front cover of Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life
Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life
Edited by Jacquelynn Baas
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Fluxus—from the Latin, meaning “to flow”—was a radical, international network of artists, composers, and designers in the 1960s and 1970s noted for blurring the boundaries between what we term “art” and what makes up everyday life. Following the work of American Fluxus founder George Maciunus, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life presents a variety of objects that express the Fluxus mission, while empowering readers to challenge the presumptions we bring to the concept and practice of art making.

Based on a large-scale traveling exhibition first organized at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, this book chronicles the movement in the form of an art self-help book, playfully providing answers to fourteen key questions such as “Art—what is it good for?” and “What am I?” via Fluxus works. Featuring over eighty color and black-and-white illustrations, accompanied by essays from curator Jacquelynn Baas, Fluxus scholars Hannah Higgins and Jacob Proctor, and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, this book will make an original contribution to our understanding of this provocative moment in modern art.

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Fluxus Forms
Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network
Natilee Harren
University of Chicago Press, 2020
“PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art. . . . Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples,” writes artist George Maciunas in his Fluxus manifesto of 1963. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making.

While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. With Fluxus Forms, Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.
 
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Flying Out of this World
Peter Greenaway
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Flights of fancy and fear, ecstatic highs, dreadful falls, and beckoning skies: these are the images British filmmaker Peter Greenaway collects and dissects in Flying out of This World, the second volume in a series developed by the Louvre and devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts.

As guest curator, Greenaway selected from the Louvre's collection of European prints and drawings ninety-one masterpieces that illustrate the human longing for flight. Greenaway's text, a compilation of brief commentaries that combine description, allusion, and interpretation, illuminate the images as depictions of flight desired and denied. Including works by Redon, Goya, Brueghel, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Rubens, Poussin, and Delacroix, this volume offers a combination of literary and visual art, of sight and insight.

A pursuit through the Bible, classical mythology, cosmology, theology, etymology, ornithology, and meteorology, Flying out of This World is not just an illustrated history of imagined flight, but a meditation on its meaning as a metaphor for the human condition, caught between a weighty body and a soaring spirit.
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Focus on Teaching
Edited by Walter Doyle and Thomas L. Good
University of Chicago Press, 1982

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Folk Religion in Japan
Continuity and Change
Ichiro Hori
University of Chicago Press, 1968
Ichiro Hori's is the first book in Western literature to portray how Shinto, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist elements, as well as all manner of archaic magical beliefs and practices, are fused on the folk level.

Folk religion, transmitted by the common people from generation to generation, has greatly conditioned the political, economic, and cultural development of Japan and continues to satisfy the emotional and religious needs of the people. Hori examines the organic relationship between the Japanese social structure—the family kinship system, village and community organizations—and folk religion. A glossary with Japanese characters is included in the index.
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Folklore and Folklife
An Introduction
Richard M. Dorson
University of Chicago Press, 1982
"This introduction to the study of folklore and folklife contains an inspiring and spirited mixture of essays, theoretical contributions, practical instructions, and pure encyclopedia articles. It is a very well put together book, written by eighteen researchers who have something to say. One can see here that it is competent educators who have come forward and are narrating. . . . All in all it is a very use-oriented handbook with attractive typography and layout."—Iorn Pio, Journal of American Folklore
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Folktales of Egypt
Hasan M. El-Shamy
University of Chicago Press, 1982
In this book Hasan M. El-Shamy has gathered the first authentic new collection of modern Egyptian folk narratives to appear in nearly a century. El-Shamy's English translations of these orally presented stories not only preserve their spirit, but give Middle Eastern lore the scholarly attention it has long deserved.

"This collection of seventy recently collected Egyptian tales is a major contribution to African studies and to international distribution studies of folktales. In the face of the recent anthropological trend to use folkloric materials for extra-folkloric purposes, the preeminence of the text must be asserted once more, and these are obviously authentic, straightforwardly translated, fully documented as to date of collection and social category of informant, and for all that . . . readable."—Daniel J. Crowley, Research in African Literatures

"Western knowledge of virtually all facets of contemporary Egyptian culture, much less the roots of that culture, is woefully inadequate. By providing an interesting, varied, and readable collection of Egyptian folktales and offering clear and sensible accounts of their background and meaning, this book renders a valuable service indeed."—Kenneth J. Perkins, International Journal of Oral History
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Folktales of England
Edited by Katharine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue
University of Chicago Press, 1968
If wonder tales are not abundant in England, other kinds of folktales thrive: local traditions, historical legends, humorous anecdotes. Many of the favorite tales which English-speaking peoples carry with them from childhood come from a long tradition—stories as familiar to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser, and their many contemporaries as they are to us.

"This is a fine, homely feast, immediately intelligble. . . ."—Times Educational Supplement

". . . should be of special concern to Americans since many of the tales are parallel to or the source of our own folk stories."—Choice

"This is entertainment, to be sure, but is also part of man's attempts to comprehend his world."—Quartet

"Folktales of England is by all odds the most satisfactory general collection of folktales to come out of England since the advent of modern collection and classification techniques."—Ernest W. Baughman, Journal of American Folklore
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Folktales of India
Edited by Brenda E. F. Beck, Peter J. Claus, Praphulladatta Goswami, and Jawahar
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Bringing together nearly one hundred tales translated from fourteen languages, Folktales of India opens the vast narrative world of Indian folklore to readers of English. Beck includes oral tales collected from tribal areas, peasant groups, urban areas, and remote villages in north and south India, and the distinctive boundary regions of Kashmir, Assam, and Manipur. The tales in this collection emphasize universal human characteristics—truthfulness, modesty, loyalty, courage, generosity, and honesty. Each story is meant to be savored individually with special attention given to the great range of motifs presented and the many distinct narrative styles used. Folktales of India offers a superb anthology of India's bountiful narrative tradition.

"This collection does an excellent job of representing India. . . . It is the type of book that can be enjoyed by all readers who love a well-told tale as well as by scholars of traditional narrative and scholars of India in general."—Hugh M. Flick, Jr., Asian Folklore Studies

"The stories collected here are representative, rich in structural subtlety, and endowed with fresh earthy humor."—Kunal Chakraborti, Contributions to Indian Sociology
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Folktales of India
Edited by Brenda E. F. Beck, Peter J. Claus, Praphulladatta Goswami, and Jawaharlal Handoo
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Bringing together nearly one hundred tales translated from fourteen languages, Folktales of India opens the vast narrative world of Indian folklore to readers of English. Beck includes oral tales collected from tribal areas, peasant groups, urban areas, and remote villages in north and south India, and the distinctive boundary regions of Kashmir, Assam, and Manipur. The tales in this collection emphasize universal human characteristics—truthfulness, modesty, loyalty, courage, generosity, and honesty. Each story is meant to be savored individually with special attention given to the great range of motifs presented and the many distinct narrative styles used. Folktales of India offers a superb anthology of India's bountiful narrative tradition.

"This collection does an excellent job of representing India. . . . It is the type of book that can be enjoyed by all readers who love a well-told tale as well as by scholars of traditional narrative and scholars of India in general."—Hugh M. Flick, Jr., Asian Folklore Studies

"The stories collected here are representative, rich in structural subtlety, and endowed with fresh earthy humor."—Kunal Chakraborti, Contributions to Indian Sociology
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Folktales of Ireland
Edited by Sean O'Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Few countries can boast such a plentitude of traditional folktales as Ireland. In 1935, the creation of The Irish Folklore Commission set in motion the first organized efforts of collecting and studying a multitude of folktales, both written as well as those of the Irish oral tradition. The Commission has collected well over a million pages of manuscripts. Folktales of Ireland offers chief archivist Sean O'Sullivan's representation of this awe-inspiring collection. These tales represent the first English language collection of Gaelic folktales.

"Without doubt the finest group of Irish tales that has yet been published in English."—The Guardian

"O'Sullivan writes out of an intimacy with his subject and an instinctive grasp of the language of the originals. He tells us that his archives contain more than a million and a half pages of manuscript. If Mr. O'Sullivan translates them, I'll read them."—Seamus Heaney, New Statesman

"The stories have an authentic folktale flavor and will satisfy both the student of folklore and the general reader."—Booklist

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Folktales of Ireland
Edited by Sean O'Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Few countries can boast such a plentitude of traditional folktales as Ireland. In 1935, the creation of The Irish Folklore Commission set in motion the first organized efforts of collecting and studying a multitude of folktales, both written as well as those of the Irish oral tradition. The Commission has collected well over a million pages of manuscripts. Folktales of Ireland offers chief archivist Sean O'Sullivan's representation of this awe-inspiring collection. These tales represent the first English language collection of Gaelic folktales.

"Without doubt the finest group of Irish tales that has yet been published in English."—The Guardian

"O'Sullivan writes out of an intimacy with his subject and an instinctive grasp of the language of the originals. He tells us that his archives contain more than a million and a half pages of manuscript. If Mr. O'Sullivan translates them, I'll read them."—Seamus Heaney, New Statesman

"The stories have an authentic folktale flavor and will satisfy both the student of folklore and the general reader."—Booklist

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Folktales of Norway
Edited by Reidar Christiansen
University of Chicago Press, 1964
Often lacking the clear episodic structure of folktales about talking animals and magic objects, legends grow from retellings of personal experiences. Christiansen isolated some seventy-seven legend types, and many of these are represented here in absorbing stories of St. Olaf, hidden treasures, witches, and spirits of the air, water, and earth. The ugly, massively strong, but slow-witted trolls are familiar to English-speaking readers. Less well-known, but the subject of an enormous number of legends, are the more manlike yet sinister "huldre-folk" who live in houses and try to woo human girls. These tales reflect the wildness of Norway, its mountains, forests, lakes, and sea, and the stalwart character of its sparse population.

"The translation is excellent, retaining the traditional Norwegian style . . . the tales themselves will also appeal to the interested layman."—Library Journal

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front cover of Folktales Told Around the World
Folktales Told Around the World
Richard M. Dorson
University of Chicago Press, 1978
All the selections in Richard M. Dorson's Folktales Told around the World were recorded by expert collectors, and the majority of them are published here for the first time. The tales presented are told in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North and South America, and Oceania. Unlike other collections derived in large part from literary texts, this volume meets the criteria of professional folklorists in assembling only authentic examples of folktales as they were orally told. Background information, notes on the narrators, and scholarly commentaries are provided to establish the folkloric character of the tales.
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Follow the Leader?
How Voters Respond to Politicians' Policies and Performance
Gabriel S. Lenz
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In a democracy, we generally assume that voters know the policies they prefer and elect like-minded officials who are responsible for carrying them out. We also assume that voters consider candidates' competence, honesty, and other performance-related traits. But does this actually happen? Do voters consider candidates’ policy positions when deciding for whom to vote? And how do politicians’ performances in office factor into the voting decision?
 
In Follow the Leader?, Gabriel S. Lenz sheds light on these central questions of democratic thought. Lenz looks at citizens’ views of candidates both before and after periods of political upheaval, including campaigns, wars, natural disasters, and episodes of economic boom and bust. Noting important shifts in voters’ knowledge and preferences as a result of these events, he finds that, while citizens do assess politicians based on their performance, their policy positions actually matter much less. Even when a policy issue becomes highly prominent, voters rarely shift their votes to the politician whose position best agrees with their own. In fact, Lenz shows, the reverse often takes place: citizens first pick a politician and then adopt that politician’s policy views. In other words, they follow the leader.
 
Based on data drawn from multiple countries, Follow the Leader? is the most definitive treatment to date of when and why policy and performance matter at the voting booth, and it will break new ground in the debates about democracy.
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Follow Your Conscience
The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties
Peter Cajka
University of Chicago Press, 2021
What is your conscience? Is it, as Peter Cajka asks in this provocative book, “A small, still voice? A cricket perched on your shoulder? An angel and devil who compete for your attention?” Going back at least to the thirteenth century, Catholics viewed their personal conscience as a powerful and meaningful guide to align their conduct with worldly laws. But, as Cajka shows in Follow Your Conscience, during the national cultural tumult of the 1960s, the divide between the demands of conscience and the demands of the law, society, and even the church itself grew increasingly perilous. As growing numbers of Catholics started to consider formerly stout institutions to be morally hollow—especially in light of the Vietnam War and the church’s refusal to sanction birth control—they increasingly turned to their own consciences as guides for action and belief. This abandonment of higher authority had radical effects on American society, influencing not only the broader world of Christianity, but also such disparate arenas as government, law, health care, and the very vocabulary of American culture. As this book astutely reveals, today’s debates over political power, religious freedom, gay rights, and more are all deeply infused by the language and concepts outlined by these pioneers of personal conscience.
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Following Searle on Twitter
How Words Create Digital Institutions
Adam Hodgkin
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Twitter allows us to build communities, track celebrities, raise our social profile, and promote a personal brand. Adam Hodgkin thinks Twitter is much more than a mere social media tool—it is a terrain ripe for a conceptual and theoretical analysis of our use of digital language. In Following Searle on Twitter, Hodgkin takes John Searle’s theory of speech acts as Status Function Declarations (SFDs)—speech acts that fulfill their meaning by saying the right words in the right context—as a probe for understanding Twitter’s institutional structure and the still-developing toolset that it provides for its members. He argues that Twitter is an institution built, constituted, and evolving through the use of SFDs. Searle’s speech act theories provide a framework for illuminating how Twitter membership arises, how users of Twitter relate to each other by following, and how increasingly complex content is conveyed with tweets. Using this framework, Hodgkin places language, action, intention, and responsibility at the core of the digital culture and the digital institutions that we are constructing.
 
Combining theoretical perspective with a down-to-earth exposition of present-day digital institutions, Following Searle on Twitter explores how all of our interactions with these emerging institutions are deeply rooted in language, and are the true foundation of social media and contemporary institutions.
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Food Hoarding in Animals
Stephen B. Vander Wall
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In this first comprehensive synthesis of the literature on food hoarding in animals, Stephen B. Vander Wall discusses how animals store food, how they use food and how this use affects individual fitness, why and how food hoarding evolved, how cached food is lost, mechanisms for protecting and recovering cached food, physiological and behavioral factors that influence hoarding, and the impact that hoarding animals have on plant populations and plant dispersal. He then provides detailed coverage of hoarding behavior across taxa—mammals, birds, and arthropods—to address issues in evolution, ecology, and behavior.

Drawings, photographs, and appendixes document complex and intrinsically interesting food-hoarding behaviors, and the bibliography of nearly 1,500 sources is itself an invaluable and unique reference.
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The Food Web of a Tropical Rain Forest
Edited by Douglas P. Reagan and Robert B. Waide
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Destruction of tropical rain forests has increased exponentially in recent years, as have efforts to conserve them. However, information essential to these conservation programs—an understanding of the population dynamics of the community at risk—is often unavailable to the scientists and resource managers who need it most.

This volume helps fill the gap by presenting a comprehensive description and analysis of the animal community of the tropical rain forest at El Verde, Puerto Rico. Building on more than a decade of field research, the contributors weave the complex strands of information about the energy flow within the forest—who eats whom—into a powerful tool for understanding community dynamics known as a food web. This systematic approach to organizing the natural histories of the many species at El Verde also reveals basic patterns and processes common to all rain forests, making this book a valuable contribution for anyone concerned with studying and protecting these fragile ecosystems.

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Food Webs
Stuart L. Pimm
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Food webs are diagrams depicting which species interact or in other words, who eats whom. An understanding of the structure and function of food webs is crucial for any study of how an ecosystem works, including attempts to predict which communities might be more vulnerable to disturbance and therefore in more immediate need of conservation.

Although it was first published twenty years ago, Stuart Pimm's Food Webs remains the clearest introduction to the study of food webs. Reviewing various hypotheses in the light of theoretical and empirical evidence, Pimm shows that even the most complex food webs follow certain patterns and that those patterns are shaped by a limited number of biological processes, such as population dynamics and energy flow. Pimm provides a variety of mathematical tools for unravelling these patterns and processes, and demonstrates their application through concrete examples. For this edition, he has written a new foreword covering recent developments in the study of food webs and demonstrates their continuing importance to conservation biology.
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Food Webs at the Landscape Level
Edited by Gary A. Polis, Mary E. Power, and Gary R. Huxel
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Scientists rely on food webs—complex networks that trace the flow of nutrients and energy between species and through ecosystems—to understand the infrastructure of ecological communities.

But given the complexities of food webs—think of following the flow of nutrients through the microbes, fungi, roots, worms, ants, and birds that pass over or through a single cubic meter of prairie soil—it's not difficult to see why most experiments on food-web dynamics focus on small, local habitats. Yet as this book convincingly shows, important insights come when scientists expand the temporal and spatial scope of their research to look at the ways energy, organisms, nutrients, and pollutants flow not just at the local level, but across whole landscapes—between and among food webs in a wide variety of habitats.

Paying special attention to the fertile boundaries between terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems, Food Webs at the Landscape Level not only shows what this new methodology means for ecology, conservation, and agriculture but also serves as a fitting tribute to Gary Polis and his major contributions to the field.
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Fools Are Everywhere
The Court Jester Around the World
Beatrice K. Otto
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In this lively work, Beatrice K. Otto takes us on a journey around the world in search of one of the most colorful characters in history—the court jester. Though not always clad in cap and bells, these witty, quirky characters crop up everywhere, from the courts of ancient China and the Mogul emperors of India to those of medieval Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. With a wealth of anecdotes, jokes, quotations, epigraphs, and illustrations (including flip art), Otto brings to light little-known jesters, highlighting their humanizing influence on people with power and position and placing otherwise remote historical figures in a more idiosyncratic, intimate light.

Most of the work on the court jester has concentrated on Europe; Otto draws on previously untranslated classical Chinese writings and other sources to correct this bias and also looks at jesters in literature, mythology, and drama. Written with wit and humor, Fools Are Everywhere is the most comprehensive look at these roguish characters who risked their necks not only to mock and entertain but also to fulfill a deep and widespread human and social need.
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For and Against Method
Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence
Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend
University of Chicago Press, 1999
The work that helped to determine Paul Feyerabend's fame and notoriety, Against Method, stemmed from Imre Lakatos's challenge: "In 1970 Imre cornered me at a party. 'Paul,' he said, 'you have such strange ideas. Why don't you write them down? I shall write a reply, we publish the whole thing and I promise you—we shall have a lot of fun.' " Although Lakatos died before he could write his reply, For and Against Method reconstructs his original counter-arguments from lectures and correspondence previously unpublished in English, allowing us to enjoy the "fun" two of this century's most eminent philosophers had, matching their wits and ideas on the subject of the scientific method.

For and Against Method opens with an imaginary dialogue between Lakatos and Feyerabend, which Matteo Motterlini has constructed, based on their published works, to synthesize their positions and arguments. Part one presents the transcripts of the last lectures on method that Lakatos delivered. Part two, Feyerabend's response, consists of a previously published essay on anarchism, which began the attack on Lakatos's position that Feyerabend later continued in Against Method. The third and longest section consists of the correspondence Lakatos and Feyerabend exchanged on method and many other issues and ideas, as well as the events of their daily lives, between 1968 and Lakatos's death in 1974.

The delight Lakatos and Feyerabend took in philosophical debate, and the relish with which they sparred, come to life again in For and Against Method, making it essential and lively reading for anyone interested in these two fascinating and controversial thinkers and their immense contributions to philosophy of science.

"The writings in this volume are of considerable intellectual importance, and will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the development of the philosophical views of Lakatos and Feyerabend, or indeed with the development of philosophy of science in general during this crucial period."—Donald Gillies, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (on the Italian edition)

"A stimulating exchange of letters between two philosophical entertainers."—Tariq Ali, The Independent

Imre Lakatos (1922-1974) was professor of logic at the London School of Economics. He was the author of Proofs and Refutations and the two-volume Philosophical Papers. Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was educated in Europe and held numerous teaching posts throughout his career. Among his books are Against Method; Science in a Free Society; Farewell to Reason; and Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.
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For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution
An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature
Edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers. This anthology is a landmark introduction to Japanese proletarian literature from that period.

Contextualized by introductory essays, forty expertly translated stories touch on topics like perilous factories, predatory bosses, ethnic discrimination, and the myriad indignities of poverty. Together, they show how even intensely personal issues form a pattern of oppression.  Fostering labor consciousness as part of an international leftist arts movement, these writers, lovers of literature, were also challenging the institution of modern literature itself. This anthology demonstrates the vitality of the “red decade” long buried in modern Japanese literary history.
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For Fear of the Fire
Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity
Françoise Meltzer
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Why are contemporary secular theorists so frequently drawn to saints, martyrs, and questions of religion? Why has Joan of Arc fascinated some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century? In a book that faces crucial issues in both critical and feminist inquiry, Françoise Meltzer uses the story of Joan as a guide for reading the postmodern nostalgia for a body that is intact and transparent. She argues that critics who place excessive emphasis on opposition and difference remain blind to their nostalgia for the pre-Cartesian idea that the body and mind are the same.

Engaging a number of theorists, and alternating between Joan's historical and cultural context, Meltzer also explores the ways in which postmodern thinkers question subjectivity. She argues that the way masculine subjects imagine Joan betrays their fear of death and necessitates the role of women as cultural others: enigmatic, mysterious, dark, and impossible. As such, Joan serves as a useful model of the limits and risks of subjectivity. For Meltzer, she is both the first modern and the last medieval figure. From the ecclesial jury that burned her, to the theorists of today who deny their attraction to the supernatural, the philosophical assumptions that inform Joan's story, as Meltzer ultimately shows, have changed very little.
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For Money and Elders
Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in Kenya
Robert W. Blunt
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Many observers of Kenya’s complicated history see causes for concern, from the use of public office for private gain to a constitutional structure historically lopsided towards the executive branch. Yet efforts from critics and academics to diagnose the country’s problems do not often consider what these fiscal and political issues mean to ordinary Kenyans. How do Kenyans express their own political understanding, make sense of governance, and articulate what they expect from their leaders?
 
In For Money and Elders, Robert W. Blunt addresses these questions by turning to the political, economic, and religious signs in circulation in Kenya today. He examines how Kenyans attempt to make sense of political instability caused by the uncertainty of authority behind everything from currency to title deeds. When the symbolic order of a society is up for grabs, he shows, violence may seem like an expedient way to enforce the authority of signs. Drawing on fertile concepts of sovereignty, elderhood, counterfeiting, acephaly, and more, Blunt explores phenomena as diverse as the destabilization of ritual “oaths,” public anxieties about Satanism with the advent of democratic reform, and mistrust of official signs. The result is a fascinating glimpse into Kenya’s past and present and a penetrating reflection on meanings of violence in African politics.
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For the Love of It
Amateuring and Its Rivals
Wayne C. Booth
University of Chicago Press, 1999
For the Love of It is a story not only of one intimate struggle between a man and his cello, but also of the larger struggle between a society obsessed with success and individuals who choose challenging hobbies that yield no payoff except the love of it.

"If, in truth, Booth is an amateur player now in his fifth decade of amateuring, he is certainly not an amateur thinker about music and culture. . . . Would that all of us who think and teach and care about music could be so practical and profound at the same time."—Peter Kountz, New York Times Book Review

"[T]his book serves as a running commentary on the nature and depth of this love, and all the connections it has formed in his life. . . . The music, he concludes, has become part of him, and that is worth the price."—Clea Simon, Boston Globe

"The book will be read with delight by every well-meaning amateur who has ever struggled. . . . Even general readers will come away with a valuable lesson for living: Never mind the outcome of a possibly vain pursuit; in the passion that is expended lies the glory."—John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

"Hooray for amateurs! And huzzahs to Wayne Booth for honoring them as they deserve. For the Love of It celebrates amateurism with genial philosophizing and pointed cultural criticism, as well as with personal reminiscences and self-effacing wit."—James Sloan Allen, USA Today

"Wayne Booth, the prominent American literary critic, has written the only sustained study of the interior experience of musical amateurism in recent years, For the Love of It. [It] succeeds as a meditation on the tension between the centrality of music in Booth's life, both inner and social, and its marginality. . . . It causes the reader to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the pleasures involved in making music; the satisfaction in playing well, the pride one takes in learning a difficult piece or passage or technique, the buzz in one's fingertips and the sense of completeness with the bow when the turn is done just right, the pleasure of playing with others, the comfort of a shared society, the joy of not just hearing, but making, the music, the wonder at the notes lingering in the air."—Times Literary Supplement
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For the Love of Mars
A Human History of the Red Planet
Matthew Shindell
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A tour of Mars in the human imagination, from ancient astrologers to modern explorers.

Mars and its secrets have fascinated and mystified humans since ancient times. Due to its vivid color and visibility, its geologic kinship with Earth, and its potential as our best hope for settlement, Mars embodies everything that inspires us about space and exploration. For the Love of Mars surveys the red planet’s place in the human imagination, beginning with ancient astrologers and skywatchers and ending in our present moment of exploration and virtual engagement.
 
National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell describes how historical figures across eras and around the world have made sense of this mysterious planet. We meet Mayan astrologer priests who incorporated Mars into seasonal calendars and religious ceremonies; Babylonian astrologers who discerned bad omens; figures of the Scientific Revolution who struggled to comprehend it as a world; Victorian astronomers who sought signs of intelligent life; and twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientists who have established a technological presence on its surface. Along the way, we encounter writers and artists from each of these periods who take readers and viewers along on imagined journeys to Mars.
 
By focusing on the diverse human stories behind the telescopes and behind the robots we know and love, Shindell shows how Mars exploration has evolved in ways that have also expanded knowledge about other facets of the universe. Captained by an engaging and erudite expert, For the Love of Mars is a captivating voyage through time and space for anyone curious about Curiosity and the red planet.
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For the Love of Mike
More of the Best of Mike Royko
Mike Royko
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In 1999, the University of Chicago Press published a collection of Mike Royko's columns, entitled One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko. The response was immediate and overwhelming—readers almost instantly began asking when the second volume of Royko columns would appear. With more than a hundred vintage Royko columns and a foreword by Roger Ebert, For the Love of Mike was the answer.

Royko, a nationally syndicated Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote for three major Chicago newspapers in the course of his 34 years as a daily columnist. Chosen from more than 7,000 columns, For the Love of Mike brings back more than a hundred vintage Royko pieces-most of which have not appeared since their initial publication-for readers across the country to enjoy. This second collection includes Royko's riffs on the consequences of accepting a White House dinner invitation (not surprisingly, he turned it down); his explanation of the notorious Ex-Cub Factor in World Series play; and his befuddlement at a private screening of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, to which he was invited by his pal Ebert, the screenplay's author. The new collection also illuminates Royko's favorite themes, topics he returned to again and again: his skewering of cultural trends, his love of Chicago, and his rage against injustice. By turns acerbic, hilarious, and deeply moving, Royko remains a writer of wit and passion who represents the best of urban journalism.

"To read these columns again is to have Mike back again, nudging, chuckling, wincing, deflating pomposity, sticking up for the little guy, defending good ideas against small-minded people," writes Roger Ebert in his foreword to the book. For the Love of Mike does indeed bring Mike back again, and until a Chicago newspaper takes up Ebert's suggestion that it begin reprinting each of Royko's columns, one a day, this collection will more than satisfy Royko's loyal readers.
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For the Many or the Few
The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy
John G. Matsusaka
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Direct democracy is alive and well in the United States. Citizens are increasingly using initiatives and referendums to take the law into their own hands, overriding their elected officials to set tax, expenditure, and social policies. John G. Matsusaka's For the Many or the Few provides the first even-handed and historically based treatment of the subject.

Drawing upon a century of evidence, Matsusaka argues against the popular belief that initiative measures are influenced by wealthy special interest groups that neglect the majority view. Examining demographic, political, and opinion data, he demonstrates how the initiative process brings about systematic changes in tax and expenditure policies of state and local governments that are generally supported by the citizens. He concludes that, by and large, direct democracy in the form of the initiative process works for the benefit of the many rather than the few.

An unprecedented, comprehensive look at the historical, empirical, and theoretical components of how initiatives function within our representative democracy to increase political competition while avoiding the tyranny of the majority, For the Many or the Few is a most timely and definitive work.
[more]

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For the Sake of Argument
Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief
Eugene Garver
University of Chicago Press, 2004
What role does reason play in our lives? What role should it play? And are claims to rationality liberating or oppressive? For the Sake of Argument addresses questions such as these to consider the relationship between thought and character. Eugene Garver brings Aristotle's Rhetoric to bear on practical reasoning to show how the value of such thinking emerges when members of communities deliberate together, persuade each other, and are persuaded by each other. That is to say, when they argue.

Garver roots deliberation and persuasion in political friendship instead of a neutral, impersonal framework of justice. Through incisive readings of examples in modern legal and political history, from Brown v. Board of Education to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he demonstrates how acts of deliberation and persuasion foster friendship among individuals, leading to common action amid diversity. In an Aristotelian sense, there is a place for pathos and ethos in rational thought. Passion and character have as pivotal a role in practical reasoning as logic and language.
[more]

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For the Sake of the Children
The Social Organization of Responsibility in the Hospital and the Home
Carol A. Heimer and Lisa R. Staffen
University of Chicago Press, 1998
For the Sake of the Children examines the social organization of responsibility by asking who takes responsibility for critically ill newborns. Drawing on medical records and interviews with parents and medical staff, the authors take us into two neonatal intensive care units, showing us the traumas of extreme medical measures and the sufferings of infants. The accounts are by turns heroic and disturbing as we see people trying to take charge of these infants' care, thinking about long-term plans, redefining their roles as adults and parents, and coping with sometimes awful contingencies.

Rather than treating responsibility as an ethical issue, the authors focus on how responsibility is socially produced and sustained. The authors ask: How do staff members encourage parents to take responsibility, but keep them from interfering in medical matters, and how do parents encourage staff vigilance when they are novices attempting to supervise the experts?

The authors conclude that it is not sufficient simply to be responsible individuals. Instead, we must learn how to be responsible in an organizational world, and organizations must learn how to support responsible individuals.

[more]

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Foragers and Farmers
Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe
Susan Alling Gregg
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Susan Alling Gregg presents a sophisticated model for the transition from hunter-gatherer societies tosettled agricultural communities in prehistoric Europe. She proposes that farmers and foragers must have encountered each other and interacted in a variety of ways for over a millennium as farming systems spread throughout the continent. Several variations of subsistence developed, such as foraging and hunting for part of the year and farming for the rest, or cooperative exchange arrangements between hunter-gatherers and farmers throughout the year.

Gregg examines anthropological, ecological, and archaeological dimensions of prehistoric population interaction. She then examines the ecological requirements of both crops and livestock and, in order to identify an optimal farming strategy for Early Neolithic populations, develops a computer simulation to examine various resource mixes. Turning to the foragers, she models the effects that interaction with the farmers would have had on the foragers' subsistence-settlement system.

Supporting her model with archaeological, ecological, and ethnobotanical evidence from southwest Germany, Gregg shows that when foragers and farmers occur contemporaneously, both need to be considered before either can be understood. Theoretically and methodologically, her work builds upon earlier studies of optimal diet and foraging strategy, extending the model to food-producing populations. The applicability of Gregg's generalized model for both wild and domestic resources reaches far beyond her case study of Early Neolithic Germany; it will interest both Old and New World archaeologists.
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Foraging
Behavior and Ecology
Edited by David W. Stephens, Joel S. Brown, and Ronald C. Ydenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Foraging is fundamental to animal survival and reproduction, yet it is much more than a simple matter of finding food; it is a biological imperative. Animals must find and consume resources to succeed, and they make extraordinary efforts to do so. For instance, pythons rarely eat, but when they do, their meals are large—as much as 60 percent larger than their own bodies. The snake’s digestive system is normally dormant, but during digestion metabolic rates can increase fortyfold. A python digesting quietly on the forest floor has the metabolic rate of thoroughbred in a dead heat. This and related foraging processes have broad applications in ecology, cognitive science, anthropology, and conservation biology—and they can be further extrapolated in economics, neurobiology, and computer science.

Foraging is the first comprehensive review of the topic in more than twenty years. A monumental undertaking, this volume brings together twenty-two experts from throughout the field to offer the latest on the mechanics of foraging, modern foraging theory, and foraging ecology. The fourteen essays cover all the relevant issues, including cognition, individual behavior, caching behavior, parental behavior, antipredator behavior, social behavior, population and community ecology, herbivory, and conservation. Considering a wide range of taxa, from birds to mammals to amphibians, Foraging will be the definitive guide to the field.
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Foraging for Survival
Yearling Baboons in Africa
Stuart A. Altmann
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Stuart A. Altmann presents the results of one of the most intensive investigations ever carried out on foraging behavior and its consequences for survival and reproduction.
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Forbidden City
Gail Mazur
University of Chicago Press, 2016
from “Mount Fuji”

A draughtsman’s draughtsman, Hokusai at 70
thought he’d begun to grasp the structures
 
of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way
plants grow, hoped that by 90 he’d have
penetrated to their essential nature.
 
And more, by 100, I will have reached the stage
where every dot, every mark I make will be
alive. You always loved that resolve, you’d repeat
 
joyfully—Hokusai’s utterance of faith
in work’s possibilities, its reward, that,
at 130, he’d perhaps have learned to draw.
 
Gail Mazur’s poems in Forbidden City  build an engaging meditative structure upon the elements of mortality and art, eloquently contemplating the relationship of art and life—and the dynamic possibilities of each in combination. At the collection’s heart is the poet’s long marriage to the artist Michael Mazur (1935–2009). A fascinating range of tone infuses the book—grieving, but clear-eyed rather than lugubrious, sometimes whimsical, even comical, and often exuberant. The note of pleasure, as in an old tradition enriched by transience, runs through the work, even in the final poem, “Grief,” where “our ravenous hold on the world” is a powerful central element.
[more]

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Forbidden History
The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe
Edited by John C. Fout
University of Chicago Press, 1992
How have society's values and attitudes toward sexuality and morality changed over the centuries? Why and how has the state sought to criminalize certain forms of sexual behavior and to control reproduction? How have churches tried to influence the state in its regulation of sexuality?

This anthology encompasses a broad range of essays on sexuality spanning European history from the fifteenth century to the present. The topics in this collection of fifteen essays have both historic importance and current relevance. All crucial issues in the regulation of sexuality are addressed, from incest to infanticide, from breast-feeding and women's sexuality to female prostitution, from pornography to reproductive politics, and from the first homosexual rights movement to AIDS.

Contributions from a diverse group of prominent scholars representing a variety of disciplines are included in this anthology. Essays by Randolph Trumbach on "Sex, Gender, and Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London"; Ruth Perry on "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth Century England"; Theo van der Meer on "Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth Century Amsterdam"; Robin Ann Sheets on "Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'"; and James W. Jones on "Discourses on and of AIDS in West Germany, 1986-1990."

Offering the most up-to-date scholarship from a significant and growing field, this collection is essential for both students and faculty in social history, family history, women's and gender studies, gay studies, sociology and literature.
[more]

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The Forbidden Image
An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm
Alain Besançon
University of Chicago Press, 2001

 

Philosophers and theologians have long engaged in intense debate and introspection over the representation of the deity, its possibilities and its proscriptions. The Forbidden Image traces the dual strains of “iconophilia” and iconoclasm, the privileging and prohibition of religious images, over a span of two and a half millennia in the West.

Alain Besançon’s work begins with a comprehensive examination of the status of the image in Greek, Judaic, Islamic, and Christian thought. The author then addresses arguments regarding the moral authority of the image in European Christianity from the medieval through the early modern periods. Besançon completes The Forbidden Image with an examination of how iconophilia and iconoclasm have been debated in the modern period.

“Even the reader who has heard something of the Byzantine quarrels about images and their theological background will be surprised by a learned and convincing interpretation of the works of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich in terms of religiously inspired iconoclasm. . . . This is an immensely rich and powerful masterpiece.”—Leszek Kolakowski, Times Literary Supplement

 

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Forbidden Journeys
Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers
Edited by Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher
University of Chicago Press, 1992
As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie's adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti's unsettling antifantasies in Speaking Likenesses, these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary stories, full of strange delights for readers of any age.

"Forbidden Journeys is not only a darkly entertaining book to read for the fantasies and anti-fantasies told, but also is a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies."—United Press International

"A service to feminists, to Victorian Studies, to children's literature and to children."—Beverly Lyon Clark, Women's Review of Books

"These are stories to laugh over, cheer at, celebrate, and wince at. . . . Forbidden Journeys is a welcome reminder that rebellion was still possible, and the editors' intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres 

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Forbidden Knowledge
Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy
Hannah Marcus
University of Chicago Press, 2020
An exploration of the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation.

Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities.
 
Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact, began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge.
[more]

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Forbidden Signs
American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language
Douglas C. Baynton
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Forbidden Signs explores American culture from the mid-nineteenth century to 1920 through the lens of one striking episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language among deaf people.

The ensuing debate over sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages," humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, Baynton found that although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language.

"Baynton's brilliant and detailed history, Forbidden Signs, reminds us that debates over the use of dialects or languages are really the linguistic tip of a mostly submerged argument about power, social control, nationalism, who has the right to speak and who has the right to control modes of speech."—Lennard J. Davis, The Nation

"Forbidden Signs is replete with good things."—Hugh Kenner, New York Times Book Review
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The Force of Truth
Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault
Daniele Lorenzini
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth.

Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today.
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Foreign Aid
Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics
Carol Lancaster
University of Chicago Press, 2006

A twentieth-century innovation, foreign aid has become a familiar and even expected element in international relations. But scholars and government officials continue to debate why countries provide it: some claim that it is primarily a tool of diplomacy, some argue that it is largely intended to support development in poor countries, and still others point out its myriad newer uses. Carol Lancaster effectively puts this dispute to rest here by providing the most comprehensive answer yet to the question of why governments give foreign aid. She argues that because of domestic politics in aid-giving countries, it has always been—and will continue to be—used to achieve a mixture of different goals. 

Drawing on her expertise in both comparative politics and international relations and on her experience as a former public official, Lancaster provides five in-depth case studies—the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Denmark—that demonstrate how domestic politics and international pressures combine to shape how and why donor governments give aid. In doing so, she explores the impact on foreign aid of political institutions, interest groups, and the ways governments organize their giving. Her findings provide essential insight for scholars of international relations and comparative politics, as well as anyone involved with foreign aid or foreign policy.

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Foreign Direct Investment
Edited by Kenneth A. Froot
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Over the past decade, foreign direct investment (FDI) around the world has nearly tripled, and with this surge have come dramatic shifts in FDI flows. In Foreign Direct Investment, distinguished economists look at changes in FDI, including historical trends, specific country experiences, developments in the semiconductor industry, and variations in international mergers and acquisitions.

Chapters cover such topics as theoretical accounts of FDI patterns, the growth of multinational enterprises, and the FDI experiences of Japan, the United States, and selected developing countries. This volume will interest economists, government officials, and business people concerned with FDI today.
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Foreign Investment in American Telecommunications
J. Gregory Sidak
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Restrictions on foreign investment in U.S. telecommunications firms have harmed the interests of American consumers and investors, argues J. Gregory Sidak in this convincing study. Sidak shows why these restrictions, originally intended to protect America from the perils of wireless telegraphy by foreign agents, should be repealed.

Basing his analysis on legislative history, statutory and constitutional interpretation, and finance and trade theory, Sidak shows that these restrictions no longer serve their national security purpose (if they ever did). Instead they deny American consumers lower prices and more robust innovation, hamper access of American investors to foreign telecommunications markets, and unconstitutionally impinge on freedom of speech. Sidak's study encompasses the Telecommunications Act of 1996, recent global mergers such as British Telecom-MCI, and the 1997 World Trade Organization agreement to liberalize trade in telecommunications services.
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Foreign News
Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents
Ulf Hannerz
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Foreign News gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the practices of the global tribe we call foreign correspondents. Exploring how they work, Ulf Hannerz also compares the ways correspondents and anthropologists report from one part of the world to another.

Hannerz draws on extensive interviews with correspondents in cities as diverse as Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He shows not only how different story lines evolve in different correspondent beats, but also how the correspondents' home country and personal interests influence the stories they write. Reporting can go well beyond coverage of a specific event, using the news instead to reveal deeper insights into a country or a people to link them to long-term trends or structures of global significance. Ultimately, Hannerz argues that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents can learn from each other in their efforts to educate a public about events and peoples far beyond our homelands.

The result of nearly a decade's worth of work, Foreign News is a provocative study that will appeal to both general readers and those concerned with globalization.
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The Foreign Policy Disconnect
What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get
Benjamin I. Page with Marshall M. Bouton
University of Chicago Press, 2006

With world affairs so troubled, what kind of foreign policy should the United States pursue? Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton look for answers in a surprising place: among the American people. Drawing on a series of national surveys conducted between 1974 and 2004, Page and Bouton reveal that—contrary to conventional wisdom—Americans generally hold durable, coherent, and sensible opinions about foreign policy. Nonetheless, their opinions often stand in opposition to those of policymakers, usually because of different interests and values, rather than superior wisdom among the elite. The Foreign Policy Disconnect argues that these gaps between leaders and the public are harmful, and that by using public opinion as a guideline policymakers could craft a more effective, sustainable, and democratic foreign policy. 

Page and Bouton support this argument by painting a uniquely comprehensive portrait of the military, diplomatic, and economic foreign policies Americans favor. They show, for example, that protecting American jobs is just as important to the public as security from attack, a goal the current administration seems to pursue single-mindedly. And contrary to some officials’ unilateral tendencies, the public consistently and overwhelmingly favors cooperative multilateral policy and participation in international treaties. Moreover, Americans’ foreign policy opinions are seldom divided along the usual lines: majorities of virtually all social, ideological, and partisan groups seek a policy that pursues the goals of security and justice through cooperative means. Written in a clear and engaging style, The Foreign Policy Disconnect calls, in an original voice, for a more democratic approach to creating such a policy.

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Forensics of Capital
Michael Ralph
University of Chicago Press, 2015
As one of Africa’s few democracies, Senegal has long been thought of as a leader of moral, political, and economic development on the continent. We tend to assume that any such nation has achieved favorable international standing due to its own merits. In Forensics of Capital, Michael Ralph upends this kind of conventional thinking, showing how Senegal’s diplomatic standing was strategically forged in the colonial and postcolonial eras at key periods of its history and is today entirely contingent on the consensus of wealthy and influential nations and international lending agencies.
           
Ralph examines Senegal’s crucial and pragmatic decisions related to its development and how they garnered international favor, decisions such as its opposition to Soviet involvement in African liberation—despite itself being a socialist state—or its support for the US-led war on terror—despite its population being predominately Muslim. He shows how such actions have given Senegal an inflated political and economic position and status as a highly credit-worthy nation even as its domestic economy has faltered. Exploring these and many other aspects of Senegal’s political economy and its interface with the international community, Ralph demonstrates that the international reputation of any nation—not just Senegal—is based on deep structural biases. 
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The Forest
Susan Stewart
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Susan Stewart plumbs human history in an attempt to articulate the way language, memory, and art join in evoking consciousness. The Forest is about violence and memory: the violence we do to our surroundings and to ourselves; and the propensity of the human mind to exploit and rationalize in its longing for truth.
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Forests
The Shadow of Civilization
Robert Pogue Harrison
University of Chicago Press, 1992
In this wide-ranging exploration of the role of forests in Western thought, Robert Pogue Harrison enriches our understanding not only of the forest's place in the cultural imagination of the West, but also of the ecological dilemmas that now confront us so urgently. Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth.

"Forests is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The Country and the City. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.—William Cronon, Yale Review

"Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."—John Haines, The New York Times Book Review
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Forever 17
Coming of Age in the German Asylum System
Ulrike Bialas
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An exploration of how age affects the experience and life prospects of asylum-seekers in Germany.
 
Heartbreaking images of children in distress have propelled some of the most urgent calls for action on immigration crises, and that compassion often affects how state asylum policies are structured. In Germany, for example, the immigration system is engineered to protect minors, which leads to unintended consequences for migrants.
 
In Forever 17, Ulrike Bialas follows young African and Central Asian migrants in Germany as they navigate that system. Without official paperwork or even, in many cases, knowledge of their exact age, migrants must decide how to present their complicated life stories to government officials. They quickly realize that their age can have an outsized effect on the outcome of their cases. A migrant under 18, for example, can’t be deported, but might instead be placed in a youth home, where they will be subject to strict curfew laws. An 18-year-old adult, on the other hand, can get permission to work, but not opportunities to go to school.
 
Regardless of their age—actual or assumed—migrants face great difficulties. Those classified as minors must live with the psychological burden of being treated like children, while those classified as adults must live without the practical support and legal protections reserved for minors. The significance of age stands in stark contrast to the ambiguities inherent in its determination. Though Germany’s infamous bureaucracy is designed to issue clear statements about refugees and migrants, the truth is often more complicated, and officials are forced to grapple with the difficult implications of their decisions. Ultimately, Bialas shows, policies surrounding asylum seekers fall dramatically short of their humanitarian ideals. Even those policies designed to help the most vulnerable can lead to outcomes that drastically limit the possibilities for migrants in real need of protection and keep them from leading fulfilling lives.
 
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Forever Open, Clear, and Free
The Struggle for Chicago's Lakefront
Lois Wille
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Of the thirty miles of Lake Michigan shoreline within the city limits of Chicago, twenty-four miles is public park land. The crown jewels of its park system, the lakefront parks bewitch natives and visitors alike with their brisk winds, shady trees, sandy beaches, and rolling waves. Like most good things, the protection of the lakefront parks didn't come easy, and this book chronicles the hard-fought and never-ending battles Chicago citizens have waged to keep them "forever open, clear, and free."

Illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, Wille's book tells how Chicago's lakefront has survived a century of development. The story serves as a warning to anyone who thinks the struggle for the lakefront is over, or who takes for granted the beauty of its public beaches and parks.

"A thoroughly fascinating and well-documented narrative which draws the reader into the sights, smells and sounds of Chicago's story. . . . Everyone who cares about the development of land and its conservation will benefit from reading Miss Wille's book."—Daniel J. Shannon, Architectural Forum

"Not only good reading, it is also a splendid example of how to equip concerned citizens for their necessary participation in the politics of planning and a more livable environment."—Library Journal
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The Forge and the Crucible
The Origins and Structure of Alchemy
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1979
Primitive man's discovery of the ability to change matter from one state to another brought about a profound change in spiritual behavior. In The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade follows the ritualistic adventures of these ancient societies, adventures rooted in the people's awareness of an awesome new power.

The new edition of The Forge and the Crucible contains an updated appendix, in which Eliade lists works on Chinese alchemy published in the past few years. He also discusses the importance of alchemy in Newton's scientific evolution.
[more]

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Forgery, Replica, Fiction
Temporalities of German Renaissance Art
Christopher S. Wood
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Today we often identify artifacts with the period when they were made. In more traditional cultures, however, such objects as pictures, effigies, and buildings were valued not as much for their chronological age as for their perceived links to the remote origins of religions, nations, monasteries, and families. As a result, Christopher Wood argues, premodern Germans tended not to distinguish between older buildings and their newer replacements, or between ancient icons and more recent forgeries.
             But Wood shows that over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, emerging replication technologies—such as woodcut, copper engraving, and movable type—altered the relationship between artifacts and time.  Mechanization highlighted the artifice, materials, and individual authorship necessary to create an object, calling into question the replica’s ability to represent a history that was not its own. Meanwhile, print catalyzed the new discipline of archaeological scholarship, which began to draw sharp distinctions between true and false claims about the past. Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.
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Forgetful of Their Sex
Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this remarkable study of over 2,200 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church by examining factors such as family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, and motherhood. The result is a unique depiction of the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society that led to recognition of sanctity.

"A tremendous piece of scholarship. . . . This journey through more than 2,000 saints is anything but dull. Along the way, Schulenburg informs our ideas regarding the role of saints in the medieval psyche, gender-specific identification, and the heroics of virginity." —Library Journal

"[This book] will be a kind of 'roots' experience for some readers. They will hear the voices, haunted and haunting, of their distant ancestors and understand more about themselves." —Christian Science Monitor

"This fascinating book reaches far beyond the history of Christianity to recreate the 'herstory' of a whole gender." —Kate Saunders, The Independent
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Forging Gay Identities
Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994
Elizabeth A. Armstrong
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Unlike many social movements, the gay and lesbian struggle for visibility and rights has succeeded in combining a unified group identity with the celebration of individual differences. Forging Gay Identities explores how this happened, tracing the evolution of gay life and organizations in San Francisco from the 1950s to the mid-1990s.
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Forgive and Remember
Managing Medical Failure, 2nd Edition
Charles L. Bosk
University of Chicago Press, 2003
On its initial publication, Forgive and Remember emerged as the definitive study of the training and lives of young surgeons. Now with an extensive new preface, epilogue, and appendix by the author, reflecting on the changes that have taken place since the book's original publication, this updated second edition of Charles L. Bosk's classic study is as timely as ever.
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Forgiveness
Vladimir Jankélévitch
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has only recently begun to receive his due from the English-speaking world, thanks in part to discussions of his thought by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Paul Ricoeur. His international readers have long valued his unique, interdisciplinary approach to philosophy’s greatest questions and his highly readable writing style.
Originally published in 1967, Le Pardon, or Forgiveness, is one of Jankélévitch’s most influential works. In it, he characterizes the ultimate ethical act of forgiving as behaving toward the perpetrator as if he or she had never committed the action, rather than merely forgetting or rationalizing it—a controversial notion when considering events as heinous as the Holocaust.
Like so many of Jankélévitch’s works, Forgiveness transcends standard treatments of moral problems, not simply generating a treatise on one subject but incorporating discussions of topics such as free will, giving, creativity, and temporality. Translator Andrew Kelley masterfully captures Jankélévitch’s melodic prose and, in a substantive introduction, reviews his life and intellectual contributions. Forgiveness is an essential part of that legacy, and this indispensable English translation provides key tools for understanding one of the great Western philosophers of the twentieth century.
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The Forgotten Frontier
A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier
Andrew C. Hess
University of Chicago Press, 1978

The sixteenth-century Mediterranean witnessed the expansion of both European and Middle Eastern civilizations, under the guises of the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman empire. Here, Andrew C. Hess considers the relations between these two dynasties in light of the social, economic, and political affairs at the frontiers between North Africa and the Iberian peninsula.

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The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox
A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in FDR's Washington
John Knox
University of Chicago Press, 2002
"My name will survive as long as man survives, because I am writing the greatest diary that has ever been written. I intend to surpass Pepys as a diarist."

When John Frush Knox (1907-1997) wrote these words, he was in the middle of law school, and his attempt at surpassing Pepys—part scrapbook, part social commentary, and part recollection—had already reached 750 pages. His efforts as a chronicler might have landed in a family attic had he not secured an eminent position after graduation as law clerk to Justice James C. McReynolds—arguably one of the most disagreeable justices to sit on the Supreme Court—during the tumultuous year when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to "pack" the Court with justices who would approve his New Deal agenda. Knox's memoir instead emerges as a record of one of the most fascinating periods in American history.

The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox—edited by Dennis J. Hutchinson and David J. Garrow—offers a candid, at times naïve, insider's view of the showdown between Roosevelt and the Court that took place in 1937. At the same time, it marvelously portrays a Washington culture now long gone. Although the new Supreme Court building had been open for a year by the time Knox joined McReynolds' staff, most of the justices continued to work from their homes, each supported by a small staff. Knox, the epitome of the overzealous and officious young man, after landing what he believes to be a dream position, continually fears for his job under the notoriously rude (and nakedly racist) justice. But he soon develops close relationships with the justice's two black servants: Harry Parker, the messenger who does "everything but breathe" for the justice, and Mary Diggs, the maid and cook. Together, they plot and sidestep around their employer's idiosyncrasies to keep the household running while history is made in the Court.

A substantial foreword by Dennis Hutchinson and David Garrow sets the stage, and a gallery of period photos of Knox, McReynolds, and other figures of the time gives life to this engaging account, which like no other recaptures life in Washington, D.C., when it was still a genteel southern town.

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The Forgotten Sense
Meditations on Touch
Pablo Maurette
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Of all the senses, touch is the most ineffable—and the most neglected in Western culture, all but ignored by philosophers and artists over millennia. Yet it is also the sense that links us most intimately to the world around us, from our mother’s caress when we’re born to the gentle lowering of our eyelids after death.

The Forgotten Sense gives touch its due, addressing it in multifarious ways through a series of six essays. Literary in feel, ambitious in conception, admirable in their range of reference and insight, these meditations address questions fundamental to the understanding of touch: What do we mean when we say that an artwork touches us? How does language affect our understanding of touch? Is the skin the deepest part of the human body? Can we philosophize about a kiss? To aid him in answering these questions, Pablo Maurette recruits an impressive roster of cultural figures from throughout history: Homer, Lucretius, Chrétien de Troyes, Melville, Sir Thomas Browne, Knausgaard, Michel Henry and many others help him unfurl the underestimated importance of the sense of touch and tactile experience.

​The resulting book is essay writing at its best—exploratory, surprising, dazzling, a reading experience like no other. You will come away from it with a new appreciation of touch, and a new way of understanding our interactions with the world around us.
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Format Friction
Perspectives on the Shellac Disc
Gavin Williams
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The first book to consider the shellac disc as a global format.

With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.

Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself remained a novelty. The very basis of this early sound reproduction technology was friction, an elemental materiality of sound shaped through cultural practice. Using friction as a lens, Gavin Williams illuminates the environments plundered, the materials seized, and the ears entangled in the making of a sound format. Bringing together material, political, and music history, Format Friction decenters the story of a beloved medium, and so explores new ways of understanding listening in technological culture more broadly.
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Formations of Violence
The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
Allen Feldman
University of Chicago Press, 1991

"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist

"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review

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Forming Humanity
Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition
Jennifer A. Herdt
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Now in paperback, Forming Humanity reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought.

Kant’s proclamation of humankind’s emergence from “self-incurred immaturity” left his contemporaries with a puzzle: What models should we use to sculpt ourselves if we no longer look to divine grace or received authorities?  Deftly uncovering the roots of this question in Rhineland mysticism, Pietist introspection, and the rise of the bildungsroman, Jennifer A. Herdt reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought. This was no simple process of secularization, in which human beings took responsibility for something they had earlier left in the hands of God.  Rather, theorists of bildung, from Herder through Goethe to Hegel, championed human agency in self-determination while working out the social and political implications of our creation in the image of God.  While bildung was invoked to justify racism and colonialism by stigmatizing those deemed resistant to self-cultivation, it also nourished ideals of dialogical encounter and mutual recognition.  Herdt reveals how the project of forming humanity lives on in our ongoing efforts to grapple with this complicated legacy.
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Forms of Attention
Botticelli and Hamlet
Frank Kermode
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Sir Frank Kermode, the British scholar, instructor, and author, was an inspired critic. Forms of Attention is based on a series of three lectures he gave on canon formation, or how we choose what art to value. The essay on Botticelli traces the artist’s sudden popularity in the nineteenth century for reasons that have more to do with poetry than painting. In the second essay, Kermode reads Hamlet from a very modern angle, offering a useful (and playful) perspective for a contemporary audience. The final essay is a defense of literary criticism as a process and conversation that, while often conflating knowledge with opinion, keeps us reading great art and working with—and for—literature.
 
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Forms of Expansion
Recent Long Poems by Women
Lynn Keller
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Expanding the boundaries of both genre and gender, contemporary American women are writing long poems in a variety of styles that repossess history, reconceive female subjectivity, and revitalize poetry itself. In the first book devoted to long poems by women, Lynn Keller explores this rich and evolving body of work, offering revealing discussions of the diverse traditions and feminist concerns addressed by poets ranging from Rita Dove and Sharon Doubiago to Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker, and Susan Howe.

Arguing that women poets no longer feel intimidated by the traditional associations of long poems with the heroic, public realm or with great artistic ambition, Keller shows how the long poem's openness to sociological, anthropological, and historical material makes it an ideal mode for exploring women's roles in history and culture. In addition, the varied forms of long poems—from sprawling free verse epics to regular sonnet sequences to highly disjunctive experimental collages—make this hybrid genre easily adaptable to diverse visions of feminism and of contemporary poetics.
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Forms of Nationhood
The Elizabethan Writing of England
Richard Helgerson
University of Chicago Press, 1992
What have poems and maps, law books and plays, ecclesiastical polemics and narratives of overseas exploration to do with one another? By most accounts, very little. They belong to different genres and have been appropriated by scholars in different disciplines. But, as Richard Helgerson shows in this ambitious and wide-ranging study, all were part of an extraordinary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century enterprise: the project of making England.
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Fort Necessity
David Gewanter
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Who are the lords of labor? The owners, or the working bodies? In this smart, ambitious, and powerful book, David Gewanter reads the body as creator and destroyer—ultimately, as the broken mold of its own work.

Haunted by his father’s autopsy of a workman he witnessed as a child, Gewanter forges intensely personal poems that explore the fate of our laboring bodies, from the Carnegie era’s industrial violence and convict labor to our present day of broken trust, profiteering, and the Koch brothers. Guided by a moral vision to document human experience, this unique collection takes raw historical materials—newspaper articles, autobiography and letters, court testimony, a convict ledger, and even a menu—and shapes them into sonnets, ballads, free verse, and prose poems. The title poem weaves a startling lyric sequence from direct testimony by steelworkers and coal-miners, strikers and members of prison chain-gangs, owners and anarchists, revealing an American empire that feeds not just on oil and metal, but also on human energy, impulse, and flesh. Alongside Gewanter’s family are hapless souls who dream of fortune, but cannot make their fates, confronting instead the dark outcomes of love, loyalty, fantasy, and betrayal. 
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Fortune Is a Woman
Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
University of Chicago Press, 1999
"Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under, you've got to knock her around some."—Niccolò Machiavelli

Hanna Pitkin's provocative and enduring study of Machiavelli was the first to systematically place gender at the center of its exploration of his political thought. In this edition, Pitkin adds a new afterword, in which she discusses the book's critical reception and situates the book's arguments in the context of recent interpretations of Machiavelli's thought.

"A close and often brilliant exegesis of Machiavelli's writings."—The American Political Science Review
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The Fortunes of Liberalism
Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 1991

The Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions." The collapse of  Eastern Europe dramatically captured in the tearing down of  the Berlin Wall. F. A. Hayek, "grand old man of capitalism" and founder of the classical liberal, free-market revival which ignited and inspired these world events, forcefully predicted their occurrence in writings such as The Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944.

Hayek's well-known social and political philosophy—in particular his long-held pessimistic view of the prospects of socialism, irrefutably vindicated by the recent collapse of the Eastern bloc—is fully grounded in the Austrian approach to economics. In this new collection, Hayek traces his intellectual roots to the Austrian school, the century-old tradition founded at the University of Vienna by Carl Menger, and links it to the modern rebirth of classical liberal or libertarian thought.

As Hayek reminds us, the cornerstone of modern economics—the theory of value and price—"represents a consistent continuation of the fundamental principles handed down by the Vienna school." Here, in this first modern collection of essays on the Austrian school by one of its preeminent figures, is the genesis of this tradition and its place in intellectual history.

Reflections on Hayek's days as a young economic theorist in Vienna, his opening address to the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, and essays on former teachers and other leading figures in the Austrian school are included in volume 4. Two hitherto unavailable memoirs, "The Economics of the 1920s as Seen from Vienna," published here for the first time, and "The Rediscovery of Freedom: Personal Recollections," available for the first time in English, make this collection invaluable for Hayek scholars.

Hayek's writings continue to provide an invaluable education in a subject which is nothing less than the development of the modern world.

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Fossil Ecosystems of North America
A Guide to the Sites and Their Extraordinary Biotas
John R. Nudds and Paul A. Selden
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The fossil record affords a fascinating glimpse at past environments and the kinds of plants and animals that inhabited them. Some sites, for instance, contain nearly complete preserved records of ancient life. Fourteen of these remarkable fossil depositories are found in North America, including Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, Mazon Creek in Illinois, and Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles.

Fossil Ecosystems of North America describes these and eleven other sites that range across the continent.
John R. Nudds and Paul A. Selden introduce each site and place the fossil findings in geologic and evolutionary context. They go on to describe the history of research at each site—the sedimentology, stratigraphy, biota, paleoecology—and offer comparisons to other localities of similar age or environment. Fossil Ecosystems of North America also includes an appendix of museums at which readers can see specimens from the sites and suggestions for visiting the sites in person. In some cases, new specimens can still be collected from these sites by professionals and amateurs alike.
Accessible and informative, this guide to Fossil-Lagerstätten will appeal to expert scientists and adventuresome lay paleontologists alike.
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Fossils in the Making
Vertebrate Taphonomy and Paleoecology
Anna K. Behrensmeyer and Andrew P. Hill
University of Chicago Press, 1988
One of the first interdisciplinary discussions of taphonomy (the study of how fossil assemblages are formed) and paleoecology (the reconstruction of ancient ecosystems), this volume helped establish these relatively new disciplines. It was originally published as part of the influential Prehistoric Archeology and Ecology series.

"Taphonomy is plainly here to stay, and this book makes a first class introduction to its range and appeal."—Anthony Smith, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
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Foucault and His Interlocutors
Edited by Arnold I. Davidson
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Containing the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on epistemology and politics, this book also features the most significant essays by the most important French thinkers who influenced and were influenced by Foucault. Foucault's teachers, colleagues, and collaborators take up his major claims, from his first to final works, and provide us with the authoritative context in which to understand Foucault's writings.

This volume also includes several important works by Foucault previously unpublished in English. The other contributors are Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Michel Serres, and Paul Veyne.

Here for the first time is the French Foucault.

This volume offers lucid and important texts that will appeal to students and professors at every level of study. It is essential reading for all scholars of twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory.
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Foucault and Political Reason
Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government
Edited by Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Despite the enormous influence of Michel Foucault in gender studies, social theory, and cultural studies, his work has been relatively neglected in the study of politics. Although he never published a book on the state, in the late 1970s Foucault examined the technologies of power used to regulate society and the ingenious recasting of power and agency that he saw as both consequence and condition of their operation.

These twelve essays provide a critical introduction to Foucault's work on politics, exploring its relevance to past and current thinking about liberal and neo-liberal forms of government. Moving away from the great texts of liberal political philosophy, this book looks closely at the technical means with which the ideals of liberal political rationalities have been put into practice in such areas as schools, welfare, and the insurance industry.

This fresh approach to one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century is essential reading for anyone interested in social and cultural theory, sociology, and politics.
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Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Gender and the Seductions of Islamism
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.

In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker.
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Foucault and the Kamasutra
The Courtesan, the Dandy, and the Birth of Ars Erotica as Theater in India
Sanjay K. Gautam
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The Kamasutra is best known in the West for its scandalous celebration of unbridled sensuality. Yet, there is much, much more to it; embedded in the text is a vision of the city founded on art and aesthetic pleasure. In Foucault and the "Kamasutra", Sanjay K. Gautam lays out the nature and origin of this iconic Indian text and engages in the first serious reading of its relationship with Foucault.

Gautam shows how closely intertwined the history of erotics in Indian culture is with the history of theater-aesthetics grounded in the discourse of love, and Foucault provides the framework for opening up an intellectual horizon of Indian thought. To do this, Gautam looks to the history of three inglorious characters in classical India: the courtesan and her two closest male companions—her patron, the dandy consort; and her teacher and advisor, the dandy guru. Foucault’s distinction between erotic arts and the science of sexuality drives Gautam’s exploration of the courtesan as a symbol of both sexual-erotic and aesthetic pleasure. In the end, by entwining together Foucault’s works on the history of sexuality in the West and the classical Indian texts on eros, Gautam transforms our understanding of both, even as he opens up new ways of investigating erotics, aesthetics, gender relations, and subjectivity.
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The Foucault Effect
Studies in Governmentality
Edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Based on Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge. In these lectures, Foucault examines the art or activity of government both in its present form and within a historical perspective as well as the different ways governmentality has been made thinkable and practicable.

Foucault's thoughts on political discourse and governmentality are supplemented by the essays of internationally renowned scholars. United by the common influence of Foucault's approach, they explore the many modern manifestations of government: the reason of state, police, liberalism, security, social economy, insurance, solidarity, welfare, risk management, and more. The central theme is that the object and the activity of government are not instinctive and natural things, but things that have been invented and learned.

The Foucault Effect analyzes the thought behind practices of government and argues that criticism represents a true force for change in attitudes and actions, and that extending the limits of some practices allows the invention of others. This unique and extraordinarily useful collection of articles and primary materials will open the way for a whole new set of discussions of the work of Michel Foucault as well as the status of liberalism, social policy, and insurance.
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Foundations of Animal Behavior
Classic Papers with Commentaries
Edited by Lynne D. Houck and Lee C. Drickamer
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Beginning with Darwin's work in the 1870s, Foundations of Animal Behavior selects the most important works from the discipline's first hundred years—forty-four classic papers—and presents them in facsimile, tracing the development of the field. These papers are classics because they either founded a line of investigation, established a basic method, or provided a new approach to an important research question.

The papers are divided into six sections, each introduced by prominent researchers. Sections one and two cover the origins and history of the field and the emergence of basic methods and approaches. They provide a background for sections three through six, which focus on development and learning; neural and hormonal mechanisms of behavior; sensory processes, orientation, and communication; and the evolution of behavior.

This outstanding collection will serve as the basis for undergraduate and graduate seminars and as a reference for researchers in animal behavior, whether they focus on ethology, behavioral ecology, comparative psychology, or anthropology.

Published in association with the Animal Behavior Society

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Foundations of Biogeography
Classic Papers with Commentaries
Edited by Mark V. Lomolino, Dov F. Sax, and James H. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Foundations of Biogeography provides facsimile reprints of seventy-two works that have proven fundamental to the development of the field. From classics by Georges-Louis LeClerc Compte de Buffon, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin to equally seminal contributions by Ernst Mayr, Robert MacArthur, and E. O. Wilson, these papers and book excerpts not only reveal biogeography's historical roots but also trace its theoretical and empirical development. Selected and introduced by leading biogeographers, the articles cover a wide variety of taxonomic groups, habitat types, and geographic regions. Foundations of Biogeography will be an ideal introduction to the field for beginning students and an essential reference for established scholars of biogeography, ecology, and evolution.

List of Contributors
John C. Briggs, James H. Brown, Vicki A. Funk, Paul S. Giller, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Lawrence R. Heaney, Robert Hengeveld, Christopher J. Humphries, Mark V. Lomolino, Alan A. Myers, Brett R. Riddle, Dov F. Sax, Geerat J. Vermeij, Robert J. Whittaker
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Foundations of Ecology
Classic Papers with Commentaries
Edited by Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Assembled here for the first time in one volume are forty classic papers that have laid the foundations of modern ecology. Whether by posing new problems, demonstrating important effects, or stimulating new research, these papers have made substantial contributions to an understanding of ecological processes, and they continue to influence the field today.

The papers span nearly nine decades of ecological research, from 1887 on, and are organized in six sections: foundational papers, theoretical advances, synthetic statements, methodological developments, field studies, and ecological experiments. Selections range from Connell's elegant account of experiments with barnacles to Watt's encyclopedic natural history, from a visionary exposition by Grinnell of the concept of niche to a seminal essay by Hutchinson on diversity.

Six original essays by contemporary ecologists and a historian of ecology place the selections in context and discuss their continued relevance to current research. This combination of classic papers and fresh commentaries makes Foundations of Ecology both a convenient reference to papers often cited today and an essential guide to the intellectual and conceptual roots of the field.

Published with the Ecological Society of America.
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Foundations of Ecology II
Classic Papers with Commentaries
Edited by Thomas E. Miller and Joseph Travis
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The classic papers that laid the foundations of modern ecology alongside commentaries by noted ecologists.

The period of 1970 to 1995 was a time of tremendous change in all areas of ecology—from an increased rigor for experimental design and analysis to the reevaluation of paradigms, new models for understanding, and theoretical advances. Edited by ecologists Thomas E. Miller and Joseph Travis, Foundations of Ecology II includes facsimiles of forty-six papers from this period alongside expert commentaries that discuss a total of fifty-three key studies, addressing topics of diversity, predation, complexity, competition, coexistence, extinction, productivity, resources, distribution, abundance, and conservation. The result is more than a catalog of historic firsts; this book offers diverse perspectives on the foundational papers that led to today’s ecological work. Like this book’s 1991 predecessor, Foundations of Ecology edited by Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown, Foundations of Ecology II promises to be the essential primer for graduate students and practicing ecologists for decades to come.
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Foundations of High-Energy Astrophysics
Mario Vietri
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Written by one of today’s most highly respected astrophysicists, Foundations of High-Energy Astrophysics is an introduction to the mathematical and physical techniques used in the study of high-energy astrophysics. Here, Mario Vietri approaches the basics of high-energy astrophysics with an emphasis on underlying physical processes as opposed to a more mathematical approach. Alongside more traditional topics, Vietri presents new subjects increasingly considered crucial to understanding high-energy astrophysical sources, including the electrodynamics of cosmic sources, new developments in the theory of standard accretion disks, and the physics of coronae, thick disks, and accretion onto magnetized objects.

The most thorough and engaging survey of high-energy astrophysics available today, Foundations of High-Energy Astrophysics introduces the main physical processes relevant to the field in a rigorous yet accessible way, while paying careful attention to observational issues. Vietri’s book will quickly become a classic text for students and active researchers in astronomy and astrophysics. Those in adjoining fields will also find it a valuable addition to their personal libraries.
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Foundations of Macroecology
Classic Papers with Commentaries
Edited by Felisa A. Smith, John L. Gittleman, and James H. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Macroecology is an approach to science that emphasizes the description and explanation of patterns and processes at large spatial and temporal scales. Some scientists liken it to seeing the forest through the trees, giving the proverbial phrase an ecological twist. The term itself was first introduced to the modern literature by James H. Brown and Brian A. Maurer in a 1989 paper, and it is Brown’s classic 1995 study, Macroecology, that is credited with inspiring the broad-scale subfield of ecology. But as with all subfields, many modern-day elements of macroecology are implicit in earlier works dating back decades, even centuries.

Foundations of Macroecology charts the evolutionary trajectory of these concepts—from the species-area relationship and the latitudinal gradient of species richness to the relationship between body size and metabolic rate—through forty-six landmark papers originally published between 1920 and 1998. Divided into two parts—“Macroecology before Macroecology” and “Dimensions of Macroecology”—the collection also takes the long view, with each paper accompanied by an original commentary from a contemporary expert in the field that places it in a broader context and explains its foundational role. Providing a solid, coherent assessment of the history, current state, and potential future of the field, Foundations of Macroecology will be an essential text for students and teachers of ecology alike.
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The Foundations of Natural Morality
On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law
S. Adam Seagrave
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in the relationship between natural law and natural rights. During this time, the concept of natural rights has served as a conceptual lightning rod, either strengthening or severing the bond between traditional natural law and contemporary human rights. Does the concept of natural rights have the natural law as its foundation or are the two ideas, as Leo Strauss argued, profoundly incompatible?

With The Foundations of Natural Morality, S. Adam Seagrave addresses this controversy, offering an entirely new account of natural morality that compellingly unites the concepts of natural law and natural rights. Seagrave agrees with Strauss that the idea of natural rights is distinctly modern and does not derive from traditional natural law. Despite their historical distinctness, however, he argues that the two ideas are profoundly compatible and that the thought of John Locke and Thomas Aquinas provides the key to reconciling the two sides of this long-standing debate. In doing so, he lays out a coherent concept of natural morality that brings together thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke, revealing the insights contained within these disparate accounts as well as their incompleteness when considered in isolation. Finally, he turns to an examination of contemporary issues, including health care, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty, showing how this new account of morality can open up a more fruitful debate.
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Foundations of Paleoecology
Classic Papers with Commentaries
Edited by S. Kathleen Lyons, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, and Peter J. Wagner
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Approximately 99% of all life that has ever existed is extinct. Fortunately, these long dead species have left traces of their lives and interactions with other species in the rock record that paleoecologists use to understand how species and ecosystems have changed over time. This record of past life allows us to study the dynamic nature of the Earth and gives context to current and future ecological challenges.

This book brings together forty-four classic papers published between 1924 and 1999 that trace the origins and development of paleoecology. The articles cross taxonomic groups, habitat types, geographic areas, and time and have made substantial contributions to our knowledge of the evolution of life. Encompassing the full breadth of paleoecology, the book is divided into six parts: community and ecosystem dynamics, community reconstruction, diversity dynamics, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, species interaction, and taphonomy. Each paper is also introduced by a contemporary expert who gives context and explains its importance to ongoing paleoecological research. A comprehensive introduction to the field, Foundations of Paleoecology will be an essential reference for new students and established paleoecologists alike.
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Foundations of Stream and River Ecology
A Guide to the Classic Literature
Edited by Wyatt F. Cross, Jonathan P. Benstead, Amy M. Marcarelli, and Ryan A. Sponseller
University of Chicago Press
For students and practitioners, a comprehensive primer on the key literature in stream and river ecology.
 
The study of streams and rivers combines ecology, chemistry, hydrology, and geology to reveal factors that control the biological diversity and functioning of these unique ecosystems. Although stream ecology is a relatively young discipline, foundational papers published over the past half-century have shaped our current understanding of these ecosystems and have informed our efforts to manage and protect them. Organized thematically, each chapter of this book—on topics including the physical template, communities, food webs, ecosystem energetics, and nutrient dynamics—offers summaries of the key literature, history and context on the topic, and forward-looking discussions that examine how past research has influenced current studies and may shape future efforts.
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front cover of Foundations of the Unity of Science, Volume 2
Foundations of the Unity of Science, Volume 2
Edited by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles F. W. Morris
University of Chicago Press, 1971
The growing concern throughout the world for the logic, the history, and the sociology of science reveals a comprehensive international movement interested in considering the scientific enterprise in its entirety. The purpose of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, as originally conceived by the late Otto Neurath, was to explore in numerous volumes the foundations of various sciences and to aid the integration of scientific knowledge. Circumstances during World War II and the death of Professor Neurath, however, limited the scope of the Encyclopedia. The Foundations of the Unity of Science constitutes the only completed unit of the proposed multi-volume Encyclopedia.
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Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology
Classic Papers with Commentaries
Edited by Robin L. Chazdon and T. C. Whitmore
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology presents a timely collection of pioneering work in the study of these diverse and fascinating ecosystems. Modeled on the highly successful Foundations of Ecology, this book consists of facsimiles of papers chosen by world experts in tropical biology as the "classics" in the field. The papers are organized into sections on related topics, each introduced with a discussion of their role in triggering subsequent research. Topics covered include ecological and evolutionary perspectives on the origins of tropical diversity; plant-animal interactions; patterns of species diversity and distribution of arthropods, vertebrates, and plants; forest dynamics and ecosystem ecology; conservation biology; and tropical forest management.

Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology makes essential works in the development of tropical biology available in a convenient form to both senior scholars interested in the roots of their discipline and to students encountering the field for the first time, as well as to everyone concerned with tropical conservation.
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Founding Choices
American Economic Policy in the 1790s
Edited by Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The political decisions made by the founding fathers were crucial to the success of the early republic. But the economic decisions they made were just as pivotal, ensuring the general welfare and common defense of the United States for decades to come. Founding Choices explores these economic choices and their profound influence on American life, westward expansion, and influence abroad. Among the topics covered are finance, trade, and monetary and banking policy, with a focus on the factors guiding those policies and their end result. 

This book redresses the relative neglect of the economic achievements of the founders. It will be essential reading for historians and economists alike.

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Four Last Songs
Aging and Creativity in Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience’s expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world’s greatest composers.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi’s Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner’s influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a “life review” of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments.

With its deft treatment of these composers’ final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.
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Four Shakespearean Period Pieces
Margreta de Grazia
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.

Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.

In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.

To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon. 
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front cover of The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
Robert William Fogel
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Robert William Fogel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1993.

"To take a trip around the mind of Robert Fogel, one of the grand old men of American economic history, is a rare treat. At every turning, you come upon some shiny pearl of information."—The Economist

In this broad-thinking and profound piece of history, Robert William Fogel synthesizes an amazing range of data into a bold and intriguing view of America's past and future—one in which the periodic Great Awakenings of religion bring about waves of social reform, the material lives of even the poorest Americans improve steadily, and the nation now stands poised for a renewed burst of egalitarian progress.
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Foxconned
Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government
Lawrence Tabak
University of Chicago Press, 2021
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 state’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.
 
Two years later, the project was in shambles. Ten thousand construction workers were supposed to have been building what Trump had promised would be “the eighth wonder of the world.” Instead, land had been seized, homes had been destroyed, and hundreds of millions of municipal dollars had been committed for just a few hundred jobs—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.
 
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 looting—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.
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Fra Angelico
Dissemblance and Figuration
Georges Didi-Huberman
University of Chicago Press, 1995
The traditional story of Renaissance painting is one of inexorable progress toward the exact representation of the real and visible. Georges Didi-Huberman disrupts this story with a new look—and a new way of looking—at the fifteenth-century painter Fra Angelico. In doing so, he alters our understanding of both early Renaissance art and the processes of art history.

A Florentine painter who took Dominican vows, Fra Angelico (1400-1455) approached his work as a largely theological project. For him, the problems of representing the unrepresentable, of portraying the divine and the spiritual, mitigated the more secular breakthroughs in imitative technique. Didi-Huberman explores Fra Angelico's solutions to these problems—his use of color to signal approaching visibility, of marble to recall Christ's tomb, of paint drippings to simulate (or stimulate) holy anointing. He shows how the painter employed emptiness, visual transformation, and displacement to give form to the mystery of faith.

In the work of Fra Angelico, an alternate strain of Renaissance painting emerges to challenge rather than reinforce verisimilitude. Didi-Huberman traces this disruptive impulse through theological writings and iconographic evidence and identifies a widespread tradition in Renaissance art that ranges from Giotto's break with Byzantine image-making well into the sixteenth century. He reveals how the techniques that served this ultimately religious impulse may have anticipated the more abstract characteristics of modern art, such as color fields, paint spatterings, and the absence of color.
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A Fragile Balance
The Extraordinary Story of Australian Marsupials
Christopher Dickman
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Marsupials are nearly synonymous with Australia. Although one of these enigmatic pouched mammals—the opossum—inhabits the United States and another 80 or so thrive in South America, some 220 species are confined to the Australasian region. In Australia, marsupials are the most diverse and dominant indigenous species, from the wallaby and the wombat to the kangaroo and koala.

The extraordinary story of these fascinating animals, A Fragile Balance provides the most up-to-date information on marsupials without losing sight of the unique set of circumstances that led them to prevalence Down Under. Covering all marsupial species in Australia, the book uses an evolutionary framework to interpret the marsupial’s biological traits. Each species account includes a basic biological description, a range map, and a measure of conservation status. The accounts are bounded by general chapters on biology, natural history, cultural history, and conservation. A Fragile Balance is the first book to emphasize interactions between and among marsupials, as well as between humans and marsupials.

Combining the expertise of renowned biologist Christopher Dickman with the artistic talents of illustrator Rosemary Woodford Ganf, A Fragile Balance will be a much celebrated reference for mammalogists worldwide, as well as for readers interested in Australian natural and cultural history.

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Fragile Finitude
A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology
Michael Fishbane
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The world we engage with is a vibrant collage brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is through the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed—this is where religious scholar Michael Fishbane dwells in his latest contribution to Jewish thought.

In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classical types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis. The first focuses on worldly experience, the second on communal forms of practice and thought in the rabbinical tradition, the third on personal development, and the fourth on transcendent, cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the divine and our fellow humans. Written from within the Jewish tradition, Fragile Finitude is intended for readers across the religious spectrum.
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A Fragile Life
Accepting Our Vulnerability
Todd May
University of Chicago Press, 2017
It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete serenity—and teaching us how to do the same. After all, isn’t a life free from suffering the ideal? Isn’t it what so many of us seek? Absolutely not, argues Todd May in this provocative but compassionate book. In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, he shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity.
           
May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way.
           
Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world, one that reassures us that our suffering, rather than a failure of physical or psychological resilience, is a powerful and essential part of life itself.    
 
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front cover of A Fragile Life
A Fragile Life
Accepting Our Vulnerability
Todd May
University of Chicago Press, 2017

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete serenity—and teaching us how to do the same. After all, isn’t a life free from suffering the ideal? Isn’t it what so many of us seek? Absolutely not, argues Todd May in this provocative but compassionate book. In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, he shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity.
           
May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way.
           
Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world, one that reassures us that our suffering, rather than a failure of physical or psychological resilience, is a powerful and essential part of life itself.    
 
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front cover of Fragile Web
Fragile Web
What Next for Nature?
Edited by Jonathan Silvertown
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Biodiversity is as close as your breakfast table. Your cereal and coffee are the products of at least a dozen species of plants and animals. And believe it or not, you are related to your morning meal—all life on earth is descended from a common ancestor, giving new meaning to the old saying “You are what you eat.”

            Making clear why the future of biodiversity matters, Fragile Web—which takes its name from the delicate mechanism that holds all life together—unites a team of international experts to explore the wonder of the natural world. Drawing on the very latest research, the book explains what biodiversity is and explores its evolution, from 3.5 billion years ago to the present day. It discusses the importance of the world’s ecosystems and how directly or indirectly humans are responsible for the fate of nature. Crucially, it also examines what can be done to protect the natural world and why it matters. Although we cannot undo all that we have done, ignoring the current crisis facing biodiversity could fundamentally change the lives of future generations.

Fully illustrated with color photographs, diagrams, and maps, and edited by celebrated ecologist Jonathan Silvertown, this book is a timely snapshot of the state of life on Earth. From the plant and animal products that make up our breakfast to the ecosystems that help to produce clean water, our very survival depends upon the variety of plant and animal life on our planet. The year 2010 has been declared by the United Nations the International Year of Biodiversity, and The Fragile Web will be an essential guidebook for our time.

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front cover of The Fragility of Freedom
The Fragility of Freedom
Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future
Joshua Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In this fresh interpretation of Tocqueville's thought, Joshua Mitchell explores the dynamic interplay between religion and politics in American democracy.

Focusing on Democracy in America, The Fragility of Freedom examines Tocqueville's key works and argues that his analysis of democracy is ultimately rooted in an Augustinian view of human psychology. As much a work of political philosophy as of religion, The Fragility of Freedom argues for the importance of a political theology that recognizes moderation.

"An intelligent and sharply drawn portrait of a conservative Toqueville."—Anne C. Rose, Journal of American History

"I recommend this book as one of a very few to approach seriously the sources of Tocqueville's intellectual and moral greatness."—Peter Augustine Lawler, Journal of Politics

"Mitchell ably places Democracy in America in the long conversation of Western political and theological thought."—Wilfred M. McClay, First Things

"Learned and thought-provoking."—Peter Berkowitz, New Republic
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