Jan Brett's exquisite interpretation of "The Night Before Christmas" has been a holiday classic since it was first published in 1998. Not only will readers delight in watching St. Nick delivering his presents to the family, but they will love the addition to two elf stowaways from the North Pole, creating mischief and mayhem under a brilliant midnight sky. Jan Brett captures the essense of the Christmas spirit in her beautiful, vibrant illustrations. "Another holiday keepsake from a master." - Publishers Weekly, starred review for The Night Before Christmas
Renaissance artists and poets readily commemorated the lives of the great, but rarely mourned a child who could not even claim noble birth. Yet the sixteenth-century masterpiece ""Treny"" stems from the Polish poet Jan Kochanowski's intense grief over the death of his little daughter Orszula, 'a delightful, radiant, extraordinary child', who died before she was three. The laments stand as Kochanowski's crowning achievement, and the first Polish work to equal the great poems of western Europe. In a cycle by turn reflective, despairing, and finally hesitantly accepting, a father evokes the unfulfilled promise of a life tragically cut short. The work's disarming simplicity and enduring passion, supported by an intellectually impressive structure, are fully realized in translation by Adam Czerniawski, the distinguished contemporary Polish poet. The English translation is accompanied by the original Polish text, edited by Renaissance scholar Piotr Wilczek, and with a foreword by Donald Davie. This important edition will prove of value to scholars and teachers of Slavonic literature, and to all lovers of poetry.
Despite hundreds of books and thousands of articles on Jackie Kennedy, surprisingly little is known about her mother's role in her life and achievements. Often dismissed as a social climber who faded into the woodwork after she divorced Jackie's father-the dashing, disreputable "Black Jack" Bouvier-and married the rich Hugh D. Auchincloss, Janet not only played a pivotal part in Jackie's own wedding to JFK, but often served as a stand-in for Jackie during the White House years, and helped her cope with John and Caroline after the assassination. The only book to explore this fascinating mother-daughter relationship, Janet & Jackie is filled with stories that shed new light on the personal life of an American icon.
The fourth in a series of editions of Shakespeare’s most political and history-soaked plays, this Macbeth offers copious aids to understanding the play not found in any other edition. By attending to the play’s medieval Scottish setting in a way that rival editors have never matched—when they have even dug beyond the early seventeenth-century context in which it was produced—Jan H. Blits’s edition richly rewards readers left unsatisfied by “decodings” of the play’s supposed allusions to the politics of early modern England who wish to look deeper. In doing so, it opens the text for readers to encounter, in new ways, the play’s historical, political, and psychological significance.
The Indian philosopher Acharya Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE) was the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Path) school of Mahayana Buddhism and arguably the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself. Indeed, in the Tibetan and East Asian traditions, Nagarjuna is often referred to as the "second Buddha." His primary contribution to Buddhist thought lies is in the further development of the concept of sunyata or "emptiness." For Nagarjuna, all phenomena are without any svabhaba, literally "own-nature" or "self-nature," and thus without any underlying essence. In this book, Jan Westerhoff offers a systematic account of Nagarjuna's philosophical position. He reads Nagarjuna in his own philosophical context, but he does not hesitate to show that the issues of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy have at least family resemblances to issues in European philosophy.
In this “enormously accomplished and compelling novel,” a man crisscrosses Scandinavia to solve the mystery of his wife’s death—and of his own life (Paul Auster, bestselling author of 4 3 2 1). Jonas Wergeland, a famous TV documentary producer with an almost magical knack for infidelity, returns one evening from the World’s Fair in Seville to find his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer, and an endlessly inventive look at the conditions that have brought Wergeland to this critical juncture in life. From his hairsbreadth escape from a ravenous polar bear while filming in Greenland to a near-death experience aboard a passenger ferry in the icy Baltic, the experiences that comprise the narrative of Wergeland’s life provide a fascinating portrait of a media icon at the crux of his journey as an artist.
In ten brilliant essays, Jan Assmann explores the connections between religion, culture, and memory. Building on Maurice Halbwachs's idea that memory, like language, is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one, he argues that memory has a cultural dimension too. He develops a persuasive view of the life of the past in such surface phenomena as codes, religious rites and festivals, and canonical texts on the one hand, and in the Freudian psychodrama of repressing and resurrecting the past on the other. Whereas the current fad for oral history inevitably focuses on the actual memories of the last century or so, Assmann presents a commanding view of culture extending over five thousand years. He focuses on cultural memory from the Egyptians, Babylonians, and the Osage Indians down to recent controversies about memorializing the Holocaust in Germany and the role of memory in the current disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
The House of a Thousand Floors is one of the earliest science-fiction novels in European literature, published first in 1929. Besides being a pioneer in its genre, the book is highly regarded for its general merits as psychological literature. The novel tells the story of a dream in fever of a soldier wounded in World War I. He finds himself in the stairway of a gigantic (and kafkaesque) tower-like building, which is a metaphor for modern society. He learns that his task is to rescue Princess Tamara from Muller, the lord of the edifice. After a number of surrealistic encounters in the building, during which he is hailed as a liberator by many and is hunted by the cruel security guards, the main character finds Tamara and faces the cruel lord of Mullerdom. The novel makes fine use of a range of experimental styles and techniques. At times, linear storytelling gives way to a collage of incongruous elements: excerpts from fictitious books, encyclopedia articles, radio broadcast transcripts are used as a shortcut to describe places or events; other narrative ingredients include fanciful advertisements, ludicrous administrative documents or political slogans which highlight the idiosyncrasies of this decadent world. ÿ
When Bo spots what he thinks is a "rip-roarin', rootin'-tootin', shiny red armadillo," he knows what he has to do. Follow that armadillo! Bo leaves his mother and three brothers behind and takes off for a two-stepping, bronco-bucking adventure. Jan Brett turns her considerable talents toward the Texas countryside in this amusing story of an armadillo on his own.
This thoroughly revised and updated edition is the most comprehensive and detailed reference ever published on United Nations. The book demystifies the complex workings of the world's most important and influential international body.
This is a collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bittersweet stories of life among the inhabitants of the Little Quarter of nineteenth-century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth-century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech rather than an Austrian city. Prague Tales is a classic by a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klíma, who contributes an introduction to this new translation.
The groundbreaking book that launched America's urban legend obsession! Folklore scholar Jan Harold Brunvand assembles the best-known urban legends—including "The Hook," "The Spider in the Hairdo," and "The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs"—and provides an enlightening and entertaining analysis of their variants and evolution. The Vanishing Hitchhiker was Professor Brunvand's first popular book on urban legends, and it remains a classic. The culmination of twenty years of collection and research, this book is a must-have for urban legend lovers.
An integrative account of the neural underpinnings of decision making, emphasizing the ways in which some information sources are given more weight than others. I will recklessly endeavor to scavenge materials from these various fields with the single aim of producing a coherent, but open-minded account of attention, or bias versus sensitivity, or how the activities of neurons allow us to decide one way or another that, with a faint echo of Hamlet in the background, something appears to be or not to be.—from The Anatomy of Bias. In this engaging, even lyrical, book, Jan Lauwereyns examines the neural underpinnings of decision-making, using "bias" as his core concept rather than the more common but noncommittal terms "selection" and "attention." Lauwereyns offers an integrative, interdisciplinary account of the structure and function of bias, which he defines as a basic brain mechanism that attaches different weights to different information sources, prioritizing some cognitive representations at the expense of others. Lauwereyns introduces the concepts of bias and sensitivity based on notions from Bayesian probability, which he translates into easily recognizable neural signatures, introduced by concrete examples from the experimental literature. He examines, among other topics, positive and negative motivations for giving priority to different sensory inputs, and looks for the neural underpinnings of racism, sexism, and other forms of "familiarity bias." Lauwereyns—a poet and essayist as well as a scientist—connects findings and ideas in neuroscience to analogous concepts in such diverse fields as post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theory, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, and experimental economics. With The Anatomy of Bias, he gives readers that rarity in today's world of proliferating and ever more narrowly focused technical research papers: a work of sustained, rational thinking, elegantly expressed.
A tour de force...A fresh and detailed account of how the court works and, relatedly, how presidents decide who gets there." -The Wall Street Journal "A fascinating look at dynamics within the court, showing how personalities and ideology can affect alliances and debates." -The New York Times The New York Times bestselling account of the most consequential shift in the use of American judicial power in almost one hundred years. Drawing on unprecedented access to the Supreme Court justices themselves and their inner circles, acclaimed ABC News legal correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg offers an explosive newsbreaking account of one of the most momentous political watersheds in American history. From the series of Republican nominations that proved deeply frustrating to conservatives to the decades of bruising battles that led to the rise of Justices Roberts and Alito, this is the authoritative story of the conservative effort to shift the direction of the high court—a revelatory look at one of the central fronts of America's culture wars by one of the most widely respected experts on the subject.
What is evolution? What is a gene? How did these concepts originate and how did they develop? This book is a short history ranging from Lamarck and Darwin to DNA and the Human Genome Project, exploring the conceptual oppositions, techniques, institutional conditions and controversies that have shaped the development of biology.
With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, ... Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers ... weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven--his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the 'immortal beloved, ' and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven's music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist"--Publisher marketing.
General complaints about moral decay, however frequent, and perhaps even justified they might be, are of little use. This book is not complaining. It is an attempt to apply our improved knowledge in various fields to questions of morality. It seeks to enhance our ability to discern among different moral phenomena and to discuss them more precisely. Second, it tries to take use of recent developements of sciences, in particular sciences of life, in practical philosophy, without giving up the differences between a human and other living beings. With very few exceptions, the whole tradition of moral philosophy considers the acting person to be an autonomous, independent individual, handling with his or her own property to pursue his or her own happiness. On the other hand, most of us in the contemporary societies are often acting as employees or representatives of social institutions, using entrusted property and competence of our employers to pursue their – and not our own – goals. People in public roles, like judges, policemen or clerks, cannot guide themselves even by the categorical imperative or by the role reversal test. In complex networks of organizations, morals cannot be fully replaced by written rules, as some philosophers think, but takes a different shape. The content of the book can be roughly divided into three parts. In the first one, the basic notions of e.g. freedom, life, responsibility or justice are analyzed and precized, as well as varied layers of practical philosophy. The second is a succinct overview of main schools or streams of western moral thought, trying to find a binding and universal foundation of morals and ethics. The third part re-introduces another founding idea, rather forgotten in modern times, namely the idea of heritage, both biologiocal and cultural, of the past. This idea, widespread e.g. in the sedentary farming societies, has to be reformulated, but could be fundamental for more realistic and efficient solutions of our responsibility for life and nature. The last part is a tentative analysis of moral relations and problems connected with the growing complexity of institutions.
An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors “[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”—Elie Wiesel FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War, in which 90 percent of the country’s three and a half million Jews perished. Yet despite this unprecedented calamity, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war were further subjected to terror and bloodshed. The deadliest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce on July 4, 1946. In Fear, Jan T. Gross addresses a vexing question: How was this possible? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and how ordinary Poles responded to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens. Anti-Semitism, Gross argues, became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many were complicit in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder—and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. For more than half a century, the fate of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland was cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross brings to light a truth that must never be ignored. Praise for Fear “That a civilized nation could have descended so low . . . such behavior must be documented, remembered, discussed. This Gross does, intelligently and exhaustively.”—The New York Times Book Review “Gripping . . . an especially powerful and, yes, painful reading experience . . . illuminating and searing.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Gross tells a devastating story. . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.”—Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing . . . Gross supplies impeccable documentation.”—Baltimore Sun “Compelling . . . Gross builds a meticulous case.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This textbook, extensively revised and updated in this new second edition, introduces the student to what is most basic and most interesting about Latin America. The authors-each widely recognized in his or her own discipline, as well as among Latin Americanists-analyze both the enduring features of the area and the pace and direction of change. Th
Jan Bremmer presents a provocative picture of the historical development of beliefs regarding the soul in ancient Greece. He argues that before Homer the Greeks distinguished between two types of soul, both identified with the individual: the free soul, which possessed no psychological attributes and was active only outside the body, as in dreams, swoons, and the afterlife; and the body soul, which endowed a person with life and consciousness. Gradually this concept of two kinds of souls was replaced by the idea of a single soul. In exploring Greek ideas of human souls as well as those of plants and animals, Bremmer illuminates an important stage in the genesis of the Greek mind.
Moses is at the foundation of monotheism, and so of Western culture. Here the factual and fictional events and characters in religious beliefs are studied. It traces monotheism back to the Egyptian king Akhenaten and shows how Moses's followers established truth by denouncing all others as false.
The literature of Scandinavia is amazingly rich and varied, consisting of the works produced by the countries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, and stretching from the ancient Norse Sagas to the present day. While much of it is unknown outside of the region, some has gained worldwide popularity, including the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the stories of Isak Dinesen, and the plays of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. While obviously including the area's most famous works, the Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature and Theater also provides information on lesser known authors and currents trends, literary circles and journals, and historical background. This is accomplished through a list of acronyms, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries, which together make this reference the most comprehensive and up to date work of its kind related to Scandinavian literature and theater available anywhere.
A delightfully original companion book to Jan Brett's bestseller The Mitten. When Lisa's woolen stocking flies off the clothesline, Hedgie finds it and pokes his nose in. He tries to pull it out, but the stocking gets stuck on his prickles -- and the fun begins. A mother hen comes by, then a noisy goose, a talkative barn cat, a playful farm dog, a mama pig and her piglets, and a pony. They all laugh at Hedgie, especially when he pretends he's wearing a new hat. But in the end, it is clever Hedgie who has the last laugh. And where is Lisa when all of this is going on? She's in Jan Brett's signature borders, getting ready for winter, until she realizes her stocking is missing and she enters the story to look for it. Luminous paintings of a Scandinavian farm and the forest around it are bathed in northern light, as the snow begins to fall and the adventure unfolds.
After observing over 300 classrooms, authors Valerie Hastings Gregory and M. Jan Rozzelle provide the framework, knowledge, and tools necessary to help create a community of literacy coaches, leaders, and teachers to improve reading across schools. Demonstrating the critical link between adult learning and student learning that makes professional learning communities our best hope for improving reading and comprehension for today's students, this developmental resource provides information, research findings, and strategies that teachers can apply immediately in the classroom.
Often hailed as one of the best travel books ever written, Venice is neither a guide nor a history book, but a beautifully written immersion in Venetian life and character, set against the background of the city's past. Analysing the particular temperament of Venetians, as well as its waterways, its architecture, its bridges, its tourists, its curiosities, its smells, sounds, lights and colours, there is scarcely a corner of Venice that Jan Morris has not investigated and brought vividly to life. Jan Morris first visited the city of Venice as young James Morris, during World War II. As she writes in the introduction, 'it is Venice seen through a particular pair of eyes at a particular moment - young eyes at that, responsive above all to the stimuli of youth.' Venice is an impassioned work on this magnificent but often maddening city. Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Sydney, Coronation Everest, Hong Kong, Spain and Manhattan '45. Since its first publication, Venice has appeared in many editions, won the W.H. Heinemann award and become an international bestseller. 'The best book about Venice ever written' Sunday Times 'No sensible visitor should visit the place without it . . . Venice stands alone as the essential introduction, and as a work of literature in its own right.' Observer
“A delightful tour of the tearooms that dotted the nation in the first half of the twentieth century . . . [an] irresistible slice of American popular culture.” —Booklist The Gypsy Tea Kettle. Polly’s Cheerio Tea Room. The Mad Hatter. The Blue Lantern Inn. These are just a few of the many tea rooms—most owned and operated by women—that popped up across America at the turn of the last century, and exploded into a full-blown craze by the 1920s. Colorful, cozy, festive, and inviting, these new-fangled eateries offered women a way to celebrate their independence and creativity. Sparked by the Suffragist movement, Prohibition, and the rise of the automobile, tea rooms forever changed the way America eats out, and laid the groundwork for the modern small restaurant and coffee bar. In this lively, well-researched book, Jan Whitaker brings us back to the exciting days when countless American women dreamed of opening their own tea room—and many did. From the Bohemian streets of New York’s Greenwich Village to the high-society tea rooms of Chicago’s poshest hotels, from the Colonial roadside tea houses of New England to the welcoming bungalows of California, the book traces the social, artistic, and culinary changes the tea room helped bring about. Anyone interested in women’s history, the early days of the automobile, the Bohemian lives of artists in Greenwich Village, and the history of food and drink will revel in this spirited, stylish, and intimate slice of America’s past. “The book is both informative and clear-eyed, and leavened with wonderful illustrations.” —House & Garden
This is the first account of Old Norse syntax for almost a hundred years and the first ever in a non-Scandinavian language. The language of the Vikings and of the Old Icelandic sagas is the best documented medieval Germanic language: the author presents a full analysis of its syntax and overviews of its phonology and morphology. He includes a complete bibliography of Old Norse syntax.
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