List Headline Image
Updated by Marie Jones on Mar 09, 2016
 REPORT
Marie Jones Marie Jones
Owner
75 items   1 followers   0 votes   1 views

December and January New Books & DVDs

1

American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration, 1953-2006

American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration, 1953-2006

When the U.S. government ended its relationship with dozens of Native American tribes and bands between 1953 and 1966, it was engaging in a massive social experiment. Congress enacted the program, known as termination, in the name of “freeing” the Indians from government restrictions and improving their quality of life. However, removing the federal status of more than nine dozen tribes across the country plunged many of their nearly 13,000 members into deeper levels of poverty and eroded the tribal people’s sense of Native identity. Roberta Ulrich provides a concise overview of all the terminations and restorations of Native American tribes from 1953 to 2006 and explores the enduring policy implications for Native peoples. This is the first book to consider all the terminations and restorations in the twentieth century as part of continuing policy while detailing some of the individual tribal differences. Ulrich Draws from Congressional records, interviews with tribal members, and other primary sources.

2

Anthony Caro

Anthony Caro

Anthony Caro (born 1924) is widely regarded as 'Britain's greatest living sculptor' (The Guardian, 2003) and has enjoyed an international reputation since the early 1960s. This publication accompanies a major retrospective exhibition of Caro's work at Tate Britain in January 2005. Caro studied at Regent Street Polytechnic and the Royal Academy Schools, before working as Henry Moore's assistant between 1951 and 1953. His work changed radically following a visit to America in 1959, when he met the sculptor David Smith, the painter Kenneth Noland and the critic Clement Greenberg. In 1960 he began making purely abstract sculptures constructed and welded in steel, comprising beams, girders and other found elements painted in bright colours. 'I think my big break in 1960 was in challenging the pedestal, killing statuary, bringing sculpture into our lived-in space', Caro wrote. The exhibition of these works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, caused a sensation and heralded a revolution in sculpture.

3

Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga

Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga

Offering fresh scholarship and featuring artworks rarely seen outside of Japan, this is the first English-language publication focused on Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga—two of Japan’s most successful and important postwar artists.

4

Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us

Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us

In Charisma, Philip Rieff explores the emergence and evolution of this mysterious and compelling concept within Judeo-Christian culture. Its first expression was in the idea of the covenant between God and the Israelites: Charisma–religious grace and authority–was transferred through divine inspiration to the Old Testament prophets; it was embodied by Jesus of Nazareth, the first true charismatic hero. Rieff shows how St. Paul transformed charisma into a form of social organization, how it was reworked by Martin Luther and by nineteenth-century Protestant theologians, and, finally, how Max Weber redefined charisma as a secular political concept. By emptying charisma of its religious meaning, Weber opened the door to the modern perception of it as little more than a form of celebrity, stripped of moral considerations.

5

Chasing the Red Queen: The Evolutionary Race Between Agricultural Pests and Poisons

Chasing the Red Queen: The Evolutionary Race Between Agricultural Pests and Poisons

In the race to feed the world’s seven billion people, we are at a standstill. Over the past century, we have developed increasingly potent and sophisticated pesticides, yet in 2014, the average percentage of U.S. crops lost to agricultural pests was no less than in 1944. To use a metaphor the field of evolutionary biology borrowed from Alice in Wonderland, farmers must run ever faster to stay in the same place—i.e., produce the same yields. With Chasing the Red Queen, Andy Dyer offers the first book to apply the Red Queen Hypothesis to agriculture. He illustrates that when selection pressure increases, species evolve in response, creating a never-ending, perpetually-escalating competition between predator (us) and prey (bugs and weeds). The result is farmers are caught in a vicious cycle of chemical dependence, stuck using increasingly dangerous and expensive toxics to beat back progressively resistant pests.

6

Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic

Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic

This convergence of technical and aesthetic trends prompts the need for a new text focused on the opportunities of a sound oriented, multiscale approach to composition of electronic music. Sound oriented means a practice that takes place in the presence of sound. Multiscale means an approach that takes into account the perceptual and physical reality of multiple, interacting time scales-each of which can be composed. After more than a century of research and development, now is an appropriate moment to step back and reevaluate all that has changed under the ground of artistic practice.
Composing Electronic Music outlines a new theory of composition based on the toolkit of electronic music techniques.

7

Contemporary Glass Sculptures and Panels: Selections from the Corning Museum of Glass

Contemporary Glass Sculptures and Panels: Selections from the Corning Museum of Glass

Glass is a unique material for sculpture because no other medium has its ability to change color, texture, and, seemingly, mass. Contemporary Glass Sculptures and Panels presents the work of 68 artists in the collection of The Corning Museum of Glass; what this diverse group of established and emerging artists share is an experimental approach to glass that transcends the material's traditional association with the decorative arts. Through their investigations of material and ideas, they have encouraged the development of glass-throughout the late twentieth century and into the early years of the twenty-first century-as a medium for sculpture and painting. This generously illustrated volume features the work of a range of international artists, including Larry Bell, Howard Ben Tre, Dale Chihuly, Vaclav Cigler, Brian Clarke, Jun Kaneko, and Robert Rauschenberg. Museum website: http: //www.cmog.or

8

Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio

Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio

In the first comprehensive look at Iranian art and visual culture since the 1979 revolution, Talinn Grigor investigates the official art sponsored by the Islamic Republic, the culture of avant-garde art created in the studio and its display in galleries and museums, and the art of the Iranian diaspora within Western art scenes. Divided into three parts—street, studio, and exile—the book argues that these different areas of artistic production cannot be understood independently, revealing how this art offers a mirror of the sociopolitical turmoil that has marked Iran’s recent history.
Exploring the world of galleries, museums, curators, and art critics, Grigor moves between subversive and daring art produced in private to propaganda art, martyrdom paraphernalia, and museum interiors. She examines the cross-pollination of kitsch and avant-garde, the art market, state censorship, the public-private domain, the political implications of art, and artistic identity in exile.

9

Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self

Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self

The explosion of creative and speculative philosophy that emerged in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century is a thrilling intellectual adventure story, as well as an essential chapter in the history of philosophy. The main theme of this story is the rise and fall of the Self. The Self in question is no ordinary self - no individual personality nor even one of the many heroic or mock-heroic personalities of the early nineteenth century. The Self is the Transcendental Self, whose nature and ambitions are unprecedently arrogant, cosmic and often obscure. In modest terms, this universal self is human nature. In less modest terms, the Transcendental Self is nothing less than God. This thesis is what Solomon terms the Transcendental Pretence.

10

Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

Everyone is born curious. But only some retain the habits of exploring, learning and discovering as they grow older. Which side of the ’curiosity divide’ are you on?

In Curious Ian Leslie makes a passionate case for the cultivation of our desire to know. Curious people tend to be smarter, more creative and more successful. But at the very moment when the rewards of curiosity have never been higher, it is misunderstood and undervalued, and increasingly practised only by a cognitive elite.

Filled with inspiring stories, case studies and practical advice, Curious will change the way you think about your own mental life, and that of those around you.

11

Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America

Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America

Almost thirty years since its original publication, Drawing Down the Moon continues to be the only detailed history of the burgeoning but still widely misunderstood Neo- Pagan subculture. Margot Adler attended ritual gatherings and interviewed a diverse, colorful gallery of people across the United States, people who find inspiration in ancient deities, nature, myth, even science fiction. In this new edition featuring an updated resource guide of newsletters, journals, books, groups, and festivals, Margot Adler takes a fascinating and honest look at the religious experiences, beliefs, and lifestyles of modern America's Pagan groups.

12

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

In fascinating detail, Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past 15 years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin—the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, 2 to 3 times purer than its white powder cousin—to the veins of people across the United States. Communities where heroin had never been seen before—from Charlotte, NC and Huntington, WVA, to Salt Lake City and Portland, OR—were overrun with it. Local police and residents were stunned. How could heroin, long considered a drug found only in the dense, urban environments along the East Coast, and trafficked into the United States by enormous Colombian drug cartels, be so incredibly ubiquitous in the American heartland? Who was bringing it here, and perhaps more importantly, why were so many townspeople suddenly eager for the comparatively cheap high it offered?

13

Early Education in the Public Schools: Lessons from a Comprehensive Birth-To-Kindergarten Program

Early Education in the Public Schools: Lessons from a Comprehensive Birth-To-Kindergarten Program

Based on a $5.5 million, eleven-year study of the Brookline Early Education Project (BEEP), this book provides a framework for planning, administering, and evaluating a comprehensive birth-to-kindergarten program in the public schools. Using the story of one school district's experience, the BEEP findings show how school-based early education can present a coordinated approach to the problems of childhood poverty, inadequate child care, and fragemented services to multineeded families, and improve academic skills in the classroom.

14

Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche

Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche

n Examined Lives, James Miller returns to this vibrant tradition with short, lively biographies of twelve famous philosophers. Socrates spent his life examining himself and the assumptions of others. His most famous student, Plato, risked his reputation to tutor a tyrant. Diogenes carried a bright lamp in broad daylight and announced he was "looking for a man." Aristotle's alliance with Alexander the Great presaged Seneca's complex role in the court of the Roman Emperor Nero. Augustine discovered God within himself. Montaigne and Descartes struggled to explore their deepest convictions in eras of murderous religious warfare. Rousseau aspired to a life of perfect virtue. Kant elaborated a new ideal of autonomy. Emerson successfully preached a gospel of self-reliance for the new American nation. And Nietzsche tried "to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance in man," before he lapsed into catatonic madness.

15

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression comes a monumental new work, a decade in the writing, about family. In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so.

Solomon's startling proposition is that diversity is what unites us all. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, as are the triumphs of love Solomon documents in every chapter.

16

Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses - and Misuses - of History

Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses - and Misuses - of History

The two great financial crises of the past century are the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession, which began in 2008. Both occurred against the backdrop of sharp credit booms, dubious banking practices, and a fragile and unstable global financial system. When markets went into cardiac arrest in 2008, policymakers invoked the lessons of the Great Depression in attempting to avert the worst. While their response prevented a financial collapse and catastrophic depression like that of the 1930s, unemployment in the U.S. and Europe still rose to excruciating high levels. Pain and suffering were widespread. The question is why didn't policymakers do better? Hall of Mirrors, Barry Eichengreen's monumental twinned history of the two crises, provides the farthest-reaching answer to this question to date.

17

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began his four-decade-long series "Dioramas" in 1974, inspired by a trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Surrounded by the museum's elaborate, naturalistic dioramas, Sugimoto realized that the scenes jumped to life when looked at with one eye closed. Recreated forestry and stretches of uninhabited land, wild, crouching animals against painted backgrounds and even prehistoric humans seemed entirely convincing with this visual trick, which launched a conceptual exploration of the photographic medium that has traversed his entire career. Focusing his camera on individual dioramas as though they were entirely surrounding scenes, omitting their frames and educational materials and ensuring that no reflections enter the shot, his subjects appear as if photographed in their natural habitats. He also explores the power of photography to create history--in his own words, "photography functions as a fossilization of time."

18

How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of de-Extinction

How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of de-Extinction

Could extinct species, like mammoths and passenger pigeons, be brought back to life? The science says yes. "In How to Clone a Mammoth," Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist and pioneer in "ancient DNA" research, walks readers through the astonishing and controversial process of de-extinction. From deciding which species should be restored, to sequencing their genomes, to anticipating how revived populations might be overseen in the wild, Shapiro vividly explores the extraordinary cutting-edge science that is being used--today--to resurrect the past. Journeying to far-flung Siberian locales in search of ice age bones and delving into her own research--as well as those of fellow experts such as Svante Paabo, George Church, and Craig Venter--Shapiro considers de-extinction's practical benefits and ethical challenges. Would de-extinction change the way we live? Is this really cloning? What are the costs and risks? And what is the ultimate goal?

19

Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind

Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind

In this widely acclaimed biography, Charles Nicholl uncovers the man behind the myth of the Renaissance master, tracing the journey from an illegitimate child in Tuscany to his service with some of the most powerful families of Renaissance Europe.

20

Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education

Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education

"Locus of Authority" argues that every issue facing today's colleges and universities, from stagnant degree completion rates to worrisome cost increases, is exacerbated by a century-old system of governance that desperately requires change. While prior studies have focused on boards of trustees and presidents, few have looked at the place of faculty within the governance system. Specifically addressing faculty roles in this structure, William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin ask: do higher education institutions have what it takes to reform effectively from within?
Bowen and Tobin use case studies of four very different institutions--the University of California, Princeton University, Macalester College, and the City University of New York--to demonstrate that college and university governance has capably adjusted to the necessities of the moment and that governance norms and policies should be assessed in the context of historical events.

21

March

March

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize For Fiction. From the author of the acclaimed YEAR OF WONDERS, an historical novel and love story set during a time of catastrophe, on the front lines of the American Civil War. Acclaimed author Geraldine Brooks gives us the story of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women - and conjures a world of brutality, stubborn courage and transcendent love. An idealistic abolitionist, March has gone as chaplain to serve the Union cause. But the war tests his faith not only in the Union - which is also capable of barbarism and racism - but in himself. As he recovers from a near-fatal illness, March must reassemble and reconnect with his family, who have no idea of what he has endured. A love story set in a time of catastrophe, March explores the passions between a man and a woman, the tenderness of parent and child, and the life-changing power of an ardently held belief.

22

My Life on the Road

My Life on the Road

Gloria Steinem—writer, activist, organizer, and one of the most inspiring leaders in the world—now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, traveling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road.

23

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over her long writing career, and she explores here a multitude of tales through the ages, their different manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. From the phenomenal rise of Victorian and Edwardian literature to contemporary children's stories, Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White and gothic interpretations such as Pan's Labyrinth.
In ten succinct chapters, Marina Warner digs into a rich collection of fairy tales in their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. She makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture.

24

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

In Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku — the New York Times bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible — gives us a stunning, provocative, and exhilarating vision of the coming century based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists who are already inventing the future in their labs. The result is the most authoritative and scientifically accurate description of the revolutionary developments taking place in medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics.

25

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, politics, and science.

At the origin of Western philosophy stands Plato, who got about as much wrong as one would expect from a thinker who lived 2,400 years ago. But Plato’s role in shaping philosophy was pivotal. On her way to considering the place of philosophy in our ongoing intellectual life, Goldstein tells a new story of its origin, re-envisioning the extraordinary culture that produced the man who produced philosophy.