Amazon.com Review One can only imagine the amazement felt by L.J.M. Daguerre, when, in the summer of 1839, he gazed upon the first photograph ever made. An image of the view from his Paris apartment of the bustling Boulevard du Temple, it was remarkably detailed yet mysteriously vacant, save for a single man in the distance who appeared to be having his boots polished; the rest...(展开全部)

Here at last is a concise critical history of photography which explains by what criteria we can judge one photograph to be better than another, what is special about the photographic recording of images, what in fact is the essence of photography both in itself and in relation to other visual art forms. This brilliant study provides a unique guide to the critical issues throug...(展开全部)

If art and science have one thing in common, it's a hunger for the new - new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the world. But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental philosophical problem: If everything has to come from something, how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible? In Novelty, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tou...(展开全部)

Nostalgia has a bad reputation. Its critics dismiss it as mere sentimentality or, worse, a dangerous yearning for an imagined age of purity. And nostalgia is routinely blamed for trivializing the past and obscuring its ugly sides. In Yesterday, Tobias Becker offers a more nuanced and sympathetic view. Surveying the successive waves of nostalgia that swept the United States and ...(展开全部)

“Thrilling . . . a bracing summary of what we have learned [from] ‘archaeogenetics’—the study of ancient DNA . . . Krause and Trappe capture the excitement of this young field.”—Kyle Harper, The Wall Street Journal Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a brilliant pioneer in the field of archaeogenetics—archaeology augment...(展开全部)

Depression has colonized the world. Today, more than 300 million of us have been diagnosed as depressed. But 150 years ago, “depression” referred to a mood, not a sickness. Does that mean people weren’t sick before, only sad? Of course not. Mental illness is a complex thing, part biological, part social, its definition dependent on time and place. But in the mid-twentieth centu...(展开全部)

丹尼尔•西门子，纽卡斯尔大学欧洲史教授，出版过三本关于19世纪和20世纪欧洲及美国历史的著作。