Surveying the night sky, a charming philosopher and his hostess, the Marquise, are considering thep ossibility of travelers from the moon. "What if they... were skillful enough to navigate on the outer surface of our air, and from there, through their curiosity to see us, they angled for us like fish? Would that please you?" asks the philosopher. "Why not?" the Marquise replies. "As for me, I'd put myself into their nets of my own volition just to have the pleasure of seeing those who caught me."In this imaginary conversation of three hundred years ago, readers can share the excitement of a new, extremely daring view of the uinverse. Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes), first published in 1686, is one of the best loved classics of the early French enlightenment. Through a series of informal dialogues that take place on successive evenings in the marquise's moonlit gardens, Fontenelle describes the new cosmology of the Copernican world view with matchles clarity, imagination, and wit. Moreover, he boldly makes his interlocutor a woman, inviting female participation in the almost exclusively male province of scientific discourse.The popular Fontenelle lived through an entire century, from 1657 to 1757, and wrote prolifically. H. A. Hargreaves's fresh, appealing translation brings the author's masterpiece to new generations of readers, while the introduction by Nina Rattner Gelbart clearly demonstrates the importance of the Conversations for the history of science, of women, of literature, and of French civilization, and for the popularization of culture.

Since the Reagan presidency, more and more public policymaking authority has devolved to the states, a trend that the contributors to this volume argue... is unlikely to abate soon. Public Opinion in State Politics is an innovative collection of recent research developed in response to signs of this growing importance of state politics. It updates and expands the previous work on public opinion and state politics, taking into account new data and methods, and drawing comparisons across states.The book is organized around three major themes: the conceptualization and measurement of public opinion in the states; explanations of variation in state public opinion; and the impact of public opinion on state politics and policy.

Conversations: Readings for Writing provides the reader an entry point to an extraordinary variety of authors, genres, voices, and viewpoints on... important contemporary civic issues.

Recommended by the Ontario Ministry of Education     Grades K-8   If you’re looking for a single book that provides everything you need to... create a balanced, comprehensive literacy program, you’ll find it here. Applying research, expertise, and common sense, veteran teacher Regie Routman discusses and demonstrates exemplary teaching practices, strategies, and activities. Explicit demonstration lessons, with accompanying examples of children’s work, focus on: reading the literature program writing spelling and word study curriculum inquiry classroom management assessment and evaluation Also available by Regie Routman, for Grades K-8:   Writing Essentials / 0325006016 / 2004 / 304 pp. + DVD Reading Essentials / 0325004927 / 2005 / 288 pp.

From one remarkable mind to another, Conversations with Anne documents the series of intimate interviews that theater director Anne Bogart has... conducted—before live audiences—with major artists and cultural thinkers at her West Side studio over half a decade. In these extraordinary conversations, Bogart and her guests consider such free-ranging topics as the driving forces in their work, the paths their lives have taken, and their visions for the future of their field. Bogart delves into the daily thoughts of these artists and thinkers whom she most admires—a group that, collectively, has profoundly shaped the arts and artistry in America over the past twenty-five years.Interviewees include: JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Ben Cameron, Martha Clarke, Oskar Eustis, Zelda Fichandler, Richard Foreman, Andre Gregory, Bill T. Jones, Tony Kushner, Tina Landau, Elizabeth LeCompte, Eduardo Machado, Charles Mee, Joseph V. Melillo, Meredith Monk, Mary Overlie, Peter Sellars, SITI Company, Molly Smith, Elizabeth Streb, Julie Taymor, Robert Woodruff and Paula Vogel.Anne Bogart is artistic director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She has received two OBIE Awards, a Bessie Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a professor at Columbia University, where she runs the Graduate Directing Program.

In an effort to show parents how to protect their children from sexual predators Conversations with a Pedophile, through direct correspondence with a... convicted pedophile, describes how victims are selected and preyed upon. Dr. Hammel-Zabin details ways to spot early warning signs of abuse and proves that the danger of pedophilia does not come from the stranger in the street offering gifts of candy. It's the nice boy next door, the distant relative, the sweet baby-sitter. It is also shown that our churches aren't safe havens. Nor are our schools or our Scout troops.

In little more than twenty years, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) completed a ten-play cycle depicting African American life in the twentieth... century, with each play taking place in a different decade. Two of the plays—Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990)—were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and seven of them received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best American play. Wilson was indisputably the most significant American playwright to emerge since Edward Albee. Conversations with August Wilson collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"—the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards. Throughout, Wilson is candid, expansive, and provocative, displaying in these exchanges his willingness to confront controversial topics just as he did in his plays. Jackson R. Bryer is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. Mary C. Hartig teaches English at Montgomery College and is the coeditor, with Jackson R. Bryer, of Facts on File Companion to American Drama.

Though a well-regarded physicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) is best-known as a writer of popular nonfiction and science fiction and as the host of the PBS... series Cosmos. Through his writings and spoken commentary, he worked to popularize interests in astronomy, the universe, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. From the beginning of his public career, when he co-wrote Intelligent Life in the Universe to the very end as he worked on the 1997 film adaptation of his novel Contact, these subjects absorbed him. This interest in space was rooted in his understanding of the smallness and vulnerability of humanity measured against the immense size and power of the universe. This profound philosophical humility, mixed with personal exuberance, comes through in Conversations with Carl Sagan. In interviews and profiles, Sagan discusses with verve a wide variety of topics--the environment, nuclear disarmament, religion, politics, extraterrestrial life, astronomy, physics, robotics. Whether he is discussing his science fiction or his well-researched nonfiction works, his voice embraces reason and skepticism. This volume shows how Sagan, a lifelong skeptic, refined his views and expressed amazement that Earth, for all his belief in extraterrestrial life, encompasses everything about which he cared. Tom Head of Jackson, Mississippi, is a writer and poet whose work includes Women and Families (Voices from the Civil War), Possessions and Exorcisms (Fact or Fiction?), and 1966 (The Turbulent 60s).

How do choreographers do what they do? Where do the ideas come from? Is there a technique involved and how do they even begin? From the publishers of... Conversations in the Wings: Actors on Acting comes another practical inside look at the professional theatre. Svetlana Grody and Dorothy Lister have conducted a dozen interviews over the last two decades with show business' top choreographers on and about their technical approach to choreography, and bring the best of these to you in Conversations With Choreographers. Includes: Hermes Pan, Don Saddler, Lee Theodore, Graciela Daniele, Tommy Tune . . . and more!

Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from unclassifiable essays, to... a book about transfinite mathematics, to vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System), the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our measures of modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent.Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a formal enclosure in which the writer "could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise." Wallace's interviews create a wormhole in which an author's private theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace's best interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his signature concerns--irony's magnetic hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry McCaffery's influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original raw transcript.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar were friends for half a century, since they first crossed paths as students in 1950. Although one was a Russian and... the other a Czech, they were both ardent supporters of communism and socialism. One took part in laying the groundwork for and carrying out the Prague spring; the other opened a new political era in Soviet world politics.In 1993 they decided that their conversations might be of interest to others and so they began to tape-record them. This book is the product of that "thinking out loud" process. It is an absorbing record of two friends trying to explain to one another their views on the problems and events that determined their destinies. From reminiscences of their starry-eyed university days to reflections on the use of force to "save socialism" to contemplation of the end of the cold war, here is a far more candid picture of Gorbachev than we have ever seen before.

In the spirit of Studs Terkel's Working, Bill Smoot interviews master teachers in fields ranging from K–12 and higher education to the arts, trades... and professions, sports, and politics. The result suggests a dinner party where the most fascinating teachers in America discuss their various styles as well as what makes their work meaningful to them. What is it that passes between the best teachers and their students to make learning happen? What are the keys to teaching the joys of literature, shooting a basketball, alligator wrestling, or how to survive one's first year in the U.S. Congress? Smoot's insightful questions elicit thought-provoking reflections about teaching as a calling and its aims, frustrations, and satisfactions.

"What is most impressive about this book is its intelligence, its sophistication, and its charm. . . . This book presents Piaget's work and his person... better than anything else that I know about."—David Elkind, Tufts University"The tone is one of constant movement from the most ordinary to the most abstruse. There are 14 conversations with 'le Patron,' some in 1969, some in 1975, and several more with co-workers in various fields. . . . In Mr. Bringuier's book, in a pleasant informal way, we see a sophisticated non-scientist exploring Piaget's domain with the master. Some of Piaget's best-known findings about children as explained along the way, but Mr. Bringuier has ways of bringing out the relation of this psychological work to the whole of Piaget's enterprise, and we get a good sense of the man and his work."—Howard E. Gruber, New York Times Book Review

Conversations with Jeremiah on the Magic of Counseling by Geoffrey G. Yager, Ph.D.: A non-traditional introduction to counseling with a special focus on... counselor self-care. Conversations with Jeremiah on the Magic of Counseling is not a typical textbook. It is a unique approach to teaching, written in a conversational and casual style in order to engage students. The book describes the weekly meetings of two young counseling graduate students and their mysterious mentor over the course of the academic year. The mentor answers the questions of his protégés using thirty illustrative stories. The underlying themes of the stories encompass the crucial components of counseling relationships, and the topics cover the concerns most commonly voiced by students during their early experiences with actual clients. The issues addressed include counselor self-care, the nature of counseling, empathy, perfectionism, ethics, and, of course, the magic of counseling! Although the text is written from a counseling point of view, it will prove useful to any clinical class in a closely related field, such as counseling psychology, clinical psychology, clinical social work, health promotion, or psychiatric nursing. The text will also be beneficial to counselor trainees, experienced counselors interested in a refresher on basic skills, and potential clients who want to know more about counseling before they start seeing a counselor.