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George Steiner

208 pages | 5-1/2 x 8-3/8 | © 1978, 1989

With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger’s immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism.”It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger.”—George Kateb, The New Republic 

 

 

Distributed for British Library

David Crystal

160 pages | 150 color plates | 8 x 11 | © 2010

 

One-third of the world’s population can speak or write in English, which is an unprecedented achievement for a language. How did this enormous reach come about? And what happens to a language when it is used by so many? In Evolving English, David Crystal, the leading authority on the development of the English language, answers these questions and more.

Unlike other histories of the English language, Evolving English is a fully illustrated history, charting the development of the language through images, from the earliest runic inscriptions in Old English and the emergence of a standard variety of English between 1400 and 1800 to the most modern forms of the language, as seen in concrete and text poetry. In telling the story of the language’s growth and change, Crystal draws on examples from English in its various guises and uses—including everyday English, English in the workplace, regional and international varieties, and English in playful and literary expression.

Crystal’s accessible and lively linguistic history shows where language is now, where it has been, and—perhaps most important of all—where it is heading. Crystal is not afraid to address the new varieties of the language appearing in world literature, on the Internet, and in cell phone text messages. Both topical and readable, Evolving English shows that the story of the world’s most common language is as diverse and interesting as those words that comprise it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barak said Israel recognized the “unprecedented” and “historic” nature of the changes sweeping the Arab world. Like m

 

 

In an age when pundits constantly decry overt political bias in the media, we have naturally become skeptical of the news. But the bluntness of such critiques masks the highly sophisticated ways in which the media frame important stories. In Front Page Economics, Gerald Suttles delves deep into the archives to examine coverage of two major economic crashes—in 1929 and 1987—in order to systematically break down the way newspapers normalize crises.

Poring over the articles generated by the crashes—as well as the people in them, the writers who wrote them, and the cartoons that ran alongside them—Suttles uncovers dramatic changes between the ways the first and second crashes were reported. In the intervening half-century, an entire new economic language had arisen and the practice of business journalism had been completely altered. Both of these transformations, Suttles demonstrates, allowed journalists to describe the 1987 crash in a vocabulary that was normal and familiar to readers, rendering it routine.

A subtle and probing look at how ideologies are packaged and transmitted to the casual newspaper reader, Front Page Economics brims with important insights that shed light on our own economically tumultuous times.

 

 

In the view of many Christians, the teenage years are simultaneously the most dangerous and the most promising. At the very moment when teens are trying to establish a sense of identity and belonging, they are beset by temptation on all sides—from the pressure of their peers to the nihilism and materialism of popular culture. Add the specter of homosexuality to the mix, and you’ve got a situation ripe for worry, sermonizing, and exploitation.

In Recruiting Adolescence, Mark D. Jordan explores more than a half century of American church debate about homosexuality to show that even as the main lesson—homosexuality is bad, teens are vulnerable—has remained constant, the arguments and assumptions have changed remarkably. At the time of the first Kinsey Report, in 1948, homosexuality was simultaneously condemned and little discussed—a teen struggling with same-sex desire would have found little specific guidance. Sixty years later, church rhetoric has undergone a radical shift, as silence has given way to frequent, public, detailed discussion of homosexuality and its perceived dangers. Along the way, churches have quietly adopted much of the language and ideas of modern sexology, psychiatry, and social reformers—deploying it, for example, to buttress the credentials of anti-gay “deprogramming” centers and traditional gender roles.

Jordan tells this story through a wide variety of sources, including oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and even pulp novels; the result is a fascinating window onto the never-ending battle for the teenage soul.

• Gold Winner, 2008 Book of the Year Award, ForeWord Magazine

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An essential American dream—equal access to higher education—was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society. Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities, deceiving the public to serve their own ends. It is a deep and revealing analysis that is long overdue.

Newfield carefully describes how this campaign operated, using extensive research into public university archives. He launches the story with the expansive vision of an equitable and creative America that emerged from the post-war boom in college access, and traces the gradual emergence of the anti-egalitarian “corporate university,” practices that ranged from racial policies to research budgeting. Newfield shows that the culture wars have actually been an economic war that a conservative coalition in business, government, and academia have waged on that economically necessary but often independent group, the college-educated middle class. Newfield’s research exposes the crucial fact that the culture wars have functioned as a kind of neutron bomb, one that pulverizes the social and culture claims of college grads while leaving their technical expertise untouched. Unmaking the Public University incisively sets the record straight, describing a forty-year economic war waged on the college-educated public, and awakening us to a vision of social development shared by scientists and humanists alike.

A great tribute to a beloved teacher. Well worth reading and thinking about those great teachers, who made our lives so much better, by being there and making demands on us, that we thought we weren’t able to meet.