The Man Who Invented Fiction

The Man Who Invented Fiction
Author: William Egginton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-01-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1635570247

“A heroic history of novel-reading itself.” --The Atlantic In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing. This book is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world. The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes's life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work--especially Don Quixote--radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science, and how the world today would be unimaginable without it. William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.

Law and Agroecology

Law and Agroecology
Author: Massimo Monteduro
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2015-05-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3662466171

This book represents a first attempt to investigate the relations between Law and Agroecology. There is a need to adopt a transdisciplinary approach to multifunctional agriculture in order to integrate the agroecological paradigm in legal regulation. This does not require a super-law that hierarchically purports to incorporate and supplant the existing legal fields; rather, it calls for the creation of a trans-law that progressively works to coordinate interlegalities between different legal fields, respecting their autonomy but emphasizing their common historical roots in rus in the process. Rus, the rural phenomenon as a whole, reflects the plurality and interdependence of different complex systems based jointly on the land as a central point of reference. “Rural” is more than “agricultural”: if agriculture is understood traditionally as an activity aimed at exploiting the land for the production of material goods for use, consumption and private exchange, rurality marks the reintegration of agriculture into a broader sphere, one that is not only economic, but also social and cultural; not only material, but also ideal, relational, historical, and symbolic; and not only private, but also public. In approaching rus, the natural and social sciences first became specialized, multiplied, and compartmentalized in a plurality of first-order disciplines; later, they began a process of integration into Agroecology as a second-order, multi-perspective and shared research platform. Today, Agroecology is a transdiscipline that integrates other fields of knowledge into the concept of agroecosystems viewed as socio-ecological systems. However, the law seems to still be stuck in the first stage. Following a reductionist approach, law has deconstructed and shattered the universe of rus into countless, disjointed legal elementary particles, multiplying the planes of analysis and, in particular, keeping Agricultural Law and Environmental Law two separate fields.

Managing and Preventing Pandemics

Managing and Preventing Pandemics
Author: Roberto De Vogli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2024-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 104011587X

Using an evidence-based, critical, population health approach, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the key errors and most effective interventions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. It also examines the root determinants of pandemic risk on a global scale and addresses the policy changes to be implemented to prevent future health crises. Part One of the book discusses the lethal errors in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing particularly on those countries that failed to limit the death toll caused by the health crisis. These mistakes include lack of preparation, disinformation, medicalization, adoption of a “laissez-faire the virus” approach and inequity. Part Two analyzes the vital actions that enabled “virtuous” countries to effectively limit the most deadly effects of the pandemic: prevention, immunization and support. Part Three looks at what we should do to prevent the next pandemic. This part examines the proximal social and environmental causes of pandemic risk (e.g., deforestation, industrialized animal farming and climate change), as well as the “causes of the causes,” which include our model of global economic development and its philosophical and ideological underpinnings.

Talking Science

Talking Science
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2001
Genre: European Science and Technology Week
ISBN:

Precarious objects

Precarious objects
Author: Ilaria Vanni
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526135558

Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. As a category of labour and of global social experience in general, precarity is a wicked problem that affects all aspects of life, regulating the production and circulation of a wide range of material and immaterial effects. In this book, three microhistories of counter-precarity explore existent forms of resistance and resilience to precarity. Drawing on ethnographies and archives and bringing together debates from design theory, cultural studies and geography, this study shows how design objects and practices recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

RTD Info

RTD Info
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2001
Genre: Science
ISBN:

Material World

Material World
Author: Guy Hedreen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-05-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 900446137X

Scholars from ancient and early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science explore the interplay between nature, science, and art in influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance.