Here is the first reliable edition of John Keats’s complete poems designed expressly for general readers and students.

Upon its publication in 1978, Jack Stillinger’s The Poems of John Keats won exceptionally high praise: “The definitive Keats,” proclaimed The New Republic—“An authoritative edition embodying the readings the poet himself most probably intended, prepared by the leading scholar in Keats textual studies.”

Now this scholarship is at last available in a graceful, clear format designed to introduce students and general readers to the “real” Keats. In place of the textual apparatus that was essential to scholars, Stillinger here provides helpful explanatory notes. These notes give dates of composition, identify quotations and allusions, gloss names and words not included in the ordinary desk dictionary, and refer the reader to the best critical interpretations of the poems. The new introduction provides central facts about Keats’s life and career, describes the themes of his best work, and speculates on the causes of his greatness.

This ambitious study offers a panoramic survey of musical thought in the eighteenth century and, at the same time, a close analysis of the important theoretical topics of the period. The result is the most comprehensive account ever given of the theory behind the music of late Baroque and early Classical composers from Bach to Beethoven.

While giving preeminent theorists their due, Joel Lester also examines the works of over 100 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers to show how prominent theories were received and applied in actual teaching situations. Beginning with the influence of Zarlino and seventeenth-century theorists, Lester goes on to focus on central traditions emerging from definitive works in the early eighteenth century: species counterpoint in the writings of Fux; thoroughbass as presented by Niedt and Heinichen Rameau’s harmonic theories; and Mattheson’s views on melodic structure. The author traces the development and interactions of these traditions over the remainder of the century, through the writings of Albrechtsberger, C. P. E. Bach, Kirnberger, Koch, Marpurg, Martini, Nichelmann, Riepel, and many others. This historical overview is leavened throughout with accounts of individual composers grappling with theoretical issues—Haydn’s careful study of Fux’s treatise, Mozart’s instructions on harmony to his composition students, Beethoven’s own student exercises.

The links between various theoretical traditions, the pervasive influence of Rameau’s harmonic thinking, and the harmonic theories of Koch are just some of the numerous topics given their first full treatment here. Many of the theorists Lester cites are either unknown or often misunderstood today. By bringing their contributions to light and placing them within the context of theoretical tradition, Lester offers a fresh perspective, one that will inform and enhance any future study of this magnificent era in Western music.

Jerry Norman’s Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary, a substantial revision and enlargement of his Concise Manchu-English Lexicon of 1978, now long out of print, is poised to become the standard English-language resource on the Manchu language. As the dynastic language of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Manchu was used in official documents and was also the vehicle for an enormous translation literature, mostly from the Chinese. The new Dictionary, based exclusively on Qing sources, retains all of the information from the earlier Lexicon, but also includes hundreds of additional entries cited from original Manchu texts, enhanced cross-references, and an entirely new introduction on Manchu pronunciation and script. All content from the earlier publication has also been verified.

This final book from the preeminent Manchu linguist in the English-speaking world is a reference work that not only updates Norman’s earlier scholarship but also summarizes his decades of study of the Manchu language. The Dictionary, which represents a significant scholarly contribution to the field of Inner Asian studies and to all students and scholars of Manchu and other Tungusic and related languages around the world, will become a major tool for archival research on Chinese late imperial period history and government.

In a field choked with seemingly impenetrable jargon, Philip N. Johnson-Laird has done the impossible: written a book about how the mind works that requires no advance knowledge of artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, or psychology. The mind, he says, depends on the brain in the same way as the execution of a program of symbolic instructions depends on a computer, and can thus be understood by anyone willing to start with basic principles of computation and follow his step-by-step explanations.

The author begins with a brief account of the history of psychology and the birth of cognitive science after World War II. He then describes clearly and simply the nature of symbols and the theory of computation, and follows with sections devoted to current computational models of how the mind carries out all its major tasks, including visual perception, learning, memory, the planning and control of actions, deductive and inductive reasoning, and the formation of new concepts and new ideas. Other sections discuss human communication, meaning, the progress that has been made in enabling computers to understand natural language, and finally the difficult problems of the conscious and unconscious mind, free will, needs and emotions, and self-awareness. In an envoi, the author responds to the critics of cognitive science and defends the computational view of the mind as an alternative to traditional dualism: cognitive science integrates mind and matter within the same explanatory framework.

This first single-authored introduction to cognitive science will command the attention of students of cognitive science at all levels including psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists--as well as all readers curious about recent knowledge on how the mind works.

A Computer Perspective is an illustrated essay on the origins and first lines of development of the computer. The complex network of creative forces and social pressures that have produced the computer is personified here in the creators of instruments of computation, and their machines or tables; the inventors of mathematical or logical concepts and their applications; and the fabricators of practical devices to serve the immediate needs of government, commerce, engineering, and science.

The book is based on an exhibition conceived and assembled for International Business Machines Corporation. Like the exhibition, it is not a history in the narrow sense of a chronology of concepts and devices. Yet these pages actually display more true history (in relation to the computer) than many more conventional presentations of the development of science and technology.

A Computer Perspective is an illustrated essay on the origins and first lines of development of the computer. The complex network of creative forces and social pressures that have produced the computer is personified here in the creators of instruments of computation, and their machines or tables; the inventors of mathematical or logical concepts and their applications; and the fabricators of practical devices to serve the immediate needs of government, commerce, engineering, and science.

The book is based on an exhibition conceived and assembled for International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation. Like the exhibition, it is not a history in the narrow sense of a chronology of concepts and devices. Yet these pages actually display more true history (in relation to the computer) than many more conventional presentations of the development of science and technology.

This account of efforts to build a domestic Japanese computer industry is enlivened with quotations from industrial leaders commenting on the stages through which Japan has emerged as a world-class competitor.

In the late 1950s, Japan was still relying on IBM and other foreign suppliers. After the decision to enter the computer field, the government used protectionism, financial aid, and cooperative R&D projects to assist firms in developing hardware and improving their technology. The establishment of a quasi-public computer rental company to carry the burden of financing rentals played a key role in helping fledgling firms compete with IBM.

Marie Anchordoguy shows how government intervention in the market avoided the risks of technological sluggishness by encouraging keen competition among domestic computer firms. She traces the growth of Japanese computer hardware to Japan’s position as an exporter of mainframes and describes some of the problems encountered in producing software. This study provides a clear example of the way in which government–industry cooperation has enhanced Japan’s position in the world market.

The biological functions of coloration in animals are sometimes surprising. Color can attract mates, intimidate enemies, and distract predators. But color patterns can also conceal animals from detection. Concealing coloration is unusual because it is an adaptation not only to the visual features of the environment but also to the perceptual and cognitive capabilities of other organisms. Judy Diamond and Alan Bond bring to light the many factors at work in the evolution of concealing coloration.

Animals that resemble twigs, tree bark, stones, and seaweed may appear to be perfect imitations, but no concealment strategy is without flaws. Amid the clutter of the natural world, predators search for minute, telltale clues that will reveal the identity of their prey. Predators have remarkable abilities to learn to discriminate the fake from the real. But prey have their own range of defensive tactics, evolving multiple appearances or the ability to change color at will. Drawing on modern experimental evidence of the functional significance of animal color strategies, Diamond and Bond offer striking illustrations of how the evolution of features in one organism can be driven by the psychology of others.

Concealing Coloration in Animals takes readers on a scientific adventure that explores creatures inside mats of floating seaweed, mice and lizards on desert rocks and sand, and rare parrots in the rainforest of New Zealand. Color photographs extensively document the mind-boggling array of deceptive strategies animals use to blend in, mislead, or vanish from view.

The Concept of Heart Failure surveys the development of our ideas, both clinical and theoretical, on important aspects of cardiac and pulmonary disease, from the eleventh to the mid-eighteenth century. Before a unified and centralized concept of congestive heart failure was established, individual parts of the syndrome were regarded as discrete clinical entities. As a result, discussion of the syndrome is scattered throughout medieval and Renaissance literature.

Dr. Saul Jarcho, a noted clinician and medical historian, renders a great service in gathering together many little known sources and, with rich commentaries on each author, making them accessible to the modern reader. His translations of Latin, Arabic, and other texts are fluent and skillful. With its thorough documentation, concluding overview, and appendix on the relation between suffocative catarrh and pulmonary edema, The Concept of Heart Failure will be a rich resource for clinicians and historians alike.

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups. Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.

The tightening and loosening of ethnic identity under changing definitions of “Americanism” is emphasized in this volume.

The concerto has attracted relatively little attention as a genre, Joseph Kerman observes, and his urbane and wide-ranging Norton Lectures fill the gap in a way that will delight all music listeners. Kerman addresses the full range of the concerto repertory, treating both the general and the particular. His perceptive commentary on individual works--with illustrative performances on the accompanying CD--is alive with enthusiasm, intimations, and insights into the spirit of concerto.

Concertos model human relationships, according to Kerman, and his description of the conversation between solo instrument and orchestra brings this observation vividly to life. What does the solo instrument do when it first enters in a concerto? How do composers balance claims of solo-orchestra contrast and solo virtuosity? When do they deploy the sumptuous musical textures that only concertos can provide? Kerman's unexpected answers offer a new understanding of the concerto and a stimulus to enhanced listening.

In language that the Boston Globe's Richard Dyer calls "always delightfully vivid," Kerman conducts readers and listeners into the conversations that concertos so eloquently enact. Amid the musical forces at play, he renews the dialogue of music lovers with the language of the concerto--the familiar, the lesser-known, the cherished, and the undervalued. The CD packaged with the book contains movements from works that Kerman treats most intensively--by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev.

This is a dictionary of single characters which almost does the job of a dictionary of compounds. It gives the student of the Chinese language translations which translate and do not merely explain, and it offers the linguistic scholar a faithful record of current spoken Mandarin.

A comprehensive introduction on pronunciation, the system of radicals, and grammatical categories precedes the main body of the dictionary, which is arranged by radicals. An index, arranged by sounds, is included. Significant points of dialectal pronunciation, especially in Cantonese and the Wu dialects, are indicated for comparison. Neutral tones in compounds and sentences are marked throughout. The main features of dialectal pronunciation are given for each word where they differ from Mandarin.

Selection of characters is based upon authoritative frequency lists and long teaching experience. They appear in regular form, but differences between written and printed forms, together with important popular cursive variations, are also indicated. Warnings and cross-references are given to characters which are easy to confuse or hard to locate. Both National romanization and the Wade-Giles forms are given side by side. This is the first dictionary to give a full extended treatment of all the grammatical particles. The grammatical function of each word is clearly defined, and the stylistic class of each entry is either marked or implied in the translation which corresponds in style to the word translated. Important derivative words (for example, words with diminutive suffixes) and contextual words (including common synonyms and antonyms) are supplied and compared.

The centuries-long complexity of China's political experience, the richness of its culture, and the drama of its economic unfolding are the hallmarks of this short but sweeping history. China's own history is entwined with its response to the West in a rich tapestry depicting its peoples, rulers, and society. More than a nuanced history of a vast continent, this study is sensitive to the multifaceted and changing interpretations of China that have been offered over the years.

In this overarching book, J. A. G. Roberts refers to recent archeological finds--the caches of bronze vessels found at Sanxingdui--and to new documentary reevaluations--the reassessment of Manchu documentation. The first half of the book provides an up-to-date interpretation of China's early and imperial history, while the second half concentrates on the modern period and provides an interpretive account of major developments--the impact of Western imperialism, the rise of Chinese Communism, and the record of the People's Republic of China since 1949.

Concise and direct, this book is a compelling narrative and handy companion for those interested in China.

Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year

“[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”
—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.

Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites—liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners—as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”?

The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year

“A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”
—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books

How did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our sense of self. Black crime statistics have shaped debates about everything from public education to policing to presidential elections, fueling racism and justifying inequality. How was this statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged? Why was the same link not made for whites? In the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump, under the shadow of Ferguson and Baltimore, no questions could be more urgent.

“The role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work…[It] shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy-makers subscribed to a ‘statistical discourse’ about black crime…one that shifted blame onto black people for their disproportionate incarceration and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice.”
—Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation

“Muhammad identifies two different responses to crime among African-Americans in the post–Civil War years, both of which are still with us: in the South, there was vigilantism; in the North, there was an increased police presence. This was not the case when it came to white European-immigrant groups that were also being demonized for supposedly containing large criminal elements.”
—New Yorker

In recent years, the Confederate flag has become as much a news item as a Civil War relic. Intense public debates have erupted over Confederate flags flying atop state capitols, being incorporated into state flags, waving from dormitory windows, or adorning the T-shirts and jeans of public school children. To some, this piece of cloth is a symbol of white supremacy and enduring racial injustice; to others, it represents a rich Southern heritage and an essential link to a glorious past. Polarizing Americans, these "flag wars" reveal the profound--and still unhealed--schisms that have plagued the country since the Civil War.

The Confederate Battle Flag is the first comprehensive history of this contested symbol. Transcending conventional partisanship, John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. We gain unique insight into the fine line between the flag's use as a historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for. Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti Award

“McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.”
—Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic

“McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation—white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves…Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.”
—Eric Foner, The Nation

“Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry’s work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise…At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy’s ‘undoing,’ she has in fact accomplished exactly that.”
—Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic

“A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within.”
—Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News

The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise.

Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena.

The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.

W. V. Quine created a new way of looking at the eternal questions of philosophy and their interconnections. His investigations into semantics and epistemology, ontology and causality, natural kinds, time, space, and individuation transformed the philosophical landscape for generations to come. In the twenty years between his last collection of essays and his death in 2000, Quine continued his work, producing a number of impressive essays in which he deepened, elaborated, and occasionally modified his position on central philosophical issues. The last of these essays, which gives this collection its name, appeared in 2002.

This volume collects the main essays from this last, productive period of Quine’s prodigious career. It also includes some notable earlier essays that were not included in the previous collections although they contain illuminating discussions and are quite often referred to by other philosophers and also by Quine himself in his later writings. These essays, along with several manuscripts published here for the first time, offer a more complete and highly defined picture than ever before of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers working at the height of his powers.

Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these “confessions,” the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and explores their fruitful conjunction.

He begins by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction—playfully, seriously, brilliantly roaming across this frontier. Good nonfiction, he believes, is crafted like a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research. Taking us on a tour of his own creative method, Eco recalls how he designed his fictional realms. He began with specific images, made choices of period, location, and voice, composed stories that would appeal to both sophisticated and popular readers. The blending of the real and the fictive extends to the inhabitants of such invented worlds. Why are we moved to tears by a character’s plight? In what sense do Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, and Leopold Bloom “exist”?

At once a medievalist, philosopher, and scholar of modern literature, Eco astonishes above all when he considers the pleasures of enumeration. He shows that the humble list, the potentially endless series, enables us to glimpse the infinite and approach the ineffable. This “young novelist” is a master who has wise things to impart about the art of fiction and the power of words.

The classic account of crisis and conversion.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

Confessions, composed ca. 397, is a spiritual autobiography of Augustine’s early life, family, personal and intellectual associations, and explorations of alternative religious and theological viewpoints as he moved toward his conversion. Cast as a prayer addressed to God, though always conscious of its readers, Confessions offers a gripping personal story and a philosophical exploration destined to have broad and lasting impact, all delivered with Augustine’s characteristic brilliance as a stylist.

This edition replaces the earlier Loeb Confessions by William Watts.

Augustinus (354–430 CE), son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste in North Africa, and his Christian wife Monica, while studying in Africa to become a rhetorician, plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts in search of truth, joining for a time the Manichaean society. He became a teacher of grammar at Tagaste, and lived much under the influence of his mother and his friend Alypius. About 383 he went to Rome and soon after to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, being now attracted by the philosophy of the Sceptics and of the Neo-Platonists. His studies of Paul's letters with Alypius and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose led in 386 to his rejection of all sensual habits and to his famous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He returned to Tagaste and there founded a religious community. In 395 or 396 he became Bishop of Hippo, and was henceforth engrossed with duties, writing and controversy. He died at Hippo during the successful siege by the Vandals.

From Augustine's large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God's action in the progress of the world's history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical history and Augustine's relations with other theologians.

The classic account of crisis and conversion.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

Confessions, composed ca. 397, is a spiritual autobiography of Augustine’s early life, family, personal and intellectual associations, and explorations of alternative religious and theological viewpoints as he moved toward his conversion. Cast as a prayer addressed to God, though always conscious of its readers, Confessions offers a gripping personal story and a philosophical exploration destined to have broad and lasting impact, all delivered with Augustine’s characteristic brilliance as a stylist.

This edition replaces the earlier Loeb Confessions by William Watts.

Augustinus (354–430 CE), son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste in North Africa, and his Christian wife Monica, while studying in Africa to become a rhetorician, plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts in search of truth, joining for a time the Manichaean society. He became a teacher of grammar at Tagaste, and lived much under the influence of his mother and his friend Alypius. About 383 he went to Rome and soon after to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, being now attracted by the philosophy of the Sceptics and of the Neo-Platonists. His studies of Paul's letters with Alypius and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose led in 386 to his rejection of all sensual habits and to his famous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He returned to Tagaste and there founded a religious community. In 395 or 396 he became Bishop of Hippo, and was henceforth engrossed with duties, writing and controversy. He died at Hippo during the successful siege by the Vandals.

From Augustine's large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God's action in the progress of the world's history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical history and Augustine's relations with other theologians.

Ranging over a wide array of cases, Andrew Stark draws on legal, moral, and political thought--as well as the rhetoric of officeholders and the commentary of journalists--to analyze several decades of debate over conflict of interest in American public life. He offers new ways of interpreting the controversies about conflict of interest, explains their prominence in American political combat, and suggests how we might make them less venomous and intractable.

Stark shows that over the past forty years public opinion has shifted steadily toward an objective conception of conflict: instead of considering case-by-case motivations, we have adopted broadly prophylactic rules barring a variety of circumstances with no regard for whether individuals facing those circumstances would be moved in culpable ways. At the same time, we have shifted toward a subjective conception of interest: where we once focused narrowly on money, we now inquire into various commitments individuals might pursue in ways that could impair their judgment.

In exploring the consequences of these twin migrations--the passage of "conflict" from a subjective to an objective understanding; the transformation of "interest" from an objective to a subjective conception--the author aims to make our debates over public ethics less vexatious for officials, and more lucid for citizens.

We grow up--so simple, it just seems to happen--and yet there are endless variations in the way we do it. What part does culture play in the process? How much do politics and economics have to do with it? As the nation has matured, have the ways people grow up changed too? This book traces the many paths to adulthood that Americans have pursued over time. Spanning more than two centuries of intense transformation in the lives of individuals and the life of a nation, Conflicting Paths is an innovative history of growing up in America.

Harvey J. Graff, a distinguished social historian, mines more than five hundred personal narratives for what they can tell us about the passage from childhood to maturity. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and letters, he builds a penetrating, complex, firsthand account of how childhood, adolescence, and youth have been experienced and understood--as functions of familial and social relations, as products of biology and physiology, and as cultural and political constructs. These first-person testimonies cross the lines of time and space, gender and class, ethnicity, age, and race. In these individual stories and the larger story they constitute, Graff exposes the way social change--including institutional developments and shifting attitudes, expectations, and policy--and personal experience intertwine in the process of growing up. Together, these narratives form a challenging, subtle guide to historical experiences and to the epochal remaking of growing up.

The most socially inclusive and historically extensive of any such research, Graff's work constitutes an important chapter in the story of the family, the formation of modern society, and the complex interweaving of young people, tradition, and change.

Writers and intellectuals in modern Japan have long forged dialogues across the boundaries separating the spheres of literature and thought. This book explores some of their most intellectually and aesthetically provocative connections in the volatile transwar years of the 1920s to 1950s. Reading philosophical texts alongside literary writings, the study links the intellectual side of literature to the literary dimensions of thought in contexts ranging from middlebrow writing to avant-garde modernism, and from the wartime left to the postwar right.

Chapters trace these dynamics through the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s collaboration with the nativist linguist Yamada Yoshio on a modern translation of The Tale of Genji; the modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi’s dialogue with Kyoto School philosophers around the question of “worldliness”; the Marxist poet Nakano Shigeharu’s and the philosopher Tosaka Jun’s thinking about prosaic everyday language; and the postwar rumination on liberal society that surrounded the scholar Edwin McClellan while he translated Natsume Sōseki’s classic 1914 novel Kokoro as a graduate student in the United States working with the famed economist Friedrich Hayek. Revealing unexpected intersections of literature, ideas, and politics in a global transwar context, the book concludes by turning to Murakami Haruki and the resonances of those intersections in a time closer to our own.

Because of its location, volume, speed, and propensity for severe flooding, the Rhône, France’s most powerful river, has long influenced the economy, politics, and transportation networks of Europe. Humans have tried to control the Rhône for over two thousand years, but large-scale development did not occur until the twentieth century. The Rhône valley has undergone especially dramatic changes since World War II. Hydroelectric plants, nuclear reactors, and industrialized agriculture radically altered the river, as they simultaneously fueled both the physical and symbolic reconstruction of France.

In Confluence, Sara B. Pritchard traces the Rhône’s remaking since 1945. She interweaves this story with an analysis of how state officials, technical elites, and citizens connected the environment and technology to political identities and state-building. In the process, Pritchard illuminates the relationship between nature and nation in France.

Pritchard’s innovative integration of science and technology studies, environmental history, and the political history of modern France makes a powerful case for envirotechnical analysis: an approach that highlights the material and rhetorical links between ecological and technological systems. Her groundbreaking book demonstrates the importance of environmental management and technological development to culture and politics in the twentieth century. As Pritchard shows, reconstructing the Rhône remade France itself.

The preeminent sociologist and National Book Award–winning author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture grapples with the paradox of his homeland: its remarkable achievements amid continuing struggles since independence.

There are few places more puzzling than Jamaica. Jamaicans claim their home has more churches per square mile than any other country, yet it is one of the most murderous nations in the world. Its reggae superstars and celebrity sprinters outshine musicians and athletes in countries hundreds of times its size. Jamaica’s economy is anemic and too many of its people impoverished, yet they are, according to international surveys, some of the happiest on earth. In The Confounding Island, Orlando Patterson returns to the place of his birth to reckon with its history and culture.

Patterson investigates the failures of Jamaica’s postcolonial democracy, exploring why the country has been unable to achieve broad economic growth and why its free elections and stable government have been unable to address violence and poverty. He takes us inside the island’s passion for cricket and the unparalleled international success of its local musical traditions. He offers a fresh answer to a question that has bedeviled sports fans: Why are Jamaican runners so fast?

Jamaica’s successes and struggles expose something fundamental about the world we live in. If we look closely at the Jamaican example, we see the central dilemmas of globalization, economic development, poverty reduction, and postcolonial politics thrown into stark relief.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Winner of a PROSE Award

“Fascinating…Eye-opening…Illuminating…Patterson carefully explores the complexity of the structural machinery behind Jamaica’s dazzling successes and dismal failures.”
—Carrie Gibson, New York Times Book Review

“In the ruins of postcolonial Jamaica, Patterson unearths a vibrant popular culture, centered in particular on dancehall music, that can provide new resources to address the postcolonial predicament.”
—Adom Getachew, The Nation

“Masterful…A memorable, nuanced, and insightful social analysis of the island and its place in global history. Highly recommended.”
—Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail

There are few places more puzzling than Jamaica. Jamaicans claim their home has more churches per square mile than any other country, yet it is one of the most murderous nations in the world. Its reggae superstars and celebrity sprinters outshine musicians and athletes in countries many times its size. Jamaica’s economy is anemic and many of its people impoverished, yet they are, according to international surveys, some of the happiest on earth. In The Confounding Island, Orlando Patterson returns to the place of his birth to reckon with its contradictions.

Patterson investigates the failures of Jamaica’s postcolonial democracy, exploring why the country has been unable to achieve broad economic growth and why its free elections and stable government have been unable to address violence and poverty. If we look closely at the Jamaican example, we see the central dilemmas of globalization, economic development, poverty reduction, and postcolonial politics thrown into stark relief.

Why is there so much poverty in America in the 1990s? What can be done to reduce it? In this book the leading experts review three decades of research on the nature, causes, and consequences of poverty, and prescribe an antipoverty agenda for the next decade. The authors document trends in poverty and income inequality, review government programs and policies, and analyze the public’s complicated attitudes concerning these policies. They discuss the persistence and inter-generational transmission of poverty, the extent of welfare dependence, and the emergence of an urban underclass.

Confronting Poverty proposes thoughtful reforms in employment and training, child support, health care, education, welfare, immigration, and urban policies, all crafted from the successes, as well as the failures, of policies over the past three decades. Although antipoverty efforts have been frustrated by slow economic growth, rising inequality, and changes in family structure, the authors offer insightful proposals that will help us resolve the American paradox of “poverty amidst plenty.”

How Confucian traditions have shaped styles of being modern in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore presents a particular challenge to the intellectual community. Explorations of Confucian network capitalism, meritocratic democracy, and liberal education have practical implications for a sense of self, community, economy, and polity.

Seventeen scholars, of varying fields of study, here bring their differing perspectives to a consideration of the Confucian role in industrial East Asia. Confucian concerns such as self-cultivation, regulation of the family, social civility, moral education, well-being of the people, governance of the state, and universal peace provide a general framework for the study. The Confucian Problematik—how a fiduciary community can come into being through exemplary teaching and moral transformation—underlies much of the discussion. The contributors question all unexamined assumptions about the rise of industrial East Asia, at the same time exploring the ideas, norms, and values that underlie the moral fabric of East Asian societies.

Is Confucian ethics a common discourse in industrial East Asia? The answer varies according to academic discipline, regional specialization, and personal judgment. Although there are conflicting interpretations and diverging perspectives, this study represents the current thinking of some of the most sophisticated minds on this vital and intriguing subject.

Legislation to change Korean society along Confucian lines began at the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392 and had apparently achieved its purpose by the mid seventeenth century. Until this important new study, however, the nature of Koryŏ society, the stresses induced by the new legislation, and society’s resistance to the Neo-Confucian changes imposed by the Chosŏn elite have remained largely unexplored.

To explain which aspects of life in Koryŏ came under attack and why, Martina Deuchler draws on social anthropology to examine ancestor worship, mourning, inheritance, marriage, the position of women, and the formation of descent groups. To examine how Neo-Confucian ideology could become an effective instrument for altering basic aspects of Koryŏ life, she traces shifts in political and social power as well as the cumulative effect of changes over time. What emerges is a subtle analysis of Chosŏn Korean social and ideological history.

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph L. Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language can be classified as valid or invalid.

To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science.

Knowledge has increased so greatly since the first appearance of this famous book that the author not only has extensively revised the earlier text, but has added to it considerably. Several new chapter include material on pulmonary hypertension, the Taussig-Bing malformation, defective development of the right ventricle with an intact ventricular septum, and aortic septal defect. The various types of septal defect are discussed as regards both the clinical syndrome and their operability.

An addition to the revised edition is the Visual Index, designed to show at a glance in pictorial form the essential features of the various malformations; the age, sex, and activity of the patient; the size and shape of the heart; the characteristic murmurs; and the electrocardiogram. Dr. Taussig’s approach is clinical throughout, in order to explain clearly the way the heart functions and to enable the physician to reason logically about a malformation. The author’s intention is to aide the physician in making the decisions which are his responsibility—to recommend operation when necessary and to advise against it when it is unlikely to benefit.

Volume I is designed to orient the student and the general practitioner in the basic methods of approach for the diagnosis of congenital malformations of the heart. Although the book emphasizes the information derived from physical examination, X-ray, and fluoroscopy, the angiocardiograms characteristic of the various anomalies are the strong new feature of this volume. The chapter on medical care gives basic information in regard to the treatment of patients with congenital malformations of the heart.

Volume II is designed for the paediatrician, the consultant physician, and the cardiologist, and gives detailed information on each of the specific malformations. The book is heavily illustrated with X-rays and electrocardiograms, which are all based on proved cases. Diagrams of X-rays are inserted to clarify the changes in the contour of the heart. Circulatory diagrams of all the malformations of the heart show the basic changes in the circulation caused by each of them. Illustrations of the anatomical abnormalities have been drawn as accurately as possible from actual specimens.

Knowledge has increased so greatly since the first appearance of this famous book that the author not only has extensively revised the earlier text, but has added to it considerably. Several new chapter include material on pulmonary hypertension, the Taussig-Bing malformation, defective development of the right ventricle with an intact ventricular septum, and aortic septal defect. The various types of septal defect are discussed as regards both the clinical syndrome and their operability.

An addition to the revised edition is the Visual Index, designed to show at a glance in pictorial form the essential features of the various malformations; the age, sex, and activity of the patient; the size and shape of the heart; the characteristic murmurs; and the electrocardiogram. Dr. Taussig’s approach is clinical throughout, in order to explain clearly the way the heart functions and to enable the physician to reason logically about a malformation. The author’s intention is to aide the physician in making the decisions which are his responsibility—to recommend operation when necessary and to advise against it when it is unlikely to benefit.

Volume I is designed to orient the student and the general practitioner in the basic methods of approach for the diagnosis of congenital malformations of the heart. Although the book emphasizes the information derived from physical examination, X-ray, and fluoroscopy, the angiocardiograms characteristic of the various anomalies are the strong new feature of this volume. The chapter on medical care gives basic information in regard to the treatment of patients with congenital malformations of the heart.

Volume II is designed for the paediatrician, the consultant physician, and the cardiologist, and gives detailed information on each of the specific malformations. The book is heavily illustrated with X-rays and electrocardiograms, which are all based on proved cases. Diagrams of X-rays are inserted to clarify the changes in the contour of the heart. Circulatory diagrams of all the malformations of the heart show the basic changes in the circulation caused by each of them. Illustrations of the anatomical abnormalities have been drawn as accurately as possible from actual specimens.

More Americans belong to religious congregations than to any other kind of voluntary association. What these vast numbers amount to--what people are doing in the over 300,000 churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples in the United States--is a question that resonates through every quarter of American society, particularly in these times of "faith-based initiatives," "moral majorities," and militant fundamentalism. And it is a question answered in depth and in detail in Congregations in America.

Drawing on the 1998 National Congregations Study--the first systematic study of its kind--as well as a broad range of quantitative, qualitative, and historical evidence, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the most significant form of collective religious expression in American society: local congregations. Among its more surprising findings, Congregations in America reveals that, despite the media focus on the political and social activities of religious groups, the arts are actually far more central to the workings of congregations. Here we see how, far from emphasizing the pursuit of charity or justice through social services or politics, congregations mainly traffic in ritual, knowledge, and beauty through the cultural activities of worship, religious education, and the arts.

Along with clarifying--and debunking--arguments on both sides of the debate over faith-based initiatives, the information presented here comprises a unique and invaluable resource, answering previously unanswerable questions about the size, nature, make-up, finances, activities, and proclivities of these organizations at the very center of American life.

Convened following Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the Congress of Vienna is remembered as much for the pageantry of the royals and elites who gathered there as for the landmark diplomatic agreements they brokered. Historians have nevertheless generally dismissed these spectacular festivities as window dressing when compared with the serious, behind-the-scenes maneuverings of sovereigns and statesmen. Brian Vick finds this conventional view shortsighted, seeing these instead as two interconnected dimensions of politics. Examining them together yields a more complete picture of how one of the most important diplomatic summits in history managed to redraw the map of Europe and the international system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Congress of Vienna investigates the Vienna Congress within a broad framework of influence networks that included unofficial opinion-shapers of all kinds, both men and women: artists and composers, entrepreneurs and writers, hosts and attendees of fashionable salons. In addition to high-profile negotiation and diplomatic wrangling over the post-Napoleonic fates of Germany, Italy, and Poland, Vick brings into focus other understudied yet significant issues: the African slave trade, Jewish rights, and relations with Islamic powers such as the Ottoman Empire and Barbary Corsairs. Challenging the usual portrayal of a reactionary Congress obsessed with rolling back Napoleon’s liberal reforms, Vick demonstrates that the Congress’s promotion of limited constitutionalism, respect for religious and nationality rights, and humanitarian interventions was influenced as much by liberal currents as by conservative ones.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, ominous portents like columns of fire and dense fog were seen above the skies of Constantinople as the Byzantine capital fell under siege by the Ottomans. Allegedly, similar signs appeared a few decades later and seven thousand miles away, forecasting the fall of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan—Tlatelolco to the Spanish and their indigenous allies. After both cities had fallen, some Greeks and Mexica turned to poetry and song to express their anguish at the birth of what has come to be called the “modern” era.

This study probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems, the “Lament for Constantinople,” the “Huexotzinca Piece,” and the “Tlaxcala Piece.” Composed by anonymous authors soon after the conquest of the two cities, these texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic. They are the workings of creators who draw on tradition and historical particulars to articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

A bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace.

Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification.

Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a “spirit” of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars.

Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

The colonial society and economy of Latin America were based on local communities of three principal types: Spanish towns, Indian villages, and landed estates or haciendas. Of these, it was the latter that provided the economic foundations for the aristocratic social system. This book tells how and why the Spaniards who settled the Peruvian coastal valleys originally came to establish their estates. Some of the questions it attempts to answer are: Why did the hacienda system arise in the second half of the sixteenth century? Was it primarily a product of Spanish history and culture? Was it an inevitable result of the conquest? What did it owe to Indian customs and traditions? To local geography? To economic and social conditions?

Concentrating on seven major valleys of the central coast, the author investigates varying local conditions and circumstances as they appear in wills, bills of sale, contracts, and other notarial documents. The story begins with the indigenous coastal societies before the conquest and concludes with the consolidation of the hacienda system in the early seventeenth century.

Spanning nine time zones from Norway to the Bering Strait, the immense Russian Arctic was mostly unexplored before the twentieth century. This changed rapidly in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union implemented plans for its conquest. The Conquest of the Russian Arctic, a definitive political and environmental history of one of the world’s remotest regions, details the ambitious attempts, from Soviet times to the present, to control and reshape the Arctic, and the terrible costs paid along the way.

Paul Josephson describes the effort under Stalin to assimilate the Arctic into the Soviet empire. Extraction of natural resources, construction of settlements, indoctrination of nomadic populations, collectivization of reindeer herding—all was to be accomplished so that the Arctic operated according to socialist principles. The project was in many ways an extension of the Bolshevik revolution, as planners and engineers assumed that policies and plans that worked elsewhere in the empire would apply here. But as they pushed ahead with methods hastily adopted from other climates, the results were political repression, destruction of traditional cultures, and environmental degradation. The effects are still being felt today. At the same time, scientists and explorers led the world in understanding Arctic climes and regularities.

Vladimir Putin has redoubled Russia’s efforts to secure the Arctic, seen as key to the nation’s economic development and military status. This history brings into focus a little-understood part of the world that remains a locus of military and economic pressures, ongoing environmental damage, and grand ambitions imperfectly realized.

For thirty dramatic years, England ruled a great swath of France at the point of the sword—an all-but-forgotten episode in the Hundred Years’ War that Juliet Barker brings to vivid life in Conquest.

Following Agincourt, Henry V’s second invasion of France in 1417 launched a campaign that would place the crown of France on an English head. Buoyed by conquest, the English army seemed invincible. By the time of Henry’s premature death in 1422, nearly all of northern France lay in his hands and the Valois heir to the throne had been disinherited. Only the appearance of a visionary peasant girl who claimed divine guidance, Joan of Arc, was able to halt the English advance, but not for long. Just six months after her death, Henry’s young son was crowned in Paris as the first—and last—English king of France.

Henry VI’s kingdom endured for twenty years, but when he came of age he was not the leader his father had been. The dauphin whom Joan had crowned Charles VII would finally drive the English out of France. Barker recounts these stirring events—the epic battles and sieges, plots and betrayals—through a kaleidoscope of characters from John Talbot, the “English Achilles,” and John, duke of Bedford, regent of France, to brutal mercenaries, opportunistic freebooters, resourceful spies, and lovers torn apart by the conflict.

The definitive story of a top Chinese politician’s ill-fated quest to reform the Communist Party.

When Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, throngs of mourners converged on the Martyrs’ Monument in Tiananmen Square to pay their respects. Following Hu’s 1987 ouster by party elders, Chinese propaganda officials had sought to tarnish his reputation and dim his memory, yet his death galvanized the nascent pro-democracy student movement, setting off the dramatic demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre.

The Conscience of the Party is the comprehensive, authoritative biography of the Chinese Communist Party’s most avid reformer and its general secretary for a key stretch of the 1980s. A supremely intelligent leader with an exceptional populist touch, Hu Yaobang was tapped early by Mao Zedong as a capable party hand. But Hu’s principled ideas made him powerful enemies, and during the Cultural Revolution he was purged, brutally beaten, and consigned to forced labor. After Mao’s death, Hu rose again as an ally of Deng Xiaoping, eventually securing the party’s top position. In that role, he pioneered many of the economic reforms subsequently attributed to Deng. But Hu also pursued political reforms with equal vigor, pushing for more freedom of expression, the end of lifetime tenure for CCP leaders, and the dismantling of Mao’s personality cult. Alarmed by Hu’s growing popularity and increasingly radical agenda, Deng had him purged again in 1987.

Historian and former intelligence analyst Robert L. Suettinger meticulously reconstructs Hu’s life, providing the kind of eye-opening account that remains impossible in China under state censorship. Hu Yaobang, a decent man operating in a system that did not always reward decency, suffered for his principles but inspired millions in the process.

A distinguished philosopher offers a novel account of experience and reason, and develops our understanding of conscious experience and its relationship to thought: a new reformed empiricism.

The role of experience in cognition is a central and ancient philosophical concern. How, theorists ask, can our private experiences guide us to knowledge of a mind-independent reality? Exploring topics in logic, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, Conscious Experience proposes a new answer to this age-old question, explaining how conscious experience contributes to the rationality and content of empirical beliefs.

According to Anil Gupta, this contribution cannot be determined independently of an agent’s conceptual scheme and prior beliefs, but that doesn’t mean it is entirely mind-dependent. While the rational contribution of an experience is not propositional—it does not, for example, provide direct knowledge of the world—it does authorize certain transitions from prior views to new views. In short, the rational contribution of an experience yields a rule for revising views. Gupta shows that this account provides theoretical freedom: it allows the observer to radically reconceive the world in light of empirical findings. Simultaneously, it grants empirical reason significant power to constrain, forcing particular conceptions of self and world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through novel treatments of presentation, appearances, and ostensive definitions.

Collectively, Gupta’s arguments support an original theory: reformed empiricism. He abandons the idea that experience is a source of knowledge and justification. He also abandons the idea that concepts are derived from experience. But reformed empiricism preserves empiricism’s central insight: experience is the supreme epistemic authority. In the resolution of factual disagreements, experience trumps all.

Human consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping--even rediscovery--by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. As the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of understanding that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in light of recent investigations in the sciences.

How does the novel represent consciousness? And how has this changed over time? In a series of interconnected essays, Lodge pursues these questions down various paths: How does the novel's method compare with that of other creative media such as film? How does the consciousness (and unconscious) of the creative writer do its work? And how can criticism infer the nature of this process through formal analysis? In essays on Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Henry James, John Updike, and Philip Roth, and in reflections on his own practice as a novelist, Lodge is able to bring to light--and to engaging life--the technical, intellectual, and sometimes simply mysterious working of the creative mind.

In this important book, Susan Hurley sheds new light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She assesses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and considers how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment.

Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to intriguing recent work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines. Consciousness in Action is unique in the range of philosophical and scientific work it draws on, and in the deep criticism it offers of centuries-old habits of thought.

This collection of essays addresses a number of questions regarding the role of consent in marriage and in sexual relations outside of marriage in ancient and medieval societies. Ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to the Byzantine Empire and Western Medieval Europe, the contributors examine rape, seduction, and the role of consent in establishing the punishment of one or both parties; the issue of marital debt and spousal rape; and the central question of what is perceived as coercion and what may be the validity or value of coerced consent. Other concepts, such as honor and shame, are also investigated.

Because of the wide range--in time and place--of societies studied, the reader is able to see many different approaches to the question of consent and coercion as well as a certain evolution, in which Christianity plays an important role.

What made the United States what it is began long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. It began quietly in homes and schoolrooms across the colonies in the reading lessons women gave to children. Just as the Protestant revolt originated in a practice of individual reading of the Bible, so the theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America that would come to form in the United States. Gillian Brown takes us back to the basics to understand why Americans value the right to individual self-determination above all other values. It all begins with children.

Locke crucially linked consent with childhood, and it is his formulation of the child's natural right to consent that eighteenth-century Americans learned as they learned to read through Lockean-style pedagogies and textbooks. Tracing the Lockean legacy through the New England Primer and popular readers, fables, and fairy tales, Brown demonstrates how Locke's emphasis on the liberty--and difficulty--of individual judgment became a received notion in the American colonies.

After the revolution, American consent discourse features a different prototype of individuality; instead of wronged children, images of seduced or misguided women predominate postrevolutionary culture. The plights of these women display the difficulties of consent that Locke from the start realized. Individuals continually confront standards and prejudices at odds with their own experiences and judgments. Thus, the Lockean legacy to the United States is the reminder of the continual work to be done to endow every individual with consent and to make consent matter.

What emerged in America was a new and different attitude toward authority in which authority does not belong to the elders but to the upcoming generations and groups. To effect this dramatic a change in the values of humankind took a grassroots revolution. That's what this book is about.

Many assume that the conservation movement was a part of the population uprising against control by the business community—"the people" versus "the interests." Hays’s special perspective shows that it came about rather as an attempt by scientists and technicians to apply their skills to the development and use of natural resources. The resulting conflicts, far from being concerned with unequal distribution of wealth, were struggles for policy control among groups of resource users.

This book defines two conflicting political processes: the demand for an integrated, controlled development guided by an elite group of scientists and technicians and the demand for looser system allowing grassroots control through elected government representatives.

Listen to a short interview with Donald CritchlowHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Despite significant losses in the 2006 midterm elections, the Republican Right remains a powerful and defining force in American politics. Donald Critchlow, a leading historian of American conservatism, shows that time and again the GOP Right appeared defeated, only to rebound with explosive force. The ascendancy of the GOP Right was not preordained, nor was its political triumph inevitable. Rather, the history of the postwar Right was one of fierce political warfare as moderate Republicans battled right-wing Republicans for control of their party, and conservatives battled liberals for control of government. In the struggle against the dominant New Deal state, conservatives gained control of the Republican party, but their advance against liberalism and the Democratic party proved less steady. At each point the accident of historical circumstance precluded a predictable outcome.

In this provocative history of the Right in modern America, Critchlow finds a deep dilemma inherent in how conservative Republicans expressed their anti-statist ideology in an age of mass democracy and Cold War hostilities. As the Right moved forward with its political program, partisanship intensified and ideological division widened--both between the parties and across the electorate. This intensified partisanship reflects the vibrancy of a mature democracy, Critchlow argues, and a new level of political engagement despite its disquieting effect on American political debate.

The Conservative Ascendancy boldly captures the twists and turns of the GOP Right over the last sixty years, offering a story of how deeply held beliefs about the nature of the individual and the good society are translated into political power.

The Conservative Turn tells the story of postwar America’s political evolution through two fascinating figures: Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers. Born at the turn of the twentieth century, they were college classmates who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation.

A spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Chambers became the main witness in the 1948 trial of Alger Hiss, which ended in Hiss’s conviction for perjury. The trial advanced the careers of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy and marked the beginning of the Cold War mood in America. Chambers was also a major conservative thinker, a theorist of the postwar conservative movement.

Meanwhile, in the 1940s and 1950s, the literary critic Trilling wrote important essays that encouraged liberals to disown their radical past and to embrace a balanced maturity. Trilling’s liberal anti-communism was highly influential, culminating politically in the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American politics: the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism, crucially shaped by anti-communism. Taken together, these developments constitute a conservative turn in American political and intellectual life—a turn that continues to shape America’s political landscape.

In this highly praised new translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, David R. Slavitt presents a graceful, accessible, and modern version for both longtime admirers of one of the great masterpieces of philosophical literature and those encountering it for the first time. Slavitt preserves the distinction between the alternating verse and prose sections in the Latin original, allowing us to appreciate the Menippian parallels between the discourses of literary and logical inquiry. His prose translations are lively and colloquial, conveying the argumentative, occasionally bantering tone of the original, while his verse translations restore the beauty and power of Boethius’s poetry. The result is a major contribution to the art of translation.

Those less familiar with Consolation may remember it was written under a death sentence. Boethius (c. 480–524), an Imperial official under Theodoric, Ostrogoth ruler of Rome, found himself, in a time of political paranoia, denounced, arrested, and then executed two years later without a trial. Composed while its author was imprisoned, cut off from family and friends, it remains one of Western literature’s most eloquent meditations on the transitory nature of earthly belongings, and the superiority of things of the mind. In an artful combination of verse and prose, Slavitt captures the energy and passion of the original. And in an introduction intended for the general reader, Seth Lerer places Boethius’s life and achievement in context.

How malleable is human nature? Can an individual really change in meaningful ways? Or, are there immutable limits on the possibilities of human growth set in place by the genes and by the early experiences of childhood? These are questions which touch our deepest political and personal concerns; and they have long been a matter of fierce debate in the behavioral sciences.

Constancy and Change in Human Development takes a thorough inventory of the growing body of research which now bears upon these questions. Editors Brim and Kagan have assembled an outstanding group of specialists in human growth and commissioned them to assess questions of change and continuity in physical, mental, and emotional development throughout the life span. Beginning with three general chapters which place the ideas of continuity and discontinuity in historical and philosophical perspective, the book moves across a broad spectrum of developmental issues, ranging from the basic adaptability of the human central nervous system to the effects of social institutions which seek to promote individual change. There are chapters on physical growth, health, cognitive development, personality, social attitudes and beliefs, occupational careers, psychosis, and criminal behavior. Throughout these chapters, the recurring question is whether development can be seen as a continuous process in which early stages reliably predict subsequent events, or whether instead there are sharp discontinuities which render individual development essentially unpredictable. The variety and richness of the answers to this question provide a summary of human development which is unparalleled in any other single volume.

This study of the Roman Empire in the age of Constantine offers a thoroughly new assessment of the part Christianity played in the Roman world of the third and fourth centuries.

Timothy D. Barnes gives the fullest available narrative history of the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. He analyzes Constantine’s rise to power and his government, demonstrating how Constantine’s sincere adherence to Christianity advanced his political aims. He explores the whole range of Eusebius’ writings, especially those composed before Constantine became emperor, and shows that many attitudes usually deemed typical of the “Constantinian revolution” were prevalent before the new Christian empire came into existence. This authoritative political and cultural history of the age of Constantine will prove essential to students and historians of the ancient world.

At the age of twenty-two, Andronicus II became sole ruler of Byzantium. His father, Michael VIII, had been a dashing figure--a good soldier, brilliant diplomat, and the liberator of Constantinople from its fifty-seven-year Latin occupation. By contrast Andronicus seemed colorless and ineffectual. His problems were immense--partly as a result of his father's policies--and his reign proved to be a series of frustrations and disasters.

For forty-six years he fought to preserve the empire against constantencroachments. When he was finally deposed in 1328 by his grandson and co-emperor, Andronicus III, almost all of Asia Minor had been lost to the Turks, Westerners had taken over the defense of the Aegean, and the Catalan army he had invited to help him fight the Turks remained to fight the emperor.

In this penetrating account of Andronicus' foreign policy, Angeliki E. Laiou focuses on Byzantium's relations with the Latin West, the far-reaching domestic implications of the hostility of western Europe, and the critical decision that faced Andronicus: whether to follow his father's lead and allow Byzantium to become a European state or to keep it an Eastern, orthodox power.

The author, who argues that foreign policy cannot be understood without examining the domestic factors that influence, indeed create, it, devotes a large part of her study to domestic developments in Byzantium during Andronicus' reign-the decline of the power of the central government; the spread of semi-independent regional authorities; the state of finances, of the army, of the church.

She concludes that, contrary to common opinion, Andronicus II sincerely desired the union of the Greek and Latin churches, when, in the last years of his reign, he realized that the political situation made such a union necessary. Maintaining also that the conquest of Asia Minor by the Turks was not a foregone conclusion when Andronicus II came to the throne, she discusses at length the errors of policy and the manifold circumstances which combined to precipitate that loss.

This study may be the most sophisticated statistical study of legislative voting now in print. The author asks why legislators, especially U.S. senators, vote as they do. Are they influenced by their constituencies, party, committee leaders, the President? By taking a relatively short time span, the years 1961 to 1963, the author is able to give us answers far beyond any we have had before, and some rather surprising ones at that.

Constituencies played a different, but more important role in senators' voting than earlier studies have shown. Senators appeared to be responding both to the opinion held by their constituents on different issues and to the intensity with which these opinions were held. On the interrelation of constituencies and party, Mr. Jackson finds that Republicans and southern Democrats were particularly influenced by their voters.

The clearest cases of leadership influence were among the non-southern members of the Democratic Party. Western Republicans, on the other hand, rejected the leadership of party members for that of committee leaders. Finally, on Presidential leadership, Mr. Jackson shows that John F. Kennedy influenced senators only during the first two years of his administration. All of these findings challenge conventional wisdom and are bound to influence future work in legislative behavior.

In a powerful new narrative, G. Edward White challenges the reigning understanding of twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions, particularly in the New Deal period. He does this by rejecting such misleading characterizations as "liberal," "conservative," and "reactionary," and by reexamining several key topics in constitutional law.

Through a close reading of sources and analysis of the minds and sensibilities of a wide array of justices, including Holmes, Brandeis, Sutherland, Butler, Van Devanter, and McReynolds, White rediscovers the world of early-twentieth-century constitutional law and jurisprudence. He provides a counter-story to that of the triumphalist New Dealers. The deep conflicts over constitutional ideas that took place in the first half of the twentieth century are sensitively recovered, and the morality play of good liberals vs. mossbacks is replaced. This is the only thoroughly researched and fully realized history of the constitutional thought and practice of all the Supreme Court justices during the turbulent period that made America modern.

Constitutional Choices illuminates the world of scholarship and advocacy uniquely combined by Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s leading professors of constitutional law and most successful practitioners before the Supreme Court. In his new hook, Tribe boldly moves beyond the seemingly endless debate over which judicial approaches to enforcing the Constitution are “legitimate” and which are not. Arguing that all claims to legitimacy must remain suspect, Tribe focuses instead on the choices that must nonetheless be made in resolving actual constitutional controversies. To do so, he examines problems as diverse as interstate banking, gender discrimination, church subsidies, the constitutional amendment process, the war powers of the President, and First Amendment protection of American Nazis.

Challenging the ruling premises underlying many of the Supreme Court’s positions on fundamental issues of government authority and individual rights, Tribe shows how the Court is increasingly coming to resemble a judicial Office of Management and Budget, straining constitutional discourse through a managerial sieve and defending its constitutional rulings by “balancing” what it counts as “costs” against what it deems “benefits.” Tribe explains how the Court’s “Calculus” systematically excludes basic concerns about the distribution of wealth and power and conceals fundamental choices about the American polity. Calling for a more candid confrontation of those choices and of the principles and perspectives they reflect, Tribe exposes what has gone wrong and suggests how the Court can begin to reclaim the historic role entrusted to it by the Constitution.

This book argues that the Constitution has a dual nature. The first aspect, on which legal scholars have focused, is the degree to which the Constitution acts as a binding set of rules that can be neutrally interpreted and externally enforced by the courts against government actors. This is the process of constitutional interpretation. But according to Keith Whittington, the Constitution also permeates politics itself, to guide and constrain political actors in the very process of making public policy. In so doing, it is also dependent on political actors, both to formulate authoritative constitutional requirements and to enforce those fundamental settlements in the future. Whittington characterizes this process, by which constitutional meaning is shaped within politics at the same time that politics is shaped by the Constitution, as one of construction as opposed to interpretation.

Whittington goes on to argue that ambiguities in the constitutional text and changes in the political situation push political actors to construct their own constitutional understanding. The construction of constitutional meaning is a necessary part of the political process and a regular part of our nation's history, how a democracy lives with a written constitution. The Constitution both binds and empowers government officials. Whittington develops his argument through intensive analysis of four important cases: the impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson, the nullification crisis, and reforms of presidential-congressional relations during the Nixon presidency.

Americans have a love-hate relationship with government. Rejecting bureaucracy—but not the goods and services the welfare state provides—Americans have demanded that government be made to run like a business. Hence today’s privatization revolution.

But as Jon D. Michaels shows, separating the state from its public servants, practices, and institutions does violence to our Constitution, and threatens the health and stability of the Republic. Constitutional Coup puts forward a legal theory that explains the modern welfare state as a worthy successor to the framers’ three-branch government.

What legitimates the welfare state is its recommitment to a rivalrous system of separation of powers, in which political agency heads, career civil servants, and the public writ large reprise and restage the same battles long fought among Congress, the president, and the courts. Privatization now proclaims itself as another worthy successor, this time to an administrative state that Americans have grown weary of. Yet it is a constitutional usurper. Privatization dismantles those commitments to separating and checking state power by sidelining rivalrous civil servants and public participants.

Constitutional Coup cements the constitutionality of the administrative state, recognizing civil servants and public participants as necessary—rather than disposable—components. Casting privatization as an existential constitutional threat, it underscores how the fusion of politics and profits commercializes government—and consolidates state power in ways both the framers and administrative lawyers endeavored to disaggregate. It urges—and sketches the outlines of—a twenty-first-century bureaucratic renaissance.

In a series of remarkable forays, Robert Post develops an original account of how law functions in a democratic society. His work offers a radically new perspective on some of the most pressing constitutional issues of our day, such as the regulation of racist speech, pornography, and privacy.

Drawing on work in sociology, philosophy, and political theory, Post demonstrates that the law establishes distinct and competing forms of social order: democracy, in which the law embodies the possibilities of collective self-determination; community, in which the law articulates and enforces a common social identity; and management, in which the law creates the conditions for accomplishing specific goals. Debates over the boundaries between these distinct domains, Post argues, are central to some of the most intractable problems of modern constitutional law. Here we see, for instance, how the controversy over the regulation of racist speech negotiates the boundary between communitarian and democratic forms of social ordering. We see how public forum doctrine, a crucial but notoriously mysterious component of First Amendment jurisprudence, arbitrates distinctions between the social domains of democracy and management. Taking up specific court cases, such as that against Hustler magazine and that allowing prayers before state legislatures, Post shows us what is actually at stake in these constitutional struggles.

A highly complex and sophisticated account of the operation of constitutional law in modern society, Constitutional Domains is essential reading for lawyers, social theorists, and makers of public policy.

In Constitutional Identity, Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn argues that a constitution acquires an identity through experience—from a mix of the political aspirations and commitments that express a nation’s past and the desire to transcend that past. It is changeable but resistant to its own destruction, and manifests itself in various ways, as Jacobsohn shows in examples as far flung as India, Ireland, Israel, and the United States.

Jacobsohn argues that the presence of disharmony—both the tensions within a constitutional order and those that exist between a constitutional document and the society it seeks to regulate—is critical to understanding the theory and dynamics of constitutional identity. He explores constitutional identity’s great practical importance for some of constitutionalism’s most vexing questions: Is an unconstitutional constitution possible? Is the judicial practice of using foreign sources to resolve domestic legal disputes a threat to vital constitutional interests? How are the competing demands of transformation and preservation in constitutional evolution to be balanced?

Americans are increasingly ruled by an unwritten constitution consisting of executive orders, signing statements, and other forms of quasi-law that lack the predictability and consistency essential for the legal system to function properly. As a result, the U.S. Constitution no longer means what it says to the people it is supposed to govern, and the government no longer acts according to the rule of law. These developments can be traced back to a change in “constitutional morality,” Bruce Frohnen and George Carey argue in this challenging book.

The principle of separation of powers among co-equal branches of government formed the cornerstone of America’s original constitutional morality. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, Progressives began to attack this bedrock principle, believing that it impeded government from “doing the people’s business.” The regime of mixed powers, delegation, and expansive legal interpretation they instituted rejected the ideals of limited government that had given birth to the Constitution. Instead, Progressives promoted a governmental model rooted in French revolutionary claims. They replaced a Constitution designed to mediate among society’s different geographic and socioeconomic groups with a body of quasi-laws commanding the democratic reformation of society.

Pursuit of this Progressive vision has become ingrained in American legal and political culture—at the cost, according to Frohnen and Carey, of the constitutional safeguards that preserve the rule of law.

Political constitutions, hammered out by imperfect human beings in periods of intense political controversy, are always compromises with injustice. What makes the U.S. Constitution legitimate, argues this daring book, is Americans’ enduring faith that the Constitution’s promises can someday be redeemed, and the constitutional system be made “a more perfect union.”

A leading constitutional theorist, Balkin argues eloquently that the American constitutional project is based in faith, hope, and a narrative of shared redemption. Our belief that the Constitution will deliver us from evil shows in the stories we tell one another about where our country came from and where it is headed, and in the way we use these historical touchstones to justify our fervent (and opposed) political creeds. Because Americans have believed in a story of constitutional redemption, we have assumed the right to decide for ourselves what the Constitution means, and have worked to persuade others to set it on the right path. As a result, constitutional principles have often shifted dramatically over time. They are, in fact, often political compromises in disguise.

What will such a Constitution become? We cannot know. But our belief in the legitimacy of the Constitution requires a leap of faith—a gamble on the ultimate vindication of a political project that has already survived many follies and near-catastrophes, and whose destiny is still over the horizon.

Most of us regard the Constitution as the foundation of American democracy. How, then, are we to understand the restrictions that it imposes on legislatures and voters? Why, for example, does the Constitution allow unelected judges to exercise so much power? And why is this centuries-old document so difficult to amend? In short, how can we call ourselves a democracy when we are bound by an entrenched, and sometimes counter-majoritarian, constitution?

In Constitutional Self-Government, Christopher Eisgruber focuses directly on the Constitution's seemingly undemocratic features. Whereas other scholars have tried to reconcile these features with majority rule, or simply acknowledged them as necessary limits on democracy, Eisgruber argues that constitutionalism is best regarded not as a constraint upon self-government, but as a crucial ingredient in a complex, non-majoritarian form of democracy. In an original and provocative argument, he contends that legislatures and elections provide only an incomplete representation of the people, and he claims that the Supreme Court should be regarded as another of the institutions able to speak for Americans about justice. At a pivotal moment of worldwide interest in judicial review and renewed national controversy over the Supreme Court's role in politics, Constitutional Self-Government ingeniously locates the Constitution's value in its capacity to sustain an array of institutions that render self-government meaningful for a large and diverse people.

At the intersection of two sweeping global trends—the rise of popular support for principles of theocratic governance and the spread of constitutionalism and judicial review—a new legal order has emerged: constitutional theocracy. It enshrines religion and its interlocutors as “a” or “the” source of legislation, and at the same time adheres to core ideals and practices of modern constitutionalism. A unique hybrid of apparently conflicting worldviews, values, and interests, constitutional theocracies thus offer an ideal setting—a “living laboratory” as it were—for studying constitutional law as a form of politics by other means. In this book, Ran Hirschl undertakes a rigorous comparative analysis of religion-and-state jurisprudence from dozens of countries worldwide to explore the evolving role of constitutional law and courts in a non-secularist world.

Counterintuitively, Hirschl argues that the constitutional enshrinement of religion is a rational, prudent strategy that allows opponents of theocratic governance to talk the religious talk without walking most of what they regard as theocracy’s unappealing, costly walk. Many of the jurisdictional, enforcement, and cooptation advantages that gave religious legal regimes an edge in the pre-modern era, are now aiding the modern state and its laws in its effort to contain religion. The “constitutional” in a constitutional theocracy thus fulfills the same restricting function it carries out in a constitutional democracy: it brings theocratic governance under check and assigns to constitutional law and courts the task of a bulwark against the threat of radical religion.

This book describes the constitutional law of foreign affairs, derived from the historical understanding of the Constitution's text. It examines timeless and recurring foreign affairs controversies--such as the role of the president and Congress, the power to enter armed conflict, and the power to make and break treaties--and shows how the words, structure, and context of the Constitution can resolve pivotal court cases and leading modern disputes. The book provides a counterpoint to much conventional discussion of constitutional foreign affairs law, which tends to assume that the Constitution's text and history cannot give much guidance, and which rests many of its arguments upon modern practice and policy considerations.

Using a close focus on the text and a wide array of historical sources, Michael Ramsey argues that the Constitution's original design gives the president substantial independent powers in foreign affairs. But, contrary to what many presidents and presidential advisors contend, these powers are balanced by the independent powers given to Congress, the Senate, the states, and the courts. The Constitution, Ramsey concludes, does not make any branch of government the ultimate decision maker in foreign affairs, but rather divides authority among multiple independent power centers.

In this groundbreaking book, Michael Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Tomasello demonstrates that we don’t need a self-contained “language instinct” to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.

Tomasello argues that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, which rests on the uniquely human ability to comprehend intention. Grammar emerges as the speakers of a language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols; children pick up these patterns in the buzz of words they hear around them.

All theories of language acquisition assume these fundamental skills of intention-reading and pattern-finding. Some formal linguistic theories posit a second set of acquisition processes to connect somehow with an innate universal grammar. But these extra processes, Tomasello argues, are completely unnecessary—important to save a theory but not to explain the phenomenon.

For all its empirical weaknesses, Chomskian generative grammar has ruled the linguistic world for forty years. Constructing a Language offers a compellingly argued, psychologically sound new vision for the study of language acquisition.

In this wide-ranging study, Hyung Il Pai examines how archaeological finds from throughout Northeast Asia have been used in Korea to construct a myth of state formation. This myth emphasizes the ancient development of a pure Korean race that created a civilization rivaling those of China and Japan and a unified state controlling a wide area in Asia.

Through a new analysis of the archaeological data, Pai shows that the Korean state was in fact formed much later and that it reflected diverse influences from throughout Northern Asia, particularly the material culture of Han China. Her deconstruction of the uses of the archaeological finds by nationalistic historians reveals how they have been utilized to legitimate Korean nationalism and a particular form of national identity.

Meg Logan has not been farther than two miles from home in six years. She has agoraphobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder that entraps its sufferers in the fear of leaving safe havens such as home. Paradoxically, while at this safe haven, agoraphobics spend much of their time ruminating over past panic experiences and imagining similar hypothetical situations. In doing so, they create a narrative that both describes their experience and locks them into it.

Constructing Panic offers an unprecedented analysis of one patient's experience of agoraphobia. In this novel interdisciplinary collaboration between a clinical psychologist and a linguist, the authors probe Meg's stories for constructions of emotions, actions, and events. They illustrate how Meg uses grammar and narrative structure to create and recreate emotional experiences that maintain her agoraphobic identity.

In this work Capps and Ochs propose a startling new view of agoraphobia as a communicative disorder. Constructing Panic opens up the largely overlooked potential for linguistic and narrative analysis by revealing the roots of panic and by offering a unique framework for therapeutic intervention. Readers will find in these pages hope for managing panic through careful attention to how we tell the story of our lives.

As the Cold War took shape during the late 1940s, policymakers in the United States and Great Britain displayed a marked tendency to regard international communism as a “monolithic” conspiratorial movement. The image of a “Communist monolith” distilled the messy realities of international relations into a neat, comprehensible formula. Its lesson was that all communists, regardless of their native land or political program, were essentially tools of the Kremlin.

Marc Selverstone recreates the manner in which the “monolith” emerged as a perpetual framework on both sides of the Atlantic. Though more pervasive and millennial in its American guise, this understanding also informed conceptions of international communism in its close ally Great Britain, casting the Kremlin’s challenge as but one more in a long line of threats to freedom.

This illuminating and important book not only explains the Cold War mindset that determined global policy for much of the twentieth century, but also reveals how the search to define a foreign threat can shape the ways in which that threat is actually met.

James Merrill is now widely recognized as one of the essential poets of our time, one of those whose achievement will define postwar American literature. The Consuming Myth is a discerning account of his work that will well serve amateur and initiate alike. Stephen Yenser ranges over all of Merrill’s writing to date, from a precocious book printed when its author was fifteen to his most recent publication, a verse play. He writes about both of the poet’s novels and pays particular attention to the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. His close readings shed light on Merrill’s boldly and subtly original techniques, his kinship with Mallarmé, Proust, Yeats, Stevens, and others, and the network of connections among his diverse undertakings.

Yenser suggests that Merrill’s special power springs in part from transactions between evidently opposing perceptions. On the one hand—as the result of some poetic version of what physicists call “pair production”—whatever Merrill looks at hard yields its contraries. All about him, and within him too, he discovers duality and division. On the other hand, he is profoundly aware of the interconnectedness of things, whether they be his life and his art (which we might think of as aspects of his work), or humanity and nature, or good and evil. It is out of quarrels with ourselves that we make poetry, Yeats observed; and it is in striving to accommodate intuitions of both difference and identity that Merrill has fashioned his distinctive manner.

In Consumption Behavior and the Effects of Government Fiscal Policies, Randall Mariger explores how people make decisions about how much to consume and save over their lifetimes. An understanding of these issues illuminates not only individual behavior but important properties of the macro economy as well. The most popular framework for analyzing consumption has been the life-cycle theory. Mariger tests two fundamental, and controversial, assumptions underlying the theory—that there are no planned bequests and that human capital is marketable. To do this, he fits a structural consumption model that incorporates endogenous liquidity constraints (non-marketability of human capital), but no planned bequests, to data on a cross-section of U. S. families. This estimated model, in conjunction with estimates of alternative models, enables him to make inferences about the respective effects of liquidity constraints and social security wealth on consumption. This latter effect yields indirect evidence concerning planned bequests. Mariger also presents direct evidence concerning bequest behavior.

Among his findings are that the model fits the data very well in spite of its tight theoretical structure; that liquidity constraints are prevalent and have important effects on consumption behavior; that planned bequests appear not to be common among families in the lower 99.1% of the wealth distribution; and that families in the upper 0.9% of the wealth distribution appear to plan substantial bequests. Mariger devotes the latter part of his book to studying the implications of his estimated consumption model for the effects of government fiscal policies. More specifically, he simulates the model to infer the effects of government tax/debt policy, as well as those of the social security system, on aggregate savings.

With this book, Joseph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music—with which musicology is traditionally equated—but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism.

Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music toward a critical orientation. As examples, he presents fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950s and Beethoven studies in the 1960s. He sketches the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Milton Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster’s songs into the canons of “black” music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Contemplating Music is filled with wisdom and trenchant commentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.

Recently scholars have become increasingly aware that the study of Chinese law can provide new insight into the forces actually at work in Chinese society in different epochs. In an effort to encourage and facilitate the study of this subject, the thirteen essays of this volume deal with the methodology of studying the legal system of the People's Republic, describe the available research materials, and analyze the problems presented in making the materials of Chinese law intelligible to Western readers. They also review foreign works on Chinese law and explore the difficulties involved in translation and in comparing the Chinese system to our own and to that of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Cohen's thoughtful introduction provides an excellent survey of the worldwide development of studies of Chinese law. It also delineates the nature of the essays that he and the eleven other scholars have contributed to the volume.