Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via the media of their times. In the "Flood," Gleick explains genetics as biology's mechanism for informational exchange
Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming off age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.
Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective
Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as:
modern Jewish society, politics and culture
historical consciousness in the twentieth century
colonialism, anti-colonialism and postcolonial state-building.
Israel in History provides a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. This book will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in many fields, including Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies.
How the dome took shape, where it originated, and why it became the outstanding feature of Byzantine and Islamic architecture are questions which have not been satisfactorily answered either by the Orient or Rome controversy or by the misconceptions implicit in the prevailing theories regarding the origin and purpose of the domical shape.
Gustavus Hindman Miller’s groundbreaking masterwork, published nearly a century ago, remains the most compelling and thorough study of all the symbols that appear in our dreamscape. Updated, beautifully designed, and wonderfully easy to follow, it’s an invaluable source of information, and key to understanding the unconscious impulses that guide us. Miller offers an enlightening introduction to dreams in history, dream types (spiritual, mixed, and allegorical), and to prescient dreams that provide a privileged glimpse into the future.
