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Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession
¥353.16
In the aftermath of sixth-century barbarian invasions, the legal profession that had grown and flourished during the Roman Empire vanished. Nonetheless, professional lawyers suddenly reappeared in Western Europe seven hundred years later during the 1230s when church councils and public authorities began to impose a body of ethical obligations on those who practiced law. James Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession traces the history of legal practice from its genesis in ancient Rome to its rebirth in the early Middle Ages and eventual resurgence in the courts of the medieval church.By the end of the eleventh century, Brundage argues, renewed interest in Roman law combined with the rise of canon law of the Western church to trigger a series of consolidations in the profession. New legal procedures emerged, and formal training for proctors and advocates became necessary in order to practice law in the reorganized church courts. Brundage demonstrates that many features?that characterize legal advocacy today were already in place by 1250, as lawyers trained in Roman and canon law became professionals in every sense of the term. A sweeping examination of the centuries-long power struggle between local courts and the Christian church, secular rule and religious edict, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession will be a resource for the professional and the student alike.
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Democratic Art
¥370.82
Throughout the Great Recession American artists and public art endowments have had to fight for government support to keep themselves afloat. It wasn't always this way. At its height in 1935, the New Deal devoted $27 million-roughly $461 million today-to supporting tens of thousands of needy artists, who used that support to create more than 100,000 works. Why did the government become so involved with these artists, and why weren't these projects considered a frivolous waste of funds, as surely many would be today?In Democratic Art, Sharon Musher explores these questions and uses them as a springboard for an examination of the role art can and should play in contemporary society. Drawing on close readings of government-funded architecture, murals, plays, writing, and photographs, Democratic Art examines the New Deal's diverse cultural initiatives and outlines five perspectives on art that were prominent at the time: art as grandeur, enrichment, weapon, experience, and subversion. Musher argues that those engaged in New Deal art were part of an explicitly cultural agenda that sought not just to create art but to democratize and Americanize it as well. By tracing a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s, this highly original book outlines the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.
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Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
¥370.82
Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity-and then seemingly disappeared. Or did itIn The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe's but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation.?The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era.
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In the Home of the Famous Dead
¥192.08
In the Home of the Famous Dead will appeal to newcomers as well as to avid followers of Jo McDougall's long career and complex work, providing valuable insights to the development of a poet's signature, inimitable style. This collection presents work known for its sparse, compact language; surprising metaphor; humor; irony; idiomatic speech; and a stoic, sadly earned wisdom concerning death and loss. In McDougall's world, folks making do with what they have take the stage to speak of, in the words of one critic, "e;the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives."e; Her work has been described as having "e;excruciating honesty"e; (Gerald Stern), giving voice to the "e;ineffable emotions of plain people"e; (Judith Kitchen). Miller Williams notes that the work has "e;cleanness and clarity . . . in all the funk and smell of humanity."e; This is the poetry of midwestern plains and southern botttomlands, of waitresses and professors, farmers and bankers, the disadvantaged and privileged alike. Often beginning in the personal and expanding to the universal, this poet takes note of the phenomenological world with a mixture of joy, despair, and awe, providing a haunting look at the cosmic irony of our existence. McDougall's style is indescribable, yet wholly accessible. As Kelly Cherry notes, "e;Call it magic, call it art; either way [Jo McDougall's work] is something like a miracle."e;
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Diving Seals and Meditating Yogis
¥265.87
The comparative physiology of seemingly disparate organisms often serves as a surprising pathway to biological enlightenment. How appropriate, then, that Robert Elsner sheds new light on the remarkable physiology of diving seals through comparison with members of our own species on quests toward enlightenment: meditating yogis.As Elsner reveals, survival in extreme conditions such as those faced by seals is often not about running for cover or coming up for air, but rather about working within the confines of an environment and suppressing normal bodily function. Animals in this withdrawn state display reduced resting metabolic rates and are temporarily less dependent upon customary levels of oxygen. For diving seals-creatures especially well-adapted to prolonged submergence in the ocean's cold depths-such periods of rest lengthen dive endurance. But while human divers share modest, brief adjustments of suppressed metabolism with diving seals, it is the practiced response achieved during deep meditation that is characterized by metabolic rates well below normal levels, sometimes even approaching those of non-exercising diving seals. And the comparison does not end here: hibernating animals, infants during birth, near-drowning victims, and clams at low tide all also display similarly reduced metabolisms.By investigating these states-and the regulatory functions that help maintain them-across a range of species, Elsner offers suggestive insight into the linked biology of survival and well-being.
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Baroque Science
¥247.21
In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, they study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success.?Gal and Chen-Morris show how the protagonists of the new mathematical natural philosophy grasped at the very far and very small by entrusting observation to the mediation of artificial instruments, and how they justified this mediation by naturalizing and denigrating the human senses. They show how the physical-mathematical ordering of heavens and earth demanded obscure and spurious mathematical procedures, replacing the divine harmonies of the late Renaissance with an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and approximated constants.Finally, they show how the new savants, forced to contend that reason is hopelessly estranged from its surrounding world and that nature is irreducibly complex, turned to the passions to provide an alternative, naturalized foundation for their epistemology and ethics.?Enforcing order in the face of threatening chaos, blurring the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilizing the passions in the service of objective knowledge, the New Science, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, is a Baroque phenomenon: deeply entrenched in and crucially formative of the culture of its time.
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Law in Everyday Japan
¥253.10
Lawsuits are rare events in most people's lives. High-stakes cases are even less commonplace. Why is it, then, that scholarship about the Japanese legal system has focused almost exclusively on epic court battles, large-scale social issues, and corporate governanceMark D. West's Law in Everyday Japan fills a void in our understanding of the relationship between law and social life in Japan by shifting the focus to cases more representative of everyday Japanese life.Compiling case studies based on seven fascinating themes-karaoke-based noise complaints, sumo wrestling, love hotels, post-Kobe earthquake condominium reconstruction, lost-and-found outcomes, working hours, and debt-induced suicide-Law in Everyday Japan offers a vibrant portrait of the way law intermingles with social norms, historically ingrained ideas, and cultural mores in Japan. Each example is informed by extensive fieldwork. West interviews all of the participants-from judges and lawyers to defendants, plaintiffs, and their families-to uncover an everyday Japan where law matters, albeit in very surprising ways.
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Music, the Arts, and Ideas
¥265.87
Meyer makes a valuable statement on aesthetics, criteria for assessing great works of music, compositional practices and theories of the present day, and predictions of the future of Western culture. His postlude, written for the book's twenty-fifth anniversary, looks back at his thoughts on the direction of music in 1967.
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Freebooters and Smugglers
¥280.96
This book is the result of several years of collaboration with historians, students, archivists, and friends.The final product owes much to a collection of individuals who offered insight, analysis, recommendations, and sometimes their gut-level opinion about the project. In reflecting on its evolution, this study benefited greatly from two individuals in particular. In the embryonic stages of this work, Cynthia Bouton, being the true colleague that she is, took time from her own hectic academic schedule to offer several critiques, probing questions, and trenchant comments about the manu*.At a later stage in the writing, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall canvassed the study, detected gaps, and then pointed me toward additional sources without which the final product would not have been as thorough.
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Off to College
¥147.15
For many parents, sending their child off to college can be a disconcerting leap. After years spent helping with homework, attending parent-teacher conferences, and catching up after school, college life represents a world of unknowns. What really happens during that transitional first ?year of collegeAnd what can parents do to strike the right balance between providing support and fostering independence?With Off to College, Roger H. Martin helps parents understand this important period of transition by providing the perfect tour of the first year on today's campus. Martin, a twenty-year college president and former Harvard dean, spent a year visiting five very different colleges and universities across the United States-public and private, large and small, elite and non-elite-to get an insider's view of modern college life. He observes an advising session as a student sorts out her schedule, unravels the mysteries of roommate assignments with a residence life director, and patrols campus with a safety officer on a rowdy Saturday night. He gets pointers in freshman English and tips on athletics and physical fitness from coaches. He talks with financial aid officers and health service providers. And he listens to the voices of the first-year students themselves. Martin packs Off to College with the insights and advice he gained and bolsters them with data from a wide variety of sources to deliver a unique and personal view of the current student experience.The first year is not just the beginning of a student's college education but also the first big step in becoming an adult. Off to College will help parents understand what to expect whether they're new to the college experience or reconciling modern campus life with memories of their own college days.
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Legendary Detective
¥147.15
"e;I'm in a business where people come to me with troubles. Big troubles, little troubles, but always troubles they don't want to take to the cops."e; That's Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, succinctly setting out our image of the private eye. A no-nonsense loner, working on the margins of society, working in the darkness to shine a little light.?The reality is a little different-but no less fascinating. In The Legendary Detective, John Walton offers a sweeping history of the American private detective in reality and myth, from the earliest agencies to the hard-boiled heights of the 1930s and '40s. Drawing on previously untapped archival accounts of actual detective work, Walton traces both the growth of major private detective agencies like Pinkerton, which became powerful bulwarks against social and labor unrest, and the motley, unglamorous work of small-time operatives. He then goes on to show us how writers like Dashiell Hammett and editors of sensational pulp magazines like Black Mask embellished on actual experiences and fashioned an image of the PI as a compelling, even admirable, necessary evil, doing society's dirty work while adhering to a self-imposed moral code. Scandals, public investigations, and regulations brought the boom years of private agencies to an end in the late 1930s, Walton explains, in the process fully cementing the shift from reality to fantasy.?Today, as the private detective has long since given way to security services and armed guards, the myth of the lone PI remains as potent as ever. No fan of crime fiction or American history will want to miss The Legendary Detective.
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Ancient Perspectives
¥576.83
Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time-Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE-to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people.Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy's ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor's rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved.?Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.
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Measuring the New World
¥247.21
Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans.?But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission's participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a "e;sacred fire"e; passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.?
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Hard Road West
¥141.26
In 1848 news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. Lured by the promise of riches, thousands of settlers left behind the forests, rain, and fertile soil of the eastern United States in favor of the rough-hewn lands of the American West. The dramatic terrain they struggled to cross is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening-even godforsaken-its sheer rock faces and barren deserts seemed to our forebears.?Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses the diaries and letters of the settlers themselves-as well as the countless hours he has spent following the trail-to reveal how the geology and geography of the West directly affected our nation's westward expansion. He guides us through a corrugated landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place.?"e;Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled. . . . The reader comes away with both an appreciation for the arduous cross-continental wagon journey and an understanding of the events that created such a vast and difficult landscape."e;-Library Journal?"e;[Meldahl] draws on his professional knowledge to explain the geology of the West, showing how centuries of geological activity had a direct effect on the routes taken by the travelers. . . . Meldahl provides a novel account of the largest overland migration since the Crusades."e;-Science News
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Under a Bad Sign
¥229.55
Many people have contributed to the completion of this book.Its inception can be traced to a seminar that Lary May and Paula Rabinowitz asked me to deliver on hip hop's gangsta culture toward the end of my graduate studies in the American studies program at the University of Minnesota.The media hype and moral panic surrounding gangsta culture in the early 1990s bore an uncanny resemblance to the troublesome reception of Hollywood's white ethnic gangsters in the 1930s, the subject of my research at the time.The chance to discuss the gangster/gangsta relation also fueled the development of an undergraduate course on African American popular culture.So I have the American studies faculty and fellow graduates in Scott Hall, as well as the students on the consequent course, to thank for setting me on the road to writing Under a Bad Sign.A particular shout-out has to go to John Wright, who insisted I dig up Claude McKay's Harlem: Negro Metropolis in the rare books section of Wilson Library to see how deep the provenance and complex the relationship was between black denizens of the American city and their gangster culture heroes.
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Recalculating
¥147.15
Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein's first full-length collection of new poems in seven years. As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein's previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.?The collection's title, the now-familiar GPS expression, suggests a change in direction due to a mistaken or unexpected turn. For Bernstein, formal invention is a necessary swerve in the midst of difficulty. As in all his work since the 1970s, he makes palpable the idea that radically new structures, appropriated forms, an aversion to received ideas and conventions, political engagement, and syntactic novelty will open the doors of perception to exuberance and resonance, from giddiness to pleasure to grief. But at the same time he cautions, with typical deflationary ardor, "e;The pen is tinier than the sword."e; In these poems, Bernstein makes good on his claim that "e;the poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead."e;?In doing so, Recalculating incorporates translations and adaptations of Baudelaire, Cole Porter, Mandelstam, and Paul Celan, as well as several tributes to writers crucial to Bernstein's work and a set of epigrammatic verse essays that combine poetics with wry observation, caustic satire, and aesthetic slapstick.?Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange-and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight.?
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Theory of Morality
¥247.21
"e;Let us . . . nominate this the most important theoretical work on ethical or moral theory since John Rawls's Theory of Justice. If you have philosophical inclinations and want a good workout, this conscientious scrutiny of moral assumptions and expressions will be most rewarding. Donagan explores ways of acting in the Hebrew-Christian context, examines them in the light of natural law and rational theories, and proposes that formal patterns for conduct can emerge. All this is tightly reasoned, the argument is packed, but the language is clear."e;-Christian Century"e;The man value of this book seems to me to be that it shows the force of the Hebrew-Christian moral tradition in the hands of a creative philosopher. Throughout the book, one cannot but feel that a serious philosopher is trying to come to terms with his religious-moral background and to defend it against the prevailing secular utilitarian position which seems to dominate academic philosophy."e;-Bernard Gert, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
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School Principal
¥188.35
When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority-for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal's office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell's Room 101. But with School Principal, Dan C. Lortie aims to change that. Much as he did for teachers with his groundbreaking book Schoolteacher, Lortie offers here an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a compelling portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why.Lortie begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, he finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal's job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, Lortie records his subjects' professional dissatisfactions, but he also vividly depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, School Principal offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government.Lortie's scope is both broad and deep, offering an eminently useful range of perspectives on his subject. From the day-to-day toil to the long-term course of an entire career, from finding out just what goes on inside that office to mapping out the larger social and organizational context of the job, School Principal is a truly comprehensive account of a little-understood profession.
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Nostalgia for the Future
¥211.90
Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world's poorest regions.In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State's green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafs and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.
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Fragments and Assemblages
¥223.67
In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manu*s, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manu*s and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manu* compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city's literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London's literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manu* of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manu* scholars.
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Local Transcendence
¥247.21
Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today's society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present-the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen.Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history.In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism-including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory-and digital information technology.?What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicismLocal Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.