万本电子书0元读

万本电子书0元读

Feast for the Eyes
Feast for the Eyes
Normore, Christina
¥453.22
To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastical world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. We can almost hear the clock sound from within a glass castle, taste the fire-breathing roast boar, and smell the rose water cascading in a miniature fountain. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among artists in many fields, as well as the participation of the audience.A Feast for the Eyes?is the first book-length study of the court banquets of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Christina Normore draws on an array of artworks, archival documents, chroniclers' accounts, and cookbooks to re-create these events and reassess the late medieval visual culture in which banquets were staged. Feast participants, she shows, developed sophisticated ways of appreciating artistic skill and attending to their own processes of perception, thereby forging a court culture that delighted in the exercise of fine aesthetic judgment.Challenging modern assumptions about the nature of artistic production and reception,?A Feast for the Eyes?yields fresh insight into the long history of multimedia work and the complex relationships between spectacle and spectators.
Preserving the Spell
Preserving the Spell
Maggi, Armando
¥453.22
Fairy tales are supposed to be magical, surprising, and exhilarating, an enchanting counterpoint to everyday life that nonetheless helps us understand and deal with the anxieties of that life. Today, however, fairy tales are far from marvelous-in the hands of Hollywood, they have been stripped of their power, offering little but formulaic narratives and tame surprises.?If we want to rediscover the power of fairy tales-as Armando Maggi thinks we should-we need to discover a new mythic lens, a new way of approaching and understanding, and thus re-creating, the transformative potential of these stories. In Preserving the Spell, Maggi argues that the first step is to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narrative that together created the fairy tales we know today. He begins his exploration with the ur-text of European fairy tales, Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales, then traces its path through later Italian, French, English, and German traditions, with particular emphasis on the Grimm Brothers' adaptations of the tales, which are included in the first-ever English translation in an appendix. Carrying his story into the twentieth century, Maggi mounts a powerful argument for freeing fairy tales from their bland contemporary forms, and reinvigorating our belief that we still can find new, powerfully transformative ways of telling these stories.
Powers of Pure Reason
Powers of Pure Reason
Ferrarin, Alfredo
¥453.22
The Critique of Pure Reason-Kant's First Critique-is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant's oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced,?The Powers of Pure Reason?explores forgotten parts of the First Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant's works. ?Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique-the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique's greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself.
Southern Stalemate
Southern Stalemate
Bonastia, Christopher
¥447.34
In 1959, Virginia's Prince Edward County closed its public schools rather than obey a court order to desegregate. For five years, black children were left to fend for themselves while the courts decided if the county could continue to deny its citizens public education. Investigating this remarkable and nearly forgotten story of local, state, and federal political confrontation, Christopher Bonastia recounts the test of wills that pitted resolute African Americans against equally steadfast white segregationists in a battle over the future of public education in America.?Beginning in 1951 when black high school students protested unequal facilities and continuing through the return of whites to public schools in the 1970s and 1980s, Bonastia describes the struggle over education during the civil rights era and the human suffering that came with it, as well as the inspiring determination of black residents to see justice served. Artfully exploring the lessons of the Prince Edward saga, Southern Stalemate unearths new insights about the evolution of modern conservatism and the politics of race in America.
African American Writers and Classical Tradition
African American Writers and Classical Tradition
Cook, William W.
¥241.33
Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of "e;classic"e; writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.
Beyond C. L. R. James
Beyond C. L. R. James
John Nauright and Alan G. Gobley
¥261.34
Beyond C. L. R. James brings together essays analyzing the interconnections among race, ethnicity, and sport. Published in memory of C. L. R. James, the revolutionary sociologist and writer from Trinidad who penned the famous autobiographical account of cricket titled Beyond a Boundary, this collection of essays, many of which originated at the 2010 conference on race and ethnicity in sport at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill in Barbados, cover everything from Aborigines in sport and cricket and minstrel shows in Australia to Zulu stick fighting and football and racism in northern Ireland. The essays, divided into four sections that include introductory comments by each editor, are written by some of the more well-known sport historians in the world and characterized by a focus on the role of culture and sport in society in the context of both political economies and the state as well as colonial and postcolonial struggles. Included also are discussions on how sport at once brings people together, shapes the identities of its participants, and reflects the continuing search for social justice.
Scars of Project 459
Scars of Project 459
Angel, Traci
¥243.09
The Scars of Project 459 tells the environmental story of the Lake of the Ozarks, built by the Union Electric Company in 1931. At 55,000 acres, the lake was the biggest manmade lake in the United States at the time of its completion, and it remains the biggest in the Midwest, with 1,100 miles of shoreline in four different Missouri counties. Though created to generate hydroelectric power, not for development, the "e;Magic Dragon,"e; as it is popularly known because of its serpentine shape, has become a major recreational area. Located in some of the most spectacular Ozark scenery, the giant lake today attracts three million visitors annually and has more than 70,000 homes along its shoreline. Traci Angel shows how the popularity of the Lake of the Ozarks has resulted in major present-day problems, including poor water quality, loss of habitat, and increasing concerns about aging waste-management systems for the homes surrounding the lake. Many in the area, especially business owners whose incomes depend on tourism, resist acknowledging these problems. The Scars of Project 459 aims to make public the challenges facing this important resource and ensure that its future is not to be loved to death.
Long Shadow of Little Rock
Long Shadow of Little Rock
Bates, Daisy
¥141.66
At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990's Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her "e;the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time."e; Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn't be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to surround all-white Central High School and prevent the entry of nine black students, challenging the Supreme Court's 1954 order to integrate all public schools. On September 25, Daisy Bates, an official of the NAACP in Arkansas, led the nine children into the school with the help of federal troops sent by President Eisenhower-the first time in eighty-one years that a president had dispatched troops to the South to protect the constitutional rights of black Americans. This new edition of Bates's own story about these historic events is being issued to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Little Rock School crisis in 2007.
Dawn of Green
Dawn of Green
Ritvo, Harriet
¥147.15
Located in the heart of England's Lake District, the placid waters of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty. But under their calm surface lurks the legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation-and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it. Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped one hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering-and of natural resource diversion-inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times. The Dawn of Green re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, noted historian Harriet Ritvo revisits notions of the natural promulgated by romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent-and continuing-environmental struggles.
IN & OZ
IN & OZ
Tomasula, Steve
¥129.49
Steve Tomasula is a novelist like no other; his experiments in narrative and design have won him a loyal following. Exemplifying Tomasula's style, IN & OZ is a heady, avant-garde book, rooted in convincing characters even as it simultaneously subverts the genre of novel and moves it forward.IN & OZ is a novel of art, love, and auto mechanics. The story follows five different characters-an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor, and mechanic-who live in two very different places: IN, a back-alley here and now; and OZ, which reflects the desire for somewhere better. The men and women who populate Tomasula's landscape desperately hope to fill a void in their lives through a variety of media: music, language, dirt, light, and automobiles. As the plot moves forward, the story of the residents of INand that of their counterparts in OZconverge. A fanciful allegory that tackles class relations, art, commerce, and language, IN & OZ is a tale of the human condition that is as visually compelling as it is moving.A novel not only for fiction lovers, but also for artists of all stripes, IN & OZ creates a fantasy that illumines our own world as it lucidly builds its own.
Bird in the House
Bird in the House
Laurence, Margaret
¥141.26
A Bird in the House is a series of eight interconnected short stories narrated by Vanessa MacLeod as she matures from a child at age ten into a young woman at age twenty. Wise for her years, Vanessa reveals much about the adult world in which she lives."e;Vanessa rebels against the dominance of age; she watches [her grandfather] imitate her aunt Edna; and her rage at times is such that she would gladly kick him. It takes great skill to keep this story within the expanding horizon of this young girl and yet make it so revealing of the adult world."e;-Atlantic"e;A Bird in the House achieves the breadth of scope which we usually associate with the novel (and thereby is as psychologically valid as a good novel), and at the same time uses the techniques of the short story form to reveal the different aspects of the young Vanessa."e; -Kent Thompson, The Fiddlehead"e;I am haunted by the women in Laurence's novels as if they really were alive-and not as women I've known, but as women I've been."e;-Joan Larkin, Ms. Magazine"e;Not since . . . To Kill a Mockingbird has there been a novel like this. It should not be missed by anyone who has a child or was a child."e;-Pittsburgh Post-GazetteOne of Canada's most accomplished writers, Margaret Laurence (1926-87) was the recipient of many awards including Canada's prestigious Governor General's Literary Award on two separate occasions, once for The Diviners.
Narration
Narration
Stein, Gertrude
¥147.15
Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreaking Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein delivered her Narration lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home country since departing for France in 1903, and her remarks reflect on the changes in American culture after thirty years abroad.In Stein's trademark experimental prose, Narration reveals the legendary writer's thoughts about the energy and mobility of the American people, the effect of modernism on literary form, the nature of history and its recording, and the inventiveness of the English language-in particular, its American variant. Stein also discusses her ambivalence toward her own literary fame as well as the destabilizing effect that notoriety had on her daily life. Restored to print for a new generation of readers to discover, these vital lectures will delight students and scholars of modernism and twentieth-century literature."e;Narration is a treasure waiting to be rediscovered and to be pirated by jolly marauders of sparkling texts."e;-Catharine Stimpson, NYU
Haiku for a Season / Haiku per una stagione
Haiku for a Season / Haiku per una stagione
Zanzotto, Andrea
¥170.69
Andrea Zanzotto is one of the most important and acclaimed poets of postwar Italy. This collection of ninety-one pseudo-haiku in English and Italian-written over several months during 1984 and then revised slowly over the years-confirms his commitment to experimentation throughout his life. Haiku for a Season represents a multilevel experiment for Zanzotto: first, to compose poetry bilingually; and second, to write in a form foreign to Western poetry. The volume traces the life of a woman from youth to adulthood, using the seasons and the varying landscape as a mirror to reflect her growth and changing attitudes and perceptions. With a lifelong interest in the intersections of nature and culture, Zanzotto displays here his usual precise and surprising sense of the living world. These never-before-published original poems in English appear alongside their Italian versions-not strict translations but parallel texts that can be read separately or in conjunction with the originals. As a sequence of interlinked poems, Haiku for a Season reveals Zanzotto also as a master poet of minimalism. Zanzotto's recent death is a blow to world poetry, and the publication of this book, the last that he approved in manu*, will be an event in both the United States and in Italy.
Whale and the Reactor
Whale and the Reactor
Winner, Langdon
¥188.35
"e;The questions he poses about the relationship between technical change and political power are pressing ones that can no longer be ignored, and identifying them is perhaps the most a nascent 'philosophy of technology' can expect to achieve at the present time."e;-David Dickson, New York Times Book Review"e;The Whale and the Reactor is the philosopher's equivalent of superb public history. In its pages an analytically trained mind confronts some of the most pressing political issues of our day."e;-Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Isis
Conceived in Doubt
Conceived in Doubt
Porterfield, Amanda
¥200.12
Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition-and in spite of evangelicalism's more authoritarian and reactionary aspects.In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism's relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity.As the fledgling nation took shape, evangelicals organized aggressively, exploiting the fissures of partisan politics by offering a coherent hierarchy in which God was king and governance righteous. By laying out this narrative, Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals in the young republic.
How Life Began
How Life Began
Meinesz, Alexandre
¥229.55
The origin of life is a hotly debated topic. The Christian Bible states that God created the heavens and the Earth, all in about seven days roughly six thousand years ago. This episode in Genesis departs markedly from scientific theories developed over the last two centuries which hold that life appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago in the form of bacteria, followed by unicellular organisms half a millennia later. It is this version of genesis that Alexandre Meinesz explores in this engaging tale of life's origins and evolution.?How Life Began elucidates three origins, or geneses, of life-bacteria, nucleated cells, and multicellular organisms-and shows how evolution has sculpted life to its current biodiversity through four main events-mutation, recombination, natural selection, and geologic cataclysm.?As an ecologist who specializes in algae, the first organisms to colonize Earth, Meinesz brings a refreshingly novel voice to the history of biodiversity and emphasizes here the role of unions in organizing life. For example, the ingestion of some bacteria by other bacteria led to mitochondria that characterize animal and plant cells, and the chloroplasts of plant cells.?As Meinesz charmingly recounts, life's grandeur is a result of an evolutionary tendency toward sociality and solidarity. He suggests that it is our cohesion and collaboration that allows us to solve the environmental problems arising in the decades and centuries to come. Rooted in the science of evolution but enlivened with many illustrations from other disciplines and the arts, How Life Began?intertwines the rise of bacteria and multicellular life with Vermeer's portrait of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the story of Genesis and Noah, Meinesz's son's early experiences with Legos, and his own encounters with other scientists. All of this brings a very human and humanistic tone to Meinesz's charismatic narrative of the three origins of life.?
On the Nature of Limbs
On the Nature of Limbs
Owen, Richard
¥229.55
The most prominent naturalist in Britain before Charles Darwin, Richard Owen made empirical discoveries and offered theoretical innovations that were crucial to the proof of evolution. Among his many lasting contributions to science was the first clear definition of the term homology-"e;the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function."e; He also graphically demonstrated that all vertebrate species were built on the same skeletal plan and devised the vertebrate archetype as a representation of the simplest common form of all vertebrates.Just as Darwin's ideas continue to propel the modern study of adaptation, so too will Owen's contributions fuel the new interest in homology, organic form, and evolutionary developmental biology. His theory of the archetype and his views on species origins were first offered to the general public in On the Nature of Limbs, published in 1849. It reemerges here in a facsimile edition with introductory essays by prominent historians, philosophers, and practitioners from the modern evo-devo community.
Freudian Robot
Freudian Robot
Liu, Lydia H.
¥247.21
The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first placeLydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious.Liu's innovative analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. She shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, she argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.Ranging across information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.
Eating the Enlightenment
Eating the Enlightenment
Spary, E. C.
¥247.21
Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners-from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights-E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing cafe owner Charles Manoury, the "e;Turkish envoy"e; Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d'Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, Eating the Enlightenment will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.
History of Trust in Ancient Greece
History of Trust in Ancient Greece
Johnstone, Steven
¥447.34
An enormous amount of literature exists on Greek law, economics, and political philosophy. Yet no one has written a history of trust, one of the most fundamental aspects of social and economic interaction in the ancient world. In this fresh look at antiquity, Steven Johnstone explores the way democracy and markets flourished in ancient Greece not so much through personal relationships as through trust in abstract systems-including money, standardized measurement, rhetoric, and haggling.Focusing on markets and democratic politics, Johnstone draws on speeches given in Athenian courts, histories of Athenian democracy, comic writings, and laws inscribed on stone to examine how these systems worked. He analyzes their potentials and limitations and how the Greeks understood and critiqued them. In providing the first comprehensive account of these pervasive and crucial systems, A History of Trust in Ancient Greece links Greek political, economic, social, and intellectual history in new ways and challenges contemporary analyses of trust and civil society.
Habeas for the Twenty-First Century
Habeas for the Twenty-First Century
King, Nancy J.
¥447.34
For centuries, the writ of habeas corpus has served as an important safeguard against miscarriages of justice, and today?it remains at the center of some of the most contentious issues of our time-among them terrorism, immigration, crime, and the death penalty.?Yet, in recent decades, habeas has been seriously abused. In this book, Nancy J. King and Joseph L. Hoffmann argue that habeas should be exercised with greater prudence.Through historical, empirical, and legal analysis, as well as illustrative case studies, the authors examine the current use of the writ in the United States and offer sound reform proposals to help ensure its ongoing vitality in today's justice system. Comprehensive and thoroughly grounded in a modern understanding of habeas corpus, this informative book will be an insightful read for legal scholars and anyone interested in the importance of habeas corpus for American government.