万本电子书0元读

万本电子书0元读

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.
Visible Empire
Visible Empire
Bleichmar, Daniela
¥529.74
Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked-until now.In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.
Regimens of the Mind
Regimens of the Mind
Corneanu, Sorana
¥488.54
In Regimens of the Mind, Sorana Corneanu proposes a new approach to the epistemological and methodological doctrines of the leading experimental philosophers of seventeenth-century England, an approach that considers their often overlooked moral, psychological, and theological elements. Corneanu focuses on the views about the pursuit of knowledge in the writings of Robert Boyle and John Locke, as well as in those of several of their influences, including Francis Bacon and the early Royal Society virtuosi. She argues that their experimental programs of inquiry fulfill the role of regimens for curing, ordering, and educating the mind toward an ethical purpose, an idea she tracks back to the ancient tradition of cultura animi. Corneanu traces this idea through its early modern revival and illustrates how it organizes the experimental philosophers' reflections on the discipline of judgment, the study of nature, and the study of Scripture. It is through this lens, the author suggests, that the core features of the early modern English experimental philosophy-including its defense of experience, its epistemic modesty, its communal nature, and its pursuit of "e;objectivity"e;-are best understood.
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.
Building for the Arts
Building for the Arts
Frumkin, Peter
¥370.82
Over the past two decades, the arts in America have experienced an unprecedented building boom, with more than sixteen billion dollars directed to the building, expansion, and renovation of museums, theaters, symphony halls, opera houses, and centers for the visual and performing arts. Among the projects that emerged from the boom were many brilliant successes. Others, like the striking addition of the Quadracci Pavilion to the Milwaukee Art Museum, brought international renown but also tens of millions of dollars of off-budget debt while offering scarce additional benefit to the arts and embodying the cultural sector's worst fears that the arts themselves were being displaced by the big, status-driven architecture projects built to contain them.?With Building for the Arts, Peter Frumkin and Ana Kolendo explore how artistic vision, funding partnerships, and institutional culture work together-or fail to-throughout the process of major cultural construction projects. Drawing on detailed case studies and in-depth interviews at museums and other cultural institutions varying in size and funding arrangements, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Atlanta Opera, and AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, Frumkin and Kolendo analyze the decision-making considerations and challenges and identify four factors whose alignment characterizes the most successful and sustainable of the projects discussed: institutional requirements, capacity of the institution to manage the project while maintaining ongoing operations, community interest and support, and sufficient sources of funding. How and whether these factors are strategically aligned in the design and execution of a building initiative, the authors argue, can lead an organization to either thrive or fail. The book closes with an analysis of specific tactics that can enhance the chances of a project's success.A practical guide grounded in the latest scholarship on nonprofit strategy and governance, Building for the Arts will be an invaluable resource for professional arts staff and management, trustees of arts organizations, development professionals, and donors, as well as those who study and seek to understand them.
Operas of Giuseppe Verdi
Operas of Giuseppe Verdi
Basevi, Abramo
¥453.22
Abramo Basevi published his study of Verdi's operas in Florence in 1859, in the middle of the composer's career. The first thorough, systematic examination of Verdi's operas, it covered the twenty works produced between 1842 and 1857-from Nabucco and Macbeth to Il trovatore, La traviata, and Aroldo. But while Basevi's work is still widely cited and discussed-and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking world-no translation of the entire volume has previously been available. The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi fills this gap, at the same time providing an invaluable critical apparatus and commentary on Basevi's work. ?As a contemporary of Verdi and a trained musician, erudite scholar, and critic conversant with current and past operatic repertories, Basevi presented pointed discussion of the operas and their historical context, offering today's readers a unique window into many aspects of operatic culture, and culture in general, in Verdi's Italy. He wrote with precision on formal aspects, use of melody and orchestration, and other compositional features, which made his study an acknowledged model for the growing field of music criticism. Carefully annotated and with an engaging introduction and detailed glossary by editor Stefano Castelvecchi, this translation illuminates Basevi's musical and historical references as well as aspects of his language that remain difficult to grasp even for Italian readers.?Making Basevi's important contribution to our understanding of Verdi and his operas available to a broad audience for the first time, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi will delight scholars and opera enthusiasts alike.
Radium and the Secret of Life
Radium and the Secret of Life
Campos, Luis A.
¥453.22
Before the hydrogen bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many chemists, physicians, botanists, and geneticists believed that radium might hold the secret to life. Physicists and chemists early on described the wondrous new element in lifelike terms such as "e;decay"e; and "e;half-life,"e; and made frequent references to the "e;natural selection"e; and "e;evolution"e; of the elements. Meanwhile, biologists of the period used radium in experiments aimed at elucidating some of the most basic phenomena of life, including metabolism and mutation.From the creation of half-living microbes in the test tube to charting the earliest histories of genetic engineering, Radium and the Secret of Life highlights previously unknown interconnections between the history of the early radioactive sciences and the sciences of heredity. Equating the transmutation of radium with the biological transmutation of living species, biologists saw in metabolism and mutation properties that reminded them of the new element. These initially provocative metaphoric links between radium and life proved remarkably productive and ultimately led to key biological insights into the origin of life, the nature of heredity, and the structure of the gene. Radium and the Secret of Life recovers a forgotten history of the connections between radioactivity and the life sciences that existed long before the dawn of molecular biology.
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.
Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason
Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason
Hayek, F. A.
¥529.74
Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason is a series of fascinating essays on the study of social phenomena. How to best and most accurately study social interactions has long been debated intensely, and there are two main approaches: the positivists, who ignore intent and belief and draw on methods based in the sciences; and the nonpositivists, who argue that opinions and ideas drive action and are central to understanding social behavior. F. A. Hayek's opposition to the positivists and their claims to scientific rigor and certainty in the study of human behavior is a running theme of this important book.Hayek argues that the vast number of elements whose interactions create social structures and institutions make it unlikely that social science can predict precise outcomes. Instead, he contends, we should strive to simply understand the principles by which phenomena are produced. For Hayek this modesty of aspirations went hand in hand with his concern over widespread enthusiasm for economic planning. As a result, these essays are relevant to ongoing debates within the social sciences and to discussion about the role government can and should play in the economy.
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.
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.
Steam-Powered Knowledge
Steam-Powered Knowledge
Fyfe, Aileen
¥488.54
With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel-Gutenberg's printing press had been around for nearly four centuries-but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.In Steam-Powered Knowledge, Aileen Fyfe explores the activities of William Chambers and the W. & R. Chambers publishing firm during its formative years, documenting for the first time how new technologies were integrated into existing business systems. Chambers was one of the first publishers to abandon traditional skills associated with hand printing, instead favoring the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper, stereotyping, and, especially, printing machines driven by steam power. The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed dramatic advances in transportation, and Chambers used proliferating railway networks and steamship routes to speed up communication and distribution. As a result, his high-tech publishing firm became an exemplar of commercial success by 1850 and outlived all of its rivals in the business of cheap instructive print. Fyfe follows Chambers's journey from small-time bookseller and self-trained hand-press printer to wealthy and successful publisher of popular educational books on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating along the way the profound effects of his and his fellow publishers' willingness, or unwillingness, to incorporate these technological innovations into their businesses.
Victorian Scientific Naturalism
Victorian Scientific Naturalism
Bernard Lightman and Gowan Dawson
¥370.82
Victorian Scientific Naturalism examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of The Origin of Species, wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professional scientific elite. These scientific naturalists-led by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians such as William Kingdon Clifford, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall-sought to persuade both the state and the public that scientists, not theologians, should be granted cultural authority, since their expertise gave them special insight into society, politics, and even ethics.?In Victorian Scientific Naturalism, Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman bring together new essays by leading historians of science and literary critics that recall these scientific naturalists, in light of recent scholarship that has tended to sideline them, and that reevaluate their place in the broader landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging in topic from daring climbing expeditions in the Alps to the maintenance of aristocratic protocols of conduct at Kew Gardens, these essays offer a series of new perspectives on Victorian scientific naturalism-as well as its subsequent incarnations in the early twentieth century-that together provide an innovative understanding of the movement centering on the issues of community, identity, and continuity.
Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss
Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss
Lampert, Laurence
¥453.22
The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss takes on the crucial task of separating what is truly important in the work of Leo Strauss from the ephemeral politics associated with his school. Laurence Lampert focuses on exotericism: the use of artful rhetoric to simultaneously communicate a socially responsible message to the public at large and a more radical message of philosophic truth to a smaller, more intellectually inclined audience. Largely forgotten after the Enlightenment, exotericism, he shows, deeply informed Strauss both as a reader and as a philosophic writer-indeed, Lampert argues, Strauss learned from the finest practitioners of exoteric writing how to become one himself.Examining some of Strauss's most important books and essays through this exoteric lens, Lampert reevaluates not only Strauss but the philosophers-from Plato to Halevi to Nietzsche-with whom Strauss most deeply engaged. Ultimately Lampert shows that Strauss's famous distinction between ancient and modern thinkers is primarily rhetorical, one of the great examples of Strauss's exoteric craft. Celebrating Strauss's achievements while recognizing one main shortcoming-unlike Nietzsche, he failed to appreciate the ramifications of modern natural science for philosophy and its public presentation-Lampert illuminates Strauss as having even greater philosophic importance than we have thought before.?
Shape of Life
Shape of Life
Raff, Rudolf A.
¥329.62
Rudolf Raff is recognized as a pioneer in evolutionary developmental biology. In their 1983 book, Embryos, Genes, and Evolution, Raff and co-author Thomas Kaufman proposed a synthesis of developmental and evolutionary biology. In The Shape of Life, Raff analyzes the rise of this new experimental discipline and lays out new research questions, hypotheses, and approaches to guide its development.Raff uses the evolution of animal body plans to exemplify the interplay between developmental mechanisms and evolutionary patterns. Animal body plans emerged half a billion years ago. Evolution within these body plans during this span of time has resulted in the tremendous diversity of living animal forms.Raff argues for an integrated approach to the study of the intertwined roles of development and evolution involving phylogenetic, comparative, and functional biology. This new synthesis will interest not only scientists working in these areas, but also paleontologists, zoologists, morphologists, molecular biologists, and geneticists.
Deconstructing Dignity
Deconstructing Dignity
Shershow, Scott Cutler
¥311.96
The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In?Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, he employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate.Shershow examines texts from Cicero's?De Officiis?to Kant's?Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals?to court decisions and religious declarations. Through them he reveals how arguments both supporting and denying the right to die undermine their own unconditional concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life with a hidden conditional logic, one often tied to practical economic concerns and the scarcity or unequal distribution of medical resources. He goes on to examine the exceptional case of self-sacrifice, closing with a vision of a society-one whose conditions we are far from meeting-in which the debate can finally be resolved. A sophisticated analysis of a heated topic,?Deconstructing Dignity?is also a masterful example of deconstructionist methods at work.?
Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution
Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution
Thompson, John N.
¥311.96
Coevolution-reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species driven by natural selection-is one of the most important ecological and genetic processes organizing the earth's biodiversity: most plants and animals require coevolved interactions with other species to survive and reproduce. The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution analyzes how the biology of species provides the raw material for long-term coevolution, evaluates how local coadaptation forms the basic module of coevolutionary change, and explores how the coevolutionary process reshapes locally coevolving interactions across the earth's constantly changing landscapes.Picking up where his influential The Coevolutionary Process left off, John N. Thompsonsynthesizes the state of a rapidly developing science that integrates approaches from evolutionary ecology, population genetics, phylogeography, systematics, evolutionary biochemistry and physiology, and molecular biology. Using models, data, and hypotheses to develop a complete conceptual framework, Thompson also draws on examples from a wide range of taxa and environments, illustrating the expanding breadth and depth of research in coevolutionary biology.