university of chicago press okt 2022 (30 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A counterintuitive and compelling argument that existing laws already protect the entirety of our oceans--and a call to understand and enforce those protections.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Powerful and resonant, Foxconned is both the definitive autopsy of the Foxconn fiasco and a dire warning to communities and states nationwide. When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker stood shoulder to shoulder with President Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at the White House in July 2017, they painted a glorious picture of his stateâ¿s future. Foxconn, the enormous China-based electronics firm, was promising to bring TV manufacturing back to the United States with a $10 billion investment and 13,000 well-paying jobs. They actually were making America great again, they crowed. Â Two years later, the project was in shambles. Ten thousand construction workers were supposed to have been building what Trump had promised would be âthe eighth wonder of the world.â Instead, land had been seized, homes had been destroyed, and hundreds of millions of municipal dollars had been committed for just a few hundred jobsâ¿nowhere near enough for Foxconn to earn the incentives Walker had shoveled at them. In Foxconned, journalist Lawrence Tabak details the full story of this utter collapse, which was disturbingly inevitable. Â As Tabak shows, everything about Foxconn was a disaster. But worse, he reveals how the economic incentive infrastructure across the country is broken, leading to waste, cronyism, and the steady transfer of tax revenue to corporations. Tabak details every kind of financial chicanery, from eminent domain abuse to good old-fashioned lootingâ¿all to benefit a coterie of consultants, politicians, and contractors. With compassion and care, he also reports the distressing stories of the many individuals whose lives were upended by Foxconn.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Albert Camus's novel The Plague will go down in literary history as one of the most talked about books of the Covid-19 crisis. Originally intended as an allegory of World War II, this story of an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic has been a staple of literature classes since 1947. Generations of students have learned that Camus was 'really' writing about his experience of occupied Paris. In 2020, that reading tradition was transformed. The epidemic brought the novel close to readers who began to read it as a book about their own lives-a book to help them get through a global health crisis. Alice Kaplan, who teaches Camus at Yale, and Laura Marris, translator of a new edition of The Plague, wondered how Camus could know so much about what we were living through in mid-2020. His novel has it all: the official denials in the face of mounting deaths, the end of travel, the separation from one another during quarantine, the numbing grief. They wrote States of Plague in response-as a guide to these moments where the written and the real collide. For many people, The Plague feels personal now. And through this lens, certain features became vital: Camus's sensitivity toward illness, his experience of a contagious disease, the cost of separation in his own life, and the psychology and politics of the city in quarantine. Because they come to the book from different perspectives, Kaplan and Marris alternate their voices so that their chapters offer two complementary ways of looking at Camus. They find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Kaplan herself is struggling with a case if Covid as the book opens; as it closes, Marris receives her first vaccine shot. In between, they find, aspects of Camus's novel that once seemed merely literary spoke directly to their own fear and grief. They uncover for us the mysterious way a great writer can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on our possible futures'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China's growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country's rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China's population-as well as a vast majority of its children-are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China's economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'One of the most important Stoic philosophers is Epictetus. Epictetus (c. 50 - 135 CE) was a Greek enslaved person who established an important school of Stoic philosophy in Rome. Epictetus is appreciated for his clear, good-humored way of explaining difficult ideas and his focus on daily life rather than metaphysics. This may be because he did not write down his lectures and discourses, as Marcus and Seneca did-rather, he delivered them aloud and they were carefully recorded by his students. Thus we should not refer to them as 'writings' but as 'works.' The complete oeuvre consists of his popular handbook on virtue (enchiridion), also known as 'The Art of Living,' a set of discourses, and a number of fragments. This set of translations, framed by an introduction and notes, is geared expressly to general readers and students, though it will be enormously helpful to scholars as well'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'In 1994, historian Stephen Stigler placed a mail-order purchase for a rare bit of ephemera from a French bookstore: a lottery Almanac from 1834. It contained the winning numbers for the entire span of the French Loterie from 1758 onward, including details on prizes actually awarded-difficult data to come by-as well as hand-written notes by an early owner. Stigler was fascinated with what he saw about how the Loterie was carried out, who bought tickets, and what size bets they placed, and so in the decades that followed he amassed booklets, legal documents, advertising bills, notices, contracts, and tickets. His own collection and extensive additional research helped him piece together the Loterie's remarkable inner workings, as well as its implications for how we understand the history of risk more broadly. In the 1750s at the urging of famed philandering adventurer Giocomo Casanova (who had recently escaped from a Venetian prison by means of a sharpened iron, an accomplice, a rope of bed sheets, and a stolen gondola), the French state began to embrace risk in its approach to the Loterie. The prize amounts varied depending on the number of tickets bought, and the amount of the bet was determined by each individual bettor. The state could lose money on any individual lot but was statistically guaranteed it would come out on top in the long run. Stigler follows the Loterie from its curious inception to a 1776 expansion, to its interruption during the French Revolution (but only with the Terror of 1793), to its renewal in 1797 and further expansion, and finally to its suppression in 1836, examining throughout the wider question of how members of the public came to trust in new financial technologies and believe in their value'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Min Kamp-or My Struggle in English-is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the year-by-year translation into English of the novels became something of a slow-gathering storm. Ambiguously figured as autobiographical by some, the six volumes present an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a Norwegian writer, an Everyman of sorts, one with the same name as the author. In its expansiveness, textures, and anti-romanticism, Knausgaard's is a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015 a small group of scholars, all admirers of Knausgaard's work, began meeting to discuss the peculiarly 'religious' qualities of My Struggle and other writings. Some were interested in Knausgaard's attention to religious topics, his uses of religious histories, objects, and artworks, while others were curious about his capacity to engage various religious moods in ways that were not critical, suspicious, or celebratory. The group wanted to know, in part, what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, about themselves. The Abyss or Life is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor-a remarkable collection of interlocking essays on everything from ritual, beauty, writing, and morality to divine plans for the end of the world'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time--fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them--and still living them--today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called 'modern myths.' But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them What myths are still taking shape today And what makes a story become a modern myth '--back cover.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Ranging from Victorian to modern examples-Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, Henry James's What Maisie Knew, J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, Franz Kafka's 'The Cares of a Family Man,' Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita-Kenneth Gross's book explores stories that center around the figure of a strange and dangerous child. Whether written for adults or child readers, or both at once, these stories all show us odd, even frightening visions of innocence. We see these children's uncanny powers of speech, knowledge, and play, as well as their nonsense and violence. And, in the tales, these child-lives keep changing shape. These are children who are often endangered as much as dangerous, haunted as well as haunting. In looking at these narratives, Gross traces the reader's thrill of companionship with these unpredictable, often solitary creatures-children curious about the adult world, who while not accommodating its rules, fall into ever more troubling conversations with adult fears and desires. This book asks how such imaginary children, often depicted as objects of wonder, challenge our ways of seeing the world, our measures of innocence and experience, and our understanding of time and memory'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Every day is the anniversary of some historical or cultural moment in the great city of Chicago. Whether it's the dedication of the Pablo Picasso sculpture downtown on August 15, or the arrest of Rod Blagojevich at his Ravenswood home on December 9, or a fire that possibly involved a cow on October 8, each day is redolent with the power of the past. Here, acerbic Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg takes us on a tour of the year, illuminating the famous, obscure, tragic, and hilarious elements that make each day in Chicago one to remember'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Like a lot of good stories, this one begins with a rumor: in 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, of heresy. Without disclosing evidence of any kind, Gregory announced that Frederick had written a supremely blasphemous book-De tribus impostoribus, or the Treatise of the Three Impostors-in which Frederick denounced Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as impostors. Of course, Frederick denied the charge, and over the following centuries the story played out across Europe, with libertines, freethinkers, and other 'strong minds' seeking a copy of the scandalous text. The fascination persisted until finally, in the eighteenth century, someone brought the purported work into actual existence-in not one but two versions, Latin and French. Although historians have debated the origins and influences of this nonexistent book, there has not been a comprehensive biography of the Treatise of the Three Impostors. In The Atheist's Bible, the eminent historian Georges Minois tracks the course of the book from its origins in 1239 to its most salient episodes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, introducing readers to the colorful individuals obsessed with possessing the legendary work-and the equally obsessive passion of those who wanted to punish people who sought it. Minois's compelling account sheds much-needed light on the power of atheism, the threat of blasphemy, and the persistence of free thought during a time when the outspoken risked being burned at the stake.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'The Doctor who wasn't there traces the long arc of enthusiasm for-and skepticism of-electronic media for health and medicine, showing that the same challenges now facing telehealth and the use of electronic medical records can be found in the medical reception of the telephone in the late nineteenth century and the radio, television, and mainframe computer across the twentieth. Wielding a rich trove of archival materials, physician/historian Jeremy Greene explores the role that new electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of American health. Today's telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the hook-and-ringer telephones that became widespread by the 1920s, the FM radio technologies used to broadcast health information in the 1940s, the televisions used to pioneer telemedical evaluation in the 1950s, or the first full-scale attempts to establish electronic medical records in the mid-1960s. But the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns they raise are prefigured in these earlier episodes, as are the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered. Each of these platforms produced subtle transformations in health and healthcare that we have learned to forget, displaced by promises of ever newer communications platforms to take their place. When is telemedicine good enough, and when is it not And how do the uses of telemedical technologies shape patient relationships with health care providers Who benefits and who suffers when new technologies are adopted And what do these communication technologies, whose promised revolutions have all failed, bring to our understanding of health and disease '.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Phenomenology was first described by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and developed by a group of thinkers that includes Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The works of these philosophers were a foundational influence on many of twentieth-century Europe's most important intellectual movements, including existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. Yet in most American philosophy departments, phenomenology and the corpus of works branded 'continental philosophy' received scant attention. In Inventing Philosophy's Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday administrative needs and institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom has held that the absence of continental philosophy from America's philosophical mainstream reflects its obscurity or even irrelevance to America's philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this oft-told story as he traces phenomenology's reception in America, delivering the first systematic historical study of the movement in the United States. He examines the lives and works of Marjorie Grene, Alfred Schèutz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing an introduction to phenomenological philosophy'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Like many parents in the US, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children's academic performance, are turning to for-profit businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China's educational testing industry (ETI) is now the world's largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, with almost one-tenth of China's enormous population attending ETI classes every year. We see the results in the US higher education system, as more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test-preparation classes for overseas standardized tests, such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). In addition to telling an interesting educational story, sociologist Le Lin also tells a fascinating organizational one. A former insider at a Chinese ETI business, Lin shows how and why the Chinese educational testing industry evolved to become a for-profit industry dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. In addition to unpacking the industry-level evolution, he also probes the transformation at the organizational level: why do some organizations thrive while others fail during the transition to market capitalism Lin answers these questions by looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs. He found that the more opportunistic practices, even those that did not always follow the law, thrived in this initially ambiguous industry. The marginal and opportunistic operators in the ETI implemented aggressive firing and hiring policies that kept a wide range of instructors available and even innovated new teaching practices that led to better student performance. The organizations that broke the rules were the ones that most often won the day. Ultimately, Lin shows that state policies against opportunistic practices unintentionally facilitated the domination of opportunists. As opportunists became rule-makers and diffused their practices across the industry, they pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of Chinese ETI terrifically illustrates how opportunism is often destructive, but it can also be productive to the formation and function of a market'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A vivid portrait of how Naval oversight shaped American oceanography, revealing what difference it makes who pays for science.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A highly anticipated biography of the enigmatic and popular Swedish painter. The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was 44 years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained. While her naturalistic landscapes and botanicals were shown during her lifetime, her body of radical, abstract works never received the same attention. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint produced the earliest abstract paintings by a trained European artist. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a successful woman artist, but she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a non-representational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the museum/institution. Despite her enormous popularity, there has not yet been a biography of af Klint-until now. Inspired by her first encounter with the artist's work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research af Klint's life-not only who the artist was but what drove and inspired her. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled 'undesirable' by the French imperial police in the early twentieth century. These undesirables were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color proclaiming their 'Frenchness' to move throughout the empire, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. Undesirability often brought alongside it immobility or imposed migration; French officials routinely either denied passage throughout the empire or attempted to relocate women as they saw fit. To refute the label, women wrote impassioned letters to police and ministers throughout France, French West Africa, and French Indochina. Some emphasized their 'undesirable' qualities to suggest that they needed the care and protection of the state to support their movements. Others used the empire's own laws around Frenchness and mobility to challenge state interference, illustrating their independence. Tacking between advocacy and supplication, these women summoned intimate details to move beyond, contest, or confound surveillance efforts and the intrusions of imperial policing, bringing to life a practice that Boittin terms 'passionate mobility.' In considering how ordinary European, Southeast Asian, and West African women pursued autonomy, security, companionship, or simply a better existence in the face of police surveillance and control, Undesirable illuminates pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but, as Mackenzie Cooley uncovers in this timely book, there is a dark parallel to this fãeted era. Those same men and women who were offering profound advancements in our understanding of the human condition-and laying the foundations of the Scientific Revolution-were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world. Cooley traces how the Renaissance world, from the Mediterranean to Mexico City to the high mountains of the Andes, was marked by a lingering fascination with breeding. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. 'Race,' Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. And, to those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible but the fragile result of reproductive work. She follows these early modern breeders' work with Italian horses, Mesoamerican dogs, Andean camelids, and other creatures, discussing it in tandem with natural philosophers' efforts to make sense of inheritance, modification, and the new concept of race. In doing so, she shows how, as the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'In this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores influential artist and pedagogue Josef Albers's teaching practices. The pedagogy Albers developed at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale consisted in a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended modernist agendas: it involved a set of ideas and practices that cultivated a material way of thinking among his students, which included notable future artists such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. By using exercises including paper folding, cutting, and collage, Albers tried to generate a form of 'productive disorientation' in his students, teaching them problem-solving strategies to explore new conceptions of composition and color. Saletnik begins by examining Albers's pedagogy in relation to modern aesthetic, scientific, and educational thought. He then examines his design, drawing, and color instruction, focusing on his relationship with Hesse and Serra, showing how their approach to material and scale were shaped by Albers's teaching. Featuring many novel images--including nineteenth-century children's teaching toys as well as rarely seen works by Albers, Serra, and Hesse--this book challenges art historians to consider how artists are introduced to problems of form and how pedagogy shapes their work'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was for a time one of America's most beloved authors, known for household manuals and children's poems, including the immortal 'Over the River and Through the Wood.' But in 1833, having converted to the abolitionist cause, Child published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, the first book-length condemnation of slavery printed in the United States. Child's book created an immediate uproar and catapulted her into the life of an activist. Lydia Maria Child became one of the most consequential radicals of nineteenth-century America. In this biography of Child, Lydia Moland foregrounds Child's struggles of conscience and the meaning they held for her life-and, potentially, for ours. In her first career, Lydia Maria Child achieved what almost no woman in history had before-she was a self-sufficient female author. What, then, made her throw it all away to write An Appeal The scandal of that book caused sales of her other books to plummet, polite society to cast her out, her beloved husband David to be jailed for libel, and the two rendered penniless. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the cause of abolition with her writings and her deeds. Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Charles Sumner both credit her with their conversion. During the Civil War, the Union Army distributed her words to 300,000 troops to help weary soldiers justify their sacrifice. She spirited endangered abolitionists out of the country, protected activists from angry pro-slavery mobs with her own body, and helped Harriet Jacobs edit Jacobs's autobiography, the most influential slave narrative by a woman in American history. Moland's biography restores this brave and brilliant woman to her proper place in American history while showing how her example answers these urgent questions: When confronted by sanctioned evil or systematic injustice, how should a citizen live What prompts moral change When do we have a duty to disobey unjust laws Child's story is one from the past with much to teach us about our present'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Following on the success of Surface, Bruno's previous book with us, in this new one she explores the act and art of 'projection' in its manifold guises and what those can tell us about how we think and feel and create the world we inhabit. This is not just an exploration of the psychological operation of 'projection'-the idea that we cast onto others the qualities we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. It is a major work of cultural history and media archaeology. As a way to transform space and atmosphere, projection has a long history in the arts, dating back to shadow plays, camera obscuras, magic lantern shows, and phantasmagoria. But the atmosphere of projection is not a thing of the past alone. It is alive and well today. It continues to fascinate us as screens filled with moving figures pervade the spaces of the art gallery and the museum as well as the environments of our daily lives. What is the root of our fascination How does it manifest in contemporary art How do we define atmosphere How is projection an atmosphere Are these two modalities conceptually and historically related, and how so Why are artists today so interested in environments and in elements of projection To explain this continual fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'When Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight books was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater, and they were authored by leading men of science, appointed by the President of the Royal Society, and intended to explore 'the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation.' Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series gave Darwin's generation a range of approaches to one of the great questions of the age: how to incorporate the newly emerging disciplinary sciences into Britain's overwhelmingly Christian culture. Drawing on a wealth of archival and published sources, including many unexplored by historians, Jonathan R. Topham examines how and to what extent the series contributed to a sense of congruence between Christianity and the sciences in the generation before the infamous Victorian 'conflict between science and religion.' He does so by drawing on the distinctive insights of book history, using close attention to the production, circulation, and use of the books to open up new perspectives not only on aspects of early Victorian science but also on the whole subject of science and religion. Its innovative focus on practices of authorship, publishing, and reading helps us to understand the everyday considerations and activities through which the religious culture of early Victorian science was fashioned. And in doing so, Reading the Book of Nature powerfully reimagines the world in which a young Charles Darwin learned how to think about the implications of his theory'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'This is a book about Vienna in 1815, at the close of the Napoleonic era and the Napoleonic wars, and on the verge of the Congress of Vienna, which would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. Beethoven and Schubert were both citizens of Vienna at this time, Beethoven half-way through his composing career and socially withdrawn because of his almost total deafness; Schubert not yet twenty years-old and in the middle of one of his most prolific periods, with 140 songs and a symphony composed over the course of 1815 alone. Seemingly oblivious to the momentous events and deeply immersed in their own world, they each seemed to be composing 'against' something, in Richard Kramer's compelling reading: 'against the Enlightenment' in Beethoven's case, for whom only a sense of stripped-down nostalgia remained of the optimistic spirit of the 1790s; 'against Beethoven' in Schubert's case, who felt the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination bloomed. In taking his readers through a carefully chosen selection of works dating from 1815-songs, string quartets, piano sonatas, and more-Kramer insightfully unearths previously undetected resonances and associations and illuminates the two composers' 'lonely and singular journeys' through the 'rich solitude of their music''.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'One of the most important Stoic philosophers is Epictetus. Epictetus (c. 50 - 135 CE) was a Greek enslaved person who established an important school of Stoic philosophy in Rome. Epictetus is appreciated for his clear, good-humored way of explaining difficult ideas and his focus on daily life rather than metaphysics. This may be because he did not write down his lectures and discourses, as Marcus and Seneca did-rather, he delivered them aloud and they were carefully recorded by his students. Thus we should not refer to them as 'writings' but as 'works.' The complete oeuvre consists of his popular handbook on virtue (enchiridion), also known as 'The Art of Living,' a set of discourses, and a number of fragments. This set of translations, framed by an introduction and notes, is geared expressly to general readers and students, though it will be enormously helpful to scholars as well'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Min Kamp-or My Struggle in English-is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the year-by-year translation into English of the novels became something of a slow-gathering storm. Ambiguously figured as autobiographical by some, the six volumes present an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a Norwegian writer, an Everyman of sorts, one with the same name as the author. In its expansiveness, textures, and anti-romanticism, Knausgaard's is a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015 a small group of scholars, all admirers of Knausgaard's work, began meeting to discuss the peculiarly 'religious' qualities of My Struggle and other writings. Some were interested in Knausgaard's attention to religious topics, his uses of religious histories, objects, and artworks, while others were curious about his capacity to engage various religious moods in ways that were not critical, suspicious, or celebratory. The group wanted to know, in part, what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, about themselves. The Abyss or Life is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor-a remarkable collection of interlocking essays on everything from ritual, beauty, writing, and morality to divine plans for the end of the world'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'In 1994, historian Stephen Stigler placed a mail-order purchase for a rare bit of ephemera from a French bookstore: a lottery Almanac from 1834. It contained the winning numbers for the entire span of the French Loterie from 1758 onward, including details on prizes actually awarded-difficult data to come by-as well as hand-written notes by an early owner. Stigler was fascinated with what he saw about how the Loterie was carried out, who bought tickets, and what size bets they placed, and so in the decades that followed he amassed booklets, legal documents, advertising bills, notices, contracts, and tickets. His own collection and extensive additional research helped him piece together the Loterie's remarkable inner workings, as well as its implications for how we understand the history of risk more broadly. In the 1750s at the urging of famed philandering adventurer Giocomo Casanova (who had recently escaped from a Venetian prison by means of a sharpened iron, an accomplice, a rope of bed sheets, and a stolen gondola), the French state began to embrace risk in its approach to the Loterie. The prize amounts varied depending on the number of tickets bought, and the amount of the bet was determined by each individual bettor. The state could lose money on any individual lot but was statistically guaranteed it would come out on top in the long run. Stigler follows the Loterie from its curious inception to a 1776 expansion, to its interruption during the French Revolution (but only with the Terror of 1793), to its renewal in 1797 and further expansion, and finally to its suppression in 1836, examining throughout the wider question of how members of the public came to trust in new financial technologies and believe in their value'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Phenomenology was first described by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and developed by a group of thinkers that includes Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The works of these philosophers were a foundational influence on many of twentieth-century Europe's most important intellectual movements, including existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. Yet in most American philosophy departments, phenomenology and the corpus of works branded 'continental philosophy' received scant attention. In Inventing Philosophy's Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday administrative needs and institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom has held that the absence of continental philosophy from America's philosophical mainstream reflects its obscurity or even irrelevance to America's philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this oft-told story as he traces phenomenology's reception in America, delivering the first systematic historical study of the movement in the United States. He examines the lives and works of Marjorie Grene, Alfred Schèutz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing an introduction to phenomenological philosophy'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Like many parents in the US, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children's academic performance, are turning to for-profit businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China's educational testing industry (ETI) is now the world's largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, with almost one-tenth of China's enormous population attending ETI classes every year. We see the results in the US higher education system, as more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test-preparation classes for overseas standardized tests, such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). In addition to telling an interesting educational story, sociologist Le Lin also tells a fascinating organizational one. A former insider at a Chinese ETI business, Lin shows how and why the Chinese educational testing industry evolved to become a for-profit industry dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. In addition to unpacking the industry-level evolution, he also probes the transformation at the organizational level: why do some organizations thrive while others fail during the transition to market capitalism Lin answers these questions by looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs. He found that the more opportunistic practices, even those that did not always follow the law, thrived in this initially ambiguous industry. The marginal and opportunistic operators in the ETI implemented aggressive firing and hiring policies that kept a wide range of instructors available and even innovated new teaching practices that led to better student performance. The organizations that broke the rules were the ones that most often won the day. Ultimately, Lin shows that state policies against opportunistic practices unintentionally facilitated the domination of opportunists. As opportunists became rule-makers and diffused their practices across the industry, they pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of Chinese ETI terrifically illustrates how opportunism is often destructive, but it can also be productive to the formation and function of a market'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'As most American labor organizations struggle for survival and relevance in the twenty-first century, teacher unions appear to be an exception. Despite being all but nonexistent until the 1960s, these unions are maintaining members, assets-and political influence. As the COVID-19 epidemic has illustrated, today's teachers unions are something greater than mere labor organizations: they are primary influencers of American education policy. How Policies Make Interest Groups examines the rise of these unions to their current place of influence in American politics. Michael Hartney details how state and local governments adopted a new system of labor relations that subsidized--and in turn strengthened--the power of teachers' unions as interest groups in American politics. In doing so, governments created a force in American politics: an entrenched, subsidized machine for membership recruitment, political fundraising, and electoral mobilization efforts that has informed elections and policymaking ever since. Backed by original quantitative research from across the American educational landscape, Hartney shows how American education policymaking and labor relations have combined to create some of the very voter blocs to which it currently answers. How Policies Make Interest Groups is trenchant, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why some voices in American politics mean more than others'.