princeton university press okt 2022 (41 Ergebnisse)

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A vibrant new translation of Seneca's 'On the Shortness of Life,' a pointed reminder to make the most of a precious asset: our timeWho doesn't worry sometimes that smart phones, the internet, and TV are robbing us of time and preventing us from having a life How can we make the most of our time on earth In the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered one of the most famous answers to that question in his essay, 'On the Shortness of Life'-a work that has more to teach us today than ever before. In How to Have a Life, James Romm presents a vibrant new translation of Seneca's brilliant essay, plus two Senecan letters on the same theme, complete with the original Latin on facing pages and an inviting introduction.With devastating satiric wit, skillfully captured in this translation, Seneca lampoons the ways we squander our time and fail to realize how precious it is. We don't allow people to steal our money, yet we allow them to plunder our time, or else we give it away ourselves in useless, idle pursuits. Seneca also describes how we can make better use of our brief days and years. In the process, he argues, we can make our lives longer, or even everlasting, because to live a real life is to attain a kind of immortality.A counterweight to the time-sucking distractions of the modern world, How to Have a Life offers priceless wisdom about making our time-and our lives-count'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'An entertaining and enlightening collection of ancient writings about the philosophers who advocated simple living and rejected unthinking conformity. The Cynics were ancient Greek philosophers who stood athwart the flood of society's material excess, unexamined conventions, and even norms of politeness and thundered 'No!' Diogenes, the most famous Cynic, wasn't shy about literally extending his middle finger to the world, expressing mock surprise that 'most people go crazy over a finger.' When asked why he was called Diogenes the Dog, he replied 'because I fawn on those who give, I bark at those who don't, and I bite scoundrels.' How to Say No is a delightful collection of brief ancient writings about Cynicism that captures all the outrageousness, wit, and wisdom of its remarkable cast of characters-from Diogenes in the fourth century BCE to the column-stander Symeon Stylites in late antiquity. With their 'less is more' approach to life, the Cynics speak urgently to our world of climate change, economic uncertainty, and psychic malaise. Although the Cynics weren't writers, their memorable utterances and behavior were recorded by their admirers and detractors, and M. D. Usher offers fresh new translations of appealing selections from this body of writing-ranging from street sermons and repartee to biography and snapshots of Cynics in action.Complete with introductions to the volume and each selection as well as the original Greek and Latin on facing pages, this lively book demonstrates why the Cynics still retain their power to surprise us and make us laugh-and to make us think and question how we live'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Well-publicized research in psychology tells us that over half of our attempts to change habitual behavior fail within one year. Even without reading the research, most of us will intuitively sense the truth in this, as we have all tried and failed to rid ourselves of one bad habit or another. The human story of habits and the difficulty of change has been told in many books - most of which will make only a quick reference to dopamine or the 'lizard brain' before moving on to practical tips and tricks for behavior change. In contrast, Stuck: The Neuroscience of Why Changing Our Behavior is So Hard will tell the brain's story about why behavior is so hard to change. Russell Poldrack offers an in-depth, yet entirely accessible, guide to the neuroscientific research on habits and habit change. Part I introduces the 'anatomy of a habit,' starting with the argument that the resilience of our habits stems largely from a mismatch between the environment in which our brains evolved and the one in which we now live, and continuing on to introduce current work on fear and anxiety, motivation, and cognitive control that bears on habit formation. Part II focuses on what neuroscience can tell us about breaking habits, introducing evidence-based strategies that give us the best possible chance to break cycles of bad behavior. Throughout the book, Poldrack offers a clear-eyed view of what neuroscience can tell us about habit change, and what it cannot - and importantly, how we know what we know'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Before Billy Wilder (1906-2002) left Europe for the United States in 1934 and became a filmmaker, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. This book, edited and introduced by Noah Isenberg and translated by Shelley Frisch, collects about 65 articles Wilder published in Austrian and German newspapers in the 1920s. The collection includes reported pieces on urban life, from a first-person account of Wilder's stint as a taxi dancer to an article about street sweepers; profiles of writers, movie stars and poker players; and dispatches from the international film scene, from reviews to interviews with such figures as Charlie Chaplin and Erich von Stroheim. Isenberg provides an introduction that gives biographical details and places the writings in context, emphasizing their historical moment and their connections to Wilder's later career'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'This book--the first ethnography of water conservation on the Great Plains--provides an account of High Plains aquifer decline through an exploration of the different ways in which heartland residents inhabit and understand the imminent depletion of groundwater. This literary ethnography offers a vividly sketched look into the lives and stories of this community, based on interviews with members of the community such as fellow farmers and state regulators, woven together with historical data, journalistic documentation, and Bessire's personal reflections of his family's lived experiences. (Five generations of the author's family have lived in the region as farmers and ranchers.)'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A passionate eyewitness account of the mysteries and looming demise of glaciersand what their fate means for our shared futureThe ice sheets and glaciers that cover one-tenth of Earth's land surface are in grave peril. High in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating, even dying. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, thinning glaciers may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored for millions of years beneath the ice. In Ice Rivers, renowned glaciologist Jemma Wadham offers a searing personal account of glaciers and the rapidly unfolding crisis that theyand weface.Taking readers on a personal journey from Europe and Asia to Antarctica and South America, Wadham introduces majestic glaciers around the globe as individualseven friendseach with their own unique character and place in their community. She challenges their first appearance as silent, passive, and lifeless, and reveals that glaciers are, in fact, as alive as a forest or soil, teeming with microbial life and deeply connected to almost everything we know. They influence crucial systems on which people depend, from lucrative fisheries to fertile croplands, and represent some of the most sensitive and dynamic parts of our world. Their fate is inescapably entwined with our own, and unless we act to abate the greenhouse warming of our planet the potential consequences are almost unfathomable.A riveting blend of cutting-edge research and tales of encounters with polar bears and survival under the midnight sun, Ice Rivers is an unforgettable portrait ofand love letter toour vanishing icy wildernesses.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power--and how it stifles workers. With a new afterword by the author'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A compelling exploration of how our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappyWe live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change-even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves.Drawing on the insights of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, Why We Are Restless explores the modern vision of happiness that leads us on, and the disquiet that follows it like a lengthening shadow. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne articulated an original vision of human life that inspired people to see themselves as individuals dedicated to seeking contentment in the here and now, but Pascal argued that we cannot find happiness through pleasant self-seeking, only anguished God-seeking. Rousseau later tried and failed to rescue Montaigne's worldliness from Pascal's attack. Steeped in these debates, Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 and, observing a people 'restless in the midst of their well-being,' discovered what happens when an entire nation seeks worldly contentment-and finds mostly discontent.Arguing that the philosophy we have inherited, despite pretending to let us live as we please, produces remarkably homogenous and unhappy lives, Why We Are Restless makes the case that finding true contentment requires rethinking our most basic assumptions about happiness.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Robert DiYanni's You Are What You Read is a guide for readers that seeks to restore the pleasures of reading lost in the digital age (and accounted for most eloquently by Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies)'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'The classic book that exposed the scandal of the dispossession of native land by American settlers. And Still the Waters Run tells the tragic story of the liquidation of the independent Indian republics of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles, known as the Five Civilized Tribes. At the turn of the twentieth century, the tribes owned the eastern half of what is now Oklahoma, a territory immensely wealthy in farmland, forests, coal, and oil. Their political and economic status was guaranteed by the federal government--until American settlers arrived. Congress abrogated treaties that it had promised would last 'as long as the waters run,' and within a generation, the tribes were systematically stripped of their holdings, and were rescued from starvation only through public charity. Called a 'work of art' by writer Oliver La Farge, And Still the Waters Run was so controversial when it was first published that Angie Debo was banned from teaching in Oklahoma for many years. Now with an incisive foreword by Amanda Cobb-Greetham, here is the acclaimed book that first documented the scandalous founding of Oklahoma on native land.'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A groundbreaking biography of Milton's formative years that provides a new account of the poet's political radicalizationJohn Milton (1608-1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton's literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost-but would first justify the killing of a king.Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton's formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton's development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton's best-known works from this period, including the 'Nativity Ode,' 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso,' Comus, and 'Lycidas.'Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton's astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'The discovery in the last few decades of thousands of exoplanets orbiting nearby stars has made the age-old dream of interstellar travel a newly urgent scientific question. Initiatives like NASA's 100-Year Starship and the billionaire-funded Breakthrough Starshot are now investigating and developing new technologies that could one day enable humans to explore, perhaps even colonize, distant solar systems. This short, accessible book brings readers to the forefront of this new frontier, laying out both the challenges to be navigated and the latest thinking and scientific developments that could allow us to overcome them'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Tracing the rise of evangelicalism and the decline of mainline Protestantism in American religious and cultural life.'--Provided by publisher.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'When we think of animal sound we tend to think about birds or other highly sonic animals. However, scientists are learning that a much wider range of animals, and even plants, use sound, and they are figuring this out with the help of AI and other digital technologies. This book tells the stories of scientists who are using these digital technologies to decode the hidden world of nonhuman sound. Bakker shows how digital technology, so often associated with our alienation from nature, is offering an opportunity to listen to plants and animals in powerful new ways, changing our understanding of nonhuman communication and reviving our connection to the natural world. Beautifully written and deeply researched, the book is a story of discovery. Early chapters describe early 20th-century discoveries about whale noise, while subsequent chapters describe how digital technologies have revealed the surprising sonic worlds of elephants, turtles, corals, and plants. Through these stories we learn that many more plants and animals can make and sense sound and that these sounds are linked to complex communication and social behavior. But, as we learn, this science is not merely about listening to nature in new ways; it also creates new possibilities for both conservation and interspecies communication. In the book's later chapters, Bakker describes fascinating breakthroughs -- aided by robotics and AI -- that may enable people to communicate with other species. She ends the book by exploring how conservationists are using bioacoustics to protect endangered species, address the threat of noise pollution, and create innovative responses to biodiversity loss and climate change. Throughout the book, Bakker describes the research of a diverse range of scientists, with a particular emphasis on female and indigenous scientists. And while she ultimately champions the potential of digital technology, she is not naive to its limitations and is careful throughout to highlight the limits of technology. Ultimately, we see that bioacoustics, aided by digital tech, offers humanity a powerful new window into the nonhuman world'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people's livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment-environcide-constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadors exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the Indian Wars of the American West and the early twentieth century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'China was the world's leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China's decline The Rise and Fall of Imperial China offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China's history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign's dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler's pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China's fall.'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'COVID-19 has killed more people than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. Pandemic Politics examines how Donald Trump politicized COVID-19, shedding new light on how his administration tied the pandemic to the president's political fate in an election year and chose partisanship over public health, with disastrous consequences for all of us. Health is not an inherently polarizing issue, but the Trump administration's partisan response to COVID-19 led ordinary citizens to prioritize what was good for their 'team' rather than what was good for their country. Democrats seized on the crisis as evidence of Trump's indifference to public well-being. At a time when solidarity and bipartisan unity was sorely needed, Americans came to see the pandemic in partisan terms, adopting behaviors and attitudes that continue to divide us today. This book draws on a wealth of new data on public opinion to show how pandemic politics has touched all aspects of our lives-from the economy to race and immigration-and puts America's COVID-19 response in global perspective. An in-depth account of a uniquely American tragedy, Pandemic Politics reveals how the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic has profound and troubling implications for public health and the future of democracy itself'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Why your political beliefs are influenced by the language you speak. Voicing Politics brings together the latest findings from psychology and political science to reveal how the linguistic peculiarities of different languages can have meaningful consequences for political attitudes and beliefs around the world. Efrâen Pâerez and Margit Tavits demonstrate that different languages can make mental content more or less accessible and thereby shift political opinions and preferences in predictable directions. They rigorously test this hypothesis using carefully crafted experiments and rich cross-national survey data, showing how language shapes mass opinion in domains such as gender equality, LGBTQ rights, environmental conservation, ethnic relations, and candidate evaluations.Voicing Politics traces how these patterns emerge in polities spanning the globe, shedding essential light on how simple linguistic quirks can affect our political views. This incisive book calls on scholars of political behavior to take linguistic nuances more seriously and charts new directions for researchers across diverse fields. It explains how a stronger grasp of linguistic effects on political cognition can help us better understand how people form political attitudes and why political outcomes vary across nations and regions'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'The established narrative of art history is traditionally narrated through national or cultural lenses that focus on specific artistic practices characteristic of a given nation or culture: bronze in ancient China, architecture in ancient Rome, or oil painting in early modern Europe, for instance. These practices accord with a modern Western frame of reference, which defines art as the fine arts and relegates other works to the category of craft. Objects of use are rarely included-dismissed as insignificant, merely functional, lacking in imagination, or even primitive. The result has been a fragmented, hierarchical field in which broad comparative strokes have proved difficult to sustain, and longstanding biases have become standardized. This book challenges the hierarchy of genres and materials, as well as the concept of singular artistic centers with linear chronological narratives. Author Ned Cooke is one of the leading scholars working on the history of material culture within art history. Taking a thematic approach to interconnected histories and questioning the accepted notion of art as a category that privileges certain modes of production, Cooke focuses on quotidian materials-including fiber, clay, wood, and metal-and the so-called decorative arts as embodiments of a more inclusive human history of visual culture. Through an exploration of the conception, production, circulation, and ongoing social life of objects over a broad period of time and geography, he develops a more global and complex view of culture in which initiative, emulation, adaptation, and innovation flow in multiple directions, and objects operate locally, regionally, and globally, often at the same time. Eschewing traditional binaries of east versus west and fine art versus decorative art, this book offers a radical, non-normative guide to thinking about a connected world art history'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Why acknowledging diverse eco-social relationships can help us overcome the political polarization that undermines our ability to protect the environmentWhen we picture the ideal environmentalist, we likely have in mind someone who dedicates herself to reducing her own environmental footprint through individual choices about consumption-driving a fuel-efficient car, for example, or eating less meat, or refusing plastic straws. This is a benchmark that many aspire to-and many others reject. In Eco-Types, Emily Huddart Kennedy shows that there is more than one way to care about the environment, outlining a spectrum of eco-social relationships that range from engagement to indifference. Drawing on three years of interviews and research, Kennedy describes five archetypal relationships with the environment: the Eco-Engaged, often politically liberal, who have an acute level of concern about the environment, a moral commitment to protect it, and the conviction that an individual can make a difference; the Self-Effacing, who share the Eco-Engaged's concerns but not the belief in their own efficacy; the Optimists, often politically conservative, who are confident in their relationship with the environment, doubt the severity of environmental problems, and resent insinuations that they don't care; the Fatalists, who are pessimistic about environmental decline and feel little responsibility to adopt environment-friendly habits; and the Indifferent, who have no affinity for any part of the environmental movement. Kennedy argues that when liberals feel they have a moral monopoly on environmental issues, polarization results. If we are serious about protecting the planet, we must acknowledge that we don't all need to care about the environment in the same way.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - What drives anti-immigrant biasand how it can be mitigatedIn the aftermath of the refugee crisis caused by conflicts in the Middle East and an increase in migration to Europe, European nations have witnessed a surge in discrimination targeted at immigrant minorities. To quell these conflicts, some governments have resorted to the adoption of coercive assimilation policies aimed at erasing differences between natives and immigrants. Are these policies the best method for reducing hostilities Native Bias challenges the premise of such regulations by making the case for a civic integration model, based on shared social ideas defining the concept and practice of citizenship.Drawing from original surveys, survey experiments, and novel field experiments, Donghyun Danny Choi, Mathias Poertner, and Nicholas Sambanis show that although prejudice against immigrants is often driven by differences in traits such as appearance and religious practice, the suppression of such differences does not constitute the only path to integration. Instead, the authors demonstrate that similarities in ideas and value systems can serve as the foundation for a common identity, based on a shared concept of citizenship, overcoming the perceived social distance between natives and immigrants.Addressing one of the most pressing challenges of our time, Native Bias offers an original framework for understanding anti-immigrant discrimination and the processes through which it can be overcome.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America-and how it continues to divide the haves from the have-notsThe Economy of Promises is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitch together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debtors to repay money they have borrowed from lenders. Each promise poses a fundamental question: why does the lender trust the borrower The book tracks the dramatic shift from personal qualitative judgments to the impersonal quantitative measurements of credit scores and ratings, which make lending on a much greater scale possible. It discusses how lending is shaped by the shadow of failure, and the possibility that borrowers will break their promises and fail to repay their debts. It reveals how credit markets have been shaped by public policy, regulatory changes, and various political factors. And, crucially, it explains how credit interacts with economic inequality, contributing to vast and enduring racial and gender differences-which are only exacerbated by the widespread use of credit scores and ratings for 'big data' and algorithmic decision-making. Bringing to life the complicated and abstract terrain of human interaction we call the economy, The Economy of Promises is an important study of the tangle of indebtedness that, for better or worse, shapes and defines American lives.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Ths group of animals comprises a complex of disparate groups including the dolphin/shark-like ichthyosaurs, manatee-like placodonts, long- and short-necked plesiosaurs, the mososaur lizards, marine turtles, and crocodilians. Sea reptile paleontology is a very active field in terms of new discoveries and research, so the guide is highly topical. For example, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the long-standing assumption that prehistoric oceanic reptiles had low metabolic rates, like reptiles, is incorrect. Instead, it is now thought that many of these beasts were endothermic, and that this evolutionary adaptation was far more widespread than formerly realized. Preserved soft tissues are showing that most mososaurs were not snake-like undulating swimmers but were compact-bodied, deep tailed and swift swimmers (as shown by the attached skeletals that show the development of tail fins over time). Studies of bone microstructure are revealing how some sea reptiles dove deep enough to be victims of the bends. Gigantic forms as big as whales have been uncovered. There are about 350 named sea reptile species. About 250 will be accurately illustrated'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Tocqueville's ideas can help us build resilient liberal democracies in a divided worldHow can today's liberal democracies withstand the illiberal wave sweeping the globe What can revive our waning faith in constitutional democracy Tocqueville's Dilemmas, and Ours argues that Alexis de Tocqueville, one of democracy's greatest champions and most incisive critics, can guide us forward.Drawing on Tocqueville's major works and lesser-known policy writings, Ewa Atanassow shines a bright light on the foundations of liberal democracy. She argues that its prospects depend on how we tackle three dilemmas that were as urgent in Tocqueville's day as they are in ours: how to institutionalize popular sovereignty, how to define nationhood, and how to grasp the possibility and limits of global governance. These are pivotal but often neglected dimensions of Tocqueville's work, and this fresh look at his writings provides a powerful framework for addressing the tensions between liberalism and democracy in the twenty-first century.Recovering a richer liberalism capable of weathering today's political storms, Tocqueville's Dilemmas, and Ours explains how we can reclaim nationalism as a liberal force and reimagine sovereignty in a global age-and do so with one of democracy's most discerning thinkers as our guide'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate. Uncovering this history, Desert Edens looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering. From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis. Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea. In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed damming the Mediterranean in order to geoengineer an Afro-European continent called 'Atlantropa,' which would fit the needs of European settlers. Nazi designs were formulated to counteract the desertification of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Despite ideological and technical differences, these projects all incorporated and developed climate change theories and vocabulary. They also combined expressions of an extreme environmental pessimism with a powerful technological optimism that continue to shape the contemporary moment. Focusing on the intellectual roots, intended effects, and impact of early measures to modify the climate, Desert Edens investigates how the technological imagination can be inspired by pressing fears about the environment and civilization.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'An iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in India. Nehru's India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, in shaping the nation. Sherman argues that the ideas, policies, and institutions most strongly associated with Nehru-nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, the strong state, and high modernism-have lost their explanatory power. They have become myths. Sherman examines seminal projects from the time and also introduces readers to little-known personalities and fresh case studies, including India's continued engagement with overseas Indians, the importance of Buddhism in secular India, the transformations in industry and social life brought about by bicycles, a riotous and ultimately doomed attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol in Bombay, the early history of election campaign finance, and the first state-sponsored art exhibitions. The author also shines a light on underappreciated individuals, such as Apa Pant, the charismatic diplomat who influenced foreign policy from Kenya to Tibet, and Urmila Chowdhury, the rebellious architect who helped oversee the building of Chandigarh. Tracing and critiquing developments in this formative period in Indian history, Nehru's India offers a fresh and definitive exploration of the nation's early postcolonial era'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today's divided public square. Individualism is a defining feature of American public life. Its influence is pervasive today, with liberals and conservatives alike promising to expand personal freedom and defend individual rights against unwanted intrusion, be it from big government, big corporations, or intolerant majorities. The Roots of American Individualism traces the origins of individualist ideas to the turbulent political controversies of the Jacksonian era (1820-1850) and explores their enduring influence on American politics and culture. Alex Zakaras plunges readers into the spirited and rancorous political debates of Andrew Jackson's America, drawing on the stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and sermons that captivated mass audiences and shaped partisan identities. He shows how these debates popularized three powerful myths that celebrated the young nation as an exceptional land of liberty: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man. The Roots of American Individualism reveals how generations of politicians, pundits, and provocateurs have invoked these myths for competing political purposes. Time and again, the myths were used to determine who would enjoy equal rights and freedoms and who would not. They also conjured up heavily idealized, apolitical visions of social harmony and boundless opportunity, typically centered on the free market, that have distorted American political thought to this day.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'American artist, poet, and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939), has had an unusually varied and highly successful career across genres and media. As a poet, her work was edited by Toni Morrison and she is a recipient of the Carl Sandburg Prize. As a fiction writer, she was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis, and her first historical novel, Sally Hemmings (1979) was a bestseller. But Chase-Riboud trained as a visual artist, primarily as a sculptor, and her large installations made of fabric and bronze are powerful, with references to the human figure, her travels in North Africa and China, and the American Civil Rights Movement. She and Bettye Saar were the first African-American women to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art, and her work is in many major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou. This book, framed as a memoir, is composed of over forty years' worth of letters Chase-Riboud wrote to her beloved mother, and which she found in her mother's house around the time of her death. The letters begin in 1957, while the artist was a student in Paris, and continue through 1991. As Chase-Riboud writes in the introduction, 'This is not autobiography, nor biography, nor memoir nor fiction but a strange hybrid mixture of disparate and even contradictory narratives out of which portraits of the two of us emerge, separate yet united and indivisible.''.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - One of the nation's foremost urban historians traces the history of cooperative housing in New York City from the 1920s through the 1970sAs World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city's century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. Working-Class Utopias tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world's largest housing cooperative, four decades later. Robert Fogelson brings to life a tumultuous era in the life of New York, drawing on a wealth of archival materials such as community newspapers, legal records, and personal and institutional papers. In the early 1950s, a consortium of labor unions founded the United Housing Foundation under the visionary leadership of Abraham E. Kazan, who was supported by Nelson A. Rockefeller, Robert F. Wagner Jr., and Robert Moses. With the help of the state, which provided below-market-rate mortgages, and the city, which granted tax abatements, Kazan's group built large-scale cooperatives in every borough except Staten Island. Then came Co-op City, built in the Bronx in the 1960s as a model for other cities but plagued by unforeseen fiscal problems, culminating in the longest and costliest rent strike in American history. Co-op City survived, but the United Housing Foundation did not, and neither did the cooperative housing movement. Working-Class Utopias is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the housing problem that continues to plague New York and cities across the nation.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - From the New York Times bestselling author, the fascinating story of U.S. economic policy from Kennedy to Biden-filled with lessons for today.