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China's Inner Asian Frontier
Photographs of the Wulsin Expedition to Northwest China in 1923
Mary Ellen Alonso
Harvard University Press, 1979
These 100 extraordinary photographs, selected from over two thousand taken by Frederick R. Wulsin during his 1923 expedition to the northwest borders of China, document the interplay of culture and way of life among Mongols, Tibetans, and Hans. The photographs are supplemented by extensive selections from Wulsin’s journals and letters that offer a comprehensive portrait of these societies at a critical moment of transition. Joseph Fletcher places it in the context of centuries of shifting patterns of empires and ethnic dominance, which continues to this day. M. E. Alonso contributes an essay on Wulsin, and the expedition. The photographs are taken from the archives of the National Geographic Society and Harvard’s Peabody Museum.
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Henry Miller, Happy Rock
Brassaï
University of Chicago Press, 2002
"In a world like this one, it's difficult to devote oneself to art body and soul. To get published, to get exhibited, to get produced often requires ten or twenty years of patient, intense labor. I spent half my life at it! And how do you survive during all that time? Beg? Live off other people until you're successful? What a dog's life! I know something about that! You're always recognized too late. And today, it's no longer enough to have talent, originality, to write a good or beautiful book. One must be inspired! Not only touch the public but create one's own public. Otherwise, you're headed straight for suicide."

That's Henry Miller's advice for young aspiring artists, as remembered by his very good friend Brassaï in this lively book. One of two that Brassaï wrote about the man who called himself a "happy rock," this volume covers their lives and friendship from the 1950s to 1973. Over the course of a number of warm, intimate conversations, Brassaï and Miller revisit their careers; discuss art, literature, Paris, Greece, Japan, World War II, and more; and consider the lives and works of many others in their circle, including Lawrence Durrell, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Georges Simenon, André Malraux, Hans Reichel, Paul Klee, and Amedeo Modigliani. Throughout Miller's zest for life shines through, as do his love of art and his passionate intensity for just about everything he does, from discussing a movie or play he'd just seen to reminiscing about a decades-long love.

Brassaï's Henry Miller, Happy Rock presents a vivid portrait of two close friends who thoroughly enjoy each other's company—and just happen to be world—famous artists too.
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Organizing Control
August Thyssen and the Construction of German Corporate Management
Jeffrey Fear
Harvard University Press, 2005

In a pioneering work, Jeffrey Fear overturns the dominant understanding of German management as “backward” relative to the U.S. and uncovers an autonomous and sophisticated German managerial tradition. Beginning with founder August Thyssen—the Andrew Carnegie of Germany—Fear traces the evolution of management inside the Thyssen-Konzern and the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works) between 1871 and 1934.

Fear focuses on the organization and internal dynamics of the company. He demonstrates that initiatives often flowed from middle managers, rather than from the top down. Shattering stereotypes of the overly bureaucratic and rigid German firm, Fear portrays a decentralized and flexible system that underscores the dynamic and entrepreneurial nature of German business. He fundamentally revises the scholarship on Alexander Gerschenkron and Germany’s Sonderweg, and critiques Max Weber’s concept of the corporation and capital accounting. He develops a loosely coupled relationship among enterprise strategy, organization, the structure of responsibility, and its accounting system, which links information, knowledge, and power inside the firm. This method of organizing control is central to understanding corporate governance.

Original and provocative, this work will generate much debate among historians, organizational theorists, and management and accounting scholars.

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front cover of Reconsidering Michael Polanyi’s Philosophy
Reconsidering Michael Polanyi’s Philosophy
Stefania Ruzsits Jha
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was one of the first twentieth-century scientists to propose a program to resolve the internal conflict of the modern Enlightenment: scientific detachment and moral nihilism with humanist values. Stefania Jha’s intellectual biography places Polanyi in the context of his time and culture, analyzes his key philosophical ideas, and explicates the application—and at times misappropriation—of his work.

Polanyi’s method was not laid out in his published works, and his vocabulary tends to make his writings difficult to understand. By exposing the structure of his theory of tacit knowing, and by tracing the growth of his thinking, Jha shows how the various elements of his thought are integrated. Through examination of his philosophical roots in Kant and the complexity of his evolving thought, she counteracts the popular notion that Polanyi’s philosophy stands apart from the western philosophic tradition.

Jha’s deep analysis makes Polanyi’s shift of focus from science to philosophy more intelligible, his philosophy more approachable, and the causes he championed—such as the freedom of science and cultural freedom—more understandable. Applying his notion of tacit knowing in practical directions, Jha seeks to bring the study of Polanyi’s philosophy out of the specialists’ enclave and into such fields as ethics and clinical medicine.
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The World of Kate Roberts
Selected Stories, 1925-1981
Joseph Clancy
Temple University Press, 1991
Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1991, 1991 Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the foremost twentieth-century prose writer in the Welsh language. She produced a considerable body of fiction, seven novels and novellas and nine collections of short stories, and was active in the Welsh Nationalist Party as a publisher and a literary and political journalist. A contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson, she created the modern form of the short story in Welsh, and through six decades of writing earned a place with this century's masters of the genre. The World of Kate Roberts offers in English a large selection of stories, many previously, untranslated, that span her long writing career. Joseph P. Clancy's translations convey the intensity, the insight, and the distinctive prose style with which this Welsh-language writer illuminates her characters' often heroic ordinary lives. This book contains twenty-seven short stories, two short novels, and "Tea in the Heather," eight linked stories of childhood in North Wales at the turn of the century. Excerpts from her autobiography provide background for the non-Welsh reader and an Introduction presents Kate Roberts' life and work largely through her own words. The experience of poverty is the vital center of Kate Roberts' fiction: material poverty in the slate-quarrying villages of North Wales and the coal-mining communities in the south at the turn of the century and during the Depression; and the cultural, moral, and spiritual poverty of contemporary life in a small town. This poverty defines the experiences and tests the resources of her characters. Her concern was to record, to examine, and to celebrate without sentimentality the life of the close-knit society in which she had grown up. What is most characteristically Welsh in Roberts' vision is that fellowship, membership in a community, is essential to the realization of the human self. "We never saw riches," observed Kate Roberts, "but we had riches that no one can take away from us, the riches of a language and a culture."
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