We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

Introduction about the mid-eighteenth-century masterwork Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts), edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d Alembert.50 illustrations to color.Lay-flat binding and high-quality paper-easy to use with all your fine coloring tools.With their Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts), editors Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d Alembert set out to map the scope of human knowledge. Published between 1751 and 1772, the encyclopedia s 28 volumes tackled subjects from chemistry and philosophy to botany and bookbinding. Contributors, including philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, espoused such Enlightenment values as empiricism and secularism, making the encyclopedia controversial in its time.The illustrations in this book are from a copy of the Encyclopédie owned by Gouverneur Morris, who served as a delegate at the Continental Congress and, later, as United States ambassador to France. Morris authored the preamble to the US Constitution, a document heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy. Morris s copy of the Encyclopédie is held in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the world s largest and most eclectic library, the Library of Congress, which holds materials in more than 470 languages. The Library s French collection, alone, comprises approximately one million items.

The world is so full of wonderful things, take time to love what each day brings. - Children's story in a padded board book.

Much more than a history of the material sciences, Stuff brims with interviews with cutting-edge experts in the field, many of whom are building new materials literally atom by atom, and describes such astounding achievements as artificial diamonds created from peanut butter and how nanotechnologists are building new-age, state-of-the-art machines no thicker than a few hundred atoms.

Winner of the Modern Language Association’s Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Winner of the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award Winner of NAISA's Best Subsequent Book Award Winner of the Western History Association's John C. Ewers Award Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize What if we saw indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration rather than as the passive objects of that exploration? What if, instead of conceiving of global exploration as an enterprise just of European men such as Columbus or Cook or Magellan, we thought of it as an enterprise of the people they “discovered”? What could such a new perspective reveal about geographical understanding and its place in struggles over power in the context of colonialism? The World and All the Things upon It addresses these questions by tracing how Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian people) explored the outside world and generated their own understandings of it in the century after James Cook’s arrival in 1778. Writing with verve, David A. Chang draws on the compelling words of long-ignored Hawaiian-language sources—stories, songs, chants, and political prose—to demonstrate how Native Hawaiian people worked to influence their metaphorical “place in the world.” We meet, for example, Ka?iana, a Hawaiian chief who took an English captain as his lover and, while sailing throughout the Pacific, considered how Chinese, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans might shape relations with Westerners to their own advantage. Chang’s book is unique in examining travel, sexuality, spirituality, print culture, gender, labor, education, and race to shed light on how constructions of global geography became a site through which Hawaiians, as well as their would-be colonizers, perceived and contested imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism. Rarely have historians asked how non-Western people imagined and even forged their own geographies of their colonizers and the broader world. This book takes up that task. It emphasizes, moreover, that there is no better way to understand the process and meaning of global exploration than by looking out from the shores of a place, such as Hawai?i, that was allegedly the object, and not the agent, of exploration.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.

Acclaimed photographer Carl Warner invites you to explore colourful minature landscapes made entirely of edible ingredients.

Psychoanalytic perspective on what Western philosophers from Socrates to Foucault have called “the art of living.”

Following a 30-year-old-man named Rhonda suffering from depersonalisation, this striking debut novel is a darkly poetic work, creative and hypnotic, which will stand as the introduction to an original new voice in contemporary literature. When Rhonda was a child - abandoned and ignored by his mother, abused and misguided by his mother's boyfriend - he imagined the rooms of his home drifting apart from one another like separating continents. Years later, after an embarrassing episode as an adult, Rhonda's inner-child reappears, leading him to a trap-door...

The basis for the new Amazon Prime Original Series! From the author of the imaginative and “awe-inspiring” (New York Journal of Books) narrative art book The Electric State comes the haunting sequel to his remarkable Tales from the Loop. Welcome back to the Loop. In 1954, the Swedish government ordered the construction of the world’s largest particle accelerator in the pastoral countryside of Mälaröarna. The local population called this marvel of technology The Loop and celebrated its completion. But Mälaröarna and the world would never be the same. Infused with strange machines and unfathomable creatures, Things from the Flood is transcendent look at technology that will stay with you long after you turn the final page.