Contents Acknowledgments Note on Translation Introduction: The Problem of Rebirth 1. Envisioning the Dead 2. The Unquiet Dead and Their Families, Political and Agnate 3. Questionable Shapes: How the Living Interrogated Their Dead 4. Doomed for a Certain Term: The Intimate Dead 5. Rebirth Reborn Postscript List of Abbreviations Bibliography Index

In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aest...(展开全部)

Star formation is the fundamental cosmic process which makes galaxies visible, and regulates the evolution of normal matter in the Universe. New instruments and technologies are now enabling the exploration of fundamental cosmic processes. Scientists are beginning to understand the beauty and complexity of star and planet formation and their role in cosmic evolution. This fasci...(展开全部)

The bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics illuminates the nature of science through the revolutionary ideas of the Greek philosopher Anaximander Over two millennia ago, the prescient insights of Anaximander paved the way for cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. His legacy includes the revolution...(展开全部)

The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was Nietzsche's first book. Its youthful faults were exposed by Nietzsche in the brilliant "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" which he added to the new edition of 1886. But the book, whatever its excesses, remains one of the most relevant statements on tragedy ever penned. It exploded the conception of Greek culture that was prevalent down through the Vic...(展开全部)

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein's general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all of physics, be united in a single quantum theory of gravity? Can quantum and cosmos ever be combined? On this issue, two of the wor...(展开全部)

A brilliantly clear and penetrating exposition of developments in physical science and mathematics brought about by the advent of non-Euclidean geometries, including in-depth coverage of the foundations of geometry, the theory of time, Einstein’s theory of relativity and its consequences, other key topics.

Tiepolo is a brilliant example of the specifically pictorial intelligence. This book is both a study of his art and an argument for fuller recognition of the peculiarities of the painter's representational medium. Alpers and Baxandall locate distinctive modes of Tiepolo's representation of the world and human action; follow his process of invention from first pen drawings, thro...(展开全部)

In the middle ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the eighteenth century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul. Foucault sho...(展开全部)