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Using Nobel Prize-winning examples like the transistor, laser, and magnetic resonance imaging, Venky Narayanamurti and Tolu Odumosu explore the daily micro-practices of research and show that distinctions between the search for knowledge and creative problem solving break down when one pays attention to how pathbreaking research actually happens.

Can reason absorb the psyche's nonrational elements into a conception of the fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Jonathan Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. He brings into conversation psychoanalysis and moral philosophy, which together form a basis for ethical thought about how to live.

Michel Winock situates Flaubert in France's century of great democratic transition. Wary of the masses, Flaubert rejected universal male suffrage, but above all he hated the vulgar, ignorant bourgeoisie, a class that embodied every vice of the democratic age. His loathing became a fixation-and a source of literary inspiration.

Because Thomas Hardy's poetry and fiction are so closely associated with Wessex, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner, moving between country and capital throughout his life. This self-division, Mark Ford says, can be traced not only in works explicitly set in London but in his most regionally circumscribed novels.

The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. Critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, she presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.

David Silverman argues against the notion that Indians prized flintlock muskets more for their pyrotechnics than for their efficiency as tools of war. Native peoples fully recognized the potential of firearms to assist them in their struggles against colonial forces, and mostly against one another, as arms races erupted across North America.

Refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the U.S. has attempted to reform and rationalize capital punishment through federal constitutional law. While execution chambers remain active in several states, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue that the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment.

When the legendary Frankish king and emperor Charlemagne died in 814 he left behind a dominion and a legacy unlike anything seen in Western Europe since the fall of Rome. Johannes Fried paints a compelling portrait of a devout ruler, a violent time, and a unified kingdom that deepens our understanding of the man often called the father of Europe.

Tracing the global trade and trafficking in animals that supplied U.S. zoos, Daniel Bender shows how Americans learned to view faraway places through the lens of exotic creatures on display. He recounts the public's conflicted relationship with zoos, decried as prisons by activists even as they remain popular centers of education and preservation.

How did Europeans three centuries apart respond to two mysterious beasts-a living rhinoceros previously known only from ancient texts and a nameless monster's massive bones? Juan Pimentel shows that their reactions reflect deep cultural changes but also the enduring power of image and imagination to shape our understanding of the natural world.

Obstetrics and Gynecology in Low-Resource Settings provides practical guidelines for ensuring quality care to women in locations where facilities are inadequate, equipment and medications are in short supply, and medical staff are few. This reference will be an essential companion to health care providers throughout the world.

The Giza Plateau represents perhaps the most famous archaeological site in the world. With the advent of new technologies, the Necropolis is now accessible in four dimensions. Peter Der Manuelian explores technologies for cataloging and visualizing Giza and offers more general philosophical reflection on the nature of visualization in archaeology.

Tara McPherson asks what might it mean to design-from conception-digital tools and applications that emerge from contextual concerns of cultural theory and from a feminist concern for difference. This question leads to the Vectors Lab, which for a dozen years has experimented with digital scholarship at the intersection of theory and praxis.

Magha's The Killing of Shishupala is a celebrated seventh-century Sanskrit poem that tells the story of Shishupala's refusal to honor the divine Krishna at the coronation of Yudhishthira. Through this translation, the first into English, readers gain access to a sophisticated work that has dazzled Indian audiences for a thousand years.

Progymnasmata, exercises in the study of declamation, were the cornerstone of elite education from Hellenistic through Byzantine times. The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes, translated here into English for the first time, illuminate teaching and literary culture in one of the most important epochs of the Byzantine Empire.

Critics and biographers praise Elizabeth Bishop's poetry but have little to say about how it does its sublime work-in the ear and in the mind's eye. Eleanor Cook examines in detail Bishop's diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. Writers, readers, and teachers will all benefit.

Manan Ahmed Asif shows that the Chachnama is a sophisticated work of political theory, embedded in both the Indic and Islamic ethos. His social and intellectual history of this text offers an important corrective to the divisions between Muslim and Hindu that so often define Pakistani and Indian politics today.

Enlightenment thinkers, searching for ancient models to understand contemporary affairs, were the first to critically interpret Alexander the Great's achievements. As Pierre Briant shows, in their minds Alexander was the first European: an empire builder who welcomed trade with the "Orient" and brought Western civilization to its oppressed peoples.

Elisabeth Roudinesco's bold reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud is a biography for the twenty-first century-a sympathetic yet impartial appraisal of a genius admired but misunderstood in his time and ours. Alert to tensions in his character and thought, she views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as an interpreter of civilization and culture.

Waged for a just cause, World War II was America's good war. Yet for millions of GIs, the war did not end with the enemy's surrender. From letters, diaries, and memoirs, Susan Carruthers chronicles the intimate thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women whose difficult mission was to rebuild nations they had recently worked to destroy.

In Raghavanka's poetic masterpiece The Life of Harishchandra, a powerful sage tests King Harishchandra's commitment to truth. He suffers utter deprivation but refuses to yield. This spirited translation, the first from Kannada into any language, brings one of ancient India's most enduring legends to a global readership.

Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Matthew Rubery uncovers this story, from Edison to today's billion-dollar audiobook industry, and breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctive art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read.

In 2010 BP's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe spiraled into the worst human-made economic and ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history. In the most comprehensive account to date, senior systems engineers Earl Boebert and James Blossom show how corporate and engineering decisions, each one individually innocuous, interacted to create the disaster.

Miriam Laugesen goes to the heart of U.S. medical pricing: to a largely unknown committee of organizations affiliated with the American Medical Association. Medicare's ready acceptance of this committee's advisory recommendations sets off a chain reaction across the American health care system, leading to high-and disproportionate-rate setting.

Why do human beings find some tone combinations consonant and others dissonant? Why do we make music using only a small number of scales out the billions that are possible? Dale Purves shows that rethinking music theory in biological terms offers a new approach to centuries-long debates about the organization and impact of music.

Perhaps more than any other cause, the passage of texts from scroll to codex in late antiquity converted the Roman Empire from paganism to Christianity and enabled the worldwide spread of Christian faith. Guy Stroumsa describes how canonical scripture was established and how its interpretation replaced blood sacrifice in religious ritual.

In Misagh Parsa's view, the outlook for democracy in Iran is stark. Gradual reforms will not be sufficient for real change: the government must fundamentally rethink its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.

Short for Quantum Bayesianism, QBism adapts conventional features of quantum mechanics in light of a revised understanding of probability. Using commonsense language, without the equations or weirdness of conventional quantum theory, Hans Christian von Baeyer clarifies the meaning of quantum mechanics and suggests a new approach to general physics.

Big data, genomics, and quantitative approaches to network-based analysis are combining to advance the frontiers of medicine as never before. With contributions from leading experts, Network Medicine introduces this rapidly evolving field of research, which promises to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases.