A boxed collection of Jenny Holzer's renowned Truisms Jenny Holzer's Truisms (1977-79), comprising over 250 single-sentence declarations, were written to resemble existing aphorisms, maxims, and clichés. Each sentence distills difficult and contentious ideas into a seemingly straightforward statement of fact. Privileging no single viewpoint, the Truisms examine the social construction of beliefs, mores, and truths. Arranged in alphabetical order, Truisms were first shown on anonymous street posters pasted throughout downtown Manhattan, and they have since appeared on T-shirts, hats, electronic signs, stone floors, and benches. Holzer-isms presents a collection of these iconic phrases in a special form: a cloth-covered, foil-stamped box containing six folded posters designed by Holzer, each featuring a selection of Truisms, accompanied by a booklet with an introduction, biography, and chronology. The result is a beautifully designed object that offers a new way to experience Holzer's powerful and provocative text-based art.
The hidden life of the greatest surviving work of Inca art The most celebrated Andean artwork in the world is a five-hundred-year-old Inca tunic made famous through theories about the meanings of its intricate designs, including attempts to read them as a long-lost writing system. But very little is really known about it. The Royal Inca Tunic reconstructs the history of this enigmatic object, presenting significant new findings about its manufacture and symbolism in Inca visual culture. Andrew James Hamilton draws on meticulous physical examinations of the garment conducted over a decade, wide-ranging studies of colonial Peruvian manuscripts, and groundbreaking research into the tunic's provenance. He methodically builds a case for the textile having been woven by two women who belonged to the very highest echelon of Inca artists for the last emperor of the Inca Empire on the eve of the Spanish invasion in 1532. Hamilton reveals for the first time that this imperial vestment remains unfinished and has suffered massive dye fading that transforms its appearance today, proposing a bold new conception of what this radiant masterpiece originally looked like. Illustrated with stunning photography of the tunic and Hamilton's own beautiful illustrations, The Royal Inca Tunic demonstrates why this object holds an important place in the canon of art history as a deft creation by Indigenous women artists, a reminder of the horrors of colonialism, and an emblem of contemporary Andean identity.
A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today. The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond. Focusing on the material and spatial transformations of the printmaking process rather than its reproducibility, this beautifully illustrated book explores the connections between print, painting, and sculpture, but also between the fine arts, industrial arts, decorative arts, and domestic arts. Throughout, Roberts asks what artists are learning from print, and what we, in turn, can learn from them. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington
In this gripping sequel to his bestselling 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the story of what happened after the Bronze Age collapsed--why some civilizations endured, why some gave way to new ones, and why some disappeared forever At the end of the acclaimed history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost and the so-called First Dark Age had begun. Now, in After 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the compelling story of what happened next, over four centuries, across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world. It is a story of resilience, transformation, and success, as well as failures, in an age of chaos and reconfiguration. After 1177 B.C. tells how the collapse of powerful Late Bronze Age civilizations created new circumstances to which people and societies had to adapt. Those that failed to adjust disappeared from the world stage, while others transformed themselves, resulting in a new world order that included Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and Neo-Babylonians. Taking the story up to the resurgence of Greece marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., the book also describes how world-changing innovations such as the use of iron and the alphabet emerged amid the chaos. Filled with lessons for today about why some societies survive massive shocks while others do not, After 1177 B.C. reveals why this period, far from being the First Dark Age, was a new age with new inventions and new opportunities.
A history that reframes the Bolsheviks' unprecedented attempts to abolish private property after the revolutions of 1917 The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia's governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval sparked waves of dispossession that rapidly moved beyond the seizure of factories and farms from industrialists and landowners, envisioned by Bolshevik revolutionaries, to penetrate the bedrock of social life: the spaces where people lived. In Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution, Anne O'Donnell reimagines the Bolsheviks' unprecedented effort to eradicate private property and to create a new political economy--socialism--to replace it. O'Donnell's account captures the story of property in reverse, showing how the bonds connecting people to their things were broken and how new ways of knowing things, valuing them, and possessing them coalesced amid the political ferment and economic disarray of the Revolution. O'Donnell reminds us that Russia's postrevolutionary confiscation of property, like many other episodes of mass dispossession in the twentieth century, largely escaped traditional forms of record keeping. She repairs this omission, drawing on sources that chronicle the lived experience of upheaval--popular petitions, apartment inspections, internal audits of revolutionary institutions, and records of the political police--to reconstruct an archive of dispossession. The result is an unusually intimate history of the Bolsheviks' attempts to conquer people and things. The Bolsheviks' reimagining of property not only changed peoples' lives and destinies, it formed the foundation of a new type of state--one that eschewed the defense of private property rights in favor of an enduring but enigmatic new domain: socialist state property.
How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York's combative intellectual scene In the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. This prominent group was mostly male and Jewish, but also included women and non-Jews, and all embraced a secular Jewish machismo that became a defining characteristic of the contemporary experience. Write like a Man examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Ronnie Grinberg paints illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe. She describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism. A spellbinding chronicle of midcentury America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era.
"Essays ... originally presented at a conference on Chinese literary criticism held in St. Croix, Virgin Islands in December 1970."
The Byzantines surrounded themselves with their saints, invisible but constant companions, who were made visible by dreams, visions, and art. This book aims to analyze the logic of the saint's image in Byzantium, both in portraits and in narrative scenes. It emphasizes on the poems inscribed by the Byzantines upon their icons.
Why now is the time to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution Throughout history, too many Americans have been disenfranchised or faced needless barriers to vote. Part of the blame falls on the Constitution, which does not contain an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court has made matters worse by failing to protect voting rights and limiting Congress's ability to do so. The time has come for voters to take action and push for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee this right for all. Drawing on troubling stories of state attempts to disenfranchise military voters, women, African Americans, students, former felons, Native Americans, and others, Richard Hasen argues that American democracy can and should do better in assuring that all eligible voters can cast a meaningful vote that will be fairly counted. He shows how a constitutional right to vote can deescalate voting wars between political parties that lead to endless rounds of litigation and undermine voter confidence in elections, and can safeguard democracy against dangerous attempts at election subversion like the one we witnessed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. The path to a constitutional amendment is undoubtedly hard, especially in these polarized times. A Real Right to Vote explains what's in it for conservatives who have resisted voting reform, and reveals how the pursuit of an amendment can yield tangible dividends for democracy long before ratification.
A definitive new volume of the retirement papers of Thomas Jefferson During the period covered by the 575 documents in this volume, Jefferson advises President James Monroe on what later becomes known as the "Monroe Doctrine." He also approves of the Greek independence movement in correspondence with the scholar and political leader Adamantios Coray. Jefferson says that the "most dangerous blot" on the U.S. Constitution is the provision under which a vote by the states in the House of Representatives decides elections not settled by the Electoral College. With his allies in Virginia's General Assembly, he succeeds in converting the University of Virginia's loans from the state Literary Fund into an outright grant and obtains an additional $50,000 for books and scientific instruments. He seeks advice on regulating and equipping the institution, helps to obtain its architectural capitals, and designs its gymnasia. Jefferson describes coffee as "the favorite beverage of the civilised world" and advises a namesake child to "Adore God. reverence and cherish your parents. love your neighbor as yourself; and your country more than life. be just. be true. murmur not at the ways of Providence, and the life into which you have entered will be the passage to one of eternal and ineffable bliss."
A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces insured the easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined "small" violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.
"Strategically located on the Atlantic Ocean at the westernmost point of the continent, Senegal is well-known as an epicenter of Africa's modernities, modernisms, and liberation movements. It was also one of the countries where the daguerreotype first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa before circulating inland and across the region. At that time, Senegal did not exist as a nation state; local kingdoms were still in power and the French presence was limited to trading posts along the coast. The pioneers of photography in the 1840s were not exclusively Europeans, but also African, African-American, and Asian entrepreneurs. In the decades that followed, amateurs and professionals working in rural areas continued to explore and expand photography's possibilities. Senegal's photographic histories thrived as part of a global visual economy during and despite the colonial experience. Its works emerged as an integral part of the history of this medium, which unlike any other was a global enterprise from the very beginning. Portrait and place offers the first history of photography in this important country, from its first iterations, photographers, and patrons of the 1840s to photographers such as Oumar Ka (b. 1930) and Mama Casset (1908-1992), who were were active in the 1960s during the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era. Giulia Paoletti presents close studies of photographs, firmly anchoring these objects, their authors, and their consumers in a global context that extends across West Africa, the Black Atlantic, and the greater Islamic community-in other words, beyond the borders of colonial empire. Based on over ten years of field and archival research in Senegal, this book features almost exclusively new, previously unpublished visual material and explores both professional and amateur artists working in a wide variety of genres, from landscape to portraiture, and in media such as daguerreotypes and glass paintings. As the first book to focus exclusively on Senegal's photographic histories, Portrait and place expands the notions of what the medium has been and can be, from a Eurocentric model to one that is decidedly-insistingly-larger and more inclusive"--
An invaluable reference book on the mathematics of Greek antiquity Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius are familiar names to many of us, and their contributions have shaped mathematical practice up to modern times. Yet the mathematical activity of Greek antiquity extended far beyond their achievements and was furthered by diverse individuals in different contexts. Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean brings together an extensive collection of primary source materials that document the extraordinary breadth of mathematical ideas developed in the Eastern Mediterranean from 500 BCE to 500 CE, a millennium in which Greek cultural influence spanned the ancient world. Weaving together ancient commentaries with the works themselves, Victor Katz and Clemency Montelle present a wealth of newly translated texts along with sources difficult to find elsewhere, from writings by the great mathematical thinkers of Greek antiquity to those by practitioners who used mathematics in everyday life. This comprehensive and wide-ranging sourcebook includes lesser-known authors who made critical contributions, sometimes in languages other than Greek, as well as accounts of technical instrumentation, papyri by anonymous authors designed for teaching purposes, and evidence of hand computations and numerical tables. An essential resource for anyone interested in the mathematical achievements of this remarkable intellectual culture, Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean encompasses disciplines that illustrate the important role of mathematics in ancient Greek society more broadly, from astronomy, music, and optics to philosophy, literature, and theater.
Mixing passion and humor, a personal work of literary criticism that demonstrates how the greatest books illuminate our livesWhy do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor's life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person-and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature's knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters' lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge-and come to understand its cost.In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.
On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "e;poet laureate of his race"e; hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "e;caged bird"e; that sings.Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents' survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.
A mesmerizing trip across America to investigate the changing face of death in contemporary lifeDeath in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy's lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife.As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy knows that how a society treats its dead yields powerful clues about its beliefs and values. As someone who has experienced loss herself, she knows there is no way to tell this story without also reexamining her own views about death and dying. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. She also confronts the seeming contradiction that American death is becoming at the same time more materialistic and more spiritual.Written in conjunction with a documentary film project, American Afterlives features images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to our rapidly changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.
This is a rare and much-needed book: a concise but comprehensive account of quantum mechanics for popular science readers written by a respected physicist. Sam Treiman--internationally renowned for his work in particle physics--makes quantum mechanics accessible to nonspecialists. Combining mastery of the material with clear, elegant prose and infectious enthusiasm, he conveys the substance, methods, and profound oddities of the field. Treiman begins with an overview of quantum mechanics. He sketches the early development of the field by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and others, and he makes clear how the quantum outlook flies in the face of common sense. As he explains, the quantum world is intrinsically probabilistic. For example, a particle is not in general in some particular place at a given instant, nor does it have a definite momentum. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, there is a limit to how well both location and momentum can be specified simultaneously. In addition, particles can move through barriers and otherwise move in regions of space that are forbidden by classical mechanics. If a particle has a choice of different paths, it pursues all of them at once. Particles display wave-like characteristics and waves show particle-like characteristics. Treiman pays special attention to the more fundamental wave outlook and its expression in quantum field theory. He deals here with the remarkable fact that all the particles of a given species are strictly identical, and with the unnerving fact that particles can be created and destroyed. As Treiman introduces us to these and other wonders, he also touches--without resolution--on some of the deep philosophical problems of quantum mechanics, notably how probabilities become facts. Weaving together impeccable and up-to-date science, engaging writing, and a talent for clear explanation honed over Treiman's distinguished career as a physicist and teacher, The Odd Quantum is a remarkable survey of a field that changed the course of modern scientific and philosophical thought.
A definitive biography of the French aristocrat who became one of democracy's greatest championsIn 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville expert Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas.Placing Tocqueville's dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his life and work, Zunz traces Tocqueville's evolution into a passionate student and practitioner of liberal politics across a trove of correspondence with intellectuals, politicians, constituents, family members, and friends. While taking seriously Tocqueville's attempts to apply the lessons of Democracy in America to French politics, Zunz shows that the United States, and not only France, remained central to Tocqueville's thought and actions throughout his life. In his final years, with France gripped by an authoritarian regime and America divided by slavery, Tocqueville feared that the democratic experiment might be failing. Yet his passion for democracy never weakened.Giving equal attention to the French and American sources of Tocqueville's unique blend of political philosophy and political action, The Man Who Understood Democracy offers the richest, most nuanced portrait yet of a man who, born between the worlds of aristocracy and democracy, fought tirelessly for the only system that he believed could provide both liberty and equality.
From the Nobel Prize–winning economist and former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a landmark book that provides vital lessons for understanding financial crises and their sometimes-catastrophic economic effectsAs chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis, Ben Bernanke helped avert a greater financial disaster than the Great Depression. And he did so by drawing directly on what he had learned from years of studying the causes of the economic catastrophe of the 1930s—work for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. Essays on the Great Depression brings together Bernanke’s influential work on the origins and economic lessons of the Depression, and this new edition also includes his Nobel Prize lecture.
A revelatory tale of how the human brain develops, from conception to birth and beyondBy the time a baby is born, its brain is equipped with billions of intricately crafted neurons wired together through trillions of interconnections to form a compact and breathtakingly efficient supercomputer. Zero to Birth takes you on an extraordinary journey to the very edge of creation, from the moment of an egg's fertilization through each step of a human brain's development in the womb-and even a little beyond.As pioneering experimental neurobiologist W. A. Harris guides you through the process of how the brain is built, he takes up the biggest questions that scientists have asked about the developing brain, describing many of the thrilling discoveries that were foundational to our current understanding. He weaves in a remarkable evolutionary story that begins billions of years ago in the Proterozoic eon, when multicellular animals first emerged from single-cell organisms, and reveals how the growth of a fetal brain over nine months reflects the brain's evolution through the ages. Our brains have much in common with those of other animals, and Harris offers an illuminating look at how comparative animal studies have been crucial to understanding what makes a human brain human.An unforgettable chronicle of one of nature's greatest achievements, Zero to Birth describes how the brain's incredible feat of orchestrated growth ensures that every brain is unique, and how breakthroughs at the frontiers of science are helping us to decode many traits that only reveal themselves later in life.
The little-known history of how the Sahara was transformed from a green and fertile land into the largest hot desert in the worldThe Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to China or the United States. Yet, this arid expanse was once a verdant, pleasant land, fed by rivers and lakes. The Sahara sustained abundant plant and animal life, such as Nile perch, turtles, crocodiles, and hippos, and attracted prehistoric hunters and herders. What transformed this land of lakes into a sea of sands? When the Sahara Was Green describes the remarkable history of Earth's greatest desert-including why its climate changed, the impact this had on human populations, and how scientists uncovered the evidence for these extraordinary events.From the Sahara's origins as savanna woodland and grassland to its current arid incarnation, Martin Williams takes us on a vivid journey through time. He describes how the desert's ancient rocks were first fashioned, how dinosaurs roamed freely across the land, and how it was later covered in tall trees. Along the way, Williams addresses many questions: Why was the Sahara previously much wetter, and will it be so again? Did humans contribute to its desertification? What was the impact of extreme climatic episodes-such as prolonged droughts-upon the Sahara's geology, ecology, and inhabitants? Williams also shows how plants, animals, and humans have adapted to the Sahara and what lessons we might learn for living in harmony with the harshest, driest conditions in an ever-changing global environment.A valuable look at how an iconic region has changed over millions of years, When the Sahara Was Green reveals the desert's surprising past to reflect on its present, as well as its possible future.
How the "e;First State"e; has enabled international crime, sheltered tax dodgers, and diverted hard-earned dollars from the rest of usThe legal home to over a million companies, Delaware has more registered businesses than residents. Why do virtually all of the biggest corporations in the United States register there? Why do so many small companies choose to set up in Delaware rather than their home states? Why do wealthy individuals form multiple layers of private companies in the state? This book reveals how a systematic enterprise lies behind the business-friendly corporate veneer, one that has kept the state afloat financially by diverting public funds away from some of the poorest people in the United States and supporting dictators and criminals across the world.Hal Weitzman shows how the de facto capital of corporate America has provided safe haven to money launderers, kleptocratic foreign rulers, and human traffickers, and facilitated tax dodging and money laundering by multinational companies and international gangsters. Revenues from Delaware's business-formation industry, known as the Franchise, account for two-fifths of the state's budget and have helped to keep the tax burden on its residents among the lowest in the United States. Delaware derives enormous political clout from the Franchise, effectively writing the corporate code for the entire country-and because of its outsized influence on corporate America, the second smallest state in the United States also writes the rules for much of the world.What's the Matter with Delaware? shows how, in Joe Biden's home state, the corporate laws get written behind closed doors, enabling the rich and powerful to do business in the shadows.
"The great auk is one of the most tragic and documented examples of extinction. A flightless bird that bred primarily on the remote islands of the North Atlantic, the last of its kind were killed in Iceland in 1844. Gâisli Pâalsson draws on firsthand accounts from the Icelanders who hunted the last great auks to bring to life a bygone age of Victorian scientific exploration while offering vital insights into the extinction of species."--
A major new interpretation of Vergil's epic poem as a struggle between two incompatible versions of the Homeric heroThis compelling book offers an entirely new way of understanding the Aeneid. Many scholars regard Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. Joseph Farrell challenges this view, revealing how the Aeneid stages an epic contest to determine which kind of story it will tell-and what kind of hero Aeneas will be.Farrell shows how this contest is provoked by the transgressive goddess Juno, who challenges Vergil for the soul of his hero and poem. Her goal is to transform the poem into an Iliad of continuous Trojan persecution instead of an Odyssey of successful homecoming. Farrell discusses how ancient critics considered the flexible Odysseus the model of a good leader but censured the hero of the Iliad, the intransigent Achilles, as a bad one. He describes how the battle over which kind of leader Aeneas will prove to be continues throughout the poem, and explores how this struggle reflects in very different ways on the ethical legitimacy of Rome's emperor, Caesar Augustus.By reframing the Aeneid in this way, Farrell demonstrates how the purpose of the poem is to confront the reader with an urgent decision between incompatible possibilities and provoke uncertainty about whether the poem is a celebration of Augustus or a melancholy reflection on the discontents of a troubled age.
"A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans"--
One of the world's preeminent cultural anthropologists leaves a last work that fundamentally reconfigures how we study most other culturesFrom the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of "e;religion"e; and the "e;supernatural."e; The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights.In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Arawete swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of "e;economics"e; and "e;politics"e; emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods.The New Science of the Enchanted Universe offers a road map for a new practice of anthropology that takes seriously the enchanted universe and its transformations from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America.
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