lead to its own subversion, as a form of dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis.
£22.00
Columbia University Press After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation
Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity-or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. With stunning foresight and conceptual power, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work opened not only literature but also politics, society, and culture to broader investigations of power, sex, and desire, and to new possibilities of critical agency. Illuminating with uncanny prescience Western society's evolving debates on gender and sexuality, Between Men still has much to teach us. With a new foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum emphasizing the work's ongoing relevance, Between Men engages with Shakespeare's Sonnets, Wycherley's The Country Wife, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Tennyson's The Princess, Eliot's Adam Bede, Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, among many other texts. Its pathbreaking analysis of homosocial desire in Western literature remains vital to the future of queer studies and to explorations of the social transformations in which it participates.
£22.00
Columbia University Press Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints
Traditional economic theory studies idealized markets in which prices alone can guide efficient allocation, with no need for central organization. Such models build from Adam Smith’s famous concept of an invisible hand, which guides markets and renders regulation or interference largely unnecessary. Yet for many markets, prices alone are not enough to guide feasible and efficient outcomes, and regulation alone is not enough, either. Consider air traffic control at major airports. While prices could encourage airlines to take off and land at less congested times, prices alone do just part of the job; an air traffic control system is still indispensable to avoid disastrous consequences. With just an air traffic controller, however, limited resources can be wasted or poorly used. What’s needed in this and many other real-world cases is an auction system that can effectively reveal prices while still maintaining enough direct control to ensure that complex constraints are satisfied.In Discovering Prices, Paul Milgrom—the world’s most frequently cited academic expert on auction design—describes how auctions can be used to discover prices and guide efficient resource allocations, even when resources are diverse, constraints are critical, and market-clearing prices may not even exist. Economists have long understood that externalities and market power both necessitate market organization. In this book, Milgrom introduces complex constraints as another reason for market design. Both lively and technical, Milgrom roots his new theories in real-world examples (including the ambitious U.S. incentive auction of radio frequencies, whose design he led) and provides economists with crucial new tools for dealing with the world’s growing complex resource-allocation problems.
£16.99
Columbia University Press Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left
Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers’ encounter with Aristotle.Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna’s reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna’s world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch’s own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory.
£20.00
Columbia University Press Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences
Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards's analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our conception of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.
£22.50
Columbia University Press The Evolution of Money
The sharing economy's unique customer-to-company exchange is possible because of the way in which money has evolved. These transactions have not always been as fluid as they are today, and they are likely to become even more fluid. It is therefore critical that we learn to appreciate money's elastic nature as deeply as do Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter, and other innovators, and that we understand money's transition from hard currencies to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin if we are to access their cooperative potential. The Evolution of Money illuminates this fascinating reality, focusing on the tension between currency's real and abstract properties and advancing a vital theory of money rooted in this dual exchange. It begins with the debt tablets of Mesopotamia and follows with the development of coin money in ancient Greece and Rome, gold-backed currencies in medieval Europe, and monetary economics in Victorian England. The book ends in the digital era, with the cryptocurrencies and service providers that are making the most of money's virtual side and that suggest a tectonic shift in what we call money. By building this organic time line, The Evolution of Money helps us anticipate money's next, transformative role.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives
Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is true for vegetal difference. Irigaray and Marder consider how plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal world.
£22.50
Columbia University Press Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis
Conducting the first comprehensive study of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work Disappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature. Analyzing four categories of static film--furniture films, designed to be viewed partially or distractedly; protracted films, which use extremely slow motion to impress stasis; textual films, which foreground the static display of letters and written words; and monochrome films, which display a field of monochrome color as their image--Remes maps the interrelations between movement, stillness, and duration and their complication of cinema's conventional function and effects. Arguing all films unfold in time, he suggests duration is more fundamental to cinema than motion, initiating fresh inquiries into film's manipulation of temporality, from rigidly structured works to those with more ambiguous and open-ended frameworks. Remes's discussion integrates the writings of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Tom Gunning, Rudolf Arnheim, Raymond Bellour, and Noel Carroll and will appeal to students of film theory, experimental cinema, intermedia studies, and aesthetics.
£22.50
Columbia University Press Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China's West
Despite more than a decade of rapid economic development, rising living standards, and large-scale improvements in infrastructure and services, China's western borderlands are awash in a wave of ethnic unrest not seen since the 1950s. Through on-the-ground interviews and firsthand observations, the international experts in this volume create an invaluable record of the conflicts and protests as they have unfolded—the most extensive chronicle of events to date. The authors examine the factors driving the unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang and the political strategies used to suppress them. They also explain why certain areas have seen higher concentrations of ethnic-based violence than others.Essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the origins of unrest in contemporary Tibet and Xinjiang, this volume considers the role of propaganda and education as generators and sources of conflict. It links interethnic strife to economic growth and connects environmental degradation to increased instability. It captures the subtle difference between violence in urban Xinjiang and conflict in rural Tibet, with detailed portraits of everyday individuals caught among the pressures of politics, history, personal interest, and global movements with local resonance.
£22.50
Columbia University Press A Lever Long Enough: A History of Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science Since 1864
In this comprehensive social history of Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), Robert McCaughey combines archival research with oral testimony and contemporary interviews to build a critical and celebratory portrait of one of the oldest engineering schools in the United States. McCaughey follows the evolving, occasionally rocky, and now integrated relationship between SEAS's engineers and the rest of the Columbia University student body, faculty, and administration. He also revisits the interaction between the SEAS staff and the inhabitants and institutions of the City of New York, where the school has resided since its founding in 1864. McCaughey compares the historical struggles and achievements of the school's engineers with their present-day battles and accomplishments, and he contrasts their teaching and research approaches with those of their peers at other free-standing and Ivy League engineering schools. What begins as a localized history of a school striving to define itself within a university known for its strengths in the humanities and the social sciences becomes a wider story of the transformation of the applied sciences into a critical component of American technology and education.
£37.80
Columbia University Press Note-by-Note Cooking: The Future of Food
Note-by-Note Cooking is a landmark in the annals of gastronomy, liberating cooks from the constraints of traditional ingredients and methods through the use of pure molecular compounds. 1-Octen-3-ol, which has a scent of wild mushrooms; limonene, a colorless liquid hydrocarbon that has the smell of citrus; sotolon, whose fragrance at high concentrations resembles curry and at low concentrations, maple syrup or sugar; tyrosine, an odorless but flavorful amino acid present in cheese-these and many other substances, some occurring in nature, some synthesized in the laboratory, make it possible to create novel tastes and flavors in the same way that elementary sound waves can be combined to create new sounds. Note-by-note cooking promises to add unadulterated nutritional value to dishes of all kinds, actually improving upon the health benefits of so-called natural foods. Cooking with molecular compounds will be far more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable than traditional techniques of cooking. This new way of thinking about food heralds a phase of culinary evolution on which the long-term survival of a growing human population depends. Herve This clearly explains the properties of naturally occurring and synthesized compounds, dispels a host of misconceptions about the place of chemistry in cooking, and shows why note-by-note cooking is an obvious-and inevitable-extension of his earlier pioneering work in molecular gastronomy. An appendix contains a representative selection of recipes, vividly illustrated in color.
£13.99
Columbia University Press The Habermas Handbook
Jurgen Habermas is among the most influential philosophers of our time. His diagnosis of contemporary society and concepts such as the public sphere, communicative rationality, and cosmopolitanism have influenced virtually all academic disciplines, spurred political debates, and shaped intellectual life in Germany and beyond for more than fifty years. In The Habermas Handbook, leading Habermas scholars elucidate his thought, providing essential insight into his key concepts, the breadth of his work, and his influence across politics, law, the social sciences, and public life. This volume offers a comprehensive overview and in-depth analysis of Habermas's work in its entirety. Opening by examining his intellectual biography, it goes on to illuminate the social and intellectual context of Habermasian thought, such as the Frankfurt School, speech-act theory, and contending theories of democracy. The Handbook provides an extensive account of Habermas's individual texts, ranging from his dissertation on Schelling to his most recent writing about Europe. It illustrates the development of his thought and its not infrequently controversial reception while elaborating the central ideas of his work. The book also provides a glossary of key terms and concepts, making the complexity of Habermas's thought accessible to a broad readership.
£63.00
Columbia University Press Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction
A leading figure in the emerging field of extinction studies, Thom van Dooren puts philosophy into conversation with the natural sciences and his ethnographic encounters to vivify the cultural and ethical significance of modern-day extinctions. Unlike other meditations on the subject, Flight Ways incorporates the particularities of real animals and their worlds, drawing philosophers, natural scientists, and general readers into the experience of living among and losing biodiversity. Each chapter of Flight Ways focuses on a different species or group of birds: North Pacific albatrosses, Indian vultures, an endangered colony of penguins in Australia, Hawaiian crows, and the iconic whooping cranes of North America. Written in eloquent and moving prose, the book takes stock of what is lost when a life form disappears from the world-the wide-ranging ramifications that ripple out to implicate a number of human and more-than-human others. Van Dooren intimately explores what life is like for those who must live on the edge of extinction, balanced between life and oblivion, taking care of their young and grieving their dead. He bolsters his studies with real-life accounts from scientists and local communities at the forefront of these developments. No longer abstract entities with Latin names, these species become fully realized characters enmeshed in complex and precarious ways of life, sparking our sense of curiosity, concern, and accountability toward others in a rapidly changing world.
£20.00