Columbia University Press: 2355 books
by Barbara Mensch
Language: English
Release Date: April 3, 2007
Language: English
Release Date: April 3, 2007
South Street is Barbara G. Mensch's evocative tribute to the lost world of Lower Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market. For more than a century, a colorful, tightly knit community of fishmongers, many of them recent immigrants and children of immigrants, thrived under the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. Resistant...
by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2011
A terrifying sound disturbs the peace of Hansuli Turn, a forest village in Bengal, and the community splits as to its meaning. Does it herald the apocalyptic departure of the gods or is there a more rational explanation? The Kahars, inhabitants of Hansuli Turn, belong to an untouchable "criminal...
by Thomas Belmonte, Pellegrino D'Acierno, Stanislao Pugliese
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2005
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2005
As Ida Susser writes in reference to Belmonte's Broken Fountain, "good ethnographies have long lives." This classic of urban anthropology, one of the most acclaimed ethnographies of recent years, offers vivid, literary descriptions of Fontana del Re, an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood....
Wrinkled Deep in Time
Aging in Shakespeare
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 2009
Shakespeare was acutely aware of our intimate struggles with aging. His dramatic characters either prosper or suffer according to their relationship with maturity, and his sonnets eloquently explore time's ravaging effects. "Wrinkled deep in time" is how the queen describes herself in Antony...
The Intimate Universal
The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2016
William Desmond sees religion, art, philosophy, and politics as essential and distinctive modes of human practice, manifestations of an intimate universality that illuminates individual and social being. They are also surprisingly permeable phenomena, and by observing their relations, Desmond captures notes of a clandestine conversation that transforms ontology.
Progress and Values in the Humanities
Comparing Culture and Science
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2009
Money and support tend to flow in the direction of economics, science, and other academic departments that demonstrate measurable "progress." The humanities, on the other hand, offer more abstract and uncertain outcomes. A humanist's objects of study are more obscure in certain ways than...
In Their Own Voices
Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2000
Nearly forty years after researchers first sought to determine the effects, if any, on children adopted by families whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own, the debate over transracial adoption continues. In this collection of interviews conducted with black and biracial young adults...
The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks
Tales of Important Geological Puzzles and the People Who Solved Them
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2018
Every rock is a tangible trace of the earth’s past. The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks tells the fascinating stories behind the discoveries that shook the foundations of geology. In twenty-five chapters—each about a particular rock, outcrop, or geologic phenomenon—Donald R. Prothero recounts...
Disaster Deferred
A New View of Earthquake Hazards in the New Madrid Seismic Zone
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2010
In the winter of 1811-12, a series of large earthquakes in the New Madrid seismic zone-often incorrectly described as the biggest ever to hit the United States-shook the Midwest. Today the federal government ranks the hazard in the Midwest as high as California's and is pressuring communities to undertake...
Finding Ourselves at the Movies
Philosophy for a New Generation
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2013
Academic philosophy may have lost its audience, but the traditional subjects of philosophy—love, death, justice, knowledge, and faith—remain as compelling as ever. To reach a new generation, Paul W. Kahn argues that philosophy must take up these fundamental concerns as we find them in contemporary...
Why America Misunderstands the World
National Experience and Roots of Misperception
Language: English
Release Date: February 16, 2016
Being insulated by two immense oceans makes it hard for Americans to appreciate the concerns of more exposed countries. American democracy's rapid rise also fools many into thinking the same liberal system can flourish anywhere, and having populated a vast continent with relative ease impedes Americans'...
by Sōseki Natsume
Language: English
Release Date: January 9, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: January 9, 2009
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably...
Freedom and Neurobiology
Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2006
Our self-conception derives mostly from our own experience. We believe ourselves to be conscious, rational, social, ethical, language-using, political agents who possess free will. Yet we know we exist in a universe that consists of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles....
by Gianni Vattimo
Language: English
Release Date: April 18, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: April 18, 2008
First collected in Italy in 1985, Art's Claim to Truth is considered by many philosophers to be one of Gianni Vattimo's most important works. Newly revised for English readers, the book begins with a challenge to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, who viewed art as a metaphysical aspect of reality...