Barack Obama’s galvanizing victory in 2008, coming amid the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, opened the door to major reforms. But the president quickly faced skepticism from supporters and fierce opposition from Republicans, who scored sweeping wins in the 2010 midterm election. Here, noted political scientist Theda Skocpol surveys the political landscape and explores its most consequential questions: What happened to Obama’s “new New Deal”? Why have his achievements enraged opponents more than they have satisfied supporters? How has the Tea Party’s ascendance reshaped American politics?

Skocpol’s compelling account rises above conventional wisdom and overwrought rhetoric. The Obama administration’s response to the recession produced bold initiatives—health care reform, changes in college loans, financial regulation—that promise security and opportunity. But these reforms are complex and will take years to implement. Potential beneficiaries do not readily understand them, yet the reforms alarm powerful interests and political enemies, creating the volatile mix of confusion and fear from which Tea Party forces erupted. Skocpol dissects the popular and elite components of the Tea Party reaction that has boosted the Republican Party while pushing it far to the right at a critical juncture for U.S. politics and governance.

Skocpol’s analysis is accompanied by contributions from two fellow scholars and a former congressman. At this moment of economic uncertainty and extreme polarization, as voters prepare to render another verdict on Obama’s historic presidency, Skocpol and her respondents help us to understand its triumphs and setbacks and see where we might be headed next.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field.

Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.

Most observers agree that modern physical theory attempts to provide objective representations of reality. However, the claim that these representations are based on conventional choices is viewed by many as a denial of their objectivity. As a result, objectivity and conventionality in representation are often framed as polar opposites.

Offering a new appraisal of symmetry in modern physics, employing detailed case studies from relativity theory and quantum mechanics, Objectivity, Invariance, and Convention contends that the physical sciences, though dependent on convention, may produce objective representations of reality. Talal Debs and Michael Redhead show that both realists and constructivists have recognized important elements of an understanding of science that may not be contradictory.

The position—“perspectival invariantism”—introduced in this book highlights the shortcomings of existing approaches to symmetry in physics, and, for the constructivist, demonstrates that a dependence on conventions in representation reaches into the domain of the most technical sciences. For the realist, it stands as evidence against the claim that conventionality must undermine objectivity. We can be committed to the existence of a single real ontology while maintaining a cultural view of science.

A daily glass of wine prolongs life—yet alcohol can cause life-threatening cancer. Some say raising the minimum wage will decrease inequality while others say it increases unemployment. Scientists once confidently claimed that hormone replacement therapy reduced the risk of heart disease but now they equally confidently claim it raises that risk. What should we make of this endless barrage of conflicting claims?

Observation and Experiment is an introduction to causal inference by one of the field’s leading scholars. An award-winning professor at Wharton, Paul Rosenbaum explains key concepts and methods through lively examples that make abstract principles accessible. He draws his examples from clinical medicine, economics, public health, epidemiology, clinical psychology, and psychiatry to explain how randomized control trials are conceived and designed, how they differ from observational studies, and what techniques are available to mitigate their bias.

“Carefully and precisely written…reflecting superb statistical understanding, all communicated with the skill of a master teacher.”
—Stephen M. Stigler, author of The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom

“An excellent introduction…Well-written and thoughtful…from one of causal inference’s noted experts.”
—Journal of the American Statistical Association

“Rosenbaum is a gifted expositor…an outstanding introduction to the topic for anyone who is interested in understanding the basic ideas and approaches to causal inference.”
—Psychometrika

“A very valuable contribution…Highly recommended.”
—International Statistical Review

Responding to the growing need for tried-and-trusted solutions to the reproductive health care issues confronting millions of women worldwide, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Low-Resource Settings provides practical guidelines for ensuring the delivery of quality OB/GYN care to women in resource-poor countries. Including contributions from leading clinicians and researchers in the field, this welcome overview fills an important gap in existing medical literature on women’s health care and will be an invaluable resource for doctors, clinicians, and medical students at all stages of their careers who work in the global health arena.

The reproductive health risks that all women face are greatly exacerbated when health care facilities are inadequate, equipment and medications are in short supply, and well-trained medical staff are few and far away. Often in these settings, the sole doctor or medical professional on hand has expertise in some areas of women’s reproductive care but needs a refresher course in others.

This informative guide features hands-on, step-by-step instruction for the most pertinent OB/GYN conditions—both acute and chronic—that health care workers in the field confront. The authors examine a wide range of topics, including: strategies to reduce maternal mortality and stillbirths; infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, including malaria and HIV; cervical cancer; contraception; prenatal, delivery, and newborn care; and complications arising from gender-based violence and female genital cutting. Published in a convenient format with a durable binding, this reference will be an essential companion to health care providers throughout the world.

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week

One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume.

“It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.”
—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books

“Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.”
—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review

“Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.”
—John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance, was the principal humanist working in Lombardy in the middle of the Quattrocento and served as court poet to the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan. His long life saw him as busy with politics, diplomacy, and intrigue as with literature and scholarship, leaving him very often on the run from rival factions—and even from hired assassins. The first Latin poet of the Renaissance to explore the expressive potential of Horatian meters, Filelfo adapted the traditions of Augustan literature to address personal and political concerns in his own day.

The Odes, completed in the mid-1450s, constitute the first complete cycle of Horatian odes since classical antiquity and are a major literary achievement. Their themes include war, just rule, love, exile, patronage, and friendship as well as topical subjects like the plague’s grim effects on Milan.

This volume is the first publication of the Latin text since the fifteenth century and the first translation into English.

Monumental verse.

The poetry of Horace (born 65 BC) is richly varied, its focus moving between public and private concerns, urban and rural settings, Stoic and Epicurean thought. The Loeb Classical Library edition of the great Roman poet’s Odes and Epodes boasts a faithful and fluid translation and reflects current scholarship.

Horace took pride in being the first Roman to write a body of lyric poetry. For models he turned to Greek lyric, especially to the poetry of Alcaeus, Sappho, and Pindar; but his poems are set in a Roman context. His four books of Odes cover a wide range of moods and topics. Some are public poems, upholding the traditional values of courage, loyalty, and piety; and there are hymns to the gods. But most of the Odes are on private themes: chiding or advising friends; speaking about love and amorous situations, often amusingly. Horace’s seventeen Epodes, which he called iambi, were also an innovation for Roman literature. Like the Odes they were inspired by a Greek model: the seventh-century iambic poetry of Archilochus. Love and political concerns are frequent themes; the tone is only occasionally aggressive. “In his language he is triumphantly adventurous,” Quintilian said of Horace; Niall Rudd’s translation reflects his different voices.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.

Horace (b. 65 B.C.) claims the lyric poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus as models for his celebrated odes. His four books cover a wide range of moods and topics: friendship is the dominant theme of about a third of the poems; a great many deal with love and amorous situations, often amusingly; others deal with patriotic and political themes. The seventeen epodes, which Horace called iambi, were also inspired by a Greek model: the seventh century iambic poetry of Archilochus. As in the odes, love and politics are frequent themes; some of the epodes also display mockery and ridicule, of a harsher variety than we find in Horace's satires.

Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats’s whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together—that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l’oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.

Like Vendler’s previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry—thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural—are brought to bear on it at once.

The hero’s journey home from war.

Here is a new Loeb Classical Library edition of the resplendent epic tale of Odysseus’ long journey home from the Trojan War and the legendary temptations, delays, and perils he faced at every turn. Homer’s classic poem features Odysseus’ encounters with the beautiful nymph Calypso; the queenly but wily Circe; the Lotus-eaters, who fed his men their memory-stealing drug; the man-eating, one-eyed Cyclops; the Laestrygonian giants; the souls of the dead in Hades; the beguiling Sirens; the treacherous Scylla and Charybdis. Here, too, is the hero’s faithful wife, Penelope, weaving a shroud by day and unraveling it by night, in order to thwart the numerous suitors attempting to take Odysseus’ place.

The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest European epic poems, the Odyssey and Iliad. These texts have long stood in the Loeb Classical Library with a faithful and literate prose translation by A. T. Murray. George Dimock has brought the Loeb’s Odyssey up to date, with a rendering that retains Murray’s admirable style but is worded for today’s readers. The two-volume edition includes a new introduction, notes, and index.

The hero’s journey home from war.

Here is a new Loeb Classical Library edition of the resplendent epic tale of Odysseus’ long journey home from the Trojan War and the legendary temptations, delays, and perils he faced at every turn. Homer’s classic poem features Odysseus’ encounters with the beautiful nymph Calypso; the queenly but wily Circe; the Lotus-eaters, who fed his men their memory-stealing drug; the man-eating, one-eyed Cyclops; the Laestrygonian giants; the souls of the dead in Hades; the beguiling Sirens; the treacherous Scylla and Charybdis. Here, too, is the hero’s faithful wife, Penelope, weaving a shroud by day and unraveling it by night, in order to thwart the numerous suitors attempting to take Odysseus’ place.

The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest European epic poems, the Odyssey and Iliad. These texts have long stood in the Loeb Classical Library with a faithful and literate prose translation by A. T. Murray. George Dimock has brought the Loeb’s Odyssey up to date, with a rendering that retains Murray’s admirable style but is worded for today’s readers. The two-volume edition includes a new introduction, notes, and index.

Psychoanalysis, entering its second century, is a vital yet divided discipline. A confusing array of mutually contradictory theories compete for the loyalty of clinicians and for the attention of all those interested in understanding human experience.

In the classic Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, Jay Greenberg and his coauthor Stephen Mitchell brought clarity to the confusion surrounding psychoanalytic disputes. They defined two competing models: the drive model, which addresses the private dimensions of experience; and the relational model, which reveals the relentlessly social aspect of our lives. Oedipus and Beyond builds on Greenberg’s earlier contribution. Beginning with a brilliant critique of the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis, he provides fresh insight into Freud’s theory, demonstrating how attempts to resolve some of its shortcomings have generated their own theoretical and clinical dilemmas. In the process he illuminates the roles of the Oedipus complex, the drives, the unconscious, and psychic structure in shaping the sensibilities of alternative psychoanalytic approaches.

Greenberg does not attempt to synthesize the two models, because he believes that diversity is essential if psychoanalysis is to remain strong. Instead, he proposes a compelling and practical clinical theory in which Freud’s insistence on the importance of inner motivation, psychic conflict, and personal agency effectively informs a relational emphasis on the fundamental influence of social living.

The book concludes with some apt illustrations of how the “representational model” can enrich clinical work. Greenberg rethinks the process of making the unconscious conscious, and arrives at new approaches to the analyst’s neutrality, to transference analysis, and to countertransference. The result reflects the author’s profound insight into the structure of psychoanalytic theory and his mastery of the contributions of diverse psychoanalytic schools. Perhaps most important, Greenberg’s argument never loses touch with his clinical experience; ultimately, this is the deeply personal statement of a skilled practitioner.

We speak of rights as though they are objective matters of fact that have a crucial bearing on how we ought to behave. Yet few, if any, rights are universally acknowledged without wide differences of meaning. Instead, they usually represent the particular ideals of the individuals or groups that claim them. Theories of rights have always grappled with this central problem, but none of the literature on the subject has offered a satisfactory solution. Lloyd Weinreb makes the first significant advance toward an understanding of what rights are, how they function in our lives, and why we need them.

Weinreb’s central argument is that rights are tightly connected to responsibility. They are the normative constituents of persons, attributes that we have rightly, as our due. As such, they enable us to overcome the antinomy of moral freedom and natural causal order. Without them, we could not regard human beings as persons, that is, as free and responsible, or autonomous. Since responsibility is a structural feature of our experience and a matter of fact, rights too are matters of fact.

Against a review of the current debates on the subject, Weinreb fully elaborates his original argument on the nature of rights and finds the source of concrete rights in the nomos, or deep conventions, of a community. Applying his theory, he shows how it helps to answer specific questions about animal rights, human rights—including, in the context of abortion and capital punishment, the right to life—and civil rights, including particularly rights of the handicapped, gay rights, and affirmative action in contemporary American society. Along the way, Weinreb shows that Oedipus and Roger Clemens have more in common than either would probably have supposed.

This highly original work will significantly redirect the study of rights. It will be especially valuable to those who practice or study law, philosophy, politics, and public policy.

Who could have guessed that the lowly fruit fly might hold the key for decoding heredity? Or that the mouse might one day disclose astonishing evolutionary secrets? In a book infused with wisdom, wonder, and a healthy dose of wry skepticism, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist François Jacob walks us through the surprising ways of science, particularly the science of biology, in this century. Of Flies, Mice, and Men is at once a work of history, a social study of the role of scientists in the modern world, and a cautionary tale of the bumbling and brilliance, imagination and luck, that attend scientific discovery. A book about molecules, reproduction, and evolutionary tinkering, it is also about the way biologists work, and how they contemplate beauty and truth, good and evil.

Animated with anecdotes from Greek mythology, literature, episodes from the history of science, and personal experience, Of Flies, Mice, and Men tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from. In particular, Jacob scrutinizes the place of the scientist in society. Alternately cast as the soothsayer Tiresias, the conscienceless inventor Daedalus, or Prometheus, conveyer of dangerous knowledge, the scientist in our day must instead adopt the role of truthteller, Jacob suggests. And the crucial truth that molecular biology teaches is the one he elaborates with great clarity and grace in this book: that all animals are made of the same building blocks, by a combinatorial system that always rearranges the same elements according to new forms.

Of Mind and Other Matters displays perhaps more vividly than any one of Nelson Goodman’s previous books both the remarkable diversity of his concerns and the essential unity of his thought.

Many new studies are incorporated in the book, along with material, often now augmented or significantly revised, that he has published during the last decade. As a whole the volume will serve as a concise introduction to Goodman’s thought for general readers, and will develop its more recent unfoldings for those philosophers and others who have grown wiser with his books over the years.

Goodman transcends the narrow “scientism and humanism that set the sciences and the arts in opposition”; his insights derive from both formal philosophy and cognitive psychology. As Hilary Putnam has noted, Goodman “prefers concrete and partial progress to grand and ultimately empty visions”; and here are illuminating studies of topics ranging from science policy and museum administration and art education to narrative in literature and painting and the analysis of elusive aspects of literal and metaphorical reference. All these are ramifications of Goodman’s profound and often revolutionary philosophical work on the ways we understand and even make the worlds we live in.

What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese fiction and Japanese politicians' "America-bashing"? Between the portrayal of East-West relations in the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and the terms of the GATT trade agreements?

In this provocative study, Masao Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has characterized relations between the two cultures.

Both nations are blinkered by complementary forms of ethnocentricity. The United States--or, more broadly, the Eurocentric West--believes its culture to be universal, while Japan believes its culture to be essentially unique. Thus American critics read and judge Japanese literature by the standards of the Western novel; Japanese politicians pay lip service to "free trade" while supporting protectionist policies at home and abroad.

Miyoshi takes off from literature to range across culture, politics, and economics in his analysis of the Japanese and their reflections in the West; the fiction of Tanizaki, Mishima, Oe; trade negotiations; Japan bashing and America bashing; Emperor worship; Japanese feminist writing; the domination of transcribed conversation as a literary form in contemporary Japan. In his confrontation with cultural critics, Miyoshi does not spare "centrists" of either persuasion, nor those who refuse to recognize that "the literary and the economical, the cultural and the industrial, are inseparable."

Yet contentious as this book can be, it ultimately holds out, by its example, hope for a criticism that can see beyond the boundaries of national cultures--without substituting a historically false "universal" culture--and that examines cultural convergences from a viewpoint that remains provocatively and fruitfully off center.

In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago’s Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in the ghetto. From women who clean houses and prepare lunches for the local hospital to small-scale entrepreneurs like the mechanic who works in an alley; from the preacher who provides mediation services to the salon owner who rents her store out for gambling parties; and from street vendors hawking socks and incense to the drug dealing and extortion of the local gang, we come to see how these activities form the backbone of the ghetto economy.

What emerges are the innumerable ways that these men and women, immersed in their shadowy economic pursuits, are connected to and reliant upon one another. The underground economy, as Venkatesh’s subtle storytelling reveals, functions as an intricate web, and in the strength of its strands lie the fates of many Maquis Park residents. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto’s appalling isolation from the rest of the country.

The Internet has been romanticized as a zone of freedom. The alluring combination of sophisticated technology with low barriers to entry and instantaneous outreach to millions of users has mesmerized libertarians and communitarians alike. Lawmakers have joined the celebration, passing the Communications Decency Act, which enables Internet Service Providers to allow unregulated discourse without danger of liability, all in the name of enhancing freedom of speech. But an unregulated Internet is a breeding ground for offensive conduct.

At last we have a book that begins to focus on abuses made possible by anonymity, freedom from liability, and lack of oversight. The distinguished scholars assembled in this volume, drawn from law and philosophy, connect the absence of legal oversight with harassment and discrimination. Questioning the simplistic notion that abusive speech and mobocracy are the inevitable outcomes of new technology, they argue that current misuse is the outgrowth of social, technological, and legal choices. Seeing this clearly will help us to be better informed about our options.

In a field still dominated by a frontier perspective, this book has the potential to be a real game changer. Armed with example after example of harassment in Internet chat rooms and forums, the authors detail some of the vile and hateful speech that the current combination of law and technology has bred. The facts are then treated to analysis and policy prescriptions. Read this book and you will never again see the Internet through rose-colored glasses.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian Empire ranked third among the world's oil-producing states (surpassed only by the United States and Russia), and accounted for five percent of global oil production. By 1918, the Central Powers did not have enough oil to maintain a modern military. How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia (the province producing the oil) and the Empire?

In a brilliantly conceived work, Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Galician oil industry. She portrays this often overlooked oil boom's transformation of the environment, and its reorientation of religious and social divisions that had defined a previously agrarian population, as surprising alliances among traditional foes sprang up among workers and entrepreneurs, at the workplace, and in the pubs and brothels of new oiltowns.

Frank sets this complex story in a context of international finance, technological exchange, and Habsburg history as a sobering counterpoint to traditional modernization narratives. As the oil ran out, the economy, the population, and the environment returned largely to their former state, reminding us that there is nothing ineluctable about the consequences of industrial development.

A work of original scholarship and compelling sweep, Okfuskee is a community-centered Indian history with an explicitly comparativist agenda. Joshua Piker uses the history of Okfuskee, an eighteenth-century Creek town, to reframe standard narratives of both Native and American experiences.

This unique, detailed perspective on local life in a Native society allows us to truly understand both the pervasiveness of colonialism's influence and the inventiveness of Native responses. At the same time, by comparing the Okfuskees' experiences to those of their contemporaries in colonial British America, the book provides a nuanced discussion of the ways in which Native and Euro-American histories intersected with, and diverged from, each other.

Piker examines the diplomatic ties that developed between the Okfuskees and their British neighbors; the economic implications of the Okfuskees' shifting world view; the integration of British traders into the town; and the shifting gender and generational relationships in the community. By both providing an in-depth investigation of a colonial-era Indian town in Indian country and placing the Okfuskees within the processes central to early American history, Piker offers a Native history with important implications for American history.

What offers over seven hundred witty enigmas in several languages? Answer: The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Riddles, wordplay, and inscrutable utterances have been at the heart of Western literature for many centuries. Often brief and always delightful, medieval riddles provide insights into the extraordinary and the everyday, connecting the learned and the ribald, the lay and the devout, and the familiar and the imported. Many solutions involve domestic life, including “butter churn” and “chickens.” Others like “the harrowing of hell” or “the Pleiades” appeal to an educated elite. Still others, like “the one-eyed seller of garlic,” are too absurd to solve: that is part of the game. Riddles are not simply lighthearted amusement. They invite philosophical questions about language and knowledge.

Most riddles in this volume are translated from Old English and Latin, but it also includes some from Old Norse–Icelandic. The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition assembles, for the first time ever, an astonishing array of riddles composed before 1200 CE that continue to entertain and puzzle.

The Old English Boethius boldly refashions in Anglo-Saxon guise a great literary monument of the late-antique world, The Consolation of Philosophy. Condemned to death for treason around 525 ce, the Roman scholar Boethius turned to philosophy to transform his personal distress into a powerful meditation on fate, free will, and the human capacity for virtue in a flawed, fallen world. Boethius's Latin dialogues found a receptive audience in Anglo-Saxon England, where they were translated into Old English some time around 900. The translator (traditionally identified with King Alfred) freely adapts the Latin for a new audience: the Roman Fabricius, for example, becomes the Germanic weapon-smith Weland. The translation replicates Boethius’s alternation of prose and verse—only in this case Old English prose alternates with alliterative verse.

In later centuries Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth each turned The Consolation of Philosophy into English, but the Old English translation was the first to bring it to a wider vernacular audience. Verse prologues and epilogues for works traditionally associated with King Alfred fill out the volume, offering readers a fascinating glimpse of the moment when English confidently claimed its birthright as a literature capable of anything, from sublime ideas to subtle poetry.

A contemporary edition and translation of one of the great monuments of Old English literary and religious culture.

The homilies of the monk Ælfric, written in the last decade of the tenth century, offer some of the most important prose writing in Old English. They convey mainstream Christian thought at the turn of the millennium, a distillation of the spiritual inheritance of the English Church before the Norman Conquest and during a time of monastic reform. The homilies cover a broad range of topics, from biblical exegesis to saints’ lives to general Christian history, with a strong focus on the Gospel reading at Mass, explained in language that laypeople could understand. Ælfric is famous for his lucid prose, which he later developed into a rhythmical and alliterative style that has often been likened to verse.

In his first series of Catholic Homilies, Ælfric drew on the works of Church Fathers such as Augustine, Gregory, and Bede to create forty sermons for use throughout the church year. This is the first complete translation of the Catholic Homilies since 1844, presented alongside the newly edited Old English text.

The Book of Pastoral Rule, or Liber regulae pastoralis, by Pope Gregory the Great—the pontiff responsible for the conversion of the English to Christianity beginning in 597—is a guide for aspiring bishops. Pope Gregory explains who ought and who ought not seek such a position and advises on what sort of spiritual guidance a bishop should provide to those under his direction.

The Old English Pastoral Care, a translation of Gregory’s treatise completed between 890 and 896, is described in a prefatory letter by King Alfred the Great as his own work, composed with the assistance of his bishops and chaplains. It appears to be the first of the Alfredian translations into Old English of Latin texts deemed necessary for the revitalization of the English Church, which had been ravaged by the depredations of Scandinavian invaders during the ninth century and by the decline of clerical competence in Latin.

This new edition and translation into modern English is the first to appear in a century and a half.

Religious piety has rarely been animated as vigorously as in Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Ranging from lyrical to dramatic to narrative, the individual poems show great inventiveness in reimagining perennial Christian topics. In different poems, for example, Christ expels Lucifer from heaven, resists the devil's temptation on earth, mounts the cross with zeal to face death, harrows hell at the urging of John the Baptist, appears in disguise to pilot a ship, and presides over the Last Judgment. Satan and the fallen angels lament their plight in a vividly imagined hell and plot against Christ and his saints.

In Andreas the poet relates, in language reminiscent of Beowulf, the tribulations of the apostles Andrew and Matthew in a city of cannibals. In The Vision of the Cross (also known as The Dream of the Rood), the cross speaks as a Germanic warrior intolerably torn between the imperative to protect his Lord and the duty to become his means of execution. In Guthlac A, an Anglo-Saxon warrior abandons his life of violence to do battle as a hermit against demons in the fens of Lincolnshire. As a collection these ten anonymous poems vividly demonstrate the extraordinary hybrid that emerges when traditional Germanic verse adapts itself to Christian themes.

Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints complements the saints' lives found in The Old English Poems of Cynewulf, DOML 23.

The Old English poems attributed to Cynewulf, who flourished some time between the eighth and tenth centuries, are unusual because most vernacular poems in this period are anonymous. Other than the name, we have no biographical details of Cynewulf, not even the most basic facts of where or when he lived. Yet the poems themselves attest to a powerfully inventive imagination, deeply learned in Christian doctrine and traditional verse-craft.

Runic letters spelling out the name Cynewulf appear in four poems: Christ II (or The Ascension), Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles, and Elene. To these a fifth can be added, Guthlac B, because of similarities in style and vocabulary, but any signature (if one ever existed) has been lost because its ending lines are missing. What characterizes Cynewulf’s poetry? He reveals an expert control of structure as shown from the changes he makes to his Latin sources. He has a flair for extended similes and dramatic dialogue. In Christ II, for example, the major events in Christ’s life are portrayed as vigorous leaps. In Juliana the force of the saint’s rhetoric utterly confounds a demon sent to torment her.

The Latin psalms figured prominently in the lives of the Anglo-Saxons, whether sung in the Divine Office by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning by students, or recited in private devotion by lay people. They were also translated into Old English, first in prose and later in verse. Sometime in the middle of the eleventh century, the prose and verse translations were brought together and organized in a complementary sequence in a manuscript now known as the Paris Psalter. The prose version, traditionally attributed to King Alfred (d. 899), combines literal translation with interpretative clarification. In contrast, the anonymous Old English verse translation composed during the tenth century approaches the psalms in a spirit of prayer and devotion. Despite their differences, both reflect earnest attempts to capture the literal meaning of the psalms.

The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time. With this translation readers encounter the beginnings and the continuation of a long tradition of psalm renderings in English.

The twenty-five poems and eleven metrical charms in this Old English volume offer tantalizing insights into the mental landscape of the Anglo-Saxons. The Wanderer and The Seafarer famously combine philosophical consolation with introspection to achieve a spiritual understanding of life as a journey. The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message, and Wulf and Eadwacer direct a subjective lyrical intensity on the perennial themes of love, separation, and the passion for vengeance. From suffering comes wisdom, and these poems find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. “Woe is wondrously clinging; clouds glide,” reads a stoic, matter-of-fact observation in Maxims II on nature’s indifference to human suffering. Another form of wisdom emerges in the form of folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf. The enigmatic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn combine scholarly erudition and proverbial wisdom. Learning of all kinds is celebrated, including the meaning of individual runes in The Rune Poem and the catalog of legendary heroes in Widsith.

This book is a welcome complement to the previously published DOML volume Old English Shorter Poems, Volume I: Religious and Didactic.

Alongside famous long works such as Beowulf, Old English poetry offers a large number of shorter compositions, many of them on explicitly Christian themes. This volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library presents twenty-nine of these shorter religious poems composed in Old and early Middle English between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Among the texts, which demonstrate the remarkable versatility of early English verse, are colorful allegories of the natural world, poems dedicated to Christian prayer and morality, and powerful meditations on death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

Previously edited in many different places and in some instances lacking accessible translations, many of these poems have remained little known outside scholarly circles. The present volume aims to offer this important body of texts to a wider audience by bringing them together in one collection and providing all of them with up-to-date translations and explanatory notes. An introduction sets the poems in their literary-historical contexts, which are further illustrated by two appendices, including the first complete modern English translation of the so-called Old English Benedictine Office.

After the defeat and exile of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons, the political climate of France was one of seething unrest, intrigue, and dissent. A clandestine and conspiratorial movement known as the Carbonari, or Charbonnerie, arose in the early 1820's with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy of Louis XVIII. Modeling itself after the Italian Carbonari, this coalition of young French republicans--bonapartists, retired army officers, junior and non-commissioned officers, and leaders of the extreme liberal wing of the Chamber of Deputies--set up cells throughout France, hoping in particular to infiltrate vulnerable army units. Old Hatreds and Young Hopes follows the movement from its beginnings to its ultimate failure, from plots to trials.

Sources of information about secret societies and political conspiracies are always scattered and complex, and often unreliable. Spitzer demonstrates that the secrets of a conspiracy and its place in the broader history of a nation can nevertheless be brought to light by evaluating one kind of evidence against another, by checking and testing government sources, particularly police documents, against such other materials as the memoirs and letters of conspirators and contemporary journalistic accounts. His book is much more than the story of the conspirators. In showing why the conspiracy developed and how it was handled, the author has illuminated the workings of the politicalsystem of the Restoration--the structure and organization of its administration and political police and the operation of political justice in its courts. He also situates the French Carbonari in the history of secret societies and radical movements in the first half of the nineteenth century and works out links with similar groups in other countries.

Old Norse mythology is elusive: it is the label used to describe the religious stories of the pre-Christian North, featuring such well-known gods as Odin and Thor, yet most of the narratives have come down to us in manuscripts from the Middle Ages mainly written by Christians. Our view of the stories as they were transmitted in oral form in the pre-Christian era is obscured.

To overcome these limitations, this book assembles comparisons from a range of theoretical and analytical perspectives—across media, cultures, and disciplines. Fifteen scholars from a wide range of fields examine the similarities of and differences of the Old Norse mythologies with the myths of other cultures. The differences and similarities within the Old Norse corpus itself are examined to tease out the hidden clues to the original stories.

The Old English poems in this volume are among the first retellings of scriptural texts in a European vernacular. More than simple translations, they recast the familiar plots in daringly imaginative ways, from Satan's seductive pride (anticipating Milton), to a sympathetic yet tragic Eve, to Moses as a headstrong Germanic warrior-king, to the lyrical nature poetry in Azarias.

Whether or not the legendary Caedmon authored any of the poems in this volume, they represent traditional verse in all its vigor. Three of them survive as sequential epics in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The first, the Old English Genesis, recounts biblical history from creation and the apocryphal fall of the angels to the sacrifice of Isaac; Abraham emerges as the central figure struggling through exile toward a lasting covenant with God. The second, Exodus, follows Moses as he leads the Hebrew people out of Egyptian slavery and across the Red Sea. Both Abraham and Moses are transformed into martial heroes in the Anglo-Saxon mold. The last in the triad, Daniel, tells of the trials of the Jewish people in Babylonian exile up through Belshazzar's feast. Azarias, the final poem in this volume (found in an Exeter Cathedral manuscript), relates the apocryphal episode of the three youths in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.

The effort to achieve greater European unity has absorbed the interests and energies of a number of Europeans and Americans since the end of World War II. Edward Heath, who led Britain's earliest attempt to join the European Economic Community, first made this comprehensive statement of the philosophy and purpose behind the movement for European unity in a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University in March 1967. In discussing the future development of Europe, Mr. Heath considered factors relating to domestic and foreign politics, economics, and defense, presenting a complete picture of Europe and suggesting a course that might bring about a successful unity.

"The lectures," writes Mr. Heath in 1970, "...were an attempt to look behind the immediate headlines and examine in greater depth the stage which Europe had reached in its search for unity. I was particularly concerned to trace the development of the European Economic Community and to deduce from its history the direction of its future development. At the same time I examined Britain's attitude towards the EEC and how British aspirations in Europe fitted into a general concept of Britain's place in the world..."

"Much has happened since March 1967, but insofar as they concern Europe, events have in a curious way brought us full circle. Now, as in 1967, we in Europe are in the middle of a lively debate about our future. This debate has two main facets. It is partly a debate throughout our continent on the meaning and content of the search for European unity. It is partly a debate within Britain on the likelihood and wisdom of Britain's entry into the EEC and on the effect which such entry would have upon our future prosperity, security, and national identity."

Mr. Heath has updated the lectures in his introduction, although his lucid and intelligent analysis remains extremely far-sighted even in the context of subsequent political changes and events. His consideration of Europe's future is not merely theoretical--Mr. Heath speaks from the standpoint of one who has had direct and continuous practical experience with the problems of Europe. His frank recognition of Britain's loss of power in the world and his belief that through Europe his country may win new influence and play a new political role attest to his great insight. These lectures are thus an important political statement by one of Europe's outstanding leaders.

Youth mentoring programs must change in order to become truly effective. The world’s leading expert shows how.

Youth mentoring is among the most popular forms of volunteering in the world. But does it work? Does mentoring actually help young people succeed? In Older and Wiser, mentoring expert Jean Rhodes draws on more than thirty years of empirical research to survey the state of the field. Her conclusion is sobering: there is little evidence that most programs—even renowned, trusted, and long-established ones—are effective. But there is also much reason for hope.

Mentoring programs, Rhodes writes, do not focus on what young people need. Organizations typically prioritize building emotional bonds between mentors and mentees. But research makes clear that effective programs emphasize the development of specific social, emotional, and intellectual skills. Most mentoring programs are poorly suited to this effort because they rely overwhelmingly on volunteers, who rarely have the training necessary to teach these skills to young people. Moreover, the one-size-fits-all models of major mentoring organizations struggle to deal with the diverse backgrounds of mentees, the psychological effects of poverty on children, and increasingly hard limits to upward mobility in an unequal world.

Rhodes doesn’t think we should give up on mentoring—far from it. She shows that evidence-based approaches can in fact create meaningful change in young people’s lives. She also recommends encouraging “organic” mentorship opportunities—in schools, youth sports leagues, and community organizations.

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award

“This engaging and well-written book is a significant advance in our understanding of when and how mentoring matters…[It] lays the foundations for an approach to mentoring that is both rigorous and rich in new ideas.”
—Robert D. Putnam, author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Rhodes forces us to slam the brakes on ineffective practices and improve an industry that is devoted to the potential of our nation’s children…The author’s concrete recommendations will create new pathways to opportunity for youth in greatest need.”
—Michael D. Smith, Executive Director, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance

“A powerful assessment of what is needed to best help young people today.”
—Pam Iorio, President and CEO, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America

Youth mentoring is one of the most popular forms of volunteering in the world today, but does it work? Drawing on over thirty years of research and her own experience in the field, Jean Rhodes reveals that most mentoring programs fail to deliver what young people actually need. Many prioritize building emotional bonds between mentors and mentees. But research shows that effective programs go far beyond this, developing specific social, emotional, and intellectual skills.

Most mentoring programs rely on volunteers, who rarely have the training to teach these skills. Their one-size-fits-all models struggle to meet the diverse needs of mentees, and rarely take account of the psychological effects of poverty on children. Rhodes doesn’t think we should give up on mentoring—far from it. Instead, she recommends “organic” mentorship opportunities—in schools, youth sports leagues, and community organizations—and shares specific approaches that can spark meaningful change in young people’s lives.

Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks presents the Olmec portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It illustrates all thirty-nine Olmec art objects in color plates and includes many complementary and comparative black-and-white illustrations and drawings. The body of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss carefully assembled over a half-century between 1912 and 1963, amplified only slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. In addition to their aesthetic quality and artistic significance, the objects hold much information regarding the social worlds and religious and symbolic views of the people who made and used them before the arrival of Europeans in the New World.

This volume is the second in a series of catalogues that will treat objects in the Bliss Pre-Columbian Collection. The majority of the Olmec objects in the collection are made of jade, the most precious material for the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica from early times through the sixteenth century. Various items such as masks, statuettes, jewelry, and replicas of weapons and tools were used for ceremonial purposes and served as offerings.

Karl Taube brings his expertise on the lifeways and beliefs of ancient Mesoamerican peoples to his study of the Olmec objects in teh Bliss collection. His understanding of jade covers a broad range of knowledge from chemical compositions to geological sources to craft technology to the symbolic power of the green stone. Throughout the book the author emphasizes the role of jade as a powerful symbol of water, fertility, and particularly, of the maize plant which was the fundamental source of life and sustenance for the Olmec. The shiny green of the stone was analogous to the green growth of maize. This fundamental concept was elaborated in specific religious beliefs, many of which were continued and elaborated by later Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Maya. Karl Taube employs his substantial knowledge of Pre-Columbian cultures to explore and explicate Olmec symbolism in this catalogue.

The preeminent lyric poet of ancient Greece.

Of the Greek lyric poets, Pindar (ca. 518–438 BC) was “by far the greatest for the magnificence of his inspiration” in Quintilian’s view; Horace judged him “sure to win Apollo’s laurels.” The esteem of the ancients may help explain why a good portion of his work was carefully preserved. Most of the Greek lyric poets come down to us only in bits and pieces, but nearly a quarter of Pindar’s poems survive complete. William H. Race now brings us, in two volumes, a new edition and translation of the four books of victory odes, along with surviving fragments of Pindar’s other poems.

Like Simonides and Bacchylides, Pindar wrote elaborate odes in honor of prize-winning athletes for public performance by singers, dancers, and musicians. His forty-five victory odes celebrate triumphs in athletic contests at the four great Panhellenic festivals: the Olympic, Pythian (at Delphi), Nemean, and Isthmian games. In these complex poems, Pindar commemorates the achievement of athletes and powerful rulers against the backdrop of divine favor, human failure, heroic legend, and the moral ideals of aristocratic Greek society. Readers have long savored them for their rich poetic language and imagery, moral maxims, and vivid portrayals of sacred myths.

Race provides brief introductions to each ode and full explanatory footnotes, offering the reader invaluable guidance to these often difficult poems. His Loeb Pindar also contains a helpfully annotated edition and translation of significant fragments, including hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, maiden songs, and dirges.

Already the world has seen the political, economic, and cultural significance of hosting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing—in policies instituted and altered, positions softened, projects undertaken. But will the Olympics make a lasting difference? This book approaches questions about the nature and future of China through the lens of sports—particularly as sports finds its utmost international expression in the Olympics.

Drawing on newly available archival sources to analyze a hundred-year perspective on sports in China, Olympic Dreams explores why the country became obsessed with Western sports at the turn of the twentieth century, and how it relates to China’s search for a national and international identity. Through case studies of ping-pong diplomacy and the Chinese handling of various sporting events, the book offers unexpected details and unusual insight into the patterns and processes of China’s foreign policymaking—insights that will help readers understand China’s interactions with the rest of the world.

Among the questions Xu Guoqi brings to the fore are: Why did Mao Zedong choose competitive ping-pong to manipulate world politics? How did the two-China issue nearly kill the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games? And why do the 2008 Olympics present Beijing with unprecedented dangers and opportunities? In exploring these questions, Xu brilliantly articulates a fresh and surprising perspective on China as an international sport superpower as well as a new “sick man of East Asia.” In Olympic Dreams, he presents an eloquent argument that in the deeply unsettled China of today, sport, as a focus of popular interest, has the capacity to bring about major social changes.

In this gustatory tour of human history, John S. Allen demonstrates that the everyday activity of eating offers deep insights into human beings’ biological and cultural heritage.

We humans eat a wide array of plants and animals, but unlike other omnivores we eat with our minds as much as our stomachs. This thoughtful relationship with food is part of what makes us a unique species, and makes culinary cultures diverse. Not even our closest primate relatives think about food in the way Homo sapiens does. We are superomnivores whose palates reflect the natural history of our species.

Drawing on the work of food historians and chefs, anthropologists and neuroscientists, Allen starts out with the diets of our earliest ancestors, explores cooking’s role in our evolving brain, and moves on to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies. The Omnivorous Mind delivers insights into food aversions and cravings, our compulsive need to label foods as good or bad, dietary deviation from “healthy” food pyramids, and cross-cultural attitudes toward eating (with the French, bien sûr, exemplifying the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure).

To explain, for example, the worldwide popularity of crispy foods, Allen considers first the food habits of our insect-eating relatives. He also suggests that the sound of crunch may stave off dietary boredom by adding variety to sensory experience. Or perhaps fried foods, which we think of as bad for us, interject a frisson of illicit pleasure. When it comes to eating, Allen shows, there’s no one way to account for taste.

Cultivated farming advice.

Cato (M. Porcius Cato) the elder (234–149 BC) of Tusculum, statesman and soldier, was the first important writer in Latin prose. His speeches, works on jurisprudence and the art of war, his precepts to his son on various subjects, and his great historical work on Rome and Italy are lost. But we have his De Agricultura; terse, severely wise, grimly humorous, it gives rules in various aspects of a farmer’s economy, including even medical and cooking recipes, and reveals interesting details of domestic life.

Varro (M. Terentius) of Reate (116–27 BC), renowned for his vast learning, was an antiquarian, historian, philologist, student of science, agriculturist, and poet. He was a republican who was reconciled to Julius Caesar and was marked out by him to supervise an intended national library. Of Varro’s more than seventy works involving hundreds of volumes we have only one on agriculture and country affairs (Rerum Rusticarum) and part of his work on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina; LCL 333, 334), though we know much about his Satires. Each of the three books on country affairs begins with an effective mise en scene and uses dialogue. The first book deals with agriculture and farm management, the second with sheep and oxen, the third with poultry and the keeping of other animals large and small, including bees and fish ponds. There are lively interludes and a graphic background of political events.

A Roman farmer on farming.

Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service in Syria and Cilicia and that he died at Tarentum.

Columella’s On Agriculture (De re rustica) is the most comprehensive, systematic, and detailed of Roman agricultural works. Book 1 covers choice of farming site; water supply; buildings; staff. 2: Plowing; fertilizing; care of crops. 3–5: Cultivation, grafting, and pruning of fruit trees, vines, and olives. 6: Acquisition, breeding, and rearing of oxen, horses, and mules; veterinary medicine. 7: Sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs. 8: Poultry; fish ponds. 9: Bee-keeping. 10 (in hexameter poetry): Gardening. 11: Duties of the overseer of a farm; calendar for farm work; more on gardening. 12: Duties of the overseer’s wife; manufacture of wines; pickling; preserving. There is also a separate treatise, Trees (De arboribus), on vines and olives and various trees, perhaps part of an otherwise lost work written before On Agriculture.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Columella is in three volumes.

A Roman farmer on farming.

Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service in Syria and Cilicia and that he died at Tarentum.

Columella’s On Agriculture (De re rustica) is the most comprehensive, systematic, and detailed of Roman agricultural works. Book 1 covers choice of farming site; water supply; buildings; staff. 2: Plowing; fertilizing; care of crops. 3–5: Cultivation, grafting, and pruning of fruit trees, vines, and olives. 6: Acquisition, breeding, and rearing of oxen, horses, and mules; veterinary medicine. 7: Sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs. 8: Poultry; fish ponds. 9: Bee-keeping. 10 (in hexameter poetry): Gardening. 11: Duties of the overseer of a farm; calendar for farm work; more on gardening. 12: Duties of the overseer’s wife; manufacture of wines; pickling; preserving. There is also a separate treatise, Trees (De arboribus), on vines and olives and various trees, perhaps part of an otherwise lost work written before On Agriculture.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Columella is in three volumes.

A Roman farmer on farming.

Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service in Syria and Cilicia and that he died at Tarentum.

Columella’s On Agriculture (De re rustica) is the most comprehensive, systematic, and detailed of Roman agricultural works. Book 1 covers choice of farming site; water supply; buildings; staff. 2: Plowing; fertilizing; care of crops. 3–5: Cultivation, grafting, and pruning of fruit trees, vines, and olives. 6: Acquisition, breeding, and rearing of oxen, horses, and mules; veterinary medicine. 7: Sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs. 8: Poultry; fish ponds. 9: Bee-keeping. 10 (in hexameter poetry): Gardening. 11: Duties of the overseer of a farm; calendar for farm work; more on gardening. 12: Duties of the overseer’s wife; manufacture of wines; pickling; preserving. There is also a separate treatise, Trees (De arboribus), on vines and olives and various trees, perhaps part of an otherwise lost work written before On Agriculture.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Columella is in three volumes.

Occasionally zany zoological lore.

Aelian (Claudius Aelianus), a Roman born ca. AD 170 at Praeneste, was a pupil of the rhetorician Pausanias of Caesarea, and taught and practiced rhetoric. Expert in Attic Greek, he became a serious scholar and studied history under the patronage of the Roman empress Julia Domna. He apparently spent all his life in Italy where he died after AD 230.

Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals, in 17 books, is a collection of facts and beliefs concerning the habits of animals drawn from Greek authors and some personal observation. Fact, fancy, legend, stories, and gossip all play their part in a narrative that is meant to entertain. If there is any ethical motive, it is that the virtues of untaught yet reasoning animals can be a lesson to thoughtless and selfish mankind. The Loeb Classical Library edition of this work is in three volumes.

The Historical Miscellany (LCL 486) is of similar nature. In 14 books, it consists mainly of historical and biographical anecdotes and retellings of legendary events. Some of Aelian’s material is drawn from authors whose works are lost.

Aelian’s Letters—portraying the affairs and country ways of a series of fictitious writers—offer engaging vignettes of rural life. These are available in LCL 383.

Occasionally zany zoological lore.

Aelian (Claudius Aelianus), a Roman born ca. AD 170 at Praeneste, was a pupil of the rhetorician Pausanias of Caesarea, and taught and practiced rhetoric. Expert in Attic Greek, he became a serious scholar and studied history under the patronage of the Roman empress Julia Domna. He apparently spent all his life in Italy where he died after AD 230.

Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals, in 17 books, is a collection of facts and beliefs concerning the habits of animals drawn from Greek authors and some personal observation. Fact, fancy, legend, stories, and gossip all play their part in a narrative that is meant to entertain. If there is any ethical motive, it is that the virtues of untaught yet reasoning animals can be a lesson to thoughtless and selfish mankind. The Loeb Classical Library edition of this work is in three volumes.

The Historical Miscellany (LCL 486) is of similar nature. In 14 books, it consists mainly of historical and biographical anecdotes and retellings of legendary events. Some of Aelian’s material is drawn from authors whose works are lost.

Aelian’s Letters—portraying the affairs and country ways of a series of fictitious writers—offer engaging vignettes of rural life. These are available in LCL 383.

Occasionally zany zoological lore.

Aelian (Claudius Aelianus), a Roman born ca. AD 170 at Praeneste, was a pupil of the rhetorician Pausanias of Caesarea, and taught and practiced rhetoric. Expert in Attic Greek, he became a serious scholar and studied history under the patronage of the Roman empress Julia Domna. He apparently spent all his life in Italy where he died after AD 230.

Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals, in 17 books, is a collection of facts and beliefs concerning the habits of animals drawn from Greek authors and some personal observation. Fact, fancy, legend, stories, and gossip all play their part in a narrative that is meant to entertain. If there is any ethical motive, it is that the virtues of untaught yet reasoning animals can be a lesson to thoughtless and selfish mankind. The Loeb Classical Library edition of this work is in three volumes.

The Historical Miscellany (LCL 486) is of similar nature. In 14 books, it consists mainly of historical and biographical anecdotes and retellings of legendary events. Some of Aelian’s material is drawn from authors whose works are lost.

Aelian’s Letters—portraying the affairs and country ways of a series of fictitious writers—offer engaging vignettes of rural life. These are available in LCL 383.

The Renaissance man avant la lettre.

Vitruvius (Marcus V. Pollio), Roman architect and engineer, studied Greek philosophy and science and gained experience in the course of professional work. He was one of those appointed to be overseers of imperial artillery or military engines, and was architect of at least one unit of buildings for Augustus in the reconstruction of Rome. Late in life and in ill health he completed, sometime before 27 BC, De Architectura which, after its rediscovery in the fifteenth century, was influential enough to be studied by architects from the early Renaissance to recent times.

In On Architecture Vitruvius adds to the tradition of Greek theory and practice the results of his own experience. The contents of this treatise in ten books are as follows. Book 1: Requirements for an architect; town planning; design, cities, aspects; temples. 2: Materials and their treatment. Greek systems. 3: Styles. Forms of Greek temples. Ionic. 4: Styles. Corinthian, Ionic, Doric; Tuscan; altars. 5: Other public buildings (fora, basilicae, theaters, colonnades, baths, harbors). 6: Sites and planning, especially of houses. 7: Construction of pavements, roads, mosaic floors, vaults. Decoration (stucco, wall painting, colors). 8: Hydraulic engineering; water supply; aqueducts. 9: Astronomy. Greek and Roman discoveries; signs of the zodiac, planets, moon phases, constellations, astrology, gnomon, sundials. 10: Machines for war and other purposes.

The Renaissance man avant la lettre.

Vitruvius (Marcus V. Pollio), Roman architect and engineer, studied Greek philosophy and science and gained experience in the course of professional work. He was one of those appointed to be overseers of imperial artillery or military engines, and was architect of at least one unit of buildings for Augustus in the reconstruction of Rome. Late in life and in ill health he completed, sometime before 27 BC, De Architectura which, after its rediscovery in the fifteenth century, was influential enough to be studied by architects from the early Renaissance to recent times.

In On Architecture Vitruvius adds to the tradition of Greek theory and practice the results of his own experience. The contents of this treatise in ten books are as follows. Book 1: Requirements for an architect; town planning; design, cities, aspects; temples. 2: Materials and their treatment. Greek systems. 3: Styles. Forms of Greek temples. Ionic. 4: Styles. Corinthian, Ionic, Doric; Tuscan; altars. 5: Other public buildings (fora, basilicae, theaters, colonnades, baths, harbors). 6: Sites and planning, especially of houses. 7: Construction of pavements, roads, mosaic floors, vaults. Decoration (stucco, wall painting, colors). 8: Hydraulic engineering; water supply; aqueducts. 9: Astronomy. Greek and Roman discoveries; signs of the zodiac, planets, moon phases, constellations, astrology, gnomon, sundials. 10: Machines for war and other purposes.

Adultery, treason, and apostasy no longer carry the weight they once did. Yet we constantly see and hear stories of betrayal, and many people have personally experienced a destructive breach of loyalty. Avishai Margalit argues that the tension between the ubiquity of betrayal and the loosening of its hold is a sign of the strain between ethics and morality, between thick and thin human relations. On Betrayal offers a philosophical account of thick human relations—relationships with friends, family, and core communities—through their pathology, betrayal.

Judgments of betrayal often shift unreliably. A whistle-blower to some is a backstabber to others; a traitor to one side is a hero to the other. Yet the notion of what it means to betray is remarkably consistent across cultures and eras. Betrayal undermines thick trust, dissolving the glue that holds our most meaningful relationships together. Recently, public attention has lingered on trust between strangers—on relations that play a central role in the globalized economy. These, according to Margalit, are guided by morality. On Betrayal is about ethics: what we owe to the people and groups that give us our sense of belonging.

Margalit’s clear-sighted account draws on literary, historical, and personal sources, including stories from his childhood during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Through its discussion of betrayal, it examines what our thick relationships are and should be and revives the long-discarded notion of fraternity.

Late antique architecture.

Procopius, born at Caesarea in Palestine late in the fifth century, became a lawyer. In AD 527 he was made legal adviser and secretary of Belisarius, commander against the Persians, and went with Belisarius again in 533 against the Vandals and in 535 against the Ostrogoths. Sometime after 540 he returned to Constantinople. He may have been that Procopius who was prefect of Constantinople in 562, but the date of his death (after 558) is unknown.

Procopius’ History of the Wars in 8 books recounts the Persian Wars of emperors Justinus and Justinian down to 550 (2 books); the Vandalic War and after-events in Africa 532–546 (2 books); the Gothic War against the Ostrogoths in Sicily and Italy 536–552 (3 books); and a sketch of events to 554 (1 book). The whole consists largely of military history, with much information about peoples and places as well, and about special events. He was a diligent, careful, judicious narrator of facts and developments and shows good powers of description. He is just to the empire’s enemies and boldly criticizes emperor Justinian. Other works by Procopius are the Anecdota or Secret History—vehement attacks on Justinian, Theodora, and others; and the Buildings of Justinian (down to AD 558) including roads and bridges as well as churches, forts, hospitals, and so on in various parts of the empire.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Procopius is in seven volumes.

You go into teaching with high hopes: to inspire students, to motivate them to learn, to help them love your subject. Then you find yourself facing a crowd of expectant faces on the first day of the first semester, and you think “Now what do I do?”

Practical and lively, On Course is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty. It provides a range of innovative and traditional strategies that work well without requiring extensive preparation or long grading sessions when you’re trying to meet your own demanding research and service requirements. What do you put on the syllabus? How do you balance lectures with group assignments or discussions—and how do you get a dialogue going when the students won’t participate? What grading system is fairest and most efficient for your class? Should you post lecture notes on a website? How do you prevent cheating, and what do you do if it occurs? How can you help the student with serious personal problems without becoming overly involved? And what do you do about the student who won’t turn off his cell phone?

Packed with anecdotes and concrete suggestions, this book will keep both inexperienced and veteran teachers on course as they navigate the calms and storms of classroom life.

On Development is, as John Tyler Bonner says, “a book on ideas,” the ideas at stake in the contest to unravel the mechanisms of life. This fluent discussion of developmental biology synthesizes decades of intensive progress in specialized areas of the science: from the dramatic deciphering of the genetic code to detailed analyses of animal behavior patterns. Placing these discoveries in an evolutionary context, Bonner explores the continuities and the transitoriness of individual lives and individual forms.

He begins by discussing the ubiquity among organisms of developmental cycles and their universal properties, including senescence and death. He argues that the life cycle itself is an object of natural selection and shows how, in any species, it reflects the evolutionary tradeoff between energy requirements of the individual and reproductive efficiency of the species. Although nucleic acids are thought to be the ultimate and fundamental source of genetic regulation, Bonner points out that a massive amount of information required for normal development is not directly controlled by nuclear DNA during the life cycle. Each life cycle is governed by some immediate instructions from the genes and by many gene-initiated instructions that were given in previous life cycles and have accumulated in various parts of the fertilized egg. All of these instructions taken together govern the development of a new organism.

Acknowledging the great value of reductionist theories in biology, Bonner constructs his synthetic view of development without resorting to vitalist concepts or to hand-waving explanations. He draws examples and evidence from more than half a century of biological research, from sources as diverse as Spemann and Spiegelman. Certain organisms, such as the cellular slime molds, upon which Bonner himself has conducted a number of original experiments, and the social insects provide crucial examples of dramatic evolutionary increments in biological complexity and offer insight into the control mechanisms that make such advances possible.

Maximos the Confessor (580–662) occupies a unique position in the history of Byzantine philosophy, theology, and spirituality. His profound spiritual experiences and penetrating theological vision found complex and often astonishing expression in his unparalleled command of Greek philosophy, making him one of the most challenging and original Christian thinkers of all time. So thoroughly did his thought come to influence the Byzantine theological tradition that it is impossible to trace the subsequent history of Orthodox Christianity without knowledge of his work.

The Ambigua (or “Book of Difficulties”) is Maximos’s greatest philosophical and doctrinal work, in which his daring originality, prodigious talent for speculative thinking, and analytical acumen are on lavish display. In the Ambigua, a broad range of theological topics—cosmology, anthropology, the philosophy of mind and language, allegory, asceticism, and metaphysics—are transformed in a synthesis of Aristotelian logic, Platonic metaphysics, Stoic psychology, and the arithmetical philosophy of a revived Pythagoreanism. The result is a labyrinthine map of the mind’s journey to God that figured prominently in the Neoplatonic revival of the Komnenian Renaissance and the Hesychast Controversies of the Late Byzantine period.

This remarkable work has never before been available in a critically-based edition or English translation.

Maximos the Confessor (580–662) occupies a unique position in the history of Byzantine philosophy, theology, and spirituality. His profound spiritual experiences and penetrating theological vision found complex and often astonishing expression in his unparalleled command of Greek philosophy, making him one of the most challenging and original Christian thinkers of all time. So thoroughly did his thought come to influence the Byzantine theological tradition that it is impossible to trace the subsequent history of Orthodox Christianity without knowledge of his work.

The Ambigua (or “Book of Difficulties”) is Maximos’s greatest philosophical and doctrinal work, in which his daring originality, prodigious talent for speculative thinking, and analytical acumen are on lavish display. In the Ambigua, a broad range of theological topics—cosmology, anthropology, the philosophy of mind and language, allegory, asceticism, and metaphysics—are transformed in a synthesis of Aristotelian logic, Platonic metaphysics, Stoic psychology, and the arithmetical philosophy of a revived Pythagoreanism. The result is a labyrinthine map of the mind’s journey to God that figured prominently in the Neoplatonic revival of the Komnenian Renaissance and the Hesychast Controversies of the Late Byzantine period.

This remarkable work has never before been available in a critically-based edition or English translation.

The ethics of a statesman.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

Finalist, Sheikh Zayed Book Award

“With extraordinary linguistic range, Calderwood brings us the voices of Arabs and Muslims who have turned to the distant past of Spain to imagine their future.”
—Hussein Fancy, Yale University

How the memory of Muslim Iberia shapes art and politics from New York and Cordoba to Cairo and the West Bank.

During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth or in Poems shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination, especially for Arab and Muslim artists and thinkers in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

From the vast and complex story behind the name al-Andalus, Syrians and North Africans draw their own connections to history’s ruling dynasties. Palestinians can imagine themselves as “Moriscos,” descended from Spanish Muslims forced to hide their identities. A Palestinian flamenco musician in Chicago, no less than a Saudi women’s rights activist, can take inspiration from al-Andalus. These diverse relationships to the same past may be imagined, but the present-day communities and future visions those relationships foster are real.

Where do these notions of al-Andalus come from? How do they translate into aspiration and action? Eric Calderwood traces the role of al-Andalus in music and in debates about Arab and Berber identities, Arab and Muslim feminisms, the politics of Palestine and Israel, and immigration and multiculturalism in Europe. The Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish once asked, “Was al-Andalus / Here or there? On earth … or in poems?” The artists and activists showcased in this book answer: it was there, it is here, and it will be.

The philosopher-statesman on Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Old Academy.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension, and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

Though Wallace Stevens’ shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens’ central theme—the worth of the imagination—remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description—which must be repetitive—of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles.

The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens’ experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens’s work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, “Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work.”

Reproduction is among the most basic of human biological functions, both for our distant ancestors and for ourselves, whether we live on the plains of Africa or in North American suburbs. Our reproductive biology unites us as a species, but it has also been an important engine of our evolution. In the way our bodies function today we can see both the imprint of our formative past and implications for our future. It is the infinitely subtle and endlessly dramatic story of human reproduction and its evolutionary context that Peter T. Ellison tells in On Fertile Ground.

Ranging from the latest achievements of modern fertility clinics to the lives of subsistence farmers in the rain forests of Africa, this book offers both a remarkably broad and a minutely detailed exploration of human reproduction. Ellison, a leading pioneer in the field, combines the perspectives of anthropology, stressing the range and variation of human experience; ecology, sensitive to the two-way interactions between humans and their environments; and evolutionary biology, emphasizing a functional understanding of human reproductive biology and its role in our evolutionary history.

Whether contrasting female athletes missing their periods and male athletes using anabolic steroids with Polish farm women and hunter-gatherers in Paraguay, or exploring the intricate choreography of an implanting embryo or of a nursing mother and her child, On Fertile Ground advances a rich and deeply satisfying explanation of the mechanisms by which we reproduce and the evolutionary forces behind their design.

People tend to flirt only with serious things--madness, disaster, other people's affections. So is flirtation dangerous, exploiting the ambiguity of promises to sabotage our cherished notions of commitment? Or is it, as Adam Phillips suggests, a productive pleasure, keeping things in play, letting us get to know them in different ways, allowing us the fascination of what is unconvincing? This is a book about the possibilities of flirtation, its risks and instructive amusements--about the spaces flirtation opens in the stories we tell ourselves, particularly within the framework of psychoanalysis.

Phillips looks at life as a tale to be told but rejects the idea of a master plot. Instead, he says, we should be open to the contingent, and flirtation shows us the way. His book observes children flirting with their parents, our various selves flirting with one another, and literature flirting with psychoanalysis. As Phillips explores the links between literature and psychoanalysis--ranging from Philip Roth to Isaac Rosenberg, Karl Kraus to John Clare--psychoanalysis emerges as a multi-authored autobiography. Its subjects are love, loss, and memory; its authors are the analyst and the analysand, as well as the several selves brought to life in the process. A passionate and delightfully playful defense of the virtues of being uncommitted, On Flirtation sets before us the virtue of a yet deeper commitment to the openendedness of our life stories.

Edinburgh and Glasgow enjoy a famously scratchy relationship. Resembling other intercity rivalries throughout the world, from Madrid and Barcelona, to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to Beijing and Shanghai, Scotland’s sparring metropolises just happen to be much smaller and closer together—like twin stars orbiting a common axis. Yet their size belies their world-historical importance as cultural and commercial capitals of the British Empire, and the mere forty miles between their city centers does not diminish their stubbornly individual nature.

Robert Crawford dares to bring both cities to life between the covers of one book. His story of the fluctuating fortunes of each city is animated by the one-upping that has been entrenched since the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh lost parliamentary sovereignty and took on its proud wistfulness, while Glasgow came into its industrial promise and defiance. Using landmarks and individuals as gateways to their character and past, this tale of two cities mixes novelty and familiarity just as Scotland’s capital and its largest city do. Crawford gives us Adam Smith and Walter Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment and the School of Art, but also tiny apartments, a poetry library, Spanish Civil War volunteers, and the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Maria Theresa Short. We see Glasgow’s best-known street through the eyes of a Victorian child, and Edinburgh University as it appeared to Charles Darwin.

Crawford's lively account, drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, affirms what people from Glasgow and Edinburgh have long doubted—that it is possible to love both cities at the same time.

Roman biographies of foreign commanders.

Cornelius Nepos was born in Cisalpine Gaul but lived in Rome and was a friend of Cicero, Atticus, and Catullus. Most of his writings, which included poems, moral examples from history, a chronological sketch of general history, a geographical work, Lives of Cato the Elder and Cicero, and other biographies, are lost. Extant is a portion of his De viris illustribus: (i) part of his parallel Lives of Roman and non-Roman famous men, namely the portion containing Lives of non-Roman generals (all Greeks except three) and a chapter on kings; and (ii) two Lives from the class of historians. The Lives are short popular biographies of various kinds, written in a usually plain readable style, of value today because of Nepos’ use of many good sources.

Walter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written--a "truly exceptional book about hashish," as Benjamin describes it in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written by himself and his co-participants between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces that he published during his lifetime, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin, venturesome as ever at the end of the Weimar Republic, and of his unique form of thought.

Consciously placing himself in a tradition of literary drug-connoisseurs from Baudelaire to Hermann Hesse, Benjamin looked to hashish and other drugs for an initiation into what he called "profane illumination." At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin's work, is a new way of seeing, a new connection to the ordinary world. Under the influence of hashish, as time and space become inseparable, experiences become subtly stratified and resonant: we inhabit more than one plane in time. What Benjamin, in his contemporaneous study of Surrealism, calls "image space" comes vividly to life in this philosophical immersion in the sensuous.

This English-language edition of On Hashish features a section of supplementary materials--drawn from Benjamin's essays, letters, and sketches--relating to hashish use, as well as a reminiscence by his friend Jean Selz, which concerns a night of opium-smoking in Ibiza. A preface by Howard Eiland discusses the leading motifs of Benjamin's reflections on intoxication.

As writers of English from Australia to India to Sri Lanka command our attention, Salman Rushdie can state confidently that English fiction was moribund until the Empire wrote back, and few, even among the British, demur. A. S. Byatt does, and her case is persuasive. In a series of essays on the complicated relations between reading, writing, and remembering, the gifted novelist and critic sorts the modish from the merely interesting and the truly good to arrive at a new view of British writing in our time.

Whether writing about the renaissance of the historical novel, discussing her own translation of historical fact into fiction, or exploring the recent European revival of interest in myth, folklore, and fairytale, Byatt's abiding concern here is with the interplay of fiction and history. Her essays amount to an eloquent and often moving meditation on the commitment to historical narrative and storytelling that she shares with many of her British and European contemporaries. With copious illustration and abundant insights into writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, and Pat Barker, On Histories and Stories is an oblique defense of the art Byatt practices and a map of the complex affiliations of British and European narrative since 1945.

How can we think about peoples and cultures unlike our own? In the early modern period, the fact of human diversity presented Europeans with little cause for anxiety: they simply assumed the superiority of the West. During the eighteenth century this view was gradually abandoned, as thinkers argued that other peoples possessed reason and sensibility, and thus deserved the same respect that Westerners accorded themselves. Since that time, however, Enlightenment belief in the universals of human nature has fallen into disrepute; critics allege that such notions have had disastrous consequences in the twentieth century, ranging from prejudice to persecution and outright genocide.

Tzvetan Todorov, an internationally admired scholar, aims in this book to salvage the good name of the Enlightenment so that its ideas can once more inspire humane thought and action. The question he poses is of urgent relevance to the conflicts of our age: How can we avoid the dangers of a perverted universalism and scientism, as well as the pitfalls of relativism? Since the French were the ideologues of universalism and played a preeminent role in the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas in Europe, Todorov focuses on the French intellectual tradition, analyzing writers ranging from Montaigne through Tocqueville, Michelet, and Renan, to Lévi-Strauss. He shows how theories of human diversity were developed in the eighteenth century, and later systematically distorted. The virtues of Enlightenment thought became vices in the hands of nineteenth-century thinkers, as a result of racism, nationalism, and the search for exoticism. Todorov calls for us to reject this legacy and to strive once again for an acceptance of human diversity, through a "critical humanism" prefigured in the writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu.

This is a work of impressive erudition and insight--a masterly synthesis that can help us think incisively about the racial and ethnic tensions confronting the world today.

Based on the author's long life of study, observation, and experimentation, this book clears the way for the exploration of many problems in an area of botanical research about which little substantial biochemical information is yet available. Mr. Dostál's investigations largely concern the interrelations among the different organs of plants and the ways in which the various components of the plant correlate to form an integrated whole.

Mr. Dostál writes that he "early acquired the certitude that all regulations in plants take place with an absolute determinism, an iron necessity." He describes many very simple experiments, such as removing all the leaves of a horse chestnut and all the new leaves that follow, until ultimately leaves of an entirely different form, pinnate like those of a legume, develop. Experiments on algae, in parallel with those on higher plants, add to the breadth of the coverage. Much of the work has not been published in scientific journals, and is here presented in simple terms comprehensible to the intelligent layman.

The author also discusses the vital part played by inhibiting substances in the development of the primordia of leaves and other organs, serving as regulators and conservators of reserves, so as to ensure unified organization instead of the chaos that would otherwise result. He finds, too, that his experiments support the idea, now becoming widely accepted, that food for plants may be regarded as a condition rather than a causal factor in their growth and development. As an extension of Mr. Dostál's experimental observations, 40 original figures containing 161 partial illustrations are of exceptional value.

Three rhetorical treatises.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying.

He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

The left hand has traditionally represented the powers of intuition, feeling, and spontaneity. In this classic book, Jerome Bruner inquires into the part these qualities play in determining how we know what we do know; how we can help others to know—that is, to teach; and how our conception of reality affects our actions and is modified by them.

The striking and subtle discussions contained in On Knowing take on the core issues concerning man’s sense of self: creativity, the search for identity, the nature of aesthetic knowledge, myth, the learning process, and modern-day attitudes toward social controls, Freud, and fate. In this revised, expanded edition, Bruner comments on his personal efforts to maintain an intuitively and rationally balanced understanding of human nature, taking into account the odd historical circumstances which have hindered academic psychology’s attempts in the past to know man.

Writing with wit, imagination, and deep sympathy for the human condition, Jerome Bruner speaks here to the part of man’s mind that can never be completely satisfied by the right-handed virtues of order, rationality, and discipline.

One measure of Roman Jakobson's towering role in linguistics is that his work has defined the field itself. Jakobson's contributions have now become a permanent part of American and European views on language. With his uncanny ability to survive devastating uprooting again and again--from Moscow to Prague to Upsalla to New York and finally to Cambridge--Jakobson was able to bring to each milieu new and stimulating ideas, which have broadened the perspective of linguistics while giving it new direction and specifying its domain. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston have assembled an intellectual overview of his work in linguistics from partial and complete works that they have arranged, introduced, and cross-referenced. Some appear here in print for the first time, others are newly translated into English. More than a convenient access to Jakobson's basic works, On Language presents a broad profile of the polymathic general linguist who suggested radical innovations in every area of linguistic theory.

The breadth of Jakobson's engagement in linguistics is captured by the editors' informative introduction and by their perspicacious presentation of topics. His general view of the science of linguistics is followed by his stunning contributions to linguistic metatheory in the areas of structure and function. Various aspects of historical, typological, and sociolinguistics are also explored along with his phonological theory--perhaps his most influential contribution--and his views on grammatical semantics. A topic that increasingly preoccupied Jakobson in his later career, the interrelationship between sound and meaning, is presented here in detail. The concluding three essays focus on the various relations between linguistics and the human and natural sciences, which led Jakobson ultimately to be characterized as an interdisciplinary thinker.

The first complete English translation of a controversial Renaissance debate centering moral questions on power and leadership.

Poggio Bracciolini was a prominent scholar-official of the early Renaissance and a leading representative of Florentine humanism. He was employed as a secretary to seven popes and ended his career as Chancellor of the Republic of Florence. On Leaders and Tyrants contains texts, the majority by Poggio, relating to a controversy on the relative merits of the lives and deeds of Scipio Africanus and Julius Caesar. The debate addressed the nature of tyranny and military glory, as well as the qualities necessary for republican leaders, such as Stoic virtue, lawfulness, and good citizenship. Poggio’s primary opponent was the educator Guarino of Verona, a humanist in the service of the duke of Ferrara. The psychology of power, the demands placed on public servants, and the dividing line between leadership and tyranny are as topical today as they were when Poggio wrote. This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin texts and the first complete translation of the controversy into English.

The reader is given an intimate memoir of Jewish adolescence and life from a young woman’s perspective in an Eastern European shtetl at the end of the nineteenth century. Hinde Bergner, future mother of one of Yiddish literature’s greatest poets and grandmother of one of Israel’s leading painters, recalls the gradual impact of modernization on a traditional world as she finds herself caught between her thirst for a European education and true love, and the expectations of her traditional family. Written during the late 1930s as a series of episodes mailed to her children, and never completed due to Bergner’s murder at the hand of the Nazis, the memoir provides details about her teachers and matchmakers, domestic religion and customs, and the colorful characters that peopled a Jewish world that is no more.

Translated from the Yiddish and with a critical introduction by Justin Cammy, it is a lively addition to the library of Jewish women’s memoir, and should be of interest to students of Eastern European Jewish culture and women’s studies.