The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka
【著者】Franz Kafka
【出版社】Princeton University Press; Bilingual edition (April 19, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】I521.064 /K11 /E
【简 介】In 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zürau aphorisms, after the Bohemian village in which he composed them. Among the most mysterious of Kafka’s writings, they explore philosophical questions about truth, good and evil, and the spiritual and sensory world. This is the first annotated, bilingual volume of these extraordinary writings, which provide great insight into Kafka’s mind. Edited, introduced, and with commentaries by preeminent Kafka biographer and authority Reiner Stach, and freshly translated by Shelley Frisch, this beautiful volume presents each aphorism on its own page in English and the original German, with accessible and enlightening notes on facing pages.
The most complex of Kafka’s writings, the aphorisms merge literary and analytical thinking and are radical in their ideas, original in their images and metaphors, and exceptionally condensed in their language. Offering up Kafka’s characteristically unsettling charms, the aphorisms at times put readers in unfamiliar, even inhospitable territory, which can then turn luminous: “I have never been in this place before: breathing works differently, and a star shines next to the sun, more dazzlingly still.”
Above all, this volume reveals that these multifaceted gems aren’t far removed from Kafka’s novels and stories but are instead situated squarely within his cosmos―arguably at its very core. Long neglected by Kafka readers and scholars, his aphorisms have finally been given their full due here.
Reading Hegel
【著者】Slavoj Zizek, Frank Ruda, Agon Hamza
【出版社】Polity; 1st edition (March 14, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】B516.35 /Z82r /E
【简介】A spirit is haunting contemporary thought – the spirit of Hegel. All the powers of academia have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spirit: Vitalists and Eschatologists, Transcendental Pragmatists and Speculative Realists, Historical Materialists and even ‘liberal Hegelians’.
Which of these groups has not been denounced as metaphysically Hegelian by its opponents? And which has not hurled back the branding reproach of Hegelian metaphysics in its turn? Progressives, liberals and reactionaries alike receive this condemnation.
In light of this situation, it is high time that true Hegelians should openly admit their allegiance and, without obfuscation, express the importance and validity of Hegelianism to the contemporary intellectual scene.
To this end, a small group of Hegelians of different nationalities have assembled to sketch the following book – a book which addresses a number of pressing issues that a contemporary reading of Hegel allows a new perspective on: our relation to the future, our relation to nature and our relation to the absolute.
The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West
【著 者】Alistair Shearer
【出版社】Hurst (October 1, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】G831.3 /S539 /E
【简介】 How did an ancient Indian spiritual discipline turn into a $20+ billion-a-year mainstay of the global wellness industry? What happened along yoga's winding path from the caves and forests of the sages to the gyms, hospitals and village halls of the modern West?
This comprehensive history sets yoga in its global cultural context for the first time. It leads us on a fascinating journey across the world, from arcane religious rituals and medieval body-magic, through muscular Christianity and the British Raj, to the Indian nationalist movement and the arrival of yoga in the twentieth-century West. We discover how the practice reached its present-day ubiquity and how it became embedded in powerful social currents shaping the world's future, such as feminism, digital media, celebrity culture, the stress pandemic and the quest for an authentic identity in the face of unprecedented change.
Shearer's revealing history boasts a colorful cast of characters past and present, who tell an engaging tale of scholars and scandal, science and spirit, wisdom and waywardness. This is the untold story of yoga, warts and all.
My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains
【著者】Jessa Crispin
【出版社】University of Chicago Press; First Edition (August 16, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】F371.29 /C932 /E
【简介】 For many Americans, Kansas represents a vision of Midwestern life that is good and wholesome and evokes the American ideals of god, home, and country. But for those like Jessa Crispin who have grown up in Kansas, the realities are much harsher. She argues that the Midwestern values we cling to cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, women, and the economically disadvantaged.
Blending personal narrative with social commentary, Crispin meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in our country's mythic self-image. Ranging from The Wizard of Oz to race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities, My Three Dads opens on a comic scene in a Kansas rent house the author shares with a (masculine) ghost. This prompts Crispin to think about her intellectual fathers, her spiritual fathers, and her literal fathers. She is curious to understand what she has learned from them and what she needs to unlearn about how a person should be in a family, as a citizen, and as a child of god—ideals, Crispin argues, that have been established and reproduced in service to hierarchy, oppression, and wealth.
Written in Crispin’s well-honed voice—smart, assured, comfortable with darkness—My Three Dads offers a kind of bleak redemption, the insight that no matter where you go, no matter how far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you, “like it or not.”
What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make
【著者】Michael J. Hathaway
【出版社】Princeton University Press (April 26, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】S646 /H363 /E
【简 介】 What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life.
The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsutake, and the astonishing ways it is silently yet powerfully shaping worlds, from the Tibetan plateau to the mushrooms’ final destination in Japan. Many Tibetan and Yi people have dedicated their lives to picking and selling this mushroom―a delicacy that drives a multibillion-dollar global trade network and that still grows only in the wild, despite scientists’ intensive efforts to cultivate it in urban labs. But this is far from a simple story of humans exploiting a passive, edible commodity. Rather, the book reveals the complex, symbiotic ways that mushrooms, plants, humans, and other animals interact. It explores how the world looks to the mushrooms, as well as to the people who have grown rich harvesting them.
A surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways.
Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi
【编者】Cecilia Frosinini, Rachel Mcgarry
【出版社】Minneapolis Institute of Arts (October 25, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】J154.609.3 /B751 /E
【简介】This sumptuously illustrated book presents the most recent scholarship in English on Botticelli and Renaissance Florence, featuring essays and entries written by an international team of scholars and experts in the field.
The authors examine both the rich array of works featured in the exhibition―paintings, drawings, prints, decorative arts, and ancient Roman marble statues―and seminal themes concerning Botticelli and the artistic achievements of Renaissance Florence. Works by Botticelli's master, Fra Filippo Lippi, and other members of Botticelli's circle, including Filippino Lippi, the Pollaiuolo brothers, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Lorenzo di Credi, are among the selection, as well as a dozen important works from the Minneapolis Institute of Art's collection. Each object is accompanied by a dedicated entry written by a specialist. Particularly illuminating is the inclusion of antiquities and renewed consideration of the complex, multifaceted ways ancient art, literature, and philosophy influenced fifteenth-century Florence. The appendix offers a chronology contextualizing Sandro Botticelli's life and career and major historic events in Florence, enabling readers to grasp connections between sociopolitical changes and the artistic flowering of this period.
Living as a Bird
【著者】Vinciane Despret
【出版社】Polity; 1st edition (November 22, 2021)
【馆藏地】江湾馆三楼理科借阅区
【索书号】Q959.7 /D473 /E
【简介】In the first days of spring, birds undergo a spectacular metamorphosis. After a long winter of migration and peaceful coexistence, they suddenly begin to sing with all their might, varying each series of notes as if it were an audiophonic novel. They cannot bear the presence of other birds and begin to threaten and attack them if they cross a border, which might be invisible to human eyes but seems perfectly tangible to birds. Is this display of bird aggression just a pretence, a game that all birds play? Or do birds suddenly become territorial – and, if so, why?
By attending carefully to the ways that birds construct their worlds and ornithologists have tried to understand them, Despret sheds fresh light on the activities of both and, at the same time, enables us to become more aware of the multiple worlds and modes of existence that characterize the planet we share in common with birds and other species.
The Last Noble Gendarme: How the Tsar's Last Head of Security and Intelligence Tried to Avert the Russian Revolution
【著者】Vladimir G. Marinich
【出版社】State University of New York Press (July 2, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】D751.236-09 /M339 /E
【简介】The Last Noble Gendarme is the first biography of Major General Konstantin Ivanovich Globachev and his wife, Sofia. Tsar Nicholas II's last chief of security, Globachev was an eyewitness to the seething turmoil in the capital of the Russian Empire. Beginning in 1915 he tried to avert the unrest that grew into a revolution replete with mayhem and violence by cautioning his senior government officials about the growing crisis through meetings and written reports. The incompetence and corruption of his superiors caused Globachev's warnings of an impending disaster to be often disregarded, misunderstood, and sometimes rejected flat out. The warnings of Globachev's security and intelligence agency going unheeded helped lead imperial Russia to its cataclysmic destruction--perhaps a metaphor for our times. Following the revolution, Globachev was detained by the new government, but released and forced to flee with his family after the Bolsheviks gained power. Globachev and his family survived the revolution, the subsequent civil war and exile in Turkey. The final chapter of their dramatic adventure was their immigration to the United States, where they became citizens. Now, through their complete biographies, we get to know them as individuals who lived through the most tempestuous and dangerous of times.
Tutankhamun's Trumpet: Ancient Egypt in 100 Objects from the Boy-King's Tomb
【作 者】Toby Wilkinson
【出版社】W. W. Norton & Company (November 1, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆外教中心（东）
【索书号】K712.43 /E14 /E
【简介】 In 1922, after fifteen years of searching, archaeologists finally discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun. There, buried alongside the king’s mummy, they found more than 5,000 unique objects, from the mundane to the extravagant, from the precious to the everyday. Tutankhamun’s spectacular gold mask is justifiably famous, but the rest of the treasures remain largely unknown, their stories untold.
In this rich and beautifully illustrated work of history, renowned Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson allows one hundred artifacts from the boy king’s tomb to speak again―not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. A gold-decorated chariot reveals the impressive scale of Egyptian technology. Loaves of bread, baskets of fruit, and jars of wine hint at the fertility of the Nile Valley and the abundant feasts enjoyed by its people. Ebony and ivory from Nubia and a jewel of Libyan desert glass show the range of Egypt’s trading and diplomatic networks. Shaving equipment and board games provide a window into the everyday lives of the people. And perhaps most poignant of all the objects in the tomb is one that conjures up a lost world of human experience: Tutankhamun’s silver trumpet.
Through these treasures, Wilkinson bring us face-to-face with the culture of the pharaohs, its extraordinary development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact. Filled with surprising insights and vivid details, Tutankhamun’s Trumpet offers an indelible portrait of the history, people, and legacy of ancient Egypt.
The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty
【作者】Ellen Warner
【出版社】Brandeis University Press (January 20, 2022)
【馆藏地】理科馆理科书库
【索书号】C913.6 /W281 /E
【简介】The Second Half explores, in photographic portraits and interviews, how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world to interview women about their lives. She asked them what they learned in the first half that was helpful in the second, and what advice they would give to younger women. Their revealing and inspiring stories are enlightening for all readers, and are illustrated by Warner’s stunning portraits which tell their own story.