Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one... continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarch's Revolution," "The Artist Prophet and Jester" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras. The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day. Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.

This book provides a direct method called the "Understanding Process" for moving us from debate into dialogue about any issue, especially difficult or... controversial ones. As an alternative to debate in which we seek to win or be right, when we use the Understanding Process we make an effort to understand others from within their frame of reference. We also learn ways to speak our own truths without polarizing issues, invalidating others and fostering defensiveness. A key to practicing the Understanding Process is the knowledge that understanding someone from their point of view does not necessarily mean agreeing with them. Nor does deeply understanding another perspective require that we surrender our own beliefs and values. Replete with examples and case studies that illustrate the transforming potential of the Understanding Process approach to dialogue, this book shows how we can: * Convert conflict into understanding, * Increase our confidence and competence in dealing with difficult situations, * Improve relationships at work and home, * Enhance respectfulness and civility in our public conversations without sacrificing truthfulness, * Express different points of view without becoming polarized, * Replace destructive stereotyping of each other with understanding and concern, * Listen so that positive change occurs, and * Create innovative inspired solutions.

From Deficit to Deluge takes stock of shifts in scholarly investigation of the origins of French Revolution. During the last decade, scholars have moved... beyond "revisionist" historians of the 1970s, who highlighted the monarchy's degeneration into despotism, to explore related conflicts in the realms of finance, social relations, religion, diplomacy, the Enlightenment, and colonial policy. In this book, seven established authorities explore some of these critical intersections, and together they make clear the role that unresolved tensions in these realms played in the essentially political narrative told by post-Marxian revisionist historiography.While each chapter of From Deficit to Deluge focuses upon one site of contention—fiscal, social, religious, diplomatic, ideological, and colonial—they all help to explain how long-standing structural problems of the Old Regime caused a fairly "normal" fiscal crisis to metastasize into a revolution. As the editors show in their introduction and conclusion, the growing democratization of politics sparked by the monarchy's clumsy efforts to solve the fiscal crisis put these wide-ranging problems at the epicenter of political debate, thereby sapping the foundations of royal authority and the social hierarchy.

Michael Scott explores the dramatic and little-known story of how the ancient world was turned from a democracy into a monarchy in this superb example... of popular history writing.

In blood-soaked lore handed down the centuries, the vampire is a monster of endless fascination: from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Buffy the Vampire... Slayer, this seductive lover of blood haunts popular culture and inhabits our darkest imaginings. The cultural history of the vampire is a rich and varied tale that is now ably documented in From Demons to Dracula, a compelling study of the vampire myth that reveals why this creature of the undead fascinates us so.Beresford’s chronicle roams from the mountains of Eastern Europe to the foggy streets of Victorian England to Hollywood, as he investigates the portrayal of the vampire in history, literature, and art. Opening with the original Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, and his status as a national hero in Romania, he endeavors to winnow out truths from the complex legend and folklore. From Demons to Dracula tracks the evolution of the vampire as an icon and supernatural creature, drawing on classical Greek and Roman myths, witch trials and medieval plagues, Gothic literature, and even contemporary works such as Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.  Beresford also looks at the widespread impact of screen vampires from television shows, classic movies starring Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, and more recent films such as Underworld and Blade.  Whether as a demon of the underworld or a light-fearing hunter of humans, the vampire has endured through the centuries, the book reveals, as powerfully symbolic figure for human concerns with life, death, and the afterlife.A wide-ranging and engrossing chronicle, From Demons to Dracula casts this blood-thirsty nightstalker as a remarkably complex and telling totem of our nightmares, real and imagined. 

From Demo to Delivery: The Process of Production discusses each stage of the typical music production process from start to finish. Beginning with the... creation and development of the composition and song production, the book then traces the process from the recording, mixing and mastering stages through to marketing and distribution. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to learn the pro techniques involved in creating music from start to finish. Packed with essential information, including signposts to other sources of information at the end of each chapter, From Demo to Delivery provides a map for musicians, semi-pro and aspiring producers, engineers and music professionals interested in learning how music makes it from the an idea to the page to the studio to a demo and into the hands of the market and beyond.Check out the book's website - http://demo2delivery.com/

A designer in New York creates a beautiful design but when she prints it the colors become muddy. An art director in Seattle sends a file to the print... shop, and they call him to say the job won’t print. The editor of a college paper can’t figure out why all the pictures in the paper are jagged. And a freelance designer is Chicago needs to bid on her first print job. Linescreen, DPI, CMYK, RIPs, bleeds, spots, and spreads: Why didn’t they teach this stuff in design school? Sandee Cohen comes to the rescue, whether you’re producing your first newsletter or you’re an experienced graphic designer who needs to come up to speed on professional-level printing. She’ll tell you how to make your desktop printer behave, and will take the mystery out of dealing with print providers. You’ll learn all the necessary techniques, the terminology, and the rules of printing (and when you can break them). It’s like having your own production manager standing over your shoulder. The copious information in From Design Into Print will have your designs looking as stunning in print as they do on your monitor. This book will help you: Choose the right desktop printer for your needs Finally understand resolution Get the results you want from page-layout and image-editing applications Find the best stock images Know what to expect when RGB colors convert to CMYK Figure out your fonts Preflight your work Sound smart when talking to a print shop

As pressing economic and quality of life issues heighten calls for increased federal engagement in America s cities, this new book offers cause for... optimism and lessons for policy innovators. From Despair to Hope documents the evolution of HOPE VI, one of the most ambitious urban redevelopment initiatives in the past half century and a true federal-urban partnership.

Physicians recognize the importance of patients' emotions in healing yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses in objectivity. Patients... complain that physicians are too detached. Halpern argues that by empathizing with patients, rather than detaching, physicians can best help them. Yet there is no consistent view of what, precisely, clinical empathy involves. This book challenges the traditional assumption that empathy is either purely intellectual or an expression of sympathy. Sympathy, according to many physicians, involves over-identifying with patients, threatening objectivity and respect for patient autonomy. How can doctors use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients rithout jeopardizing objectivity or projecting their values onto patients? Jodi Halpern, a psychiatrist, medical ethicist and philosopher, develops a groundbreaking account of emotional reasoning as the core of clinical empathy. She argues that empathy cannot be based on detached reasoning because it involves emotional skills, including associating with another person's images and spontaneously following another's mood shifts. Yet she argues that these emotional links need not lead to over-identifying with patients or other lapses in rationality but rather can inform medical judgement in ways that detached reasoning cannot. For reflective physicians and discerning patients, this book provides a road map for cultivating empathy in medical practice. For a more general audience, it addresses a basic human question: how can one person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is feeling? "Jodi Halpern presents a scholarly and cogent exposition of the philosophic underpinnings of the concept of empathy may be rightly viewed as a seminal work in developing a scholarly understanding of the subject of empathy and will assist in the development of sound training and evaluation methods for imparting this skill to physicians." - Sharon K. Hull, MD JAMA "I would recommend this book not as a manual, but as a vital reminder of how things should be, and as an insightful and philosophically educational analysis of how things probably are for the luckiest patients in our practice and hospitals." - Philip Berry, British Medical Journal"This is a beautifully written and beautifully reasoned book. Physician-ethicist Jodi Halpern crafts one of the finest descriptions available of psychiatry's advance toward empathic involvement with patients. Intertwining psychiatry and ethics is no easy task. However in Halpern's hands, a blend of formal research, philosophical modeling, and straight talk shows how neatly psychiatry and ethics work together." - Philip Candilis, M.D., Psychiatric Services"This is an important book. I recommend it to physicians and members of medical faculties for whom its subject matter is important. It is a serious essay on subjectivity, a topic about which we will be seeing more in the coming years. It repays the work of reading it." - Eric Cassell, M.D., The New England Journal of Medicine"This lovely volume fixes on a profound truth in medicine: to the degree we are moved by our patients suffering we are better able to help them. The age of proteomics and genomics is the age of 'objective reality', yet for the patient it is all about humane empathetic care. Halpern in this scholarly and wonderful readable volume shows us that empathy is just as critical for the physician and without it healing cannot begin. This book is a must read for all of us with an interest in medical practice." - Abraham Verghese MD, author of CUTTING FOR STONE, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University

Best-selling author and futurist Marc Prensky’s book of essays challenges educators to “reboot” and make the changes necessary to prepare students... for 21st century careers.

Sofia caused a sensation in Turkey where it spent over six months on the bestsellers list. Real historical figures come to life in the exotic... sixteenth-century Ottoman world of intrigue and opulence that Turks call The Reign of the Favored Women: An ambitious young noblewoman from Venice, captured by corsairs and sold into the Sultan's harem, vows her future will hold more than sexual slavery. And the young man who sets out to rescue her is asked to pay a price higher than any man can afford.

  From Disability to Possibility will change the way you look at your students with disabilities. And when you make that shift, the way those... students look to you will change. You will see the possibilities, and in that vision, you will see the power of the inclusive classroom. -Kylene Beers   Drawing on the stories of learners, both with and without disabilities, as well as families and teachers, Patrick Schwarz shows you not only why many current special education frameworks don’t work, but also how they damage children, often for life. Then he demonstrates how possibility studies offers a meaningful, practical, and doable alternative to traditional special education practices both during the school years and after.   Ideal for general educators, special educators, administrators, educational leaders, related service professionals, paraeducators and self-advocates, From Disability to Possibility illustrates, through stories of struggle and success, how creative, conscientious teachers can work with everyone involved in a student’s learning to make special education work.

A distinguished professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, a prolific writer and award-winning thinker, Martha Nussbaum stands as one... of our foremost authorities on law, justice, freedom, morality, and emotion. In From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum aims her considerable intellectual firepower at the bulwark of opposition to gay equality: the politics of disgust.Nussbaum argues that disgust has long been among the fundamental motivations of those who are fighting for legal discrimination against lesbian and gay citizens. When confronted with same-sex acts and relationships, she writes, they experience "a deep aversion akin to that inspired by bodily wastes, slimy insects, and spoiled food--and then cite that very reaction to justify a range of legal restrictions, from sodomy laws to bans on same-sex marriage." Leon Kass, former head of President Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, even argues that this repugnance has an inherent "wisdom," steering us away from destructive choices. Nussbaum believes that the politics of disgust must be confronted directly, for it contradicts the basic principle of the equality of all citizens under the law. "It says that the mere fact that you happen to make me want to vomit is reason enough for me to treat you as a social pariah, denying you some of your most basic entitlements as a citizen." In its place she offers a "politics of humanity," based not merely on respect, but something akin to love, an uplifting imaginative engagement with others, an active effort to see the world from their perspectives, as fellow human beings. Combining rigorous analysis of the leading constitutional cases with philosophical reflection about underlying concepts of privacy, respect, discrimination, and liberty, Nussbaum discusses issues ranging from non-discrimination and same-sex marriage to "public sex." Recent landmark decisions suggest that the views of state and federal courts are shifting toward a humanity-centered vision, and Nussbaum's powerful arguments will undoubtedly advance that cause.Incisive, rigorous, and deeply humane, From Disgust to Humanity is a stunning contribution to Oxford's distinguished Inalienable Rights series.

All new Phd's hope that their dissertations can become books. But a dissertation is written for a committee and a book for the larger world. William... Germano's From Dissertation to Book is the essential guide for academic writers who want to revise a doctoral thesis for publication. The author of Getting It Published, Germano draws upon his extensive experience in academic publishing to provide writers with a state-of-the-art view of how to turn a dissertation into a manuscript that publishers will notice.Acknowledging first that not all theses can become books, Germano shows how some dissertations might have a better life as one or more journal articles or as chapters in a newly conceived book. But even dissertations strong enough to be published as books first need to become book manuscripts, and at the heart of From Dissertation to Book is the idea that revising the dissertation is a fundamental process of adapting from one genre of writing to another.Germano offers clear guidance on how to do just this. Writers will find advice on such topics as rethinking the table of contents, taming runaway footnotes, shaping chapter length, and confronting the limitations of jargon, alongside helpful timetables for light or heavy revision. With crisp directives, engaging examples, and a sympathetic eye for the foibles of academic writing, From Dissertation to Book reveals to recent PhD's the process of careful and thoughtful revision—a truly invaluable skill as they grow into their new roles as professional writers.