Books published by The University of Chicago Press

A landmark account in words and pictures of Maori art, by Maori art historians-from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Maori artists. He toi whakairo, he mana tangata. Through artistic excellence, there is human dignity.   In six hundred pages and with over five hundred illustrations, this volume takes us on an extraordinary voyage through Maori art-from ancestral weavers to contemporary artists at the Venice Biennale, from whare whakairo to film, and from Te Puea Herangi to Michael Parekowhai.   Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis, and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki explore a wide field of art practices, including raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattooing), whakairo (carving), rakai (jewellery), kakahu (textiles), whare (architecture), toi whenua (rock art), painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation art, digital media, and film. The works discussed span a period from the arrival of Pacific voyagers eight hundred years ago to the contemporary artists working around the world today. With expansive chapters and breakout texts focusing on individual artists, movements, and events, Toi Te Mana is an essential book for anyone interested in te ao Maori.

A revelatory look at modern liberalism's historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.    Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, which widened its impact but narrowed its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of "professional class liberalism," and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals' egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional class liberals' power. The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism's place in contemporary American life.

A revelatory look at modern liberalism's historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.    Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, which widened its impact but narrowed its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of "professional class liberalism," and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals' egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional class liberals' power. The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism's place in contemporary American life.

A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.   By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.   Incorporating Afshordi's cutting-edge research and insights from Halper's original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory's strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these theories. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community-all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.

An illustrated hourly guide that spotlights twenty-four flowers as they attract pollinators, resist predators, and survive our changing planet. Is it 4 am or chicory o'clock? In this short book, botanist and award-winning author Sandra Knapp walks us through a day in a global garden. Each chapter of Flower Day introduces a single flower during a single hour, highlighting twenty-four different species from around the world. Beginning at midnight in the Americas, we spot the long-tubular flowers of the moonflower, Ipomoea alba; they attract a frenzy of hawkmoths before the dawn arrives, and the flowers wither and collapse. As day breaks, dandelions and chicory open their heads-actually made up of many individual flowers tightly packed together-and flies and bees visit to get the energy they need to lay eggs and raise their young. Later, at eight o'clock in the morning, the sun rises over the watery Amazon basin, and we meet the giant waterlily, slowly turning from white to pink and purple. Trapped inside are the beetles who feasted on the flowers during the night. That evening, at seven o'clock, we travel to the Caribbean to smell night-blooming jessamine's powerful, some say nauseating, sweet scent. But this member of the nightshade family isn't just a thing of beauty-it has a reputation as both a poison and invasive species, crowding out endangered native trees.  For each hour in our flower day, celebrated artist Katie Scott has depicted these scenes with gorgeous pen and ink illustrations. Working closely together to narrate and illustrate these unique moments in time, Knapp and Scott have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two-and a true gift for amateur botanists, gardeners, and anyone who wants to stop and appreciate the flowers.

The economic case for self-interest at the outer limits of being morally good. Modern life is an exercise in discomfort. In the face of endless injustice, how much selfishness is permissible? How do we square suffering elsewhere with our hope to thrive at home? How does one strive for the greater good while guarding one's personal interests? The Price of Our Values argues that the answers to these questions are economic: by weighing our sense of the personal costs associated with the outer limits of our moral beliefs. These tradeoffs-the want to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the points at which people abandon goodness due to its costs-are somewhat unsettling. But as economists Augustin Landier and David Thesmar show, they are highly predictable, even justified. Our values guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions. The Price of Our Values is an economic reckoning with the universal unease of contemporary moral life. Wielding insights from the philosophical founders of the field, Landier and Thesmar provide frameworks for thinking about the place of values-justice, freedom, beauty- in the decisions of modern life. They do so in terms that seek to be consistent with both our good intentions and their limits.

What economists know that we should know, translated for all of us.  Should I buy or rent? Do I ask for a promotion? Should I tell people I'm pregnant? What salary do I deserve? Should I just quit this job? Common anxieties about life are often grounded in economics. In an increasingly win-lose society, these economic decisions-where to work, where to live, even how to live-have a way of feeling fixed and mistakes terminal.   Daryl Fairweather is no stranger to these dynamics. As the first Black woman to receive an economics PhD from the famed University of Chicago, she saw firsthand how concepts of behavioral economics and game theory were deployed in the real world-and in her own life-to great effect. Hate the Game combines Fairweather's elite knowledge of these principles with her singular voice in describing how they can be harnessed. Her great talent, unique among economists, is her ability to articulate economic trends in a way that is not just informative, but also accounts for life's other anxieties.   In Hate the Game, Fairweather fixes her expertise and service on navigating the earliest economic inflection points of adult life: whether to go to college and for how long; partnering, having kids, both, or neither; getting, keeping, and changing jobs; and where to live and how to pay for it. She speaks in actionable terms about what the economy means for individual people, especially those who have the sneaking suspicion they're losing out. Set against her own experiences and enriched with lessons from history, science, and pop culture, Fairweather instructs readers on how to use game theory and behavioral science to map out options and choose directions while offering readers a sense of control and agency in an economy where those things are increasingly rare.

What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?   In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research a big question: why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren't what he expected. Unforgiving Places is Ludwig's revelatory portrait of gun violence in America's most famously maligned city.   Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic and others don't, Ludwig reveals gun violence in America to be more comprehensible-and more solvable-than our traditional approaches suggest.   Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig's immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including "countless hours in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald's," Unforgiving Places is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn't require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

In this journey into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, the text explores the physical aspects of human speech (ears, lungs, tongue) and the surrounding environment (buildings, landscape, climate), as well as social and political structures.

A tour of Mars in the human imagination, from ancient astrologers to modern explorers. Mars and its secrets have fascinated and mystified humans since ancient times. For the Love of Mars surveys the red planet's place in the human imagination, beginning with ancient astrologers and skywatchers and ending in our present moment of exploration and virtual engagement. National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell describes how historical figures across eras and around the world have made sense of this mysterious planet. We meet Mayan astrologer priests who incorporated Mars into seasonal calendars and religious ceremonies, Babylonian astrologers who discerned bad omens, figures of the Scientific Revolution who struggled to comprehend Mars as a world, Victorian astronomers who sought signs of intelligent life, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientists who have established a technological presence on the planet's surface. Along the way, we encounter writers and artists from each of these periods who took readers and viewers along on imagined journeys to Mars. By focusing on the diverse human stories behind the telescopes and behind the robots we know and love, Shindell shows how Mars exploration has evolved in ways that have also expanded knowledge about other facets of the universe. Captained by an engaging and erudite expert, For the Love of Mars is a captivating voyage through time and space for anyone curious about Curiosity and the red planet.

This volume brings together James McMichael's poetry and includes works that have previously remained unpublished. James McMichael is the recipient of a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award.

First published in 1600 in answer to Giusepe Passi's diatribe about women's alleged defects, this polemic displays Lucrezia Marinella's knowledge of the Italian poetic tradition and demonstrates her ability to argue against authors of the misogynist tradition from Boccaccio to Torquato Tasso.

You're probably never going to be a saint. Even so, let's face it: you could be a better person. We all could. But what does that mean for you?   In a world full of suffering and deprivation, it's easy to despair--and it's also easy to judge ourselves for not doing more. Even if we gave away everything we own and devoted ourselves to good works, it wouldn't solve all the world's problems. It would make them better, though. So is that what we have to do? Is anything less a moral failure? Can we lead a fundamentally decent life without taking such drastic steps?   Todd May has answers. He's not the sort of philosopher who tells us we have to be model citizens who display perfect ethics in every decision we make. He's realistic: he understands that living up to ideals is a constant struggle. In A Decent Life, May leads readers through the traditional philosophical bases of a number of arguments about what ethics asks of us, then he develops a more reasonable and achievable way of thinking about them, one that shows us how we can use philosophical insights to participate in the complicated world around us. He explores how we should approach the many relationships in our lives--with friends, family, animals, people in need--through the use of a more forgiving, if no less fundamentally serious, moral compass. With humor, insight, and a lively and accessible style, May opens a discussion about how we can, realistically, lead the good life that we aspire to.   A philosophy of goodness that leaves it all but unattainable is ultimately self-defeating. Instead, Todd May stands at the forefront of a new wave of philosophy that sensibly reframes our morals and redefines what it means to live a decent life.

'A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan, ' writes Leszek Kolakowski at the start of this endlessly stimulating book, 'must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.' For over a century, philosophers have argued that philosophy is impossible or useless, or both. Although the basic agenda dates back tot he days of Socrates, there is still disagreement about the nature of truth, reality, knowledge, good and God. This may make little practical difference to our lives, but it leaves us with a feeling of radical uncertainty described by Kolakowski as 'metaphysical horror'. Is there any way out of this cul-de-sac? This trenchant analysis confronts these dilemmas head on. Philosophy may not provide definitive answers to the fundamental questions, yet the quest itself transforms our lives. It may undermine most of our certainties, yet it still leaves room for our spiritual yearnings and religious beliefs. Kolakowski has forged a dazzling demonstration of philosophy in action. It is up to readers to take up the challenge of his arguments.

Volume 51 is a thematic volume on Prisons and Prisoners. Since 1979, the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the occasional thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology. Volume 51 of Crime and Justice is the first to reprise a predecessor, Prisons (Volume 26, 1999), edited by series editor Michael Tonry and the late Joan Petersilia. In Prisons and Prisoners, editors Michael Tonry and Sandra Bucerius revisit the subject for several reasons. In 1999, most scholarly research concerned developments in Britain and the United States and was published in English. Much of that was sociological, focused on inmate subcultures, or psychological, focused on how prisoners coped with and adapted to prison life. Some, principally by economists and statisticians, sought to measure the crime-preventive effects of imprisonment generally and the deterrent effects of punishments of greater and lesser severity. In 2022, serious scholarly research on prisoners, prisons, and the effects of imprisonment has been published and is underway in many countries. That greater cosmopolitanism is reflected in the pages of this volume. Several essays concern developments in places other than Britain and the United States. Several are primarily comparative and cover developments in many countries. Those primarily concerned with American research draw on work done elsewhere. The subjects of prison research have also changed. Work on inmate subcultures and coping and adaptation has largely fallen by the wayside. Little is being done on imprisonment‿s crime-preventive effects, largely because they are at best modest and often perverse. An essay in Volume 50 of Crime and Justice, examining the 116 studies then published on the effects of imprisonment on subsequent offending, concluded that serving a prison term makes ex-prisoners on average more, not less, likely to reoffend. In 1999, little research had been done on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners‿ families, children, or communities, or even‿except for recidivism‿ on ex-prisoners‿ later lives: family life, employment, housing, physical and mental health, or achievement of a conventional, law-abiding life. The first comprehensive survey of what was then known was published in the earlier Crime and Justice: Prisons volume. An enormous literature has since emerged, as essays in this volume demonstrate. Comparatively little work had been done by 1999 on the distinctive prison experiences of women and members of non-White minority groups. That too has changed, as several of the essays make clear. What is not clear is the future of imprisonment. Through more contemporary and global lenses, the essays featured in this volume not only reframe where we are in 2022 but offer informed insights into where we might be heading. Â

The first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post-Cold War present.

Presents a historical, theoretical, and practice-oriented road map for the shift from incidental collaboration to a more conscious and explicit collaborative strategy. The author charts the history of collaborative ethnography from its earliest implementation to its contemporary emergence in fields such as feminism and humanistic anthropology.