Search results for ""Author Various"

Waste makes an outsized contribution to the study of postwar Japanese history... will be essential reading for students of modern Japan as well as our current era more broadly.―The Journal of Asian Studies Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday. In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people’s ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan’s postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived.

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Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2000 Chinese glazes have been admired throughout history for their extraordinary qualities and colors—not least in China itself, where their appearance has been compared variously to jade, to tea-dust, to hare's fur, or to the "color of the sky after the rain." Some Chinese glazes are vibrant and brilliant in tone, while others are deep, complex, and subtle, their properties seeming to change according to ambient light. Chinese glazes have long presented a technical challenge to Western potters, and this book is the most complete account yet of their nature and their reconstruction. The story of Chinese glazes is also the story of Chinese ceramics itself, one of the most fascinating and influential traditions in ceramic history. Chinese Glazes traces the development of China's great high-fired glaze tradition from its roots in the Bronze Age, through the famous monochrome stoneware glazes of the Song dynasty, to the fine porcelain glazes of southern China. The book also examines in detail the story of China's low-fired glazes, from the time of China's first emperor to the present day. The book shows clearly how the potters of ancient China were able to work their ceramic miracles from the simplest recipes, and how modern potters can use and adapt these principles for their own work. The book contains hundreds of recipes for formulating Chinese glazes with Western materials, simple and advanced calculation techniques, as well as efficient blending procedures with local materials. The book is lavishly illustrated, with nearly three hundred photographs, one hundred in full color. These depict examples of the Chinese arts as found in pottery ranging from simple earthenware jars excavated at Neolithic sites to exquisitely designed dishes found in imperial tombs. They also show examples of modern Western ware that employ these remarkable glazing techniques.

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Exploring the broad implications of evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis’s work, this collection brings together specialists across a range of disciplines, from paleontology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, and geobiology to developmental systems theory, archaeology, history of science, cultural science studies, and literature and science. Addressing the multiple themes that animated Margulis’s science, the essays within take up, variously, astrobiology and the origin of life, ecology and symbiosis from the microbial to the planetary scale, the coupled interactions of earthly environments and evolving life in Gaia theory and earth system science, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions. Dorion Sagan acquaints the reader with salient issues in Lynn Margulis’s scientific work, the controversies they raised, and the vocabulary necessary to follow the arguments. Sankar Chatterjee synthesizes several strands of current theory for the origin of life on earth. James Strick tells the intertwined origin stories of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and Margulis’s serial endosymbiosis theory. Jan Sapp explores the distinct phylogenetic visions of Margulis and Carl Woese. Susan Squier examines the epigenetics of embryologist and developmental biologist C. H. Waddington. Bruce Clarke studies the convergence of ecosystem ecology, systems theory, and science fiction between the 1960s and the 1980s. James Shapiro discusses the genome evolution that results not from random changes but rather from active cell processes. Susan Oyama shows how the concept of development balances an over-emphasis on genetic coding and other deterministic schemas. Christopher Witmore studies the ways in which a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, mixes up natural resources, animal lives, and human appetites. And Peter Westbroek brings the insights of earth system science toward a new worldview essential for a proper response to global change.

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In this compelling critique Rob Wilson explores the creation of the “Pacific Rim” in the American imagination and how the concept has been variously adapted and resisted in Hawai‘i, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Reimagining the American Pacific ranges from the nineteenth century to the present and draws on theories of postmodernism, transnationality, and post-Marxist geography to contribute to the ongoing discussion of what constitutes “global” and “local.”Wilson begins by tracing the arrival of American commerce and culture in the Pacific through missionary and imperial forces in the nineteenth century and the parallel development of Asia/Pacific as an idea. Using an impressive range of texts—from works by Herman Melville, James Michener, Maori and Western Samoan novelists, and Bamboo Ridge poets to Baywatch, films and musicals such as South Pacific and Blue Hawaii, and native Hawaiian shark god poetry—Wilson illustrates what it means for a space to be “regionalized.” Claiming that such places become more open to transnational flows of information, labor, finance, media, and global commodities, he explains how they then become isolated, their borders simultaneously crossed and fixed. In the case of Hawai’i, Wilson argues that culturally innovative, risky forms of symbol making and a broader—more global—vision of local plight are needed to counterbalance the racism and increasing imbalance of cultural capital and goods in the emerging postplantation and tourist-centered economy.Reimagining the American Pacific leaves the reader with a new understanding of the complex interactions of global and local economies and cultures in a region that, since the 1970s, has been a leading trading partner of the United States. It is an engaging and provocative contribution to the fields of Asian and American studies, as well as those of cultural studies and theory, literary criticism, and popular culture.

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This is the first anthology ever devoted to early modern Japanese literature, spanning the period from 1600 to 1900, known variously as the Edo or the Tokugawa, one of the most creative epochs of Japanese culture. This anthology, which will be of vital interest to anyone involved in this era, includes not only fiction, poetry, and drama, but also essays, treatises, literary criticism, comic poetry, adaptations from Chinese, folk stories and other non-canonical works. Many of these texts have never been translated into English before, and several classics have been newly translated for this collection. Early Modern Japanese Literature introduces English readers to an unprecedented range of prose fiction genres, including dangibon (satiric sermons), kibyoshi (satiric and didactic picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon (reading books), kokkeibon (books of humor), gokan (bound books), and ninjobon (books of romance and sentiment). The anthology also offers a rich array of poetry-waka, haiku, senryu, kyoka, kyoshi-and eleven plays, which range from contemporary domestic drama to historical plays and from early puppet theater to nineteenth century kabuki. Since much of early modern Japanese literature is highly allusive and often elliptical, this anthology features introductions and commentary that provide the critical context for appreciating this diverse and fascinating body of texts. One of the major characteristics of early modern Japanese literature is that almost all of the popular fiction was amply illustrated by wood-block prints, creating an extensive text-image phenomenon. In some genres such as kibyoshi and gokan the text in fact appeared inside the woodblock image. Woodblock prints of actors were also an important aspect of the culture of kabuki drama. A major feature of this anthology is the inclusion of over 200 woodblock prints that accompanied the original texts and drama.

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'Delightful' A HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR / BOOK OF THE WEEK, Daily Mail'Goodwood curator James Peill writes with a wonderfully light touch . . . The Goodwood story is extraordinary and rightly celebrated' Country LifeThe history of Goodwood, England's greatest sporting estateGoodwood has been the home of English sport for centuries. The story of how a small hunting lodge became the iconic location for the globally-renowned Festival of Speed, Glorious Goodwood and Goodwood Revival events is inextricably intertwined with the tale of the Dukes of Richmond. The Dukes were, variously, patrons of the arts, political influencers, royal confidantes, architectural innovators, horticultural enthusiasts and stewards of the community. Above all, they were passionate about the sports for which Goodwood is best known: horseracing, motor sports, foxhunting, cricket, shooting and golf. Drawing upon the wealth of the Goodwood archives, James Peill vividly captures the character of each Duke, some radical and others staunchly traditional, and the wide-ranging impact they had on the Goodwood of today.The broader context is a sweeping history of England, and one family's part in it. Beginning with Charles II and his mistress Louise de Keroualle, the parents of the first Duke, Glorious Goodwood takes the reader on a journey through time, from the seventeenth century to present day, via the Jacobite Rising, the Battle of Waterloo and the First and Second World Wars. There are cameo appearances from George Stubbs, Canaletto, Alexander, Emperor of Russia, Queen Victoria, Jackie Stewart and Edward VII, who famously hosted Privy Council meetings in the Tapestry Drawing Room during race week.Glorious Goodwood is a vivid and intimate portrait of a house and its inhabitants set against a dazzling, panoramic backdrop of English history. At the heart of this colourful and compelling story is a rich sense of the British heritage Goodwood embodies.

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Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorship appear differently. With respect to the new censorship, there are no books burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees. Indeed, there is no coercive state involvement at all. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the 21st-century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: social groups, employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J.P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about 21st-century censorship concerns.

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In the shadows of war, loss and longing, a poet seeking his homeland finds his memories and dreams of its distinctive beauty refracted through a second language. These subtle, elusive and potent poems build bridges of imagery and language between the past and present, the lost and found."Here is a rich legacy bypassing Milorad's difficult final years. The poems seem driven, necessary; Croatia and its language call him back, his distinctively developed English finds image after pertinent image. The book is a bounty of metaphor as he is led by Moses and by delight and necessity of observation and discovery; the natural world seems to come to him to be named. I wonder if the frequent 'you' is himself or an other - or heightened to an Other - or these variously. I understand from this book that if we do not see, hear, experience in our own truthful way and make poems with the openness of these poems, then in some crucial sense many of the human world's possibilities cease to exist."David Hart."I can't stop reading these poems. This is work of atmosphere and tone first, narrative second, but it's a narrative that combines deep melancholy with a hard-won sense of joy in the slightest shaft of light, and the thought it provokes. At times it's like trying to recall a receding dream or encountering an oracle with an urgent, impossible message for you alone. It's difficult for me to separate the poems from Milorad's generosity, gentleness and intense imagination, and in a sense that doesn't matter as these are so clearly poems by a man who found beauty, saw mystery and took dignity even in confinement."Luke Kennard.Milorad Krystanovich was born in 1950 in Dalmatia, then part of the former Yugoslavia. After conflict engulfed the region, Milorad was sent to safety with relations in the UK in 1992. He learnt English and later joined The Cannon Poets, becoming a founder member of Writers Without Borders and an active and well-respected figure within Birmingham's poetry and writing community.Hailed by Jonathan Morley in 2007 as "Birmingham's finest émigré poet", Milorad's published work includes three volumes published by Writers Without Borders. Heaventree Press published the bilingual Four Horizons / Četiri Vidika (2005) and, in English, The Yasen Tree (2007). His penultimate volume, Improvising Memory, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2010. Milorad also taught Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian at the Brasshouse Language Centre in Birmingham and wrote numerous plays and novels for children and young people. Milorad Krystanovich was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2009 and died in September 2011.

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Lawrence Paterson's groundbreaking new book is a detailed account of the now legendary Operation Colossus, the first British airborne raid of the Second World War, which took place in Basilicata, Italy on 10 February 1941. Britain was one of the last major powers of the Second World War to establish an airborne arm of service. Formed by a collection of free-thinking army and air force officers, the fledgling British paratrooper unit, known as the SAS', deployed trial and error in terms of tactics and equipment, costing the lives of several volunteers before an elite few were selected to make the first British parachute raid of the war. Alongside the paratroopers were two veterans of the First World War: an Italian SOE agent, formerly a banqueting manager in London hotels, and an RAF reserve officer who held the Military Cross for bravery. Collectively known as X-Troop', these men were parachuted by specially selected bomber crews into the heart of enemy territory, where they successfully destroyed their target, the Tragino Aqueduct, before becoming the object of an exhaustive manhunt by Italian troops and civilians. Captured, they were variously interrogated, imprisoned, and the Italian SOE agent placed on trial for treason and executed. Given the distances that had to be covered, the logistical complications and the lack of any precedent, the raid was a remarkable feat. Its success or failure depended on a group of men using methods and equipment thus far untried by the British Army. They were truly guinea pigs' for those that would follow in their footsteps. Often overlooked in British military history, Paterson brings this extraordinary episode to light, drawing on verbatim testimony and interrogating the truth of previous accounts. From the formation of the unit and the build up to its first deployment, through Operation Colossus and its aftermath, to its ongoing legacy today, this is the fascinating story of the modern day British Parachute Regiment.

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From Mondrian's bold geometric forms to Kandinsky's use of symbols to Pollock's "dripped paintings," the richly diverse movement of abstract painting challenges anyone trying to make sense of either individual works or the phenomenon as a whole. Applying his insights as an art historian and a painter, John Golding offers a unique approach to understanding the evolution of abstractionism by looking at the personal artistic development of seven of its greatest practitioners. He re-creates the journey undertaken by each painter in his move from representational art to the abstract--a journey that in most cases began with cubism but led variously to symbolism, futurism, surrealism, theosophy, anthropology, Jungian analysis, and beyond. For each artist, spiritual quest and artistic experimentation became inseparable. And despite their different techniques and philosophies, these artists shared one goal: to break a path to a new, ultimate pictorial truth. The book first explores the works and concerns of three pioneering European abstract painters--Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky--and then those of their American successors--Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Golding shows how each painter sought to see the world and communicate his vision in the purest or most expressive form possible. For example, Mondrian found his way into abstraction through a spiritual response to the landscape of his native Holland, Malevich through his apprehension of the human body, Kandinsky through a blend of religious mysticism and symbolism. Line and color became the focus for many of their creative endeavors. In the 1940s and 50s, the Americans raised the level of pictorial innovation, beginning most notably with Pollock and his Jung-inspired concept of action.p>Golding makes a powerful case that at its best and most profound, abstract painting is heavily imbued with meaning and content. Through a blend of biography, art analysis, and cultural history, Paths to the Absolute offers remarkable insights into how a sense of purpose is achieved in painting, and how abstractionism engaged with the intellectual currents of its time.

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The story of the nude in art in our times, told by a popular art historian with a rare gift for sharing her passions and ideas. The representation of the nude in art remained for many centuries a victory of fiction over fact. Beautiful, handsome, flawless – its great success was to distance the unclothed body from any uncomfortably explicit taint of sexuality, eroticism or imperfection. In this newly updated study, Frances Borzello contrasts the civilized, sanitized, perfected nude of Kenneth Clark’s classic, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), with today’s depictions: raw, uncomfortable, both disturbing and intriguing. Grittier and more subtle, depicting variously gendered bodies, the new nude asks awkward questions and behaves provocatively. It is a very naked nude, created to deal with the issues and contradictions that surround the body in our time. Borzello explores the role of the nude in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, looking at the work of a wide range of international artists creating contemporary nudes. Her fascinating text is complemented by a profusion of well-chosen, unusual and beautifully reproduced illustrations. The story begins with a tale of life, death and resurrection – an investigation into how and why the nude has survived and flourished in an art world that prematurely announced its demise. Subsequent chapters take a thematic approach, focusing in turn on Body art and Performance art, the new perspectives of women artists, the nude in painting, portraiture and sculpture and in its most extreme and graphic expressions that intentionally push the boundaries of both art and our comfort zone. The final chapter illustrates radical developments in art and culture over the last decade, focusing in particular on artworks by women, trans artists and artists of colour. Borzello links these works to their art-historical and political predecessors, demonstrating the continually unending capacity of the nude to disrupt traditional hierarchies and gender categories in life and art.

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Meet the new breed of student activists—uncompromising, focused, and connected.Activism is once again back on college campuses as students protest issues such as sexual assault, climate change, racial injustice, and student debt. It's perhaps unsurprising that the current political moment has triggered the rise of a new breed of student activist—uncompromising, focused, and connected. But many pundits have variously derided student activists as either "snowflakes," too fragile to encounter opinions that run contrary to their own, or as "social justice warriors" who aggressively fight against those who transgress the ever-changing bounds of political correctness. The New Student Activists moves beyond these simple stereotypes and convenient caricatures to examine the nuanced motives and complex experiences of real-life, present-day college student activists.Jerusha O. Conner offers insight into who these student activists are—the causes they care about, the strategies they deploy, the factors that motivate and sustain them, and the impact they have had on their campuses and beyond. Conner dubs today's student activists "neoactivists," who borrow from and build on the legacies of past generations of college student activists. Exploring when, how, and why this diverse group of students turned to activism, Conner examines the social and educational influences on their sociopolitical development. She also reveals the fraught but mutually transformative relationship between institutions of higher education and student activists in the contemporary moment. Written for anyone interested in better understanding the latest wave of student activism on campuses, The New Student Activists raises fascinating implications for developmental theory and higher education policy and practice.

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Whether in the form of Christmas trees in town squares or prayer in school, fierce disputes over the separation of church and state have long bedeviled this country. Both decried and celebrated, this principle is considered by many, for right or wrong, a defining aspect of American national identity. Nearly all discussions regarding the role of religion in American life build on two dominant assumptions: first, the separation of church and state is a constitutional principle that promotes democracy and equally protects the religious freedom of all Americans, especially religious outgroups; and second, this principle emerges as a uniquely American contribution to political theory. In Please Don't Wish Me a Merry Christmas, Stephen M. Feldman challenges both these assumptions. He argues that the separation of church and state primarily manifests and reinforces Christian domination in American society. Furthermore, Feldman reveals that the separation of church and state did not first arise in the United States. Rather, it has slowly evolved as a political and religious development through western history, beginning with the initial appearance of Christianity as it contentiously separated from Judaism.In tracing the historical roots of the separation of church and state within the Western world, Feldman begins with the Roman Empire and names Augustine as the first political theorist to suggest the idea. Feldman next examines how the roles of church and state variously merged and divided throughout history, during the Crusades, the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the British Civil War and Restoration, the early North American colonies, nineteenth-century America, and up to the present day. In challenging the dominant story of the separation of church and state, Feldman interprets the development of Christian social power vis--vis the state and religious minorities, particularly the prototypical religious outgroup, Jews.

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Among maternal deities of the Greek pantheon, the Mother of the Gods was a paradox. She is variously described as a devoted mother, a chaste wife, an impassioned lover, and a virgin daughter; she is said to be both foreign and familiar to the Greeks. In this erudite and absorbing study, Mark Munn examines how the cult of Mother of the Gods came from Phrygia and Lydia, where she was the mother of tyrants, to Athens, where she protected the laws of the Athenian democracy. Analyzing the divergence of Greek and Asiatic culture at the beginning of the classical era, Munn describes how Kybebe, the Lydian goddess who signified fertility and sovereignty, assumed a different aspect to the Greeks when Lydia became part of the Persian empire. Conflict and resolution were played out symbolically, he shows, and the goddess of Lydian tyranny was eventually accepted by the Athenians as the Mother of the Gods, and as a symbol of their own sovereignty. This book elegantly illustrates how ancient divinities were not static types, but rather expressions of cultural systems that responded to historical change. Presenting a new perspective on the context in which the Homeric and Hesiodic epics were composed, Munn traces the transformation of the Asiatic deity who was the goddess of Sacred Marriage among the Assyrians and Babylonians, equivalent to Ishtar. Among the Lydians, she was the bride to tyrants and the mother of tyrants. To the Greeks, she was Aphrodite. An original and compelling consideration of the relations between the Greeks and the dominant powers of western Asia, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia is the first thorough examination of the way that religious cult practice and thought influenced political activities during and after the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.

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An in-depth look at how U.S. Latino advocacy groups are using ethnoracial demographic projections to bring about political change in the presentFor years, newspaper headlines, partisan speeches, academic research, and even comedy routines have communicated that the United States is undergoing a profound demographic transformation—one that will purportedly change the “face” of the country in a matter of decades. But the so-called browning of America, sociologist Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz contends, has less to do with the complexion of growing populations than with past and present struggles shaping how demographic trends are popularly imagined and experienced. Offering an original and timely window into these struggles, Figures of the Future explores the population politics of national Latino civil rights groups.Based on eight years of ethnographic and qualitative research, spanning both the Obama and Trump administrations, this book investigates how several of the most prominent of these organizations—including UnidosUS (formerly NCLR), the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Voto Latino—have mobilized demographic data about the Latino population in dogged pursuit of political recognition and influence. In census promotions, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and policy advocacy, this knowledge has been infused with meaning, variously serving as future-oriented sources of inspiration, emblems for identification, and weapons for contestation. At the same time, Rodríguez-Muñiz considers why these political actors have struggled to translate this demographic growth into tangible political gain and how concerns about white backlash have affected how they forecast demographic futures.Figures of the Future looks closely at the politics surrounding ethnoracial demographic changes and their rising influence in U.S. public debate and discourse.

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The Duke of Wellington described the Battle of Waterloo as ‘the most desperate business I ever was in. I was never so near being beat’. The courage of British troops that day has been rightly praised ever since, but the fact that one-third of the forces which gave him his narrow victory were subjects, not of George III, but of the King of the Netherlands, has been almost completely ignored. This book seeks to correct a grave injustice through the study of Dutch sources – both primary and secondary – the majority of which have never been used by English-speaking historians.The Dutch-Belgians have been variously described as inexperienced, incompetent and cowardly, a rogue element in the otherwise disciplined Allied Army. It is only now being tentatively acknowledged that they alone saved Wellington from disaster at Quatre Bras.He had committed a strategic error in that, as Napoleon advanced, his own troops were scattered over a hundred kilometres of southern Belgium. Outnumbered three to one, the Netherlanders gave him time to concentrate his forces, and save Brussels from French occupation. At Waterloo itself, on at least three occasions when the fate of the battle ‘hung upon the cusp’ their engagement with the enemy aided British recovery. Their commander – the Prince of Orange – is viciously described as an arrogant fool, ‘a disaster waiting to happen’ and even a dangerous lunatic. According to the assessment of the Duke himself, he was a reliable and courageous subordinate.The Dutch material in this book reveals a new dimension for familiar events in the Campaign, and includes many unseen illustrations. For the first time, a full assessment is made of the challenge which Willem I faced as King of a country hastily cobbled together by the Congress of Vienna, and of his achievement in assembling, equipping and training thirty thousand men from scratch in eighteen months. This is a timely reassessment in the two hundredth anniversary year of the battle of Waterloo. The veneration which the Duke of Wellington justifiably enjoyed after the Waterloo Campaign should not be allowed to forgive his lifelong lack of acknowledgment of the debt he owed the Netherlanders. As he once said himself, ‘there should be glory enough for all’, and it is high time that they are allowed to claim their share.

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Neither Nature nor Grace operates at the intersection of systematic and philosophical theology, exploring in particular how St. Thomas Aquinas variously uses the latter in service to the clarification and faithful advancement of the former. More specifically, Neither Nature nor Grace explores the overlooked logical difficulties that have followed the late modern debates in ecumenical Christian theology as to whether knowledge of God is available solely through God’s gracious self-revelation (e.g., Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture), or through revelation and the deliverances of natural reason. Van Wart takes the prominent French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as paradigmatic for the case that knowledge of God can be had by both revelation and natural reason. Representing the opposing position, that God can only be known through divine revelation, Van Wart highlights the work of influential Protestant theologian Karl Barth. By placing these two imposing 20th century theologians in conversation, and by providing a careful theo-philosophical analysis of the logical mechanics of each thinker’s respective arguments, Van Wart shows how both inadvertently overreach their self-professed epistemological bounds and just so run into significant problems maintaining the coherence of their relative theological positions. That is, against their expressed intentions to the contrary, both thinkers unwittingly evacuate the divine essence of the mystery Christian tradition has always previously claimed it to have, effectively reducing the being of God to mere creaturely being writ large. As a contrasting corrective to this problem, Van Wart proffers a constructive grammatical reading of Aquinas’s measured account of the crucial but often overlooked logical differences between what can be said of the divine, on the one hand, versus what can be known of God, on the other. While many recent works have attempted to solve the ongoing arguments which Garrigou-Lagrange and Barth epitomize regarding the epistemic use of God’s effects, Van Wart’s contribution constructively pushes the conversation to a different level in showing how Aquinas’s grammar of God provides a salutary means of dissolving and moving beyond these contentious debates altogether.

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The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history. From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence. The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority. To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History. The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.

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Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs. Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the "essences" of "blood," "character," and "race." She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of "American looks" were established in the first place.

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This is a book about what it's like being a birder in an age of natural decline. It is part autobiographical - tales of spell-binding birding encounters that left indelible memories - and it is part reflective. The travellers' tales of birding adventures are about places and events that were variously entertaining, amusing, captivating, inspiring, exciting and awesome, literally. They also feature the amazing, eccentric, dedicated, inspiring people in the birding community. Travels to Madagascar, Cambodia, India and many other places are recalled. There is birding in the Himalayas, in the Australian outback, on the Southern Oceans and in hotel gardens and city parks and there are tales of the 'big listers', 'big-lensers', professional guides, and local conservation workers who try to keep their habitats safe for us. There are lots of images to accompany these stories. Martin's experiences in becoming a birder late in life revealed some strange behaviour which he soon learnt to take for granted as a member of the birding community. Why tear off chasing the next tick when we were having such a good time in the forest we were already exploring? Why was seeing a rare parrot in a cage less significant than seeing a 'wild' one that was being hand-fed in a nature reserve? Why was he visiting all those rubbish tips and sewerage farms in search of birds when birding excursions to a forest or a natural wetland were so much more pleasing? There are chapters about all of these puzzles and oddities, and more - their origins and, in some cases, how they shape our behaviour in somewhat perverse ways - on 'authentic' birding, the origins and importance of the life list, on rarities and trophy birds, and why the idea of a 'species' is elusive yet so important. All these tales and reflections are shaped by birding during an extinction crisis and the growing biodiversity crisis. As he observed trashed habitats and vanishing bird populations during his travels, Martin's growing dismay and alarm about these issues coloured everything. So he came to ponder what birders are doing in response, whether it is for good or harm. There is the paradox of 'extinction birding' - it is not difficult today to see some vanishingly rare birds, because they are hanging on in reserved, fenced spaces, kept alive by artifices such as captive breeding. Because our visits to these places provide funds, we are also among these species' last hopes for survival. Is this the best we can do? More self-reflection among all birders is necessary. Faced with the growing crisis, we can all do better.

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The New York Editions borrows its title from The New York Edition, Henry James’s name for Scribner’s 1907-09 re-issue of his life-long output of novels and shorter fiction. If the homage of Snediker’s second book of poems to the Jamesian oeuvre seems self-evident or obscure, to conceive of this poetry as a translation of James’s prose somewhat misses the mark in terms of the former’s unfolding investment in the vision of a dreamlike field belonging to neither one nor the other, so much as the deep sea dive of language in between, in the throes. These mesmeric poems are experimental meditations on the limbo of lost-in-translation as a multi-axial bardo between multiples lives and texts and those that follow, which they might foreseeably become were these poems not so distinctly wed to a jewel-like present tense driven by no single aesthetic principle save the one it immanently navigates. The multiple voices that call to us from this place are ghostlike, to the extent that the force of their coiled abandon feels tethered to bodies in no familiar way. Even at their most seductively wry or pining, these semblances of speech wash over the landscapes they’re embedded in like a film’s post-production score or the heady excrescence of lilies calling one’s attention to an open window. At the same time, such lurid, queerly disembodied phenomena are richly studded, one might say, with a singular, uncanny material of their own, shot through with the tenacious, not-quite-phantom élan of desolation, remediating mirth and the renegade confusion of each with their respective, recollected forms. These are vigilant elegies, rough odes, songs of experience shy toward neither their own felt urgency nor the latter’s tendency to spoil: baroque trauerspiel meets ghost-story in reverse, moonlight gleaming with the otherworldly shine of James Bidgood’s lambent, mineral-oiled sea-bed. The New York Editions chronicles the effort of inhabiting while doing justice to the approximate wilderness of all those variously perceptible disturbances that set the world ajar just enough to feel the draught of an adjacent universe pouring in. “… and hope is the/ shells each morning small and cool// into which we hermits/ retract the startling// need of our/ claws.”

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Lord Derby, Lancashire's highest-ranked nobleman and its principal royalist, once offered the opinion that the English civil wars had been a 'general plague of madness'. Complex and bedevilling, the earl defied anyone to tell the complete story of 'so foolish, so wicked, so lasting a war'. Yet attempting to chronicle and to explain the events is both fascinating and hugely important. Nationally and at the county level the impact and significance of the wars can hardly be over-stated: the conflict involved our ancestors fighting one another, on and off, for a period of nine years; almost every part of Lancashire witnessed warfare of some kind at one time or another, and several towns in particular saw bloody sieges and at least one episode characterised as a massacre.Nationally the wars resulted in the execution of the king; in 1651 the Earl of Derby himself was executed in Bolton in large measure because he had taken a leading part in the so-called massacre in that town in 1644. In the early months of the civil wars many could barely distinguish what it was that divided people in 'this war without an enemy', as the royalist William Waller famously wrote; yet by the end of it parliament had abolished monarchy itself and created the only republic in over a millennium of England's history. Over the ensuing centuries this period has been described variously as a rebellion, as a series of civil wars, even as a revolution.Lancashire's role in these momentous events was quite distinctive, and relative to the size of its population particularly important. Lancashire lay right at the centre of the wars, for the conflict did not just encompass England but Ireland and Scotland too, and Lancashire's position on the coast facing Catholic, Royalist Ireland was seen as critical from the very first months. And being on the main route south from Scotland meant that the county witnessed a good deal of marching and marauding armies from the north. In this, the first full history of the Lancashire civil wars for almost a century, Stephen Bull makes extensive use of new discoveries to narrate and explain the exciting, terrible events which our ancestors witnessed in the cause either of king or parliament. From Furness to Liverpool, and from the Wyre estuary to Manchester and Warrington...civil war actions, battles, sieges and skirmishes took place in virtually every corner of Lancashire.

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For Finance and Treasury professionals to effectively pitch, sell,and comprehend the true appeal and relevance of a particularsecurity, there is nothing more important than knowing how thevalue of said security has been determined. While punching numbersinto a computer may provide the information needed, it isnevertheless essential to have a firm grasp of the valuationconcepts in order to make the best, most informed decisions.Offering a straightforward, accessible approach not found anywhereelse, this comprehensive new book provides a clear-cut road mapthrough the mathematical concepts associated with the investmentssector of Treasury management. Written by an expert in the field, Investment Mathematics forFinance and Treasury Professionals explains the principles andformulae used in the fixedincome cash markets. It presents anin-depth, yet practical look at the applications associated withthese money and capital markets instruments. The book also coverscalculations and applications in the foreign exchange and equitiesmarkets. The same in-depth coverage is applied to the variousfixed-income and foreign exchange derivatives markets used as bothspeculative and hedging tools. Spanning the spectrum fromprice/yield changes to risk/return, and packed with numerousexamples that illustrate key concepts, this exhaustive resourceincludes: * Yield spread analysis--methods of price/yield quotation, yieldspreads by maturity, off-the-run vs. on-the-run * Price/yield sensitivity--hedge ratios, basis point value, dollarduration, convexity * Term structure of interest rates different yield curvestructures, zero coupon yield curve, Treasury trading STRIPS * Foreign exchange--crossrates, spot rates, forward points, coveredinterest arbitrage * Options--plain vanilla vs. exotic options, over-the-counter vs.exchange-traded options, understanding option valuation models, andoption hedging and trading strategies * Interest rate swaps, swaptions, caps, floors, collars, inversefloaters * Risk/return--valuation theory, capital asset pricing model, valueat risk Complete with supporting appendixes that contain statisticalinformation on such essentials as historical interest ratepatterns, conversion factors for Treasury bond futures, thestandard normal distribution, and day count basis for differentbonds, Investment Mathematics for Finance and TreasuryProfessionals is an indispensable reference for anyone involvedwith corporate and municipal treasury functions. Providing Finance and Treasury professionals the fundamentalinformation necessary to understand the mathematical concepts andapplications used in investment decisions, this in-depth andaccessible resource explains and clarifies the concepts behindinvestment mathematics. With numerous examples and comprehensiveappendixes containing important statistical data, InvestmentMathematics for Finance and Treasury Professionals coverseverything from price/yield changes and yield spread analysis toterm structure of interest rates, derivatives, and risk/return.

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