Tag archieven: Princeton University Press

Romeinen, Theater

T.P. Wiseman – The Lost History of Roman Theatre

T.P. Wiseman The Lost History of Roman Theatre review, recensie en informatie boek over de vergeten geschiedenis van het Romeinse theater. Op 25 november 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van T.P. Wiseman, de Britse professor en historicus oude geschiedenis aan de University of Exeter. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

T.P. Wiseman The Lost History of Roman Theatre review en recensie

  • “Peter Wiseman has been writing brilliantly about Roman literary culture for over fifty years, and this latest book is no exception: his views on the history of Roman theatre are challenging and controversial, and this will be a landmark publication in the field.” (Christopher Pelling, University of Oxford)
  • “Peter Wiseman’s book, drawing on a wealth of textual and material evidence, offers a characteristically learned and provocative reimagining of Roman theatrical traditions. This collection of studies will be essential reading for anyone interested in the place of theatre in Roman society.” (Catherine Edwards, author of Death in Ancient Rome)
  • “In this book, Peter Wiseman blends meticulous scholarship with disciplined historical imagination to throw light on different aspects of the history of Roman theatre. The picture that emerges is convincing and illuminating.” (Armand D’Angour, author of How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking)

T.P. Wiseman The Lost History of Roman Theatre

The Lost History of Roman Theatre

  • Auteur: T.P. Wiseman (Engeland)
  • Soort boek: Romeinse geschiedenis, theatergeschiedenis
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 25 november 2025
  • Omvang: 328 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: paperback / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 45,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst van het boek over het theater van de Romeinen

Theatre was an integral part of Roman civic, religious and political life for nearly a thousand years, but our understanding of it is skewed by the haphazard survival of usable evidence. The widely accepted date for the beginning of Roman drama is 240 BC, but that is only the date of the first known dramatic works. Theatre as a public spectacle was created in Athens and in Greek Sicily at the end of the sixth century BC, when the culture of Rome, to judge by the archaeological evidence, was itself thoroughly Greek. There is therefore no need to imagine that the Romans knew nothing of drama until centuries after its inception. In The Lost History of Roman Theatre, the distinguished classics scholar T. P. Wiseman reexamines the often-obscured origins of Roman theatre.

In a series of detailed investigations, Wiseman explores material ignored or inadequately treated in the modern literature, including previously overlooked information in Cicero’s letters, speeches and dialogues about what theatre meant to Romans of his era. He further shows that the various styles of drama presented on the Roman stage were listed by grammarians in late antiquity who were using well-informed histories of drama now lost, and brings to light a wide range of evidence, visual as well as textual, from all that thousand-year stretch of time, to offer a new sense of the range and richness of the Romans’ experience of theatre.

Timothy Peter Wiseman was born on 3 February 1940 in England. He has been professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter for nearly fifty years. He is the author of Catullus and His World, The Roman Audience, The House of Augustus and many other well-known works. In 2022 he was awarded the British Academy’s Kenyon Medal for classical studies.

Bijpassende boeken

Geschiedenisboeken, Nederlandse historicus

Arnoud S.Q. Visser – On Pedantry

Arnoud S.Q. Visser On Pedantry review, recensie en informatie boek met een culturele geschiedenis van de betweter. Op 4 november 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van Arnoud S.Q. Visser, de  hoogleraar vroegmoderne letterkunde aan de Universiteit van Utrecht over de geschiedenis van pedanterie en de betweter. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Arnoud S.Q. Visser On Pedantry review en recensie

  • “With élan and erudition (in just the right measure), Arnoud S. Q. Visser is our genial guide through the gentle groves of snobby academe. The mansplainer has been with us forever (or at least since the first guy who said, “actually….”). Here, in diesem herrlichen kleinen Band (as the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie might have styled it, circa Heft 3¾, 1873), we get the know-it-all from Casaubon’s monstrous bladder (yes, the one mocked in Middlemarch) to the guy who tells a NASA scientist (female, of course) to read her own work, to Marshall McLuhan popping up in Annie Hall (Woody Allen name-dropped in an academic book?!). I laughed, I cringed, I learned. (Srsly.)” (Andrew Hui)
  • “An elegant and witty history of the overbearing schoolmaster through the ages, On Pedantry wears its vast learning with a stylish lightness (though true pedants will revel in the breadth of Visser’s notes).” (Dennis Duncan)

Arnoud S.Q. Visser On Pedantry

On Pedantry

A Cultural History of the Know-it-All

  • Auteur: Arnoud S. Q. Visser (Nederland)
  • Soort boek: geschiedenisboek
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 4 november 2025
  • Omvang: 344 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 29,95
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst boek van Arnoud S.Q. Visser over de geschiedenis  van pedanterie

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice.

Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates.

Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought.

Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe.

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. His books include A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance, Reading Augustine in the Reformation, and Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image.

Bijpassende boeken

Amerikaanse historicus, Geschiedenisboeken, Romeinen

Kim Bowes – Surviving Rome

Kim Bowes Surviving Rome review, recensie en informatie boek over het economische leven van negentig procent van de Romeinen. Op 4 november 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van Kim Bowes, hoogleraar archeologie en oude geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Pennsylvania, over de gewone Romein. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Kim Bowes Surviving Rome review en recensie

  • “Finally, someone has written an economic history of Rome for the twenty-first century! In Surviving Rome, Kim Bowes does no less than challenge the whole field of ancient economic history, presenting us with a summons to think more empathetically about how ordinary Romans hustled, borrowed, and scraped to get by. She answers her own call with a radically new but highly current account of the Roman economy. This is a firecracker of a book, deeply researched and marvelously written, and I could not recommend it more.” (Seth Bernard, author of Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy)
  • “Surviving Rome explores the stress and strains, precarities and strategies of the people—the ordinary men, women, and children, enslaved and free—who shaped the world’s first ‘global’ economy. This is a brilliantly insightful microeconomic history that brings working people and their practices back into the Roman economy. Everyone interested in premodern economies should read this deeply perceptive and engagingly written book.” (Claire Taylor, author of Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being)

Kim Bowes Surviving Rome

Surviving Rome

The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent

  • Auteur: Kim Bowes (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: Amerikaanse geschiedenis
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 4 november 2025
  • Omvang: 512 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 39,95
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek van Kim Bowes over de gewone Romein

A radical revision—and worker’s-eye view—of everything we thought we knew about the ancient Roman economy.

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.

Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children’s toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans’ most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.

Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

Bijpassende boeken

Amerikaanse geschiedenis, Amerikaanse politiek, Verenigde Staten

Laura K. Field – Furious Minds

Laura K. Field Furious Minds review, recensie en informatie boek over MAGA nieuw rechts en Donald Trump in Amerika. Op 6 november 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press boek van Laura K. Field, de Amerikaanse politieke theoreticus en schrijfster over de Make America Great Again. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Laura K. Field Furious Minds review en recensie

Als er in de media een boekbespreking, review en recensie verschijnt van Furious Minds, The Making of the MAGA New Right, geschreven door Laura K. Field, dan besteden we er op deze pagina aandacht aan.

Laura K. Field Furious Minds

Furious Minds

The Making of the MAGA New Right

  • Auteur: Laura K. Field (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: Amerikaanse politiek
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 4 november 2025
  • Omvang: 432 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: $ 35,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst boek over MAGA nieuw rechts in Amerika

The story of the radical conservative intellectual movement shaping Donald Trump’s agenda—and how it threatens American freedoms, values, and democracy.

Donald Trump is not a big thinker, but his 2016 presidential victory presented a grand opportunity for people who are, and it set off a radicalization and reconfiguration of the American conservative intellectual world. In Furious Minds, Laura Field, who spent close to a decade in conservative academic circles, chronicles the rise of the New Right—the network of academics, public intellectuals, and influencers who provide ideological fuel to Trumpism. This movement includes figures such as Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance. Their agenda is built to last, and it has dire long-term implications for liberal democracy.

The New Right has precedents in American history, but it is distinct for its youthfulness, misogyny, and extraordinary successes—most notably the elevation of Vance to the vice presidency. The movement—which draws together associates of the right-wing Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, Postliberals, and the Hard Right—advocates nationalist economics, tight borders, isolationism, and reactionary social values. It helped to strategize January 6th and created Project 2025. But above all, the New Right is engaged in a vast culture war against modern liberal pluralism. It is determined to harness state power and use it in new, illiberal ways, from college campuses to the international scene—all driven by the fantasy of restoring a pure America.

Incisive and urgent, Furious Minds tells the story of the thinkers of the New Right—and their powerful assault on American freedoms, values, and ideals.

Bijpassende boeken

Amerikaanse historicus, Arabische geschiedenis, Geschiedenisboeken

Michael Cook – A History of the Muslim World

Michael Cook A History of the Muslim World review, recensie en informatie boek over de geschiedenis van de Islam. Op 28 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van de Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Michael Cook A History of the Muslim World review en recensie

  • “Michael Cook has written a masterpiece that will inform and inspire generations of readers. Seldom has the history of the Muslim world been told so well.” (Roy P. Mottahedeh, Harvard University)
  • “Glorious … Necessarily a dense work, it is also delightful in its sheer scope and variety. This is especially true in a writer as witty as Cook, who sustains a breezy, Socratic style throughout … The payoff for writing a book this ambitious and successful is that, for anyone interested in the history of Islam, Cook is now a must-read.” (Andrew Bernard, Washington Examiner)
  • “A fascinating work. It is written in a lucid and witty style that always tempts you to carry on reading to the bottom of the page, and then to turn over to the next one.” (John McHugo, interLib)

Michael Cook A History of the Muslim World

A History of the Muslim World

From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity

  • Auteur: Michael Cook (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: geschiedenis van de moslimwereld
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 28 oktober 2025
  • Omvang: 960 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: paperback / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 27.95
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst van het boek over de geschiedenis van de moslimwereld

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. It then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the key military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

At the same time, A History of the Muslim World contains numerous primary-source quotations that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past.

Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (Princeton), A Brief History of the Human Race, and The Koran: A Very Short Introduction.

Bijpassende boeken

Gezondheid, Slapen

Philippa Gander – Life in Sync

Philippa Gander Life in Sync review, recensie en informatie boek over de wetenschap van de biologische klokken en hoe we ze verstoren. Op 21 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van Philippa Gander, de slaaponderzoeker uit Nieuw-Zeeland over hoe we verkeerd omgaan met onze biologische klok. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Philippa Gander Life in Sync review en recensie

  • “Recent breakthroughs in chronobiology reveal powerful strategies to recover lost rhythms—and improve sleep. Drawing on decades of her own research, Gander leads an in-depth tour of the science and leaves no doubt that respecting circadian clocks is crucial not just for individual well-being but also for the future of our planet.” Lynne Peeples, author of The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms)
  • “The importance of sleep/wake cycles to our life on Earth is as inestimable as it is intriguing. Philippa Gander succeeds in communicating this complex science in her highly informative and engaging book.” (Colin A. Espie, University of Oxford)

Philippa Gander Life in Sync

Life in Sync

The Science of Internal Clocks and How We’re Disrupting Them

  • Auteur: Philippa Gander (Nieuw-Zeeland)
  • Soort boek: slaapproblemen en de biologisch klok
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 21 oktober 2026
  • Omvang: 168 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 22,95
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst boek van Philippa Gander over de verstoring van onze biologische klok

All of life is profoundly shaped by the daily, monthly, and yearly cycles of our planet, and all creatures have internal timekeeping systems that rely on cues from the surrounding environment. With modern technology, we are changing our environments—and by proxy, the ecosystems around us—to override these innate rhythms of life. But at what cost? Life in Sync reveals how Earth’s rotations shape our biology, what human sleep cycles looked like before the advent of artificial light, and why technology can’t free us from the constraints of our circadian clocks.

Philippa Gander explores the science behind the biological rhythms that animate us and our world, blending captivating storytelling with illuminating examples ranging from migratory birds and hibernating squirrels to jet-lagged pilots and astronauts in space. She shows how genetic circadian clocks are an ancient evolutionary adaptation that we share with all life on the planet, and how our rapidly expanding use of artificial light at night disrupts the time cues for entire ecosystems. Gander explains why cutting back on sleep adversely affects our well-being, safety, and longevity, and how breakthroughs in sleep science offer solutions to bring our lives more in harmony with nature’s rhythms.

An astonishing journey of scientific discovery, Life in Sync unlocks the mysteries of biological time—and offers new perspectives for anyone who has ever given up a good night’s sleep for the sake of their hectic waking hours.

Philippa Gander is a sleep researcher from New Zealand. She is an emeritus professor at Massey University in New Zealand.

Bijpassende boeken

Amerikaanse geschiedenis, Amerikaanse politiek, Sociologisch boek

Paul Starr – American Contradiction

Paul Starr American Contradiction review, recensie en informatie boek over revolutie en wraak van de jaren vijftig tot nu in de Verenigde Staten. Op 14 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van Paul Starr de Amerikaanse hoogleraar sociologie en public affairs aan de Princeton Universiteit. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Paul Starr American Contradiction review en recensie

  • “Anything Paul Starr writes is important to read, and this book is no exception. American Contradiction is a highly sophisticated history of the United States since the 1950s emphasizing the interplay between social movements, politics, culture, law, and social policy.” (Nelson Lichtenstein)
  • “Paul Starr, one of the great chroniclers of American institutions, provides a brilliant reinterpretation of the modern political era. His book unpacks the fundamental contradictions that have haunted the body politic since the 1960s. A country born in contraction between slavery and freedom has remained at odds with itself even as the issues changed. The bold attack by the progressive project on hierarchical institutions produced an equally fierce counterattack by those who wanted to restore an imagined earlier era. American Contradiction teaches us how, far from being an anomaly, the election of Donald Trump twice to the presidency was a result of deeply-rooted political forces that had been steadily gaining strength within the Republican Party for decades. This is a must-read book for sociologists, historians, political scientists, and any reader interested in our nation’s political history.” (Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University)
  • “A thoughtful study of the push and pull from right to left and back again in the past 75 years ,,, A useful key to understanding how American politics and the American polity have become so intractably polarized.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Paul Starr American Contradiction

American Contradiction

Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

  • Auteur: Paul Starr (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: Amerikaanse politieke geschiedenis
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 14 oktober 2025
  • Omvang; 456 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 35,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon 

Flaptekst van het boek van Paul Starr over de Amerikaanse politiek

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama—and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.

Paul Starr is born 12 May 1949. He is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and founding coeditor of the American Prospect magazine. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Over a half-century he has written essays and op‑eds for newspapers and magazines as well as books on America’s institutions, history, and politics.

Bijpassende boeken

Engelse schrijfsters, Verhalen

Virginia Woolf – The Life of Violet

Virginia Woolf The Life of Violet review, recensie en informatie boek met drie vroege verhalen van de schrijfster die niet eerder gepubliceerd zijn. Op 8 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van Virginia Woolf met drie niet eerder verschenen verhalen. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Virginia Woolf The Life of Violet review en recensie

  • “A whimsically serious trio of stories intended as a mock-biography of Violet Dickinson, and published here for the first time in a standalone volume … The three stories in The Life of Violet are funny. They are also, delightfully, very silly. And perhaps most of all, they are sexy, something Woolf was more than capable of being.” (Oliver Soden, Spectator World)
  • “What an extraordinary volume! Here we meet newly discovered, revised versions of Virginia Woolf’s early stories based on the life of Violet Dickinson. These tales are laugh-out-loud funny. They are also profound early experiments in the fiction/biography blend that later gave rise to Orlando and the feminist musing about women’s education, marriage, and literary history that infuse A Room of One’s Own. An illuminating preface and afterword by Urmila Seshagiri bring Dickinson’s biography and intellectual contributions into view and deftly analyze the stories and their place within Woolf’s oeuvre. Must reading for lovers of Woolf’s fiction.” (Jessica Berman, editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf)

Virginia Woolf The Life of Violet

The Life of Violet

Three Early Stories

  • Auteur: Virginia Woolf (Engeland)
  • Soort boek: verhalen uit 1907
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 8 oktober 2025
  • Omvang: 144 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: £ 16,99
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst boek met drie vroege verhalen van Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s first fully realized work of fiction—published in its final, revised form for the first time.

A beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical “cottage of one’s own,” battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike.

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.

In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.

A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read.

This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.

Virginia Woolf (was born 25 January 1882 in South Kensington,  Londen. She was one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. In addition to writing ten novels, including Mrs. Dalloway  and To the Lighthouse, Woolf was the cofounder of the Hogarth Press and a prolific essayist and critic. Her manifesto A Room of One’s Own is a cornerstone of modern feminist thought. 

Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Bijpassende boeken en informatie

Afrika, Afrikaanse geschiedenis, Architectuur, Architectuurboek

Itohan I. Osayimwese – Africa’s Buildings

Itohan I. Osayimwese Africa’s Buildings review and information of the content of the architecture book. Princeton University Press will publish the new book about Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage by Itohan I. Osayimwese, professor of the history of art and architecture and urban studies at Brown University, on october 7, 2025. 

Itohan I. Osayimwese Africa’s Buildings review

  • “Enlightening and relatable across cultural boundaries, Itohan Osayimwese presents an erudite rendering of African architectural history by demolishing preconceived Western definitions about the subject. The book’s carefully woven narratives demonstrate that attempts to cast Africa’s architectural production as purely traditional were and remain anthropological projects of race and class distinctions in modernity.” (Nnamdi Elleh, author of Architecture and Politics in Nigeria)
  • “In this wide-ranging study of the looting and collecting of Africa’s architecture by European powers, Itohan Osayimwese brilliantly demonstrates the effects of such violent scattering of cultures, places, lives, and knowledge systems on our understanding of African architecture. A must-read for anyone interested in architecture or the problem of cultural restitution.” (Swati Chattopadhyay, author of Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire)

Itohan I. Osayimwese Africa's Buildings

Africa’s Buildings

Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage

  • Author: Itohan I. Osayimwese
  • Book type: African Architecture
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • To be released: 7 October 2025
  • Length: 296 pages
  • Format: hardcover / ebook
  • Prize: $ 35.00
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb book by Itohan I. Osayimwese about architecture in Africa

A groundbreaking history of Africa’s looted architectural heritage – and a bold proposal for the repatriation of the continent’s stolen cultural artifacts.

Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa’s Buildings traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings and addressing the ethical questions surrounding the display of these objects.

Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent. She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting. She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft. Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.

Richly illustrated, Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities.

Itohan I. Osayimwese is professor of the history of art and architecture and urban studies at Brown University, where she is an affiliate faculty in Africana studies and at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the editor of German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies.

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A. Wess Mitchell – Great Power Diplomacy

A. Wess Mitchell Great Power Diplomacy review, recensie en informatie boek over de vaardigheid van staatsmanschap en diplomatie van Attila de Hun tot Kissinger. Op 14 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek over de rol van diplomatie, geschreven door A. Wess Mitchell, de Amerikaanse historicus en voormalig diplomaat. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

A. Wess Mitchell Great Power Diplomacy review en recensie

  • “Wess Mitchell’s book continues his fine tradition of writing perceptively and realistically about the confluence of history, diplomacy, and geopolitics.” (Robert D. Kaplan)
  • “Great Power Diplomacy is an indictment, understated but devastating, of the utopian foreign policy pursued by the United States and its allies in the post–Cold War world; an eloquent summons to the study of grand strategy and political, cultural, economic, military, and diplomatic history; and a clarion call for a return to old-fashioned diplomacy aimed at securing the survival and prosperity of one’s own political community. This book is a must-read for those in our foreign policy establishment, and it ought to be on the bedside table of the president of every American college or university that gives short shrift to political, cultural, economic, military and diplomatic history.” (Paul A. Rahe, author of The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge)
  • “As powers contend with the consequences of today’s era of geopolitical rivalry and face an increasingly dangerous world, Mitchell offers a thoughtful account of the role diplomacy has played across centuries defined by periods of sharper competition. Those seeking insights into the importance of diplomacy in our new era will find much to appreciate in this timely and well-crafted book.” (Walter Russell Mead, author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World)

A. Wess Mitchell Great Power Diplomacy

Great Power Diplomacy

The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger

  • Auteur: A. Wess Mitchell (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: over de diplomatie
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Princeton University Press
  • Verschijnt: 14 oktober 2025
  • Omvang; 352 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 35,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst boek over de rol van diplomatie van A. Wess Mitchell

A captivating history of diplomacy—and an urgent reminder of why we need to revive its lost arts to survive in a dangerous era of great power competition.

From the beginning of time, human societies have found themselves confronted by enemies too numerous or ferocious to defeat solely by force of arms. In these dramatic moments, wise leaders have turned to diplomacy to rearrange the gameboard in their favor and stymie seemingly unstoppable foes. In Great Power Diplomacy, American historian and diplomat A. Wess Mitchell recounts the forgotten story of how history’s most legendary empires have used diplomacy as a tool of grand strategy to outwit, outmaneuver, and outlast militarily superior opponents.

Through fifteen centuries of history, Great Power Diplomacy recreates the perilous junctures, colorful personalities, and intricate statecraft that led to some of history’s most stunning diplomatic achievements—and greatest disasters. The protagonists include giants like Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, and Kissinger, but also a lesser-known cast of scoundrels, eunuchs, drunkards, and fools. At every turn, fortune favored those great powers with the foresight and dexterity to build winning alliances, splinter enemy coalitions, and, when necessary, make peace with their bitterest foes.

Diplomacy of this kind has become a lost art in recent years as Western elites embraced the illusion that globalization and the spread of democracy would create a borderless world where nations would live in harmony and war would be abolished from the human story. But, as Great Power Diplomacy reveals, we will need to rediscover the secrets of skillful statecraft as the world enters an unstable new era in which continent-sized great powers compete for territory, resources, and prestige. By recalling diplomacy’s rich past, we can equip ourselves for a more dangerous future.

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