#220 - Alessandro Roncaglia - The Wealth of Ideas

Author or Editor: Alessandro Roncaglia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005
ISBN: 978-0-511-11348-2
Pages: 582
Size: 5.91MB

The idea underlying this work is that the history of economic thought is essential for understanding the economy, which constitutes a central aspect of human societies. Confronted with complex, ever-changing realities, the different lines of research developed in the past are rich in suggestions for anyone trying to interpret economic phenomena, even for those tackling questions of immediate relevance.

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#219 - Philippe Blondel and John W. Mason - Solar System Update

Author or Editor: Philippe Blondel and John W. Mason
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2006
ISBN: 3-540-26056-0
Pages: 329
Size: 8.69MB

This first volume of Solar System Update comprises a collection of twelve topical reviews, each presented as a separate chapter, covering important areas of Solar System science. The contributions have been written by scientists at the forefront of research in the selected areas, in a style which, we hope, will be accessible not only to advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduate students, but also to professional astronomers, planetary scientists and physicists, helping them to keep abreast of the latest developments in related fields.

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#218 - Geoffrey Nowell-Smith - The Oxford History of World Cinema

Author or Editor: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1996
ISBN: 0198112572
Pages: 856
Size: 57MB

Most histories of the international cinema focus on the careers of prominent directors. But the authors of The Oxford History of World Cinema set cinematic genres, trends, and national themes at the fore, composing a history of the cinema that is equally a history of our multifarious world culture. Still, in deference to the older historical style, the text of this hefty book is dotted with hundreds of minibiographies on individual filmmakers. The result of this hybrid approach is one of the most comprehensive film histories ever, allowing insight into its complex subject from a number of different perspectives.

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#217 - Andrew M. Riggsby - Caesar in Gaul and Rome

Author or Editor: Andrew M. Riggsby
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2006
ISBN: 0-292-71303-7
Pages: 271
Size: 2,66MB

This book is a study of what is—in many senses—an already well-known historical event: Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, or Gallic War.1 To think of texts as events is certainly in line with various historicist tendencies in the field of Classics in general, but it is also an approach that has come to be seen as particularly appropriate to this work.2 For one thing, the direct evidence for De Bello Gallico is incomparably better than that for the Gallic War fought in the 50’s b.c.3 We have the former actually before us (though not its prior composition nor its subsequent circulation). Slightly less obviously, however, we have much better controls for the War than for the War.

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#216 - David Christian - Maps of Time

Author or Editor: David Christian
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2004
ISBN: 0-520-90163-0
Pages: 642
Size: 31,3MB

Maps of Time unites natural history and human history in a single, grand, and intelligible narrative. This is a great achievement, analogous to the way in which Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century united the heavens and the earth under uniform laws of motion; it is even more closely comparable to Darwin's nineteenth-century achievement of uniting the human species and other forms of life within a single evolutionary process.

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#215 - Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

Author or Editor: Steven Weinberg
Publisher: Fontana Paperbacks
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1 904048 62 5
Pages: 174
Size: 1,81MB

It is a remarkable thing to be able to say just what the universe was like at the end of the first second or the first minute or the first year. To a physicist, the exhilarating thing is to be able to work things out numerically, to be able to say that at such and such a time the temperature and density and chemical composition of the universe had such 10 The First Three Minutes and such values. True, we are not absolutely certain about all this, but it is exciting that we are now able to speak of such things with any confidence at all. It was this excitement that I wanted to convey to the reader.

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#214 - Sean Martin - Alchemy and Alchemists

Author or Editor: Sean Martin
Publisher: Pocket Essentials
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1 904048 62 5
Pages: 592
Size: 3,25MB

Alchemy has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. It has been present in almost every culture, from Old Kingdom Egypt and the China of Lao Tzu; from the Greece of Alexander the Great to the era of Islamic conquest; from the islands of the Indonesian archipelago to the twilight world of Victorian occultism. It has been called ‘the mightiest secret that a man [or woman] can possess’, yet it has also been derided as ‘the history of an error’. It has often been portrayed as a fraudulent, delusional quest for wealth and worldly power through the attempt to transmute base metals into gold, but has also been regarded as a Divine art, the highest gift of God, one that should only be practiced by the sincere seeker and the pure of heart.

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