In Dates, Nawal Nasrallah draws on her experience of growing up in the lands of ancient Mesopotamia, where the date palm was first cultivated, to explore the history behind the fruit. Dates have an important role in their arid homeland of the Middle East, where they are a dietary staple and can be consumed fresh or dried, as a snack or a dessert, and are even thought to have aphrodisiac qualities.
In this history, Nasrallah describes the central role the date palm has played in the economy of the Middle East. This informative account of the date palm’s story follows its journey from its land of origin to the far-flung regions where it is cultivated today. Along the way, Nasrallah weaves many fascinating and humorous anecdotes that explore the etymology, history, culture, religion, myths, and legends surrounding dates. For example, she explains how the tree came to be a symbol of the Tree of Life and associated with the fiery phoenix bird, the famous ancient goddess Ishtar, and the moon, and how the medjool date acquired its name.
This delightful and unusual book is generously illustrated with many beautiful images, and supplemented with more than a dozen delicious date recipes for savory dishes, sweets, and wine.
Today, writing by hand seems a nearly archaic process. Nearly all of our written communication is digital—our letters are via email or text message, our manuscripts are composed using word processors, our journals are blogs, and we sign checks to pay bills with the push of a button. Sonja Neef believes that what we have lost in our modern technological conversation is the ductus—the physical and material act of handwriting.
In Imprint and Trace Neef argues, however, that handwriting throughout its history has always been threatened with erasure. It exists in a dual state: able to be standardized, repeated, copied—much like an imprint—and yet persistently singular, original, and authentic as a trace or line. Throughout its history, from the first prehistoric handprint, through the innovations of stylus, quill, and printing press, handwriting has revealed an interweaving, ever-changing relationship between imprint and trace. Even today, in the age of the digital revolution, the trace of handwriting is still an integral part of communication, whether etched, photographed, pixelated, or scanned.
Imprint and Trace presents an essential re-evaluation of the relationships between handwriting and technology, and between the various imprints and traces that define communication.
Despite its modest size, Portugal has played a major part in the development of Europe and the modern world. In Portugal in European and World History Malyn Newitt offers a fresh appraisal of Portuguese history and its role in the world—from early Moorish times to the English Alliance of 1650–1900 and through the country’s liberal revolution in 1974.
Newitt specifically examines episodes where Portugal was a key player or innovator in history. Chapters focus on such topics as Moorish Portugal, describing the cultural impact of contact with the Moors—one of the oldest points of contact between Western Europe and Islam; the opening up of trade with western Africa; and the explorations of Vasco de Gama and the evolution of Portugal as the first commercial empire of modern times. Newitt also examines Portugal’s role in the Counter-reformation, in Spain’s wars in Europe, and in the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Finally, Newitt analyzes the fall of fascism and the Portuguese decolonization within the context of larger global empires and movements.
This new account of a country with a rich historyshows how Portugal has moved from being the last colonial power to one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the modern European ideal.
It scares—and titillates—in such movies as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Basic Instinct. It violently ended the lives of legendary artists such as Selena and John Lennon, and thousands of people endure it daily in anonymity from ex-lovers and strangers. Stalking has been a fact of human society for a surprisingly long time, yet it is only in the last two decades that the term “stalking” came into wide use throughout mass culture. Bran Nicol traces here the history of stalking and chronicles how acts of extreme obsession have created a public fixation of their own.
This unprecedented study draws on a wealth of sources—including forensic psychology, films, literature, news reports, and cultural theory—to examine stalking as a behavior and a social phenomenon. Moving from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to Fatal Attraction and from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend to Taxi Driver and One Hour Photo, Nicol skillfully probes how stalking has pervaded our civilizatoin for over two hundred years. He then turns his focus to the role that stalking plays in the context of our contemporary media-saturated culture, posing provocative questions about the state of modern society: Have interpersonal relations become increasingly intense or more perverse today? Are we dealing with something truly new, or is stalking simply the latest name for an age-old form of social interaction? Stalking also examines cases of deadly obsession with celebrities, such as Jodie Foster, and explores how such fixations are fueled by mass media and the Internet.
A wholly fascinating and groundbreaking investigation into one of the extreme consequences of our hyper-connected age, Stalking provides a thorough understanding of this disturbingly compelling abnormality.
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