PUP Best Sellers for the Past Week

This list takes into account print and e-editions of Princeton University Press books.

 

j9925[1] The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil
j9929[1] The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It by Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig
crossley The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, & Brian Sullivan
j8973[1] This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff
Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson
The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow
The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by Noam Wasserman
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman
Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell by A. Zee

Isaiah Berlin and European Politics

New editions of works by Isaiah Berlin will be rolling out this spring into next fall! Among the works that will be reprinted is one of his quintessential collection of essays, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History.

Berlin’s work has influenced numerous other scholars and philosophers specifically due to his work on positive and negative liberty on the value of political freedom and value pluralism. Most recently, Berlin’s writings on hedgehogs and foxes have been utilized in a piece examining the state of British politics.

Read the piece from the Wall Street Journal below to see how Berlin’s work still relates to our current events.

The Rise of the UKIP ‘Hedgehogs’

The ‘foxes’ of European politics have presided over a still-ongoing car crash.

By DOUGLAS MURRAY

A divide has opened in British politics. It is not between north and south, or left and right, but between hedgehogs and foxes.

Isaiah Berlin first popularized the idea (taken from a fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus) that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” He used the notion to categorize the difference between various thinkers. But since last week’s local-election upset for the U.K.’s major political parties, it is a way to understand our changing politics.

For some years, in Britain and the rest of Europe, politics has been dominated by foxes who knew (or at least pretended to know) many things. They were of varying quality: some sleek and impressive, others akin to those mangy specimens you find in cities. But whatever their attributes, the foxes also presided over a still-ongoing, continent-wide car crash. So today, in a time of apparently endless and insoluble crises, the attraction of those who know one big thing is very considerable. And if that one big thing happens to be the big thing of your day? Well then perhaps it is right that we’ve arrived at the age of the hedgehog.

Read the complete article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323372504578464704081223308.html?mod=wsj_streaming_latest-headlines

Reflections on Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary makes you think back and realize that maybe you treated your last ex perfectly fine. At least you didn’t toy with their emotions for the fun of it- or maybe you did, in which case: no judgment. M.G Piety on the Piety on Kierkegaard blog would say that The Seducer’s Diary incited different thoughts on the famed philosopher.

The new edition of The Seducer’s Diary brought back memories of years past in which Piety wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books about John Updike’s review of The Seducer’s Diary and statement that Kierkegaard had visited a brothel and subsequently fathered a child. For a man who believed that life had three stages with the first being the aesthetic- the stage which basically condemns boredom as an ultimate evil- I wouldn’t really put it past him. Bored? Go to a brothel, have some fun, emerge and go on to stage two of life: the ethical.

Check out all the links and decide for yourself!

 

“In the vast literature of love, The Seducer’s Diary is an intricate curiosity–a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast,” observes John Updike in his foreword to Søren Kierkegaard’s narrative. This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard’s first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancée, Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected Kierkegaard profoundly. Olsen became a muse for him, and a flood of volumes resulted. His attempt to set right, in writing, what he feels was a mistake in his relationship with Olsen taught him the secret of “indirect communication.” The Seducer’s Diary, then, becomes Kierkegaard’s attempt to portray himself as a scoundrel and thus make their break easier for her.

Matters of marriage, the ethical versus the aesthetic, dread, and, increasingly, the severities of Christianity are pondered by Kierkegaard in this intense work.

Wildflower Wednesday — Blue Cohosh

Caulophyllum thalictroides

The seed coats of blue cohosh seeds become blue over
a prolonged period from August through September so
that some are always attractive to birds during the
time of fall migration. © 2012 Carol Gracie.

 

Blue Cohosh – A Deceptive Plant

The flowers of blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) don’t attract much notice in spring. They are small and rather dull yellowish-green or purplish-brown. However, they bear looking at with a hand lens to better appreciate their strangely modified, fan-shaped petals that serve as glistening nectaries. The nectaries attract insect pollinators—in this case, various species of flies. What appear to be petals are actually the flower’s sepals.

It is the “fruit” that attracts the eye in late summer and autumn. The term “fruit” is put into quotation marks because what appear to be juicy blue fruits (from which the plant gets its common name) are actually the seeds of the plant with bright blue seed coats. By appearing to be fruits, the seeds appeal to birds at the time of migration, when they need a good source of fuel to continue their southward journey. Birds eat the “fruits,” gaining no energy from them, and excrete them further along their route, thus serving as dispersal agents for the plant.

k9668Read more about blue cohosh and other spring wildflowers in Carol Gracie’s book, Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast: A Natural History.

The Battle to be Born: Sand Tiger Shark edition

It’s a dog-eat-dog world and inside a sand tiger shark’s womb, it’s a shark-eat-shark world. While inside the womb, baby sand tiger sharks duke it out with their fellow unborn baby tiger shark siblings to be the lone victor (and only child) in this real life Hunger Games battle to the death.

In a report by National Geographic, Ed Yong discusses new information about sand tiger sharks gathered from a new study.

“The first embryo to emerge in each uterus—the ‘hatchling’—always cannibalises its younger siblings. It’s so voracious that at least one scientist has been bitten by a sand tiger pup while unwisely sticking a finger in a pregnant female’s uterus.”

From their diet of nutrients from its mother and the bodies of their siblings, these cannibalistic sharks emerge from the womb at a size that is big enough so that they can protect themselves from predators. Makes you re-think your own sibling rivalry a bit.

Check out more on sharks and animal family life from PUP!

1. A Natural History of Families by Scott Forbes

Why do baby sharks, hyenas, and pelicans kill their siblings? Why do beetles and mice commit infanticide? Why are twins and birth defects more common in older human mothers? A Natural History of Families concisely examines what behavioral ecologists have discovered about family dynamics and what these insights might tell us about human biology and behavior. Scott Forbes’s engaging account describes an uneasy union among family members in which rivalry for resources often has dramatic and even fatal consequences.

In nature, parents invest resources and control the allocation of resources among their offspring to perpetuate their genetic lineage. Those families sometimes function as cooperative units, the nepotistic and loving havens we choose to identify with. In the natural world, however, dysfunctional familial behavior is disarmingly commonplace.

While explaining why infanticide, fratricide, and other seemingly antisocial behaviors are necessary, Forbes also uncovers several surprising applications to humans. Here the conflict begins in the moments following conception as embryos struggle to wrest control of pregnancy from the mother, and to wring more nourishment from her than she can spare, thus triggering morning sickness, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Mothers, in return, often spontaneously abort embryos with severe genetic defects, allowing for prenatal quality control of offspring.

Using a broad sweep of entertaining examples culled from the world of animals and humans, A Natural History of Families is a lively introduction to the behavioral ecology of the family.

2. Sharks of the World by Leonard Compagno, Marc Dando, & Sarah Fowler

Everyone’s heard of the Great Whites. But most people know little of the hundreds of other types of sharks that inhabit the world’s oceans. Written by two of the world’s leading authorities and superbly illustrated by wildlife artist Marc Dando, this is the first comprehensive field guide to all 440-plus shark species. Color plates illustrate all species, and detailed accounts include diagnostic line drawings and a distribution map for each species. Introductory chapters treat physiology, behavior, reproduction, ecology, diet, and sharks’ interrelationships with humans.

Why has Nikola Tesla become a countercultural hero?

This video was taped at a recent event at the Johns Hopkins University bookstore. The speaker here is W. Bernard Carlson, author of Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age.

How to Use The Warbler Guide‘s Species Accounts

 

Tom Stephenson and Scott Whittle have created the most innovative and complete guide to warblers available in their forthcoming book The Warbler Guide. We will be posting a series of videos that highlight and explain how to use some of the key features of the book over the coming weeks. In this video, they describe the features of the species accounts which have been optimized to make them easy to use and to aid in identification.

Click here to learn more about The Warbler Guide. The book will be available July 2013.
For more tips on how to use The Warbler Guide and how to identify warblers in the field, please see additional videos in this series.

Celebrate Mother’s Day with Bird Fest

Instead of taking mom to just brunch, celebrate Mother’s Day with some spring themed events and activities (AND a brunch!).

If you are in the Pittsburgh area, Derek Lovitch, author of How to Be a Better Birder, will be giving a free talk on May 11th at the Audobon Society of Western Pennsylvania. The following day, Lovitch will accompany birders to Presque Isle in Erie, and then participants will head to a birdhouse painting event and a Mother’s Day brunch.

Bring the whole family out for a weekend of fun! For ticket information for the walk and brunch, visit the Audobon Society of Western Pennsylvania webpage.

Prep for the event and pick up a copy of Lovitch’s book!

How to Be a Better Birder by Derek Lovitch

This unique illustrated handbook provides all the essential tools you need to become a better birder. Here Derek Lovitch offers a more effective way to go about identification–he calls it the “Whole Bird and More” approach–that will enable you to identify more birds, more quickly, more of the time. He demonstrates how to use geography and an understanding of habitats, ecology, and even the weather to enrich your birding experience and help you find something out of the ordinary. Lovitch shows how to track nocturnal migrants using radar, collect data for bird conservation, discover exciting rarities, develop patch lists–and much more.

This is the ideal resource for intermediate and advanced birders. Whether you want to build a bigger list or simply learn more about birds, How to Be a Better Birder will take your birding skills to the next level.

The Cicadas are Coming!

The weather is great, the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and soon, the cicadas will be chirping, too. This year marks the end of a 17 year long life-cycle for the cicada genus magicicadas in the Northeast. After spending nearly two decades burrowed in the ground as nymphs, they are slated to spring out of the ground to mate and lay eggs for the next generation of cicadas.

These cicadas are part of the North American genus magicicadas that have one of the longest life spans of all insects. If you are near any place that has trees that have not been disturbed for the past 17 years, you can expect many cicadas to be flying around soon- though they will be flying around everywhere soon enough! When the ground reaches a toasty 64 degrees, cicadas that have burrowed deep in the ground around trees will emerge. Scientists are reporting that billions of cicadas will emerge very soon with the warm weather.

Many are dubbing the return of the cicadas as “Swarmageddon” because of the number of cicadas that are expected to emerge. Cicadas are harmless and won’t bite or sting you, though their loud buzzing noises (some as loud as a subway) will let you know that they have arrived.

As you wait out the cicada-storm, check out these PUP books on bugs!

1. Bugs Rule!: An Introduction to the World of Insects by Whitney Cranshaw & Richard Redak

Bugs Rule! provides a lively introduction to the biology and natural history of insects and their noninsect cousins, such as spiders, scorpions, and centipedes. This richly illustrated textbook features more than 830 color photos, a concise overview of the basics of entomology, and numerous sidebars that highlight and explain key points. Detailed chapters cover each of the major insect groups, describing their physiology, behaviors, feeding habits, reproduction, human interactions, and more.

Ideal for nonscience majors and anyone seeking to learn more about insects and their arthropod relatives, Bugs Rule! offers a one-of-a-kind gateway into the world of these amazing creatures.

Another book by Cranshaw that is currently available features an entire chapter on cicadas among many other bugs.

2. Garden Insects of North America: The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Bugs by Whitney Cranshaw

Garden Insects of North America is the most comprehensive and user-friendly guide to the common insects and mites affecting yard and garden plants in North America. In a manner no previous book has come close to achieving, through full-color photos and concise, clear, scientifically accurate text, it describes the vast majority of species associated with shade trees and shrubs, turfgrass, flowers and ornamental plants, vegetables, and fruits–1,420 of them, including crickets, katydids, fruit flies, mealybugs, moths, maggots, borers, aphids, ants, bees, and many, many more. For particularly abundant bugs adept at damaging garden plants, management tips are also included. Covering all of the continental United States and Canada, this is the definitive one-volume resource for amateur gardeners, insect lovers, and professional entomologists alike.

To ease identification, the book is organized by plant area affected (e.g., foliage, flowers, stems) and within that, by taxa. Close to a third of the species are primarily leaf chewers, with about the same number of sap suckers. Multiple photos of various life stages and typical plant symptoms are included for key species. The text, on the facing page, provides basic information on host plants, characteristic damage caused to plants, distribution, life history, habits, and, where necessary, how to keep “pests” in check–in short, the essentials to better understanding, appreciating, and tolerating these creatures.

Whether managing, studying, or simply observing insects, identification is the first step–and this book is the key. With it in hand, the marvelous microcosm right outside the house finally comes fully into view.

For more on cicada-watch 2013, Radiolab has a cool interactive map that is tracking cicada sightings along the East Coast. You can also check out this article over at New York Daily News for more information on the cicadas.

Have you seen any cicadas in your area?

Cinco de Søren!

Happy 200th birthday to Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)! The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher is considered the father existentialism, as he held controversial and insightful contemporary views on life and theology. His unique concepts of love, religion, and self-awareness hold serious significance into the twenty first century, and remain central to discussions concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also fields such as social thought, psychology, contemporary aesthetics, and literary theory. Today, celebrate Søren by reading his own words (free chapter excerpts below!).

k7809Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries
Collected, edited, and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse
Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen
This is a collection of every known eyewitness account of the great Danish thinker. Through many sharp observations of family members, friends and acquaintances, supporters and opponents, the life story of this elusive and remarkable figure comes into focus, offering a rare portrait of Kierkegaard the man.

Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography
Joakim Garff, Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse
Read Chapter 1
“The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life–the intriguing secret of all the machinery–will be studied and studied.” Kierkegaard’s remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard’s life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic j6784Dane who changed the course of intellectual history.

The Essential Kierkegaard
Edited by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong
This is the most comprehensive anthology of Søren Kierkegaard’s works ever assembled in English. The selections represent every major aspect of Kierkegaard’s extraordinary career. They reveal the powerful mix of philosophy, psychology, theology, and literary criticism that made Kierkegaard one of the most compelling writers of the nineteenth century and a shaping force in the twentieth. Together, the selections provide the best available introduction to Kierkegaard’s writings and show more completely than any other book why his work, in all its creativity, variety, and power, continues to speak so directly today to so many readers around the world.

k9988Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death (New in Paperback)
Søren Kierkegaard
Translated and with notes by Walter Lowrie, new introduction by Gordon Marino
Walter Lowrie’s classic, bestselling translation of Søren Kierkegaard’s most important and popular books remains unmatched for its readability and literary quality. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death established Kierkegaard as the father of existentialism and have come to define his contribution to philosophy. Lowrie’s translation, first published in 1941 and later revised, was the first in English, and it has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to Kierkegaard’s thought.

The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology
Søren Kierkegaard
Edited and introduced by Thomas C. Oden
Check out the Introduction
Who might reasonably be nominated as the funniest philosopher of all time? With this anthology, Thomas Oden provisionally declares Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)–despite his enduring stereotype as the melancholy, despairing Dane–as, among philosophers, the most amusing. Kierkegaard not only explored comic perception to its depths but also practiced the art of comedy as astutely as any writer of his time. This k9987collection shows how his theory of comedy is integrated into his practice of comic perception, and how both are integral to his entire authorship.

The Seducer’s Diary (New in Paperback)
Søren Kierkegaard
Read Chapter 1
Edited & translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, foreword by John Updike
“In the vast literature of love, The Seducer’s Diary is an intricate curiosity–a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast,” observes John Updike in his foreword to Søren Kierkegaard’s narrative. This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard’s first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancée, Regine Olsen.

A Short Life of Kierkegaard (New in Paperback)
Walter Lowrie
In this classic biography, the celebrated Kierkegaard translator Walter Lowrie presents a charming and warmly appreciative introduction to the life and work of the great Danish writer. Lowrie tells the story of Kierkegaard’s emotionally turbulent life with a keen sense of drama and an acute understanding of how his life shaped his thought. The result is a wonderfully informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the past two centuries. This edition also includes Lowrie’s wry essay “How Kierkegaard Got into English,” which tells the improbable story of how Lowrie became one of Kierkegaard’s principal English translators despite not learning Danish until he was in his 60s, as well as a new introduction by Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay.

The Quotable Kierkegaardk10061
Edited by Gordon Marino
Be sure to keep an eye out for this anticipated collection of quotes (October 2013). Organized by topic, this volume covers notable Kierkegaardian concerns such as anxiety, despair, existence, irony, and the absurd, but also erotic love, the press, busyness, and the comic. Here readers will encounter both well-known quotations (“Life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward“) and obscure ones (“Beware false prophets who come to you in wolves’ clothing but inwardly are sheep–i.e., the phrasemongers”). Those who spend time in these pages will discover the writer who said, “my grief is my castle,” but who also taught that “the best defense against hypocrisy is love.” Illuminating and delightful, this engaging book also provides a substantial portrait of one of the most influential of modern thinkers.

Be sure to check out our two PUP Kierkegaard series Kierkegaard’s Writings and Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks.

Throwback Thursday with Isaiah Berlin: The Roots of Romanticism

The Roots of Romanticism was first published by Princeton in 1998. The new edition will be available this month! The Roots of Romanticism is a series of Berlin’s famed Mellon lectures that were originally delivered in Washington in 1965 and broadcasted by the BBC. Take a look at the covers for the 1998 edition and the 2013 edition!

4-1 roots BOTH

“For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity’s view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: “The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men’s outlook in modern times.”

In these brilliant lectures Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define Romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how its lasting legacy permeates our own outlook. Combining the freshness and immediacy of the spoken word with Berlin’s inimitable eloquence and wit, the lectures range over a cast of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. Berlin argues that the ideas and attitudes held by these and other figures helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, individual self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art.”

You can listen to an excerpt from Berlin’s first lecture of the series here.

3 Poets from our Contemporary Poetry series at KGB Bar, May 8 – What a line up!

Join KGB Bar as they welcome Gary Whitehead, Jessica Greenbaum, and Anthony Carelli on May 8.Princeton University Press Contemporary Poets

May 08, 2013
7:00 pm9:00 pm
KGB Bar
85 East 4th St.
NY, NY 10003

 

Gary J. Whitehead has authored three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is A Glossary of Chickens, chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton University Press Contemporary Poets Series. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s public radio program the Writer’s Almanac. He has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Whitehead teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Jessica Greenbaum was born in Brooklyn in 1957, but didn’t ascend to residency there until 1987, after living stints in Long Island, Manhattan and Houston, TX. She is a winner of the Nation’s Discovery Award, PEN’s Emerging Writer Award and the Gerald Cable Prize for her first book, Inventing Difficulty. Her second book, The Two Yvonnes, came out from Princeton’s Contemporary Poets Series . She is the poetry editor for the annual upstreet and lives, with her family, in Ft. Greene, where she takes advantage of foot traffic going to the Brooklyn Flea to raise money for girls’ and women’s civil rights issues in the third world.

Anthony Carelli was raised in Poynette, Wisconsin and studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and New York University. In 2011 he was awarded a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. His poems have appeared in various magazines, including the New Yorker. His first book of poems, Carnations (Princeton, 2011), was named a finalist for the 2011 Levis Reading Prize. Anthony lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches expository writing at New York University.

j9947[1]j9825[1]j9415[1]