Growing tulip bulbs on the moon, and a tulip shaped island in the North Sea. Frederick Ruysch's wunderkammer and contemporary bloemencorsos. A Dutch-Chinese billionaire, aka the Orchid King, recreates a 'Dutch' town in northeast China complete with a replica of Amsterdam's central station and the International Court of Justice. A retired grower recalls a life in flowers, from the Second World War to the European Union. Dutch development policies in Ethiopia today and its former civilizing mission in Java. Auctions, cooperatives, networking, commodity culture, Dutch masculinity, and globalization. These are some of the imaginaries, themes, curious details, and perspectives you will encounter in this book. All of them pivot around Dutch flower culture today and in the Dutch Golden Age, and directly or indirectly link to Aalsmeer's flower auction, the world's largest, located not far from Amsterdam.

The Hollywood blacklist, which began in the late 1940s and ran well into the 1960s, ended or curtailed the careers of hundreds of people accused of having ties to the Communist Party. Bernard Gordon was one of them. In this highly readable memoir, he tells a engrossing insider's story of what it was like to be blacklisted and how he and others continued to work uncredited behind the scenes, writing and producing many box office hits of the era.

Gordon describes how the blacklist cut short his screenwriting career in Hollywood and forced him to work in Europe. Ironically, though, his is a success story that includes the films El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, The Thin Red Line, Krakatoa East of Java, Day of the Triffids, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Horror Express, and many others. He recounts the making of many movies for which he was the writer and/or producer, with wonderful anecdotes about stars such as Charlton Heston, David Niven, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, and James Mason; directors Nicholas Ray, Frank Capra, and Anthony Mann; and the producer-studio head team of Philip Yordan and Samuel Bronston.

Cundill Prize Finalist
A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year
A Five Books Book of the Year

The Mongols are known for one thing: conquest. But in this first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire that arose after the death of Chinggis Khan, Marie Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful engines of economic integration in world history to show that their accomplishments extended far beyond the battlefield. Central to the extraordinary commercial boom that brought distant civilizations in contact for the first time, the Horde had a unique political regime—a complex power-sharing arrangement between the khan and nobility—that rewarded skillful administrators and fostered a mobile, innovative economic order. From their capital on the lower Volga River, the Mongols influenced state structures in Russia and across the Islamic world, disseminated sophisticated theories about the natural world, and introduced new ideas of religious tolerance.

An eloquent, ambitious, and definitive portrait of an empire that has long been too little understood, The Horde challenges our assumptions that nomads are peripheral to history and makes it clear that we live in a world shaped by Mongols.

“The Mongols have been ill-served by history, the victims of an unfortunate mixture of prejudice and perplexity…The Horde flourished, in Favereau’s fresh, persuasive telling, precisely because it was not the one-trick homicidal rabble of legend.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating…The Mongols were a sophisticated people with an impressive talent for government and a sensitive relationship with the natural world…An impressively researched and intelligently reasoned book.”
—The Times

In a state assumed to have a constitutionally weak governor, the Speaker of the Texas House wields enormous power, with the ability to almost single-handedly dictate the legislative agenda. The House Will Come to Order charts the evolution of the Speaker's role from a relatively obscure office to one of the most powerful in the state. This fascinating account, drawn from the Briscoe Center's oral history project on the former Speakers, is the story of transition, modernization, and power struggles.

Weaving a compelling story of scandal, service, and opportunity, Patrick Cox and Michael Phillips describe the divisions within the traditional Democratic Party, the ascendance of Republicans, and how Texas business, agriculture, and media shaped perceptions of officeholders. While the governor and lieutenant governor wielded their power, the authors show how the modern Texas House Speaker built an office of equal power as the state became more complex and diverse. The authors also explore how race, class, and gender affected this transition as they explain the importance of the office in Texas and the impact the state's Speakers have had on national politics.

At the apex of its power, the Texas House Speaker's role at last receives the critical consideration it deserves.

How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women looks at the remarkable impact of war on women in Britain. It shows how conflict has changed women’s lives and how those changes have put women at the centre of peace campaigning.

Lindsey German, one of the UK's leading anti-war activists and commentators, shows how women have played a central role in anti-war and peace movements, including the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The women themselves talk about how they overcame prejudice and difficulty to become active. The book integrates this experience with a historical overview, analysing the two world wars as catalysts of social change for women. It looks at how the changing nature of war, especially the involvement of civilians, increasingly involves significant numbers of women.

As well as providing an inspiring account of women's opposition to war, the book also tackles key contemporary developments, challenging negative assumptions about Muslim women and showing how anti-war movements are feeding into a broader desire to change society.

In his exploration of his development as one of the most prolific and thoughtful writers in the field of writing studies, Charles Bazerman considers how, like all writers, he has been shaped in distinctive and unique ways by his literate experiences. “Each of our stories is particular,” he writes, calling this book “my experiment in saying what I can from my perspective about my development as a writer.” How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became poses questions about the lifespan development of writing and, in particular, how writing emerges within the “conditions, relations, and needs of life.” Observing that his autoethnography does not offer a norm or an ideal, Bazerman calls attention to the need for more of these kinds of reflections. “We need many such stories from many kinds of writers,” he notes, “reflecting on what opportunities, needs, experiences, and resources came their way and how they iteratively solved the problem of what to write and how to write it, as they saw it.” As the first book in the Lifespan Writing Research book series, Bazerman’s work serves as both a model for reflective inquiry and a call for additional work in this area.

    In the early 1950s writers were leaving radio en masse to try their hand at another promising medium—television. William Froug was in the thick of that exodus, a young man full of ideas in a Hollywood bursting with opportunities. In his forty-year career Froug would write and/or produce many of the shows that America has grown up with. From the drama of Playhouse 90 and the mind-bending premises of The Twilight Zone to the escapist scenarios of Adventures in Paradise, Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, and Charlie’s Angels, Froug played a role in shaping his trade. He crossed paths with some of the memorable personalities in the industry, including Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Agnes Moorehead, Elizabeth Montgomery, Robert Blake, Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Aaron Spelling, and Sherwood Schwartz.

    Froug reveals a post-WWII America giddy with the success of its newest medium—yet sobered at moments by strikes and union politics, McCarthyism and anti-Semitism. It was a world of hastily written scripts, sudden firings, thwarted creativity, and fickle tastes. And yet, while clearly exasperated with many aspects of Hollywood, Froug was a man utterly in his element, his frustration with the industry ultimately eclipsed by his dedication to his craft.

In these fifteen personal essays, Gary Gildner comes of age at a Catholic school learning Latin, how the girls crossed their legs in algebra, and football in the school’s bomb shelter by exchanging punches with his best friend. He goes to Communist Poland to teach American literature and, in medias res, teaches the Warsaw Sparks baseball team how to win. Living in Czechoslovakia when that country is splitting in half, he learns the meaning of “Where the Dog is Buried” and fathers a daughter. Gildner writes about his Polish-German family’s immigrant story and his friendships with poet Richard Hugo and Raymond Andrews, his college roommate and the author of Baby Sweet’s and other African American novels. He writes about 9/11, stealing, meeting a cougar up close, meeting Michele, felling his barn in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains with a crowbar, and boxing with Chuck Davey, a fellow Michigan State Spartan and one-time challenger for the World Welterweight title.
 
Essays from this collection have appeared in such venues as the New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, and New Letters.

An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history. 

Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering. 

Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice. 

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

An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history. 

Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering. 

Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice. 

The story of how the country house, historically a site of violent disruption, came to symbolize English stability during the eighteenth century.
 
Country houses are quintessentially English, not only architecturally but also in that they embody national values of continuity and insularity. The English country house, however, has more often been the site of violent disruption than continuous peace. So how is it that the country how came to represent an uncomplicated, nostalgic vision of English history? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the Reformation and Civil War, and shows how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England’s political stability.

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth’s history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization.

Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth,nearly all the land in the United States was transferred from AmericanIndians to whites. This dramatic transformation has been understood in two very different ways--as a series of consensual transactions, but also as a process of violent conquest. Both views cannot be correct. How did Indians actually lose their land?

Stuart Banner provides the first comprehensive answer. He argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers. Instead, time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles. As whites' power grew, they were able to establish the legal institutions and the rules by which land transactions would be made and enforced.

This story of America's colonization remains a story of power, but a more complex kind of power than historians have acknowledged. It is a story in which military force was less important than the power to shape the legal framework within which land would be owned. As a result, white Americans--from eastern cities to the western frontiers--could believe they were buying land from the Indians the same way they bought land from one another. How the Indians Lost Their Land dramatically reveals how subtle changes in the law can determine the fate of a nation, and our understanding of the past.

Maya architecture is often described as "massive" and "monumental," but experiments at Copan, Honduras, convinced Elliot Abrams that 300 people could have built one of the large palaces there in only 100 days.

In this groundbreaking work, Abrams explicates his theory of architectural energetics, which involves translating structures into volumes of raw and manufactured materials that are then multiplied by the time required for their production and assembly to determine the labor costs of past construction efforts. Applying this method to residential structures of the Late Classic period (A.D. 700-900) at Copan leads Abrams to posit a six-tiered hierarchic social structure of political decision making, ranging from a stratified elite to low-ranking commoners. By comparing the labor costs of construction and other economic activities, he also prompts a reconsideration of the effects of royal construction demands on commoners.

How the Maya Built Their World will interest a wide audience in New and Old World anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and engineering.

The United States has two separate banking systems today—one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. How the Other Half Banks contributes to the growing conversation on American inequality by highlighting one of its prime causes: unequal credit. Mehrsa Baradaran examines how a significant portion of the population, deserted by banks, is forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services to cover emergency expenses and pay for necessities—all thanks to deregulation that began in the 1970s and continues decades later.

“Baradaran argues persuasively that the banking industry, fattened on public subsidies (including too-big-to-fail bailouts), owes low-income families a better deal…How the Other Half Banks is well researched and clearly written…The bankers who fully understand the system are heavily invested in it. Books like this are written for the rest of us.”
—Nancy Folbre, New York Times Book Review

“How the Other Half Banks tells an important story, one in which we have allowed the profit motives of banks to trump the public interest.”
—Lisa J. Servon, American Prospect

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

Jacob Riis’s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais’s Pantagruel: “One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country.” An anatomy of New York City’s slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of “the other half,” who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.

Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of How the Other Half Lives reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis’s original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.

This is a traditional "how and why" or Pourquoi Tale, a folktale retold by a prominent American storyteller.

This is a new and thorough revision of a recognized classic whose first edition was hailed as the most authoritative account in English of the governing of the Soviet Union. Now, with historical material rearranged in chronological order, and with seven new chapters covering most of the last fifteen years, this edition brings the Soviet Union fully into the light of modern history and political science.

The purposes of Fainsod's earlier editions were threefold: to explain the techniques used by the Bolsheviks and Stalin to gain control of the Russian political system; to describe the methods they employed to maintain command; and to speculate upon the likelihood oftheir continued control in the future. This new edition increases very substantially the attention paid to another aspect of the political process—how policy is formed, how the Soviet Union is governed. Whenever possible, Mr. Hough attempts to analyze the alignments and interrelationships between Soviet policy institutions. Moreover, he constantly moves beyond a description of these institutions to probe the way they work. Two chapters are devoted to the questions of individual political participation. Other chapters examine the internal organization of institutions and explore the ways in which the backgrounds of their officials influence their policy positions and alliances. The picture that emerges is an unprecedented account of the distribution of power in the Soviet Union.

The untold story of the engineering behind the empire, showing how imperial Spain built upon existing infrastructure and hierarchies of the Inca, Aztec, and more, to further its growth.
 
Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited, and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had ever seen. How did they achieve this? Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo argue that Spain’s engineers were critical to this venture. The Spanish invested in infrastructure to the advantage of local power brokers, enhancing the abilities of incumbent elites to grow wealthy on trade, and widening the arc of Spanish influence. Bringing to life stories of engineers, prospectors, soldiers, and priests, the authors paint a vivid portrait of Spanish America in the age of conquest. This is a dazzling new history of the Spanish Empire, and a new understanding of empire itself, as a venture marked as much by collaboration as oppression.

The rise of the Tea Party redefined both the Republican Party and how we think about intraparty conflict. What initially appeared to be an anti-Obama protest movement of fiscal conservatives matured into a faction that sought to increase its influence in the Republican Party by any means necessary. Tea Partiers captured the party’s organizational machinery and used it to replace established politicians with Tea Party–style Republicans, eventually laying the groundwork for the nomination and election of a candidate like Donald Trump.

In How the Tea Party Captured the GOP, Rachel Marie Blum approaches the Tea Party from the angle of party politics, explaining the Tea Party’s insurgent strategies as those of a party faction. Blum offers a novel theory of factions as miniature parties within parties, discussing how fringe groups can use factions to increase their political influence in the US two-party system. In this richly researched book, the author uncovers how the electoral losses of 2008 sparked disgruntled Republicans to form the Tea Party faction, and the strategies the Tea Party used to wage a systematic takeover of the Republican Party. This book not only illuminates how the Tea Party achieved its influence, but also provides a framework for identifying other factional insurgencies.
 

Throughout his remarkable career, Donald Pfaff has demonstrated that by choosing problems and methods with care, biologists can study the molecular mechanisms of brains more complex than those of fruit flies, snails, roundworms, and other invertebrates. His half century in the lab, starting with his discovery of hormone receptors in the brains of mammals and leading to the first detailed account of a neural circuit for mammalian behavior, puts him in a unique position to survey the origins and development of behavioral neurobiology and the current state of research. How the Vertebrate Brain Regulates Behavior offers a close-up, conversational perspective on scientific struggles and successes throughout a fifty-year quest to understand how behavior is regulated in a complex organism.

In graduate school, when Pfaff expressed a desire to study behavioral regulation, his advisor suggested focusing on hormones. Pfaff’s investigation into the hormonal basis of female sexual behavior in laboratory rats led him to a comprehensive appreciation of how hormone-dependent neurons work through neural circuits to produce discrete behaviors among all vertebrates. This breakthrough, along with other researchers’ findings, established a link between molecular biology and neuroscience that opened up a fruitful new field of inquiry.

Pfaff’s approach is to focus on one solvable problem and explore it from many angles. He begins with a single observed behavior and traces its regulation through a series of biological mechanisms—from hormones to genes to neural circuits. Pfaff’s relentless pursuit of his goals continues to inspire neuroscientists today.

In How to Abandon Ship, Sasha West harnesses poetry as a vessel to ferry the inconceivable, to wreck upon the shores of what we’ve known thus far. Assessing the accelerating emergencies of climate change amid the West’s self-cannibalizing capitalism, the speaker of these poems wrestles with the state of the world and its compounding catastrophes as a new parent. That fierce love becomes her grappling hook into the glut of information and epochal view of time and space we must scale to leave our children a habitable, equitable planet. To approach a perspective too vast for the individual mind, West cycles through personae which collectively metabolize the strands of the past, and the foundational myths of Western civilization, that constructed this looming future. West speaks as a contemporary mother and an ancient proxy, the unheeded Greek oracle Cassandra; gives voice to fossil fuels; and imagines grown children, real and mythological, surviving beyond a world our generation preemptively mourns. “I have taken / my voice past the threshold, past / the lintel,” Cassandra addresses readers and, more broadly, a paralyzed and apathetic public. “I am speaking to you now from / inside the wildfire while it burns the hair / from my body: I don’t expect you will listen.” But while making space for climate grief, holding our faces up to the ever-expanding sinkhole of earthly loss, West liberates us unto joy, enjoining us to remake the narratives that drive our culture, our consumption, and our relationship to the non-human world. Cassandra’s daughter rides the ship as it sinks, declaring, “I am being shaped / into something new, waiting, / listening to birds give out song / before / the songs give out.” And Cassandra’s granddaughter endures to remind us that, when the sails buckle, we need not drown if we choose to swim. “When you were still alive and apt to get weepy over what you saw as rubbled landscapes, I was impatient. Only a tourist fetishizes the ground where tragedy occurred…. What needs to be done, we do. We act in tiny increments.” These splinters compose the timeless story of humanity: we love each other because we cannot help it; we fail, and fail repeatedly; we go on. 

Across the centuries, few experiences in life rival the excitement and emotional intensity of falling in love. Yet from the moment we set eyes on a special someone, the path to their heart seems strewn with devastating pitfalls. What if the object of our affection hates the way we wear our hair, finds our kisses lacking, or resents our talk of former loves?How does one go about successfully wooing a future husband or wife? Fortunately, there are time-honored strategies to avoid these pitfalls and help us attract and keep the paramour of our dreams.

Every student brings their own individual set of educational and personal experiences to a research project, and peer research consultants are uniquely able to reveal this “hidden curriculum” to the researchers they assist.
 
In seven highly readable chapters, How to Be a Peer Research Consultant provides focused support for anyone preparing undergraduate students to serve as peer research consultants, whether you refer to these student workers as research tutors, reference assistants, or research helpers. Inside you’ll find valuable training material to help student researchers develop metacognitive, transferable research skills and habits, as well as foundational topics like what research looks like in different disciplines, professionalism and privacy, ethics, the research process, inclusive research consultations, and common research assignments. It concludes with an appendix containing 30 activities, discussion questions, and written reflection prompts to complement the content covered in each chapter, designed to be easily printed or copied from the book.
 
How to Be a Peer Research Consultant can be read in its entirety to gather ideas and activities, or it can be distributed to each student as a training manual. It pays particular attention to the peer research consultant-student relationship and offers guidance on flexible approaches for supporting a wide range of research needs. The book is intended to be useful in a variety of higher education settings and is designed to be applicable to each institution’s unique library resources and holdings. Through mentoring and coaching, undergraduate students can feel confident in their ability to help their peers with research and may be inspired to continue this work as professional librarians in the future.
 

There are certain things every Texan should know how to do and say, whether your Lone Star roots reach all the way back to the 1836 Republic or you were just transplanted here yesterday. Some of these may be second nature to you, but others . . . well, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a few handy hints if, say, branding the herd or hosting a tamalada aren’t your usual pastimes. That’s where How to Be a Texan can help.

In a friendly, lighthearted style, Andrea Valdez offers illustrated, easy-to-follow steps for dozens of authentic Texas activities and sayings. In no time, you’ll be talking like a Texan and dressing the part; hunting, fishing, and ranching; cooking your favorite Texas dishes; and dancing cumbia and two-step. You’ll learn how to take a proper bluebonnet photo and build a Día de los Muertos altar, and you’ll have a bucket list of all the places Texans should visit in their lifetime. Not only will you know how to do all these things, you’ll finish the book with a whole new appreciation for what it means to be a Texan and even more pride in saying “I’m from Texas” anywhere you wander in the world.

No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth.

David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style.

Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.

People mean business and most professionals know how important it is to get on well with others.

This is a practical handbook. Its aim is to help engineers and others with a technical background to communicate effectively with non-technical people. Effective communication is essential for both individual and corporate success in business.

How to Date a Flying Mexican is a collection of stories derived from Chicano and Mexican culture but ranging through fascinating literary worlds of magical realism, fairy tales, fables, and dystopian futures. Many of Daniel A. Olivas’s characters confront—both directly and obliquely— questions of morality, justice, and self-determination.

The collection is made up of Olivas’s favorite previously published stories, along with two new stories—one dystopian and the other magical— that challenge the Trump administration’s anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. How to Date a Flying Mexican draws together some of Olivas’s most unforgettable and strange tales, allowing readers to experience his very distinct, and very Chicano, fiction.
 

The fall of the crusader-controlled city of Acre to the Muslims in 1291 inspired many schemes for crusades to recover Jerusalem and its environs. One of these proposals is How to Defeat the Saracens, written around 1317 by William of Adam, a Dominican who traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, and parts of India. The treatise, poorly known even among specialists, presents a five-pronged plan for retaking the Holy Land. In particular, it focuses on cutting off economic and military support for Egypt. William’s personal experience in the lands he describes comes through, for example, when he recollects his encounters in Persia with a captive Greek woman whose child he baptized, and in India with a lapsed Christian who said that God had abandoned him. In this volume Giles Constable provides a critical edition of the Latin text and a facing English translation. Extensive notes, produced in collaboration with other experts, guide the reader through the political, geographical, economic, military, and historical context of this fascinating work.

An all-star cast of scholars and politicians from Europe and America propose and debate the creation of a new European parliament with substantial budgetary and legislative power to solve the crisis of governance in the Eurozone and promote social and fiscal justice and public investment.

The European Union is struggling. The rise of Euroskeptic parties in member states, economic distress in the south, the migrant crisis, and Brexit top the news. But deeper structural problems may be a greater long-term peril. Not least is the economic management of the Eurozone, the nineteen countries that use the Euro. How can this be accomplished in a way generally acceptable to members, given a political system whose structures are routinely decried for a lack of democratic accountability? How can the EU promote fiscal and social justice while initiating the long-term public investments that Europe needs to overcome stagnation? These are the problems a distinguished group of European and American scholars set out to solve in this short but valuable book.

Among many longstanding grievances is the charge that Eurozone policies serve large and wealthy countries at the expense of poorer nations. It is also unclear who decides economic policy, how the interests of diverse member states are balanced, and to whom the decision-makers are accountable. The four lead authors—Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez—describe these and other problems, and respond with a draft treaty establishing a parliament for economic policy, its members drawn from national parliaments. We then hear from invited critics, who express support, objections, or alternative ideas.

How to Democratize Europe offers a chance to observe how major thinkers view some of the Continent’s most pressing issues and attempt to connect democratic reform with concrete changes in economic and social policies.

It is not surprising that biography is one of the most popular literary genres of our day. What is remarkable is that there is no accessible guide for how to write one. Now, following his recent Biography: A Brief History (from Harvard), award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton tackles the practicalities of doing biography in this first succinct primer to elucidate the tools of the biographer’s craft.

Hamilton invites the reader to join him on a fascinating journey through the art of biographical composition. Starting with personal motivation, he charts the making of a modern biography from the inside: from conception to fulfillment. He emphasizes the need to know one’s audience, rehearses the excitement and perils of modern research, delves into the secrets of good and great biography, and guides the reader through the essential components of life narrative.

With examples taken from the finest modern biographies, Hamilton shows how to portray the ages of man—birth, childhood, love, life’s work, the evening of life, and death. In addition, he suggests effective ways to start and close a life story. He clarifies the difference between autobiography and memoir—and addresses the sometimes awkward ethical, legal, and personal consequences of truth-telling in modern life writing. He concludes with the publication and reception of biography—its afterlife, so to speak.

Written with humor, insight, and compassion, How To Do Biography is the manual that would-be biographers have long been awaiting.

Legal doctrine—the creation of doctrinal concepts, arguments, and legal regimes built on the foundation of written law—is the currency of contemporary law. Yet law students, lawyers, and judges often take doctrine for granted, without asking even the most basic questions. How to Do Things with Legal Doctrine is a sweeping and original study that focuses on how to understand legal doctrine via a hands-on approach. Taking up the provocative invitations from the “New Doctrinalists,” Pierre Schlag and Amy J. Griffin refine the conceptual and rhetorical operations legal professionals perform with doctrine—focusing especially on those difficult moments where law seems to run out, but legal argument must go on.  The authors make the crucial operations of doctrine explicit, revealing how they work, and how they shape the law that emerges. How to Do Things with Legal Doctrine will help all those studying or working with law to gain a more systematic understanding of the doctrinal moves many of our best lawyers make intuitively.

Feminist philosophers have made important strides in altering the overwhelmingly male-centric discipline of philosophy. Yet, in Nancy Bauer’s view, most are still content to work within theoretical frameworks that are fundamentally false to human beings’ everyday experiences. This is particularly intolerable for a species of philosophy whose central aspiration is to make the world a less sexist place. How to Do Things with Pornography models a new way to write philosophically about pornography, women’s self-objectification, hook-up culture, and other contemporary phenomena. Unafraid to ask what philosophy contributes to our lives, Bauer argues that the profession’s lack of interest in this question threatens to make its enterprise irrelevant.

Bauer criticizes two paradigmatic models of Western philosophizing: the Great Man model, according to which philosophy is the product of rare genius; and the scientistic model, according to which a community of researchers works together to discover once-and-for-all truths. The philosopher’s job is neither to perpetuate the inevitably sexist trope of the philosopher-genius nor to “get things right.” Rather, it is to compete with the Zeitgeist and attract people to the endeavor of reflecting on their settled ways of perceiving and understanding the world.

How to Do Things with Pornography boldly enlists J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, showing that it should be read not as a theory of speech acts but as a revolutionary conception of what philosophers can do in the world with their words.

An investigation of how-to guides for sensor technologies

Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often require the use of a how-to guide. From online instructional videos for troubleshooting sensor installations to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruction continue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instructions unfold through multiple aspects of technoscientific practices, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and actionable through the instructional mode of citizen-sensing projects.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

John L. Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. The William James Lectures presented Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. These talks became the classic How to Do Things with Words.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary. Students will find the new text clearer, and, at the same time, more faithful to the actual lectures. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin's work.

John L. Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. The William James Lectures presented Austin’s conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. These talks became the classic How to Do Things with Words.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin’s original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary. Students will find the new text clearer, and, at the same time, more faithful to the actual lectures. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin’s work.

Gather your party, it’s time to level up your parenting game!
         For years, millions of fans have looked to the beloved role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons for fun, friendship, and entertainment. And now parents and parents-to-be can use it to gain inspiration and how-to when it comes to their most challenging and rewarding role yet. Dungeon Masters are not just expert storytellers and arbiters of the rules, they’re compassionate, creative, quick-thinking leaders who embody the same traits that make a great parent.
         Where do you find an adventuring party who will have your back? What must-have starting equipment should you own before venturing into babyland? How does your gaming style reflect your parenting style? You don’t have to know how to be a Dungeon Master to master parenting—just think like one. Kids may not come with rulebooks, but now their parents do.
 

Conspiracy theories have always been with us, but in the age of the Internet, twenty-four-hour news programs of varying reliability, and ever-more incendiary talk radio, the crop of rumors, bombshells, and shadowy secrets seems more extensive and potent than ever. How to Escape from the Diabolic Triangle? dives into those collective delusions to show what they mean to us as individuals and what role they play in society. Looking closely at nine cases of collective delusion, Jan Berting shows how they can help society articulate widespread fears, but that at the same time they can be wildly misleading, even dangerous.

“Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls “mad methodology.” Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.