Film is arguably the dominant art form of the twentieth century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Wood offers a wealth of insight into the nature of film, considering its role and impact on society as well as its future in the digital age. As Wood notes, film is many things, but it has become above all a means of telling stories through images and sounds. The stories are often quite fal…
We wanted to have this experience to assess whether our hypotheses were well founded. Hassan, an old camel driver of few words but who knew all the “secrets” of a desert journey, served as our guide.From the expedition diary: 12 February 1990: “Since a few hours, we have been travelling on our teetering rides across an immense stony plain towards Jebel Maqran, a tiny outcrop tha…
Civil engineering has made an inestimable contribution to modern life, providing the crucial expertise behind our vast transportation systems and the wide array of built structures where we work, study, and play. In this Very Short Introduction, engineer David Muir Wood turns a spotlight on a field that we often take for granted. He sheds light on the nature and importance of civil engineering …
Ernest Wood has taken an interest in Zen since writing his first article on the subject for a Shanghai magazine when he was in Japan in 1920. This book gives a clear picture of Zen ideas, history, and biography of the growth of Zen in China and Japan. Professor Ernest Egerton Wood (* 18 August 1883 in Manchester, England; + 17 September 1965 in Houston, United States) was a noted yogi, theosoph…
As we gradually saw, there is more to the dialogue form of our expositions than we initially realized – something new, perhaps, in poetry criticism; we could call it dialogical poetics. We are accustomed to seeing all extended commentary on poetry as the vision of some individual consciousness – the more individual and “original,” the better. There is almost always a significant degree …
Of all the fields of study to which human beings have devoted themselves, linguistics could lay claim to being the most conservative. Two thousand five hundred years ago, Panini began it by describing an individual human language, and describing individual languages is what the majority of linguists are still doing. Even during the last couple of decades, in which linguists have begun to be int…
The brief literature review above demonstrates the necessity of a compre-hensive inquiry into the methodological ramifications of the “world-Christian turn”. This volume gives methodology the center stage and aspires to spark the debate on methodology. To that end, we as editors have purposely invited a diverse group of contributors from a variety of academic backgrounds (anthr…
And there were always apples, real apples. I think they must make apples in factories nowadays. They taste like it. These were real ones, picked off the trees. Out at grandpap's they had bellflowers, and winesaps, and seek-no-furthers, and, I think, sheep-noses, and one kind of apple that I can't find any more, though I have sought it carefully. It was the finest apple I ever set a tooth i…