Best of
Humanities

1987

A Global History: From Prehistory to the 21st Century


Leften Stavros Stavrianos - 1987
    

Old Age


Helen M. Luke - 1987
    By examining the work produced by writers at the end of their lives, it elucidates the difference between growing old and disintegrating.

The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery


C.D.B. Bryan - 1987
    In this celebratory volume, bursting with stunning photography and dramatic accounts, award-winning author C.D.B. Bryan brings to life the Society's formidable legacy.

Does Writing Have a Future?


Vilém Flusser - 1987
    In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means.Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India, 1921-1952


Nirad C. Chaudhuri - 1987
    The author was regarded as an admirable historian & one of the best Indian writers of non-fiction.

The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought


David Miller - 1987
    Encompassing the whole spectrum of the history and theory of politics from Socrates to Rawls, this is the most comprehensive and scholarly reference work available on the subject.

Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People


Anthony Seeger - 1987
    In paperback for the first time, Anthony Seeger's Why Suyá Sing considers the reasons for the importance of music for the Suyá--and by extension for other groups-- through an examination of myth telling, speech making, and singing in the initiation ceremony.   Based on over twenty-four months of field research and years of musical exchange, Seeger analyzes the different verbal arts and then focuses on details of musical performance. He reveals how Suyá singing creates euphoria out of silence, a village community out of a collection of houses, a socialized adult out of a boy, and contributes to the formation of ideas about time, space, and social identity.   This new paperback edition features an indispensable CD offering examples of the myth telling, speeches, and singing discussed, as well as a new afterword that describes the continuing use of music by the Suyá in their recent conflicts with cattle ranchers and soybean farmers.

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America


Alicia S. Ostriker - 1987