万本电子书0元读

万本电子书0元读

In the Home of the Famous Dead
In the Home of the Famous Dead
McDougall, Jo
¥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;
Measuring the New World
Measuring the New World
Safier, Neil
¥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.?
Hard Road West
Hard Road West
Meldahl, Keith Heyer
¥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
After the Ice Age
After the Ice Age
Pielou, E. C.
¥147.15
The fascinating story of how a harsh terrain that resembled modern Antarctica has been transformed gradually into the forests, grasslands, and wetlands we know today."e;One of the best scientific books published in the last ten years."e;-Ottowa Journal"e;A valuable new synthesis of facts and ideas about climate, geography, and life during the past 20,000 years. More important, the book conveys an intimate appreciation of the rich variety of nature through time."e;-S. David Webb,Science
Everyday Technology
Everyday Technology
Arnold, David
¥147.15
In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday.?Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate "e;big"e; technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood.?Arnold's fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.
Sounds of Capitalism
Sounds of Capitalism
Taylor, Timothy D.
¥206.01
From the early days of radio through the rise of television after World War II to the present, music has been used more and more to sell goods and establish brand identities. And since the 1920s, songs originally written for commercials have become popular songs, and songs written for a popular audience have become irrevocably associated with specific brands and products. Today, musicians move flexibly between the music and advertising worlds, while the line between commercial messages and popular music has become increasingly blurred.Timothy D. Taylor tracks the use of music in American advertising for nearly a century, from variety shows like The Clicquot Club Eskimos to the rise of the jingle, the postwar upsurge in consumerism, and the more complete fusion of popular music and consumption in the 1980s and after. The Sounds of Capitalism is the first book to tell truly the history of music used in advertising in the United States and is an original contribution to this little-studied part of our cultural history. ?
The Complete Poems
The Complete Poems
Gaspara Stampa
¥353.16
Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) is one of the finest female poets ever to write in Italian. Although she was lauded for her singing during her lifetime, her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only after her verse was republished in the early eighteenth century. Her poetry runs the gamut of human emotion, ranging from ecstasy over a consummated love affair to despair at its end. While these tormented works and their multiple male addressees have led to speculation that Stampa may have been one of Venice's famous courtesans, they can also be read as a rebuttal of typical assumptions about women's roles. Championed by Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, she has more recently been celebrated by feminist scholars for her distinctive and original voice and her challenge to convention.The first complete translation of Stampa into English, this volume collects all of her passionate and lyrical verse. It is also the first modern critical edition of her poems, and in restoring the original sequence of the 1554 text, it allows readers the opportunity to encounter Stampa as she intended. Jane Tylus renders Stampa's verse in precise and graceful English translations, allowing a new generation of students and scholars of poetry, Renaissance literature, and music history to rediscover this incipiently modern Italian poet.
Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered
Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered
Maria Galli Stampino
¥353.16
Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202-04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella's other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.?
Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion
Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion
Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor
¥253.10
At the height of Mara de Zayas's popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes. But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas's signature topics-gender equality and domestic violence-written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas's entire body of stories, and restores Zayas's author's note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love's treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.
Under a Bad Sign
Under a Bad Sign
JONATHAN MUNBY
¥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.
Nostalgia for the Future
Nostalgia for the Future
Charles Piot
¥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.
Culture in Chaos
Culture in Chaos
Stephen C. Lubkemann
¥282.53
Fought in the wake of a decade of armed struggle against colonialism, the Mozambican civil war lasted from 1977 to 1992, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives while displacing millions more. As conflicts across the globe span decades and generations, Stephen C. Lubkemann suggests that we need a fresh perspective on war when it becomes the context for normal life rather than an exceptional event that disrupts it. Culture in Chaos calls for a new point of departure in the ethnography of war that investigates how the inhabitants of war zones live under trying new conditions and how culture and social relations are transformed as a result.Lubkemann focuses on how Ndau social networks were fragmented by wartime displacement and the profound effect this had on gender relations. Demonstrating how wartime migration and post-conflict return were shaped by social struggles and interests that had little to do with the larger political reasons for the war, Lubkemann contests the assumption that wartime migration is always involuntary. His critical reexamination of displacement and his engagement with broader theories of agency and social change will be of interest to anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and demographers, and to anyone who works in a war zone or with refugees and migrants.
School Principal
School Principal
Dan C. Lortie
¥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.
Local Transcendence
Local Transcendence
Alan Liu
¥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.
Romey's Order
Romey's Order
Atsuro Riley
¥117.72
Romey's Order is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry.As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records--and tries to order--the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his "e;blood-home"e; and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform "e;every burn-mark and blemish,"e; to "e;bind our river-wrack and leavings,"e; Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral, Atsuro Riley's poems bristle with musical and imaginative pleasures, with story-telling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind.
Medicine Show
Medicine Show
Tom Yuill
¥117.72
In Medicine Show, inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, Tom Yuill's book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with all the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop, when city meets small town, and when provincialism confronts urbanity. Here, the poems talk to one another, one poem nudging the cusps of many others, those poems touching still others' circumferences. Yuill, by invoking the Rolling Stones as muses and as background music, offers cover versions of Shakespeare, Keats, and Dylan Thomas, ultimately giving us a new kind of verse, funneled through the languages and rhythms of his masters' voices.
Marked
Marked
Devah Pager
¥129.49
Nearly every job application asks it: have you ever been convicted of a crimeFor the hundreds of thousands of young men leaving American prisons each year, their answer to that question may determine whether they can find work and begin rebuilding their lives.The product of an innovative field experiment, Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable-yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds. Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price: those with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place."e;Using scholarly research, field research in Milwaukee, and graphics, [Pager] shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job. . . . Both informative and convincing."e;-Library Journal?"e;Marked is that rare book: a penetrating text that rings with moral concern couched in vivid prose-and one of the most useful sociological studies in years."e;-Michael Eric Dyson
We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers
We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers
Marvin Schwartz
¥225.63
Rock and roll pioneer and Newport native Sonny Burgess is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In this book full of personal interviews and remembrances, Burgess and his band tell of their original recordings for Sun Records in the 1950s; their shows with greats such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis; and their success in the contemporary rockabilly revival. This also is the history of a once prominent and spirited Delta community of extensive agricultural wealth. Newport was home to numerous music clubs that hosted national artists as well as illicit backroom gambling. Burgess is a product of this history, and his vivacious music is shaped by his hometown and the dramatic transformation of southern rural life it witnessed.
Worlds Before Adam
Worlds Before Adam
Martin J.S. Rudwick
¥353.16
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth-and the relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period, many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale. But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these scientists still debated a great many questions: Had the earth cooled from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same kind of place as it is nowWas prehuman life marked by mass extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time?The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, Martin J. S. Rudwick's Worlds Before Adam picks up where his celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain's Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory.Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick's magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of one of the world's leading historians of science.
Desperately Seeking Certainty
Desperately Seeking Certainty
Farber, Daniel A.
¥229.55
Irreverent, provocative, and engaging, Desperately Seeking Certainty attacks the current legal vogue for grand unified theories of constitutional interpretation. On both the Right and the Left, prominent legal scholars are attempting to build all of constitutional law from a single foundational idea. Dan Farber and Suzanna Sherry find that in the end no single, all-encompassing theory can successfully guide judges or provide definitive or even sensible answers to every constitutional question. Their book brilliantly reveals how problematic foundationalism is and shows how the pragmatic, multifaceted common law methods already used by the Court provide a far better means of reaching sound decisions and controlling judicial discretion than do any of the grand theories.
Learning to Look
Learning to Look
Taylor, Joshua C.
¥123.61
Sometimes seeing is more difficult for the student of art than believing. Taylor, in a book that has sold more than 300,000 copies since its original publication in 1957, has helped two generations of art students "e;learn to look."e;This handy guide to the visual arts is designed to provide a comprehensive view of art, moving from the analytic study of specific works to a consideration of broad principles and technical matters. Forty-four carefully selected illustrations afford an excellent sampling of the wide range of experience awaiting the explorer.The second edition of Learning to Look includes a new chapter on twentieth-century art. Taylor's thoughtful discussion of pure forms and our responses to them gives the reader a few useful starting points for looking at art that does not reproduce nature and for understanding the distance between contemporary figurative art and reality.