Books published by The University of Chicago Press

The legacy of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) looms large over the natural sciences. His 1799-1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist Aime Bonpland set the course for the great scientific surveys of the nineteenth century. This book features his influential work - and his personal favorite.

Presents an account of the author's life in relation to political events of his time; the character and history of his writings and of the Politics in particular; his overall conception of political science; and his impact on subsequent political thought from antiquity to the present.

Provides a definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. In this title, iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a crucial resource for critical reflection.

Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for Novaya gazeta, has gathered together a collection of articles and columns which offer a rare insider's view of life in Chechnya. The book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of war, and how conflict has affected Russian society.

Offers a look at the delectable secrets of Mesopotamia. The author's broad perspective takes us inside the religious rites, everyday rituals, attitudes and taboos, and even the detailed preparation techniques involving food and drink in Mesopotamian high culture during the second and third millenniums BCE, as the Mesopotamians recorded them.

"Langdon Winner is the Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. He has a blog and tweets liberally. First published in 1986, The Whale and the Reactor has been assigned for years. This edition includes a passionately argued new chapter entitled Beyond Techno-narcissism as well as a new Preface and a postscript describing the now planned decommissioning of the Diablo Canyon reactor in California"--

Economics is not a field that is known for good writing. Charts, yes. Sparkling prose, no.   Except, that is, when it comes to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Her conversational and witty yet always clear style is a hallmark of her classic works of economic history, enlivening the dismal science and engaging readers well beyond the discipline. And now she's here to share the secrets of how it's done.  Economical Writing is itself economical: a collection of thirty-five pithy rules for making your writing clear, concise, and effective. Proceeding from big-picture ideas to concrete strategies for improvement at the level of the paragraph, sentence, or word, McCloskey shows us that good writing, after all, is not just a matter of taste--it's a product of adept intuition and a rigorous revision process. Debunking stale rules, warning us that "footnotes are nests for pedants," and offering an arsenal of readily applicable tools and methods, she shows writers of all levels of experience how to rethink the way they approach their work, and gives them the knowledge to turn mediocre prose into magic.   At once efficient and digestible, hilarious and provocative, Economical Writing lives up to its promise. With McCloskey as our guide, it's impossible not to see how any piece of writing--on economics or otherwise--can, and perhaps should be, a pleasure to read.

How and why did archaeology in Israel emerge as such a persuasive force? How can the practices of archaeology help answer those questions? This text addresses these questions and specifies the relationship between national ideology, colonial settlement and the production of historical knowledge.

Encourages legal writers to challenge conventions and offers valuable insights into the writing process that will appeal to other professionals: how to organize ideas, create and refine prose, and improve editing skills. This title includes case examples from past decade and addresses the widespread use of legal documents in electronic formats.

Gendun Chopel is considered the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. This title presents the English translation of the work, "Adornment for Nagarjuna's Thought", accompanied by an essay on Gendun Chopel's life liberally interspersed with passages from his writings.

A reference and guide for students, scholars, and practitioners of ethnography and beyond. It discusses about the deskwork of fieldwork and the various ways culture is put forth in print.

Wolves are some of the world's most charismatic and controversial animals, capturing the imaginations of their friends and foes alike. Highly intelligent and adaptable, they hunt and play together in close-knit packs, sometimes roaming over hundreds of square miles in search of food. Once teetering on the brink of extinction across much of the United States and Europe, wolves have made a tremendous comeback in recent years, thanks to legal protection, changing human attitudes, and efforts to reintroduce them to suitable habitats in North America. As wolf populations have rebounded, scientific studies of them have also flourished. But there hasn't been a systematic, comprehensive overview of wolf biology since 1970. In Wolves, many of the world's leading wolf experts provide state-of-the-art coverage of just about everything you could want to know about these fascinating creatures. Individual chapters cover wolf social ecology, behavior, communication, feeding habits and hunting techniques, population dynamics, physiology and pathology, molecular genetics, evolution and taxonomy, interactions with nonhuman animals such as bears and coyotes, reintroduction, interactions with humans, and conservation and recovery efforts. The book discusses both gray and red wolves in detail and includes information about wolves around the world, from the United States and Canada to Italy, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, and Mongolia. Wolves is also extensively illustrated with black and white photos, line drawings, maps, and fifty color plates. Unrivalled in scope and comprehensiveness, Wolves will become the definitive resource on these extraordinary animals for scientists and amateurs alike.

Hans Jonas here rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and the like. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. Jonas offers an assessment of practical goals under present circumstances, ending with a critique of modern utopianism.

Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals. Focusing on the concept of personal identity, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of the self that charts its epistemological path and ontological status.

A thoroughly updated edition of a beloved classic that has guided generations of researchers in conducting effective and meaningful research. With more than a million copies sold since its first publication, The Craft of Research has helped generations of researchers at every level--from high-school students and first-year undergraduates to advanced graduate students to researchers in business and government. Conceived by seasoned researchers and educators Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, this fundamental work explains how to choose significant topics, pose genuine and productive questions, find and evaluate sources, build sound and compelling arguments, and convey those arguments effectively to others. While preserving the book's proven approach to the research process, as well as its accessible voice and general structure, this new edition acknowledges the many ways research is conducted and communicated today. Thoroughly revised by Joseph Bizup and William T. FitzGerald, it recognizes that research may end in a product other than a paper--or no product at all--and includes a new chapter about effective presentations. It features fresh examples from a variety of fields that will appeal to today's students and other readers. It also accounts for new technologies used in research and offers basic guidelines for the appropriate use of generative AI. And it ends with an expanded chapter on ethics that addresses researchers' broader obligations to their research communities and audiences as well as systemic questions about ethical research practices. This new edition will be welcomed by a new and more diverse generation of researchers.

Editing is a tricky business. It requires analytical flair and creative panache, the patience of a saint and the vision of a writer. This book provides an approach to developmental editing. It deals with the core tasks of shaping the proposal, finding the hook, building the narrative or argument, executing the plan, and establishing a style.

"There's no such thing as rural America. Or, rather, as Steven Conn argues, "rural America" is a phrase that has been made to mean so many things that it doesn't mean anything. In fact, he maintains, rural America--so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind--has been shaped by the same major forces as the rest of the country since at least the end of the Civil War: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Conn calls for us to dispense with the fantasies and visions that are often imposed on rural America, in the hopes of more productively addressing the real challenges facing all of America"--

"As a pioneer of ubiquitous computing-the embedding of technology in everyday objects from thermostats to doorbells-computer scientist Mark Weiser's descriptions of smart homes, now thirty years later, might seem to approach our reality. Weiser's views certainly influenced our technology's developers-his 1991 Scientific American article 'The Computer for the 21st Century' was flagged a must-read by Microsoft's Bill Gates and then circulated among the day's digirati, including those Silicon Valley insiders who crowded his beer garden-based 'office hours.' Unlike many of his contemporaries, Weiser's vision was motivated by the philosophies of Michael Polanyi and Martin Heidegger, collaboration with anthropologists such as Lucy Suchman, and insights from artists including Natalie Jeremijenko. He hoped to realize 'tacit computing' as an escape from a single attention-grabbing screen as a portal to work, entertainment, and education. When rivals such as Nicholas Negroponte at MIT's Media Lab championed the development of smart agents (the ancestors of Siri and Alexa) or pervasive sensing in wearable technologies (proto-Fitbits or Apple Watches), Weiser balked. Weiser wanted computers to be something closer to the white cane a person with low vision might use to navigate the world. Good technology, he argued, should not mine our experiences for data to sell or demand our attention. Technology should not rob its users of the hardships that establish their expertise, but instead give them the ability to conceive of the world in new ways. In this compelling biography of a person and idea, digital studies scholar John Tinnell shows Weiser, who died of cancer at 46, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. Informed by deep archival research and interviews with Weiser's family and Xerox PARC colleagues, this book uses Weiser's life to offer a new history of today's technological reality, an inside view of Xerox PARC during its heyday, and a compelling vision of what computers failed to be"--

"A highly anticipated biography of the enigmatic and popular Swedish painter. The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was 44 years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained. While her naturalistic landscapes and botanicals were shown during her lifetime, her body of radical, abstract works never received the same attention. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint produced the earliest abstract paintings by a trained European artist. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a successful woman artist, but she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a non-representational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the museum/institution. Despite her enormous popularity, there has not yet been a biography of af Klint-until now. Inspired by her first encounter with the artist's work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research af Klint's life-not only who the artist was but what drove and inspired her. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic"--

"Scott Burton (1939-89) created performance art and sculpture that drew on queer experience and the sexual cultures that flourished in New York City in the 1970s. David J. Getsy argues that Burton looked to nonverbal body language and queer behavior in public space-most importantly, street cruising-as a foundation for rethinking the audiences and possibilities of art. Throughout the decade, he made complex works about bodies and how they communicate. Extending his performances about cruising, sexual signaling, and power dynamics, Burton also created functional sculptures that covertly signaled queerness by hiding in plain sight as furniture waiting to be used. With research drawing from multiple archives and numerous interviews, Getsy charts Burton's deep engagements with postminimalism, performance, feminism, behavioral psychology, design history, and queer culture. A restless and wide-ranging artist, Burton transformed his commitment to gay liberation into a unique practice of performance, sculpture, and public art that aspired to be anti-elitist, embracing of differences, and open to all. Filled with stories of Burton's life in New York's art communities, Queer Behavior makes a case for Burton as one of the most significant out queer artists to emerge in the wake of the Stonewall uprising and, in so doing, provides a rich account of the interwoven histories of queer art and performance art in the 1970s"--