Search results for ""author paul""

Risk management is not just a topic for risk professionals. Managers and directors at all levels must be equipped with an understanding of risk and the tools and processes required to assess and manage it successfully. Risk Management offers a practical and structured approach while avoiding jargon, theory and many of the complex issues that preoccupy risk management practitioners but have little relevance for non-specialists. Supported by online templates and with real-life examples throughout, this is a straightforward and engaging guide to the practice and the benefits of good risk management. Coverage includes: the nature of risk; the relevance of risk management to the business model; essential elements of the risk management process; different approaches to risk assessment; strategy, tactics, operations and compliance requirements; how to build a risk-aware culture; and the importance of risk governance. Online supporting resources for this book include downloadable templates including risk agenda, risk response and risk communication.

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This book is a major reassessment of how immigration is changing our world. The policies of multiculturalism that were implemented in the wake of post-war immigration have, especially since 9/11, come under intense scrutiny, and the continuing flow of populations has helped to ensure that immigration remains the focus of intense social and political debate. Based on his deep knowledge of the European and American experience, Scheffer shows how immigration entails the loss of familiar worlds, both for immigrants and for host societies. The conflict that accompanies all major migratory movements is not the result of a failure of integration, but is part of a search for new ways of living together. It prompts an intensive process of self-examination on all sides. Immigration has such a profound impact because it goes to the heart of institutions like the welfare state and liberties like the freedom of expression; liberal democracies developing into immigrant nations go through an existential change. To cope with these challenges, Scheffer argues, we should move beyond multiculturalism and take a fresh look at the meaning of citizenship in a globalizing world. This principled and path-breaking book will establish itself as a classic work on immigration and will be an indispensable text for anyone interested in one of the most important social and political issues of our time.

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Future developments in war, armed conflict and international relations are central to our collective fate in this century. This book looks forward by considering the forces that will drive changes in military organizations, sources of conflict, the power of states and the nature of the international system. New military technologies will alter how wars are fought and will influence the balance of power. Changes in the global environment will provide new causes of conflict and will change economic priorities. As a result, the state will survive as the key social institution and populations will look to it to acquire and to distribute scarce resources like water, energy and land. Many of the changes that seem transformatory today, like globalization, the internet and mass consumerism, will be shown to be less significant than we believe them to be. Hirst puts such changes into perspective by comparing them with the revolutionary changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe: the firepower revolution, the rise of the sovereign territorial state and the parallel development of the international system, and the creation of world trade. These basic structures of the modern world are still with us and will remain, despite major changes in twenty-first-century society. This book will appeal to students of politics, political sociology & international relations as well as the interested general reader.

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In this new book Paul Ricoeur - one of the greatest contemporary philosophers - offers a personal reflection on his life and on the themes which have preoccupied him over the course of his career. Ranging across topics in ethics and metaphysics, psychoanalysis and hermeneutics, history, politics and religion, Critique and Conviction provides unique insight into the ideas and sources of influence which have shaped Ricoeur's philosophical approach and defined his core concerns. Ricoeur also discusses in detail a number of topics about which he has not written extensively before, including questions of aesthetics and current affairs. This remarkable testimony by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century will be of great interest to students of philosophy, theology, literary theory and social and political theory.

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Across the world anxiety, stress and depression are on the increase, a trend which looks set to continue as austerity measures bite. The official response tells people that unhappiness is just a personal problem, rather than a social one. Written by a practising psychologist, with nearly thirty years' experience in the fields of mental health and learning disabilities, The Therapy Industry offers a concise, accessible and critical overview of the world of psychological practice in Britain and the USA. Paul Moloney argues that much therapy is geared towards compliance and acceptance of the status quo, rather than attempting to facilitate social change. The Therapy Industry fundamentally challenges our conceptions of happiness and wellbeing. Moloney argues that therapeutic and applied psychology have little basis in science, that their benefits are highly exaggerated and they prosper because they serve the interests of power.

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The perfect introduction to the life and work of Cindy Sherman.

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This is the last in a series of four full-colour information books on the theme of Plants. The books have been carefully created to make information accessible to young readers. Large, exciting photographs draw readers into the text and get them thinking about the topic. The books are ideal for school libraries and for topic work. They can also be used to supplement the Go Facts: Plants Starter Pack which includes a photocopiable Teaching Guide full of inspirational guided reading and guided writing lesson plans using the information books. The content, layout, language and writing style of the books will help pupils to learn and understand the structures and conventions of nonfiction writing.

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This is the third in a series of four full-colour information books on the theme of Plants. The books have been carefully created to make information accessible to young readers. Large, exciting photographs draw readers into the text and get them thinking about the topic. The books are ideal for school libraries and for topic work. They can also be used to supplement the Go Facts: Plants Starter Pack which includes a photocopiable Teaching Guide full of inspirational guided reading and guided writing lesson plans using the information books. The content, layout, language and writing style of the books will help pupils to learn and understand the structures and conventions of nonfiction writing.

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Grouped together in this book are several smaller volumes and plaquettes in which Valery had published selections of his shorter prose writings: aphorisms, moral reflections, poetic observations, flashes of wit or fancy, even jokes--a variety of remarks and impressions, many of them first recorded in his Notebooks. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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How David Hume and Adam Smith forged a new way of thinking about the modern stateWhat is the modern state? Conspicuously undertheorized in recent political theory, this question persistently animated the best minds of the Enlightenment. Recovering David Hume and Adam Smith's long-underappreciated contributions to the history of political thought, The Opinion of Mankind considers how, following Thomas Hobbes's epochal intervention in the mid-seventeenth century, subsequent thinkers grappled with explaining how the state came into being, what it fundamentally might be, and how it could claim rightful authority over those subject to its power.Hobbes has cast a long shadow over Western political thought, particularly regarding the theory of the state. This book shows how Hume and Smith, the two leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, forged an alternative way of thinking about the organization of modern politics. They did this in part by going back to the foundations: rejecting Hobbes's vision of human nature and his arguments about our capacity to form stable societies over time. In turn, this was harnessed to a deep reconceptualization of how to think philosophically about politics in a secular world. The result was an emphasis on the "opinion of mankind," the necessary psychological basis of all political organization.Demonstrating how Hume and Smith broke away from Hobbesian state theory, The Opinion of Mankind also suggests ways in which these thinkers might shape how we think about politics today, and in turn how we might construct better political theory.

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Physics can explain many of the things that we commonly encounter. It can tell us why the night is dark, what causes the tides, and even how best to catch a baseball. With In Praise of Simple Physics, popular math and science writer Paul Nahin presents a plethora of situations that explore the science and math behind the wonders of everyday life. Roaming through a diverse range of puzzles, he illustrates how physics shows us ways to wring more energy from renewable sources, to measure the gravity in our car garages, to figure out which of three light switches in the basement controls the light bulb in the attic, and much, much more. How fast can you travel from London to Paris? How do scientists calculate the energy of an atomic bomb explosion? How do you kick a football so it stays in the air and goes a long way downfield? Nahin begins with simpler problems and progresses to more challenging questions, and his entertaining, accessible, and scientifically and mathematically informed explanations are all punctuated by his trademark humor. Readers are presumed to have some background in beginning differential and integral calculus. Whether you simply have a personal interest in physics' influence in the world or you're an engineering and science student who wants to gain more physics know-how, this book has an intriguing scenario for you. In Praise of Simple Physics proves that if we look carefully at the world around us, physics has answers for the most astonishing day-to-day occurrences.

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Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between race, political parties, and American democracy. While scholars frequently claim that the need to win elections makes government officials responsive to any and all voters, Paul Frymer shows that not all groups are treated equally; politicians spend most of their time and resources on white swing voters--to the detriment of the African American community. As both parties try to attract white swing voters by distancing themselves from blacks, black voters are often ignored and left with unappealing alternatives. African Americans are thus the leading example of a "captured minority." Frymer argues that our two-party system bears much of the blame for this state of affairs. Often overlooked in current discussions of racial politics, the party system represents a genuine form of institutional racism. Frymer shows that this is no accident, for the party system was set up in part to keep African American concerns off the political agenda. Today, the party system continues to restrict the political opportunities of African American voters, as was shown most recently when Bill Clinton took pains to distance himself from African Americans in order to capture conservative votes and win the presidency. Frymer compares the position of black voters with other social groups--gays and lesbians and the Christian right, for example--who have recently found themselves similarly "captured." Rigorously argued and researched, Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between black voters, political parties, and American democracy. In a new afterword, Frymer examines the impact of Barack Obama's election on the delicate relationship between race and party politics in America.

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Today, the term "Jewish self-hatred" often denotes a treasonous brand of Jewish self-loathing, and is frequently used as a smear, such as when it is applied to politically moderate Jews who are critical of Israel. In On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, Paul Reitter demonstrates that the concept of Jewish self-hatred once had decidedly positive connotations. He traces the genesis of the term to Anton Kuh, a Viennese-Jewish journalist who coined it in the aftermath of World War I, and shows how the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing came, in 1930, to write a book that popularized "Jewish self-hatred." Reitter contends that, as Kuh and Lessing used it, the concept of Jewish self-hatred described a complex and possibly redemptive way of being Jewish. Paradoxically, Jews could show the world how to get past the blight of self-hatred only by embracing their own, singularly advanced self-critical tendencies--their "Jewish self-hatred." Provocative and elegantly argued, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred challenges widely held notions about the history and meaning of this idea, and explains why its history is so badly misrepresented today.

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Through his many books on the history of anarchism, Paul Avrich has done much to dispel the public's conception of the anarchists as mere terrorists. In Anarchist Voices, Avrich lets American anarchists speak for themselves. This abridged edition contains fifty-three interviews conducted by Avrich over a period of thirty years, interviews that portray the human dimensions of a movement much maligned by the authorities and contemporary journalists. Most of the interviewees (anarchists as well as their friends and relatives) were active during the heyday of the movement, between the 1880s and the 1930s. They represent all schools of anarchism and include both famous figures and minor ones, previously overlooked by most historians. Their stories provide a wealth of personal detail about such anarchist luminaries as Emma Goldman and Sacco and Vanzetti.

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This book presents a detailed overview of the economics and technological change in all its various dimensions. Topics covered include: * Game-theoretic approaches to the modelling of technological change * Finance and technological change * Technological change in internatonal trade The Handbook will be essential reading for students and researchers of the economics of technological change and industrial organization.

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Genghis Khan was the founder of the Mongol Empire, the largest continuous land empire ever. On his death in 1227, this extended from the Near East to the Yellow Sea, and was expanded by his successors to include what is now Iran, Iraq and southern Russia. By 1206, Genghis Khan had completed the unification by conquest of all the tribes of Mongolia, and was acclaimed as universal Khan. He then launched his assault on Northern China. Peking was captured in 1215, and the Chin were finally subjugated by Genghis's successors in 1234. This is the definitive biography.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEKThe hard-hitting new poetry collection from 'Ireland's most ingenious poet' (Telegraph).'Very few poets, living or otherwise, can combine high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration and dizzying rhyme with the kind of insight that makes us pause, laugh, remember; feel envious, out of breath, punch-drunk.' Kit Fan, GuardianA 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an 'affront' to good taste. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture, but to hold our attention.

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Michael Jackson died on June 25 2009 in Los Angeles, from of acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication (according to Wikipedia). The one-time King of Pop was preparing for one last assault on the mainstream with a proposed 50 night run of shows at the 02 (thereby trumping his arch-rival, Prince, who had just concluded his legendary 21 Nights). His exhaustion, paranoia and general ill-heath were an open secret. He had lived many lives and inhabited many bodies; PT Barnum, Fred Astaire, and Peter Pan in one mortal coil. His death was mourned by hundreds of millions of fans but it was almost as if he had been dead for some time already. And in his death, in vivid technicolor, we relived the dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and perversions that we had all projected on to him as a celebrity for four decades. Paul Morley's short biographical portrait of Michael Jackson looks at how we turned the most outrageous child star talent of the late 20th century into a monster; how his decline soundtracked the end of Pop and the end of American Imperialism; how his once staggeringly modern and funky music became secondary to the dysfunctional freak show of watching a vulnerable man literally disintegrate. Tender, erudite, and provocative, Morley's monograph documents a tragedy that is so Shakespearean in scale that it obscures the legacy of the last of the great Song and Dance Men. It is poignant and wild, melancholy and obsessive, cannibalising itslef in ever decreasing circles of enquiry. This is a rare piece of pop cultural alchemy that cuts through the myth in a way that only a writer as great as Paul Morley could do.

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In 2008 Paul Robertson, the renowned violinist and leader of the Medici Quartet, suffered a ruptured aorta. After dying for a lengthy period on the operating table, he remained in a coma for many weeks. During this time, he experienced visions which afforded him profound insights and when he awoke, he found his understanding of the world fundamentally altered. This surprising and rewarding memoir offers a fascinating perspective on creative endeavour: the rigours of learning, the challenges of performance and the spiritual nourishment that drives us on. It is a poignant and wise book that draws on a lifetime of experiences, in both life and death.

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'Like Robert Macfarlane re-written by Cormac McCarthy.' Telegraph'Beckett doing Beowulf.' London Review of Books One thousand years from now, the sole inhabitants of a small island - a group no larger than an extended family - are living in a post-civilised world. They are perhaps the Earth's only human survivors.But lurking outside their isolated community is a figure in red, an emissary from another way of life: a virtual place of refuge and security, of escape from the dangers of a newly wild world. The visitor calls it Alexandria. A work of radical and matchless imagination, Paul Kingsnorth's new novel is a mythical, polyphonic drama driven by elemental themes: of community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine over man; whether to put your faith in the present or the future.Set on the far side of the climate apocalypse, Alexandria completes the Buckmaster Trilogy, which began with Kingsnorth's prize-winning The Wake.

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Two stories which have been made into films. In "Smoke" a novelist, suffering from writer's block and the violent death of his wife, is inspired by a young black boy to write again. The action of "Blue in the Face" partly takes place in the cigar shop which was the focal point of "Smoke".

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Surveys the history of changing tastes in food and fine dining – what was available for people to eat, and how it was prepared and served – from prehistory to the present daySince earliest times food has encompassed so much more than just what we eat – whole societies can be revealed and analysed by their cusines. In this wide-ranging book, leading historians from Europe and America piece together from a myriad sources the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present, and the pleasures of dining. Ten chapters cover the food and taste of the hunter-gatherers and first farmers of Prehistory; the rich Mediterranean cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome; the development of gastronomy in Imperial China; Medieval Islamic cuisine; European food in the Middle Ages; the decisive changes in food fashions after the Renaissance; the effect of the Industrial Revolution on what people ate; the rise to dominance of French cuisine in the 19th and 20th centuries; the evolution of the restaurant; the contemporary situation where everything from slow to fast food vies for our attention. Throughout, the entertaining story of worldwide food traditions provides the ideal backdrop to today’s roaming the globe for great gastronomic experiences.

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An authoritative introduction to one of the most influential painters in the history of art, written by the pre-eminent authority on the subject and informed by the latest research. More versatile and less idiosyncratic than Michelangelo, more prolific and accessible than his mentor Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, though he died at only thirty-seven, is considered the single most influential artist of the Renaissance. Here, art historian Paul Joannides explores the different social and regional contexts of Raphael’s work and discusses all aspects of his artistic output. He traces Raphael’s career from his origins in Urbino, through his altarpieces made in Umbria in the shadow of Perugino, to the first flowering of his genius in Florence where he painted a series of iconic Madonnas that are among the most beloved images in Western art. Raphael’s employment by the dynamic and demanding Pope Julius II gave him opportunities without parallel and encouraged the full expansion of his genius. As a sophisticate entrepreneur, he dominated Rome’s artistic life and extended the range of his activities to that of architect, designer, pioneer archaeologist and theoretician. The foundation of Raphael’s versatility and range was his supreme clarity of mind as a draughtsman. Knowledge of his drawings, on which Joannides is a leading expert, is central to understanding of his achievement, and they are thoroughly explored here.

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A sweeping new history of the city of Rome, told through its emperors and the monuments they built to make their mark on one of the great capitals of the classical world. What is worse than Nero? What is better than Nero's Baths?' so wrote the poet Martial in the first century AD, demonstrating the power that buildings have on public consciousness. In ancient Rome, who built a monument and why mattered as much as its physical structure. Over centuries and under many different emperors, a small village in Italy was transformed into the crowning glory of an empire. Seeking out the personalities behind the great building projects is key to understanding them. With this firmly in mind, Paul Roberts takes the reader on a tour of ancient Rome, vividly evoking the sights and sounds of the city: from the roar of the crowds at the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, to the dazzling gleam of the marble- and mosaic-covered baths of Caracalla and Diocletian. He tells this story emperor by e

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The story of our Universe, from its beginning in the first milliseconds of the Big Bang right up to our present moment and beyond, told in a gripping narrative. We have entered a new age of exploration and discovery, enabling us to probe ever more distant reaches of space and greatly advance our knowledge of the Universe. Today, telescopes peer not only into outer space, but also into the deep past. Paul Murdin takes us on an original and breathtaking journey across the lifetime of the Universe, from the first milliseconds of the Big Bang right up to our present moment and even beyond. Murdin draws on the latest discoveries in astronomy to describe the most important characters and events in the life of our Universe: the most powerful explosions, the most curious planets, and the most spectacular celestial bodies. He charts our developing understanding of the cosmos, showing how thinkers have deduced profound truths from even the simplest observations – everyone can see that it is dark at night, but only recently have we understood this as proof that the Universe has not been the same forever. Since then, the Universe has grown up from childhood: astronomers have tracked it as it passed through maturity and as it now moves into middle age. Murdin shows how our own lives were seeded from the Big Bang, galaxies, stars and planets. He considers some of the key questions: how did structures like galaxies and ourselves emerge from the dense maelstrom of the Universe’s birth? How did the ‘dark matter’ that we can’t even see speed up the development of galaxies, and how does ‘dark energy’ work to speed up the expansion of the Universe? Why hasn’t the Universe collapsed in on itself – and will it one day? And finally, he offers a glimpse into the future old age of our Universe, and what it means for us all.

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Water borne disease is responsible for millions of deaths worldwide every year. Within both developed and developing countries the demand for clean drinking and bathing water is ever increasing and the control of water borne disease is therefore of extreme importance. The book first addresses the magnitude of the problem, with subsequent chapters on specific diseases including Crytosporidiosis, Schistosomiasis, legionellosis and viral gastrointeritis. Concluding chapters discuss practical control issues such as basic water treatment and the problems of water borne disease control in less developed countries.

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Every year corporations spend billions in pursuit of change. Some are successful. Many are not. In this winner of the prestigious 1999 Management Consultancy Association Prize, Paul Taffinder casts a critical eye over the big change efforts of more than 30 organizations worldwide, and offers conclusions as unsettling as they are insightful and firmly supported by real-world business sense. "Paul Taffinder achieves what in many other books remains an empty promise. Brilliant insight...inspiring...A real eye-opener."--Dr. Siegfried Hoenle, Director, Warburg Dillon Read.

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A captivating look at one of America's most prominent and fascinating public figures Bestselling author, war hero, presidential candidate, champion of the most politically sticky issue to rock Washington since Watergate-campaign finance reform- there may be no better known senator than John McCain. From Democrats to Republicans, many Americans relate to John McCain's straight-talking form of politics. In Man of the People: The Life of John McCain, political journalist Paul Alexander offers the only objective, in-depth account of this remarkable politician's journey-from Naval Academy student to Presidential hopeful. Readers will follow McCain from his rich Navy roots through his twenty-one year tour in the Navy, and then behold as he evolves into one of our country's most distinguished yet controversial political leaders. With insider access, Alexander flushes out the personal history to present a candid portrait of the political evolution of McCain. From the WWII hero grandfather who aggressively helped destroy the Japanese military machine to McCain's growth from Navy plebe to Reagan foot soldier, Alexander uncovers what makes McCain tick, how he evolved into a politician with a cause that has endeared him to Democrats and antagonized the Republican party leadership. Political insider, radio talk show host, and well-known journalist Paul Alexander followed McCain from the Presidential campaign trail to stumping for campaign finance reform. McCain's life is not only the story of the most compelling politician since Ronald Reagan but also the history of the transformation of American politics over the last thirty years. Through McCain's personal history-from Vietnam veteran to Reagan go-to guy to a key figure in the Keating S&L crisis to military campaign critic, Alexander pulls back the public curtain to reveal the private man. In doing so, he exposes military machinations, Vietnam controversy, POW torture, mental depression, and political intrigue. John McCain continues to push the political system, thus capturing the attention of the American public. The straightforward, no-nonsense style that has become his hallmark shines through every page of this telling biography.

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The essential design companion-now in an up-to-date new edition For architects, drawing is more than a convenient way to communicate ideas; it is an integral part of the creative process that has a profound impact on thinking and problem-solving. In Graphic Thinking for Architects and Designers, Third Edition, Paul Laseau demonstrates that more versatile and facile sketching leads to more flexible, creative approaches to design challenges. To encourage this flexibility and stimulate graphic thinking, he introduces numerous graphic techniques that can be applied in a variety of situations. He also helps readers acquire a solid grasp of basic freehand drawing, representational drawing construction, graphic note-taking, and diagramming. Important features of this new edition include: * Easy-to-understand discussions supported by freehand illustrations * A new format with superior representation of techniques and concepts * Dozens of new and updated illustrations * Extensive coverage of new technologies related to the graphic thinking process For architects and students who want to maximize their creativity, Graphic Thinking for Architects and Designers is a valuable tool in the pursuit of architectural solutions to contemporary design problems.

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Paul Wilkes has been a writer/journalist, a TV producer, a monastic, a hedonist, a friend of the famous, a family man, and ultimately a true prodigal son. With In Due Season, Wilkes, one of America's most respected writers on religious belief and spirituality, details his search for God--from his working class upbringing in Cleveland to giving up everything he owned and living with the poor to his hedonistic life among the rich and famous. Wilkes's inspiring life story is one of abysmal failure and ultimate triumph, of a faith in God, battered and tried in the crucible of his experience.

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Drinking wine can be traced back 8,000 years, yet the wines we drink today are radically different from those made in earlier eras. While its basic chemistry remains largely the same, wine's social roles have changed fundamentally, being invented and reinvented many times over many centuries. In Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs tells the enticing story of wine's transformation from a source of spiritual and bodily nourishment to a foodstuff valued for the wide array of pleasures it can provide. He chronicles how the prototypes of contemporary wines first emerged when people began to have options of what to drink, and he demonstrates that people selected wine for dramatically different reasons than those expressed when doing so was a necessity rather than a choice. During wine's long history, men and women imbued wine with different cultural meanings and invented different cultural roles for it to play. The power of such invention belonged both to those drinking wine and to those producing it. These included tastemakers like the medieval Cistercian monks of Burgundy who first thought of place as an important aspect of wine's identity; nineteenth-century writers such as Grimod de la Reyniere and Cyrus Redding who strived to give wine a rarefied aesthetic status; scientists like Louis Pasteur and Émile Peynaud who worked to help winemakers take more control over their craft; and a host of visionary vintners who aimed to produce better, more distinctive-tasting wines, eventually bringing high-quality wine to consumers around the globe. By charting the changes in both wine's appreciation and its production, Lukacs offers a fascinating new way to look at the present as well as the past.

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Heir to Mallarmé and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valéry was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks. Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 27,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry's lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary "exercise of thought," a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject. The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works-Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms-with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem "The Angel." Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.

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The Lincoln Reader is a biography of Abraham Lincoln written by sixty-five authors. Paul Angle, the noted Lincoln scholar, selected passages from the works on contemporaries, later biographers, and even Lincoln himself, to form a composite portrait of one of the wisest and most beloved American presidents. These passages, interwoven by Angle's running commentary, blend into a single vivid narrative of Lincoln's life, from his boyhood in Indiana to his assassination and funeral. First published in 1947, The Lincoln Reader has long been considered the most definitive, complete, and authentic retelling of the life of Abraham Lincoln

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A new account of the brilliant and prolific Danish writer whose works captivated readers across Europe Rarely does an American or European child grow up without an introduction to Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Ugly Duckling," "The Princess and the Pea," or "Thumbelina." Andersen began publishing his fairy tales in 1835, and they brought him almost immediate acclaim among Danish and German readers, followed quickly by the French, Swedes, Swiss, Norwegians, British, and Americans. Ultimately he wrote more than 150 tales. And yet, Paul Binding contends in this incisive book, Andersen cannot be confined to the category of writings for children. His work stands at the very heart of mainstream European literature. The author considers the entire scope of Andersen’s prose, from his juvenilia to his very last story. He shows that Andersen’s numerous novels, travelogues, autobiographies, and even his fairy tales (notably addressed not to children but to adults) earned a vast audience because they distilled the satisfactions, tensions, hopes, and fears of Europeans as their continent emerged from the Napoleonic Wars. The book sheds new light on Andersen as an intellectual, his rise to international stardom, and his connections with other eminent European writers. It also pays tribute to Andersen’s enlightened values—values that ensure the continuing appeal of his works.

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Biography of a Book traces the life of an iconic Australian literary work in the lead-up to, and for a century after, its initial publication: Henry Lawson's 1896 collection While the Billy Boils. Paul Eggert follows Lawson's gradual development of a pared-back bush realism in the early 1890s, as he struggled to forge a career, writing short stories and sketches for the newspapers. Lawson’s famous collection came out at a decisive moment for the development of a fully professional Australian literary publishing industry, then in its infancy in Sydney. The volume’s editing, design, and production were collaborative events that changed the feel and nature of Lawson’s writing. He had to give ground on the order in which his stories were presented and even on their texts—especially the idiosyncratic wordings that helped breathe life into his characters.While the Billy Boils went on to be reprinted and repackaged countless times. Its production and reception histories act like a geological cross section, revealing the contours of successive cultural formations in Australia. In unraveling the life of Lawson’s classic work, Eggert’s book-historical approach challenges and clarifies established understandings of crucial moments in Australian literary history and of Lawson himself.

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A Monk's Confession is the first completely new English translation of Guibert of Nogent's remarkable memoirs in over seventy years. Written around the year 1115, they offer an unparalleled look at the life of a monk in the Middle Ages. Guibert, who lived his entire life in northern France, called these memoirs his book of monodiae, or solitary songs. Many scholars consider them the first Latin autobiography in the West after Augustine's Confessions. Readers will be stirred and surprised by Guibert's intense preoccupation with the sinfulness of his soul, his visions of demons and necromancy, and his frank struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. But Guibert is also a valuable witness to his age. In addition to his personal history, his memoirs give a brief chronicle of the abbey of Nogent—where he served as abbot for some twenty years—and a vivid account of the bloody uprising of the Laon Commune in 1112. His observations give precious insight into education, monastic life, and the beginnings of the great medieval towns.Paul J. Archambault's translation successfully renders Guibert's Latin—at times stylish, at times rustic—into lively, modern English. He consulted Edmond-René Labande's authoritative 1981 Latin edition with French translation. He provides a complete introduction and annotation that help situate Guibert within the history and literature of the Middle Ages while permitting readers to judge for themselves how to interpret this fascinating voice from the past.

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Messiahs and Machiavellians is an innovative exploration of "modern evil"in works of early- and late-modern theatre, raising issues about ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics that speak to our present condition. Paul Corey examines how theatre—which expressed a key political dynamic both in the Renaissance and the twentieth century—lays open the impulses that instigated modernity and, ultimately, unparalleled levels of violence and destruction. Starting with Albert Camus' Caligula and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, then turning to Machiavelli's Mandragola and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Corey traces the emergence of two dominant, intertwining features of modern evil: an unrestrained pursuit of power and the utopian desire for perfection. Corey's imaginative and convincing readings of these plays, based on detailed textual analysis, move beyond the accounts usually offered by literary critics. Drawing on political, theological, and philosophical sources—a combination as fertile as it is unusual—Corey's methodology allows him to make keen and subtle arguments about the eschatological nature of modern politics.

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The inhabitants of Meadow Lake, California, dreamed as big as all the gold seekers of the far West, certain that their town, their mine was the "big bonanza"—a place of legendary wealth that most prospectors believed really existed somewhere. The dream took shape in 1865 when the Meadow Lake region of eastern California became the scene of one of the most feverish stampedes in the history of prospecting. Reports of gold-filled ledges five miles long brought miners, lumbermen, and speculators rushing into the area, and within a year a city of several thousand people sprang up. Their frenzied optimism was undiminished by disquieting news that the gold could not be removed from the surrounding granite. The following summer brought increasing crowds, but a profitable method of separating the gold from the rock was never discovered. Disenchanted miners began to leave, and within a few years only a lone hermit, the original inhabitant of Meadow Lake, remained in the dismal wreckage of the once-thriving town. Paul Fatout brings to life the colorful characters who figured in the history of Meadow Lake, telling the story at a sprightly pace and in fascinating detail.

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The Ghana Dance Ensemble takes Ghana's national culture and interprets it in performance using authentic dance forms adapted for local or foreign audiences. Often, says Paul Schauert, the aims of the ensemble and the aims of the individual performers work in opposition. Schauert discusses the history of the dance troupe and its role in Ghana's post-independence nation-building strategy and illustrates how the nation's culture makes its way onto the stage. He argues that as dancers negotiate the terrain of what is or is not authentic, they also find ways to express their personal aspirations, discovering, within the framework of nationalism or collective identity, that there is considerable room to reform national ideals through individual virtuosity.

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Misinformation is one of the twenty-first century’s greatest challenges, a peril to democracy, peace, science, and public health. Yet we lack a clear understanding of what makes misinformation so potent and why it can spread so rapidly. In Falsehoods Fly, a leading cognitive scientist and philosopher offers a new framework for recognizing and countering misleading claims by exploring the ways that information works—and breaks down.Paul Thagard examines the dangers of misinformation on COVID-19, climate change, conspiracy theories, inequality, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He argues that effective responses to these problems require understanding how information is generated and spread. Bringing together empirical findings about the psychological and social mechanisms that drive cognitive errors with philosophical accounts of critical thinking, Thagard develops an innovative theory of how we gain information. Grasping how the generation and transmission of knowledge can fail helps us find ways to repair it and provides tools for converting misinformation into facts. Offering a deep and rich account of the nature and workings of information, Falsehoods Fly provides practical, concrete strategies to stop the creation and spread of misinformation.

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Intense partisanship is a familiar part of the contemporary United States, but its consequences do not stop at the country’s borders. The damage now extends to U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Too often, political leaders place their own party’s interest in gaining and keeping power ahead of the national interest.Paul R. Pillar examines how and why partisanship has undermined U.S. foreign policy, especially over the past three decades. Placing present-day discord in historical perspective going back to the beginning of the republic, Beyond the Water’s Edge shows that although the corrupting effects of partisan divisions are not new, past leaders were often able to overcome them. Recent social and political trends and developments including the end of the Cold War, however, have contributed to a surge of corrosive partisanship. Pillar demonstrates that its costs range from the prolongation of war and crisis to the intrusion of foreign influence and the undermining of democracy. He explores the ways other governments respond to inconsistency in U.S. foreign policy, the consequences of domestic division for U.S. global leadership, and how the corruption of American democracy also weakens democracy worldwide. Pillar considers possible remedies but draws the sobering conclusion that entrenched political sectarianism makes their adoption unlikely. Offering insightful analysis of the decline of U.S. foreign relations, Beyond the Water’s Edge is an important book for all readers concerned about the state of the American political system.

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Winner, 2023 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, Media Ecology AssociationAlthough virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure?In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.

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Paul Gionfriddo's son Tim is one of the "6 percent"-an American with serious mental illness. He is also one of the half million homeless people with serious mental illnesses in desperate need of help yet underserved or ignored by our health and social-service systems. In this moving, detailed, clear-eyed expose, Gionfriddo describes how Tim and others like him come to live on the street. Gionfriddo takes stock of the numerous injustices that kept his son from realizing his potential from the time Tim first began to show symptoms of schizophrenia to the inadequate educational supports he received growing up, his isolation from family and friends, and his frequent encounters with the juvenile justice system and, later, the adult criminal-justice system and its substandard mental health care. Tim entered adulthood with limited formal education, few work skills, and a chronic, debilitating disease that took him from the streets to jails to hospitals and then back to the streets. Losing Tim shows that people with mental illness become homeless as a result not of bad choices but of bad policy. As a former state policy maker, Gionfriddo concludes with recommendations for reforming America's ailing approach to mental health.

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A career of nearly three decades with the CIA and the National Intelligence Council showed Paul R. Pillar that intelligence reforms, especially measures enacted since 9/11, can be deeply misguided. They often miss the sources that underwrite failed policy and misperceive our ability to read outside influences. They also misconceive the intelligence-policy relationship and promote changes that weaken intelligence-gathering operations. In this book, Pillar confronts the intelligence myths Americans have come to rely on to explain national tragedies, including the belief that intelligence drives major national security decisions and can be fixed to avoid future failures. Pillar believes these assumptions waste critical resources and create harmful policies, diverting attention away from smarter reform, and they keep Americans from recognizing the limits of obtainable knowledge. Pillar revisits U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and highlights the small role intelligence played in those decisions, and he demonstrates the negligible effect that America's most notorious intelligence failures had on U.S. policy and interests. He then reviews in detail the events of 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, condemning the 9/11 commission and the George W. Bush administration for their portrayals of the role of intelligence. Pillar offers an original approach to better informing U.S. policy, which involves insulating intelligence management from politicization and reducing the politically appointed layer in the executive branch to combat slanted perceptions of foreign threats. Pillar concludes with principles for adapting foreign policy to inevitable uncertainties.

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A groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago's AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music. Founded on Chicago's South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical and musical investigation of the collective, analyzing individual performances and formal innovations in captivating detail. He pays particular attention to compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, the Association's leading figures, as well as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis (and his famous computer-music experiment, Voyager), Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, along with younger AACM members such as Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Nicole Mitchell. Sound Experiments represents a sonic history, spanning six decades, that affords insight not only into the individuals who created this music but also into an astonishing collective aesthetic. This aesthetic was uniquely grounded in nurturing communal ties across generations, as well as a commitment to experimentalism. The AACM's compositions broke down the barriers between jazz and experimental music and made essential contributions to African American expression more broadly. Steinbeck shows how the creators of these extraordinary pieces pioneered novel approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, musical form, and technology, creating new soundscapes in contemporary music.

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In the eighteenth century, the Cul de Sac plain in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was a vast open-air workhouse of sugar plantations. This microhistory of one plantation owned by the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, a family of Breton nobles, draws on remarkable archival finds to show that despite the wealth such plantations produced, they operated in a context of social, political, and environmental fragility that left them weak and crisis prone. Focusing on correspondence between the Ferronnayses and their plantation managers, Cul de Sac proposes that the Caribbean plantation system, with its reliance on factory-like production processes and highly integrated markets, was a particularly modern expression of eighteenth-century capitalism. But it rested on a foundation of economic and political traditionalism that stymied growth and adaptation. The result was a system heading toward collapse as planters, facing a series of larger crises in the French empire, vainly attempted to rein in the inherent violence and instability of the slave society they had built. In recovering the lost world of the French Antillean plantation, Cul de Sac ultimately reveals how the capitalism of the plantation complex persisted not as a dynamic source of progress, but from the inertia of a degenerate system headed down an economic and ideological dead end.

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