From one of today’s leading experts on ancient DNA, a sweeping genetic history that unravels the mystery of where horses were first domesticatedLudovic Orlando garnered world acclaim for helping to rewrite the genomic history of horse domestication. Horses takes you behind the scenes of this ambitious genealogical investigation, revealing how he and an international team of scientists discovered the elusive origins of modern horses. Along the way, he shows how the domestication of the horse changed the trajectory of civilization—with benefits and unforeseen consequences for the animals themselves.Orlando brought together worldclass experts in genomics, archaeology, and the history of peoples, languages, and migrations. Comparing the DNA of ancient horses to the genomes of dozens of modern horse breeds, these researchers reconstructed millennia of equine evolutionary history. They now believe that horses were first domesticated some 4,200 years ago on the steppes of the North Caucasus. Orlando discusses how selective breeding significantly intensified over the past two centuries, giving rise to faster, stronger horses but also creating a severe decline in genetic diversity that has made horses more prone to genetic diseases. He looks at breeds throughout history and around the world, explaining how they have been bred for particular purposes or environments, from Botai and Przewalski’s horses to the warhorses of the Vikings and Genghis Khan, Arabian thoroughbreds, Himalayan steeds, and mules.Blending panoramic storytelling with cutting-edge genetic science, Horses chronicles an unbreakable bond that was forged thousands of years ago on the windswept Eurasian Steppe, one that heralded a bold new era in the human drama—that of speed.
A vivid and accessible new translation of essential selections from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy—a moving classic about facing life’s worst events with courage and hopeWhat do you do when your life has fallen apart? Fifteen hundred years ago, a Roman nobleman named Boethius (ca. 480–524 CE) asked this question as he was sitting in a prison cell waiting to die, accused—probably unjustly—of treason. Boethius had been a rich and powerful man with all a person could want in life, but now he had lost everything. Shaken, he wondered how such terrible misfortune could have happened to him and why life was so unfair. When Philosophy herself appears in his cell and confronts Boethius, the conversation that follows between the two on the nature of evil and why humans suffer is as powerful and inspiring today as it was to its first readers. In How to Endure Hardship, Philip Freeman presents a lively modern translation of essential selections from Boethius’s classic, complete with an introduction and the original Latin on facing pages.This translation vividly captures Boethius’s journey from bitterness and anger to reconciliation and peace, showing how ancient philosophy, especially Stoicism, can help readers deal with adversity in their own lives. The book reveals the qualities that have made The Consolation of Philosophy one of the most popular and influential works of classical and world literature, and an inspiration to countless writers, including Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Chaucer.
A bold vision that empowers communities to solve our cities’ most pressing problemsBudget Justice challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets, and shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as members of voting blocs or consumers. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive.
From one of today’s leading historians of the early medieval period, an enthralling chronicle of Æthelstan, England’s founder king whose achievements of 927 rival the Norman Conquest of 1066 in shaping Britain as we know itThe First King of England is a foundational biography of Æthelstan (d. 939), the early medieval king whose territorial conquests and shrewd statesmanship united the peoples, languages, and cultures that would come to be known as the “kingdom of the English.” In this panoramic work, David Woodman blends masterful storytelling with the latest scholarship to paint a multifaceted portrait of this immensely important but neglected figure, a man celebrated in his day as much for his benevolence, piety, and love of learning as he was for his ambitious reign.Set against the backdrop of warring powers in early medieval Europe, The First King of England sheds new light on Æthelstan’s early life, his spectacular military victories and the innovative way he governed his kingdom, his fostering of the church, the deft political alliances he forged with Europe’s royal houses, and his death and enduring legacy. It begins with the reigns of Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder, Æthelstan’s grandfather and father, describing how they consolidated and expanded the “kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” But it was Æthelstan who would declare himself the first king of all England when, in 927, he conquered the viking kingdom at York, required the submission of a Scottish king, and secured an annual tribute from the Welsh kings.Beautifully illustrated and breathtaking in scope, The First King of England is the most comprehensive, up-to-date biography of Æthelstan available, bringing a magisterial richness of detail to the life of a consequential British monarch whose strategic and political sophistication was unprecedented for his time.
How to make sense of the divergence between philosophers' quest for a single morality and social scientists' assumption that there are multiple moralitiesWhen we speak of morals, what are we speaking of? Is morality singular (as many philosophers tend to assume, even if they don't agree on what it is) or are there multiple moralities (which social scientists, notably anthropologists, study)? In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes brings together these differing perspectives. Drawing on philosophy, sociology, social anthropology, psychology, and political theory, Lukes considers what the moral domain includes and what it excludes; how what is moral differs from what is conventional or customary in different contexts; whether morality is unified or a series of fragments; and, if there is a diversity of morals, what that diversity consists of. Lukes looks both ways-toward philosophers' quest for a single best answer to the question of morality and toward sociologists' and anthropologists' assumption that there are several, even many, even very many, answers-to make sense of their divergence. He traces the two approaches back to their beginnings, linking them to the differences between the ideas of David Hume, Johann Gottfried Herder and Adam Smith. Lukes examines how we went from viewing the social world as "us" versus "them" to thinking of morality as universal, envisioning shared humanity and the sacredness of the human person, and what prevents this vision from being realized. Considering the breakdown of moral constraints in the perpetration of mass atrocities, Lukes asks if there are phenomena that are beyond moral justification. And he raises this crucial question: in light of the vast variation that history and the ethnographic record display, how wide and how deep is the diversity of morals?
For the first time in English, Jung's landmark lecture on Nerval's hallucinatory memoirIn 1945, at the end of the Second World War and after a long illness, C. G. Jung delivered a lecture in Zurich on the French Romantic poet Gerard de Nerval. The lecture focused on Nerval's visionary memoir, Aurelia, which the poet wrote in an ambivalent attempt to emerge from madness. Published here for the first time, Jung's lecture is both a cautionary psychological tale and a validation of Nerval's visionary experience as a genuine encounter.Nerval explored the irrational with lucidity and exquisite craft. He privileged the subjective imagination as a way of fathoming the divine to reconnect with what the Romantics called the life principle. During the years of his greatest creativity, he suffered from madness and was institutionalized eight times. Contrasting an orthodox psychoanalytic interpretation with his own synthetic approach to the unconscious, Jung explains why Nerval was unable to make use of his visionary experiences in his own life. At the same time, Jung emphasizes the validity of Nerval's visions, differentiating the psychology of a work of art from the psychology of the artist. The lecture suggests how Jung's own experiments with active imagination influenced his reading of Nerval's Aurelia as a parallel text to his own Red Book.With Craig Stephenson's authoritative introduction, Richard Sieburth's award-winning translation of Aurelia, and Alfred Kubin's haunting illustrations to the text, and featuring Jung's reading marginalia, preliminary notes, and revisions to a 1942 lecture, On Psychological and Visionary Art documents the stages of Jung's creative process as he responds to an essential Romantic text.
An invigorating exploration of the pleasures and social benefits of conversationTalking Cure is a timely and enticing excursion into the art of good conversation. Paula Marantz Cohen reveals how conversation connects us in ways that social media never can and explains why simply talking to each other freely and without guile may be the cure to what ails our troubled society.Drawing on her lifelong immersion in literature and culture and her decades of experience as a teacher and critic, Cohen argues that we learn to converse in our families and then carry that knowledge into a broader world where we encounter diverse opinions and sensibilities. She discusses the role of food in encouraging conversation, the challenges of writing dialogue in fiction, the pros and cons of Zoom, the relationship of conversation to vaudeville acts, and the educational value of a good college seminar where students learn to talk about ideas. Cohen looks at some of the famous groups of writers and artists in history whose conversation fed their creativity, and details some of the habits that can result in bad conversation.Blending the immediacy of a beautifully crafted memoir with the conviviality of an intimate gathering with friends, Talking Cure makes a persuasive case for the civilizing value of conversation and is essential reading for anyone interested in the chatter that fuels culture.
Jung's lectures on consciousness and the unconscious-in English for the first timeBetween 1933 and 1941, C. G. Jung delivered a series of public lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Intended for a general audience, these lectures addressed a broad range of topics, from dream analysis and yoga to the history of psychology. They are at the center of Jung's intellectual activity in this period and provide the basis of his later work. Here for the first time in English is Jung's introduction to his core psychological theories and methods, delivered in the summer of 1934.With candor and wit, Jung shares with his audience the path he himself took to understanding the nature of consciousness and the unconscious. He describes their respective characteristics using examples from his clinical experience as well as from literature, his travels, and everyday life. For Jung, consciousness is like a small island in the ocean of the unconscious, while the unconscious is part of the primordial condition of humankind. Jung explains various methods for uncovering the contents of the unconscious, in particular talk therapy and dream analysis.Complete with explanations of Jungian concepts and terminology, Consciousness and the Unconscious painstakingly reconstructs and translates these talks from detailed shorthand notes by attendees, making a critical part of Jung's work available to today's readers.
"How eighteenth-century literature depended on misinterpretation--and how this still shapes the way we read. Reading It Wrong is a new history of eighteenth-century English literature that explores what has been everywhere evident but rarely talked about: the misunderstanding, muddle and confusion of readers of the past when they first met the uniquely elusive writings of the period. Abigail Williams uses the marginal marks and jottings of these readers to show that flawed interpretation has its own history--and its own important role to play--in understanding how, why and what we read. Focusing on the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of satire, Reading It Wrong tells how a combination of changing readerships and fantastically tricky literature created the perfect grounds for puzzlement and partial comprehension. Through the lens of a history of imperfect reading, we see that many of the period's major works--by writers including Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift--both generated and depended upon widespread misreading. Being foxed by a satire, coded fiction or allegory was, like Wordle or the cryptic crossword, a form of entertainment, and perhaps a group sport. Rather than worrying that we don't have all the answers, we should instead recognize the cultural importance of not knowing"--
The case for an eco-emancipatory politics to release the Earth from human domination and free us all from lives that are both exploitative and exploitedHuman domination of nature shapes every aspect of our lives today, even as it remains virtually invisible to us. Because human beings are a part of nature, the human domination of nature circles back to confine and exploit people as well-and not only the poor and marginalized but also the privileged and affluent, even in the world's most prosperous societies. Although modern democracy establishes constraints intended to protect people from domination as the arbitrary exercise of power, it offers few such protections for nonhuman parts of nature. The result is that, wherever we fall in human hierarchies, we inevitably find ourselves both complicit in and entrapped by a system that makes sustainable living all but impossible. It confines and exploits not only nature but people too, albeit in different ways. In Eco-Emancipation, Sharon Krause argues that we can find our way to a better, freer life by constraining the use of human power in relation to nature and promoting nature's well-being alongside our own, thereby releasing the Earth from human domination and freeing us from a way of life that is both exploitative and exploited, complicit and entrapped. Eco-emancipation calls for new, more-than-human political communities that incorporate nonhuman parts of nature through institutions of representation and regimes of rights, combining these new institutional arrangements with political activism, a public ethos of respect for nature, and a culture of eco-responsibility.
A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the livingKilling the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yogin¿s of India.Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.
The world’s best bird photography gathered in one beautiful bookThe 10th-anniversary volume of the acclaimed seriesCelebrating the artistry of bird photography from around the globe, the Bird Photographer of the Year is the leading international bird photography competition, and this gorgeous, large-format book showcases the best images from the contest—some of the most spectacular bird photographs ever taken. A remarkable record of avian beauty and diversity across the globe, the book demonstrates the astonishing skill of bird photographers and the incredible quality of today’s digital imaging systems. Previous volumes of this annual series of books have garnered rave reviews. Writing about Collection 9, The Washington Post said, “This stunning collection of images . . . presents the avian world in all its soaring grandeur, stunning color and, yes, accidental comedy.”The Collection 10 volume features more than 250 of the best photographs selected from a record 33,000-plus entries submitted for the tenth anniversary of the competition, including all the winning and short-listed pictures. Taken by experienced professionals and enthusiastic amateurs, these richly various photos are organized by contest category, including Birds in the Environment, Bird Behavior, Birds in Flight, Urban Birds, Conservation, and the Young Bird Photographer of the Year. A portion of the Bird Photographer of the Year’s profits goes to Birds on the Brink, a charity that supports bird conservation around the world.Filled with unforgettable images of a kind that simply weren’t possible before digital photography, this book will delight anyone who loves birds or great photography.Large (11 x 9 inches / 28 x 23 cm), beautifully designed, and lavishly produced hardcover volumeFeatures more than 250 stunning photographsProvides details about how each image was captured—including camera, lens, and shutter speed
A marvelously illustrated look at the life of the whaleWhales are the majestic giants of the ocean, yet much of their world remains a mystery to us. The routes of their vast oceanic migrations are largely elusive, as are the intricacies of their behavior and social dynamics. This narrative biography takes you out beyond our shorelines and into the depths, providing an up-close exploration of the life of the whale. It covers everything from conception and childhood to family history, relationships, communication, and life challenges, and explains why studying whales helps us to monitor the health of our planet’s oceans and marine ecosystems. Written by internationally acclaimed expert Asha de Vos, Whale: The Illustrated Biography blends engaging profiles of the best-known species with stunning illustrations to tell the story of these magnificent creatures in all their diversity and complexity.Features a wealth of specially commissioned illustrationsDiscusses familiar species such as the humpback whale, blue whale, killer whale, and sperm whale, as well as smaller and more elusive cousinsCovers anatomy, hunting and feeding, migration, habitats, whale song, conservation, human interactions with whales, and much moreExplains how whales play key roles in nutrient cycling, regulating prey populations, and influencing carbon sequestrationA must-have reference for whale watchers everywhere
How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligenceEverything Evolves reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving its own solutions to thorny problems.Taking readers on an astonishing journey, Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the science of evolvable systems. Vellend shows how this Second Science unifies biology and culture and how evolution gives rise to everything from viruses and giraffes to nation-states, technology, and us. He discusses how the idea of evolution had precedents in areas such as language and economics long before it was made famous by Darwin, and how only by freeing ourselves of the notion that the study of evolution must start with biology can we appreciate the true breadth of evolutionary processes.A sweeping tour of the natural and social sciences, Everything Evolves is an essential introduction to one of the two key pillars to the scientific enterprise and an indispensable guide to understanding some of the most difficult challenges of the Anthropocene.
The essential field guide to all of Europe’s major habitats—visually stunning, meticulously researched, and packed with invaluable informationEurope is a place of natural wonders, from the icy expanses of the tundra to the arid beauty of deserts and the lush vibrancy of rainforests. This illustrated guide covers all the continent’s major habitats, providing an invaluable resource for understanding and preserving its breathtaking landscapes, ecosystems, and wildlife. Unlike standard habitat classification systems that focus solely on plant communities, Habitats of Europe offers a unique approach to understanding habitats by combining animal assemblages with descriptions of habitat structure, climate, soils, and vegetation. Perfect for nature lovers and ecologists. Whether you’re a seasoned ecologist or a curious nature lover, this one-of-a-kind field guide will inspire you to explore and protect the rich biodiversity of Europe.Features engaging, fact-filled descriptions of 56 major habitatsIncludes a wealth of climate graphs, silhouettes, and breathtaking color photosPresents an easy-to-use system for assessing and understanding habitats—developed in collaboration with experts in conservation, birding, and tour guidingEncourages the reader to look beyond individual species and understand the intricate interactions that define each ecosystemMakes habitat science accessible to a wider audience, enticing the reader to discover more about the continent and its ecologyAn ideal travel companion for birders, naturalists, and wildlife enthusiastsThe go-to reference for conservation organizations, ecologists, and policymakers
How modern Yiddish children’s literature gave expression to emerging forms of Jewish identityAs migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the long twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness.Udel provides the most comprehensive study to date of this corpus of nearly a thousand picture books, chapter books, story and poetry collections, and anthologies. Moving geographically from Europe to the Americas and chronologically through the twentieth century, she considers this emerging canon in relation to the deep Jewish past and imagined Jewish futures before reckoning with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused political ideologies ranging from socialism to Zionism and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism, one shaped equally by the utopianism of the Jewish left and important shifts in the Western understanding of children, childhood, and family life.Modern Jewish Worldmaking through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
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