700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators600+ Threads
I would hope readers open the book at the introduction where I describe the following:Imagine a sparkling day on Sydney’s Harbour... eating creamy Sydney rock oysters and drinking a glass...
If a reader wanted to browse my book, a number of strategies suggest themselves. The introductory chapter is quite brief, but sets out the range of topics I plan to...
Picking up a book in a bookstore, a lot of readers look at a book’s opening and closing pages. From these they can get a sense of the basic idea...
The book includes a 16-page color section that is a kind of visual overture of the project. This section uses a series of drawings and diagrams to address the main...
If the casual reader or bookshop-browser were to follow my grandfather’s advice, they would start at the end to see whether my book was worth reading. In this case, they...
Today, headlines from France depict the country’s Muslims and Jews as ever, inevitably in conflict. Numerous commentators suggest Muslim attacks against Jews are the newest chapter in an age-old anti-Jewish...
C. Wright Mills argued that sociological research often springs from the intersection of personal biography and history. My book is no exception.I come from a family that bought organic foods...
Thirtyfour Campgrounds examines the standardization and modernization of the contemporary campground as a familiar setting in the American landscape.Campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives...
E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...
The discussion and arguments are generally easy to follow. Even so, my guess is that the casual reader will most likely turn first to the graphics, which were chosen to...
Of course, homelessness is one of the major problems facing society today. Part of the impetus for this project was to think historically about representations of homelessness to see how...
Encouraged by therapists, people search for their inner selves. Groups and corporations develop “identities,” to which their members are “invited” to internalize. Political leaders encourage us to distinguish ourselves from...
While chapter four, dealing with the debates surrounding the use of the death penalty for counterfeiting crimes, offers some revealing examples of how contemporaries understood money politically, I would steer...
Cruel Optimismis a book about living within crisis, and about the destruction of our collective genres of what a “life” is; it is about dramas of adjustment to the pressures...
The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s...
On the face of it, my title is silly: there is no “before fiction” for humans, for we are, from the start of recorded history and from the start of...
I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book.The archival images that...
My intellectual trajectory in coming to this book stems from my longstanding interest in France.I’m an American who has studied France and its history for the past 30 years. I...
My motivations for writing this book were largely historical and aesthetic. I wanted to explain the proliferation of various tropes of play in Victorian literary representations of modern life. Even...
This book is an effort at the “quest for the historical Muhammad” that uses methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical and early Christian studies to investigate the beginnings of Islam....
How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities.Costs matter: they play a role in...
You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland. Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there. If...
In 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image at every level, from the logo...
The book arcs from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Throughout, it investigates the shifting fortunes of prostitution and marriage, of...
In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...
Although the Enlightenment, at the dawn of Modernity, raised the beacon of Reason and thus raised humanity’s hopes for a right answer to complex issues, doubts about that promise emerged...
Chapter 3 is devoted to the celebrated artist Sadequain (1930–1987) who introduced calligraphic motifs in his modernist paintings and drawings. Sadequain’s residence in Paris during the 1960s is of fundamental...
My book examines the role of values, reason and ethics, and concern with dignity in everyday life. It’s about everyday morality and immorality—banal goodness as well as banal evil. While...
I think the casual reader might be surprised to discover that the military made significant contributions to over half of the vaccines developed in the twentieth century.Just as military interest...
In the beginning of the prologue I draw upon a specific recent event: the theft of thousands of scientists’ emails, including many of mine. This is the world in which...
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