From Abacus To Zeus, A Handbook Of Art History, by James Smith Pierce
This handbook defines the most common terms used in discussing the history of visual arts, relating them to specific works illustrated in these standard volumes. Topics covered include art terms, processes, and principles, gods, heroes, and monsters, Christian subjects, saints and their attributes, Christian signs and symbols, chronology of painters, photographers, sculptors, and architects, as well as maps, and a directory of museum websites. For art and art history enthusiasts.
( courtesy of James Smith Pierce, 131 pages )
Between Heaven and Hell, the story of a thousand years of artistic life in Russia, by W. Bruce Lincoln
‘How did a country with such a tormented past bring such stunning works of art into being? America’s leading Russian historian, W. Bruce Lincoln, finds answers in a land uniquely suspended between East and West, past and future, sacred and secular, and in its suppressed artists? creative search for identity and inner freedom under tyranny.Examining Russia’s masterpieces through the prism of its social and political history, Between Heaven and Hell synthesizes accounts of music, painting, architecture, literature, iconography, ballet, and cinema into a gripping saga. Transforming exhaustive archival research into a passionate story, this gorgeously illustrated volume brims with the silent mysteries of Byzantine Christianity, the dazzling Imperial splendor of the czars, and the poignant return of brutalized exiles to their homelands. The roster of artists?Pushkin, Tolstoy, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Kandinsky, Pavlova, Chagall, Pasternak’carries straight through to the contemporary ordeals of Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky. A fabulous gift for Russophiles, history buffs, and connoisseurs of all the arts, Between Heaven and Hell shows how the collision of social contradictions, imported art forms, and creative genius gave birth to the quintessential Russian experience.
( courtesy of Google Books, 511 pages )
A Good Year, by Peter Mayle
Max Skinner has recently lost his job at a London financial firm and just as recently learned that he has inherited his late uncle’s vineyard in Provence. On arrival he finds the climate delicious, the food even better, and two of the locals ravishing. Unfortunately, the wine produced on his new property is swill. Why then are so many people interested in it? Enter a beguiling Californian who knows more about wine than Max does—and may have a better claim to the estate. Fizzy with intrigue, bursting with local color and savor, A Good Year is Peter Mayle, beloved author of A Year in Provence, at his most entertaining.
( from the sleeve, 287 pages )
Humic substances in soil, sediment, and water : geochemistry, isolation, and characterization, edited by George R. Aiken, Diane M. McKnight, Robert L. Wershaw, and Patrick MacCarthy
A comprehensive and critical geochemical overview of the nature and functions of humic substances in such diverse environments as soil, peat, groundwater, salt and fresh water. Shows how to isolate humic substances from their environments and analyze their organic components. Individual chapters are extensively cross referenced and extensive documentation and literature references are provided.
( courtesy of the publisher, hardcover 692 pages )
Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood 2nd ed, Edited by Allison James and Alan Prout
When the first edition of this seminal work appeared in 1990, the sociology of childhood was only just beginning to emerge as a distinct sub-discipline. Drawing together strands of existing sociological writing about childhood and shaping them into a new paradigm, the original edition of this Routledge Classic offered a potent blend of ideas that informed, even inspired, many empirical studies of children’s lives because it provided a unique lens through which to think about childhood. Featuring a collection of articles which summarised the developments in the study of childhood across the social sciences, including history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, feminist and developmental studies, scholars and professionals from developed and developing countries world-wide shared their knowledge of having worked and of working with children.
( from the sleeve, 260 pages )
The Sociology Of Childhood, by William A. Corsaro
This volume brings an extraordinary range of theoretical ideas and empirical research to a neglected area of sociology. William A Corsaro shows how children contribute to both social stability and social change through a process of interpretive reproduction. He breaks new ground by stressing the conceptual autonomy of children. Part One reviews traditional approaches to socialization and contrasts them with the author’s perspective of interpretive reproduction. The second part places the new sociology of childhood in historical and cultural perspective. The importance of children’s peer culture is defined and discussed in Part Three, and the last part considers children as social problems as well as the social problems of children.
( courtesy of Google Books, 304 pages )
Seeing Ourselves, 3rd Cdn ed, by John J. Macionis, Nijole V. Benokraitis, Peter Urmetzer, Bruce Ravelli
Seeing Ourselves is the only reader that systematically weaves together three types of articles—classic, contemporary, and cross-cultural. Classic articles will provide you with sociological statements of recognized importance and lasting significance. Contemporary articles focus on current sociological issues, controversies, and applications. They will show you the real world of sociologists at work, and demonstrate the importance of on-going research. Cross-cultural articles cast sociological insights about the world’s striking cultural diversity. Together, these articles offer the most comprehensive coverage of any sociology reader.
( from the text, 498 pages )
The Collectors of Lost Souls, Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, by Warwick Anderson
This riveting account of medical detective work traces the story of kuru, a fatal brain disease, and the pioneering scientists who spent decades searching for its cause.
When whites first encountered the Fore people in the isolated highlands of colonial New Guinea during the 1940s and 1950s, they found a people in the grip of a bizarre epidemic. Women and children succumbed to muscle weakness, uncontrollable tremors, and lack of coordination, until death inevitably supervened. Facing extinction, the Fore attributed their unique and terrifying affliction to a particularly malign form of sorcery.
The Collectors of Lost Souls tells the story of the resilience of the Fore through this devastating plague, their transformation into modern people, and their compelling attraction for a throng of eccentric and adventurous scientists and anthropologists.
Battling competing scientists and the colonial authorities, the brilliant and troubled American doctor D. Carleton Gajdusek determined that the cause of kuru was a new and mysterious agent of infection, which he called a slow virus (now called prions). Anthropologists and epidemiologists soon realized that the Fore practice of eating their loved ones after death had spread the slow virus. Though the Fore were never convinced, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
The study of kuru opened up a completely new field of medical investigation, challenging our understanding of the causes of disease. But The Collectors of Lost Souls is far more than a tantalizing case study of scientific research in the twentieth century. It is a story of how a previously isolated people made contact with the world by engaging with its science, rendering the boundary between primitive and modern completely permeable. It tells us about the complex and often baffling interactions of researchers and their erstwhile subjects on the colonial frontier, tracing their ambivalent exchanges, passionate engagements, confused estimates of value, and moral ambiguities. Above all, it reveals the “primitive” foundations of modern science.
This astonishing story links first-contact encounters in New Guinea with laboratory experiments in Bethesda, Maryland; sorcery with science; cannibalism with compassion; and slow viruses with infectious proteins, reshaping our understanding of what it means to do science.
( from the sleeve, hardcover 318 pages )
Conscience And Its Critics, protestant conscience, enlightenment reason, and modern subjectivity, by Edward G. Andrew
Conscience and Its Critics is an eloquent and passionate examination of the opposition between Protestant conscience and Enlightenment reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seeking to illuminate what the United Nations Declaration of Rights means in its assertion that reason and conscience are the definitive qualities of human beings, Edward Andrew attempts to give determinate shape to the protean notion of conscience through historical analysis.
The argument turns on the liberal Enlightenment’s attempt to deconstruct conscience as an innate practical principle. The ontological basis for individualism in the seventeenth century, conscience was replaced in the eighteenth century by public opinion and conformity to social expectations. Focusing on the English tradition of political thought and moral psychology and drawing on a wide range of writers, Andrew reveals a strongly conservative dimension to the Enlightenment in opposing the egalitarian and antinomian strain in Protestant conscience. He then traces the unresolved relationship between reason and conscience through to the modern conception of the liberty of conscience, and shows how conscience served to contest social inequality and the natural laws of capitalist accumulation.
( from the sleeve, hardcover 259 pages )