Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Svetlana Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities–St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague–and the imagined homelands of exiles...(展开全部)

In "The Future of the Image", Jacques Ranciere develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Ranciere argues that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from ...(展开全部)

A leading philosopher presents a radical manifesto for the future of art and film. In The Future of the Image, Jacques Ranci&232;re develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and G...(展开全部)

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling “everything you need for suicide...(展开全部)

We live in a world saturated by future-consciousness. Our lives are constructed around expectations of the future as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This volume is a conceptual tool kit for thinking about the hopes and anxieties embodied in ideas of the future. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, and ...(展开全部)

The eminent Harvard naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Wilson marshals all the prodigious powers of his intellect and imagination in this impassioned call to ensure the future of life. Opening with an imagined conversation with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, he writes that he has come "to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has h...(展开全部)

Our world is far richer than previously conceived, yet so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the 21st century. These two contrasting themes - unexpected magnificence and underestimated peril - have originated since the 1980s. In this book, scientist E.O. Wilson describes exactly what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose fo...(展开全部)

Michio Kaku's "Physics of the Future: The Inventions that will Transform our Lives" is a hypothetical journey through the next 100 years of scientific innovation, as told by the scientists who are making it happen. We all wish we could predict the future, but most of us don't know enough about the science that makes it possible. That's why Michio Kaku decided to talk to the peo...(展开全部)

Where the science of black holes, gravitational waves, and time travel will likely lead us. Our minds tell us that some things in the universe must be true. The New Physics tells us that they are not, and in the process, blurs the line between science and science fiction. Here are six accessible essays by those who walk that line, moving ever further out in discovering the patt...(展开全部)

One of America's leading policy intellectuals, who coined the term "Soft Power", looks at what has happened to American power from the time of Kennedy to the present day. In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, power in the US was expressed in terms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, numbers of men under arms, and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of Eastern Europe....(展开全部)