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万本电子书0元读

Constructed Climates
Constructed Climates
William G. Wilson
¥253.10
As our world becomes increasingly urbanized, an understanding of the context, mechanisms, and consequences of city and suburban environments becomes more critical. Without a sense of what open spaces such as parks and gardens contribute, it's difficult to argue for their creation and maintenance: in the face of schools needing resources, roads and sewers needing maintenance, and people suffering at the hands of others, why should cities and counties spend scarce dollars planting trees and preserving parksIn Constructed Climates, ecologist William G. Wilson demonstrates the value of urban green. Focusing specifically on the role of vegetation and trees, Wilson shows the costs and benefits reaped from urban open spaces, from cooler temperatures to better quality ground water-and why it all matters. While Constructed Climates is a work of science, it does not ignore the social component. Wilson looks at low-income areas that have poor vegetation, and shows how enhancing these areas through the planting of community gardens and trees can alleviate social ills. This book will be essential reading for environmentalists and anyone making decisions for the nature and well-being of our cities and citizens.
Masculine Self in Late Medieval England
Masculine Self in Late Medieval England
Derek G. Neal
¥247.21
What did it mean to be a man in medieval EnglandMost would answer this question by alluding to the power and status men enjoyed in a patriarchal society, or they might refer to iconic images of chivalrous knights. While these popular ideas do have their roots in the history of the aristocracy, the experience of ordinary men was far more complicated. Marshalling a wide array of colorful evidence-including legal records, letters, medical sources, and the literature of the period-Derek G. Neal here plumbs the social and cultural significance of masculinity during the generations born between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. He discovers that social relations between men, founded on the ideals of honesty and self-restraint, were at least as important as their domination and control of women in defining their identities. By carefully exploring the social, physical, and psychological aspects of masculinity, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the exterior and interior lives of medieval men.
The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound
The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound
Marjorie Perloff,Craig Dworkin
¥247.21
Sound-one of the central elements of poetry-finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkinbreak that critical silence to readdress some of thefundamental connections between poetry and sound-connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies.Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, the contributors to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme,the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, theconnections between "e;sound poetry"e; and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essaystake on the "e;ensemble discords"e; of Maurice Scve's Dlie, Ezra Pound's use of "e;Chinese whispers,"e; the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball's Dada performances, Jean Cocteau's modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing.A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called "e;articulations of sound forms in time"e; as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.
From Mesopotamia to Iraq
From Mesopotamia to Iraq
Hans J. Nissen,Peter Heine
¥141.26
In April 2003, the world watched in horror as part of Iraq's cultural heritage disintegrated among the rubble of Saddam Hussein's regime. Looters descended on the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, Arabic manu*s disappeared from the National Library, and countless Iraqi government records were destroyed. For those to whom Iraq meant only terror, weapons of mass destruction, or oil, several thousand years of history between the Tigris and the Euphrates opened into view. Basic techniques and concepts of civilization, without which human society would not have attained its present level, had their origin there. A writing system, the prerequisite of modern and premodern societies, was part of the human knowledge that spread from Mesopotamia, as were bureaucratic techniques such as archiving, still basic to any modern administration, or early forms of monotheism. Such “firsts” will be highlighted in the following pages. But the uniqueness of the ancient Mesopotamian culture rests not only on countless innovations of this kind but, to an even greater degree, on the fact that we can follow its gradual development and its absorption into the cultural canon over a period of ten thousand years, almost without major gaps.
Church Mother
Church Mother
Katharina Schütz Zell
¥253.10
Imbued with character and independence, strength and articulateness, humor and conviction, abundant biblical knowledge and intense compassion, Katharina Schutz Zell (1498-1562) was an outspoken religious reformer in sixteenth-century Germany who campaigned for the right of clergy to marry and the responsibility of lay people-women as well as men-to proclaim the Gospel. As one of the first and most daring models of the pastor's wife in the Protestant Reformation, Schutz Zell demonstrated that she could be an equal partner in marriage; she was for many years a respected, if unofficial, mother of the established church of Strasbourg in an age when ecclesiastical leadership was dominated by men.Though a commoner, Schtz Zell participated actively in public life and wrote prolifically, including letters of consolation, devotional writings, biblical meditations, catechetical instructions, a sermon, and lengthy polemical exchanges with male theologians. The complete translations of her extant publications, except for her longest, are collected here in Church Mother, offering modern readers a rare opportunity to understand the important work of women in the formation of the early Protestant church.
Class War?
Class War?
Benjamin I. Page
¥141.26
Recent battles in Washington over how to fix America's fiscal failures strengthened the widespread impression that economic issues sharply divide average citizens. Indeed, many commentators split Americans into two opposing groups: uncompromising supporters of unfettered free markets and advocates for government solutions to economic problems. But such dichotomies, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs contend, ring false. In Class Warthey present compelling evidence that most Americans favor free enterprise and practical government programs to distribute wealth more equitably.At every income level and in both major political parties, majorities embrace conservative egalitarianism-a philosophy that prizes individualism and self-reliance as well as public intervention to help Americans pursue these ideals on a level playing field. Drawing on hundreds of opinion studies spanning more than seventy years, including a new comprehensive survey, Page and Jacobs reveal that this worldview translates to broad support for policies aimed at narrowing the gap between rich and poor and creating genuine opportunity for all. They find, for example, that across economic, geographical, and ideological lines, most Americans support higher minimum wages, improved public education, wider access to universal health insurance coverage, and the use of tax dollars to fund these programs.In this surprising and heartening assessment, Page and Jacobs provide our new administration with a popular mandate to combat the economic inequity that plagues our nation.
The emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture
The emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture
Richard Neer
¥353.16
This book was written in Chicago and Rome during the years 2002-2005.Difficulties in obtaining photographs (some insurmountable) delayed publication; the bibliography is reasonably up to date through early 2006 but later additions have been unsystematic.
Shock of the Ancient
Shock of the Ancient
Norman, Larry F.
¥447.34
The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature-rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition-celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world.At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.
Lucretian Renaissance
Lucretian Renaissance
Passannante, Gerard
¥447.34
With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost-a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe.?By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, Passannante argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters-a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering.?From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be "e;reborn"e;?
Image and Reality
Image and Reality
Rocke, Alan J.
¥447.34
Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity.?Arguing that visual mental images regularly assisted many of these scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated molecules were interconnected. These portrayals of "e;chemical structures,"e; both as mental images and as paper tools, gradually became an accepted part of science during these years and are now regarded as one of the central defining features of chemistry.In telling this fascinating story in a manner accessible to the lay reader, Rocke also suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative thinking in all fields.Image and Reality is the first book in the Synthesis series, a series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Angela N. H. Creager, John E. Lesch, Stuart W. Leslie, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan Rocke, E.C. Spary, and Audra J. Wolfe, in partnership with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Unrepentant Renaissance
Unrepentant Renaissance
Strier, Richard
¥447.34
Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physicalThese widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the revival of Stoicism and Platonism. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them.?Richard Strier reveals that many long-recognized major texts did question the most traditional values and uncovers a Renaissance far more bumptious and affirmative than much recent scholarship has allowed.The Unrepentant Renaissance counters the prevalent view of the period as dominated by the regulation of bodies and passions, aiming to reclaim the Renaissance as an era happily churning with surprising, worldly, and self-assertive energies. Reviving the perspective of Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Strier provides fresh and uninhibited readings of texts by Petrarch, More, Shakespeare, Ignatius Loyola, Montaigne, Descartes, and Milton. Strier's lively argument will stir debate throughout the field of Renaissance studies.
Not without Madness
Not without Madness
Della Seta, Fabrizio
¥488.54
Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike. Such madness, as Goethe wrote, is indispensable in all theater, and yet in practice, sentiment and passion must be balanced by sense and reason. Exploring this tension between madness and reason, Not without Madness presents new analytical approaches to thinking about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera through the lenses of its historical and cultural contexts.?In these twelve essays, Fabrizio Della Seta explores the concept of opera as a dramatic event and an essential moment in the history of theater. Examining the meaning of opera and the devices that produce and transmit this meaning, he looks at the complex verbal, musical, and scenic mechanisms in parts of La sonnambula, Ernani, Aida, Le nozze di Figaro, Macbeth, and Il trovatore. He argues that approaches to the study of opera must address performance, interpretation, composition, reception, and cultural ramifications. Purely musical analysis does not make sense unless we take into account music's dramatic function. Containing many essays available for the first time in English, Not without Madness bridges recent divisions in opera studies and will attract musicologists, musicians, and opera lovers alike.
Discoveries in the Economics of Aging
Discoveries in the Economics of Aging
David A. Wise
¥906.54
The oldest members of the Baby-Boomer generation are now crossing the threshold of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare with extensive and significant implications for these programs' overall spending and fiscal sustainability. Yet the aging of the Baby Boomers is just one part of the rapidly changing landscape of aging in the United States and around the world.The latest volume in the NBER's Economics of Aging series, Discoveries in the Economics of Aging assembles incisive analyses of the most recent research in this expanding field of study. A substantive focus of the volume is the well-documented relationship between health and financial well-being, especially as people age. The contributors explore this issue from a variety of perspectives within the context of the changing demographic landscape. The first part of the volume explores recent trends in health measurement, including the use of alternative measurement indices. Later contributions explore, among other topics, alternate determinants of health, including retirement, marital status, and cohabitation with family, and the potential for innovations, interventions, and public policy to improve health and financial well-being.
Shareholder Democracies?
Shareholder Democracies?
Freeman, Mark
¥618.03
Understanding the challenges of corporate governance is central to our comprehension of the economic dynamics driving corporations today. Among the most important institutions in capitalism today, corporations and joint-stock companies had their origins in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And as they became more prevalent, the issue of internal governance became more pressing. At stake-and very much contested-was the allocation of rights and obligations among shareholders, directors, and managers.This comprehensive account of the development of corporate governance in Britain and Ireland during its earliest stages highlights the role of political factors in shaping the evolution of corporate governance as well as the important debates that arose about the division of authority and responsibility. Political and economic institutions confronted similar issues, including the need for transparency and accountability in decision making and the roles of electors and the elected, and this book emphasizes how political institutions-from election procedures to assemblies to annual reporting-therefore provided apt models upon which companies drew readily. Filling a gap in the literature on early corporate economy, this book provides insight into the origins of many ongoing modern debates.
Image and Myth
Image and Myth
Giuliani, Luca
¥535.63
On museum visits, we pass by beautiful, well-preserved vases from ancient Greece-but how often do we understand what the images on them depictIn Image and Myth, Luca Giuliani tells the stories behind the pictures, exploring how artists of antiquity had to determine which motifs or historical and mythic events to use to tell an underlying story while also keeping in mind the tastes and expectations of paying clients.?Covering the range of Greek style and its growth between the early Archaic and Hellenistic periods, Giuliani describes the intellectual, social, and artistic contexts in which the images were created. He reveals that developments in Greek vase painting were driven as much by the times as they were by tradition-the better-known the story, the less leeway the artists had in interpreting it. As literary culture transformed from an oral tradition, in which stories were always in flux, to the stability of written texts, the images produced by artists eventually became nothing more than illustrations of canonical works. At once a work of cultural and art history, Image and Myth builds a new way of understanding the visual culture of ancient Greece.
Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting
Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting
Foxwell, Chelsea
¥535.63
The Western discovery of Japanese paintings at nineteenth-century world's fairs and export shops catapulted Japanese art to new levels of international popularity. With that popularity, however, came criticism, as Western writers began to lament a perceived end to pure Japanese art and a rise in westernized cultural hybrids. The Japanese response: nihonga, a traditional style of painting that reframed existing techniques to distinguish them from Western artistic conventions.?Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting?explores the visual characteristics and social functions of nihonga and traces its relationship to the past, its viewers, and emerging notions of the modern Japanese state.Chelsea Foxwell sheds light on interlinked trends in Japanese nationalist discourse, government art policy, American and European commentary on Japanese art, and the demands of export. The seminal artist Kano Hogai (1828-88) is one telling example: originally a painter for the shogun, his art eventually evolved into novel, eerie images meant to satisfy both Japanese and Western audiences. Rather than simply absorbing Western approaches, nihonga as practiced by Hogai and others broke with pre-Meiji painting even as it worked to neutralize the rupture.By arguing that fundamental changes to audience expectations led to the emergence of nihonga-a traditional interpretation of Japanese art for a contemporary, international market-Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting?offers a fresh look at an important aspect of Japan's development into a modern nation.
Large Carnivore Conservation
Large Carnivore Conservation
Susan G. Clark and Murray B. Rutherford
¥494.42
Drawing on six case studies of wolf, grizzly bear, and mountain lion conservation in habitats stretching from the Yukon to Arizona, Large Carnivore Conservation argues that conserving and coexisting with large carnivores is as much a problem of people and governance-of reconciling diverse and sometimes conflicting values, perspectives, and organizations, and of effective decision making in the public sphere-as it is a problem of animal ecology and behavior. By adopting an integrative approach, editors Susan G. Clark and Murray B. Rutherford seek to examine and understand the interrelated development of conservation science, law, and policy, as well as how these forces play out in courts, other public institutions, and the field.In combining real-world examples with discussions of conservation and policy theory, Large Carnivore Conservation not only explains how traditional management approaches have failed to meet the needs of all parties, but also highlights examples of innovative, successful strategies and provides practical recommendations for improving future conservation efforts.
American Sunshine
American Sunshine
Freund, Daniel
¥394.36
In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed anxities about these new conditions with claims about a rising tide of the "e;diseases of darkness,"e; especially rickets and tuberculosis.In American Sunshine, Daniel Freund ?tracks the obsession with sunlight from those bleak days into the twentieth century. ?Before long, social reformers, medical professionals, scientists, and a growing nudist movement proffered remedies for America's new dark age. Architects, city planners, and politicians made access to sunlight central to public housing and public health. and entrepreneurs, dairymen, and tourism boosters transformed the pursuit of sunlight and its effects into a commodity. Within this historical context, Freund sheds light on important questions about the commodification of health and nature and makes an original contribution to the histories of cities, consumerism, the environment, and medicine.
Planning the Home Front
Planning the Home Front
Peterson, Sarah Jo
¥370.82
Before Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7 to be a "e;date which will live in infamy"e;; before American soldiers landed on D-Day; before the B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s roared over Europe and Asia, there was Willow Run. Located twenty-five miles west of Detroit, the bomber plant at Willow Run and the community that grew up around it attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the United States during World War II. Together, they helped build the nation's "e;Arsenal of Democracy,"e; but Willow Run also became the site of repeated political conflicts over how to build suburbia while mobilizing for total war.In Planning the Home Front, Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people-industrialists and labor leaders, federal officials and municipal leaders, social reformers, industrial workers, and their families-that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners. By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.
Archaeology of Sympathy
Archaeology of Sympathy
Chandler, James
¥370.82
In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture-a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being.?In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It's a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism-two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental-examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work.?Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.
Frontier Seaport
Frontier Seaport
Cangany, Catherine
¥370.82
Detroit's industrial health has long been crucial to the American economy. Today's troubles notwithstanding, Detroit has experienced multiple periods of prosperity, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the city was the center of the thriving fur trade. Its proximity to the West as well as its access to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River positioned this new metropolis at the intersection of the fur-rich frontier and the Atlantic trade routes.In?Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany details this seldom-discussed chapter of Detroit's history. She argues that by the time of the American Revolution, Detroit functioned much like a coastal town as a result of the prosperous fur trade, serving as a critical link in a commercial chain that stretched all the way to Russia and China-thus opening Detroit's shores for eastern merchants and other transplants. This influx of newcomers brought its own transatlantic networks and fed residents' desires for popular culture and manufactured merchandise. Detroit began to be both a frontier town and seaport city-a mixed identity, Cangany argues, that hindered it from becoming a thoroughly "e;American"e; metropolis.
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