Prepare to be even more revolted, flabbergasted, appalled, and completely entertained by this incredible follow-up collection of absolutely true trivia from the author of 5 People Who Died During Sex. Nothing is too insane, too inane, or too sacred for Karl Shaw’s eclectic lists of the world’s very worst. DID YOU KNOW… …that according to recent estimates (2010) your body is worth between $10,000-$100,000 on today’s open market—from companies legitimately trading body parts from willing donors to recognized medical facilities? …that the great plague of Athens in 404, which lead to the defeat of the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, was probably caused by contaminated cereals? …that Benjamin Franklin liked to sit stark naked in front of his open windows, calling the practice “taking an air bath”? …that in the last days of his life, the actor Steve McQueen lived on a diet largely comprised of boiled alligator skin and apricot pits, washed down with urine?
A close look at Günter Blobel’s transformative contributions to molecular cell biology. The difficulty of reconciling chemical mechanisms with the functions of whole living systems has plagued biologists since the development of cell theory in the nineteenth century. As Karl S. Matlin argues in Crossing the Boundaries of Life, it is no coincidence that this longstanding knot of scientific inquiry was loosened most meaningfully by the work of a cell biologist, the Nobel laureate Günter Blobel. In 1975, using an experimental setup that did not contain any cells at all, Blobel was able to target newly made proteins to cell membrane vesicles, enabling him to theorize how proteins in the cell distribute spatially, an idea he called the signal hypothesis. Over the next twenty years, Blobel and other scientists were able to dissect this mechanism into its precise molecular details. For elaborating his signal concept into a process he termed membrane topogenesis—the idea that each protein in the cell is synthesized with an "address" that directs the protein to its correct destination within the cell—Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1999. Matlin argues that Blobel’s investigative strategy and its subsequent application addressed a fundamental unresolved dilemma that had bedeviled biology from its very beginning—the relationship between structure and function—allowing biology to achieve mechanistic molecular explanations of biological phenomena. Crossing the Boundaries of Life thus uses Blobel’s research and life story to shed light on the importance of cell biology for twentieth-century science, illustrating how it propelled the development of adjacent disciplines like biochemistry and molecular biology.
Forgotten Peace examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. In this book, Robert A. Karl reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history--including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language--Karl provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Sweeping in scope, Forgotten Peace challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America."--Provided by publisher.
Sevastopol, located in present-day Ukraine but still home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet and revered by Russians for its role in the Crimean War, was utterly destroyed by German forces during World War II. In From Ruins to Reconstruction, Karl D. Qualls tells the complex story of the city's rebuilding. Based on extensive research in archives in both Moscow and Sevastopol, architectural plans and drawings, interviews, and his own extensive experience in Sevastopol, Qualls tells a unique story in which the periphery "bests" the Stalinist center: the city's experience shows that local officials had considerable room to maneuver even during the peak years of Stalinist control.Qualls first paints a vivid portrait of the ruined city and the sufferings of its surviving inhabitants. He then turns to Moscow's plans to remake the ancient city on the heroic socialist model prized by Stalin and visited upon most other postwar Soviet cities and towns. In Sevastopol, however, the architects and city planners sent out from the center "went native," deviating from Moscow's blueprints to collaborate with local officials and residents, who seized control of the planning process and rebuilt the city in a manner that celebrated its distinctive historical identity. When completed, postwar Sevastopol resembled a nineteenth-century Russian city, with tree-lined boulevards; wide walkways; and buildings, street names, and memorials to its heroism in wars both long past and recent. Though visually Russian (and still containing a majority Russian-speaking population), Sevastopol was in 1954 joined to Ukraine, which in 1991 became an independent state. In his concluding chapter, Qualls explores how the "Russianness" of the city and the presence of the Russian fleet affect relations between Ukraine, Russia, and the West.
This volume evaluates the understanding of dreams and the form of dream reports in Josephus' writings, and it compares Josephan texts with ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and Hellenistic dream reports to discern Josephus' sources of literary inspiration and intellectual assumptions.
The original edition of this ambitious reference was published in hardcover in 1998, in two oversize volumes (10x13"). This edition combines the two volumes into one; it's paperbound ("flexi-cover"--the paper has a plastic coating), smaller (8x10", and affordable for art book buyers with shallower pockets--none of whom should pass it by. The scope is encyclopedic: half the work (originally the first volume) is devoted to painting; the other half to sculpture, new media, and photography. Chapters are arranged thematically, and each page displays several examples (in color) of work under discussion. The final section, a lexicon of artists, includes a small bandw photo of each artist, as well as biographical information and details of work, writings, and exhibitions. Ruhrberg and the three other authors are veteran art historians, curators, and writers, as is editor Walther. c. Book News Inc.
At a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was reported that a ghost was haunting the deliberations of the assembled global elite - that of the renowned social scientist and economic historian, Karl Polanyi. In his classic work, The Great Transformation, Polanyi documented the impact of the rise of market society on western civilization and captured better than anyone else the destructive effects of the economic, political and social crisis of the 1930s. Today, in the throes of another Great Recession, Polanyi’s work has gained a new significance. To understand the profound challenges faced by our democracies today, we need to revisit history and revisit his work. In this new collection of unpublished texts - lectures, draft essays and reports written between 1919 and 1958 - Polanyi examines the collapse of the liberal economic order and the demise of democracies in the inter-war years. He takes up again the fundamental question that preoccupied him throughout his work - the place of the economy in society - and aims to show how we might return to an economy anchored in society and its cultural, religious and political institutions. For anyone concerned about the danger to democracy and social life posed by the unleashing of capital from regulatory control and the dominance of the neoliberal ideologies of market fundamentalism, this important new volume by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century is a must-read.
A volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology West Baltimore stands out in the popular imagination as the quintessential “inner city”—gritty, run-down, and marred by drugs and gang violence. Indeed, with the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the area experienced a rapid onset of poverty and high unemployment, with few public resources available to alleviate economic distress. But in stark contrast to the image of a perpetual “urban underclass” depicted in television by shows like The Wire, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson present a more nuanced portrait of Baltimore’s inner city residents that employs important new research on the significance of early-life opportunities available to low-income populations. The Long Shadow focuses on children who grew up in west Baltimore neighborhoods and others like them throughout the city, tracing how their early lives in the inner city have affected their long-term well-being. Although research for this book was conducted in Baltimore, that city’s struggles with deindustrialization, white flight, and concentrated poverty were characteristic of most East Coast and Midwest manufacturing cities. The experience of Baltimore’s children who came of age during this era is mirrored in the experiences of urban children across the nation. For 25 years, the authors of The Long Shadow tracked the life progress of a group of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children through the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP). The study monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults. The authors’ fine-grained analysis confirms that the children who lived in more cohesive neighborhoods, had stronger families, and attended better schools tended to maintain a higher economic status later in life. As young adults, they held higher-income jobs and had achieved more personal milestones (such as marriage) than their lower-status counterparts. Differences in race and gender further stratified life opportunities for the Baltimore children. As one of the first studies to closely examine the outcomes of inner-city whites in addition to African Americans, data from the BSSYP shows that by adulthood, white men of lower status family background, despite attaining less education on average, were more likely to be employed than any other group in part due to family connections and long-standing racial biases in Baltimore’s industrial economy. Gender imbalances were also evident: the women, who were more likely to be working in low-wage service and clerical jobs, earned less than men. African American women were doubly disadvantaged insofar as they were less likely to be in a stable relationship than white women, and therefore less likely to benefit from a second income. Combining original interviews with Baltimore families, teachers, and other community members with the empirical data gathered from the authors’ groundbreaking research, The Long Shadow unravels the complex connections between socioeconomic origins and socioeconomic destinations to reveal a startling and much-needed examination of who succeeds and why.
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