In this study of space and power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s, Rabinow uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how social environment was perceived and described. Ranging from epidemiology to the layout of colonial cities, he shows how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, health and welfare administration, and social legislation.

For fans of Lorna Sage and Paula Fox, a unique memoir from Irma Kurtz, the acclaimed author of 'The Great American Bus Ride' and internationally renowned agony aunt. "A girl of indisputable gifts, she should of course use them someday to make a beautiful home and raise a family in elegant surroundings..." School psychologist's report on Irma Kurtz, 1950. In 1954 eighteen-year-old Irma Kurtz left New Jersey to travel across Europe, intent on transforming herself and changing the world. She looked to the Old World for an alternative destiny to that mapped out by the traditional expectations at home. On her post-war Grand Tour she found what she believed in: Art and Culture and Beauty and Love, and some horror as a Jewish girl encountering the seat of much of her family's destruction. Years later, sifting through a cardboard box filled with memories at her mother's house, she rediscovered the journal of her first journey, the one that marked the beginning of a life of writing and living abroad. Gripped by intense recollections of sailing across the Atlantic, and intrigued by the exuberant remarks of her adventurous younger self, she decided to leave her London home and retrace her footsteps, this time with herself as a guide. Testing her theory that older women are invisible, Kurtz's journey is peppered with acute observations of human behaviour, not to mention some sharp advice for her ghostly travel companion, a teenager who thinks she knows it all, yet is blind to what lies ahead of her. Part-memoir, part-travelogue, this unique book contrasts the experience of two very different travellers, offering an insight into what has endured, and what has been lost, in the life of one woman and the altered environment of Europe at the dawn of a new millennium. Beautifully written, moving and funny, Then Again is time-travel at its best, revealing the pains and pleasures of growing older and wiser.

The Green Revolution of 1960s introduced herbicides, pesticides, and advanced agricultural technologies to third world countries-rescuing hundreds of millions of people from malnutrition and starvation and transforming low-yield, labor-intensive farming into the high-tech, immensely productive industry it is today. Despite these stunning gains, critics of chemical farming remain vocal. Recently, the European Union passed a ban on twenty-two chemicals-about 15 percent of the EU pesticides market-to begin in 2011. In Crop Chemophobia, Jon Entine and his coauthors examine the "precautionary principle" that underlies the EU's decision and explore the ban's potential consequences-including environmental degradation, decreased food safety, impaired disease-control efforts, and a hungrier world.

"Here is the definitive history of contemporary Europe, a controversial but authoritative and lively narrative that is destined to become the standard account of the period from 1914 to the present. In this important new book, University of Chicago historian Bernard Wasserstein offers the first serious, full-length history of a century of convulsive change. It is a history of barbarism and civilization, of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental blight, of imperial expansion and withdrawal, of authoritarian repression and of individualism resurgent. Wasserstein provides both a narrative of the main contours of the political, diplomatic, and military history and an analysis of the underpinnings of demographic, economic, and social developments. Most notably, the book explores the evolution of values and sensibilities in a period when, for the first time, God disappeared as a living presence in the minds of most Europeans. Wasserstein argues that barbarism and civilization were not polar opposites: rather they marched hand in hand. Twentieth-century Europe saw incontestable improvements in living conditions for most inhabitants of the continent: average life span was extended by more than half; real incomes increased dramatically; illiteracy was all but eliminated; women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals advanced closer to equality of respect and opportunity. Yet the century also witnessed some of the most brutish episodes in the recorded history of our species. Hence Wasserstein's conclusion that "greed, selfishness, lies, and cruelty are the stuff of the history of Europe in our time." Drawing on the latest scholarly findings,including recent disclosures of intelligence materials and archival revelations that followed the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Wasserstein captures the essence of contemporary European history in an engaging narrative that is by turns grim, humorous, surprising, and enlightening." -- Publisher.

They have a dream—a dream of a world where everything and everybody can be bought and sold, a world run efficiently by managers, a world where “freedom” means the free market. Maurice Glasman argues that this dream is an unrealizable utopia—or a nightmare if put into practice. He takes the tired old clichés of management-speak of the New Right and New Left alike and turns them on their heads: managers are not efficient, they are barriers to work and production. “Liberal democracy”—which now means the free market and the strong state—should be turned upside down, with democracy at the level of the economy and liberalism at the level of the state. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, Glasman argues that there is no need to surrender solidarity and human rights to the march of the managers and the market. There is another tradition, represented by the labour movement and Catholic Church in postwar West Germany, and Solidarity in Poland before 1989, when statist communitarianism and the New Right took over. Unnecessary Suffering examines this tradition and issues a call that human beings and the environment cannot, should not, and will not be treated like commodities. For all workers drowning in a sea of dogma and management.memos, Unnecesary Suffering is necessary reading.

From the European revolutions of 1848 through the Italian independence movement, the American Civil War, and the French Commune, the era Albert Boime explores in this fourth volume of his epic series was, in a word, transformative. The period, which gave rise to such luminaries as Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, was also characterized by civic upheaval, quantum leaps in science and technology, and the increasing secularization of intellectual pursuits and ordinary life. In a sweeping narrative that adds critical depth to a key epoch in modern art’s history, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle shows how this turbulent social environment served as an incubator for the mid-nineteenth century’s most important artists and writers. Tracing the various movements of realism through the major metropolitan centers of Europe and America, Boime strikingly evokes the milieus that shaped the lives and works of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the earliest photographers, among countless others. In doing so, he spearheads a powerful new way of reassessing how art emerges from the welter of cultural and political events and the artist’s struggle to interpret his surroundings. Boime supports this multifaceted approach with a wealth of illustrations and written sources that demonstrate the intimate links between visual culture and social change. Culminating at the transition to impressionism, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle makes historical sense of a movement that paved the way for avant-garde aesthetics and, more broadly, of how a particular style emerges at a particular moment.

The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikulás Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science - and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher - The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Using pagan prose fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, Bowersock investigates the complex relationship among perceived and presented 'historical' and 'fictional' truths. Bowersock's superb lecturing style is successfully transferred into writing with force and eloquence, as he weaves accounts from a wide range of sources into his text, illuminating social attitudes of the period and persuasively arguing that fiction of the period was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives. In the second half of the first century emerges a new kind of fiction including outlandish tales of travel, romance and comic novels. Bowersock concentrates on secular literature, illuminating not only its literary motifs, but also reconstructing the societal context as one engrossed in fabrications and all kinds of revisions or rewriting. Using these less familiar materials as his points of reference, he reads into familiar Christian material, making linkages and casting new light on familiar subjects, as well as providing some provocative interpretations of familiar Christian texts. Bowersock uses close historical and literary analyses of specific passages of works, and pays attention to larger and more general issues and questions around the relationship between fiction and history and how we read them. This book will be of basic intellectual concern to all raised in the environment of Christian belief.

This is the first in a series of annual reports on European economic developments by an international panel of distinguished economists, writing accessibly. Competitive Disinflation addresses one of the main areas of debate concerning economic developments in Europe: the extent to which the budgetary policy of national governments is competitive rather than cooperative. The discussion focuses on three particular cases, French macroeconomic policy since 1987, the reunification of Germany, and constraints imposed on national governments budgetary powers by membership of the EMU. This is a book about the radical alteration of the environment in which economic policy is formulated, with an analysis of options for action and a consideration of factors limiting the effectiveness of that action. It will be a stimulating read for all those, including students, who have an interest in macroeconomic policy issues in the context of European pressures.