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An incomparable look at how Chinese artists have used mass production to assemble exquisite objects from standardized parts Chinese workers in the third century BC created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century AD, Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand separately carved wooden pieces. As these examples show, throughout history, Chinese artisans have produced works of art in astonishing quantities, and have done so without sacrificing quality, affordability, or speed of manufacture. In this book, Lothar Ledderose takes us on a remarkable tour of Chinese art and culture to explain how artists used complex systems of mass production to assemble extraordinary objects from standardized parts or modules. He reveals how these systems have deep roots in Chinese thought and reflect characteristically Chinese modes of social organization. Combining invaluable aesthetic and cultural insights with a rich variety of illustrations, Ten Thousand Things make a profound statement about Chinese art and society.

A vivid and exciting account of royal collectors, art dealers, connoisseurs, and the rise of old master paintings Old master paintings are among the most valuable and prestigious of the visual arts, and the best examples command the highest prices of any luxury commodity. In Kings and Connoisseurs, Jonathan Brown tells the story of how painting rose to this exalted status. The transformation of painting from an inexpensive to a costly art form reached a crucial stage in the royal courts of Europe in the seventeenth century, where rulers and aristocrats assembled huge collections, often in short periods of time. By comparing collecting and collectors at these courts, Brown explains the formation of new attitudes toward pictures, as well as the mechanisms that supported the enterprise of collecting, including the emergence of the art dealer, the development of connoisseurship, and the publication of sumptuous picture books of various collections. The result is an exciting narrative of greed and passion, played out against a background of international politics and intrigue.

From one of the world's leading authorities on ancient Greek art, a groundbreaking account of how Greek images were understood and used by other ancient peoples, from Britain to China In this book, acclaimed archaeologist and art historian John Boardman explores Greek art as a foreign art transmitted to the non-Greeks of antiquity--peoples who weren't necessarily able to judge the meaning of Greek art and who may have regarded the Greeks themselves with great hostility. Boardman examines how and why the arts of the classical world traveled and to what effect, from Britain to China, from roughly the eighth century BCE to the early centuries CE. In some places, such as Italy, Greek images were overwhelmingly successful. In Egypt, the Celtic world, the eastern steppes, and other regions with strong local traditions, they were never effectively assimilated. And in cultures where there was a subtler blend of influences, notably in the Buddhist east, classical images served as a catalyst to the generation of new styles. Along the way, Boardman demonstrates that looking at Greek art from the outside provides a wealth of new insights into Greek art itself, and he raises important questions about how images in general are copied and reinterpreted.

A magisterial exploration of poetry's place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poets In this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing literature's links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality.

How ornamentation enables a direct and immediate encounter between viewers and art objects Based on universal motifs, ornamentation occurs in many artistic traditions, though it reaches its most expressive, tangible, and unique form in the art of the Islamic world. The Mediation of Ornament shares a veteran art historian's love for the sheer sensuality of Islamic ornamentation, but also uses this art to show how ornament serves as a consistent intermediary between viewers and artistic works from all cultures and periods. Oleg Grabar analyzes early and medieval Islamic objects, ranging from frontispieces in Yemen to tilework in the Alhambra, and compares them to Western examples, treating all pieces as testimony of the work, life, thought, and emotion experienced in one society. The Mediation of Ornament is essential reading for admirers of Islamic art and anyone interested in the ways of perceiving and understanding the arts more broadly.

An in-depth look at the exquisite metal sculpture of the Roman baroque Roman baroque sculpture is usually thought of in terms of large-scale statues in marble and bronze, tombs, or portrait busts. Smaller bronze statuettes are often overlooked, and the extensive production of sculptural silver--much of which is now lost but can be studied from drawings--is frequently omitted from the histories of art. In this book, Jennifer Montagu enriches our understanding of the sculpture of the period by investigating the bronzes that adorn the great tabernacles of Roman churches; gilded silver, both secular and ecclesiastical; elaborately embossed display dishes; and the production of medals. Concentrating on selected pieces by such master sculptors as Bernini and leading metal-workers such as Giovanni Giardini, Montagu examines the often tortuous relationship between patrons and artists and elucidates the relationship between those who provided the drawings or models and the craftsmen who executed the finished sculptures.

"A concise and rigorous introduction to widely used approaches in structural econometric modeling Structural econometric modeling specifies the structure of an economic model and estimates the model's parameters from real-world data. Structural econometric modeling enables better economic theory-based predictions and policy counterfactuals. This book offers a primer on recent developments in these modeling techniques, which are used widely in empirical industrial organization, quantitative marketing, and related fields. It covers such topics as discrete choice modeling, demand modes, estimation of the firm entry models with strategic interactions, consumer search, and theory/empirics of auctions. The book makes highly technical material accessible to graduate students, describing key insights succinctly but without sacrificing rigor. Concise overview of the most widely used structural econometric models Rigorous and systematic treatment of the topics, emphasizing key insights Coverage of demand estimation, estimation of static and dynamic game theoretic models, consumer search, and auctions Focus on econometric models while providing concise reviews of relevant theoretical models"--

An integrated approach to the economics of sovereign defaultFiscal crises and sovereign default repeatedly threaten the stability and growth of economies around the world. Mark Aguiar and Manuel Amador provide a unified and tractable theoretical framework that elucidates the key economics behind sovereign debt markets, shedding light on the frictions and inefficiencies that prevent the smooth functioning of these markets, and proposing sensible approaches to sovereign debt management.The Economics of Sovereign Debt and Default looks at the core friction unique to sovereign debt-the lack of strong legal enforcement-and goes on to examine additional frictions such as deadweight costs of default, vulnerability to runs, the incentive to "e;dilute"e; existing creditors, and sovereign debt's distortion of investment and growth. The book uses the tractable framework to isolate how each additional friction affects the equilibrium outcome, and illustrates its counterpart using state-of-the-art computational modeling. The novel approach presented here contrasts the outcome of a constrained efficient allocation-one chosen to maximize the joint surplus of creditors and government-with the competitive equilibrium outcome. This allows for a clear analysis of the extent to which equilibrium prices efficiently guide the government's debt and default decisions, and of what drives divergences with the efficient outcome.Providing an integrated approach to sovereign debt and default, this incisive and authoritative book is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students interested in this important topic.

A comprehensive history of censorship in modern BritainFor Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, "e;Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"e; Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society.Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. He reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. He describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s.Based on extensive archival research, this incisive and multifaceted book reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

"A new translation of selections from the 5th century monk John Cassian's writings on ways to avoid distraction and enhance our concentration. Distraction is not just an artifact of the digital age, and we're not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Monks in the late Roman Empire beat us to it. Concentration was their job, which made them more aware of how hard it was to master. John Cassian was a monk who lived in the Roman Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries, the very early days of monasticism. He was born in the Levant and joined his first monastery there, then spent over twenty years in Egypt, interviewing and learning from ascetic hermits. Eventually, he moved to Marseilles to start his own monastery. He found that the monks in Gaul were hungry for stories of what he'd learned in Egypt, and in the 420s, wrote a massive record of his most memorable conversations with the Egyptian ascetics called the Collationes (or Conferences), in which one of the central preoccupations is the art of staying focused. While many monks in Cassian's day blamed demons for their cognitive lapses, Cassian was more convinced that distraction was largely a self-inflicted problem of minds "driven by random impulses" that could be fixed (or at least mitigated) by disciplining the mind itself. A large portion of his Collationes is dedicated to helping monks accomplish this, and his thoughts about thinking influenced centuries of monks. Many of Cassian's techniques to stay focused became signature elements of the emerging Christian monasticism: renouncing property and family, avoiding sex, eating sparingly. These were all strategies to minimize the things that didn't matter in order to stretch the mind out to God. But he also recommended forms of mental discipline that are accessible today, even to the non-monks among us. In this addition to our Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers (AWMR) series, historian of late antiquity Jamie Kreiner selects and focuses on (no pun intended) those portions of Cassian's work that can help us poor, overloaded, overstimulated moderns cope with our inability to concentrate"--

The first biography of Henry VIII's court fool William Somer, a legendary entertainer and one of the most intriguing figures of the Tudor age In some portraits of Henry VIII there appears another, striking figure--a gaunt and morose-looking man with a shaved head and, in one case, a monkey on his shoulder. This is William or "Will" Somer, the king's fool, a celebrated wit who reportedly could raise Henry's spirits and spent many hours with him, often alone. Was Somer an "artificial fool," a cunning comic who could speak freely in front of the king, or a "natural fool," someone with intellectual disabilities, like many other members of the profession? And what role did he play in the tumultuous and violent Tudor era? Fool is the first biography of Somer--and perhaps the first of a Renaissance fool. After his death, Somer disappeared behind his legend, and historians struggled to separate myth from reality. Unearthing as many facts as possible, Peter K. Andersson pieces together the fullest picture yet of an enigmatic and unusual man with a very strange job. Somer's story provides new insights into how fools lived and what exactly they did for a living, how monarchs and courtiers related to commoners and people with disabilities, and whether aspects of the Renaissance fool live on in the modern comedian. But most of all, we learn how a commoner without property or education managed to become the court's chief mascot and a continuous presence at the center of Tudor power from the 1530s to the reign of Elizabeth I. Looking beyond stereotypes of the man in motley, Fool reveals a little-known world, surprising and disturbing, when comedy was something crueler and more unpleasant than we like to think.

A groundbreaking survey of contemporary Indigenous art and its enduring connections to the land The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans brings together works by many of today's most boldly innovative Native American artists. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, one of the leading artists and curators of her generation, has carefully chosen some fifty works across a diversity of practices--including weaving, beadwork, sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, performance, and video--that share the common thread of the land. This beautifully illustrated book features both well-known and emerging artists, from G. Peter Jemison (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron Clan) and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma/European descent) to Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) and Rose B. Simpson (Pueblo of Santa Clara, New Mexico). Smith brings her personal perspective to the Native American experience and Indigenous connections to the land. In her essay, heather ahtone examines the history and practices of landscape art, shedding light on how it is both a tool for self-expression and a means to understanding the natural world. Celebrated poet and memoirist Joy Harjo pays homage to the land in her poem "Once the World Was Perfect." Shana Bushyhead Condill discusses the themes and practices that distinguish these artworks. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans shares new perspectives on these visionary and provocative artists while offering a timely celebration of contemporary Indigenous art. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Exhibition ScheduleNational Gallery of Art, Washington, DC>New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, ConnecticutApril 18-September 15, 2024

A stunningly illustrated guide to these extraordinary creatures from a world-renowned paleontologist Paleobiology has advanced from a speculative subject to a cutting-edge science. Today, researchers are applying the latest forensic technologies to the fossil record, revealing startling new insights into the lives of dinosaurs. This illustrated guide explores the behavior, evolution, physiology, and extinction of dinosaurs, taking readers inside the mysterious world of these marvelous animals. With specially commissioned illustrations by Bob Nicholls, Dinosaur Behavior explains how the dinosaurs lived and courted, fought and fed, signaled and interacted with each other, and much more.Features a wealth of breathtaking illustrations throughoutOffers new perspectives on the prehistoric world inhabited by dinosaursSheds light on how dinosaurs actually looked, how they moved, and how fast they ranExplains the feeding habits of carnivores, herbivores, scavengers, and solitary huntersDiscusses sight, hearing, smell, spatial orientation, and intelligenceBrings to life the social behavior of dinosaurs, from mating and parenting to herd dynamics and migrationTakes readers behind the scenes of the latest, most thrilling discoveries

"A richly illustrated introduction to the spectacular reptiles that swam the oceans when dinosaurs roamed the landDuring the Mesozoic Era, 252 to 66 million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the land, but the ocean deeps were roiling with equally spectacular reptiles-including giant predators. This richly illustrated, authoritative, and accessible book introduces readers to the world of these fascinating marine animals, whose predecessors returned to the seas a few million years after the first vertebrates emerged from the water. As we meet ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and many others, we learn about the astonishing anatomical, physiological, and behavioral adaptations that enabled these reptiles to become ocean dwellers again. We also learn about their living descendants, including sea turtles and sea snakes. Featuring stunning artwork depicting these prehistoric ocean creatures and photographs of their fossil remains, this book invites readers to discover the enthralling past of marine reptiles in all their extraordinary diversity"--

Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by the award-winning writer and literary translatorTranslating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid's myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle's Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino's popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question "e;Why Italian?,"e; and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers.Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri's most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator's art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

How a modern radio works, told through mathematics, history, and selected puzzles The modern radio is a wonder, and behind that magic is mathematics. In The Mathematical Radio, Paul Nahin explains how radios work, deploying mathematics and historical discussion, accompanied by a steady stream of intriguing puzzles for math buffs to ponder. Beginning with oscillators and circuits, then moving on to AM, FM, and single-sideband radio, Nahin focuses on the elegant mathematics underlying radio technology rather than the engineering. He explores and explains more than a century of key developments, placing them in historical and technological context. Nahin, a prolific author of books on math for the general reader, describes in fascinating detail the mathematical underpinnings of a technology we use daily. He explains and solves, for example, Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field. Readers need only a familarity with advanced high school-level math to follow Nahin's mathematical discussions. Writing with the nonengineer in mind, Nahin examines topics including impulses in time and frequency, spectrum shifting at the transmitter, the superheterodyne, the physics of single-sideband radio, and FM sidebands. Chapters end with "challenge problems" and an appendix offers solutions, partial answers, and hints. Readers will come away with a new appreciation for the beauty of even the most useful mathematics.

"A new account of the Antonine plague and its long-lasting effects on the history of the Roman empire"--

"Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century, in no small part because he very much lived the events and ideologies of that century. Born into a Polish family in what was then the western fringe of the Russian Empire, and what is now Lithuania, a young man Milosz found his life upended by the First World War and his father's conscription in the Russian army. In the Second World War, he provided aid to Jews in Warsaw as a partisan and a member of the Polish socialist underground. But after the war he lived as a permanent exile, from Poland, from Soviet communism, from his early fervent Catholicism and then, later, even from the almost garish extremes and inequalities of the American society in which he chose to live. His work is a lasting legacy. His poetry remains in print, whether in Polish or English or the other languages into which it has been translated, and his two classic works of prose non-fiction, The Captive Mind, his reflection on the hypnotic effect of ideology, and Native Realm, his memoir on his life in Poland and his life away from it, have been reissued in Penguin Classics. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. In this new volume of the Writers on Writers series, writer Eva Hoffman draws on her conversations with Milosz during their encounters and her own private engagement with his work, in order to comprehend someone whose intellectual and geographic trajectory serves as a mirror to her own, as someone who emigrated with her family from her native Poland and who has since lived and pursued a literary career in the anglophone world. Hoffman concentrates on several important themes in Milosz's life and work, such as his resistance to dogma and fanaticism, his fascination with place and geographic separation, his awareness of his own exile, his attraction to all life, his capacity for pleasure, and finally his basic humanism, which underpinned his poetry"--

A monumental work of history that reveals the Ottoman dynasty's important role in the emergence of early modern EuropeThe Ottomans have long been viewed as despots who conquered through sheer military might, and whose dynasty was peripheral to those of Europe. The Last Muslim Conquest transforms our understanding of the Ottoman Empire, showing how Ottoman statecraft was far more pragmatic and sophisticated than previously acknowledged, and how the Ottoman dynasty was a crucial player in the power struggles of early modern Europe.In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Gabor Agoston captures the grand sweep of Ottoman history, from the dynasty's stunning rise to power at the turn of the fourteenth century to the Siege of Vienna in 1683, which brought an end to Ottoman incursions into central Europe. He discusses how the Ottoman wars of conquest gave rise to the imperial rivalry with the Habsburgs, and brings vividly to life the intrigues of sultans, kings, popes, and spies. Agoston examines the subtler methods of Ottoman conquest, such as dynastic marriages and the incorporation of conquered peoples into the Ottoman administration, and argues that while the Ottoman Empire was shaped by Turkish, Iranian, and Islamic influences, it was also an integral part of Europe and was, in many ways, a European empire.Rich in narrative detail, The Last Muslim Conquest looks at Ottoman military capabilities, frontier management, law, diplomacy, and intelligence, offering new perspectives on the gradual shift in power between the Ottomans and their European rivals and reframing the old story of Ottoman decline.

How an acceptance of our limitations can lead to a more fulfilling life and a more harmonious societyWe live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible-a good-enough life for all.Avram Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction of the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes. By competing less with each other, each of us can find renewed meaning and purpose, have our material and emotional needs met, and begin to lead more leisurely lives. Alpert makes no false utopian promises, however. Life can never be more than good enough because there will always be accidents and tragedies beyond our control, which is why we must stop dividing the world into winners and losers and ensure that there is a fair share of decency and sufficiency to go around.Visionary and provocative, The Good-Enough Life demonstrates how we can work together to cultivate a good-enough life for all instead of tearing ourselves apart in a race to the top of the social pyramid.