Dynamics: the Geometry of Behavior (Studies in nonlinearity)
This is one of my favorite books. Chock full of enlightening artwork, page after page of colorful drawings, graphs, representations of springs, sound, heat, and other non-linear, real-world phenomena explained and illustrated for intuitive ease. Even if you're not a scientist, or a mathematics fan - this book will open your eyes to concepts that scientists deal with, and that deeply inspire artists and musicians alike.
Language and Identity: An introduction (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics)
Written in a truly interdisciplinary spirit, this rich, lucid and irreverent book on language, culture and politics is bound to win admirers across the humanities and social sciences. Very readable, highly enjoyable, deeply enlightening.
The author’s contention is that Chekhov’s plays have often been misinterpreted by scholars and directors, particularly through their failure to adequately balance the comic and tragic elements inherent in these works. Through a close examination of the form and content of Chekhov’s dramas, the author shows how deeply pessimistic or overly optimistic interpretations fail to sufficiently account for the rich complexity and ambiguity of these plays.
Is Ebonics really a dialect or simply bad English? Do women and men speak differently? Will computers ever really learn human language? Does offensive language harm children? These are only a few of the issues surrounding language that crop up every day. Most of us have very definite opinions on these questions one way or another. Yet as linguist Donna Jo Napoli points out in this short and highly entertaining volume, many of our most deeply held ideas about the nature of language and its role in our lives are either misconceived or influenced by myths and stereotypes.
Orson Scott Card has the distinction of having swept both the Hugo and Nebulaawards in two consecutive years with his amazing novels Ender’s Game
and Speaker for the Dead. For a body of work that ranges from science
fiction to nonfiction to plays, Card has been recognized as an author
who provides vivid, colorful glimpses between the world we know and
worlds we can only imagine.
In a peaceful, prosperous African
American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mack Street is a mystery child
who has somehow found a home. Discovered abandoned in an overgrown
park, raised by a blunt-speaking single woman, Mack comes and goes from
family to family–a boy who is at once surrounded by boisterous
characters and deeply alone. But while Mack senses that he is different
from most, and knows that he has strange powers, he cannot possibly
understand how unusual he is until the day he sees, in a thin slice of
space, a narrow house. Beyond it is a backyard–and an entryway into an
extraordinary world stretching off into an exotic distance of
geography, history, and magic.
