“An absorbing exploration of one man’s life” —as an orphan, refugee, shopkeeper, and grandfather—through a century of upheaval in India (Library Journal). Born in colonial India into a despised caste of former tree climbers, Ayya lost his mother as a child and came of age in a small town in lowland Burma. Forced to flee at the outbreak of World War II, he made a treacherous 1,700-mile journey by foot, boat, bullock cart, and rail back to southern India. Becoming a successful fruit merchant, Ayya educated and eventually settled many of his descendants in the United States. Luck, nerve, subterfuge, and sorrow all have their place along the precarious route of his advancement. Emerging out of tales told to his American grandson, Ayya’s Accounts embodies a simple faith—that the story of a place as large and complex as modern India can be told through the life of a single individual. “At once a mesmerizing memoir of an ordinary man’s life and an anthropologist’s revealing examination of the astounding changes experienced by persons and families . . . impossible to put down.” —South Asia “No one deemed a superhero by the movies has had a more interesting life with such extraordinary sweep.” —Scott Simon, NPR Weekend Edition

In Lebanon, the study of modern art—rather than power or hierarchy—has compelled citizens to confront how they define themselves as a postcolonial nation. In Fantasmic Objects, Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense of what it means to be Lebanese through the evolution of new exhibition, pedagogical, and art-writing practices. She reveals that art and artists helped found the nation during French occupation, as the formal qualities and international exhibitions of nudes and landscapes in the 1930s crystallized notions of modern masculinity, patriotic femininity, non-sectarian religiosity, and citizenship. Examining the efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists in Lebanon who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being, Fantasmic Objects offers an insightful approach to the history and formation of modern Lebanon.

The main topics presented in this book deal with methods from functional analysis applied to the study ofsmall movements and normal oscillations ofhydrome- chanical systems having cavities filled with either ideal or viscous fluids. The book is a sequel to and at the same time substantially extends the volume entitled "Opera- tor Methods in Linear Hydrodynamics: Evolution and Spectral Problems," by N. D. Kopachevsky, S.G. Krein, and Ngo Zuy Kan that was published in 1989 by the Nauka publishing house in Moscow. The present book includesseveral new problems on the oscillations ofpartially dissipative hydrosystems and the oscillations of visco-elastic or relaxing fluids. The contents of this book do not overlap almost at all with the ones in the following volumes: "Mathematical Problems of the Motion of Viscous Incopressible Fluids," by O. A. Ladyzhenskaya, "The Dynamics ofBodies with Cavities Filled with Fluids," by N. N. Moiseev and V. V. Rumiantzev, "Navier-Stokes Equations," by R. Temam, and "Boundary Problems for Navier-Stokes Equations," by S. M. Belonosov and K. A. Chernous. Mainly, the contents of the present book rely on the authors' and their students' works. We would like to express our gratitude to I. T. Gohberg and A. S. Markus, who encouraged us to publish the book and who offered many helpful suggestions. Our gratidude goes also to our colleagues T. Ya. Azizov, O. A. Ladyzhenskaya, N. N.