How to Read Nietzsche
【作 者】Keith Ansell Pearson
【出版社】W. W. Norton (September 17, 2005)
【馆藏地】理科馆外国教材中心阅览室
【索书号】B516.47 /A618h /E(MIT)
【简 介】Approaching the writing of major intellectuals, artists, and philosophers need no longer be daunting. How to Read is a new sort of introduction--a personal master class in reading--that brings you face to face with the work of some of the most influential and challenging writers in history. In lucid, accessible language, these books explain essential topics such as Nietzsche's thinking on beauty, truth, and memory.
Nietzsche's thinking revolves around a new and striking concept of humanity—a humanity that has come to terms with the death of God and practices the art and science of living well, free of the need for metaphysical certainties and moral absolutes. How, then, are we to live? And what do we love?
Keith Ansell Pearson introduces the reader to Nietzsche's distinctive philosophical style and to the development of his thought. Through a series of close readings of Nietzsche's aphorisms he illuminates some of his best-known but often ill-understood ideas, including eternal recurrence and the superman, and he brings to light the challenging nature of Nietzsche's thinking on key topics such as beauty, truth, and memory. Extracts are taken from a range of Nietzsche's work, including Human, All Too Human; The Gay Science; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and On the Genealogy of Morality.
GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
【作 者】Diane Coyle
【出版社】Princeton University Press (February 23, 2014)
【馆藏地】管理学院图书馆书库
【索书号】F222.33 /C881 /E
【简 介】Why did the size of the U.S. economy increase by 3 percent on one day in mid-2013--or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the U.K. financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008--just as the world's financial system went into meltdown? And why was Greece's chief statistician charged with treason in 2013 for apparently doing nothing more than trying to accurately report the size of his country's economy? The answers to all these questions lie in the way we define and measure national economies around the world: Gross Domestic Product. This entertaining and informative book tells the story of GDP, making sense of a statistic that appears constantly in the news, business, and politics, and that seems to rule our lives--but that hardly anyone actually understands.
Diane Coyle traces the history of this artificial, abstract, complex, but exceedingly important statistic from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors through its invention in the 1940s and its postwar golden age, and then through the Great Crash up to today. The reader learns why this standard measure of the size of a country's economy was invented, how it has changed over the decades, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. The book explains why even small changes in GDP can decide elections, influence major political decisions, and determine whether countries can keep borrowing or be thrown into recession. The book ends by making the case that GDP was a good measure for the twentieth century but is increasingly inappropriate for a twenty-first-century economy driven by innovation, services, and intangible goods.
Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders
【作 者】Peter Redfield
【出版社】University of California Press (12 Mar 2013)
【馆藏地】医科馆外文书库
【索书号】R19 /R315 /E(MIT)
【简 介】"Life in Crisis" tells the story of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders or MSF) and its effort to "save lives" on a global scale. Begun in 1971 as a French alternative to the Red Cross, the MSF has grown into an international institution with a reputation for outspoken protest as well as technical efficiency. It has also expanded beyond emergency response, providing for a wider range of endeavors, including AIDS care. Yet its seemingly simple ethical goal proves deeply complex in practice. MSF continually faces the problem of defining its own limits. Its minimalist form of care recalls the promise of state welfare, but without political resolution or a sense of well-being beyond health and survival. Lacking utopian certainty, the group struggles when the moral clarity of crisis fades. Nevertheless, it continues to take action and innovate. Its organizational history illustrates both the logic and the tensions of casting humanitarian medicine into a leading role in international affairs.
Solar System: A Visual Exploration of All the Planets, Moons and Other Heavenly Bodies that Orbit Our Sun
【作 者】Marcus Chown
【出版社】Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers (October 26, 2011)
【馆藏地】理科馆外国教材中心阅览室
【索书号】P18 /C552 /E(MIT)
【简 介】Following the stunning success of both the print edition and the app of The Elements, Black Dog & Leventhal and Touch Press have teamed up again. Solar System is something completely new under the sun. Never before have the wonders of our solar system—all its planets, dwarf planets, the sun, moons, rocky Asteroid Belt, and icy Kuiper Belt—been so immediately accessible to readers of all ages.
Beginning with a fascinating overview and then organized by planet, in order of its distance from the sun, Solar System takes us on a trip across time and space that includes a front-row seat to the explosive birth of the solar system, a journey to (and then deep inside) each of its eight planets, and even an in-depth exploration of asteroids and comets.
With hundreds of gorgeous images produced especially for this project and through a collaboration between NASA and the graphics experts at Planetary Visions Ltd. and Joe Zeff Design, Solar System gives us page after page of unique, detailed, and never-before-seen views, both photographic and computer-generated. Take a dive down into the canyons of Mars; ride across the rings of Saturn; fly over the volcanoes of Io, Jupiter's so-called Pizza Moon; and sail through the fiery loops of gas that are constantly erupting from our sun.
Every planet and moon is introduced with a big, beautiful, full-page image and a databox that shows the orbit and position of the planet or moon in relation to surrounding bodies, as well as the diameter, mass, volume, surface temperature, atmospheric makeup, and orbital period of the planet; a scale comparison graphic; and a planet cross-section for the eight planets.
Throughout, award-winning author and CalTech radio astronomer Marcus Chown explains everything to us in his easy-to understand, exciting style. The result is a gorgeous and thoroughly entertaining—not to mention educational—book.
How Big is Big and How Small is Small: The Sizes of Everything and Why
【作 者】Timothy Paul Smith
【出版社】Oxford University Press (February 1, 2014)
【馆藏地】物理系资料室
【索书号】O4 /S662 /E
【简 介】This book is about how big is the universe and how small are quarks, and what are the sizes of dozens of things between these two extremes. It describes the sizes of atoms and planets, quarks and galaxies, cells and sequoias. It is a romp through forty-five orders of magnitude from the smallest sub-nuclear particles we have measured, to the edge of the observed universe. It also looks at time, from the epic age of the cosmos to the fleeting lifetimes of ethereal particles. It is a narrative that trips its way from stellar magnitudes to the clocks on GPS satellites, from the nearly logarithmic scales of a piano keyboard through a system of numbers invented by Archimedes and on to the measurement of the size of an atom.
Why do some things happen at certain scales? Why are cells a hundred thousandths of a meter across? Why are stars never smaller than about 100 million meters in diameter? Why are trees limited to about 120 meters in height? Why are planets spherical, but asteroids not? Often the size of an object is determined by something simple but quite unexpected. The size of a cell and a star depend in part on the ratio of surface area to volume. The divide between the size of a spherical planet and an irregular asteroid is the balance point between the gravitational forces and the chemical forces in nature.
Most importantly, with a very few basic principles, it all makes sense. The world really is a most reasonable place.
The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900
【主 编】Rudi Matthee
【出版社】Princeton University Press (July 25, 2005)
【馆藏地】理科馆外国教材中心阅览室
【索书号】D737.388 /M436 /E(MIT)
【简 介】From ancient times to the present day, Iranian social, political, and economic life has been dramatically influenced by psychoactive agents. This book looks at the stimulants that, as put by a longtime resident of seventeenth-century Iran, Raphaël du Mans, provided Iranians with damagh, gave them a "kick," got them into a good mood. By tracing their historical trajectory and the role they played in early modern Iranian society (1500-1900), Rudi Matthee takes a major step in extending contemporary debates on the role of drugs and stimulants in shaping the modern West.
At once panoramic and richly detailed, The Pursuit of Pleasure examines both the intoxicants known since ancient times--wine and opiates--and the stimulants introduced later--tobacco, coffee, and tea--from multiple angles. It brings together production, commerce, and consumption to reveal the forces behind the spread and popularity of these consumables, showing how Iranians adapted them to their own needs and tastes and integrated them into their everyday lives.
Matthee further employs psychoactive substances as a portal for a set of broader issues in Iranian history--most notably, the tension between religious and secular leadership. Faced with reality, Iran's Shi`i ulama turned a blind eye to drug use as long as it stayed indoors and did not threaten the social order. Much of this flexibility remains visible underneath the uncompromising exterior of the current Islamic Republic.
Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module
【作 者】Thomas J. Kelly
【出版社】Princeton University Press (September 8, 2013)
【馆藏地】理科馆外国教材中心阅览室
【索书号】V42 /K29 /E(MIT)
【简 介】Chief engineer Thomas J. Kelly gives a firsthand account of designing, building, testing, and flying the Apollo lunar module. It was, he writes, “an aerospace engineer’s dream job of the century.” Kelly’s account begins with the imaginative process of sketching solutions to a host of technical challenges with an emphasis on safety, reliability, and maintainability. He catalogs numerous test failures, including propulsion-system leaks, ascent-engine instability, stress corrosion of the aluminum alloy parts, and battery problems, as well as their fixes under the ever-present constraints of budget and schedule. He also recaptures the exhilaration of hearing Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong report that “The Eagle has landed,” and the pride of having inadvertently provided a vital “lifeboat” for the crew of the disabled Apollo 13.
Nineteenth Century European Art (3rd Edition)
【作 者】Petra ten-Doesschate Chu
【出版社】Pearson; 3 edition (January 6, 2011)
【馆藏地】理科馆外国教材中心阅览室
【索书号】J150.094 /C559(3) /E(MIT)
【简 介】For one-semester courses in 19th-Century Art, and two-semester courses that cover the periods of 1760-1830 and 1830-1900. This essential survey of European art and visual culture in the nineteenth-century treats art forms within a broad historical framework to show the connections between visual cultural production and the political, social, and economic order of the time. Nineteenth-Century European Art was written to address a need in the market for a readable undergraduate textbook dealing with the period from 1760-1900. The new edition has been revised based in response to reviewer comments and criticisms, making it an even better and more readable book.
Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
【作 者】Norbert Wiener
【出版社】The MIT Press; second edition (March 15, 1965)
【馆藏地】理科馆外国教材中心阅览室
【索书号】TP13 /W647c(2) /E(MIT)
【简 介】Acclaimed one of the "seminal books... comparable in ultimate importance to... Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill", Cybernetics was judged by twenty-seven historians, economists, educators, and philosophers to be one of those books published during the "past four decades," which may have a substantial impact on public thought and action in the years ahead.
Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way
【作 者】Steven Radelet
【出版社】Centre for Global Development (1 Nov 2010)
【馆藏地】理科馆外国教材中心阅览室
【索书号】F140.9 /R126 /E(MIT)
【简 介】Emerging Africa describes the too-often-overlooked positive changes that have taken place in much of Africa since the mid-1990s. In 17 countries, five fundamental and sustained breakthroughs are making old assumptions increasingly untenable: * The rise of democracy brought on by the end of the Cold War and apartheid * Stronger economic management * The end of the debt crisis and a more constructive relationship with the international community * The introduction of new technologies, especially mobile phones and the Internet * The emergence of a new generation of leaders. With these significant changes, the countries of emerging Africa seem poised to lead the continent out of the conflict, stagnation, and dictatorships of the past. The countries discussed in the book are Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Ghana, Lesotho, Mali Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.