(Times Books, 1983), an en- grossing and brilliantly illustrated guide to the oceans and marine envi- ronment.
Into 272 tabloid-size pages, Alas- tair Dougal Couper, head of the De- partment of Maritime Studies at the University of Wales Institute of Sci- ence and Technology, has packed 400 color maps and a tightly written text brimming with information on every conceivable aspect of the sea.
This is the prime source book for the reader who wants to know the volume of sludge and sewage dumped...
/ No one can describe the topic that I have chosen to discuss
'
as a neglected and understudied one. How much ink has been spilled about it, how many library shelves have been filled with works on the subject, since the days of Thucydides! How many scholars from how many specialties have applied their expertise to this intractable problem! Mathematicians, meteorologists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, physicists, political scientists, philosophers, theologians, and lawyers are only...
may have their origins in inventive attempts to "establish or legiti- mize .. .status or relations of authority."
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Today, whenever Scotsmen gather together to celebrate their national identity, they wear the kilt, woven in a tartan whose colors and pattern indicate their clan. This apparel, to which they ascribe great antiquity, is, in fact, of fairly recent ori- gin. Indeed, the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention.
Before th...
Today, whenever Scotsmen gather together to celebrate their national identity, they wear the kilt, woven in a tartan whose colors and pattern indicate their clan. This apparel, to which they ascribe great antiquity, is, in fact, of fairly recent ori- gin. Indeed, the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention.
Before the later years of the 17th century, the Highlanders of Scotland did not form a distinct people. They were simply the overflow of Ireland....
took on a peculiar character, distinguishing them from both their European and Asian imperial forms.
In contrast to India, many parts of Africa became colonies of white settlement. This meant that the settlers had to define themselves as natural and undisputed masters of vast numbers of Africans. They drew upon the freshly minted European tradi- tions both to define and to justify their roles, and also to provide models of subservience into which it was possible to draw Afri- cans. In Africa,...
TRADITION
Man has always been shaped to some degree tradition, whether in his personal relations, his economic life, or his capacity as a political animal. As late as the 18th century in the West, most people still ordered their lives (as historian Marc Bloch wrote of medieval man) "on the assump- tion that the only title to perma- nence was that conferred by long usage. Life was ruled by tradition, by group custom." The intellectual up- heavals of the Renaissance and Ref- ormation,...
public agencies and private institutions
"Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty."
Institute for Social Research, Publishing Division, Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Mich.
48106.200 pp. $24.00.
Author: Greg J. Duncan
If you are on the top of the economic heap today, your chances of staying there during the next few years are not particularly good. But neither are you condemned to remain poor next year if you are now.
These are among the findings of Duncan and his colleagues at the Uni- versity o...
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With the discovery of fire, man conquered cold. Beating the heat was a more daunting challenge. In ancient Rome, patricians simply fled to the Alban Hills to wait out the sultry summer months. Caliph Mahdi of Baghdad was more ambitious. In A.D. 775, he began cooling his garden by packing the hollow walls around it with snow from nearby mountains. Some 700 years later, Leonardo da Vinci devised a water-driven fan for a pa- tron's home. Not to be outdone, one 19th-century inventor built a ve...
LECTIONS
Growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, the writer Brendan Gill occasionally caught sight of an aloof, well-dressed insurance ex- ecutive by the name of Wallace Stevens. "He marched," Gill later recalled, "like a tame bear through the streets of our city, but there was nothing tamed about him; he had chosen to im- prison his fiercer self in a cage of upper-middle-class decorum as Frost had hidden himself inside a canny bumpkin." Stevens's "fiercer self" was busy...
Phil Duncan, in Congressional Quiet inCongress Quarterly Weekly Report (Mar. 24, 1984),
1414 22nd St. N.W., Washington. D.C. 20037.
In the 1980 elections, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives suffered a dramatic loss of 33 seats. Two years later it was the Republi- cans' turn to be ambushed: They lost 26 seats. Duncan, a Congressional Quarterly staff writer, predicts that 1984 will provide both parties a respite from all the excitement.
There are a number of reasons for the eerie calm...