Search results for ""University of Chicago Press""

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past. This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean. Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. The author reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture. Consequently,

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Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy - everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence...But what if they didn't? This pamphlet ponders what that response would be and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here, David Graeber invites readers to imagine this discipline that currently only exists in the realm of possibility: anarchist anthropology.

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During the 1960s and 70s, Chicago was shaped by art and ideas produced and circulated on its South Side. Defined by the city’s social, political, and geographic divides and by the energies of its multiple overlapping art scenes, this vibrant moment of creative expression produced a cultural legacy whose impact continues to unfold nationally and internationally. The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, published in tandem with an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, examines this cultural moment—brimming with change and conflict—and the figures who defined it. Focusing primarily on African American artists in and out of the Black Arts Movement, The Time is Now! re-examines watershed cultural moments: from the Wall of Respect to Black Creativity, from the Civil Rights Movement to AfriCOBRA, from vivid protest posters to visionary Afrofuturist art, and from the Hairy Who to the radical sounds of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Employing new scholarship that reassesses and recalibrates traditional narratives of postwar Chicago art, the exhibit resonates with current national dialogues around race, gender, protest, and belonging. The book contains a series of long and short essays, interviews, and other contextual material, along with full-color images of all works included in the exhibition and extensive reproductions of ephemera and historical photographs

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Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan were the crowning cultural achievement of the sixth-century Northern Qi dynasty. Once home to a magnificent array of limestone sculptures, the caves were heavily damaged during the first half of the twentieth century, and much of the work housed there was lost to the international art market. The exhibition Echoes of the Past - co-organized by the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery - draws upon the findings of a multiyear research project headed by Katherine R. Tsiang at the University of Chicago's Center for the Arts of East Asia. Using such twenty-first-century technologies as 3-D scanning, Tsiang and an international team of technicians and scholars have identified many of the dispersed sculptures from Xiangtangshan in an effort to shed new light on the original beauty and meaning of the cave temples. This exhibition catalog features entries with full-color illustrations of the works in the exhibition, as well as six new essays discussing the artistic, historical, and religious significance of the caves and their sculptures and recent research dedicated to their digital reconstruction.

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Anthony C. Yu's translation of "The Journey to the West", initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time. Written in the sixteenth century, "The Journey to the West" tells the story of the fourteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang, one of China's most famous religious heroes, and his four supernatural disciples, in search of Buddhist scriptures. An adventure rich with danger and excitement, this seminal work of the Chinese literary canon is by turns allegory, satire, and fantasy. With one hundred chapters written in both prose and poetry, "The Journey to the West" has always been a complicated and difficult text to render in English while preserving the lyricism of its language and the content of its plot. But Yu has successfully taken on the task, and in this new edition he has made his translations even more accurate and accessible. The explanatory notes are updated and augmented, and Yu has added much new material to his introduction, based on his original research as well as on the newest literary criticism and scholarship on Chinese religious traditions. He has also modernized the transliterations included in each volume, using the now-standard Hanyu Pinyin romanization system. Perhaps most important, Yu has made changes to the translation itself in order to make it as precise as possible.

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Anthony C. Yu's translation of "The Journey to the West", initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time. Written in the sixteenth century, "The Journey to the West" tells the story of the fourteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang, one of China's most famous religious heroes, and his four supernatural disciples, in search of Buddhist scriptures. An adventure rich with danger and excitement, this seminal work of the Chinese literary canon is by turns allegory, satire, and fantasy. With one hundred chapters written in both prose and poetry, "The Journey to the West" has always been a complicated and difficult text to render in English while preserving the lyricism of its language and the content of its plot. But Yu has successfully taken on the task, and in this new edition he has made his translations even more accurate and accessible. The explanatory notes are updated and augmented, and Yu has added much new material to his introduction, based on his original research as well as on the newest literary criticism and scholarship on Chinese religious traditions. He has also modernized the transliterations included in each volume, using the now-standard Hanyu Pinyin romanization system. Perhaps most important, Yu has made changes to the translation itself in order to make it as precise as possible.

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Best known for the challenging four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner (1813-83) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in history, such as The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, and Tristan and Isolde. Though his influence on the development of European music is indisputable, Wagner was also quite outspoken on the politics and culture of his time. To befit such a dynamic figure, acclaimed biographer Martin Geck offers here a Wagner biography unlike any other, one that strikes a unique balance between the technical musical aspects of Wagner's compositions and his overarching understanding of aesthetics. There are few, if any, scholars today who know more about Wagner and his legacy than Geck, who builds upon his extensive research and considerable knowledge as one of the editors of the Complete Works and the Complete Letters to offer a distinctive appraisal of the composer and his operas. Geck explores key ideas in Wagner's life and works, while always keeping the music in the foreground. This year will mark the bicentennial of Wagner's birth, and there is no better testament to the composer's enduring influence than this fresh, vivid, and authoritative work. Richard Wagner: A Life in Music is a landmark study of one of music's most important figures, offering something new to opera enthusiasts, Wagnerians, and anti-Wagnerians alike.

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Although their leaders and staff are not elected, bureaucratic agencies have the power to make policy decisions that carry the full force of the law. In this groundbreaking book, Sean Gailmard and John W. Patty explore an issue central to political science and public administration: How do Congress and the president ensure that bureaucratic agencies implement their preferred policies? The assumption has long been that bureaucrats bring to their positions expertise, which must then be marshaled to serve the interests of a particular policy. In "Learning While Governing", Gailmard and Patty overturn this conventional wisdom, showing instead that much of what bureaucrats need to know to perform effectively is learned on the job. Bureaucratic expertise, they argue, is a function of administrative institutions and interactions with political authorities that collectively create an incentive for bureaucrats to develop expertise. The challenge for elected officials is therefore to provide agencies with the autonomy to do so while making sure they do not stray significantly from the administration's course. To support this claim, the authors analyze several types of information-management processes. "Learning While Governing" speaks to an issue with direct bearing on power relations between Congress, the president, and the executive agencies, and it will be a welcome addition to the literature on bureaucratic development.

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What Soldiers Do presents a devastating new perspective on the Greatest Generation and the liberation of France, one in which the US military use the lure of easy, sexually available French women to sell soldiers on the invasion, thus unleashing a "tsunami of male lust" among the war-weary GIs. The resulting chaos-ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease - horrified the battered and demoralized French population and caused serious friction between the two nations at a crucial point as the war drew to a close.

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A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness. "Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism."—Jürgen Habermas Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.

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A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis. It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we’re missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs—fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don’t exist and never did. In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America—so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind—has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we’ve believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.

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New edition of poignant selected images from famed Life photographer W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh project. In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs. In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the “synthesis of the whole,” presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.

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A revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement. A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science. Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.

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An essential guide to the ways data can improve decision making. Statistics are everywhere: in news reports, at the doctor’s office, and in every sort of forecast, from the stock market to the weather. Blogger, teacher, and computer scientist Allen B. Downey knows well that people have an innate ability both to understand statistics and to be fooled by them. As he makes clear in this accessible introduction to statistical thinking, the stakes are big. Simple misunderstandings have led to incorrect medical prognoses, underestimated the likelihood of large earthquakes, hindered social justice efforts, and resulted in dubious policy decisions. There are right and wrong ways to look at numbers, and Downey will help you see which are which. Probably Overthinking It uses real data to delve into real examples with real consequences, drawing on cases from health campaigns, political movements, chess rankings, and more. He lays out common pitfalls—like the base rate fallacy, length-biased sampling, and Simpson’s paradox—and shines a light on what we learn when we interpret data correctly, and what goes wrong when we don’t. Using data visualizations instead of equations, he builds understanding from the basics to help you recognize errors, whether in your own thinking or in media reports. Even if you have never studied statistics—or if you have and forgot everything you learned—this book will offer new insight into the methods and measurements that help us understand the world.

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A formidable critical project on the limits of antiracist philosophy. Exploring anxieties raised by Atlantic slavery in radical enlightenment literature concerned about political unfreedom in Europe, Metaracial argues that Hegel's philosophy assuages these anxieties for the left. Interpreting Hegel beside Rousseau, Kant, Mary Shelley, and Marx, Terada traces Hegel's transposition of racial hierarchy into a hierarchy of stances toward reality. By doing so, she argues, Hegel is simultaneously antiracist and antiblack. In dialogue with Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Metaracial offers a genealogy of the limits of antiracism.

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An urgent and deeply resonant case for the power of workplace democracy to restore balance between economy and society. What happens to a society-and a planet-when capitalism outgrows democracy? The tensions between democracy and capitalism are longstanding, and they have been laid bare by the social effects of COVID-19. The narrative of "essential workers" has provided thin cover for the fact that society's lowest paid and least empowered continue to work risky jobs that keep our capitalism humming. Democracy has been subjugated by the demands of capitalism. For many, work has become unfair. In Democratize Work, essays from a dozen social scientists-all women-articulate the perils and frustrations of our collective moment, but they also see the current crisis as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. Amid mounting inequalities tied to race, gender, and class-and with huge implications for the ecological fate of the planet-the authors detail how adjustments in how we organize work can lead to sweeping reconciliation. By treating workers as citizens, treating work as something other than an asset, and treating the planet as something to be cared for, a better way is attainable. Building on cross-disciplinary research, Democratize Work is both a rallying cry and an architecture for a sustainable economy that fits the democratic project of our societies.

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The 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, staged in the young nation of Zaire and dubbed the Rumble in the Jungle, was arguably the biggest sporting event of the twentieth century. The bout between an ascendant undefeated champ and an outspoken master trying to reclaim the throne was a true multimedia spectacle. A three-day festival of international music—featuring James Brown, Miriam Makeba, and many others—preceded the fight itself, which was viewed by a record-breaking one billion people worldwide. Lewis A. Erenberg’s new book provides a global perspective on this singular match, not only detailing the titular fight but also locating it at the center of the cultural dramas of the day.TheRumble in the Jungle orbits around Ali and Foreman, placing them at the convergence of the American Civil Rights movement and the Great Society, the rise of Islamic and African liberation efforts, and the ongoing quest to cast off the shackles of colonialism. With his far-reaching take on sports, music, marketing, and mass communications, Erenberg shows how one boxing match became nothing less than a turning point in 1970s culture.

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Constructing Social Theories presents to the reader a range of strategies for constructing theories, and in a clear, rigorous, and imaginative manner, illustrates how they can be applied. Arthur L. Stinchcombe argues that theories should not be invented in the abstract—or applied a priori to a problem—but should be dictated by the nature of the data to be explained. This work was awarded the Sorokin prize by the American Sociological Association as the book that made an outstanding contribution to the progress of sociology in 1970.

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Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name’s Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who begins to pick off his fellow heisters, one by one. The first mistake? That he doesn’t begin things by putting a bullet in Parker. That means he won’t get the chance to make a second. One of the darkest novels in the series, this caper proves the adage that no one crosses Parker and lives.

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We think with objects—we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads. Medieval scholars learned to think with their pages in a peculiar way: drawing hundreds of tree diagrams. Lines of Thought is the first book to investigate this prevalent but poorly studied notational habit, analyzing the practice from linguistic and cognitive perspectives and studying its application across theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. These diagrams not only allow a glimpse into the thinking practices of the past but also constitute a chapter in the history of how people learned to rely on external devices—from stone to parchment to slide rules to smartphones—for recording, storing, and processing information. Beautifully illustrated throughout with previously unstudied and unedited diagrams, Lines of Thought is a historical overview of an important cognitive habit, providing a new window into the world of medieval scholars and their patterns of thinking.

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While other writers contemplated the events of the 1968 Chicago riots from the safety of their hotel rooms, John Schultz was in the city streets, being threatened by police, choking on tear gas, and listening to all the rage, fear, and confusion around him. The result, "No One Was Killed", is his account of the contradictions and chaos of convention week, the adrenaline, the sense of drama and history, and how the mainstream press was getting it all wrong.

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Fazlur Rahman (1919-88), one of the most important Muslim scholars of the twentieth century, devoted his career to helping students understand the Qur'an's teachings about God, man, and society. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars to discover, "Major Themes of the Qur'an" is his introduction to one of the richest texts in the history of religious thought. In this classic work, Rahman unravels the Qur'an's complexities with the deep attachment of a Muslim educated in Islamic schools and the clarity of a scholar who taught for decades in the West.

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The essays in this collection by the noted French philosopher Paul Ricoeur grew out of a series of invited lectures given in France on the question of the nature of justice and the law at the Institut des Hautes Etudes pour a Justice in Paris. Gathered under the title "The Just", the essays represent a sustained reflection on the relation between the concept of the juridical - as embedded in written laws, tribunals, judges and verdicts - and the philosophical concept of right, situated between moral theory and politics. In political philosophy, Ricoeur argues, the question of right is obscured by the haunting presence of historical evil. In a philosophy of right, on the other hand, the leading theme is peace. Building on the framework established in his earlier work, "Oneself as Another", Ricoeur shifts his focus from political considerations to those having to do with the juridical dimension of the problem of justice. Fleshing out this framework, Ricoeur revisits the work of Plato, Aristotle and Kant in his engagements with contemporary thinkers, particularly John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Hannah Arendt and Ronald Dworkin. His thought ranges from conceptual analysis, to the theory of law, and finally to the act of judging, exploring the ideas of sanction, rehabilitation, pardon and the status of conscience in relation to the demands of the law. A valuable work for understanding the development of Ricoeur's hermeneutic philosophy and the literary and religious dimensions of his thought, "The Just" should also be of interest to scholars interested in matters of ethics, law and justice.

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For almost a century and a half, biologists have gone to the seashore to study life. The oceans contain rich biodiversity, and organisms at the intersection of sea and shore provide a plentiful sampling for research into a variety of questions at the laboratory bench: How does life develop and how does it function? How are organisms that look different related, and what role does the environment play? From the Stazione Zoologica in Naples to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, the Amoy Station in China, or the Misaki Station in Japan, students and researchers at seaside research stations have long visited the ocean to investigate life at all stages of development and to convene discussions of biological discoveries. Exploring the history and current reasons for study by the sea, this book examines key people, institutions, research projects, organisms selected for study, and competing theories and interpretations of discoveries, and it considers different ways of understanding research, such as through research repertoires. A celebration of coastal marine research, Why Study Biology by the Sea? reveals why scientists have moved from the beach to the lab bench and back.

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'I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell', writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. "The Tacit Dimension", originally published in 1967, argues that such tacit knowledge - tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments - is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.

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The 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited nationwide protests and brought widespread attention to tragically relevant issues like police brutality and institutional racism. But Ferguson is not alone. As Colin Gordon shows in this urgent and timely book, the events in Ferguson exposed not only the deep racism of the local police department, but the ways in which decades of public policy effectively segregated and curtailed citizenship across the St. Louis suburbs... Citizen Brown uncovers half a century of private practices and public policies that resulted in bitter inequality and sustained segregation in Ferguson and beyond. Gordon shows how municipal and school district boundaries were pointedly drawn to contain or exclude African Americans, how local policies and services--especially policing, education, and urban renewal--were weaponized to maintain civic separation. He also makes clear that the outcry that arose in Ferguson was no impulsive outburst, but an explosion of pent-up rage against longstanding local systems of segregation and inequality--of which a police force which viewed citizens not as subjects to serve and protect, but as sources of revenue, was just the most immediate example. Worse, Citizen Brown illustrates the fact that, though the greater St. Louis area provides some extraordinarily clear examples of fraught racial dynamics, it is hardly alone among American cities and regions.

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"Playing in an orchestra in an intelligent way is the best school for democracy."--Daniel Barenboim The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been led by a storied group of conductors. And from 1994 to 2015, through the best work of Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, and Ricardo Muti, Andrew Patner was right there. As music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and WFMT radio, Patner was able to trace the arc of the CSO's changing repertories, all while cultivating a deep rapport with its four principal conductors. This book assembles Patner's reviews of the concerts given by the CSO during this time, as well as transcripts of his remarkable radio interviews with these colossal figures. These pages hold tidbits for the curious, such as Patner's "driving survey" that playfully ranks the Maestri he knew on a scale of "total comfort" to "fright level five," and the observation that Muti appears to be a southpaw on the baseball field. Moving easily between registers, they also open revealing windows onto the sometimes difficult pasts that brought these conductors to music in the first place, including Boulez's and Haitink's heartbreaking experiences of Nazi occupation in their native countries as children. Throughout, these reviews and interviews are threaded together with insights about the power of music and the techniques behind it--from the conductors' varied approaches to research, preparing scores, and interacting with other musicians, to how the sound and personality of the orchestra evolved over time, to the ways that we can all learn to listen better and hear more in the music we love. Featuring a foreword by fellow critic Alex Ross on the ethos and humor that informed Patner's writing, as well as an introduction and extensive historical commentary by musicologist Douglas W. Shadle, this book offers a rich portrait of the musical life of Chicago through the eyes and ears of one of its most beloved critics.

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The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn't that empire's glory but its fall--and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building--from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon's campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and '40s--and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case--particularly that of the Nazi regime--the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.

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The philosophy of medicine has become a vibrant and complex intellectual landscape, and Care and Cure is the first extended attempt to map it. In pursuing the interdependent aims of caring and curing, medicine relies on concepts, theories, inferences, and policies that are often complicated and controversial. Bringing much-needed clarity to the interplay of these diverse problems, Jacob Stegenga describes the core philosophical controversies underlying medicine in this unrivaled introduction to the field.The fourteen chapters in Care and Cure present and discuss conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, and political questions that arise in medicine, buttressed with lively illustrative examples ranging from debates over the true nature of disease to the effectiveness of medical interventions and homeopathy. Poised to be the standard sourcebook for anyone seeking a comprehensive overview of the canonical concepts, current state, and cutting edge of this vital field, this concise introduction will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of medicine and philosophy.

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In modern life, technology is everywhere. Yet as a concept, technology is a mess. In popular discourse, technology is little more than the latest digital innovations. Scholars do little better, offering up competing definitions that include everything from steelmaking to singing. In Technology: Critical History of a Concept, Eric Schatzberg explains why technology is so difficult to define by examining its three thousand year history, one shaped by persistent tensions between scholars and technical practitioners. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars have tended to hold technicians in low esteem, defining technical practices as mere means toward ends defined by others. Technicians, in contrast, have repeatedly pushed back against this characterization, insisting on the dignity, creativity, and cultural worth of their work. The tension between scholars and technicians continued from Aristotle through Francis Bacon and into the nineteenth century. It was only in the twentieth century that modern meanings of technology arose: technology as the industrial arts, technology as applied science, and technology as technique. Schatzberg traces these three meanings to the present day, when discourse about technology has become pervasive, but confusion among the three principal meanings of technology remains common. He shows that only through a humanistic concept of technology can we understand the complex human choices embedded in our modern world.

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On the battlefields of World War II, with their fellow soldiers as the only shield between life and death, a generation of American men found themselves connecting with each other in new and profound ways. Back home after the war, however, these intimacies faced both scorn and vicious homophobia. The Mourning After makes sense of this cruel irony, telling the story of the unmeasured toll exacted upon generations of male friendships. John Ibson draws evidence from the contrasting views of male closeness depicted in WWII-era fiction by Gore Vidal and John Horne Burns, as well as from such wide-ranging sources as psychiatry texts, child development books, the memoirs of veterans’ children, and a slew of vernacular snapshots of happy male couples. In this sweeping reinterpretation of the postwar years, Ibson argues that a prolonged mourning for tenderness lost lay at the core of midcentury American masculinity, leaving far too many men with an unspoken ache that continued long after the fighting stopped, forever damaging their relationships with their wives, their children, and each other.

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Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm.What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

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“It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist’s dream.” So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what elixir does he refer? Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations are covering over one-time cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The list of entwined horrors—climatic, biological, social—is long. But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: “habitat loss,” “human rights abuses,” “climate change.” The shock of these words has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig’s keen attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues from precursors’ ruminations: Roland Barthes’s suggestion that trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest; William Burroughs’s retort to critics that for him words are alive like animals and don’t like to be kept in pages—cut them and the words are let free. Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with experimental verve, this book is Taussig’s Tristes Tropiques for the twenty-first century.

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Scholarly considerations of Andy Warhol abound, including very fine catalogues raisonne, notable biographies, and essays in various exhibition catalogues and anthologies. But nowhere is there an in-depth scholarly examination of Warhol's oeuvre as a whole until now. Jonathan Flatley's Like Andy Warhol is a revelatory look at the artist's likeness-producing practices, not only reflected in his famous Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, but across Warhol's whole range of interests including movies, drag queens, boredom, and his sprawling collections. Flatley shows us that Warhol's art is an illustration of the artist's own talent for "liking." He argues that there is in Warhol's productions a utopian impulse, an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms find a new home. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Warhol in print, it is also an instant classic of queer theory.

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Soren Kierkegaard's influence has been felt in many areas of human thought from theology to psychology. Nearly 100 of his prayers are gathered here, illuminating his own life of prayer and speaking to the concerns of Christians today. The second part of the volume is a reinterpret ation of the life and thought of Kierkegaard. Long regarded as primarily a poet or a philosopher, Kierkegaard is revealed as a fundamentally religious thinker whose central problem was that of becoming a Christian and realizing personal existence.

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If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world - not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

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In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. Yet despite the fact that this time period, located in the wake of the Enlightenment and at the peak of romanticism, was one of rich intellectual exploration and social change, the influence of such threads of thought on Beethoven's work has until now remained hidden beneath the surface of the notes. Beethoven's Symphonies presents a fresh look at the great composer's approach and the ideas that moved him, offering a lively account of the major themes unifying his radically diverse output. Martin Geck opens the book with an enthralling series of cultural, political, and musical motifs that run throughout the symphonies. A leading theme is Beethoven's intense intellectual and emotional engagement with the figure of Napoleon, an engagement that survived even Beethoven's disappointment with Napoleon's decision to be crowned emperor in 1804. Geck also delves into the unique ways in which Beethoven approached beginnings and finales in his symphonies, as well as his innovative use of particular instruments. He then turns to the individual symphonies, tracing elements a pitch, a chord, a musical theme that offer a new way of thinking about each work and will make even the most devoted fans of Beethoven admire the symphonies anew. Offering refreshingly inventive readings of the work of one of history's greatest composers, this book shapes a fascinating picture of the symphonies as a cohesive oeuvre and of Beethoven as a master symphonist.

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"The Biology of Sharks and Rays" is a comprehensive resource on the biological and physiological characteristics of the cartilaginous fishes: sharks, rays, and chimaeras. In sixteen chapters, organized by theme, A. Peter Klimley covers a broad spectrum of topics, including taxonomy, morphology, ecology, and physiology. For example, he explains the body design of sharks and why the ridged, tooth-like denticles that cover their entire bodies are present on only part of the rays' bodies and are absent from those of chimaeras. Another chapter explores the anatomy of the jaws and the role of the muscles and teeth in jaw extension, seizure, and handling of prey. The chapters are richly illustrated with pictures of sharks, diagrams of sensory organs, drawings of the body postures of sharks during threat and reproductive displays, and maps showing the extent of the species' foraging range and long-distance migrations. Each chapter commences with an anecdote from the author about his own personal experience with the topic, followed by thought-provoking questions and a list of recommended readings in the scientific literature. The book will be a useful textbook for advanced ichthyology students as well as an encyclopedic source for those seeking a greater understanding of these fascinating creatures.

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Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic? "Routes of Remembrance" tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade's absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country's classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities. Holsey's study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.

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The highly chromatic music of the late 1800s and early 1900s includes some of the best-known works by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Cesar Franck, and Hugo Wolf. In this book, Daniel Harrison builds on nineteenth-century music theory to provide an original and illuminating method for analyzing chromatic music. Combining theoretical innovations with a sound historical understanding, "Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music" will aid anyone studying this pivotal period of Western music history.

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Each year, tens of thousands of students who are interested in politics go through a rite of passage: they take a course in research methods. Many find the subject to be boring or confusing, and with good reason. Most of the standard books on research methods fail to highlight the most important concepts and questions. Instead, they brim with dry technical definitions and focus heavily on statistical analysis, slighting other valuable methods. This approach not only dulls potential enjoyment of the course, but prevents students from mastering the skills they need to engage more directly and meaningfully with a wide variety of research. With wit and practical wisdom, Christopher Howard draws on more than a decade of experience teaching research methods to transform a typically dreary subject and teach budding political scientists the critical skills they need to read published research more effectively and produce better research of their own. The first part of the book is devoted to asking three fundamental questions in political science: What happened? Why? Who cares? In the second section, Howard demonstrates how to answer these questions by choosing an appropriate research design, selecting cases, and working with numbers and written documents as evidence. Drawing on examples from American and comparative politics, international relations, and public policy, Thinking Like a Political Scientist highlights the most common challenges that political scientists routinely face, and each chapter concludes with exercises so that students can practice dealing with those challenges.

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"At various times, homosexuality has been considered the noblest of loves, a horrible sin, a psychological condition or grounds for torture and execution. David F. Greenberg's careful, encyclopedic and important new book argues that homosexuality is only deviant because society has constructed, or defined, it as deviant. The book takes us over vast terrains of example and detail in the history of homosexuality."—Nicholas B. Dirks, New York Times Book Review

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In the early 1950s, Willem de Kooning's Woman I and subsequent paintings established him as a leading member of the abstract expressionist movement. His wildly impacted brushstrokes and heavily encrusted surfaces baffled most critics, who saw de Kooning's monstrous female image as violent, aggressive, and ultimately the product of a misogynistic mind. In the image-rich Willem de Kooning Nonstop, Rosalind E. Krauss counters this view with a radical rethinking of de Kooning's bold canvases and reveals his true artistic practices. Krauss demonstrates that contrary to popular conceptions of de Kooning as an artist who painted chaotically only to end a piece abruptly, he was in fact constantly reworking the same subject based on a compositional template. This template informed all of his art and included a three-part vertical structure; the projection of his male point of view into the painting or sculpture; and the near-universal inclusion of the female form, which was paired with her re-doubled projection onto his work. Krauss identifies these elements throughout de Kooning's oeuvre, even in his paintings of highways, boats, and landscapes: Woman is always there. A thought-provoking study by one of America's greatest art critics, Willem de Kooning Nonstop revolutionizes our understanding of de Kooning and shows us what has always been hiding in plain sight in his work.

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In many ways, twentieth-century America was the land of superheroes and science fiction. From Superman and Batman to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, these pop-culture juggernauts, with their "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men," thrilled readers and audiences - and simultaneously embodied a host of our dreams and fears about modern life and the onrushing future. But that's just scratching the surface, says Jeffrey J. Kripal. In Mutants and Mystics, Kripal offers a brilliantly insightful account of how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science. Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field - from Jack Kirby's cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick's futuristic head - trips to Alan Moore's sex magic and Whitley Strieber's communion with visitors - Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives. Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi-incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops, and vast intergalactic intelligences - and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions. A bravura performance, beautifully illustrated in full color throughout and brimming over with incredible personal stories, Mutants and Mystics is that rarest of things: a book that is guaranteed to broaden-and maybe even blow-your mind.

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Your Personal God From Horace, Epistles, II. 2. II. 180-89 Jewels, marble, ivory, paintings, beautiful Tuscan meter? Pottery, silver, Gaetulian robes dyed purple - Many there are who'd love to have all of these things. There are some who don't care about them in the least. Why one twin brother lives for nothing but pleasure, And loves to fool around even more than Herod Loves his abundant gardens of date-trees, while The other twin brother works from morning to night Improving his farm, ploughing and clearing the lands, Pruning and planting, working his ass off, only The genius knows, the personal god who knows And controls the birth start of every person There is in the world. Your personal god is the god Who dies in a sense when your own breath gives out, And yet lives on, after you die, to be The personal god of somebody other than you; Your personal god, whose countenance changes as He looks at you, smiling sometimes, sometimes not. To read David Ferry's "Bewilderment" is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. This is the passionate nature and originality of Ferry's prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. His diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against - and with - his genius for metrical variation, thus becoming an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry and which gives him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it's like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry's translations, meanwhile, are vitally related to the original poems around them.

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Our nation began with the simple phrase "We the People." But who were and are "We"? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or in 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today? With "Made in America", Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths - such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption - and reveals instead how greater security and wealth have only reinforced the independence, egalitarianism, and commitment to community that characterized our people from the earliest years.

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Long before Moneyball became a sensation, or Nate Silver turned the knowledge he'd honed on baseball into electoral gold, John Thorn and Pete Palmer were using statistics to shake the foundations of the game. First published in 1984, The Hidden Game of Baseball ushered in the sabermetric revolution by demonstrating that we were thinking about baseball stats - and thus the game itself - all wrong. Instead of praising sluggers for gaudy RBI totals or pitchers for wins, Thorn and Palmer argued in favor of more subtle measurements that correlated much more closely to the ultimate goal: winning baseball games. The new gospel promulgated by Thorn and Palmer opened the door for a flood of new questions, such as how a ballpark's layout helps or hinders offense or whether a strikeout really is worse than another kind of out. Taking questions like these seriously - and backing up the answers with data-launched a new era, showing fans, journalists, scouts, executives, and even players themselves a new, better way to look at the game. This brand-new edition retains the original, while adding a new introduction by the authors tracing the book's influence. A foreword by ESPN's lead baseball analyst, Keith Law, details the book's central role in the transformation of baseball coverage and team management. Thirty years after its original publication, The Hidden Game is still bringing the high heat - a true classic of baseball literature.

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Tracing a central theme of Plato's Republic, G. R. F. Ferrari reconsiders in this study the nature and purpose of the comparison between the structure of society and that of the individual soul. In four chapters, Ferrari examines the personalities and social status of the brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato's notion of justice, coherence in Plato's description of the decline of states, and the tyrant and the philosopher king - a pair who, in their different ways, break with the terms of the city-soul analogy. In addition to acknowledging familiar themes in the interpretation of the Republic - the sincerity of its utopianism, the justice of the philosopher's return to the Cave - Ferrari provocatively engages secondary literature by Leo Strauss, Bernard Williams, and Jonathan Lear. With admirable clarity and insight, Ferrari conveys the relation between the city and the soul and the choice between tyranny and philosophy. "City and Soul in Plato's Republic" will be of value to students of classics, philosophy, and political theory alike.

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