Books published by Columbia University Press

This book brings together a range of chimpanzee experts who tell powerful personal stories about their lives and careers. It features some of the world's preeminent primatologists-including Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal-as well as representatives of a new generation from varied backgrounds.

In essays and conversations, leading writers reflect on how Black churches have participated in recent discussions about issues such as marriage equality, reproductive justice, and transgender visibility. They consider the varied ways that Black people and groups negotiate the intersections of religion, race, gender, and sexuality.

This book brings together a range of chimpanzee experts who tell powerful personal stories about their lives and careers. It features some of the world's preeminent primatologists-including Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal-as well as representatives of a new generation from varied backgrounds.

In essays and conversations, leading writers reflect on how Black churches have participated in recent discussions about issues such as marriage equality, reproductive justice, and transgender visibility. They consider the varied ways that Black people and groups negotiate the intersections of religion, race, gender, and sexuality.

This book brings together leading scholars to provide new perspectives on one of the most traumatic episodes in Taiwan's modern history and its fraught legacies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines revisit the Musha Incident and its afterlife in history, literature, film, art, and popular culture.

This book brings together leading scholars to provide new perspectives on one of the most traumatic episodes in Taiwan's modern history and its fraught legacies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines revisit the Musha Incident and its afterlife in history, literature, film, art, and popular culture.

Eli Friedman reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. He provides a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.

Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging "gentrification plot" in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods-the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The perfect textbook for nonscience majors, this volume explains dinosaur evolution, phylogeny, and classification. Revised to reflect recent fossil discoveries and the current consensus on dinosaur science, the text details the behavior and extinction of the species, their relationship to birds, and their representation in popular culture.

Bob Dylan's iconic 1962 song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" stands at the crossroads of musical and literary traditions. Alessandro Portelli explores the power and resonance of the song, considering the meanings of history and memory in folk cultures and in Dylan's work.

Why and when does China exercise restraint-and how does this aspect of Chinese statecraft challenge the assumptions of international relations theory? Chin-Hao Huang argues that a rising power's aspirations for acceptance provide a key rationale for refraining from coercive measures.

Dung Kai-cheung's A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China.

James Boyd White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with St. Augustine's Confessions. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin-even for those who have never studied the language-guiding readers to experience the immediacy, urgency, and vitality of Augustine's writing.

The Santo Daime is a syncretic religion whose spiritual practice is based around the sacramental use of ayahuasca. G. William Barnard-an initiate of the religion and a scholar of religious studies-considers the religious practice and transformative inner experiences of the Santo Daime community.

In recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt.

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki is one of the most prominent Japanese writers of the twentieth century. This book presents three powerful stories of family from the first decade of Tanizaki's career. Written in different genres, they are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan's traditional culture in the face of Westernization.

Luce Irigaray reflects on three critical concerns of our time: the cultivation of energy in its many forms, the integration of Asian and Western traditions, and the reenvisioning of religious figures for the contemporary world. A philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, Irigaray draws deeply on her personal experience in addressing these questions.

This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and North America. Beginning in fin de siecle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements.

Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Edward Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community.

In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept's genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity. Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity.

The culmination of more than fifty years of research by the foremost living expert on plant classification, Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants is an important contribution to the field of plant taxonomy.

The Gathering of Intentions reads a single Tibetan Buddhist ritual system through the movements of Tibetan history, revealing the social and material dimensions of an ostensibly timeless tradition. By subjecting tantric practice to historical analysis, the book offers new insight into the origins of Tibetan Buddhism, the formation of its canons, the emergence of new lineages and ceremonies, and modern efforts to revitalize the religion by returning to its mythic origins.The ritual system explored in this volume is based on the Gathering of Intentions Sutra, the fundamental "e;root tantra"e; of the Anuyoga class of teachings belonging to the Nyingma ("e;Ancient"e;) school of Tibetan Buddhism. Proceeding chronologically from the ninth century to the present, each chapter features a Tibetan author negotiating a perceived gap between the original root text-the Gathering of Intentions-and the lived religious or political concerns of his day. These ongoing tensions underscore the significance of Tibet's elaborate esoteric ritual systems, which have persisted for centuries, evolving in response to historical conditions. Rather than overlook practice in favor of philosophical concerns, this volume prioritizes Tibetan Buddhism's ritual systems for a richer portrait of the tradition.

The influence of Vannevar Bush on the history and institutions of twentieth-century American science and technology is staggeringly vast. Edited by Bush's biographer, G. Pascal Zachary, this collection presents more than fifty of Bush's most important works across four decades.

Michel Chion is renowned for his explorations of the significance of frequently overlooked elements of cinema, particularly the role of sound. In this inventive and inviting book, Chion considers how cinema has deployed music. He shows how music and film not only complement but also transform each other.

In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism.

In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism.

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with critics and data analysis, this book provides an unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets. It shows how the concepts of genre and collective identity explain producers' choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines.

The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese state. Perhat Tursun follows an unnamed Uyghur man who comes to the capital of Xinjiang. Seeking to escape the pain and poverty of the countryside, he finds only cold stares and rejection.

This book presents three tales that encapsulate Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's gift for creating philosophical, satirical, and lyrical phantasmagorias. It also includes excerpts from his notebooks-aphoristic glimpses of his worldview, moods, humor, and writing methods-and reminiscences of Krzhizhanovsky by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek.