Are we alone in the Universe? Was there anything before the Big Bang? Are there other universes? What are sunspots? What is a shooting star? Was there ever life on Mars? This book answers the fascinating questions that we have been asking ourselves for hundreds of years. Using non-technical language, the authors summarize current astronomical knowledge, taking care to include the important underlying scientific principles. Plentiful color illustrations, graphs and photographs lend further weight to their simple yet meticulously written explanations.
The writers studied in this supplement are mostly contemporary, although a few have roots in the early twentieth century. David Budbill, W. S. Di Piero, Mark Halliday, Ted Kooser, Molly Peacock, and Bruce Weigl are mainly poets by trade, though most of them have also worked in other areas. While each of the writers discussed in this supplement has already found an audience—a large one in the case of Robert B. Parker—few of them have yet to receive the kind of sustained attention they deserve, although each has been reviewed at length in periodicals.
Although during the last sixty years philology has attained a high degree of development, looking at the literature available, Etymology appears only to have reached the level of philology at the turn of the century. This dictionary is the first major work of its kind in the 20th century, and as such, embodies the findings of modern philological scholarship. For example, full reference is made to Tocharian, the extinct language rediscovered at the end of the Nineteenth Century which often provides the key to the important transition form between the Old-Indian and the Indo-European group of languages
In Drawing the Line, Andrew Stark takes a fresh and provocative look at how Americans debate the border between the public realm and the private. The seemingly eternal struggle to establish the proper division of societal responsibilities to draw the line has been joined yet again. Obama administration initiatives, particularly bank bailouts and health care reform, roil anew the debate of just what government should do for its citizens, what exactly is the public sphere, and what should be left to individual responsibility.
Richard III (Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages)
Equal parts tragedy and history play, Richard III chronicles the rise and short reign of its diabolical title character. Of this masterful creation, esteemed critic Harold Bloom has written, "The manipulative, highly self-conscious, obsessed hero-villain moves himself from being the passive sufferer of his own moral and/or physical deformity to becoming a highly active melodramatist."
