Search results for ""University of Chicago Press""

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century. In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides' "Medea", "The Children of Heracles", "Andromache", and "Iphigenia among the Taurians", fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles' satyr-drama "The Trackers". New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays. In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

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"I, without earning a penny, have to be the provider!" Thus Umm Ali sums up the nearly impossible challenge of her daily existence. Living in a poor neighbourhood of Cairo, she has raised eight children with almost no help from her husband or the Egyptian government and through hardships from domestic violence to constant quarrels over material possessions. Umm Ali's story is amazing not only for what it reveals about her resourcefulness but for the light it sheds on the resilience of Cairo's poor in the face of disastrous poverty. Like countless other poor people in Cairo, she has developed a personal buoyancy to cope with relentless economic need. It stems from a belief in the ability of people to shape their own destiny and helps explain why Cairo remains virtually free of the social ills - violent street crime and homelessness - that have eroded the lives of poor people in other major cities. Unni Wikan first met Umm Ali and her family 25 years ago and has returned almost every year. She draws on her firsthand experience of their lives to create an intimate portrait of Cairo's back streets and the people who live there. Wikan's approach to ethnographic writing reads like a novel that presents the experiences of Umm Ali's family and neighbours in their own words. As Umm Ali recounts triumphs and defeats - from forming a savings club with neighbours to the gradual drifting away and eventual return of her husband - she unveils a deeply reflective attitude and her unwavering belief that she can improve her situation. Showing how Egyptian culture interprets poverty and family, this book attests to the capacity of an individual's self-worth to withstand incredible adversity. Unni Wikan is the author of "Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman" and "Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living", both published by the University of Chicago Press. She is fluent in Arabic and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Egypt, Oman, Bali, Bhutan and New Guinea.

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A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies. The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme's association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a fo

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A provocative exploration of how America's democratic crisis is rooted in a dangerous mismatch between our Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble. In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today's challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscapestate parties, interest groups, and mediavaried locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities an

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A taxonomy we didn’t know we needed for identifying and cataloging stray shopping carts by artist and photographer Julian Montague. Abandoned shopping carts are everywhere, and yet we know so little about them. Where do they come from? Why are they there? Their complexity and history baffle even the most careful urban explorer. Thankfully, artist Julian Montague has created a comprehensive and well-documented taxonomy with The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America. Spanning thirty-three categories from damaged, fragment, and plow crush to plaza drift and bus stop discard, it is a tonic for times defined increasingly by rhetoric and media and less by the plain objects and facts of the real world. Montague’s incomparable documentation of this common feature of the urban landscape helps us see the natural and man-made worlds—and perhaps even ourselves—anew. First published in 2006 to great perplexity and acclaim alike, Montague’s book now appears in refreshed and expanded form. Told in an exceedingly dry voice, with full-color illustrations and photographs throughout, it is both rigorous and absurd, offering a strangely compelling vision of how we approach, classify, and understand the environments around us. A new afterword sheds light on the origins of the project.

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An in-depth look at the hidden power of the mistral wind and its effect on modern French history. Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind is central to the area's regional identity and has inspired artists and writers near and far for centuries. This force of nature is the focus of Catherine Dunlop's The Mistral, a wonderfully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular, the ways it challenged central tenets of nineteenth-century European society: order, mastery, and predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modifica

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A counterintuitive and compelling argument that existing laws already protect the entirety of our oceans—and a call to understand and enforce those protections. The world’s oceans face multiple threats: the effects of climate change, pollution, overfishing, plastic waste, and more. Confronted with the immensity of these challenges and of the oceans themselves, we might wonder what more can be done to stop their decline and better protect the sea and marine life. Such widespread environmental threats call for a simple but significant shift in reasoning to bring about long-overdue, elemental change in the way we use ocean resources. In Future Sea, ocean advocate and marine-policy researcher Deborah Rowan Wright provides the tools for that shift. Questioning the underlying philosophy of established ocean conservation approaches, Rowan Wright lays out a radical alternative: a bold and far-reaching strategy of 100 percent ocean protection that would put an end to destructive industrial activities, better safeguard marine biodiversity, and enable ocean wildlife to return and thrive along coasts and in seas around the globe. Future Sea is essentially concerned with the solutions and not the problems. Rowan Wright shines a light on existing international laws intended to keep marine environments safe that could underpin this new strategy. She gathers inspiring stories of communities and countries using ocean resources wisely, as well as of successful conservation projects, to build up a cautiously optimistic picture of the future for our oceans—counteracting all-too-prevalent reports of doom and gloom. A passionate, sweeping, and personal account, Future Sea not only argues for systemic change in how we manage what we do in the sea but also describes steps that anyone, from children to political leaders (or indeed, any reader of the book), can take toward safeguarding the oceans and their extraordinary wildlife.

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A delightful A-to-Z menagerie of the sea—whimsically illustrated, authoritative, and thought-provoking. For millennia, we have taken to the waves. And yet, for humans, the ocean remains our planet’s most inaccessible region, the place about which we know the least. From A to Z, abalone to zooplankton, and through both text and original illustrations, Ocean Bestiary is a celebration of our ongoing quest to know the sea and its creatures. Focusing on individual species or groups of animals, Richard J. King embarks upon a global tour of ocean wildlife, including beluga whales, flying fish, green turtles, mako sharks, noddies, right whales, sea cows (as well as sea lions, sea otters, and sea pickles), skipjack tuna, swordfish, tropicbirds, walrus, and yellow-bellied sea snakes. But more than this, King connects the natural history of ocean animals to the experiences of people out at sea and along the world’s coastlines. From firsthand accounts passed down by the earliest Polynesian navigators to observations from Wampanoag clamshell artists, African-American whalemen, Korean female divers (or haenyeo), and today’s pilots of deep-sea submersibles—and even to imaginary sea expeditions launched through poems, novels, and paintings—Ocean Bestiary weaves together a diverse array of human voices underrepresented in environmental history to tell the larger story of our relationship with the sea. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, but always compelling, King’s vignettes reveal both how our perceptions of the sea have changed for the better and how far we still have to go on our voyage.

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An award-winning math popularizer, who has advised the US Olympic Committee, NFL, and NBA, offers sports fans a new way to understand truly improbable feats in their favorite games. In 2013, NBA point guard Steph Curry wowed crowds when he sunk 11 out of 13 three-pointers for a game total of 54 points—only seven other players, including Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, had scored more in a game at Madison Square Garden. Four years later, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team won its hundredth straight game, defeating South Carolina 66–55. And in 2010, one forecaster—an octopus named Paul—correctly predicted the outcome of all of Germany’s matches in the FIFA World Cup. These are surprising events—but are they truly improbable? In Get in the Game, mathematician and sports analytics expert Tim Chartier helps us answer that question—condensing complex mathematics down to coin tosses and dice throws to give readers both an introduction to statistics and a new way to enjoy sporting events. With these accessible tools, Chartier leads us through modeling experiments that develop our intuitive sense of the improbable. For example, to see how likely you are to beat Curry’s three-pointer feat, consider his 45.3 percent three-point shooting average in 2012–13. Take a coin and assume heads is making the shot (slightly better than Curry at a fifty percent chance). Can you imagine getting heads eleven out of thirteen times? With engaging exercises and fun, comic book–style illustrations by Ansley Earle, Chartier’s book encourages all readers—including those who have never encountered formal statistics or data simulations, or even heard of sports analytics, but who enjoy watching sports—to get in the game.

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Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation. In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups like the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. Ten years ago, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers. Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day.

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New poetry collection from Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In these poems, Peter Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities, including challenges for the human species amid planetary transmutation and the impact of mass violence on the self and culture. At the collection's heart is "No Sign," another in Balakian's series of long-form poems, following "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" and "Ozone Journal," which appeared in his previous two collections. In this dialogical multi-sectioned poem, an estranged couple encounters each other, after years, on the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. The dialogue that ensues reveals the evolution of a kaleidoscopic memory spanning decades, reflecting on the geological history of Earth and the climate crisis, the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, the Vietnam War, a visionary encounter with the George Washington Bridge, and the enduring power of love.. Whether meditating on the sensuality of fruits and vegetables, the COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma and memory of the Armenian genocide, James Baldwin in France, or Arshile Gorky in New York City, Balakian's layered, elliptical language, wired phrases, and shifting tempos engage both life's harshness and beauty and define his inventive and distinctive style.

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Part anthology and part craft guide, this collection of pieces from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist offers something for readers and writers alike. Lane DeGregory loves true stories, intimate details, and big ideas. In her three-decade career as a journalist, she has published more than 3,000 stories and won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her acclaimed work in the Tampa Bay Times often takes her to the edges of society, where she paints empathetic portraits of real-life characters like a 99-year-old man who still works cleaning a seafood warehouse, a young couple on a bus escaping winter, and a child in the midst of adoption. In “The Girl in the Window” and Other True Tales, DeGregory not only offers up the first collection of her most unforgettable newspaper features—she pulls back the curtain on how to write narrative nonfiction. This book—part anthology, part craft guide—provides a forensic reading of twenty-four of DeGregory’s singular stories, illustrating her tips for writers alongside pieces that put those elements under the microscope. Each of the pieces gathered here—including the Pulitzer Prize–winning title story—is accompanied by notes on how she built the story, plus tips on how nonfiction writers at all levels can do the same. Featuring a foreword by Beth Macy, author of the acclaimed Dopesick, this book is sure to delight fans of DeGregory’s writing, as well as introduce her to readers and writers who have not yet discovered her inspiring body of work.

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A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy. Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

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“She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the history of the country.”—Alfreda M. Duster Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells’s private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster.

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A revealing and authoritative history that shows how Soviet whalers secretly helped nearly destroy endangered whale populations, while also contributing to the scientific understanding necessary for these creatures' salvation. The Soviet Union killed over 600,000 whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries-especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway-expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefitted from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling-not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether.

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Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you'll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they'll see dollar signs: moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That's a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story-and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as a filmmaker, Olson first diagnoses the problem: When scientists tell us about their work, they pile one moment and one detail atop another moment and another detail-a stultifying procession of "and, and, and." What we need instead is an understanding of the basic elements of story, the narrative structures that our brains are all but hardwired to look for-which Olson boils down, brilliantly, to "And, But, Therefore," or ABT. At a stroke, the ABT approach introduces momentum ("And"), conflict ("But"), and resolution ("Therefore")-the fundamental building blocks of story. As Olson has shown by leading countless workshops worldwide, when scientists' eyes are opened to ABT, the effect is staggering: suddenly, they're not just talking about their work-they're telling stories about it. And audiences are captivated. Written with an uncommon verve and enthusiasm, and built on principles that are applicable to fields far beyond science, Houston, We Have a Narrative has the power to transform the way science is understood and appreciated, and ultimately how it's done.

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Eaglemania celebrates Boston College’s mascot, a monumental Japanese bronze eagle, following its recent conservation and return to view. Donated in the 1950s by the estate of diplomat and collector Larz Anderson (1866–1937) and his wife, Isabel (1876–1948), the eagle recently received in-depth restoration that has revealed its fine detail, carefully modeled form, and excellent material construction.Eaglemania brings the history of this stunning object to life. It features new research on topics that contextualize the Boston College eagle, assembling articles that discuss various aspects of its Edo- and Meiji-period origins. These include the Andersons’ acquisition of the eagle; the Boston College eagle seen in comparison with other exceptional Meiji eagle figures; the meanings of eagle depictions in the Edo and Meiji periods; and Japan’s rise as a destination for American collectors, particularly of sculpture, in the Meiji period. Through its focus on eagle imagery, this study illuminates cross-cultural dynamics resulting from American collectors’ fascination with traditional and contemporary Japanese arts and Japanese artists’ adaptation to this market.

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No contemporary artist has succeeded so thoroughly in blending classical Chinese art and modern abstract art as Cao Jun, who has exhibited widely in China, as well as at the Louvre. Accompanying an exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, this volume presents the art of Cao Jun for the first time in the United States. Featuring the artist’s early wild animal paintings, to his landscapes, to recent explorations of space depicted abstractly, the book also showcases Cao Jun’s calligraphy and ceramics. Essays by Chinese and American scholars examine Cao Jun’s art, showing how it is deeply rooted in the experience of nature and how it portrays our place within nature. The essays demonstrate also the way in which Cao Jun’s art brings together classical Chinese painting with modern abstract forms akin to those of Western art. Yet Cao Jun’s art foregoes simply fusing these traditions; it employs the techniques of Chinese ink and brush painting and uses ink- and color-splashing to produce abstract forms.

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Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado, located in eastern Bolivia where the moist forests of the Amazon meet the dry forests of the Cerrado, contains numerous unique ecosystems and exceptionally high levels of biodiversity. This book presents the results not only of an intensive biological survey of the area conducted in 1991, but also of long-term research conducted from 1987 to 1995. Among other findings, the survey discovered 26 new species of plants, one new mammal species, and three new species of reptiles. This report, with text in both English and Spanish, includes extensive data appendices, a large fold-out satellite map of vegetation, and conservation recommendations for the region.

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This book focuses on the under-explored significance of materials throughout Chinese art. Since the inventions of porcelain and gunpowder, Chinese artists have experimented with unconventional artistic materials and used conventional materials in unorthodox ways. This groundbreaking volume is the first publication to expound the trans-historical importance of materiality in Chinese art by bringing together essays from leading scholars, curators, and conservators. Essayists Anne Feng, Yuhang Li, Wei-Cheng Lin, Catherine Stuer, and Yusen Yu examine how materials including lacquer, crystal, paper, and gold stimulated advances in premodern Chinese art. Alex Burchmore, Orianna Cacchione, Nancy P. Lin, Sara Moy, and Rachel Rivenc analyze several instances of material experimentation in contemporary Chinese art in essays that consider materials as varied as gunpowder, plastic, and water. This book builds upon scholarship originally presented at the Art and Materiality Symposium, held on the occasion of the Smart Museum of Art’s exhibition The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China.

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The companion to a one-of-a-kind exhibition at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, "Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art" explores the role of the meal in contemporary art. "Feast" offers the first survey of the artist-orchestrated meal: since the 1930s, the act of sharing food and drink has been used to advance aesthetic goals and foster critical engagement with the culture of the moment. Both exhibition catalogue and reader, this richly illustrated book offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the art of the meal and its relationship to questions about hospitality, politics, and culture. From the Italian Futurists' banquets in the 1930s, to 1960s and '70s conceptual and performative work, to the global prevalence of socially engaged practice today, "Feast" considers a diverse group of artists who have taken on practices of sharing food with friends, families, and strangers. After an essay by curator Stephanie Smith, the book includes new interviews with over twenty contributing artists and reprinted excerpts of classic texts. It also features a selection of contextual essays contributed by an international group of critics, writers, curators, and scholars.

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In 2014, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago received a generous gift from collectors Lester and Betty Guttman: 830 photographs, created by a total of 414 artists, that cover a time period stretching all the way from the early 1800s into our modern moment. This richly illustrated volume, which accompanies an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, offers both an intriguing overview of the collection and, with it, a tour through the very history of photography itself.There Was a Whole Collection Made includes an extensive timeline on the medium’s evolution that notes important dates, exhibitions, and texts. Artists and scholars alike contribute personal reflections on and interpretations of the Guttmans’ photographs, which include images by such artists as William Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and Carrie Mae Weems. A colorful introduction to a key visual resource, There Was a Whole Collection Made crosses time periods and genres to revel in the enduring power of the camera lens.

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Fashion - the question of what to wear and how to wear it - is a centuries-old obsession. Beyond superficial concerns with personal appearance, the history of dress points to deep preoccupations surrounding the social order, national identity, and moral decency. Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art (running from October 23, 2001 through April 28, 2002), A Well-Fashioned Image investigates clothing and the representation of clothing from these various perspectives. This richly illustrated catalogue, the fourth in a series sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, features an introduction by co-curators Elizabeth Rodini and Elissa B. Weaver, which is followed by essays addressing the topic from a variety of perspectives. Also included are a substantial bibliography on the topic of costume in art and an exhibition checklist.

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In their ongoing search for divinity, Western European Christians followed many different paths to a personal connection with the eternal, including the intimacies of private prayer, the spectacle of the Mass, and the veneration of saintly relics. Along the way, art objects and artifacts served as companions, guides and comforts. The essays in this catalogue consider the central role objects and images played in these spiritual journeys. They investigate imagery's critical role in the development of personal devotions, in the organization of liturgical worship, and in practices surrounding the institution of the Eucharist and the cult of saints.

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Is Leo Strauss truly an intellectual forebear of neoconservatism and a powerful force in shaping Bush administration foreign policy? "The Truth about Leo Strauss" puts this question to rest, revealing for the first time how the popular media came to perpetuate an oversimplified view of a complex and wide-ranging philosopher. In doing so, it corrects our perception of Strauss, providing the best general introduction available to the political thought of this misunderstood figure.Catherine and Michael Zuckert - both former students of Strauss - guide readers here to a nuanced understanding of how Strauss' political thought fits into his broader philosophy. Challenging the idea that Strauss was an inflexible conservative who followed in the foot-steps of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, the Zuckerts contend that Strauss' signature idea was the need for a return to the ancients. Through their work, they conclude that Strauss was a sober defender of liberal democracy, aware of both its strengths and its weaknesses.Balanced and accessible, "The Truth about Leo Strauss" is a must-read for anyone who wants to more fully comprehend this enigmatic philosopher and his much-disputed legacy.

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In this groundbreaking study, Oliver Zunz examines how the growth of corporations changed

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Is Leo Strauss truly an intellectual forebear of neoconservatism and a powerful force in shaping Bush administration foreign policy? "The Truth about Leo Strauss" puts this question to rest, revealing for the first time how the popular media came to perpetuate an oversimplified view of a complex and wide-ranging philosopher. In doing so, it corrects our perception of Strauss, providing the best general introduction available to the political thought of this misunderstood figure.Catherine and Michael Zuckert - both former students of Strauss - guide readers here to a nuanced understanding of how Strauss' political thought fits into his broader philosophy. Challenging the idea that Strauss was an inflexible conservative who followed in the foot-steps of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, the Zuckerts contend that Strauss' signature idea was the need for a return to the ancients. Through their work, they conclude that Strauss was a sober defender of liberal democracy, aware of both its strengths and its weaknesses.Balanced and accessible, "The Truth about Leo Strauss" is a must-read for anyone who wants to more fully comprehend this enigmatic philosopher and his much-disputed legacy.

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This volume brings to the study of China the theoretical concerns and methods of contemporary critical cultural studies. Written by historians, art historians, anthropologists and literary critics who came of age after the People's Republic resumed scholarly ties with the United States, these essays provide new insights not only for China studies but also, by extension, for non-Asian cultural criticism. Contributors investigate problems of bodiliness, engendered subjectivities and discourses of power through a variety of sources that include written texts, paintings, buildings, interviews and observations. Taken together, the essays show that bodies in China have been classified, represented, discussed, ritualized, gendered and eroticized in as many ways as those described in critical histories of the West. Silk robes, rocks, winds, gestures of bowing, yin yang hierarchies and cross-dressing have helped create experiences of the body specific to Chinese historical life. By pointing to multiple examples of re-imagining subjectivity and renegotiating power, the essays encourage scholars to avoid making broad generalizations about China and to rethink traditional notions of power, subject and bodiliness in light of actual Chinese practices.

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Confucius called them the "king of fragrant plants," and John Ruskin condemned them as "prurient apparitions." Across the centuries, orchids have captivated us with their elaborate exoticism, their powerful perfumes, and their sublime seductiveness. But the disquieting beauty of orchids is an unplanned marvel of evolution, and the story of orchids is as captivating as any novel. As acclaimed writer Michael Pollan and National Geographic photographer Christian Ziegler spin tales of orchid conquest in "Deceptive Beauties: The World of Wild Orchids", we learn how these flowers forests to the Arctic, from semi deserts to rocky mountainsides; how their shapes, colors, and scents are, as Darwin put it, "beautiful contrivances" meant to dupe pollinating male insects in the strangest ways. What other flowers, after all, can mimic the pheromones and even appearance of female insects, so much so that some male bees prefer sex with the orchids over sex with their own kind? And insects aren't the only ones to fall for the orchids' charms. Since the "orchidelirium" of the Victorian era, humans have braved the wilds to search them out and devoted copious amounts of time and money propagating and hybridizing, nurturing and simply gazing at them. This astonishing book features over 150 unprecedented color photographs taken by Christian Ziegler himself as he trekked through wilderness on five continents to capture the diversity and magnificence of orchids in their natural habitats. His intimate and astonishing images allow us to appreciate up close nature's most intoxicating and deceptive beauties.

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In the spring of 1989 over 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Tiananmen Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown.Dingxin Zhao's award-winning The Power of Tiananmen is the definitive treatment of these historic events. Along with grassroots tales and interviews with the young men and women who launched the demonstrations, Zhao carries out a penetrating analysis of the many parallel changes in China's state-society relations during the 1980s. Such changes prepared an alienated academy, gave rise to ecology-based student mobilization, restricted government policy choices, and shaped student emotions and public opinion, all of which, Zhao argues, account for the tragic events in Tiananmen.

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Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Did the terrorist attacks of September 11 mark the end of an era? Or the beginning of a new one? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in "Time Maps", we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of our collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past in our minds, the mental strategies that help us string together unrelated events into coherent and meaningful narratives, and the social grammar of battles over conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, from Watergate to the West Bank, and from ancient Rome to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we organize time into stories; how we tie discontinuous events together into eras; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin wall. Most people think the Roman Empire ended in 476, even though it lasted another 977 years in Byzantium. Challenging such conventional wisdom, "Time Maps" should be valuable reading for anyone interested in how the history of our world takes shape.

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Because new nations need new pasts, they create new ways of commemorating and recasting select historic events. In this volume Yael Zerubavel illuminates this dynamic process by examining the construction of Israeli national tradition. Zerubavel focuses on the nationalist reinterpretation of the defence of Masada against the Romans in 73 C.E. and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 133-135; and on the transformation of the 1920 defence of a new Jewish settlement in Tel Hai into a national myth. Zerubavel demonstrates how, in each case, Israeli memory transforms events that ended in death and defeat into heroic myths and symbols of national revival. Drawing on a broad range of official and popular sources and original interviews, Zerubavel shows that the construction of a new national tradition is not necessarily the product of government policy but a creative collaboration between politicians, writers, and educators. Her discussion of the politics of commemoration demonstrates how rival groups can turn the past into an arena of conflict as they posit competing interpretations of history and opposing moral claims on the use of the past. Zerubavel analyzes the emergence of counter-memories within the reality of Israel's frequent wars, the ensuing debates about the future of the occupied territories, and the embattled relations with Palestinians.

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This volume presents the most complete collection available of the work of Victor Zarnowitz, a leader in the study of business cycles, growth, inflation, and forecasting.. With characteristic insight, Zarnowitz examines theories of the business cycle, including Keynesian and monetary theories and more recent rational expectation and real business cycle theories. He also measures trends and cycles in economic activity; evaluates the performance of leading indicators and their composite measures; surveys forecasting tools and performance of business and academic economists; discusses historical changes in the nature and sources of business cycles; and analyzes how successfully forecasting firms and economists predict such key economic variables as interest rates and inflation.

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In "Out of the Pits", Caitlin Zaloom shows how traders, brokers, and global financial markets have adapted to the digital age. Drawing on her firsthand experiences as a clerk and a trader, as well as her unusual access to key sites of global finance, she explains how changes at the world's leading financial exchanges have transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation; how people and places are responding to the digital transition; how traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace; and how brokers, business managers, and software designers are collaborating to build new markets. A penetrating and richly detailed account of how cities, culture, and technology shape everyday life in the global economy, "Out of the Pits" will be required reading for anyone who has ever wondered how financial markets work.

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During the 1830s, the United States experienced a wave of movements for social change over temperance, the abolition of slavery, anti-vice activism, and a host of other moral reforms. While these efforts have mostly been considered independently of one another, Michael P. Young argues, for the first time in "Bearing Witness against Sin" that together they represented a distinctive new style of mobilization - one that prefigured contemporary forms of social protest by underscoring the role of national religious structures. In this book, Young identifies a new strain of protest that challenged antebellum Americans to take personal responsibility for reforming social problems. At this point in history, national sins, such as slaveholding were first being recognized for their unmatched evil and sinfulness. This newly awakened consciousness coupled with a confessional style of protest seized the American imagination and took off in a way that galvanized thousands of people. Such a phenomenon, Young argues, helps explain the lives of charismatic reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimke sisters, and many others. Marshalling lively historical materials, including letters and life histories of reformers, "Bearing Witness against Sin" is a revelatory account of how religion lay at the heart of social reform.

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American urban ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in debates about home foreclosures, images of 9/11, or postapocalyptic movies. Nick Yablon argues that this association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation's history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation - from accounts of failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to popular fiction and cartoons that envisioned disintegrating skyscrapers and bridges - Yablon challenges the myth that ruins were absent or at least insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the past, American ruins often appeared unpredictably and disappeared before they could accrue an aura of age. In doing so, they generated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the new kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative depictions of these untimely ruins everywhere from the archives of photography clubs to the pages of pulp magazines, Yablon reconstructs crucial debates about America's economic, technological, and cultural transformation in an age of urban modernity.

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Nationalism is one of modern history's great surprises. How is it that the nation, a relatively old form of community, has risen to such prominence in an era so strongly identified with the individual? Bernard Yack argues that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of community - and especially the moral psychology that animates it - that has made this question so difficult to answer. Yack develops a broader and more flexible theory of community and shows how to use it in the study of nations and nationalism. What makes nationalism such a powerful and morally problematic force in our lives is the interplay of old feelings of communal loyalty and relatively new beliefs about popular sovereignty. By uncovering this fraught relationship, Yack moves our understanding of nationalism beyond the oft-rehearsed debate between primordialists and modernists, those who exaggerate our loss of individuality and those who underestimate the depth of communal attachments. A brilliant and compelling book, "Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community" sets out a revisionist conception of nationalism that cannot be ignored.

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Always connect - that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself - those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself - instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today-mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway's classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

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When the Republic of Guinea gained independence in 1958, one of the first policies of the new state was a village-to-village eradication of masks and other ritual objects it deemed "fetishes." The Demystification Program, as it was called, was so urgent it even preceded the building of a national road system. In Unmasking the State, Mike McGovern attempts to understand why this program was so important to the emerging state and examines the complex role it had in creating a unified national identity. In doing so, he tells a dramatic story of cat and mouse where minority groups cling desperately to their important - and outlawed - customs. Primarily focused on the communities in the country's south-eastern rainforest region - people known as Forestiers - the Demystification Program operated via a paradox. At the same time it banned rituals from Forestiers' day-to-day lives, it appropriated them into a state-sponsored program of folklorization. McGovern points to an important purpose for this: by objectifying this polytheistic group's rituals, the state created a viable counter example against which the Muslim majority could define proper modernity. Describing the intertwined relationship between national and local identity making, McGovern showcases the coercive power and the unintended consequences involved when states attempt to engineer culture.

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