Carbon Capital: Climate Change and the Ethics of Oil Investing
【ISBN】9781479831692
【著者】Sean Field
【出版社】New York University Press (2025)
【馆藏地】管院图书馆4楼书库
【索书号】F471.262 /F456 /E
【简 介】It is no secret that the fossil fuel industry, whose products power modern America both physically and financially, inflicts immense destruction to our environment. The past, present, and future of US energy have been determined not just by engineers, but by financiers, an under-studied group of energy investors.
Drawing on four years of ethnographic work in Houston, Texas, the financial center of the oil industry, Carbon Capital explores how oil financiers decide what a good investment is, and how they incorporate ethics into their decision making. While many who are concerned about climate change see those involved in the gas and oil industries as immoral profit chasers who do not care about the environment, the author finds that this is not the case. His interviews and observations demonstrate that the people who finance the energy industries are actually deeply concerned with ethics. They grapple with questions about climate change and what it means to do the right thing, but the choices they make are ultimately guided by a combination of how they perceive the historical context in which they operate, their faith, which is largely religious Christian; their financial interests; plus the capitalist system in which they are running, all of which come together to shape their moral understandings about what a good energy future looks like. While the worldview of oil financiers may not align with our own, the author argues that given their importance in shaping environmental approaches, it is crucial that we understand what drives their ethical sensibilities.
Hopeful Pessimism
【ISBN】9780691265605
【作者】Mara van der Lugt
【出版社】Princeton University Press(2025)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】B089 /L951 /E
【简 介】The climate debate is rife with calls for optimism. While temperatures rise and disasters intensify, we are asked to maintain optimism and hope, as if the real threat is pessimism and despair. In this erudite and engaging book, Mara van der Lugt argues that this is a mistake: crude optimism can no longer be a virtue in a breaking world, and may well prove to be our besetting vice. In an age of climate change and ecological devastation, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism.
Drawing on thinkers that range from J.R.R.Tolkien and Mary Shelley to Albert Camus and Jonathan Lear, van der Lugt invites us to rethink what we thought we knew about optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, activism and grief. She shows that pessimism is closely linked to a tradition of moral and political activism, and offers a different way to think about pessimism: not as synonymous with despair but as compatible with hope. Gently yet fiercely, van der Lugt argues that what we need to avoid is not pessimism but fatalism or self-serving resignation. Pessimism does not imply the loss of courage or the lack of a desire to strive for a better world; on the contrary, these are the very gifts that pessimism can bestow.
What Hopeful Pessimism asks instead is that we strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change.
Twenty-Nine Goodbyes: An Introduction to Chinese Poetry
【ISBN】9781531508357
【作者】Timothy Billings
【出版社】Fordham University Press (2025)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】I207.2 /B598 /E
【简介】A primer for those with no previous knowledge of Chinese, this book introduces readers to the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine ways of understanding a single poem. “Seeing Off a Friend,” by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701–762) has long been praised for its vividness, subtlety, and poignancy. Anthologizing twenty-nine translations of the poem, Timothy Billings not only introduces the poem’s richness and depth but also the nuanced art of translating Chinese poetry into European languages.
A famous exemplar of “seeing off poetry,” which was common in an empire whose literati were continually on the move, Li’s poem has continued to fascinate readers far removed from its moment of composition, from the Victorians, to Ezra Pound, to contemporary translators from around the world. In talking us through these linguistic crossings, Billings unpacks the intricacies of the lüshi or "regulated verse poem," a form as pivotal to Chinese literature as the sonnet is to European tradition.
This book promises to transform its readers, step-by-step, into adept interpreters of one of the most significant verse forms in Chinese literary history. Billings’s engaging teaching style, backed by a lightly worn but deep scholarly engagement with Chinese poetry, makes this work an indispensable guide for anyone interested in poetry, translation, or the cultural heritage of China.
Cross-dressing in the Middle Ages
【ISBN】9781032325781
【作 者】Marina Montesano
【出版社】Routledge (2024)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】C913.14-09 /M779 /E
【简介】By encompassing the hagiographies of the first centuries, the most famous case of Joan of Arc, numerous chivalrous novels, and the overlooked accounts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this is the first study to consider cross-dressing for the entire medieval age.
Cross-dressing is a thought-provoking practice in a world that, in theory, adheres to neat distinctions of the functions and attires of males and females in society; this volume demonstrates that only a long-term analysis can fully account for the phenomenon in its various facets. If dress is a gender marker, the argument that it also marks many other conditions beyond the man–woman binary cannot be ignored. There is a dress for the cleric and one for the layman; there is the dress of the rich and that of the poor. In some cases, these other binary distinctions are intertwined with that of sex and gender, and this intersectional perspective is developed through a wide range of sources read with philological rigour.
The narrative style makes this book accessible to both students and general readers interested in the history of sexuality, gender history, and medieval studies.
The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries
【ISBN】9780691243320
【著者】Andrew Hui
【出版社】Princeton University Press (2025)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】G258.83 /H899 /E
【简介】With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo—a “little studio”—and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.
Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo’s influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.
Beautifully illustrated, The Study is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.
Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe
【ISBN】9781503636323
【著者】Robert G. Morrison
【出版社】Stanford University Press (2025)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】K545.03 /M881 /E
【简 介】Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge―multilingual and transregional Jewish scholars―became an important bridge among the powers.
With this book, Robert Morrison is the first to track the network of scholars who mediated exchanges in astronomy, astrology, Qabbalah, and philosophy. Their books, manuscripts, and acts of translation all held economic value, thus commercial and intellectual exchange commingled―knowledge became transactional as these merchants exchanged texts for more intellectual material and social capital. While parallels between medieval Islamic astronomy and the famous heliocentric arrangement posited by Copernicus are already known, Morrison reveals far deeper networks of intellectual exchange that extended well beyond theoretical astronomy and shows how religion, science, and philosophy, areas that will eventually develop into separate fields, were once interwoven. The Renaissance portrayed in Merchants of Knowledge is not, from the perspective of the Ottoman Muslim contacts of the Jewish merchants of knowledge, hegemonic. It's a Renaissance permeated by diversity, the cultural and political implications of which the West is only now waking up to.
The art of uncertainty: How to navigate chance, ignorance, risk and luck, how to navigate chance, ignorance, risk and luck
【ISBN】9781324106111
【作者】David Spiegelhalter
【出版社】W. W. Norton & Company (2025)
【馆藏地】管院图书馆4楼书库
【索书号】C8-05 /S755 /E
【简介】How dangerous is our diet? How much of sports falls into the realm of luck? When authorities categorize a given event as “highly likely”―how likely is that, really? Whether we’re trying to decide if the benefits of a new medication are worth the chance of side effects or if artificial intelligence truly threatens humanity, our lives are riddled with uncertainties both everyday and existential―yet it can be difficult to know how to properly weigh all those unknowns. Luckily for us, renowned statistician David Spiegelhalter has spent his career dissecting data to resolve the apparently random and decode the many decisions we face with imperfect information. In The Art of Uncertainty, he shows how we can become better at dealing with what we don’t know to make smarter choices in a world so full of puzzling variables.
In lucid, lively prose, Spiegelhalter guides us through the principles of probability, illustrating how they can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to sports to climate change forecasts. He demonstrates how taking a mathematical approach to phenomena we might otherwise attribute to fate or luck can help us sort hidden patterns from mere coincidences, better evaluate cause and effect, and predict what’s likely to happen in the future. Along the way, we learn how a misinterpretation of a probability contributed to the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco, why a ship twice the size of the Titanic sank without a trace, and why we can be so confident that no two properly shuffled decks of cards have ever been in the same order.
Sparkling with wit and fascinating real-world examples, this is an essential guide to navigating uncertainty while also retaining the humility to admit what we don’t, or simply cannot, know.
Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture
【ISBN】9789463727242
【编者】Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, Federica Pich
【出版社】Amsterdam University Press (2024)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】J205.546 /P493 /E
【简介】The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch’s legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch’s vast literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and self-representation developed during the Renaissance. His two sonnets on Laura’s portrait by Simone Martini and his ambivalent fascination with the illusionary power of portraiture in his Latin texts — such as the Secretum, the Familiares and De remediis utriusque fortune — constituted the theoretical reference for artists and writers alike. In a century dominated by the rhetorical comparison between art and literature (ut pictura poësis) and by the paragone debate, the interplay between Petrarch’s oeuvre, Petrarchism and portraiture shaped the discourse on the relationship between the sitters’ physical image and their inner life. The volume brings together diverse interdisciplinary contributions that explore the subject through a rich body of literary and visual sources.
Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: modernism, media and emotion
【ISBN】9781399526982
【著者】Marit Grøtta
【出版社】Edinburgh University Press (2024)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】I0-05 /G884 /E
【简介】Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grøtta discusses these writers’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.
Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death
【ISBN】9780691260761
【作 者】Susana Monsó
【出版社】Princeton University Press (2024)
【馆藏地】江湾馆三楼理科借阅区
【索书号】Q958.12 /M755 /E
【简介】When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.
With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today’s leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.
Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.