The great board game revolution is here-- What do these games tell us about our society, our relationships, and ourselves? "Games, Jonathan Kay and Joan Moriarity show in this lively and insightful book, are not just fun and games: they allow us to explore the complexities of the world, from evolution to war to climate." - STEVEN PINKER, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress "Kay and Moriarity are both skilled writers and elucidators, and their voices are distinct enough to provide the book with a pleasing yin and yang. It's a far more perceptive and intriguing book than it appears at first blush, particularly for those readers who have never thought of games as an artistic medium - at least not one that comments on society." - KIRKUS REVIEWS Board games are among our most ancient and beloved art forms. During the rise of digital media, they fell from prominence for a decade or two but today they are in a new golden age. They're ingeniously designed, beautiful to look at, and exhilarating to play. Games are reclaiming their place in our culture, as entertainment, social activity, and intellectual workout equipment. Alone among all art forms, games require their audience (called "players") to participate. If nobody's playing, there is no game. As a result, games can tell far more about us than our TV shows, movies or music ever could. How does The Game of Life illustrate our changing attitudes about virtue? How does a World War II conflict simulation game explain the shortcomings of a failed novelist? Each chapter of Your Move examines one game, and what it reveals about our culture, history, society, and relationships. The book's two co-authors bring the perspectives of a writer who plays, and a player who writes. Before Jonathan Kay began his distinguished career as an author and commentator, he had a passion for games, and in recent years he has rediscovered them. Meanwhile, Joan Moriarity's career has been spent designing, developing, distributing, art directing, recommending and teaching board games and, recently, writing about them for a wider audience. With its short, punchy essays, and beautiful photographs of the games themselves, every chapter will be a worthwhile read in itself, and the book overall will leave you inspired to discover the truths of your own inner and outer world through play -- whether you're a seasoned veteran or a total newcomer.

What can be understood of other cultures? And what can we learn about people in general from the study of other cultures? In the three closely related essays that constitute this book and which have already created considerable controversy in their original French versions, and been rewritten and expanded for this edition, Dan Sperber discusses these fundamental issues of anthropology. In the first essay he analyses the way in which anthropology is written and read. In the second, he offers a novel rationalist alternative to cultural relativism, based on both anthropological and psychological arguments, and illustrated by his own fieldwork in Ethiopia. The third essay provides an assessment of the work of Lévi-Strauss, in which the arguments of the previous two essays are linked with an incisive critique of Lévi-Strauss' contribution to the study of cultural variation.

Whether we're aware of it or not, we spend much of our time in this globalised world in the act of translation. Language is a big part of it, of course, as anyone who has fumbled with a phrasebook in a foreign country will know, but behind language is something far more challenging to translate: culture. As a traveller, a mistranslation might land you a bowl of who-knows-what when you think you asked for noodles, and mistranslations in international politics can be a few steps from serious trouble. But translation is also a way of entering new and exciting worlds, and forging links that never before existed. Linda Jaivin has been translating from Chinese for more than thirty years. While her specialty is subtitles, she has also translated song lyrics, poetry and fiction, and interpreted for ABC film crews, Chinese artists and even the English singer Billy Bragg as he gave his take on socialism to some Beijing rockers. In Found in Translation she reveals the work of the translator and considers whether different worldviews can be bridged. She pays special attention to China and the English-speaking West, Australia in particular, but also discusses French, Japanese and even the odd phrase of Maori. This is a free-ranging essay, personal and informed, about translation in its narrowest and broadest senses, and the prism - occasionally prison - of culture. "About six years ago, President George W. Bush was delivering a speech at a G8 summit, when, made impatient by the process of translation, he interrupted his German interpreter: 'Everybody speaks English, right?' ..." Linda Jaivin, Found in Translation Linda Jaivin is the author of novels, stories, plays and essays. Her books include the China memoir The Monkey and the Dragon and the novels Eat Me and A Most Immoral Woman. In 1992 she co-edited the acclaimed anthology of translations New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices. She has also subtitled many films, including Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, Zhang Yimou's Hero and Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster.

An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century—an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely—and ultimately fatally—tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

Alongside the Arab Spring, the 'Occupy' anti-capitalist movements in the West, and the events on the Maidan in Kiev, Russia has had its own protest movements, notably the political protests of 2011-12. As elsewhere in the world, these protests had unlikely origins, in Russia's case spearheaded by the 'creative class'. This book examines the protest movements in Russia. It discusses the artistic traditions from which the movements arose; explores the media, including the internet, film, novels, and fashion, through which the protesters have expressed themselves; and considers the outcome of the movements, including the new forms of nationalism, intellectualism, and feminism put forward. Overall, the book shows how the Russian protest movements have suggested new directions for Russian - and global - politics.

In 1975, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers landed on the island nation of Tonga. Among them was Deborah Gardner -- a beautiful twenty-three-year-old who, in the following year, would be stabbed twenty-two times and left for dead inside her hut. Another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned home a free man. Although the story was kept quiet in the United States, Deb Gardner's death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga. Now journalist Philip Weiss "shines daylight on the facts of this ugly case with the fervor of an avenging angel" (Chicago Tribune), exposing a gripping tale of love, violence, and clashing ideals. With bravura reporting and vivid, novelistic prose, Weiss transforms a Polynesian legend into a singular artifact of American history and a profoundly moving human story.

Arnold Beichman's comprehensive study of the writings of Herman Wouk, one of America's leading writers, shows how Wouk's plays and novels exemplify an extraordinary and often highly perceptive preoccupation with American society in war and in peace. Situating Wouk in the same literary tradition as Cervantes, Richardson, Balzac, and Dickens, Beichman demonstrates that Wouk's novels have strong plots, moralist outcomes, and active--essentially positive--characters. The new introduction serves to bring Wouk's work over the past two decades into the reckoning. Making extensive use of Wouk's personal papers and manuscripts as well as personal interviews with him, Beichman's focus is on the social and literary qualities of Wouk's work. In particular, he examines eight novels including War and Remembrance and The Winds of War; The Traitor, one of his three plays; and two moral tracts on Judaism. Wouk has written four more novels, including his latest, A Hole in Texas, his twelfth. Beichman portrays Wouk as one of the few living novelists concerned with virtue, and sees his work as against the mainstream of contemporary American novelists. These, he argues, have eschewed such elements of the traditional novel as invention, coincidences, surprises, suspense, and a moral perspective more presumed than examined.