princeton university press jun 2023 (33 Ergebnisse)

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A selection of key passage from Aristotle's seminal work the Nicomachean Ethics, which sets out what it means to flourish and live life well'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A definitive and richly illustrated guide to the botanically unique area of Upper Teesdale in England's County DurhamTo anyone who loves the wild flowers of Great Britain and Ireland, there are some places that beckon time and again, such as The Lizard in Cornwall, The Burren in Ireland's County Clare and Ben Lawers in Perthshire, Scotland. Upper Teesdale in England's County Durham must, however, be included among these jewels of our botanical heritage. This locality, which is within sight of the highest point of the Pennines, has an outstanding and special flora that has been shaped by its altitude, land-use patterns and diverse geology. Many of the plants found here are rare and localized, while others are more common and widespread, but together they form the botanically unique Teesdale Assemblage. For this reason, Upper Teesdale is a hotspot for botanists. It is also a scenically beautiful area, located within easy reach of the industrial heartlands of the north-east, and is much visited by walkers and tourists. This book offers visitors unique insights about this area and its botanical riches. Presents the first account to cover together the places, plants and people of this special areaFeatures more than 330 stunning photographsIncludes detailed profiles of 96 plants that make up the Teesdale AssemblageOffers a history of Teesdale's botanical exploration and describes the people who live, work and study plants there todayProvides an overview of environmental threats and what is required to ensure a sustainable future.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The marvelous microbes that made life on Earth possible and support our very existenceFor almost four billion years, microbes had the primordial oceans all to themselves. The stewards of Earth, these organisms transformed the chemistry of our planet to make it habitable for plants, animals, and us. Life's Engines takes readers deep into the microscopic world to explore how these marvelous creatures made life on Earth possible-and how human life today would cease to exist without them.Paul Falkowski looks 'under the hood' of microbes to find the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on Earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built-and how they have been appropriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies. Falkowski shows how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomerations of microbes.A vibrantly entertaining book about the microbes that support our very existence, Life's Engines will inspire wonder about these elegantly complex nanomachines that have driven life since its origin. It also issues a timely warning about the dangers of tinkering with that machinery to make it more 'efficient' at meeting the ever-growing demands of humans in the coming century.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - How populism is fueled by the demise of the industrial order and the emergence of a new digital society ruled by algorithmsIn the revolutionary excitement of the 1960s, young people around the world called for a radical shift away from the old industrial order, imagining a future of technological liberation and unfettered prosperity. Industrial.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - An entertaining and enlightening history of irrational numbers, from ancient Greece to the twenty-first centuryThe ancient Greeks discovered them, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that irrational numbers were properly understood and rigorously defined, and even today not all their mysteries have been revealed. In The Irrationals, the first popular and comprehensive book on the subject, Julian Havil tells the story of irrational numbers and the mathematicians who have tackled their challenges, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Along the way, he explains why irrational numbers are surprisingly difficult to define-and why so many questions still surround them. Fascinating and illuminating, this is a book for everyone who loves math and the history behind it.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Two simple yet tremendously powerful ideas that shaped virtually every aspect of civilizationThis book is a breathtaking examination of the two greatest ideas in human history. The first is the idea that the human mind can grasp the universe. The second is the idea that the human mind can grasp itself. Acclaimed philosopher Linda Zagzebski shows how the first unleashed a cultural awakening that swept across the world in the first millennium BCE, giving birth to philosophy, mathematics, science, and virtually all the major world religions. It dominated until the Renaissance, when the discovery of subjectivity profoundly transformed the arts and sciences. This second great idea governed our perception of reality up until the dawn of the twenty-first century.Zagzebski explores how the interplay of the two ideas led to conflicts that have left us ambivalent about the relationship between the mind and the universe, and have given rise to a host of moral and political rifts over the deepest questions human beings face. Should we organize civil society around the ideal of living in harmony with the world or that of individual autonomy Zagzebski explains how the two greatest ideas continue to divide us today over issues such as abortion, the environment, free speech, and racial and gender identity.This panoramic book reveals what is missing in our conception of ourselves and the world, and imagines a not-too-distant future when a third great idea, the idea that human minds can grasp each other, will help us gain an idea of the whole of reality.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A fresh look at electricity and its powerful role in life on Earth. When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices--or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical. The story of how we came to understand electricity's essential role in all life is rooted in our observations of its influences on the body--influences governed by the body's central nervous system. Spark explains the science of electricity from this fresh, biological perspective. Through vivid tales of scientists and individuals--from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk--Timothy Jorgensen shows how our views of electricity and the nervous system evolved in tandem, and how progress in one area enabled advancements in the other. He explains how these developments have allowed us to understand--and replicate--the ways electricity enables the body's essential functions of sight, hearing, touch, and movement itself. Throughout, Jorgensen examines our fascination with electricity and how it can help or harm us. He explores a broad range of topics and events, including the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of the electron and neuron, the history of experimentation involving electricity's effects on the body, and recent breakthroughs in the use of electricity to treat disease. Filled with gripping adventures in scientific exploration, Spark offers an indispensable look at electricity, how it works, and how it animates our lives from within and without'--]cProvided by publisher.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A revolutionary concept-based approach to thinking about, designing, and interacting with softwareAs our dependence on technology increases, the design of software matters more than ever before. Why then is so much software flawed Why hasn't there been a systematic and scalable way to create software that is easy to use, robust, and secure Examining these issues in depth, The Essence of Software introduces a theory of software design that gives new answers to old questions. Daniel Jackson explains that a software system should be viewed as a collection of interacting concepts, breaking the functionality into manageable parts and providing a new framework for thinking about design. Through this radical and original perspective, Jackson lays out a practical and coherent path, accessible to anyone-from strategist and marketer to UX designer, architect, or programmer-for making software that is empowering, dependable, and a delight to use.Jackson explores every aspect of concepts-what they are and aren't, how to identify them, how to define them, and more-and offers prescriptive principles and practical tips that can be applied cost-effectively in a wide range of domains. He applies these ideas to contemporary software designs, drawing examples from leading software manufacturers such as Adobe, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and others. Jackson shows how concepts let designers preserve and reuse design knowledge, rather than starting from scratch in every project.An argument against the status quo and a guide to improvement for both working designers and novices to the field, The Essence of Software brings a fresh approach to software and its creation.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'From a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in environmental economics, an innovative account of how and why 'green thinking' could cure many of the world's most serious problems-from global warming to pandemics Solving the world's biggest problems-from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance-requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. For carbon emissions and other environmental damage, this means ensuring that those responsible pay their full costs rather than continuing to pass them along to others, including future generations. In The Spirit of Green, Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus describes a new way of green thinking that would help us overcome our biggest challenges without sacrificing economic prosperity, in large part by accounting for the spillover costs of economic collisions. In a discussion that ranges from the history of the environmental movement to the Green New Deal, Nordhaus explains how the spirit of green thinking provides a compelling and hopeful new perspective on modern life. At the heart of green thinking is a recognition that the globalized world is shaped not by isolated individuals but rather by innumerable interactions inside and outside the economy. He shows how rethinking economic efficiency, sustainability, politics, profits, taxes, individual ethics, corporate social responsibility, finance, and more would improve the effectiveness and equity of our society. And he offers specific solutions-on how to price carbon, how to pursue low-carbon technologies, how to design an efficient tax system, and how to foster international cooperation through climate clubs. The result is a groundbreaking new vision of how we can have our environment and our economy too'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A deep history of Africa, from 70,000 BCE to 300 CE, that synthesizes the archeological and historical linguistic evidence to tell an integrated global history of the continent. A framing chapter introduces the historical goals and issues of the book, recounting the terrible histories of recent centuries that led to Africa being wrongly treated as a peripheral other in the history of us all. Chapter two, 'African Firsts in the History Technology,' brings to light the histories of the independent inventions by Africans, living in different regions in the heart of the continent, of ceramic technology, more than 11,000 years ago; of the earliest cotton weaving technology in World History, 7,000-plus years ago; and of the earliest iron smelting, 4,000 or more years ago. Ehret then turns to agricultural innovations between the ninth and seventh millennia BCE, introducing the evidence that shows that Africa helped usher in the 'Age of Agricultural Exchange,' and was, on the whole, a net exporter of agricultural innovations into Eurasia (including twelve early essential crops, and domesticated donkeys). Chapter four, 'Towns and Long-Distance Commerce in Ancient Africa,' turns attention to the roles of Africans (particularly the regions of Sudan and the Congo Basin) in the development of new systems for trading over distance, which facilitated an emerging class of merchants, during the second and first millennia BCE. Next, 'The Africanity of Ancient Egypt,' summarizes the evidence of intensive cultural interaction between the lands several hundred kilometers south of the confluence of the White and Blue Niles in modern-day Sudan all the way north to Middle Egypt. Finally, a closing chapter, 'Africa and Africans in Global History,' takes up the problem of how to bring what we have learned about 'ancient' Africa integrally into how we tell World History and proposes a new periodization of African and World History over the ages from around 68,000 BCE-when true, fully modern humans all still lived in eastern Africa-down to the first three centuries CE'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'In this book, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle illuminate an underexplored aspect of worked-over cultural icon Henry David Thoreau and what his thinking has to tell us about the way we work now. Henry at Work overturns the popular perception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse, scornful of work and other mundanities. Just the opposite, they argue, Thoreau worked hard and thought intensely about work: why we do it, what we hope to gain from it, and what it does to us. They aim to show readers not only Thoreau the writer and philosopher, but also the lesser-known Thoreau: Thoreau the worker, economist, and even the efficiency expert'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The forgotten story of the nineteenth-century freethinkers and twentieth-century humanists who tried to build their own secular religionIn The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, Leigh Eric Schmidt tells the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in nineteenth-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture wars of the late twentieth century.After Paine's remains were stolen from his grave in New Rochelle, New York, and shipped to England in 1819, the reverence of his American disciples took a material turn in a long search for his relics. Paine's birthday was always a red-letter day for these believers in democratic cosmopolitanism and philanthropic benevolence, but they expanded their program to include a broader array of rites and ceremonies, particularly funerals free of Christian supervision. They also worked to establish their own churches and congregations in which to practice their religion of secularism.All of these activities raised serious questions about the very definition of religion and whether it included nontheistic fellowships and humanistic associations-a dispute that erupted again in the second half of the twentieth century. As right-wing Christians came to see secular humanism as the most dangerous religion imaginable, small communities of religious humanists, the heirs of Paine's followers, were swept up in new battles about religion's public contours and secularism's moral perils.An engrossing account of an important but little-known chapter in American history, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine reveals why the lines between religion and secularism are often much blurrier than we imagine.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Nearly one hundred years after the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange's indelible photographs remain vivid in our collective memory as the face of unemployment. Her portraits showed down and out men waiting in breadlines and the desperation of families living through the trauma of job loss. Though evocative, however, these pictures don't look much like today's unemployed. Instead of male laborers in breadlines or relief camps, today we see men and women in equal numbers, manual laborers and high-flying executives, high school graduates alongside those with college degrees. The one truth about unemployment held constant between then and now is the anxiety and disquiet Lange captioned, 'The Toll of Uncertainty.' Ten years ago, we had our own devastating recession, during which one out of every six workers reported a job loss. The lesson we carried from it into the following decade was that all workers are at heightened risk for job loss and its accompanying uncertainty. Although media outlets dubbed the Great Recession of 2007-2009 a 'man-cession' because men's job losses were double women's at first, women experienced greater job loss after the so-called 'conclusion' of the recession and recovered jobs at a slower rate than men. Women also appeared to face greater economic consequences of job loss: they were more likely than men to experience hunger and deprivation. These trends bring us to the first puzzle at the heart of this book: do women and men experience job loss and its effects differently Using in-depth interviews from 100 people from rural and urban counties in Pennsylvania, Sarah Damaske investigates how men and women of different classes lose jobs, experience the economic and social ramifications of their unemployment in their own lives and their family life, and begin to search for work again. She argues that many of ways we have thought about unemployment are either incomplete (like the breadline) or just plain wrong'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A history of US involvement in late twentieth-century campaigns against global poverty and how they came to focus on women A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor.When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations. In an emerging 'women in development' movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and antipoverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit-with its tiny loans-as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution.Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A bold reevaluation of Spinoza that reveals his powerful, inclusive vision of religion for the modern ageSpinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither. In Spinoza's Religion, she sets out a bold interpretation of Spinoza through a lucid new reading of his masterpiece, the Ethics. Putting the question of religion centre-stage but refusing to convert Spinozism to Christianity, Carlisle reveals that 'being in God' unites Spinoza's metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza's Religion unfolds a powerful, inclusive philosophical vision for the modern age-one that is grounded in a profound questioning of how to live a joyful, fully human life.Like Spinoza himself, the Ethics doesn't fit into any ready-made religious category. But Carlisle shows how it wrestles with the question of religion in strikingly original ways, responding both critically and constructively to the diverse, broadly Christian context in which Spinoza lived and worked. Philosophy itself, as Spinoza practiced it, became a spiritual endeavor that expressed his devotion to a truthful, virtuous way of life. Offering startling new insights into Spinoza's famously enigmatic ideas about eternal life and the intellectual love of God, Carlisle uncovers a Spinozist religion that integrates self-knowledge, desire, practice, and embodied ethical life to reach toward our 'highest happiness'-to rest in God.Seen through Carlisle's eyes, the Ethics prompts us to rethink not only Spinoza but also religion itself.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A personal account of-and guide to-unlocking the wildlife potential of gardens and other plots of land in lowland BritainOver the past decade, wildlife author and photographer Paul Sterry has nurtured, both through action and by doing nothing, what has become a small island of flourishing biodiversity in the half-acre garden that surrounds his north Hampshire cottage. By giving nature a free hand, and fostering habitats appropriate to this part of southeast England, he has enabled an abundance of native plant and animal species to call the garden home. This contrasts with the continued decline in biodiversity in the surrounding countryside. In this inspiring and informative book, Sterry tells the story of his own experiences in biodiversity gardening and offers detailed practical advice to anyone who wants to give nature the upper hand on their own bit of land, no matter how small.Hampshire still retains traces of its rich wildlife heritage, but changes in land use over the past half-century have had a devastating impact on local biodiversity. Against this backdrop, The Biodiversity Gardener presents a habitat-driven and evidence-based approach, describing how any gardener can unlock the wildlife potential of their plot and enjoy the satisfaction of watching it become home to a rich array of native species, including butterflies, wildflowers, grasshoppers, amphibians, and fungi.In The Biodiversity Gardener, Sterry explains the ecological imperative of adopting this approach. Collectively, biodiversity gardens could leave a lasting legacy-wildlife oases from which future generations stand a fighting chance of restoring Britain's natural heritage. The book encourages and empowers readers to create their own biological inheritance for posterity-and shows them how they can do it.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Songs, barks, roars, hoots, squeals, and growls: exploring the mysteries of how animal communicate by soundWhat is the meaning of a bird's song, a baboon's bark, an owl's hoot, a dolphin's clicks In The Voices of Nature, Nicolas Mathevon explores the mysteries of animal sound. Putting readers in the middle of animal soundscapes that range from the steamy heat of the Amazon jungle to the icy terrain of the Arctic, Mathevon reveals the amazing variety of animal vocalizations. He describes how animals use sound to express emotion, to choose a mate, to trick others, to mark their territory, to call for help, and much more. What may seem like random chirps, squawks, and cries are actually signals that, like our human words, allow animals to carry on conversations with others.Mathevon explains how the science of bioacoustics works to decipher the ways animals make and hear sounds, what information is encoded in these sound signals, and what this information is used for in daily life. Drawing on these findings as well as observations in the wild, Mathevon describes, among many other things, how animals communicate with their offspring, how they exchange information despite ambient noise, how sound travels underwater, how birds and mammals learn to vocalize, and even how animals express emotion though sound. Finally, Mathevon asks if these vocalization, complex and expressive as they are, amount to language.For readers who have wondered about the meaning behind a robin's song or the cicadas' relentless 'tchik-tchik-tchik,' this book offers a listening guide for the endlessly varied concert of nature'--]cProvided by publisher.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - How everyday forms of surveillance threaten undocumented immigrants-but also offer them hope for societal inclusionSome eleven million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, carving out lives amid a growing web of surveillance that threatens their and their families' societal presence. Engage and Evade examines how undocumented immigrants navigate complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins. Asad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials, to offer a rare perspective on the surveillance that undocumented immigrants encounter daily. He describes how and why these immigrants engage with various institutions-for example, by registering with the IRS or enrolling their kids in public health insurance programs-that the government can use to monitor them. This institutional surveillance feels both necessary and coercive, with undocumented immigrants worrying that evasion will give the government cause to deport them. Even so, they hope their record of engagement will one day help them prove to immigration officials that they deserve societal membership. Asad uncovers how these efforts do not always meet immigration officials' high expectations, and how surveillance is as much about the threat of exclusion as the promise of inclusion. Calling attention to the fraught lives of undocumented immigrants and their families, this superbly written and compassionately argued book proposes wide-ranging, actionable reforms to achieve societal inclusion for all.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Jay Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the past half century. But in recent years, he has also written a series of unconventional essays that he calls 'examination papers,' which he defines as 'designated inquiries to myself.' In these linked essays, most of which resemble prose-poems, with only a few lines set on each page, Wright explores abiding artistic and philosophical concerns, including language, aesthetic form, knowledge, time, and death. Soul and Substance presents these pieces for the first time'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - How religious ritual united a growing and diversifying Roman RepublicMany narrative histories of Rome's transformation from an Italian city-state to a Mediterranean superpower focus on political and military conflicts as the primary agents of social change. Divine Institutions places religion at the heart of this transformation, showing how rel.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Canonical theorists of sovereignty (Hobbes, Rousseau, and others) put the monopoly of power at the center of their definitions. These thinkers abstracted from western European experiences to universal norms. In the wake of their transformative contributions, states that did not fit the model appeared to be underdeveloped or deviant. Labels such as 'provisional' or 'irregular' rendered them irrelevant to theorizing and, worse, political problems that needed to be solved. One early 'anomaly,' says historian Natasha Wheatley, was the Habsburg Empire. Layered as it was with imperial, national, and regional sovereignty, its trajectory was not one of progress toward a unitary state. Instead, it encompassed compound polities, or states bundled together under experimental constitutional orders. Wheatley's aim in this book is to theorize from Central Europe to see how sovereignty can be produced in a complex world. In reconstructing this political and legal history, Wheatley treats Austria-Hungary as a crucible for modern legal theory. The serial remaking and eventual unmaking of imperial sovereigny in Central Europe showed how old-world dynastic conceptions of sovereignty were translated into abstract categories of modern legal thought. In so doing, she uncovers the irresolvable tensions and strategic silences in modern political theory: the presumed unity and timelessness of states. Eschewing explanations of 'failure,' she instead uncovers how the Central European experience crystallized legal questions that would arise again in the era of global decolonization, connecting the story of the end of empire to the birth of new nations throughout the twentieth century. In this respect, the work serves not only as a history of Central Europe but also a 'prehistory' of the era of decolonization'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'It is not an exaggeration to say that the honey bee is the most well understood insect. We know more about Drosophila genetics, but our integrative understanding of that species pales in comparison to our understanding of every facet of honey bee biology. Despite the tremendous growth in our understanding of honey bee biology, the last comprehensive book on topic was published in 1987. In this book, Brian Johnson offers a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of honey bee biology. The book covers classic topics such as physiology, communication, division of labor, and reproduction as well as areas that were barely known decades ago such as genomics, cognition, toxicology, and immunity. He concludes with a discussion of honey bees as managed pollinators and conservation issues. Throughout, Johnson also offers his analysis and evaluation of key studies and areas of research. Ultimately, this book is likely to be the new standard reference on honey bee biology and an invaluable resource for anyone with a serious interest in these fascinating organisms'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'An introductory-level statistics textbook for psychology students'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A comprehensive, self-contained primer on validated numericsThis textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of validated numerics, an emerging new field that combines the strengths of scientific computing and pure mathematics. In numerous fields ranging from pharmaceutics and engineering to weather prediction and robotics, fast and precise computations are essential. Based on the theory of set-valued analysis, a new suite of numerical methods is developed, producing efficient and reliable solvers for numerous problems in nonlinear analysis. Validated numerics yields rigorous computations that can find all possible solutions to a problem while taking into account all possible sources of error-fast, and with guaranteed accuracy.Validated Numerics offers a self-contained primer on the subject, guiding readers from the basics to more advanced concepts and techniques. This book is an essential resource for those entering this fast-developing field, and it is also the ideal textbook for graduate students and advanced undergraduates needing an accessible introduction to the subject. Validated Numerics features many examples, exercises, and computer labs using MATLAB/C++, as well as detailed appendixes and an extensive bibliography for further reading.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A beautifully written personal account of the discovery of late antiquity by one of the world's most influential and distinguished historians. The end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and pathbreaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the 'neglected half-millennium' now known as late antiquity was in fact crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the classical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discovered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundational institution-building. A respect for diversity and outreach to the non-European world, relatively recent concerns in other fields, have been a matter of course for decades among the leading scholars of late antiquity.Documenting both his own intellectual development and the emergence of a new and influential field of study, Brown describes his childhood and education in Ireland, his university and academic training in England, and his extensive travels, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. He discusses fruitful interactions with the work of scholars and colleagues that include the British anthropologist Mary Douglas and the French theorist Michel Foucault, and offers fascinating snapshots of such far-flung places as colonial Sudan, midcentury Oxford, and prerevolutionary Iran. With Journeys of the Mind, Brown offers an essential account of the 'grand endeavor' to reimagine a decisive historical moment'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'In this book, Melissa Lane argues that the concept of political office should be central to our understanding of Greek politics and political theory. Yet discussions of the Greeks tend to focus on courts and assemblies, or at most, on lottery as a means of selecting officeholders - without thinking about their powers of command or about how they were held accountable. Meanwhile, discussions of Plato's Republic and Statesman tend to ignore the profound extent to which his understanding of politics was articulated in terms of the vocabulary and practice of officeholding, on the one hand, and an interrogation of whether these were adequate to a full understanding of ruling, on the other. In The Origins of Political Office: Ancient Greek Ideas of Ruling and Being Ruled, based on the 2018 Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford, Melissa Lane explores public office as a principal building block of Greek political ideas that lies at the intersection of command and accountability. In this way, she argues, the normative conception of office was not a form of absolute rule, but rather always constrained by the ruled, who held them accountable through elections and various forms of review. In return, the ruled gave up some of their freedom by agreeing to obey their rulers. Lane weaves together the role played by this understanding of office in key historical moments, especially but not only in Athens, with its use and rethinking by the philosophers particularly Plato. She does so with novel attention to the absence and abuse of office in various dimensions: from anarchy to tyranny. The book offers a path-breaking interpretation of the relationship between office-holding and ruling, of the meaning of ruling and being ruled, and of the significance of office in political theory and practice both in ancient Greece and with reference to today'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A definitive reframing of the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial eraThe twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organizational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism, brought forth what became a dominant narrative: that administrative coordination by trained professional managers is essential to the efficient running of organizations both public and private. And yet if managerialism was the apotheosis of administrative efficiency, why did both its practice and the accompanying narrative lie in ruins by the end of the century In The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, Richard Langlois offers an alternative version: a comprehensive and nuanced reframing and reassessment of the the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era.Langlois argues that managerialism rose to prominence not because of its inherent superiority but because of its contingent value in a young and rapidly developing American economy. The structures of managerialism solidified their dominance only because the century's great catastrophes of war, depression, and war again superseded markets, scrambled relative prices, and weakened market-supporting institutions. By the end of the twentieth century, Langlois writes, these market-supporting institutions had reemerged to shift advantage toward entrepreneurial and market-driven modes of organization.This magisterial new account of the rise and fall of managerialism holds significant implications for contemporary debates about industrial and antitrust policies and the role of the corporation in the twenty-first century'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A lavishly illustrated look at how evolution plays out in selective breedingUnnatural Selection is a stunningly illustrated book about selective breeding-the ongoing transformation of animals at the hand of man. More important, it's a book about selective breeding on a far, far grander scale-a scale that encompasses all life on Earth. We'd call it evolution.A unique fusion of art, science, and history, this book is intended as a tribute to what Charles Darwin might have achieved had he possessed that elusive missing piece to the evolutionary puzzle-the knowledge of how individual traits are passed from one generation to the next. With the benefit of a century and a half of hindsight, Katrina van Grouw explains evolution by building on the analogy that Darwin himself used-comparing the selective breeding process with natural selection in the wild, and, like Darwin, featuring a multitude of fascinating examples.This is more than just a book about pets and livestock, however. The revelation of Unnatural Selection is that identical traits can occur in all animals, wild and domesticated, and both are governed by the same evolutionary principles. As van Grouw shows, animals are plastic things, constantly changing. In wild animals, the changes are usually too slow to see-species appear to stay the same. When it comes to domesticated animals, however, change happens fast, making them the perfect model of evolution in action.Featuring more than four hundred breathtaking illustrations of living animals, skeletons, and historical specimens, Unnatural Selection will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in natural history and the history of evolutionary thinking.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Why investment and financial reform are essential to China's continued economic well-beingAlthough China's economy has grown spectacularly over the last twenty-five years, economists disagree about how the Chinese economy is likely to fare in the short- and long-term future. Is China's growth sustainable, or has China relied too much on investment, which is subject to diminishing returns, and not enough on technological change The first book on the relation between investment, finance, and growth in China, How China Grows dismisses this concern. James Riedel, Jing Jin, and Jian Gao argue that investment has not only been the engine of growth, but also the main source of technological progress and structural change in China.What threatens future growth instead, the authors argue, are the weaknesses of China's financial system that undermine efficiency in investment allocation. Financial-sector reform and development are necessary, not only for sustaining long-term growth, but also for maintaining macroeconomic stability.Although it includes some technical economic analysis, How China Grows is accessible to noneconomists and will benefit anyone who is interested in development finance in general and in China's economic growth in particular-whether economists, political scientists, bankers, or business people.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'This will be the first textbook on nonlinear control at the upper undergraduate level, reflecting the many updates in the field that have occurred since the 1990s. Nonlinear control is a control engineering course usually taught at the graduate level and preceded by a full semester course on nonlinear systems analysis, yet - as the authors of this textbook argue -- these tools and techniques are accessible to an undergraduate audience and practicing engineers, if presented in the right way. This book is class-tested, growing out of a third-year undergraduate course on nonlinear control and estimation for mechatronics, mechanical and electrical engineering, and mathematics students at the University of Newcastle, Australia. It is part of a trend toward reimagining the content of undergraduate control engineering curricula, to render widely-used tools and techniques accessible to students much earlier in their education, opening them up to those who will not go on to the graduate level. This alternative course sequence currently begins with the text Feedback Systems: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers by Astrèom and Murray (PUP 2008); this new project is designed to follow Astrèom and Murray in the undergraduate sequence, as a second or third year course'.