In 1958, ad man and soon-to-be best-selling author Shepherd Mead moved to England with his family to pursue his career. Six years later, his observations on the oddities of British culture were enough to compile a satirical guidebook for fellow Americans planning to visit from across the pond. The blunders that could befall them were many. For instance, explains Mead, “Pants are always underpants and what you wear out in the open are trousers. Mistakes in this area can lead to nasty misunderstandings.”

Ever since the publication of her first H.D. essay in 1985 (included here in an expanded version), Morris has eschewed prevailing literary trends in favor of new approaches that both challenge and overpass dominant critical constructs. As she argues in this volume, the writing and, crucially, the reading of poetry is a process in which meaning is produced by the interplay of words on a page and in the ear of the reader. This quality of being not heard but overheard, composed within the body, is crucial to an appreciation of H.D.

Morris shows H.D. to be a playful linguistic innovator whose writings bear on debates in science, technology, and cinema as well as on poetry. Foremost, however, H.D. was a profound reshaper of the boundaries and possibilities of poetry, a generative form that, as this book shows, can indeed serve the cultural work of survival and resistance against the violence of modern culture.

How to Look Good in A War examines the methods used to depict, defend and justify the use of state violence. Many books have shown how 'truth is the first casualty of war' but this is the first to analyse exactly how pro-war narratives are constructed and normalised.

Brian Rappert details the 'upside-down' world of war in which revelation conceals, knowledge fosters uncertainty, and transparency obscures. He looks at government spin during recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya where officials manoeuvre between circulating and withholding information.

Examining how organised violence is justified, How to Look Good in A War draws on experiences from recent controversy to consider how ignorance about the operation of war is produced and how concerned individuals and groups can intervene to make a difference.

Winner of Ploughshares’ 2022 John C. Zacharis First Book Award

Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo, the over in lover? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future?

    David Gere, who came of age as a dance critic at the height of the AIDS epidemic, offers the first book to examine in depth the interplay of AIDS and choreography in the United States, specifically in relation to gay men. The time he writes about is one of extremes. A life-threatening medical syndrome is spreading, its transmission linked to sex. Blame is settling on gay men. What is possible in such a highly charged moment, when art and politics coincide?
    Gere expands the definition of choreography to analyze not only theatrical dances but also the protests conceived by ACT-UP and the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. These exist on a continuum in which dance, protest, and wrenching emotional expression have become essentially indistinguishable. Gere offers a portrait of gay male choreographers struggling to cope with AIDS and its meanings.

2024/25 Story Prize Longlist

2024 Foreword Indies Finalist, Multicultural Adult Fiction
 

Roland Barthes remains one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text collects his most influential essays. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text.

As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers.

This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes' ideas in cultural studies and literary theory.

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.

Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, Schwan and Shapiro take a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.

Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How to Suppress Women’s Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle—and not so subtle—strategies that society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its powerful feminist critique.

“What is it going to take to break apart these rigidities? Russ’s book is a formidable attempt. It is angry without being self-righteous, it is thorough without being exhausting, and it is serious without being devoid of a sense of humor. But it was published over thirty years ago, in 1983, and there’s not an enormous difference between the world she describes and the world we inhabit.”
—Jessa Crispin, from the foreword

“A book of the most profound and original clarity. Like all clear-sighted people who look and see what has been much mystified and much lied about, Russ is quite excitingly subversive. The study of literature should never be the same again.”
—Marge Piercy

“Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit.”
—Adrienne Rich

In 1989 Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer. In this book, Bishop tells us how he and Varmus made their momentous discovery. More than a lively account of the making of a brilliant scientist, How to Win the Nobel Prize is also a broader narrative combining two major and intertwined strands of medical history: the long and ongoing struggles to control infectious diseases and to find and attack the causes of cancer.

Alongside his own story, that of a youthful humanist evolving into an ambivalent medical student, an accidental microbiologist, and finally a world-class researcher, Bishop gives us a fast-paced and engrossing tale of the microbe hunters. It is a narrative enlivened by vivid anecdotes about our deadliest microbial enemies--the Black Death, cholera, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, HIV--and by biographical sketches of the scientists who led the fight against these scourges.

Bishop then provides an introduction for nonscientists to the molecular underpinnings of cancer and concludes with an analysis of many of today's most important science-related controversies--ranging from stem cell research to the attack on evolution to scientific misconduct. How to Win the Nobel Prize affords us the pleasure of hearing about science from a brilliant practitioner who is a humanist at heart. Bishop's perspective will be valued by anyone interested in biomedical research and in the past, present, and future of the battle against cancer.

An engrossing history of the century that transformed our knowledge of the body’s inner senses 

The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment.

Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks.

Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today.

Victor Fuchs, author of Who Shall Live?, cuts through the hand wringing and the “pop” panaceas for America's current social crises in a brilliant analysis of the way we live. The facts are familiar. A doubled rate of divorce. A birth rate cut nearly in half while the percentage of illegitimate births nearly tripled. The young face dismal job prospects, and many of the old are totally dependent on the federal government.

Fuchs's economic approach shows us that the societal upheaval of American life is not created by fiat but rather emerges as millions of men and women make seemingly small choices that are constrained by their circumstances: “Should I go back to school?” “How many children should we have?” “When should I retire?” In a masterly synthesis, he shows the interrelatedness of our choices regarding family, work, health, and education throughout the life cycle. He uses the latest facts of American life to explore three major themes—the fading family, the impact of simple demographics on individual destiny, and the effect of weighing present and future costs and benefits on individual choice.

Fuchs concludes by offering innovative solutions to many contemporary problems: social security, health insurance, child care, youth unemployment, and illegitimate births. Moving beyond the outworn orthodoxies of liberalism and conservatism, he offers a clearer view of our circumstances so that readers from all walks of life can make better private choices, and contribute to more effective public policies.

A riveting story about parenthood, substance abuse, and the strength it takes to come back from our mistakes

Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside—while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.
 

A former Wisconsin high school science teacher makes the case that how and why we teach science matters, especially now that its legitimacy is under attack.

Why teach science? The answer to that question will determine how it is taught. Yet despite the enduring belief in this country that science should be taught, there has been no enduring consensus about how or why.

This is especially true when it comes to teaching scientific process. Nearly all of the basic knowledge we have about the world is rock solid. The science we teach in high schools in particular—laws of motion, the structure of the atom, cell division, DNA replication, the universal speed limit of light—is accepted as the way nature works. Everyone also agrees that students and the public more generally should understand the methods used to gain this knowledge. But what exactly is the scientific method?

Ever since the late 1800s, scientists and science educators have grappled with that question. Through the years, they’ve advanced an assortment of strategies, ranging from “the laboratory method” to the “five-step method” to “science as inquiry” to no method at all. How We Teach Science reveals that each strategy was influenced by the intellectual, cultural, and political circumstances of the time. In some eras, learning about experimentation and scientific inquiry was seen to contribute to an individual’s intellectual and moral improvement, while in others it was viewed as a way to minimize public interference in institutional science.

John Rudolph shows that how we think about and teach science will either sustain or thwart future innovation, and ultimately determine how science is perceived and received by the public.

“How do we think?” N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis—the belief that humans and technics are coevolving—and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa.

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex.

In How We Vote, Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore what is at the heart of our democracy: how elections are run. Election administration determines how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process, as well as how election officials work.

Election officials must work in a difficult intergovernmental environment of constant change and intense partisanship. Voting practices and funding vary from state to state, and multiple government agencies, the judicial system, voting equipment vendors, nonprofit groups, and citizen activists also influence practices and limit change. Despite real challenges and pessimistic media assessments, Hale and Brown demonstrate that election officials are largely successful in their work to facilitate, protect, and evolve the voting process.

Using original data gathered from state and local election officials and policymakers across the United States, Hale and Brown analyze innovations in voter registration, voting options, voter convenience, support for voting in languages other than English, the integrity of the voting process, and voting system technology. The result is a fascinating picture of how we vote now and will vote in the future.

In How Women Must Write, Olga Peters Hasty takes us from an emphatically male Romantic age to a modernist period preoccupied with women’s creativity but also with its containment. In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, the woman poet was invented: by women poets themselves, by readers who projected gender biases into their poems, and by male poets who wrote posing as women. Examining Karolina Pavlova and Evdokiia Rostopchina, who inspired those writing after them, as well as two women invented by men, Cherubina de Gabriak and Briusov’s Nelli, and challenges to male authority by Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, this book shows women as purposeful actors realizing themselves creatively and advancing the woman poet’s cause. It will appeal to the general reader and to specialists in Russian literature, women’s studies, and cultural history.

Top 100 Books on Science, American Scientist, 2001

In 1992, the University of Texas Press published Before Writing, Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform and Before Writing, Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens. In these two volumes, Denise Schmandt-Besserat set forth her groundbreaking theory that the cuneiform script invented in the Near East in the late fourth millennium B.C.—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device.

How Writing Came About draws material from both volumes to present Schmandt-Besserat's theory for a wide public and classroom audience. Based on the analysis and interpretation of a selection of 8,000 tokens or counters from 116 sites in Iran, Iraq, the Levant, and Turkey, it documents the immediate precursor of the cuneiform script.

British playwright Howard Barker coined the term “theatre of catastrophe” to describe his unique brand of complex, ambiguous, and often unsettling drama. Revered in continental Europe, North America, and Australia as one of the greatest living dramatists working in the English language, Barker is also a celebrated poet, theater theorist, and painter. The first collection of interviews conducted with Barker, Howard Barker Interviews 1980–2010 covers his entire career and gives a strong sense of the life and work of this innovative dramatist.

One of the great repositories of a people's world view and religious beliefs, the Huarochirí Manuscript may bear comparison with such civilization-defining works as Gilgamesh, the Popul Vuh, and the Sagas. This translation by Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste marks the first time the Huarochirí Manuscript has been translated into English, making it available to English-speaking students of Andean culture and world mythology and religions.

The Huarochirí Manuscript holds a summation of native Andean religious tradition and an image of the superhuman and human world as imagined around A.D. 1600. The tellers were provincial Indians dwelling on the west Andean slopes near Lima, Peru, aware of the Incas but rooted in peasant, rather than imperial, culture. The manuscript is thought to have been compiled at the behest of Father Francisco de Avila, the notorious "extirpator of idolatries." Yet it expresses Andean religious ideas largely from within Andean categories of thought, making it an unparalleled source for the prehispanic and early colonial myths, ritual practices, and historic self-image of the native Andeans.

Prepared especially for the general reader, this edition of the Huarochirí Manuscript contains an introduction, index, and notes designed to help the novice understand the culture and history of the Huarochirí-area society. For the benefit of specialist readers, the Quechua text is also supplied.

Yun Wen uses the Huawei story as a microcosm to understand China's evolving digital economy and the global rise of the nation's corporate power. Rejecting the idea of the transnational corporation as a static institution, she explains Huawei's formation and restructuring as a historical process replete with contradictions and complex consequences. She places Huawei within the international political economic framework to capture the dynamics of power structure and social relations underlying corporate China's globalization. As she explores the contradictions of Huawei's development, she also shows the ICT firm's complicated interactions with other political-economic forces.

Comprehensive and timely, The Huawei Model offers an essential analysis of China's dynamic development of digital economy and the global technology powerhouse at its core.

The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest, most complex, and most powerful observatory ever deployed in space, designed to allow astronomers to look far back into our own cosmic past with unprecedented clarity. Yet from its launch in 1990, when it was discovered that a flawed mirror was causing severe “myopia” and sending fuzzy images back to Earth, the HST has been at the center of a controversy over who was at fault for the flaw and how it should be fixed. Now Eric Chaisson, a former senior scientist on the HST project, tells the inside story of the much heralded mission to fix the telescope. Drawing on his journals, Chaisson recreates the day-to-day struggles of scientists, politicians, and publicists to fix the telescope and control the political spin. Illustrated with “before and after” full-color pictures from the telescope and updated with a new preface, The Hubble Wars tells an engaging tale of scientific comedy and error.

In this new edition, coming at the half-way point in the HST’s planned mission of fifteen years, Chaisson has brought the Hubble story up-to-date by sorting out the spectacular from the mundane contributions the HST has made to our knowledge of the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the distant galaxies of deep space.

A new perspective on ancient Athens at the height of its powers, reinterpreting the city’s supposed “Golden Age” as a period of ruinous culture wars.

The age of Pericles, in the fifth century BC, is often described as the Golden Age of Athens. The city witnessed a flowering of philosophy, art, and architecture—including an ambitious building program, with the Parthenon its centerpiece. But as David Stuttard shows in this vivid account, the seemingly triumphant city was in fact riven by conflict and contradiction. Though nominally a democracy, Athens led a tyrannical empire. And for Pericles and his circle, the Parthenon was less a holy place than a propaganda vehicle. Its sculptures carried the message that Athenians, beloved by the gods, were nearly divine in their own right—which to many Greeks smacked of hubris.

As long as things went well, Athenian democracy appeared to prosper. But just a year after the Parthenon was finished, Athens was at war with Sparta; a plague killed a third of the population, including Pericles; and earthquakes razed much of the city. In the wake of what seemed like divine retribution, popular outrage against those accused of undermining state religion was so strong that it took the execution of Socrates to lance the boil.

Hubris offers dramatic portraits of key figures like Pheidias, who sculpted the monumental statue of Athena yet fell prey to charges of impiety; Themistocles, who built the Athenian navy but died an exile in enemy lands; and Alcibiades, the psychopathic playboy whose mercurial ego hastened his city’s defeat. To understand the Parthenon and the Athens that built it, Stuttard makes clear, we must recognize the tensions among the city’s rivalrous families, generations, and social classes, whose visions of their place in the world ultimately proved incompatible.

A leading expert on US-Russian relations reveals how the United States and its European allies set the course for the war in Ukraine—and offers a sobering indictment of American foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, but its origins are visible as far back as the aftermath of the Cold War, when newly independent Ukraine moved to the center of tense negotiations between Russia and the West. The United States was a leading player in this drama. In fact, Jonathan Haslam argues, it was decades of US foreign policy missteps and miscalculations, unchecked and often reinforced by European allies, that laid the groundwork for the current war.

Isolated, impoverished, and relegated to a second-order power on the world stage, Russia grew increasingly resentful of Western triumphalism in the wake of the Cold War. The United States further provoked Russian ire with a campaign to expand NATO into Eastern Europe—especially Ukraine, the most geopolitically important of the former Soviet republics. Determined to extend its global dominance, the United States repeatedly ignored signs that antagonizing Russia would bring consequences. Meanwhile, convinced that Ukraine was passing into the Western sphere of influence, Putin prepared to shift the European balance of power in Russia’s favor.

Timely and incisive, Hubris reveals the assumptions, equivocations, and grievances that have defined the West’s relations with Russia since the twilight of the Soviet Union—and ensured that collision was only a matter of time.

Like Huck’s raft, the experience of American childhood has been both adventurous and terrifying. For more than three centuries, adults have agonized over raising children while children have followed their own paths to development and expression. Now, Steven Mintz gives us the first comprehensive history of American childhood encompassing both the child’s and the adult’s tumultuous early years of life.

Underscoring diversity through time and across regions, Mintz traces the transformation of children from the sinful creatures perceived by Puritans to the productive workers of nineteenth-century farms and factories, from the cosseted cherubs of the Victorian era to the confident consumers of our own. He explores their role in revolutionary upheaval, westward expansion, industrial growth, wartime mobilization, and the modern welfare state. Revealing the harsh realities of children’s lives through history—the rigors of physical labor, the fear of chronic ailments, the heartbreak of premature death—he also acknowledges the freedom children once possessed to discover their world as well as themselves.

Whether at work or play, at home or school, the transition from childhood to adulthood has required generations of Americans to tackle tremendously difficult challenges. Today, adults impose ever-increasing demands on the young for self-discipline, cognitive development, and academic achievement, even as the influence of the mass media and consumer culture has grown. With a nod to the past, Mintz revisits an alternative to the goal-driven realities of contemporary childhood. An odyssey of psychological self-discovery and growth, this book suggests a vision of childhood that embraces risk and freedom—like the daring adventure on Huck’s raft.

When Hugo Chavez, then President of Venezuela, died in 2013, millions across the globe mourned. In an age where most politicians inspire only apathy and cynicism, Chavez's popularity, radicalism and vibrant personality were truly unique.

Released one year after Chavez's unexpected death, this dramatic and intimate biography traces Chavez's life from an impoverished rural family to the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas. Mike Gonzalez shows how Chavez's 'Bolivarian revolution' aimed to complete Simon Bolivar’s promise of a Latin America free from imperialism.

Gonzalez details Chavez's close connection to the masses and how he enraged wealthy elites by declaring his support for 21st century socialism. He concludes that the struggle for social justice inspired by Chavez can and must continue. This is an ideal guide to Chavez's inspiring life and legacy.

The authors of these eight essays examine the social and ethical implications of new biomedical technologies—from behavior control to organ transplants and human experimentation. They also examine the shortcomings in our system of medical care—from the disappearance of the general practitioner to problems of medical care for the poor.

In an introductory essay, Irene Taviss analyzes the allocation of resources to biomedical research and medical care and considers problems related to human experimentation, organ transplantation, and genetic and behavior control. She also discusses possible controls in these fields—legal controls as well as formal professional codes and informal professional practices. In discussing the rare disease phenylketonuria, a cause of mental retardation, Samuel P. Bessman and Judith P. Swazey point out the dangers of a hasty decision to institute legislative controls of diseases on the basis of inadequate scientific evidence. In separate essays, Edmund D. Pellegrino and Louis Lasagna examine the problems of establishing professional controls over different kinds of human experimentation. Everett P. Mendelsohn, Judith P. Swazey, and Irene Taviss present an overview of the new behavior control technologies and point out the dilemmas that have resulted from these developments. Victor Sidel's essay examines the effects of new technologies on the practice of medicine and the potential effects on society. The two final essays deal with the organization and delivery of medical care. Mark G. Field reports on the problems caused by medical specialization and the disappearance of the general practitioner and proposes some remedies. John H. Knowles analyzes medical manpower shortages in various specialties and the effects of these shortages on the health care of the nation.

Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is as easy as going to the grocery store for most Americans—which makes it all too easy to forget that our food is cultivated, harvested, and packaged by farmworkers who labor for less pay, fewer benefits, and under more dangerous conditions than workers in almost any other sector of the U.S. economy. Seeking to end the public's ignorance and improve workers' living and working conditions, this book addresses the major factors that affect farmworkers' lives while offering practical strategies for action on farmworker issues.

The contributors to this book are all farmworker advocates—student and community activists and farmworkers themselves. Focusing on workers in the Southeast United States, a previously understudied region, they cover a range of issues, from labor organizing, to the rise of agribusiness, to current health, educational, and legal challenges faced by farmworkers. The authors blend coverage of each issue with practical suggestions for working with farmworkers and other advocates to achieve justice in our food system both regionally and nationally.

We often speak of the dignity owed to a person. And dignity is a word that regularly appears in political speeches. Charters are promulgated in its name, and appeals to it are made when people all over the world struggle to achieve their rights. But what exactly is dignity? When one person physically assaults another, we feel the wrong demands immediate condemnation and legal sanction. Whereas when one person humiliates or thoughtlessly makes use of another, we recognize the wrong and hope for a remedy, but the social response is less clear. The injury itself may be hard to quantify.

Given our concern with human dignity, it is odd that it has received comparatively little scrutiny. Here, George Kateb asks what human dignity is and why it matters for the claim to rights. He proposes that dignity is an “existential” value that pertains to the identity of a person as a human being. To injure or even to try to efface someone’s dignity is to treat that person as not human or less than human—as a thing or instrument or subhuman creature. Kateb does not limit the notion of dignity to individuals but extends it to the human species. The dignity of the human species rests on our uniqueness among all other species. In the book’s concluding section, he argues that despite the ravages we have inflicted on it, nature would be worse off without humanity. The supremely fitting task of humanity can be seen as a “stewardship” of nature. This secular defense of human dignity—the first book-length attempt of its kind—crowns the career of a distinguished political thinker.

What does human dignity mean and what role should it play in guiding the mission of international institutions? In recent decades, global institutions have proliferated—from intergovernmental organizations to hybrid partnerships. The specific missions of these institutions are varied, but is there a common animating principle to inform their goals? Presented as an integrated, thematic analysis that transcends individual contributions, Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions argues that the concept of human dignity can serve as this principle.

Human dignity consists of the agency of individuals to apply their gifts to thrive, and requires social recognition of each person's inherent value and claim to equal access to opportunity. Contributors examine how traditional and emerging institutions are already advancing human dignity, and then identify strategies to make human dignity more central to the work of global institutions. They explore traditional state-created entities, as well as emergent, hybrid institutions and faith-based organizations. Concluding with a final section that lays out a path for a cross-cultural dialogue on human dignity, the book offers a framework to successfully achieve the transformation of global politics into service of the individual.

In Human Documents, Robert Gardner introduces the work of photographers with whom he has worked over a period of nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard. Their images achieve the status of what Gardner calls “human documents”: visual evidence that testifies to our shared humanity. In images and words, the book adds to the already significant literature on photography and filmmaking as ways to gather both fact and insight into the human condition. In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, New Guinea, Ethiopia, and the United States, Human Documents demonstrates the important role photography can play in furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Author and cultural critic Eliot Weinberger contributes the essay “Photography and Anthropology (A Contact Sheet),” in which he provides a new and intriguing context for viewing and thinking about the images presented here.

With photographs by Michael Rockefeller, Robert Gardner, Kevin Bubriski, Adelaide de Menil, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb.

Deeply touched by the tragedies of botched abortions that they witnessed as medical students and young physicians in Chile in the 1940s and later around the world, the authors have attempted in their professional lives and now in this book to establish a framework for dialogue to replace the polarization that exists today.

Doctors Faundes and Barzelatto use their decades of international work to document the personal experiences of different classes of women in different countries and those countries' policies and practices. No other book provides such a comprehensive and reasoned examination of the entire topic of abortion, from the medical to the religious and ethical and from the psychological to the legal, in plain language understandable by non-specialists.

The central thesis is that there are too many induced abortions in the world today, that most are preventable and should be prevented--a middle ground that both pro-life and pro-choice advocates can accept. The first part of the book reviews why women have abortions, as well as the magnitude and consequences. The second part examines values. The third part discusses effective interventions. The final part states conclusions about what can be done to reach a necessary social consensus.

The Portuguese edition of this book was issued at the very end of 2004. The Spanish edition, launched in mid-2005, is already in a second printing. The authors are making presentations at special events sponsored by universities, professional associations, and feminist networks in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and the United States.