Plastic surgery had its beginning nearly 3000 years ago, when Sushruta, an Indian surgeon, reconstructed the nose by transferring a flap of cheek and then forehead skin. It is a modern field, stimulated by the challenging reconstructive problems of the unfortunate victims of the World Wars. The advent of the operating microscope has thrust the plastic surgeon of today into the forefront of adva…
Modern Western culture is inordinately present-minded. Politicians are ignorant of the past. School curricula foreshorten the historical record by focusing on recent events. People lack a sense of their location in time and fail to perceive that contemporary society is constrained by its cultural as well as its biological inheritance. Many historians of the white South African establishment sta…
At the waning of this century, we take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Christian Dior's New Look to review the magnificent work he created in a little more than one decade at the century's heart. Few occasions in fashion history are as precise, and few are as worthy of consideration and celebration. It is difficult to analyze Dior today: the intervening four decades have irrevocabl…
This open access book examines the chronic underperformance of economies with respect to inclusion, sustainability and resilience. It finds that the standard liberal economic growth and development model has evolved over the past century in a fundamentally unbalanced manner that underemphasizes the crucial role of institutions – legal norms, policy incentives and public administrative capacit…
Known as the father of modern electricity, Nikola Tesla’s work transformed the world. Devoted to discovery, the scientist and engineer registered more than 700 patents in his lifetime, from X-ray to radar, to the Tesla Coil, radio, and remote control. This illustrated biography follows the development of Tesla’s key theories and inventions, shining a light on an eccentric man who, ultimatel…
Perhaps the best way to approach this volume on Buddhist statecraft is with the following observation in mind: the proper functioning of the state is a Buddhist concern. Throughout the history of the tradition, Buddhist have engaged questions of statecraft in their creation and propagation of texts, doctrines, rituals, institutions, and visual cultures. Political actors have, in turn, employed …
For millennia, one of the most consistent characteristics of Hindu traditions has been variation. Scholarly work on contemporary Hinduism and its premodern antecedents ably captures this complexity, paying attention to a wide spectrum of ideologies, practices, and positions of authority. Studies of religion in ancient India stress doctrinal variation in the period, when ideas about pe…
Poems and poets : people greet them with scorn andpoke fun at them. Why is that? Because people take the realm of poetry to be the depic-tion of simple sensual beauty, self-complacent emotionalpain and dark melancholy—things not real mirrored in mor-bid sensibilities. If poetry required only a unique sensitivityand dreamy beauty, then hysterics and the mentally il…
The idea that we learn by interacting with our environment is probably the first to occur to us when we think about the nature of learning. When an infant plays, waves its arms, or looks about, it has no explicit teacher, but it does have a direct sensorimotor connection to its environment. Exercising this connection produces a wealth of information about cause and effect, about the consequence…
Whilst occupied on many and various studies, I happened to light upon the History of the Kings of Britain, and wondered that in the account which Gildas and Bede, in their elegant treatises, had given of them, I found nothing said of those kings who lived here before the Incarnation of Christ, nor of Arthur and many others who succeeded after the Incarnation, though their actions both deserved …