Best of
Academia

1994

The Glass Essay


Anne Carson - 1994
    Copyright © 1994 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Plumb's Veterinary Drug Handbook


Donald C. Plumb - 1994
    Newly revised, this edition of the handbook includes more than 50 new monographs with a list of synonyms at the end of each monograph, a revised insulin monograph, an expanded ophthalmology section and new headings for reproductive/nursing safety.

Representations of the Intellectual


Edward W. Said - 1994
    Said here examines the ever-changing role of the intellectual today. In these six stunning essays - delivered on the BBC as the prestigious Reith Lectures - Said addresses the ways in which the intellectual can best serve society in the light of a heavily compromised media and of special interest groups who are protected at the cost of larger community concerns. Said suggests a recasting of the intellectual's vision to resist the lures of power, money, and specialization. in these powerful pieces, Said eloquently illustrates his arguments by drawing on such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Regis Debray, Julien Benda, and Adorno, and by discussing current events and celebrated figures in the world of science and politics: Robert Oppenheimer, Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Said sees the modern intellectual as an editor, journalist, academic, or political adviser - in other words, a highly specialized professional - who has moved from a position of independence to an alliance with powerful institutional organizations. He concludes that it is the exile-immigrant, the expatriate, and the amateur who must uphold the traditional role of the intellectual as the voice of integrity and courage, able to speak out against those in power.BBC episodes presented by Edward Said: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gm...

Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England


Paul Watkins - 1994
    He was greeted by a delegation of bullies who, in time, would become his friends and whose rules would become his own. For at Dragon, and later at Eton, "there was no middle ground. You could not go here and come out not caring one way or the other. You had to stand before your God and commit."In this enthralling and sometimes harrowing memoir, the acclaimed author of The Promise of Light gives us a masterly companion to such classics as Brideshead Revisited and A Separate Peace. Here are the masters who paddle boys for small infractions and then offer them sweets; the seniors who pamper pretty favorites and subject all others to humiliating servitude; the deep friendships and sudden, devastating betrayals. Above all, here is the exhilaration of a boy discovering own capacities for learning and creativity, in a book that conveys with astonishing insight the pangs of growing up.

Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World


Arturo Escobar - 1994
    The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. Development was not even partially deconstructed until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific Third World cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era.Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the gaze of experts.

The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting


Galen A. Johnson - 1994
    His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945), "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), and "Eye and Mind" (1960), have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Study of Second Language Acquisition


Rod Ellis - 1994
    This thorough introduction to second language research provides a comprehensive review of the research into learner language, internal and external factors in language acquisition, individual differences, and classroom second language learning.

The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief


George M. Marsden - 1994
    In fact, state-sponsored chapel services were commonplace until the World War II era, and as late as the 1950s, it was not unusual for leading schools to refer to themselves as "Christian" institutions. Today, the once pervasive influence of religion in the intellectual and cultural life of America's preeminent colleges and universities has all but vanished. In The Soul of the American University, George Marsden explores how, and why, these dramatic changes occurred.Far from a lament for a lost golden age when mainline Protestants ruled American education, The Soul of the American University offers a penetrating critique of that era, surveying the role of Protestantism in higher education from the founding of Harvard in the 1630s through the collapse of the WASP establishment in the 1960s. Marsden tells the stories of many of our pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. He recreates the religious feuds that accompanied Yale's transition from a flagship evangelical college to a university, and the dramatic debate over the place of religion in higher education between Harvard's President Charles Eliot and Princeton's President James McCosh. Marsden's analysis ranges from debates over Darwinism and higher criticism of the Bible, to the roles of government and wealthy contributors, the impact of changing student mores, and even the religious functions of college football. He argues persuasively that the values of "liberalism" and "tolerance" that the establishment championed and used to marginalize Christian fundamentalism and Roman Catholicism eventually and perhaps inevitably led to its own disappearance from the educational milieu, as nonsectarian came to mean exclusively secular.While the largely voluntary disestablishment of religion may appear in many respects commendable, Marsden believes that it has nonetheless led to the infringement of the free exercise of religion in most of academic life. In effect, nonbelief has been established as the only valid academic perspective. In a provocative final chapter, Marsden spells out his own prescription for change, arguing that just as the academy has made room for feminist and multicultural perspectives, so should there be room once again for traditional religious viewpoints. A thoughtful blend of historical narrative and searching analysis, The Soul of the American University exemplifies what it advocates: that religious perspectives can provide a legitimate contribution to the highest level of scholarship.

The Mad Man


Samuel R. Delany - 1994
    Marr encounters numerous obstacles, as other researchers turn up evidence of Hassler's personal life that is deemed simply too unpleasant and disillusioning for the rarified air of academe. On another front, Marr finds himself increasingly drawn toward more shocking, depraved sexual entanglements with the homeless men of his neighborhood, until it begins to seem that Hassler's death might hold some key to his own life as a gay man in the age of AIDS. As John Marr learns more about the enigma that was Timothy Hassler, his own increasing sexual debasement leads him to a point where his and the philosopher's lives collide violently.…Surely Samuel R. Delany's most graphic and unsettling novel, The Mad Man is a provocative look at contemporary social and sexual outsiders.

A Dictionary of Law


Jonathan Law - 1994
    The Dictionary defines all the major terms, concepts, processes, and organization of the legal system - with new coverage of important recent legislation and expanded coverage of criminology and law enforcement. International in scope, the book includes terms taken from European law, international law, human rights law, and environmental law. This edition offers highlighted feature entries that discuss key topics in detail, such as adoption law or the Terrorism Act. There is a useful Writing and Citation Guide that specifically addresses problems and established conventions for writing legal essays and reports and the book features entry-level web links which are accessed and kept up to date via the Dictionary of Law companion website. This classic dictionary is an invaluable source of legal reference for lawyers, law students, and anyone else needing succinct clarification of legal terms.

Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason


Terry P. Pinkard - 1994
    Written in a clear and straightforward style, the book reconstructs Hegel's theoretical philosophy and shows its connection to the ethical and political theory. Terry Pinkard sets the work in a historical context and reveals the contemporary relevance of Hegel's thought to European and Anglo-American philosophers.

On Flirtation


Adam Phillips - 1994
    So is flirtation dangerous, exploiting the ambiguity of promises to sabotage our cherished notions of commitment? Or is it, as Adam Phillips suggests, a productive pleasure, keeping things in play, letting us get to know them in different ways, allowing us the fascination of what is unconvincing?

Mystical Languages of Unsaying


Michael A. Sells - 1994
    which literally means "speaking away." Sometimes translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this close study of apophasis in Greek, Christian, and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it.This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite theirwide-ranging differences in era, tradition, and theology.By showing how apophasis works as a mode of discourse rather than as a negative theology, this work opens a rich heritage to reevaluation. Sells demonstrates that the more radical claims of apophatic writers—claims that critics have often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic—are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying. This work also has important implications for the relationship of classical apophasis to contemporary languages of the unsayable. Sells challenges many widely circulated characterizations of apophasis among deconstructionists as well as a number of common notions about medieval thought and gender relations in medieval mysticism.

Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event: Together with the Vocabulary of Deleuze


François Zourabichvili - 1994
    From the publication of Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event to his untimely death in 2006, Fran�ois Zourabichvili was regarded as one of the most important new voices of contemporary philosophy in France. His work continues to make an essential contribution to Deleuze scholarship today.This edition makes two of Zourabichvili's most important writings on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze available in a single volume. A Philosophy of the Event (1994) is an exposition of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, while the complementary Deleuze's Vocabulary (2003) approaches Deleuze's work through an analysis of key concepts in a dictionary form.This new translation is set to become an event within Deleuze Studies for many years to come.Key Features: Distinguishes Deleuze's notion of the event from the phenomenological, ontological and voluntarist conceptions that continue to lay claim to it today With an introduction by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, two of the world's leading commentators on Deleuze, explaining the key themes and arguments of Zourabichvili's work

Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies


Kobena Mercer - 1994
    The ten essays collected here examine new forms of cultural expression in black film, photography and visual art exerging with a new generation of black British artists, and interprets this prolific creativity within a sociological framework that reveals fresh perspectives on the bewildering complexity of identity and diversity in an era of postmodernity. Kobena Mercer documents a wealth of insights opened up by the overlapping of Asian, African and Caribbean cultures that constitute Black Britain as a unique domain of diaspora.

Princeton Seminary Faith and Learning 1812-1868


David B. Calhoun - 1994
    Here We meet great spirituality, great scholars, great missionary vision and great consecration to Christ.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English


Florentino García Martínez - 1994
    One of the world's foremost experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community that produced them provides an authoritative new English translation of the two hundred longest and most important nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran, along with an introduction to the history of the discovery and publication of each manuscript and the background necessary for placing each manuscript in its actual historical context.

An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics


Suzanne Eggins - 1994
    An approach which views language as a strategic, meaning-making resource, systemic linguistics focuses on the analysis of authentic, everyday texts, and asks both how people use language to make meanings, and how language itself is organised to enable those meanings to be made.The book offers both an overview of systemic theory and illustrations of how systemic techniques can be applied in the analysis of everyday texts. Written for students who may have little or no formal knowledge of linguistics, it covers most of the major concepts in systemic linguistics. In addition, it introduces readers to Halliday's functional grammatical analysis of English clauses, and presents the essentials of the systemic analysis of cohesive patterns in text.With its systemic theory of the relationship between language and context, systemic linguistics has applications in many fields where an understanding of how language functions to transmit social structure is important, in , for example, language education, cultural studies, stylistics, and women's studies. The book provides an accessible first step into systemics for those who wish to equip themselves with the conceptual and practical tools to analyse and explain how people make meanings with each other in everyday contexts.

Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject


Carole Boyce Davies - 1994
    The book explores a complex and fascinating set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as: * re-mapping, re-naming and cultural crossings * tourist ideologies and playful world travelling * gender, heritage and identity * African women's writing and resistance to domination * marginality, effacement and decentering * gender, language and the politics of location Carole Boyce-Davies is at the forefront of attempts to broaden the discourse surrounding the representation of and by black women and women of colour. Black Women Writing and Identity represents an extraordinary achievement in this field, taking our understanding of identity, location and representation to new levels.

Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought


Naila Kabeer - 1994
    She identifies the household as a primary site for the construction of power relations and compares the extent to which gender inequalities are revealed in different approaches to the concept of the family unit. The book assesses the inadequacies of the poverty line as a measuring tool and provides a critical overview of an issue that has been fiercely contested by feminists: population control. While feminists themselves have no unanimous view of the meaning of “reproductive choice,” Kabeer argues that it is imperative for them to take a lead in the construction of population policy.

Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook


Matthew B. Miles - 1994
    Bringing the art of qualitative analysis up-to-date, this edition adds hundreds of new techniques, ideas and references developed in the past decade. The increase in the use of computers in qualitative analysis is also reflected in this volume. There is an extensive appendix on criteria to choose from among the currently available analysis packages. Through examples from a host of social science and professional disciplines, Qualitative Data Analysis remains the most comprehensive and complete treatment of this topic currently available to scholars and applied researchers.

Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History


R.F. Foster - 1994
    In these essays Roy Foster explores the patterns of resentment, exploitation, dependence and rejection which were created by centuries of proximity, colonization and emigration. Often seen through the individual experiences of people 'caught' between England and Ireland (a varied gallery including Randolph Churchill, Thackeray, Trollope, Yeats, Parnell and the notorious Mrs O'Shea), these intersections also cut across subjects like the representation of the Irish in Victorian journalism and fiction, the roots of constitutional nationalist agitation, and the making of literary reputations. The last essay, 'Marginal Men and Micks on the Make', is a wide-ranging discussion of the uses of exile, both to and from Ireland. Against the cut and dried stereotypes of Anglo-Irish relations, an overall ambiguity is asserted here, whether the topic examined is the flawed structure of the Act of Union, the way words are used in Irish political rhetoric, or the divided allegiances of Parnell, Yeats and Bowen. These closely linked essays stress assonances as well as dissonances, and provide a commentary on neglected aspects of literary history and national identity.

Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film


Linda Williams - 1994
    No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects. These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered, unitary, distanced, and objectifying spectator's gaze; investigates the period when film spectatorship as an idea began; and analyses gender- and sexuality-based challenges to the homogeneous classical theory of spectatorship. It makes available critical understandings of spectatorship that have, until now, largely eluded cinema studies.

Next Time, She'll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It


Ann Jones - 1994
    This revised and updated edition of "the most critically acclaimed book" (Publishers Weekly) on domestic violence includes new information on the effect of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, examines resources on the Internet, and details what you can do to help stop battering.

Early Political Writings


Karl Marx - 1994
    This volume will be an invaluable guide to the formation of one of the most influential doctrines in the history of political thought.

Thermodynamics of Materials, Volume 2


David V. Ragone - 1994
    Volume 2 reviews macroscopic thermodynamics before moving on to the more complex behavior of defects and interfaces. The kinetics of liquids and gases are explored through discussion of evaporation, diffusion, and molecular movement, while solids are explored through in-depth explanations of nucleation, spinodal decomposition, and reaction kinetics. Concise, with clearly-defined equations and constants, this guide is an invaluable reference for both theoretical and practical applications.

A Performer's Guide to Renaissance Music


Jeffery Kite-Powell - 1994
    The format addresses the widest possible audience for early music, including amateur and professional performers, musicologists, theorists, and educators.

Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney


Jahan Ramazani - 1994
    From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt, and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets. Through subtle readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems, and the blues, Ramazani greatly enriches our critical understanding of a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the signal contributions to the American family elegy of Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, and Amy Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art—in particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.Grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also draw on various historical, formal, and feminist critical approaches. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the history of modern poetry."Consists of full, intelligent and lucid exposition and close reading. . . . Poetry of Mourning is itself a welcome contribution to modern poetry's search for a 'resonant yet credible vocabulary of grief in our time."—Times Literary Supplement

The Thousand and One Nights: From the Earliest Known Sources; Introduction and Indexes to Volumes 1 & 2


Muhsin Mahdi - 1994
    For the first time, the oldest manuscript of this famous Arabic text is now completely accessible to scholars and interested readers. This third and final volume, which completes painstaking work of more than three decades, magnificently adds to the important and pioneering work by Muhsin Mahdi which has been lauded by so many.

Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell


Constance Classen - 1994
    Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the olfactory silence of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the odour of sanctity, to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations


Mary R. Jackman - 1994
    Mary Jackman employs a unique national survey to investigate all three of the most prominent relations of inequality in the United States: gender, class, and race. Where other scholars have emphasized conflict as the emblem of intergroup oppression, Jackman proposes a theory in which both dominant and subordinate groups maneuver to avoid open hostility as they strive to control resources within the confines of their mutual relationship.Hostility, Jackman points out, creates resistance in a relationship. Dominant groups therefore try to preempt the use of force by following a velvet-glove strategy of "sweet persuasion." They are drawn especially to the ideological mold of paternalism, in which the coercion of subordinates is grounded in love rather than hate. Dominant-group members pronounce authoritatively on the needs and welfare of all and then profess to "provide" for those needs. Love, affection, and praise are offered to subordinates on strict condition that they comply with the terms of the unequal relationship. Whether in the home or in the arena of class or race relations, paternalism wraps control and authority in an ideological cocoon in which discriminatory actions are defined as benevolent and affection is made contingent on compliance.Jackman's emphasis on the practice of coercive love in race, class, and gender relations is sure to generate controversy and further research. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and anyone interested in group ideology will find here a provocative challenge to conventional views.

Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches


Mark Twain - 1994
    Twain was a master of virtually every prose genre; in fables and stories, speeches and essays, he skilfully adapted, extended or satirized literary conventions, guided only by his unruly imagination. From the comic wit that sparkles in maxims from 'Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar,' to the parodic perfection of 'An Awful - Terrible Medieval Romance,' to the satirical delights of The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It; from the warm nostalgia of 'Early Days' to the bitter, brooding tone of 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' to the anti-imperial vehemence of 'To the Person Sitting in the Darkness' and the poignant grief expressed in 'Death of Jean', Twain emerges in this volume in many guises, all touched by genius.

Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium


Patrick J. Geary - 1994
    Women praying for their dead, monks creating and re-creating their archives, scribes choosing which royal families of the past to applaud and which to forget: it is from such sources that most of our knowledge of the medieval period comes. Throughout richly detailed descriptions of various acts of remembrance--including the naming of children and the recording of visions--the author unearths a wide range of approaches to preserving the past as it was or formulating the past that an individual or group prefers to imagine.

Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities


Michael Bérubé - 1994
    Why--and how--is higher education in America under fire?

Bibles and Bestiaries: A Guide to Illuminated Manuscripts


Elizabeth B. Wilson - 1994
    Using examples of illuminated manuscripts from the Pierpont Morgan Library as illustrations, Wilson describes how a book was crafted in the Middle Ages...Magnificent...The volume is as elegant and special as its subject.-Boxed review/Booklist A glorious book, both fascinating and gorgeously presented.-Pointer/Kirkus Reviews

The Free People of Color of New Orleans: An Introduction


Mary Gehman - 1994
    The French called them les gens de couleur libre, the free people of color; after the Civil War they were known as the Creoles of color, shortened today to simply Creoles. Theirs was an ambiguous status, sharing the French Language, Catholic religion and European education of the elite whites, but also keeping African and indigenous American influences from their early heritage. This is their story, rarely mentioned in conventional histories, and often misunderstood today, even by some of their descendants. The book is an easy read that lays out the chronology of events, laws and circumstances that formed the unique racial mix of New Orleans and much of Louisiana. Includes end notes, suggested bibliography, index, and a listing of family names of free people of color that appear in the early years of the Louisiana Territory. A must-have for genealogists, historians, and students of African-American history.

الرحالة المتأخرون : الإستشراق في عصر التفكك الإسلامي


Ali Behdad - 1994
    Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century European travelers to the Middle East experienced a sense of belatedness, of having missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing. Behdad argues that this nostalgic desire for the other contains an implicit critique of Western superiority, a split within European discourses of otherness. Working from these insights and using analyses of power derived from Foucault, Behdad engages in a new critique of orientalism. No longer viewed as a coherent and unified phenomenon or a single developmental tradition, it is seen as a complex and shifting field of practices that has relied upon its own ambivalence and moments of discontinuity to ensure and maintain its power as a discourse of dominance. Through readings of Flaubert, Nerval, Kipling, Blunt, and Eberhardt, and following the transition in travel literature from travelog to tourist guide, Belated Travelers addresses the specific historical conditions of late nineteenth-century orientalism implicated in the discourses of desire and power. Behdad also views a broad range of issues in addition to nostalgia and tourism, including transvestism and melancholia, to specifically demonstrate the ways in which the heterogeneity of orientalism and the plurality of its practice is an enabling force in the production and transformation of colonial power.An exceptional work that provides an important critique of issues at the forefront of critical practice today, Belated Travelers will be eagerly awaited by specialists in nineteenth-century British and French literatures, and all concerned with colonial and post-colonial discourse.

Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel


Sally R. Munt - 1994
    Sally Munt asks why the form has proved so attractive as a vehicle for oppositional politics; whether the pleasures of detective fiction can be truly transgressive; and when exactly it was that the dyke detective appeared as the new super-hero for today. Along the way Munt poses some critical questions about the relations between fiction and activism, politics and representations, the writer and the reader. This will be an enticing book both for addicts of the genre and for teachers and their students.

Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire Within East-Central Europe, 1295 1345


S.C. Rowell - 1994
    Until 1387 the country was pagan. How this huge state came to expand, defend itself against western European crusaders and play a conspicuous part in European life are the main subjects of this book. Chapters are devoted to the types of sources used, to the religion of the ancient Balts (and the discovery of a pagan temple in Vilnius in the late 1980s), and to Lithuanian relations and wars with Poland and the Germans. Under Grand Duke Gediminas, Lithuania came to control more of Russia than the prince of Moscow.