Books published by Harvard University Press

AIDS is unquestionably the most serious threat to public health in this century--yet how effective has the United States been in coping with this deadly disease? This sobering analysis of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic reveals the failure of traditional approaches in recognizing and managing this health emergency; it is an extremely unsettling probe into what makes the nation ill equipped to handle a crisis of the magnitude of the one that now confronts us. Sandra Panem pays particular attention to the Public Health Service, within which the vast majority of biomedical research and public health services are organized, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. We learn in dismaying detail how shortcomings in communication within and among the many layers of the health establishment delayed management of the crisis. She also investigates other problems that surface during a health emergency, involving issues such as federal budgeting, partisan politics, bureaucratic bungles, educating the public, the complications of policymaking, and the vexing role of the press. Panem makes specific recommendations for a centrally coordinated federal response to health emergencies, including the creation of a national health emergency plan.

America may now be the last remaining superpower, but what does this triumph mean when the challenges faced often defy military solutions? This text examines this question with its implications for America's role in the post-Cold War world. Ronald Steel offers a critique of a high-stakes game of foreign policy played by rules that no longer apply, and then proposes an alternative view of the world and America's place in it.

"Worlds of Dissent" analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences-diverse, uncertain, nameless-have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Vaclav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West-including Ludvik Vaculik, whose 1980 diary "The Czech Dream Book" is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. "Worlds of Dissent" offers a rare opportunity to understand the texture of dissent in a closed society."

Place and orientation are important aspects of human experience. Place evokes geography and culture and conjures up history and myth. Place is not only a particular physical location but an idea, a mental construction that captures and directs the human relationship to the world. The distinguished contributors to this volume invite us to reflect on the significance of places, real and imagined, in the religious traditions they study and on how places are known, imagined, remembered, and struggled for. Whether looking at the ways myth and ritual reinforce the Yoruba's bond to the land or at Australian Aboriginal engagements with the origins of the created world, exploring Hildegard of Bingen's experience of heaven or myths of the underworld in contemporary American millennialism, listening to oral narratives of divine politics and deserted places of Rajasthan or investigating literal and literary images of the Promised Land, these essays underscore that place is constructed in the intersection of material conditions, political realities, narrative, and ritual performance.

The central theme of this book is that an economic framework--incorporating such concepts as information asymmetry, moral hazard, and adaptation to changed circumstances--is appropriate for contract interpretation, analyzing contract disputes, and developing contract doctrine. The value of the approach is demonstrated through the close analysis of major contract cases. In many of the cases, had the court (and the litigators) understood the economic context, the analysis and results would have been very different. Topics and some representative cases include consideration (Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon), interpretation (Bloor v. Falstaff and Columbia Nitrogen v. Royster), remedies (Campbell v. Wentz, Tongish v. Thomas, and Parker v. Twentieth Century Fox), and excuse (Alcoa v. Essex).

Aëtius¿ Placita (ca. AD 100) is a reconstructed compendium summarizing the principal doctrines and opinions of the Greek philosophers, which served as a multi-purpose manual both for study and for personal enlightenment and which remains a valuable source for our knowledge of pre-Socratic and Hellenistic philosophy.

Volume II of the Loeb Hippocrates presents eight works by or attributed to the ¿Father of Medicine¿ that illustrate the value of medical theory and clinical methods, and propose a new model of medical education. Included are Prognostic, Regimen in Acute Diseases, The Sacred Disease, The Art, Breaths, Law, Decorum, and Dentition.

Kalidasa's The Lineage of the Raghus, or Raghuvä¿a, belongs to the literary tradition of mah¿k¿vya, or court poem. It recounts the lives of ancient kings-such as Dilipa, Raghu, and Rama-who ruled from the capital city of Ayodhya. This volume presents a new edition of the Sanskrit text in the Devanagari script alongside a fresh English translation.

Mhaimbhat¿s God at Play, or L¿¿¿caritra, is a remarkable biography of the medieval religious figure Chakradhar Svami, considered by the Mahanubhavs to be an incarnation of the supreme god. The first volume of this new English translation, accompanied by the Marathi text, describes Chakradhar¿s early life, wanderings, and the gathering of disciples.

The last volume in The Image of the Black in Western Art marks a shift by focusing on representation of blacks by black artists in the West. It takes on migration in the U.S and globalization, Negritude and cultural hybridity, black artists' relationship with European traditions and experimentation, as well as photography, jazz and activism.

Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Becrsani and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows us how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original-and profoundly antimodernist-renunciation of art's authority.

This book embraces an era of enormous creative variety-the formative period during which the Romantic traditions of the past were abandoned or transformed and a major new literature created. More than a hundred poets are treated in this volume, and many more are noticed in passing.

What is law, and why does it matter? Scott Hershovitz says that law is a moral practice-a tool for adjusting our moral relations. This claim is simple on its face, but it has stark implications for the rule of law. At once erudite and entertaining, Hershovitz's argument engages with the most important legal and political controversies of our time.

Philostratus "the Elder" or "the Athenian" (2nd to mid-3rd c.) and Eunapius (ca. 345-415) provide fascinating intellectual and professional biographies of notable sophists that reveal their predominant influence in the educational, social, religious, and political life of the Empire in their times.

M. Porcius Cato (234-149 BC) remains legendary for his political and military career, his integrity and austere morality, his literary works, his pithy sayings, and his drive to define and to champion the Roman national character. This edition supplies all testimonia about, and all fragments by or attributed to him.

M. Porcius Cato (234-149 BC) remains legendary for his political and military career, his integrity and austere morality, his literary works, his pithy sayings, and his drive to define and to champion the Roman national character. This edition supplies all testimonia about, and all fragments by or attributed to him.

This edition brings the research university into the 21st century. The multiversity that Clark Kerr discovered now finds itself in an age of apprehension with few certainties. Kerr gives five general points of advice on what kinds of attitudes universities should adopt.

No Birds of Passage explores the remarkable business success of three Gujarati Muslim commercial castes: the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons. Often stereotyped as "Westernized" and as Hindus in all but name, these groups are better seen as having developed a distinctive Muslim capitalism, in which religious and commercial prerogatives are inseparable.

The Painting Master's Shame describes the remarkable circumstances of the period around 1120, when the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings was written. Amy McNair's translation and analysis offers a definitive argument for Liang Shicheng, not Emperor Huizong, as the catalogue's compiler.

Avant-Garde Post- follows seven Russophone poets as they reinvigorate leftist art in the wake of state socialism. Rejecting both the Putin regime-with its selective mobilizations of Soviet nostalgia-and Western discourses of liberal superiority, this circle is reviving class-based critique through experimental forms and global collaborations.